No, you suggested someone did such a thing but didn’t name them, post a log, or provide any other sort of information. The only logs of any Shaman “tanking” attempts have been Reft and Zamkabob, both on Fairbanks.
As for Shaman viability in BWL, that question has been answered, they are strictly non-viable up to Broodlord, both in terms of progression (no loot from Broodlord or beyond) and in terms of the tier overall (all loot from the phase can be considered). Even with Naxx gear, a Shaman can’t meet the 33k+ EH check that is an MS Crit, so any Shaman attempting to do Broodlord is just a dice-roll away from instantaneous death. Shaman EH just doesn’t scale well at all because of middling Armor, DPS-level Health scaling, and no special defensive mechanics like Shield Block or Defensive Stance.
I’ll have the rest of the bosses mapped out tonight once I get home. Need to grab a few more logs on the Drakes and Chrommagus to get the proper base damage and damage range for each.
I come back and you guys are still having the argument…persistent little buggers you are!
The whole EH conversation is moot.
Shamans simply can’t generate the necessary long term threat against ramping DPS values. They simply don’t have necessary threat modifiers to accomplish that task long term.
If a Shaman had unlimited talents and unlimited mana and unlimited spell power they still couldn’t do it.
ES is +100% threat.
RB is +72 TPS that can be enhanced to about 85 TPS through Flurry.
Everything else is normal threat values.
ES, with 20% mana reduction (10% reduction + CC), with +5% damage with talents, +10% damage from 1 SS enhanced ES, with 1000 SPELL POWER:
360 mana per cast, 4320 mana per minute.
1084 damage
2167 threat
433 TPS
While that doesn’t factor in spell crit at 1/2% per point…it also doesn’t factor in spell miss, which will be far higher against a boss.
THATS 1000 SPELL POWER BTW!
Topping 800 TPS for any fight that’s nearing or exceeding 2m is a Herculean effort for a Shaman…because front loading isn’t as powerful in long fights.
Just 5s ES and SS use is 5277 mana per minute.
Consumables are ~1700 mana per minute, assuming you can safely rune.
I wouldn’t say that. If you can’t survive an unavoidable Tank spike, the rest of this is entirely pointless. You can’t generate threat when you’re dead.
And it scales for crap, even going up with stronger hitting weapons and neglecting defense. Oh and a big chunk of their potential EH goes away if they’re using Mana instead of Greater Stoneshield like I calculated.
But the thing about TPS is that while it is highly non-optimal, so long as you aren’t OOMing your Healers and you aren’t running into hard Enrage timers, you can viably kill a boss with crappy TPS and very very bored DPS plinking away for 15+ minutes. That’s why I put EH as the primary focus, which Shaman lack there as well.
You’ll tank fine in 5-mans, but you’re limited by your mana.
That’s where Warriors and bears will shine because rage keeps building throughout the duration of fights, so you can always hit that critical ability when you need to. Shamans will have trouble if they are OOM and an extra pack of mobs gets pulled and you have no mana to grab agro…
Same thing happened to me on my hunter. We completed sm gy and the tank left. We couldn’t find a tank so my pet tanked the other 3 arms. Np, but I never offer when groups are looking for a tank because I don’t think people would accept a hunter pet tank. Given the difficulty in finding tanks people should be more open to accepting other classes as tanks. It works fine at least until some of the 55+ dungeons
And Shaman make surprisingly solid Raid trash tanks as well.
However when you add things like:
Tank Swaps
Wing Buffet
EH choices in regards to Pot use
AQ 40 nature resistance on Nature Damage
It limits the viability of a Raid Boss tanking Shaman, especially when you consider the talent choices limiting your DPS role when not tanking…because you can’t due to encounter mechanics.
Tanking Trash or 5 mans can still utilize a standard Enhance Talent layout for DPS output. Tanking bosses requires far more Elemental choices that preclude things like SS.
Additionally tanking Trash means Shaman are only facing 10% or less pure frontal avoidance and can talent to 2% spell miss.
