Tank Viability

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I started in Classic, but I never made it to 60.

While I am excited about the upcoming launch, I’ve heard others explain the law of the land when it came to endgame:

If you want to tank, you play warrior. No questions.

The reasoning for this is because apparently they’re the only ones who got a taunt ability? Protection paladins and feral (tank) druids are just not viable, despite having tank mechanics in them?

They have aggro increasing abilities, but would it break the game so much to give them a taunt? Having every tank end game be a warrior seems a bit boring.

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It’s two things. Many of the bosses are immune to taunt, and Bears actually have taunts.

The main thing is Shield Block which through a combination of %miss, %dodge, %parry and %block pushes Crushing Blows off the attack table. Alongside that is being able to become “crit immune” through reaching the defense cap.

The other is just threat, Warriors put out the most threat.

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When it comes to Feral Druids, they do have a taunt but they’re just generally a little bit weaker than Warriors at tanking. They are still very much so viable, just not as good.

With Paladins it ultimately comes down to you can make it work, but there are so many little things to put up with most people likely just wont want to bother.

They lack a taunt, they can have mana issues, they struggle with uncrushable, and most of their threat comes from reflective damage meaning if the mob isn’t hitting you you aren’t doing a lot of threat.

None of those things individually knock them out of the running, but combined it’s just more headache than a lot of people are going to want to put up with.

Edit: This only applies to raids. Prot Paladins make good AoE tanks in dungeons because of that reflective threat.

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Precisely.

Feral druid tanks are viable and for some bosses are even ideal over a warrior tank. Generally speaking a feral tank is preferred on fights where the tank needs to wear a lot of resist gear.

Feral tanks also have the advantage of not sharing much of the same gear with warrior tanks. So if you have a feral tank in your guild you’ll be able to gear up your tanks significantly faster giving the guild an edge with progression.

And of course as a feral tank you also have the option to throw on some healing gear and heal when your tanking abilities are not required for a particular encounter; an option that warrior tanks do not have.

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I see, I didn’t know tanking was so radically different back then. We’ll it does my heart good to know that feral can at least hold their own. Maybe a solid OT? If not MTing in raids, I’d at least have fun doing dungeon runs with people as a bear druid.

Thanks for your explanations!

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I wouldn’t mistake having taunt for being too easy. Keeping threat over the DPS and healer in vanilla was a challenge in itself. The Taunt was often your saving grace for oh s**t moments, or when DPS got really bursty, it wasn’t for common rotation.

My experience is mostly in dungeons and heroics. Paladin and Druid tanks did fine there. In what little 40 man raiding I did, I saw plenty of capable Paladin and Druid tanks on raid bosses. But Warriors always seem to be more capable, not necessarily easier. Certain bosses may favor another Class, but protection was your best all around ability set.

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Oh boy, that is a massive understatement lol.

To be clear, as others have said Paladins and Druids can tank 5 man content “fine”. In limited cases they are potentially better or in any case have an easier time of it. Thinking stuff like Scholomance for a Paladin. We used a Bear to tank Jin’Do in ZG and a few others and even used a Warlock to do some offtanking in AQ40 on one fight.

When you get to your typical raid bosses, it changes because of the Crushing Blow mechanic. Those were removed from the game in 3.0. Basically a Crushing Blow is a type of melee damage that any mob that is 3+ levels above you (every raid boss) gets in their attack table that deals 150% damage. So basically in Vanilla and BC raiding the most important thing to survival of the tank is to remove Crushes and Crits from the attack table through gear, talents and judicious use of Shield Block (75% chance to block 1 attack, 2 attacks with talents).

Particularly on bosses that are immune to Taunt the tank’s jobs is to 1) stay alive and 2) generate a big enough threat lead that the DPS can really push their hardest on damage.

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You are correct that it will be boring only having 1 raid viable tank again. But at least we are fore armed with this knowledge of hindsight this time. Should greatly reduce the number of mistakes at character creation screen and simultaneously reduce the available number of hybrids we can socially pressure into healbotting.
/evilgrin

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Bear Druids were actually extremely strong in 5-mans and at super-high gear levels post-AQ40 and Naxx.

