The best way I can explain it is the Auto Attack and ES are the foundation for Shaman threat.
My auto attack damage output with a Deathbringer was between 250 and 280 DPS with talents during MC…ie Flurry, Weapon Mastery, etc. Enhanced SoE + Rockbiter AP makes weapons hit like a truck.
The AP value prior to mitigation alone is nearly 500 damage every 2.4s factoring in talents. A Deathbringer to a Shaman is like weilding an Arc Reaper in the main hand alone.
So using a Flurry Axe was actually a TPS loss for me…
Think of it as a small tank profile sacrifice, like MCP vs Warden Staff, to boost threat ouput.
ES was about 200 TPS for me. I ES after SS at least once every 20s for the enhancement…but my spell crit was higher than my spell miss which offset some of the loss.
None of this included world buffs btw. My potion use however was the standard Mongoose + Superior Defense layout intrinsic to most tanks.
Considering that I would LB, then ES, with a precast LS on the pull…the moment the mob reached me I had a near 3000 point threat lead on a 20 to 25s fight.
I get where you’re coming from. Unfortunately, I don’t think the purpose of Caperfin’s guide was to be the Shaman Tank bible, nor is he responsible for expanding. It’s an AMAZING “intro to Shaman Tanking”. The stat weights are values are perfectly fine until you get into BWL/AQ, where I (should) have a different set of gear for every fight. Depends on the resistance level of the boss, their avoidance, the duration of the fight, and so on.
It would be rad to delve deeper, but honestly there are probably only a half dozen people who could even have those conversations. I defininately can’t, and I feel like I know a lot having my hands on it. No ‘one size fits all’, and so many modifiers that saying “oh elemental fury adds X points to Y” because you would be discounting the 10 other affecting talent choices, what if any consumables or world buffs you’re bringing, what type of boss you are planning on fighting. Stat allocation for druids and warriors is much more simple, due to being able to disregard spells and alternative methods of generating threat.
I would love more discussions along the lines of the above, but shaman tanks get so much flak on forums and are so complicated, that the barrier to entry is high. The barrier to bring the layman into the conversation is next to impossible.
What would be better, is to encourage people to give it a try, feel it for yourself. Increase the size of the community. With more questioning minds comes a much healthier platform for discussion, where the combined knowledge of all shaman tanking is not condensed into those half dozen few.
Every possible topic that comes to mind will be analyzed to answer any questions you might have.
Shamans are classified under Viable and with each theorycrafter joining our ranks and contributing their work, perhaps shamans could “feasibly” one day dethrone those braggadocious paladin tanks/bear tanks and reach a theoretical semi-optimal spot.
As a guideline, the Example Druid Tank below is BIS/buffed and able to clear most bosses without a problem.
Caper plays very fast and loose with terminology because the guide reads like part-RP and part-theorycrafting. The thing is there isn’t any justification behind his conclusions to be found in his guide. I get that the average player isn’t looking for every formula in detailed format, but if you’re going to hand me a BiS list, or a stat comparison, or a stat weight, I should be able to find somewhere in the guide the work put in to arrive at those conclusions.
This is why I raise a fuss, because these complications are not complicated at all, and are something theorycrafters have handled for over a decade now. When I maintained the Druid sheets throughout WotLK and Cata, it was in conjunction with Warrior, Paladin, and Death Knight setups. The whole point is to be able to compare across unlike classes in a like manner, or apples-to-apples. That’s why TPS, DPS, and EH are commonly used.
But there is more to it than that. There is the need to show how each class scales across time and gearing thresholds. It is all well and good that a Shaman can achieve X, Y, and Z stats eventually once Naxxramas is on farm, but no one is there yet.
So when someone puts a lot of work into reprinting all the buffs/debuffs/consumables and class skills to cobble together a guide, but I can’t see any actual substantive work to support any suggestions, and a lot of it is cribbed from p-servers to boot, the whole guide becomes suspect.
