I think you are right for tanking in a raid beyond MC, especially when it comes to scaling. However, for 5 mans, can you at least give some love as a viable tank option on par or superior to a paladin?
…Prove it?
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Imagine disputing something that’s been done in a video game, with three people who have done it, and asking them to math it out for you…
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5-mans are an exceptionally low threshold, so if a Shaman wants to Chain Lightning their way to victory through one as the “tank” more power to them. I mean there are presently guides on how to duo/solo various bosses with gear available right now that don’t necessitate complete (or any) raid gear or a shred of PvP gear. It is practically a rite of passage for a Druid to be able to stealth to various fights and solo them for particular loot.
Imagine not actually understanding what I’m disputing. Y’all got insults but no substance.
something several of us have done and provided plenty of sample size for?
Standing in front of a mob and getting attacked is something literally any class can do, particularly if all you do (as in your case) is trash tanking.
Again… imagine not actually understanding what I’m disputing.
Shamans can tank 5-mans, very slowly, they can’t hold aggro on multiple mobs easily. They can OT MC, but anything beyond that is just asking for trouble. Also… out threating a feral druid?
I’d love to see the math behind a feral druid with pummeler compared to a shaman.
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I posted a video with my channel above. Just a dump of a few MC runs this last week and a few months ago when we first started.
Shaman initial threat in 5 mans is actually extremely high. Love mage cleave groups because I can hold agro until mob death. We also drink at the same time, perks! If you’re on fairbanks I’d love to take you through an UBRS and change your mind 
Unfortunately, to do it properly requires a lot of game knowledge, so you may have experienced shamans-in-training in the past ( as all of us were! )
The slow runs may be with ‘windfury cleave’ groups, which seem like a great idea, but are not as easy for us to control, but far from impossible! This is because they don’t need to drink. ( to any shaman reading, trick is to not fight agro on skull mob and build agro on other 2-3 while balancing mana. Makes runs EXTREMELY fast, perhaps faster than spellcleave, just a little more pressure on our wonderful healers )
Rockbiter Rank 7 with talents grants 784 AP and an invisible, unresistable proc, that’s capable of critting, with a 72 TPS baseline.
With a 25% crit rate, 56% uptime on Flurry, (2.25 resultant charges due to overwrites), results in a near 15% reduction in weapon delay with SS employed.
Resultant Rockbiter proc TPS is ~100 TPS.
ES + SS threat is 637 average damage, 1274 raw threat, generated every 6s without Concussion, without Reverberation, and sans +spell power, for 212 TPS.
Auto Attack will gain 784 AP and 140% of sheet driven DPS prior to mitigation with a 25% crit rate.
For Weapons refer to Deathbringer, Edge of Chaos, or Ebon Hand for a craftable.
Shamans entering MC can generate near 500 TPS without Lightening, Lightening Shield, or front loaded math.
Shamans in BWL can generate near 600 TPS with just Rockbiter and ES/SS.
I’m not suggesting Shaman should be tanking Raid bosses, but for 5 mans and raid trash Shaman tanks are just fine.
An example is a Shaman in BWL is a 7k+ HP offtank, with 7k+ AC, generating 600 TPS that starts front loaded.
Moreover Shaman retain their DPS raid profile with the same spec for when they aren’t tanking.
All this has been done and parsed to death in Vanilla. Its been done, done well I might add, and filled a roll that guilds who only wanted 2 MT’s or in my guilds case we had an MT run a little late for raids.
It’s not optimal, but when fighting trash optimal isn’t needed, and in no way interfered with the raids Boss fighting profile.
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Just read through this thread, and the evolution of the naysaying is really amusing.
“Shamans can’t tank.”
“They can tank at 30 and below, but not after that.”
“They can tank up to early BRD, but they can’t tank endgame dungeons.”
“They can tank 5- and 10-man content, but they can’t tank raids.”
“They can off-tank raids, but they can’t main tank raids.”
“They can MT Ony and MC because the content is so easy and anyone can do it, but they won’t be able to MT Naxx.”
Can’t wait for the videos of shamans MTing Naxx. 
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This is great information, thank you! Lightning shield being a solid TPS increase with 200-250 dmg per proc. Elemental Fury ( 150% crit damage ) talent for ES and abusing our other enh shaman stormstrikes, around once per fight will get 1.8k damage ES which results in 3.6k raw threat. Anecdotal, but not at all uncommon. Stormstrike’s tooltip being wrong, which can cause us to invoke another 33% (not 20%) increased damage from ES, twice per 20 seconds in a perfect world of no serpent stings or rogue poisons.
We also have more options when it comes to world buffs over warriors, as we can squeeze a huge benefit out of spell power crit ( tribute, dragonslayer, songflower ) due to elemental fury. Available consumables expands as well, as spell power flask & greater arcane elixirs are available.
First off, this is incorrectly stated. Rockbiter provides a flat 72 threat any time it is applied, not per second. Second, flat threat applications do not critically hit, anymore than Sunder Armor applications, so I’m not sure where you’re pulling that information from whatsoever.
So this:
This is flatly incorrect. You need to account for weapon swing time, miss/parry/dodge/block events, the application of Rockbiter from other skills like Stormstrike, and unique things like Flurry Axe or Hand of Justice procs.
- You incorrectly bake in SS’s debuff to every application of ES. Not only are you hitting ES 3.333 times more often than SS, the SS debuff is for two sources of Nature Damage only, and are not exclusive to the casting Shaman. Instant Poison, Thorns, Lightning Shield, etc, will eat these procs as well.
- You account for no spell miss or spell resist.
