Generally speaking, shamans can off tank any raid boss. I have seen situations where hunter pets, and rogues have tanked bosses in vanilla, but these are specific bosses, with specific builds / gear required.
I’m fine with that, if a rogue goes all out for it.
Definitely not against it myself. These sorts of things are for more skilled players to handle, and are not for the general, bottom feeder group. you know the ones that cry about pulling one mob when they have 99% mana.
You clearly never played vanilla.
Stormstrike is a massive mana waste if you’re shaman tanking
#MyClassic
Actually do your homework, Druids have the lowest amount of avoidance since they are unable to parry. Druids do not get parry and therefore makes it harder for them to not get hit by a crushing blow than a Shaman.
Also here is a break down video of Shaman Tanking. Are they the best tank no, but can they be done yes. With the lack of tanks leveling now that most tank players of hit lvl cap Shaman tanks could fill the role but I guess you prefer groups just wait for you, but I am not sure why it should matter to a NE that doesn’t have to worry about Shamans tanking.
None of this matters for pushing Crushing Blows off the table as they are the LAST thing shoved off the table before Crits. No Shaman will ever be able to shove off Crushing Blows ever and they have substantially less EH to eat it compared to even an undergeared Paladin Tank.
Yeah no. A nearly hour long video where over half of it is listing out abilities and buffs/consumables accessible to literally everyone else.
This is just silly haha
You are super dismissive without actually knowing how things work. I provide links and evidence of how it can work. You provide nothing but the rhetoric you have been pushing this whole thread. Try backing up your assertions with proof, instead of just being dismissive.
Because what is being asserted isn’t correct. A Shaman getting more Parry to get 5-8% more total Avoidance isn’t going to lessen the amount of Crushing Blows that occur since you have to shove off normal Hits first, and no Shaman, Druid, Warrior, or Paladin is doing that without a mechanic like Redoubt or Shield Block. That’s how the hit table works and how a Rogue can actually become a better temporary Tank than any of others with Evasion because the huge influx of Dodge shoves everything off the hit table (or at least it can if they have enough Agility and +Dodge gear).
You provided a video that is mostly filler about what a Shaman is, rather than how a Shaman can actually work in comparison to even a half-baked geared Druid or Warrior. Reducing gear down to stat weights and stacking them up isn’t really all that exciting or meaningful because it only compares gear to other pieces of gear with the Shaman as the baseline.
That’s why EH was developed and used extensively (for example) in WotLK to compare all four Tanks to each other in as close to an apples-to-apples manner, but even that was plagued with problems (TPS, Avoidance, etc). I mean FFS the video attempts to say a Shaman can overcome its many inherent weaknesses with:
- Buffs
- Consumables
- Use of varied gear sets
- Use of varied “rotations”
- And having friends
These aren’t unique to Shaman. I appreciate the effort that went into this but it isn’t even close to being useful or meaningful. When he goes into the “stat comparison” between Druids and Shaman… there’s literally zero consistency in how any stats are applied, buffs are used, and no actual gear shown to establish the numbers.
It is all wish-casting nonsense. He cites a Shaman rocking 15k Armor. So let’s do something shall we? Let’s slap on the highest Armor items we can get using the WoWHead Gear Planner tool and see what we get, which is going to be mostly T2.5, T3 stuff.
https://classic.wowhead.com/gear-planner/shaman/tauren/AjwNVQMB9QBQAgVVAxUf8AFXwgJYzANXwwUxYQZXxgdXwQhXxAlXxwpAvgsxAAw97w02jg4uIw9H7RBHyBFaAw
And there it is: without buffs a massive 8,492 ARMOR
And this fool puts 15,000 in his video? Even with both Ancestral Healing and Inspiration (1.25 modifiers that I assume are multiplied, not added), that still only gets you to 13,269 using an otherwise HORRIBLE set that only looks at the highest Armor possible. Meanwhile he simply jots down 16,000 for a Druid? Who can get that without buffs?
Take a seat.
