TBC Shaman Tank Talents

So, for 5-Man Heroics and maybe some early raiding, I wanted to try out a Shaman Tank. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of resources out there that I can glean from, so I couldn’t find any talent builds I could work from.

I went online and made my own “build” but I wonder at how effective it would be. Here’s what I have so far:

https://tbcdb.com/talents/index.html?en&shaman&2503015000000000000005250301505203350005100000000000000000000

One thing I’m curious about is whether or not the Spirit Weapons talent in Enhancement is worth taking at all. You’d receive the ability to Parry attacks, but at the cost of 30% of your threat generation by melee attacks. Is the threat loss worth taking the talent?

Also, should I invest in Flurry as Shaman Tank?

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Zero percent effective. Absolutely no chance.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRmL-qvihao

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A) I commend you for wanting to think out of the box.

B) That’s at least 2 orcs in that group, being healed by a Draenei paladin. So it’s obviously a pserver thing of some sort, and also obvious that it’s not a pserver that was trying their best to faithfully and accurately recreate the content.

C) They have a rogue there which can help keep mobs near the shaman ‘tank’ and cc etc, and also notice the shaman is using consumes etc. While yes, perhaps the first week of content there will be tanks using consumes to get past tough content, that will die off very very quickly because of being cost prohibitive.

D) Just like in Classic, the meta specs/builds will be dominated by what we have learned in pserver. Although I can’t see a damage/threat meter of any kind here, be assured that the average mage/lock/hunter will be using a pserver build and have optimized gear (at least the best they can.) They will have insane burst/sustained and I just don’t see the sham being able to hold threat.

Okay, now to the numbers…

Although I didn’t watch the entire video (34mins long) I did watch some of the initial trash packs. Those are lv70 against a lv70 shaman (equal.) Even in heroics, the bosses will be 72, and therefore the bosses ‘weapon skill’ will be measured against the tank’s defense skill, and of course the obvious combat table rolls will ensue.

There is no mail gear that will have +defense. Yes, there are tons of plate (shaman can’t wear) and also leather (sham gives up tons of armor to do so.) It’s possible I guess that he could find green random pieces ‘of defense’ or something? (oh, forgot he can get a def shield, that’s good.)

Ok that leaves him jewelry and trinkets to find some defense in an attempt to push crits/crushings off the table, which will still leave ordinary white hits from bosses, special attacks, and parry hasting.

It’s an interesting idea, and certainly here in vanilla we see shamans tanking lowbie dungeons below 40 or so when we can’t find a bear or a warrior. But I don’t see how you can build towards threat/mitigation with the mail limitations, and still possibly manage to hold threat against pserver meta dps builds.

Perhaps you and your personal friends will take things slow enough to try and give you a solid shot just to see what happens. I still see zero chance that any type of average pug/guild group will want to go thru this exhaustingly slow type of cc/threat/wait on damage in order to let you do your thing.

Just curious, why is it that you’re drawn to this? Why not just play a proper tank? Even with bears and paladins, there are tanks that can also hybrid for your other things you’re interested in etc.

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I hope you are able to make this work, a Shaman Tank would be site to behold.

One thing I noticed quickly from the video is that the shaman was using gear from MT, Hyjal, and other end game content. Have you found any sources or videos that show shamans being able to tank Heroics or Raids in pre-raid bis because that is what you will have going into ‘early raids’. There is a big difference between phase 1 gear and cheesing content in phase 6 gear (BC will have 6 phases, no?).

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Here’s a Healer POV with a Shaman Tank for dungeons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0upXlyUSZM

Here’s another from Heroic MGT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f05lI2E8-H8

Given enough healing, pretty much anything can tank so long as they aren’t 1 shot.

As a Shaman I suspect your biggest issues will be you’ll have a very hard time pushing crits and, for raids, crushing blows off the attack table. You don’t have the abundance of +defense gear from plate, nor the high durability of a Feral Druid to help offset it.

You also don’t have an ability like Shield Block or Holy Shield to heavily inflate your block chance.

A shaman tank is a bit more of a testament to your healer than it is anything else. The additional damage you’re taking puts more stress on them.

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I remember when a rogue tanked Illidan by passively maxing avoidance.

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Nice! That’s something else I’d love to try.

We usually used to make a Shaman play second tank on Netherspite in Karazhan when single tanking the raid. That’s really the only shaman tank experience I can remember at max level in TBC.

I did once heal a heroic Sethick Halls with a Boomkin tank. It was actually one of the smoothest pugs I’d ever had in that instance. We cc’ed the crap out of everything, and with 4 dps melted stuff.

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While I am not up to date on warden shaman tanking in tbc, the warden shaman discord channel is certainly buzzing about it.

https://discord.gg/JfakhDdx

I’d recommend starting here to help you make the best choices possible in your endeavor.

You’ll “try”, you’ll go splat, you’ll need to come back while dramatically over gearing it, which means you need to do something else to get gear ahead of these content thresholds so you can back and do something you’re not intended to do.

I mean… sure… I guess… but you’d probably want a more SP oriented weapon with this build than not. No Flurry, no Stormstrike, those are free sources of extra damage and threat you won’t have with this build. I’d argue you’re better off dropping Reverberation and going for Flurry, and you won’t be using Stoneskin/Windwall totems ever anyway so move a point over to Convection (3/5) and the other point to Stormstrike.

Your threat is going to be piss poor if you take Spirit Weapons with everything you do except your Shocks, meaning you’d want a more Elemental-style build than Enhancement style. Lack of Parry really hurts without Spirit Weapons since you get precious little in the way of Avoidance stats on the gear you’d want to use, which brings me to the next point: gear.