Trying to tank bosses means you are facing a baseline of 9% miss, 14% parry, 6.5% dodge, and 5% block…not to mention spell miss going through the roof.
I’ve even tanked AQ40 trash without ES use and it was fine, as long as my mob wasn’t the first target and I wasn’t facing initial DPS competition.
But with all those factors in place, having a Shaman MT or even OT bosses is a hard sell when you have to bring another OT anyways, and your spec isn’t an optimized DPS spec when you can’t tank.
Sure you can, you just have a slightly different role during progression, you’re an offtank. You can run high threat on the boss to prevent wipes, tank all trash, and there are typically 1 or 2 bosses you can main tank right off the bat. In a casual guild that still warrants being looted tank gear, as you gear you become more viable for certain bosses. Practically speaking, if you’re an off tank who is gearing up, there is absolutely no reason you should pass on gear that drops on a later boss simply over a viability semantic. There are very few shaman tanks who actually tank progression boss fights as the main tank. I explained it earlier, but understanding the niche is key. Drawing parallels to your ICC reference, just because warrior tanks couldn’t avoid certain 1 shot mechanics didn’t mean that non-hardcore guild didn’t gear them up.
You’d be surprised. Not only are dps constantly told to reign in their threat regardless who or what is tanking, but there are ways to synergize even more rockbiter swings than just what you get out of flurry. Might be hard to believe and it’s only anecdotal but I definitely was causing wipes in BWL this week by pulling off the furry tank without even trying, ie allowing him 10 seconds for threat and down ranking my ES. Shaman tanks are def good front loading threat in dungeons, but if you’re going to assert that that is how we maintain threat on a raid boss you ought to do a little more research into how the gearing and talent builds are almost entirely different between 5/10man and 40man.
Hard to be a viable OT when you still risk exploding when a boss touches you. OTing in Vanilla almost always means tanking the same boss as the MT as we have very few add fights.
Tanking right now is mostly a matter of who goes first, not who has the easier/different job.
I argued no such thing. Take gear upgrades whenever and wherever you can, but viability having any relevant definition can’t include unavailable loot while on progression. If that was the case we could just argue that Shaman have no problems Tanking Firemaw because Face of Death is such a fantastic shield and T3 has some amazing Stamina/Armor totals.
Unless you’re getting extra swings or other forms of haste that aren’t Juju Flurry, then there really are not. Also note that Rockbiter works much like Sunder Armor in the sense they are static additions. Plus, standing behind a boss means no Parry and 14% is a helluva hurdle to overcome. Even though Bear TPS can blast out 1.3-1.4k steadily in high rage situations, we still can go on an unlucky streak of Parry/Parry/Dodge/Parry and do no real Threat.
I mean it sounds like we agree on the viability of being an OT. In progression shaman are sub-optimal offtanks. Once everything is cleared they can push to main tank more and more bosses, and going back is what makes it really fun. It’s like a hard mode you can turn on after your guild has been farming the place for months, it makes the game more interesting and fun. Not viable to main tank the majority of bosses during progression, but definitely capable of tanking most bosses while the content is still current. Good enough to be considered a raid tank, even if it’s just off tank status.
Not… quite. My point was that being the “OT” on Vael isn’t really any different than being the “MT” since you do the same job regardless: get beat up by a giant red dragon.
The same is true of every other boss except Nef. When we get to AQ20/40 the distinction between OT and MT becomes more prevalent.
Well OT for most of these bosses is the same role. It’s more of a co tank situation. Which I did prove can be done, with that broodlord log. Tanked him for nearly a minute total throughout the fight. So still, viable, small chance to get 1shot, still can work and get the job done. For example, I could just be the first tank to pull on each drake and front load threat, once the buffet or other swap mechanic occurs I can swap out.
They are not. The term viability is determine on a guild by guild basis. If your guild is fine with a less than 5% chance of you getting 1shot, on only 25% of bosses, by their special ability which only occurs a few times per tank, then you are considered viable to that guild.