This is such a stupid post. Let’s be real. Shamans can tank. I mean if the healer is good enough I suppose a priest could tank. The real question is would anyone prefer a shaman tank to literally any other tank option …I would think not. It’s not viable. Sure they can wear a shield but they have no real aoe moves to keep threat, even with the talents they are missing armor, and the talents other tanks get regarding actual tanking abilities is also missing for shamans. So if you choose to tank as a shaman know that it’ll be harder then other classes to tank with and will also be frowned upon by the majority of the community, unless they can’t find any other option.
imo Shamans should have gained a tank role option in the later expansions not lost more and more abilities.
but there is always a better option so the only way i think one could argue as being the better choice is if they vastly out geared the other tanks interested in doing the dungeon. One could avoid that problem by having a group of friends/guild mates who would roll with the Shaman.
i watched a enhance shaman in semi ele gear tank ST with zero problems holding threat and did actualy good damage, he was chain lightning pulling with rockbiter, was full hollywood
Just for clarity, I tanked on my warrior from Vanilla and up until I stopped playing around Wrath/Mists, doing most of the raids the game had to offer at the time. While my alt was a shaman in vanilla, I never thought of tanking back in the day. However, all this talk made me curious as to how viable (not optimal, not best, not better than warrior) it was. If they had a shot of doing it without gimmicks such as hunter/WL pets.
I took the liberty of looking up a preraid BiS set for Warrior tanks and tried matching it as best I could to what is available to Shaman. (I know Shamans would seek a different itemization, but this is just for comparsion-sake)
Again, this is PRERAID BiS Gear, stuff you get before attempting to raid despite Shaman not being asked to MT raids. Warriors are king due to shield block knocking crushing blows off the hit table. This is just for science-sake and not to justify that they can Main tank. They can’t unless they are super overgeared for the encounter, and even then a warrior would be an easier choice.
[Warrior Pre-Raid BiS Gear Planner]
https://classic.wowhead.com/gear-planner/warrior/tauren/AjwPBQBQAfBfUCUBEFMCEQUfATFgAjMjA0FdBTw1BjNWB0FcCDPLCUFfCjaLC0UxDDQ9DzRVED2-ETE6
[Shaman Pre-Raid BiS Gear Planner (Warrior Mimic)]
https://classic.wowhead.com/gear-planner/shaman/tauren/AjwO8FBQAgNVIxUfBQBTAfABCMUCMyMDQScFQSIGQSgHWKIINo8JM5sKV4oLRTEMND0PR-0QFJMRMTo
The first one is the warrior with all the defensive talents placed, the latter the shaman with defense-oriented talents. I took the liberty of giving the shaman an epic BoE helm to match the difficulty of getting the Lionheart helm for warriors. If you look at the side-by-side stat comparisions, you will see:
-----------------------Warrior--------------Shaman-------------------------
- Health -------4,283 ----------------3,634
- Armor--------6,979 ----------------5,636
- Defense------330 ----------------- 325
- Miss-----------6.2% ---------------- 6.0%
- Dodge--------8.05% -------------- 15.24%
- Parry----------11.20% ------------ 6.00%
- Block C. ----- 11.20% ------------ 11.00%
The first 2 stats are the most noticeable as Shaman have ~600 less health as well as 1,300 less armor. The armor difference equates to the warrior mitigating 5.3% more damage than the shaman (55.9% vs 50.3%). Shamans do gain a touch more avoidance though with a total of 21.24% compared to the warrior’s 19.25% (2% difference). Block chance and Hit chance are equal, but Crit chance is in favor of shaman (Warrior’s 13.85% chance vs. Shaman’s 17.24%).
What does this all mean? Nothing if you don’t care about anyone or what they think. But if you do care about others, then you can see that while shamans are weaker in taking a raw hit, being susceptible to crushing blows, spells possibly missing, and needing to drink after a few pulls, they actually do have a reasonable amount of mitigation.
Not better than warriors though. They also don’t beat druids in health and armor either (most if not all the buffs shamans could get to get close, the druid could do the same unless shifting forms is required).
It’s not about beating warriors or druids though. It’s about trying something new. Attempting to make something work that was planned but never meant to be in later expansions. Shaman aren’t there to take a more optimal tank’s spot, but to help their party clear the obstacles ahead of them. Having fun. I think that’s what people are looking for, and as long as they aren’t hurting others in seeking their fun, then I don’t have anything against it.