Paladins were okay in 5-mans but didnt have a Taunt so they were a bit tricky.

Warriors were the most reliable tanks with the most tools to do the job. They werent the only viable ones, they were just the ones who could do the job well in just about every situation. Druids and Paladins had certain fights that they simply could not Main Tank while Warriors were good just about everywhere.

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Warriors were the de facto tank because the could easily get uncrittable/uncrushable, had a taunt, and had more tools to tank with.

Druids, with the right set of gear can out threat a warrior but they cannot become uncrushable (potentially the could be uncrittable if they could get enough +def but it would be hard and need close to end game gear). They can reach armor cap much easier than warriors however and have more overall stamina/hp pools so they work better at magic fights and fights that don’t have major crit/crush mechanics. They’re one of the best off tanks as they can dps in the same spec as they tank which allows them to put out more dps than a prot warrior trying to dps and more threat/survivability than a fury warrior trying to tank.

Paladins can potentially reach the uncrittable cap and could be close to the uncrushable cap but they were harder to get to that gear point. They lacked a taunt which made them less desirable and could have mana issues that made it harder to tank but they were godly when it came to AoE tanking.

Both paladins and druids tended to be very desirable for 5 mans as both could AoE tank far better and they could potentially put out more threat than a warrior.

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If you want to tank, you play…a tanking class.

Have fun bro :sunglasses:

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It is possible, a few PS guilds would run a druid OT, it is rare but it does happen. The problem with druid OTs is that a DPS warrior can throw on tank gear and OT anything a feral druid can. When not OTing a warrior will do 3-4x as much DPS as a feral druid. Warriors are also one of the most played classes, as opposed to druids who are the least played.

Druids are great dungeon tanks, especially while leveling and early in the server when everyone is just gearing up.

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Druids have superior TPS to warriors. Both are viable. There’s some comentary by one of the Salad Baker (classic world record naxx speed run guild) tanks that goes over it.

Either druid or warrior is fine. Both are seeing Naxx level play. Crushing blows don’t really matter anymore with how we use consumable items, so even if the druid is taking more damage, they’re not going to die. Flask of the Titans and armor potions make defense pretty much irelevant.

Druid is better for single target, warrior is better for multi-target. Paladin doesn’t do anything well and will always leave their dps threat capped and the entire group’s dps goes down.

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Was this a straight up higher-dps-makes-higher-threat thing, or was there a greater threat-per-dps thing going on, or maybe both?

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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/415573477282545695/437665979187855371/jid0p6qwzdt01.png

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Feral druids were viable tanks in vanilla, however they were just very rare. Because fleas.

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With reference to Druid tanks, can anyone speculate as to the itemisation changes blizz just announced, how they will fair.

As long as they can get enough armor/hp… warden staff, heart of the mountain + mark of tyrany, ring of protection heavy dark iron… they might be ok?

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The way they’ve worded it, it actually sounds like they’re only doing a temporary reverting of drop tables and drop rates, not the actual itemization of the items.

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Maximizing threat per second is a pretty involved topic, but no actually, Warrior tanks in Vanilla actually do relatively low DPS.

The most important detail is that Defensive Stance has a threat bonus. Optionally Warriors can also take the Defiance Talent which further increases their threat per ability. Aside from that Sunder Armor actually does 0 damage but does a steady reliable amount of threat per application with forever. Whenever the Warrior has excess rage not needed for Shield Slam, Revenge or Shield Block they can queue up a Heroic Strike (off the GCD) which does a very nice amount of threat per rage.

In earlier content Warriors can get away with being Arms or Fury and just wearing tanking gear. Played correctly this is tremendously high threat. It just starts to fall apart as the mobs start pummeling the hell out of the tanks in later content. Similarly a Warrior in very good late progression gear can get away with wearing a lot of DPS offset pieces to skyrocket on threat while still being quite tanky.

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Heroics were introduced in TBC.
Are you quite sure you actually played Vanilla?

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