I literally said a couples comments earlier that aoe would be ruff… but chain lightning could help a little bit
Free country do what you want man don’t let naysayers say you can’t do anything. I mean if we listened to them. We would still be under the crown. Or i’d still be married to a night elf priest.
Seemed like a cool novelty to me at first but then I ran a dungeon with one on pserver and it was just miserable. Felt like the run was going in slow motion. Had to drink a lot. Threat was bad, aoe threat was worse.
I mean play how you want but I’ll never join a group with a Shaman tank again.
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AoE would largely be non-existent. Unless you go a more Elemental oriented build and stack the Elemental PvP set instead of the Enhancement PvP set, Chain Lightning is going to be too anemic to actually help much and then you’re just SoL.
Colonist opinions… /disgust
That’s basically what every attempt at it on WoW Classic has been as well. Back during AQ40 someone cobbled together a “OMG WORLD FIRST SHAMAN BWL TANK RUN” video and it was >4 hours long with most fights having the Shaman eat dirt while a Druid and Warrior did all the heavy lifting. They wiped, they had to dramatically hold back on DPS, it was a mess.
But the Shaman was the GL so that is that.
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But you’d still be a mail tank, with minimal block, minimal dodge, and average health. Shaman tank is in the same bracket as vanilla paladin tank. It is theoretically possible, if your entire group is hard carrying you over the finish line? Sure. But no PUG would ever let you in, and most guilds won’t humor you more than a single time.
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Given the rest of your bullet points are focused on AA-based damage and threat, Spirit Weapons is explicitly a bad call on a class that already suffers from poor threat generation.
If you’re going for Flurry and Physical Crit pieces, you just won’t have much of any SP to rev up Shocks, even with Mental Quickness.
If you’re the melee focused variety, this is true, but it is also just a single talent point. It isn’t like you’re sinking 3 or 5 points there to get a minor low chance buff like Elemental Devastation.
You say this quite a bit, but you’re not going to have much in the way of Agility for Shaman “tanking” at all, unless you want to get Critically Hit and don’t want as much Armor/Stamina as you can get. The PvE Tier gear for Enhancement just isn’t as sturdy as the PvP gear.
All the Gladiator Linked gear (Enhancement) is Stamina/Strength with a bit of Int on one or two pieces. For bracers/belt/boots you can go for the Chain gear (Hunter) since it isn’t class locked and get Agility there, but it isn’t much. That just leaves cloak and jewelry options of which you’ll mostly be wearing stuff like Thoriumweave Cloak, A’dal’s Signet of Defense, Violet Signet of the Great Protector, etc, which is all Armor, Stamina, Defense, and Dodge.
Honestly, until I can mess with an updated SS more, I’m not sure if going deep Enhancement even makes sense. You can go deeper into Elemental for things like Elemental Fury and Unrelenting Storm, slap on Flametongue Weapon, and go 100% PvP Elemental gear. The Armor/Stamina values are basically identical, but the Elemental setup gives less Avoidance since you end up with less overall Dodge stats.
On the flip side you have just shy of 700 SP in a Phase 1 PvP setup with double Stamina trinkets and 14.31% unbuffed Spell Crit. Autos would be far weaker but Flametongue procs would be much nicer and your Frost Shock would actually land more consistently, hit harder baseline, and have a decent chance at landing a crit as well. Stormstrike could still be taken for the instant hit, and since Stormstrike can proc WF I assume it can also proc Flametongue but I’m not seeing that explicitly stated.
If you could spare the points and skip out on some longevity stuff like Unrelenting Storm, Mental Quickness, Ancestral Knowledge, etc, you could probably sink 13 points into Resto for Nature’s Guidance, but that’s a big hunk of talent points for just 3% Hit/Spell Hit.
I’ll have to play around the sets a bit more but honestly you aren’t any less durable as an Ele build, you just dodge a bit less, and now your spells actually do something. For stuff that dies faster, like in normal 5-mans, an Ele build would probably be best since the CL on pull would hit significantly harder.
Eh this is a bit unfair to the Paladin, who at least has Plate and access to the same baseline talent bonuses of a Warrior and superior Block. Paladins suffer most from lack of decent itemization to augment everything they’re doing and provide Defense/Dodge/Parry/Block, but lack of EH is not one of their problems.
When the pre-patch hits, any Paladin who actually threw together their full T3 set is going to have a fairly useful Protadin set, because all +Healing becomes +Healing and Spell Power, and since T3 has ridiculous Armor/Stamina values on it, the only real worry for them is Critical Hits.
Shaman aren’t even up to that level.
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Shaman “tanking” isn’t a thing. Just stop it.
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for you, or for the poor soul stuck healing you / people who must hold back for threat?
Please don’t waste everyone’s time.