Will it be harder to do than the normal route? Yes.
Will it be easier to just bring a warrior or a druid? Of course.
Is it possible to do for the sake of fun? Most likely, and we shouldn’t shun them for having fun.
Actually i think shamans could do fine as an ot in ubrs. I just did an ubrs run with 1 tank. As a rogue id get aggro every now and then and even then the damage was manageable with evasion up.
The content really isnt hard. Im not sure why everyone keeps trying to tow the meta when you dont need to. Hell im a dagger rogue and i was top 3 dps among fury wars and sword rogues.
You seem to be arguing the wrong point here. If you are going to jump in mid convo at least know what flavor the Kool-Aid is. We aren’t talking if Shamans are better tanks but if they can tank. The video shows a comparison of stats to show Shamans hold similar avoidance stats as the rest of the tank classes but lacks a cd to help lower avoidance requirements, but the video also shows that Druids don’t get parry which gives Shamans an advantage in the avoidance side of tanking over bear tanks. You took only what you wanted from the video and didn’t bother to actual listen to it. By the way the Kool-aid is Pink Lemonade flavored if you were curious, before you answer unaware of what flavor it is again.
Which is irrelevant when “can tank” is as simple as “doesn’t die immediately and holds aggro” which is a very low bar to clear. The video doesn’t present evidence in such a way that lends any listener the impression this is for giggles to be like a Hunter Pet or a Rogue popping Evasion, so this is disingenuous.
The video lists stats without gear. That’s absurd. I can make a tallied list and just assert, without evidence, that Class X does more DPS than Class Y because Reasons™, but it won’t be useful information.
Did you even look at the linked set I provided that exclusively aimed to cap out Armor and didn’t even come close to the values asserted in the video? I have my doubts.
As for Avoidance differences, the gap between Druids and Shaman is minute, even with the addition of Parry mechanics, because you have no other means of reliably scaling it. And it doesn’t assist with any of the survival thresholds necessary to stay current.
The video had a link to its accompanying slides that let me look at the entire thing. By all means address the issues at hand rather than continue using a moronic Kool-Aid reference.
Hi Roxx,
I healed dungeons leveling up and only ran into a shaman tank a few times.
They weren’t difficult to heal. The issue was their mana efficiency and if their earth shock gets resisted they have no emergency taunt. It makes the healer have to focus on healing the entire group as the mob bounces from 1 clothie to another while the shaman tank panics.
If a shaman tank doesn’t get resisted, has a decent health pool, some mana pots maybe then it works fine HOWEVER, the entire group has to understand that it is a shaman tank, not a druid or warrior. Treat it like a paladin so to speak. Be careful with threat the higher up you are so you don’t have party members getting 2 shot by boss mobs etc.
TLDR: Group needs to support them, they’re okay, higher up you get the less viable they become imo. Healer POV
I’m elemental with mostly Mail SP, int and stamina gear (so basically dungeon quality blue gear).
I’ve tanked ZF, Princess (which sucked tbh because of all the immunities), BRD arena, All of SM branches, and several low level isntances prior to respeccing to elemental.
If you are good at playing a shaman and have a decent quality shield with some half decent gear shamans are capable (elemental or “”"“tank spec”""" enhance) of tanking all leveling instances.
I imagine emperor, and all level 60 instances would be a pain however without extreme overgearing. Its just easier to DPS or heal as a shaman and let the druid take over with bear form (or occasional warrior who doesn’t refuse to dps).
/thread
Any class that can generate high threat can tank if the healer is good enough. Hell warlocks are the best tank at the twin emps boss in AQ, druids bear form are fine for tanking some raid encounters, and shamans and paladins all have tanked. Hell there is even that one time a hunter stacked all +healing gear and had his pet solo azurgeos.
I’m sure if someone tried hard enough a frost mage or rogue could main tank, too. Actually I’m sure a rogue could tank with ease. Evasion, prep, riposte/parry and high dodge chance. Back in the beta rogues could use bucklers before removing that too hinting at rogues ability to tank to some degree.
How does magma totem function with threat, or flame nova?