Shaman have no access to Defense gear outside of Cloak/Neck/Rings/Trinkets/Gems. What you can get, isn’t much, and it isn’t enough to hit the 5.6% soft cap you need for zero Critical Hits. Shaman can’t even touch the Crushing Blow mark. That means you’re bound to use Gladiator gear to actually be a “tank” and all the items there are a mishmash of stats.

Gladiator’s Earthshaker (Enhancement) is Stamina, Strength, Resilience, Crit, and a bit of Intellect. It also has the glove bonus of extra damage on Lightning Shield and the 4pc bonus of shorter CD on Stormstrike.

Gladiator’s Thunderfist (Elemental) is Stamina, Intellect, Resilience, SP, and Crit. It also has the glove bonus of extra range on Shocks and the 4pc bonus of 50% chance to ignore pushback while casting Lightning Bolt.

Of these two, the Enhance set is clearly better as it boosts Lightning Shield and provides a heaping helping of Strength to amplify your autos and Stormstrike. But then that goes back to the whole Spirit Weapons problem where you don’t Parry.

IMHO if you are trying this, your Avoidance is going to be utter crap no matter what you do, and Parry only scales with Defense rating anyway (something you don’t get much of), so skip Spirit Weapons and go Gladiator mode.

However, all of this being said, your stats are TERRIBLE compared to worse geared Druids, Paladins, and Warriors.

Shaman Stats:

  • 12.5k Health
  • 13.0k Armor
  • 33.52% Total Boss Avoidance
  • 0% Damage Reduction

Warrior Stats:

  • 15.8k Health
  • 16.5k Armor
  • 69.68% Total Boss Avoidance
  • 10% Damage Reduction

The Warrior in this comparison is using Kara gear, T4, etc, which is the closest equivalent the Shaman can hope to match and it just… isn’t even close. If I were to run a pre-BiS setup for the Warrior the stats would still just dwarf the Shaman entirely and, this is very important, WARRIORS HAVE THE WEAKEST EFFECTIVE HEALTH SCALING OF THE THREE LEGITIMATE TANKS.

If I put up a Paladin or a Druid that is also Stamina stacking, they’re just going to shoot past these numbers entirely.

It just… no.

Don’t do it.

As for your video evidence:

  • First video is p-server garbage, but more importantly the Shaman “Tank” is doing a Heroic 5-man, not even a particularly hard one, and using TIER 6 gear. This just reinforces my point that Shaman aren’t Tanks because they have to gear up and group with people who are dramatically stronger than the content in order to do it.

  • Second video is also p-server garbage, and again the group is in a smattering of T5 and other gear. Why should I care that a Paladin can spam the crap out of a Shaman in Heroic Slave Pens while wearing T4/T5 gear? Especially when, like the first video, they spend almost as much time trying to skip packs and avoid pulling anything as they do actually fighting. And they still take over an hour to clear it!

  • 3rd video is probably legit, but the 5man team is in Sunwell and T6 gear and the Shaman even has a flask running. I mean c’mon… the Hunter in the group has the Archimonde bow.

So no. Big no.

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There is a reason for that. lol.

Its a waste of time and an effort in futility. Like others have already said, you wont be able to do it until you vastly out gear the content.

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What’s ironic is that you responded literally two posts after someone linked a Shaman Tanking Discord.

Sounds like fun! If I’m running folks through Heroics as a Shaman, that’ll be a novelty experience even if I do out-gear the content.

I totally respect wanting to try something different, and I wish you luck.

But I think (other than close friends) you’ll have a ton of work convincing folks to even let you try, join your groups, etc.

And you’ll most likely use more consumes than other tanks would use, take longer, etc.

Just be ready for an uphill battle. Please drop in and let us know if you get it going, and give us an update.

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There’s a Discord for everything, regardless of whether or not it makes sense.

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Shaman do not tank current level content without major issues and great concessions from the other people present

So your reply is pointless.

If you want to consider vastly outgearing content as tanking…then a mage, priest or literally anything can “tank”

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Every one of these videos shows the shaman massively overgearing the content. Like, sunwell/t6 gear for heroic dungeons.

It’ll be fun to do for a laugh at the end of tbcs life cycle, but I don’t think you’re going to see legitimate progress in shaman tanking before then. And not without a guild farming sunwell who’s geared enough that they don’t care if you’re taking tank pieces.

You do not take spirit weapons as a shaman tank. You will lose parry but you will have a bit of dodge to make up for it.

First time I ever tanked in wow was on a shaman at level 39 in sm cath during tbc. A shaman tank is basically a weak bear tank. There isn’t much sense in advocating for it in the forums though, there are a bunch of anti shaman tanking forum regulars that will spawn and debate you till the end of time.

In their defense shaman tanking is tedious, and you have to go to extraordinary lengths to make it work well. But this I think is where these anti shaman tank types miss the point. The point being the challenge and the fun that comes with a challenge if you find the right group.

Just find a group of players looking to run meme specs like moonkin, and ret. A shaman tank will hold its own in such a group. Also, someone mentioned a discord dedicated to shaman tanks. (super cool btw) Id start there.

I used to advocate for a return of 2 hand enhancement and shaman tanking to come back myself. I never imagined I’d finally get my wish after years of asking for it and getting the wall of no lol

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as others have pointed out

you do realize the shamans are in almost TBC BIS. not pre-bis, or T4 bis… like… GAME BIS.

a warlock can tank dungeons in GAME BIS lol

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