Yea, sometimes 200hp can be life or death, just enough to hang on while that big heal hits
The damage prevented become more trivial as bosses start to hit harder. In dungeons and MC it is worth it, but once you get to BWL+ it starts to diminish rapidly. That is to say, if a 5k swing killed you, chances are a 4.8k swing will do the same, and the damage only increases from there. Like on patchwerk, if a 9k hateful is gonna kill you, a 8.8k hateful will likely do the same. Plus you’re only blocking ~11% of the time, it’s pretty useless after BWL until you’re pushing ~20% chance to block 400.
Unfortunately, no. That’s the difference between a viable and non-viable Tank. A Rogue can rely upon RNG via Evasion and their own massive Agility pools and favorable Agility-to-Dodge ratio to “Tank” for a time, but they can’t consistently deal with it and eventually something will get through that makes them go splat. It doesn’t need to be a high chance to make this a reality, because even a 0.01% chance event can be devastating simply because it means you die.
There’s only been one situation in all my progression Tanking since Vanilla through the end of Mythic Hellfire Citadel where literally zero Tanks could reliably survive an encounter on progression, and that was 0% Buff-Heroic Lich King-25m. If the upper 10% of his swing damage occurred at the same time as Soul Reaper, even with a Druid or Death Knight, it would squash you when you were between CD usage. That’s the only time where the “can guarantee no death” viability was lifted and it was because it was a bleeding-edge, end-of-expansion boss encounter.
I agree, a Tank dying suddenly isn’t instantly the end of the fight, but it is a critical failure that shouldn’t be happening as a result of RNG. Right now we don’t have a lot of fixed thresholds for success as we don’t have any real hard enrage timers or mechanics that just end the raid if you mess them up. But that doesn’t change how viability is calculated.
A non-viable DPS class is one in which the DPS output they can produce is not sufficient to kill a boss with that kind of DPS, based upon whatever timers and mechanics need negotiating. Right now, not a single DPS is non-viable, and as far as I can tell, they all remain viable through the end of Naxx.
Tanks simply don’t have that luxury.
I’ll do you a favor and do some math for you.
Tanks can be measured in one of four ways, in order of most important to least:
- Effective Health (EH)
- Threat per Second (TPS)
- Time to Live (TTL)
- Damage per Second (DPS)
What we’re currently discussing is EH. EH is the minimum threshold for viability because it is the value that says you can eat the damage and Healers can respond… or you can’t and you just die regardless of how fast and ready your Healers are.
Effective Health is the easiest to calculate as well, being a measure of your Health after accounting for all guaranteed sources of mitigation. So that means Dodge, Parry, Miss, and Block do not factor in here for Shaman. Only Armor matters, and to a much lesser extent Stoneskin Totem. So when looking at gear for EH purposes, your stat weights will be very limited and narrowly tailored. For Broodlord, the stat weights look like this:
- Agility - 2.0
- Stamina - 24.9
- Health - 2.1
- Armor - 4.6
- Bonus Armor - 1.0
https://classic.wowhead.com/items/class:7/weights:115:41:22:21/weight-values:21:46:249:20?filter=238;4;3
Here are the stat weights applied to WoWHead items, available in Phase 3. Note that the weights are all multiplied by a factor of 10 because WoWHead doesn’t like decimals.
And here is the set using those stat weights to create the most EH you can achieve for Broodlord, without using any gear from Broodlord himself or beyond, and no PvP gear.
https://classic.wowhead.com/gear-planner/shaman/orc/AjwAgUmBPB0CRx2DSY1YR4VByU46BkIwh0IyPB2ISshONIlCL04rikHHSnELSb8MPe8NLiMONo6PQtNOL5BHyFz4kULSTjE
Using this set, I plugged the stats into my spreadsheet, assumed every defensive talent possible (including Shield Specialization), and applied all the non-World Buff external bonuses. Usual raid buffs included, you’re in a Warlock group for improved Blood Pact, I assumed you had the fully improved totems, and I gave you all the EH relevant consumables as well. I also included chain-use of Greater Stoneshield Potions. Your final stats look like this:
- 7,700 Health
- 10,211 Armor
- 305 Defense
- 19.30% Dodge
- 5.20% Parry
- 10.20% Block
This gives you a grand total Effective Health of: 21,361.58
For Broodlord, he is debuffed with a fully improved Demoralizing Shout and a Curse of Recklessness. With these stats Broodlord can dish out:
- Worst-case Normal Mortal Strike of 16,571.43
- Worst-case Crush Mortal Strike of 24,857.14
- Worst-case Critical Mortal Strike of 33,142.85
This means that with the absolute best EH-only gear, disregarding your TPS, TTL, and DPS entirely, you can only endure the non-Crit/Crush Mortal Strike. With this gear set, you have a 20.40% chance to be either Crit or Crushed. Now you could argue that you’re almost there for Crushing Blows, making only some of the the Crushing MS actually dangerous… but even a best-case Crit MS (as in the lowest possible) will gib you.