Two of these aren’t even available, and due to the speed dependent nature of Rockbiter, and lack of any generalized threat modifiers, I’m not sure Deathbringer is even a competent choice.
Even if I used the kind of napkin math you presented for Druids or Warriors, Shaman would pale in comparison.
Which is just another way of saying a Fury Warrior can slap on a Shield and do just fine as well, or a Feral can swap from Cat to Bear. If the argument were about successfully handling trash mobs that don’t hit hard and die in <20 sec, I wouldn’t even bother because as evidenced by many MC runs, Warlocks and Rogues and Fury Warriors in zerker stance eat hits from dogs and giants alike and no real problems occur.
The argument ranges from “Shaman can MT anything up through Naxx with enough love and support and massive consumable use” to “Shaman are just as good as other Tanks, look at how close they are in stats!” These are the claims of other Shaman posters I take great issue with, particularly when presented alongside a “guide” that purports to satisfy the same role as a Prot Warrior guide, minus any intelligible math or support.
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And 98% of them say “I’m not a tank. I’m fury”
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As a tanking Shaman, against trash mind you, I had Natures Guidance and was hit capped. I was also an Orc weilding an Axe…I was melee hit capped.
I also had +3% spell hit against trash, nor did I factor in spell crit.
I only used LS on the pull, I didn’t refresh it, as it wasn’t needed and had no intrinsic threat modifier.
Deathbringer with ~1600 AP, with Flurry was a threat choice. Its TPS output was a small sacrifice to make considering its damage output.
We are talking trash…I’m not sure that sinking in yet.
Lightening bolt to prevent splash, LS up on pull, followed by base ES, immediate SS + auto attack, then repeat SS and ES on timer up.
Average swing time was 2.4s on a Deathbringer.
I was hit capped.
I had +3% spell hit.
I had over 6% spell crit.
The issue with Rockbiter is it never showed on meters at the time. Most was supposition.
But it doesn’t change much considering my threat numbers were actually higher than I posted.
My listed threat on a meter at the time, which didn’t show Rockbiter threat due to addon limitations, was ~550 to 600 TPS on trash in MC.
Hit capped and 2% spell hit short of cap on trash, in addition to spell crit.
Against trash miss/parry/dodge and block are nearly irrelevant if your hit capped with +3% spell hit and over 6% spell crit.
Nor does boss 3% crit suppression enter into the equation at all.
It should be noted I did not tank AQ trash…AQ has an issue with nature damage 
However my avoidance on my Shaman was better than my Druid during MC, Ony, and BWL. But I didn’t tank trash from the tank group…Warriors are finicky about their Windfury Totem, and I was using talented GoA while tanking.
During MC I had enough threat to tank Skull on trash pulls.
During BWL, our DPS had ramped enough that I was tanking X…to give me a threat lead…but again not an issue.
Shaman don’t need Druid threat against raid trash.
Shaman don’t need Druid mitigation against raid trash.
They are however more than capable of tanking 5 mans, OT during UBRS, and tanking Raid trash, while maintaining their full DPS spec.
Nope. 72 threat multiplied by weapon speed. So, in essence, 72 TPS assuming no miss/block/dodge. Speaking with such conviction is dangerous.
See this information would be useful to put up front, because when people omit it I don’t know if they just forgot or they don’t realize what they’re missing.
Additionally, you need to account for spell hit/crit/resist as it does not wash out evenly. Plus, since we’re on the topic of talents, talent choices are pretty diverse so the value you get out of things like SP or AP will depend on the those choices. If you got Nature’s Guidance, you sacrifice Elemental choice, deeper damage talents in Enhancement, or even potentially defensive talents in Enhancement. This matters a great deal.
But that’s entirely the problem. If you’re swinging a Deathbringer and nerfing your TPS output because it primarily comes from Rockbiter procs, the extra DPS is irrelevant if it places your threat at subpar levels. Again, Shaman have no blanket threat modifiers like everyone else, so when you swing your big ax for 200, you only deal 200 threat.
Against trash isn’t the argument. Belaboring this point is irrelevant.
You have anything to support this? No other static threat modifiers scale with weapon speed.
vanilla-twinhead()twinstar()cz/?issue=10167
(replace () with .)
I’m not sure how to post links without an error.
This could be slightly different in Vanilla, as the thread references bugs in a server; however, my TPS when testing a few weeks ago between a fast 1h (1.5 a/s) and 1h (2.8 a/s) were identical.
I feel like this will still be called ‘napkin math’. Next I need to provide video evidence, a cap of the vanilla source code, and confirmation from a developer that it works this way.
Well that’s… worse then. It only applies to actual swings, nothing else, which makes Hit cap an imperative, and you still have to deal with Parry. And still nothing that would allow the proc to critically strike like Valor stated.
Fast would still be better than slow on account of Flurry procs from Critical Strikes, smoothing the increase.
I see what you’re saying, but I haven’t had an issue. Such high initial threat allows for a buffer. Much more important to have a weapon based on the fight. Aurastone for SP important fight like Baron Geddon, Eskarhand for higher threat is important, timeworn mace for higher defense.
Hit is nice, but we have so many other valuable stats, it’s not critical to be maxed out. You only really feel it on 3 straight misses on timeworn mace, but even then the high initial threat and ES always keeps me above the packs.
Which is why the spreadsheets need a bit more than just “Spell Crit has a stat weight of 10” and that’s that. Elemental Fury and Elemental Devastation really alter the stat priority if you get them, likewise Hit and Spell Hit thresholds are pretty dramatically different if you don’t sink 13pts into Nature’s Guidance.
There’s no doubt Shaman can use a variety of stats but the stat weighting matters, a lot. Especially since landing ES puts you on a far nastier table than landing autos.