This isn’t how it grows though, and I’m speaking strictly from experience as a Druid from Vanilla to present. Vanilla lacked serious theorycrafting of any kind, but it especially lacked substantive proofs for Druid output in terms of DPS and Tanking. It wasn’t until TBC that enough time had been sunk into meaningful theorycrafting that people became more accepting of Druids, simply because the numbers could be verified and substantiated. It is due to this that some fights were strictly Druid superior, because the boss simply could not Crushing Blow at all, and the math showed that dominance in spades. By Sunwell, Crushing Blows were deactivated almost entirely, but we also had Sunwell Radiance to keep Druid Avoidance in check, again because the math had been done showing how close to passively unhittable we could get.
If you want to grow the Shaman community doing this goal, aspiration isn’t going to cut it. Legitimate side-by-side comparisons, showcased with concrete and verifiable information, of Shaman utility/superiority in specific scenarios/boss encounters, will do wonders.
Valar makes an excellent point about weaker, lvl60-62 mobs, that die very fast: Shaman initial aggro is fantastic. Lay that out next to what a Druid/Warrior/Paladin can do in the same scenario with the same level of gear/buffs/consumables, and you make a case for Shaman slapping on a Shield and picking up lighter hitting mobs.
If Caperfin can’t/won’t do that, well his own words undermine him and his purpose. And it doesn’t have to be him, it can be any of you. The stuff isn’t hard to model, I just don’t have tons of free time to play on Excel, and maybe I’ll get to it one day, just not today.
But for his claims, in his very guide thread, that he foresees Shaman MTing Naxx bosses, well… nothing indicates such capacity based on his own work.
It should be noted that I never chose Elemental for talents because it was important that I retain my primary raid purpose…which was to do damage on bosses and to totem twist when needed.
Without totem mana reduction talents or +3% spell/melee hit that job was infringed upon.
Nor was it an issue, tanking trash was never a problem in regards to threat or the ability to tank.
However with that being said, as someone who also tanked on every other class in Vanilla at the raid level…hence my love of tanking, a raid would have better off with a Fury Warrior or pure Cat DPS build tanking trash.
Its also important to note that Bears and Warriors don’t have the issue that Shaman or Paladins do…being tied to a mana pool.
Sustaining the levels of threat, necessary to a raid on trash, requires copious amounts of mana that would be difficult to maintain longer than 90s or so.
Meanwhile Fury Warriors and Bears can tank forever.
However this is all based on my perspective of what worked for me at the time. But in regards to the original purpose of the thread, Shamans can tank 5 mans, UBRS, and trash just fine while retaining their full DPS spec.
Simple compared to what? Druid? Which has had a thriving community since vanilla, and is generally accepted as viable tanks. The collective man hours of effort spreadsheeting in order to prove them viable through all of Naxx.
Lets expect Caperfin to do all of that, or myself, or anyone in this thread. With a class that is unimaginably more complex and layered with shrouds of bad knowledge ( not knowing 72 threat * weapon speed ).
We were shunned during Vanilla as anything other than flag runners and Raid healers. The 3rd Party program, Rawr, authored by Toskk alone to start, didn’t become a thing until very late Vanilla and it was a mess. And my own work? Entirely solo development which I pinged off the rest of the Tank Forum (when it still existed) for corrections and sanity checks.
If you expect to be taken seriously, then yes. Otherwise it is just another “well my guild lets me” and the community will remain small, niche, and largely overlooked for good reason.
Eh… problem is some folks are wishcasting this all the way through to Kel’thuzad himself, so there is a helluva lot of glossing over with the word “not optimal” when many cases and raids will be “not viable.”
That’s fair, but not always true. I come more prepared and can outperform our other tanks in both TPS and EH. Also, you can combine a tank slot with an enhanced windfury slot, which actually saves space in the raid.
