I have to be honest, it has been a while and I only tanked in TBC near the end. What were the goto tank classes back in TBC? I seem to remember seeing a lot of Warriors at first then Pallys started taking over. Or am I getting TBC and Wrath blended together?
When TBC is out, I think tanks are going to be in demand just as they always are, that and healers and I am debating what to focus on for my first toon.
Warriors are still great in raids, but druids are going to be up there too. Warrior however isn’t the greatest at dungeon tanking, with paladin being king at that and druid being pretty good.
Paladin can have some threat issues in single target raid bosses, but is extremely nice to have for aoe raid bosses.
Ok that makes sense, I have memories of following a Pally tank through Ramparts and just watching him AoE tank the snot out of the place.
Just check out some of the Beta streams man - been watching a couple guildies and with gear all tanks are reasonable. Pallies are ridiculous if you’re looking at leveling exclusively through dungeons with a couple AoE classes in tow.
I was pulling and tanking 3-4 packs at a time last night with my warrior in ramps on the beta with no problem. 2 frost mages dropping blizzards and a lock aoe’ing their heart out.
Warriors are the defacto “best raid tank” because of their strong CDs for progression as well as shield block. People say paladins take the most damage on raid bosses but are obviously the strongest aoe tanks. Druids are kid of a happy medium between the two. They all have their roles and one of each is a standard setup in raids.
When trying to form groups, tanks were always hard for me to find (I was holy until late’ish.) Once I went ret, it was frequently me and 2 other DPS looking for a tank and a healer.
Class doesn’t matter that much… Tanks and healers will be in demand.
In the original BC each tank had its niche: Warriors were the best main boss tanks with a bevy of cooldowns and a relatively straightforward path to gearing for the Defense cap. Druids excelled at off-tanking with their huge health pools and the ability to seamlessly transition to DPS in Cat form. No other tank could compete with a Paladin in AOE (5 mans, certain trash packs–most of Hyjal– and specific raid boss phases like Tidewalker). With Burning Crusade Classic using the 2.4.3, Tankadins will have access to the critical Combat Expertise talent. Prior to receiving this talent, Protection Paladins had lower HP than similarly geared Druids and Warriors.
Tankadins (and Druids to a lesser extent) took a long time to be accepted as tanks initially because Warriors were the only tank in vanilla. It started to change in SSC with bosses like Tidewalker and Leo. Then MH would really change some minds.
There was also some pressure on Druids on Paladins to switch to heals because it seemed like you never had enough healers.
But that’s all based on how it was. One thing that will fascinating to see is in what ways all that changes in TBC:Classic.
People keep trying to pigeon hole each tanking class. I am switching from Warrior to Pally in TBC and I will be MTing all of TBC. I played a Paladin tank for years and trust me I will not have threat issues. The gearing can be harder to ensure no crushing blows but once geared there is no better IMO. Play the class you want cause all 3 are great.
Best thing about a bear tank is that if you don’t need them to tank they can swap to a cat set and put out better DPS than any of the other tank specs
I remember Pallies going from having lowest HP (among the tank classes) in T4/T5 to the highest in T6.
That’s because they finally got a talent that scaled their Stamina by a significant degree, and since that’ll be in from the start, Paladins will be significantly stronger from start to finish.
This is silly, notably the Shield Block inclusion as if Holy Shield doesn’t exist. Warriors are going to be buff/debuff bots who Tank because that’s the easiest way to bring all their utility and they have little else they can do well.
Paladins and Druids will dominate Warriors this iteration of TBC simply because there won’t be any downsides to using them as MTs. Breaking fears have multiple work-arounds or immunities that guilds already make use of, swift repositioning just isn’t necessary, and Spell Reflect is for a single phase of a single fight.
I don’t recall it being a huge disparity between warriors and paladins.
So they will be more gear dependant than a warrior per se?
Eh… not really more or less dependent, they just scale that must faster while starting from roughly the same spot. That means a Paladin can, in theory, drop a few Stamina gems to socket for Defense or Spell Power and keep the same total EH as the Warrior who is going pure Stamina.
Paladins also didn’t have as much free access to Spell Power on their off-set and tier gear at first, which means they’ll pack a bigger punch early on than anyone remembers. With how easy most of T4 content and Heroics are, Paladin Tanks are going to be highly sought after for the tremendous ease of use and high AoE output.
I was having the same results in my research. We are basically getting Pallys at a point in TBC when Blizzard had finally worked all the issues out and they scaled well and produced significant threat and DPS.
We get to start TBC with the Pallys of 2.4.3 which was when they started making the transition from, 3rd tier, take them if you have to tanks, to 1st tier, tanks of choice.
This will be a very different TBC experience then we had originally. Remind me, didn’t Pally tanks also have access to Lay on hands and Divine protection basically giving them the ability to survive even longer.
A bunch of people that played back then but never did any of the later content still follow the old stigma about war being the only tank and the hybrids healing. TBC did such a good job making the hybrids shine in the rolls the never got brought into raid in classic. Bears and pallies are going to be tanking a lot more this time around. Remember were getting the 2.4.3 polished balanced talents.
BPeople keep trying to pigeon hole each tanking class. I am switching from Warrior to Pally in TBC and I will be MTing all of TBC. I played a Paladin tank for years and trust me I will not have threat issues. The gearing can be harder to ensure no crushing blows but once geared there is no better IMO. Play the class you want cause all 3 are great.
I wish you the best of luck on RoS Phase 2 and Archimonde. Everything else you’ll be fine.
Warrior - Best raid boss tank
Paladin - Best AOE tank, great for dungeons
Druid - Great tank, and they’re great OTs as they can easily switch to cat which is great DPS and more than the other 2 tanks can output
All 3 of them are extremely viable in TBC
Plenty of terrible guilds had trigger-happy Rogues kicking both of the casts rather than let Deaden through, and they still downed it. Phase 3 was the hard part of that fight, not Phase 2.
Likewise, I’m pretty sure our Warrior Tank still ate Doomfires despite trying to keep from moving too much during fears, so it isn’t the end of the world to be sure.