I’ll happily walk through my SS if you want, and if you want a specific breakdown of stats I can do it in another post, but definitively, a Shaman is not a viable Tank for Broodlord.
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I have zero faith in your optimization of shaman gear, absolutely none. But taking it at face value it looks like I’d survive most of, if not not all crushing blows. Especially if a shield is timed properly. Like we discussed, the only thing I have to worry about is critical mortal strikes which are less than 5% chance, at which point we’d have to get into what percentage of mortal strike crits would be enough to 1 shot me because I’m sure I could get away with the lower end of the spectrum leaving with me enough health. So in reality it’s even less than the sub 5% crit chance for me to be 1 shot. Definitely not optimal but it would work most times than not, and even when it doesn’t offtanks are there to pick up the slack.
In any case, it still means I’m a viable tank option on most fights in the instance, and more of the ‘kind of not viable’ for brood lord and nef but ‘still doable’. Which satisfies. Nothing in my decade and a half of playing this game has been as fun as tanking raids on a shaman. It might be the most satisfied I’ve ever been by a video game, highly recommend 
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I mean if you can find better EH pieces that aren’t Warlord level… by all means, but EH literally only cares about Stamina and Armor and your tier gear is going to supply most of that. If you have issues with the values, I’ll gladly lay out every stat used, every formula, every bit. EH is quick and easy to calculate.
You’d survive about 64% of the Crushing MS, leaving about 5.4% of your hit table from Crushings as deadly. So 1 out of 10 MS will just gib you. That’s bad.
MS doesn’t have a strict timer, you can’t guarantee a PW:S, Shield Block, etc.
No, it is a bit OVER 10% for you to be 1-shot, assuming perfect EH, perfect consumables, and perfect debuff application from your raid, notably your Warriors.
/giggle
Only having 7.7k Health means you can be 2-shot by any other boss in that place.
I already have over 8k fully buffed sooooo ??? What lol? Being 2 shot is irrelevant, if your guild is running a shaman tank you have not just above average healers, you have great healers. They’re on their game, you’re never taking 2 hits in a row without a heal, being 2 shot is irrelevant.
Either way, good talk, really. I’m going to finally get a chance to tank skull targets and log most bosses in MC tomorrow night so we’ll have more to chat about then. We think it will be real smooth. From there I plan on convincing my raid lead to get me tanking on razorgor/vael/flamegor in the weeks following, probably 3 or 4 weeks out from that though. Right now the only thing preventing me really is gear limitations, I kind of got screwed in my personal MC progression and I’m still catching up.
And significantly less Armor meaning you have much less EH. You’re not following the math at all.
Being 2-shot isn’t irrelevant. Plenty of 2-shot scenarios happen in a single moment in BWL. Drake Thrash, Vael melee+breath+dot, Nef breath+melee, etc.
I already explained why drake thrash isn’t a worry. As for Vael, 300 fire resist for the breath and the dot is negligible because as soon as I get it I’ll be putting out almost 2000/hps on only me. The idea is that plus healers is going to make tanking vael trivial
And yet it is a worry for exactly the same reason Broodlord is: you’re left open to being gibbed.
So you’re going to stack up FR on a boss that has the highest base raw melee damage, equal to Nef and nearly 40% more than Broodlord… m’kay.
EDIT: This means you’re stacking FR at the expense of EH, both Armor and Health.