I know that we can at least manage being on the same tier as druids, that’s easy. With pros and cons ofc, but similar viability. I’m even more hopeful than that considering footage I HAVE seen of shamans tanking Naxx as shaman, still trying to find the video though, as it was unlisted.
That being possible with soooo little optimization (e.g. few theorycrafting hours total compared to druids or wars ) is incredible. I’m hyped & can’t wait to unlock more secrets.
I healed (Holy Priest) a Shaman Tank thru UD Strat. Didnt have any issues from my end. At the time I was roughly 50-60% Pre-RAID BIS though Healing a Shaman has only been a 1 time experience for me so far. Possible skill playing into effect but that’s speculation
But not damage mitigation. So you stress the healers more. Not a big issue these days… but truth be told a guild using a shaman tank for progression is gimping themselves.
And I will look at your math, but I find out performing other tanks in regards to EH to be a tough pill to swallow. Shield block and Shield wall alone makes me think no.
Shield Block, Defensive Stance, and Plate are tough hurdles to clear for a Shaman.
Warriors are presently behind Druids on EH as well thanks to the Dire Bear Form health and armor modifiers combined with Heart of the Wild, so for a Shaman to be close in EH to a Druid, the Druid would have to be rocking full threat gear and zero armor items and even then I wonder. Dire Bear is nearly a free Flask of the Titans all by itself. If the Druid is entirely ignoring consumables on top of it, then maybe.
I have 7.6k armor and 20% dodge with GoA (which I can use instead of WF while main tanking) with 4.6k hp. Where our prot warrior has about the same armor, less dodge, 500~ more HP. I generate more threat than him too. He also doesn’t use consumables, which I absolutely do. So elixir of defense 400+ armor, stoneskin 2k armor, elixir of fortitude 140 hp, mongoose for dodge, and so on.
Def more survivability than the fury warriors. Less threat, but nobody can out-agro me during bosses anyway so it doesn’t really matter. Granted, best they’re doing is 800dps on someone like magmadar. This was last I compared a month ago. I’ll ping them and ask for exact numbers, so I stand to be corrected
Pros and cons. Like I said:
similar viability
At some point having infinity threat is not helpful, but MCP is pretty awesome. Shamans have a handful of pros that Druids lack and vice versa.
And he has Shield Block and Defensive Stance on top of those things. He could have less everything than you and because of those two skills alone, still consistently take much less damage than you. Shoving off Critical Hits and Crushing Blows, while Blocking most hits and also having a flat 10% reduction on top of everything else is fairly huge.
Which makes the comparison pointless and doesn’t speak well for Shaman if with a full set of consumables you’re still approaching a Warrior who is being entirely lazy.
Yeah phase 1 druids are pretty sweet. Shamans full Naxx BIS is similar in stats in regards to full Naxx BIS droods. That’s actually in Caperfin’s video I believe, the side-by-side.
To name a few pros, shamans have:
Insane AoE threat with advanced techniques involving healing, force reactive disk, and preventative pushback from our talents
Land somewhere inbetween prot war & fury warrior on threat and survivability. Both groups pale in comparison to p1 druids
We take a tank slot AND tank group shaman slot, effectively saving space
Our initial agro is extremely high, so risk of losing threat early in a fight is low. Druids have taunt, so this only applies to taunt immune bosses like Ony or fights where the first 30 second spike extreme
But yeah phase 1 bears are awesome. I almost rolled a druid
Which is why I initially called out his guide. He doesn’t actually justify the side-by-side, he just shows a set of stats for a supposed Druid and for a Shaman, no gear list, no buffs, nothing else, and makes his comparison. I’ve asked him to give this info repeatedly but he’s just avoided the question over and over. He low balls the Druid and leaves off several buffs, while obtaining Health and Armor values on a Shaman that I have yet to see even theoretically demonstrated, by several thousand points.
Druids hit the armor cap with no buffs in aq gear, and in naxx with the priest crit we have over 20k armor and 80% dmg reduction. Sorry man but ur just wrong.