I scoff at shaman tanks when boomkin were clearly meant to be the tanks. EZ clears. Here’s the plan:
(1) Wear full PvP gear and that sweet, sweet essence of the pure flame. Make sure I have engineering including a bag full of target dummies and grenades
(2) I pre-HOT
(3) Everyone waits a lifetime for my slow starfire cast to go off on primary target
(4) Throw a grenade at mobs
(5) I go into moonkin form
(6) Cast barkskin
(7) Cast hurricane
(8) At this point DPS should not be doing anything. THE HEALER MUST BE IN T6 AND HEALING
(9) The next 10 seconds consist of me DOT’ing everything
(10) I pop treants and start to cast wrath on everything
(11) AT THIS POINT THE DPS SHOULD NOT BE DOING ANYTHING. Hopefully the healer brought mana pots
(12) I go oom. Drink a mana potion
(13) It’s been at least 20 seconds, DPS can start
(14) I lose threat, I pop a target dummy
(15) The mobs are running around but DPS manage to kill them just in time
(16) Everyone waits for me to drink and for my CD’s to come back up. Next pull will begin in a few minutes
Let’s go boys. Viable lol
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My point is that tanking is kind of binary, in that you’re either a viable package of pros and cons. Or you’re not actually viable, and the ability to smash a square peg into a round hole, doesn’t make you viable.
Paladins in classic had itemization problems(which were two fold, they required too much itemization, in that they needed both caster stats, and warrior stats. And there was a lack of good defense gear for them), but they also lacked a taunt, which can be worked around, but is a big problem when it’s a problem. Without a substantial pro to go with those cons.
Contrast with druids who had itemization problems, but could also brute force their health/armor to levels where soaking crits/crushes wasn’t as big a deal. With the added benefit of having the absolute highest threat per second.
That’s true, especially insomuch as survival and threat are concerned. Paladins had some wonky workarounds that let them ignore a lack of SP with Kings spamming, allowing them to stack the off-set AQ20/40 +Defense gear, but that was their ultimate cap. I don’t think that let them get to Hateful Strike soaking levels at all but it would have let them do a fair number of Naxx fights that aren’t so deadly to Tanks.
But why bother with a Tank that’s doing virtually no damage the entire fight and isn’t easier to Heal than either a Druid or Warrior?
Plus they’re gimped for 4H due to no real Taunt, and if they can’t be a tank in the tankiest fight in the raid, what good are they?
I think Ghostcrawler said back in the day, even during BC there was an unstated assumption of Warrior mechanics in most boss fights.
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It’s very much a game of “why would I bring X”.
If “it would be cool to make x work” is the best answer, it’s probably not a good idea to bring X. You bring a feral druid for their threat, and ability to almost seamlessly go from off tanking to doing totally respectable dps. They’re great in that hybrid role, or as a main tank when you are prioritizing threat and damage intake smoothness.
Using that logic on shaman tanks is not flattering for them. They’d be objectively the squishiest tank by far. Their damage wouldn’t be very impressive, and they can’t even claim to out threat a bear. They’re also not really able to flex between tank and another role like a feral can.
There are no unique strengths, just all downsides.
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While I tend to agree, the caveat on 4HM is that everyone’s threat gets halved at every Mark application so as a general rule the current Tank on a Horseman really needs to stop attacking entirely when the relief Tank moves in. It would be entirely possible to just stop after the 3rd Mark lands to let the Paladin build aggro, making the transition essentially the same speed as when Taunt/Growl fails to land.
That being said, a Paladin would struggle nonetheless. I’d only use one in a pinch on one of the back two Horsemen since they don’t hit hard at all and you don’t have all the DPS zerging with you.
Yeah that was generally the plan. GC noted that mechanics and scaling were added to Druids and Paladins to make them acceptable alternatives, but not wholesale replacements, but also noted that a lack of robust testing tools meant they didn’t quite foresee just how strong both classes could take those improved scaling mechanics.
There’s a reason we never quite get the insane jump in gear and power like we see between Black Temple and Sunwell, with items going up across all stats plus several additional Sockets. That gear is so damned strong that it carries you well into WotLK Heroics in preparation for Naxx. I’m pretty sure I could do Naxx25 with BiS Sunwell gear and not really struggle.
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BC socket gear was borrowed power before borrowed power was cool. IIRC Ensidia and the other world first chasers still had a lot of T6 quality gear for T7 and just updated the gems.
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Yuuuup. Sockets OP when you can just swap prior epic gems for green quality gems with more stats on them.
Delicate Crimson Spinel - Epic - 10 Agility
Delicate Bloodstone - Uncommon - 12 Agility
Perfect Delicate Bloodstone - Uncommon - 14 Agility
Delicate Scarlet Ruby - Rare - 16 Agility
So so so silly lol
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Granted, a lot of those gems are unique limited to 1, and require being a jewel crafter.
Still a pretty nice stat boost compared to a non-JC tho.
I didn’t include any of the uniques there. 10 Agi gems are the standard epic gems we get in T6, and the 12 Agi are just the run-off-the-mill common as can be green quality gems in Northrend. The 14 Agi ones were an interesting proc you could get when making the standard greens in order to make them a tad more appealing while blue quality gems were still expensive.
I remember cutting like 40+ green quality gems to get enough Perfect procs for my gear in Naxx, saving the blue quality gems for the 25m tier set items and stuff I wasn’t going to replace very soon.
The Delicate Dragon’s Eye, the JC only prismatic gem you could have three of was worth 34 Agility, while the standard epic gem in Wrath was 20 Agility.
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