I don’t need to stack it lol. I can pop in to BRS and grab the Fire resist buff. there is also quite a bit of mail gear I can use and still maintain armor/stam values, like I said, I don’t trust your knowledge on gearing a shaman for a second. Furthermore, on top of all that resist, I get a flat 10% reduced fire dmg from talents. You take the same attitude every time and I still exceed expectations. You can call it rng all you want, I’ll take the results I’m getting all day. On golemagg it was rng to out mitigate the warrior and Druid tanks, on Domo it was too, and here we are again on brood lord, I succeed, and it’s rng 
. As for Vael and The drakes, once again, the key is preventing the 1 shot. On vael I can have extremely high fire resist and still keep the same armor values, there really isn’t an opportunity to 1 shot me, it’d have to be a combo of breath and melee, so I push as much fire res as reasonably possible. constant max rank heals from healers will save me from everything else. Once I get the dot I’m home free with instant cast self heals for nearly 2k/hps. As for the drakes, only way to get 1 shot is with 2 out of 3 thrash strikes going critical or two crushes and a critical. With all the swapping going on, by the time that happens, 9/10 the boss will be in the bag anyway. Even so, with ank I reduce wipe down time, so even if that off chance does occur, on any boss not just drakes, as long as we’re not trying to set records for times clears, it’s not a big deal at all. We just get it on the next attempt.
If you’re achieving 315 FR with buffs and consumables, you’re literally stacking FR.
Aaaand you’d still be 91 FR shy, which means:
You won’t be doing any such thing as you’ll lose overall EH.
I know, I’d hate for you to have to actually confront a model instead of just… ya know… asserting things. Much easier that way.
And that doesn’t change the fact that you’re reducing physical EH on a very melee heavy fight.
“You see man, the lottery is fine! My scratch-offs always give me 5 bucks!!”
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Reft main tanks Golemagg every week. Yes, golemagg, not the dog. Hell, he’s even forgot to put on his shield for half of MC and still lived.
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I guess you’ll see. Your knowldge on number crunching is nice but your knowledge of gearing a shaman are lacking. You’ve already under estimated the kit at every turn so pretty much any number crunching you know how to is lost in translation, you don’t have the faintest idea how you obtain optimal stats.
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You do realize the set I posted had half of the items you’re wearing, including the enchant choices, listed right? Did you even look?
Don’t be like Noori and just presume incorrectly.
…and?
not to mention totems.
Nope. An example is Emberweave Leggings the BiS legs for a shaman tank. It has 35 FR. Although, not every piece is as lucky. But this idea that other defensive aspects are hindered beyond repair is false.
Your mask is starting to slip.
No one believes you.
lol wow at all the arguing in this thread
shaman tanks are not worth this much bickering
You’re missing the point by a mile.
Viability for Vael would exclude Emberweave Leggings because you have to kill Flamegor for them. I’m well aware that the BiS EH setup at the end of BWL includes them, which is why they’re in the list I posted above, but if you’re going to argue someone is viable for an early boss, you can’t go slapping on later boss equipment.
Further, I didn’t say “beyond repair”, I said to gain FR you have to lose EH, which is 100% accurate. To load up on FR you can make the easiest swaps in enchants, notably on helm and leggings, and lose the least EH. Items like Lava Belt rank very high for Shaman as well because of the tremendously high base Armor (despite being Leather) and naturally have loads of FR. But beyond the easy swaps and gains, you start dropping loads more, and if you’re relying upon UBRS for every Vael pull, you’re seriously slowing your raid down if anything goes wrong.
Shhhh… no more speaking.
Eh, my SS now has all the levers in place to swap in any class and also check for EH, TPS, TTL, and DPS. WoWHead makes creating BiS lists super easy because you can calculate the stat weights and then slap them in. No more adding in gear lists by hand, which was always the most cumbersome part of creating these lists.
So it was worth it for that. Interestingly enough, this is how I got into theorycrafting the first time: people made and repeated assertions about Tanking that simply didn’t pass a smell test, but because I wasn’t in a Top 25 US Guild and had no model yet, I really couldn’t crack into the conversation. Like I said before: hard to argue with a robust model.
I’m confused…we were just talking wedneday night about a guy a shaman tank on kirtonis who tanked BWL…yet people on this thread are implying it can’t be done?
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