Tanking Tier List

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

The weighting of this list is mainly for AQ40 and Naxx.
S Tier: overpowered
A Tier: excellent
B Tier: good
C Tier: barely viable
D Tier: weak
F Tier: meme spec

S Tier
Fury Warrior Tank: This tank is capable of the highest tps in the game and can dps close to a full fury dps warrior when not needed as a tank at all in a fight. The only downside is that it does require you to be hit capped and have a high amount of crit (around 25%) to outperform prot in threat enough to be worth using.

A Tier
Feral Tank Druid: While shunned in retail vanilla, the 1.12 client was very kind to them. They are able to outperform warriors in single target threat unless the warrior has a Thunderfury, do somewhat decent dps in the same gear they use to tank, have the highest hp and armor in the game, and have battle rez/innervate when not tanking. The only thing holding them back is mechanics such as crushing blows, critical strikes, and fears.
Prot Warrior: This is the spec Blizzard designed to be used by the guild MT. They have the best overall mitigation as MT in the game and have solid threat even if it isn’t the best later on. They do fall short in AQ40 and Naxx where higher dps is more than worth taking some extra damage as a fury tank.

B Tier
Fury DPS Warrior: This is on the list because most guilds use fury warriors as OTs for bosses and trash that require more than 3 tanks. They simply slap on tank gear. The reason they are not higher is because they are significantly weaker as tanks than tank speced Warriors and Druids.

C Tier
Arms Tank Warrior: This spec was very common in early vanilla, but 1.12 has not been kind to it. It is inferior to Fury Tank in threat, inferior to Prot in mitigation and threat, and Mortal Strike hogs up a debuff slot as well as the talents being much weaker than both the Fury and Prot trees.

D Tier
Prot Paladin: The problems are they go oom quickly, have terrible single target threat, can’t avoid crushing blows like Warriors and don’t have higher armor/hp to make up for it, and there isn’t much spell power plate gear to be able to generate enough threat. Just wait for TBC Classic if you want to be a tankadin in old content. They are able to produce AoE threat, but so can a Warrior with an engineering shield.

F Tier
Enhancement Tank Shaman: They suffer most of the problems Prot Paladins do except for poor single target threat, but they are still worse because they can’t use plate or a spell that increases their armor significantly and they don’t have AoE threat.

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This list looks accurate for private servers but given the recent blue posts about how off boss stats vs 1.12 were im not convinced for live.

I guess we will find out.

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It’s likely DW tank won’t be viable, or will be a severe healing draw, as the proper parry values are significantly higher than they were on private servers.

I also don’t really agree that Feral Druids are as good as Prot Warriors. Feral is good for bosses that use spells, but Warriors are better for everything else.

2 Likes
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You don’t have to dual wield to get more threat than Prot if you got the crit and hit for it, but I highly doubt it will be as strong as it is on private servers.

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I asume this is based on private servers?.

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Pretty much, yes. Bosses had low parry values so you wouldn’t murder yourself with parry hasted bosses while dual wielding.

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I don’t agree with the assessment of Druids. If that were true, every tryhard private server guild would use mostly Druids for raid tanks.

Really good geared Warriors that can play are still better. As you pointed out indirectly, any Warrior is a tank by simply equipping a tanking set and being in defensive stance. The talents at that point just buff certain aspects of it.

Druids however are quite viable. People who just need a tank in 5/10 mans, 20 mans and MC or BWL should not pass up a properly geared Druid.

The difficulty of Druid is that if you look at the BiS list, some of the better items come from PVP. A really well geared Bear didn’t PVE to get that gear, and that makes it kinda weird to be honest. Unfortunately because of this it is still a bit of a meme spec, although completely capable with correct gear.

Prot Paladin will never be anything serious in Classic because they like Warriors need tanking gear (which there is very little of from raids that isn’t class locked) and they have a mana bar. Okay in 5 mans, useless in advanced raid encounters.

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I think prot pallies would be handy for trash clearing and aoe tanking niches, other tnaks do it better in theory but pressing consecrate every 8 seconds is alot less effort than tab sundering.

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My list for classic raids:

Best - Warrior
Viable - Durid
Waste of Time - Everything else.

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Druid is A tier because the tryhard guilds always use at least one of them and they outperform Warriors on some Naxx bosses like taking hatefuls on Patchwerk and tanking Thaddius. They also don’t require a legendary to do competitive tps in Naxx.

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They also do more DPS when offtanking and don’t have resource starvation.