Going to duo with a friend. I’ll be prot warrior, he’ll be a priest (likely shadow). We’re going to quest together and do dungeons together. We’ll be taking some risks and not just safely grinding mobs five levels lower than us. Its going to be glorious if we make it!
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I hesitate between warlock or hunter for easy questing. Im solo
I feel like Hunter has a more defensive approach sending in pet to tank and fighting at range where as Warlock, who can play a similar way, excels at juggling 2-3+ mobs.
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Yeah and feign death is life saver. Soulstones being useless in HC
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If you’re trying to mitigate risk, going prot is more risky than arms, solo or duo with a healer. Your kill rate will be slow and there is a higher risk of getting respawns, patrols, etc. or simply not being able to end a tough fight before OOM, etc.
Being able to consistently pull 2 even level mobs with sweeping strikes every 30 seconds, with a healer is an insane advantage. Plus you could probably get WW axe safely at about level 36. It’s way more fun than prot too, but to each their own.
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It’s a roll of the dice. My SoI character in seasonal died in Gnomer to a feign resist, a level 28 mob resisted my feign at level 33, no death there, but you can see it’s not foolproof.
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I’ll be going prot because the goal is to run dungeons whenever I can. I leveled prot when classic first came out, and it was awesome. Dungeon runs are the riskiest leveling you can do in the game, so I’m working to mitigate that. The open world is incredibly easy. Just don’t go anywhere higher than green mobs, grind for days, and you win. Not worried about mitigating the danger there.
I’d argue open world is a lot more dangerous than dungeons. If you’re the only player in the zone, it is perfectly safe, and controlled. But due to other players, things can happen that are out of your control, where it is important to have strong AOE and burst damage, or the ability to stance dance (Tactical Mastery) to maneuver out of it. If you’re playing with a healer that obviously helps a ton but I’d say is even more reason to play a spec with high damage, since defenses aren’t a concern with heals.
- In the open world, you can have hyperspawns in a cave if there are many players there killing things quickly, which can get you stuck / surrounded suddenly. This happens occasionally, and being able to quickly burst down a mob or two that spawn on top of you so you can quickly eat/bandage before more spawn is important. If your kill speed is too slow, you can become overwhelmed.
- In the open world you can have rogues, mages, etc. over-pulling a bunch of mobs accidentally within range of you re-buffing battle shout, then use ice block / vanish, etc. and now you have 7 mobs train on top of you. This has happened to me before, and I was able to fear, and intercept / hamstring away. Without tactical mastery I may have died due to rage issues.
- In the open world there are some mob camps that are very dangerous if you’re not careful, like the Deadwood furbolgs in northern Felwood. The shamans heal and cast lightning bolt, the avengers enrage if other furbolgs die in their vicinity, and the pathfinders call for help at 50%, aggroing other furbolgs within like 40yards. Also they can all cast a curse that gives you a 50% healing debuff for 2 minutes. If you’re careless for even a moment there, it can be your death. Now, combine this with the fact that other players can train mobs on top of you. In camps like this you want fast kill speed so you can keep moving so you don’t get spawns on top of you, or clean up accidents with burst quickly before they become disasters.
There are many more examples but the open world is way less controlled than dungeons and that’s the problem. Since WoW’s dungeons are instanced, there is no unpredictability, because no other players exist outside of your party. As long as you know the dungeon, know the pulls, and know the bosses, everything can be nearly perfectly controlled and very safe. Of course problems arise when people aren’t paying attention, and things can spiral out of control quickly, but as the tank, you can set the tone and usually keep problems from occurring. You can also wait to run a dungeon until most of the mobs are green to you as well. Nothing’s stopping you from using the same strategy you might for warrior questing. I wish I could run some dungeons more than once on HC currently, but that’s against the rules of the addon. Looking forward to the official servers for that reason.
I’d also argue that arms tanking in vanilla leveling dungeons is way better than prot too. Tactical Mastery and Sweeping Strikes are just massive. Prot is unfortunately one of, if not the most useless talent trees in Vanilla. Warrior tanking is more about gear, ability usage, macros and knowledge. Granted, Hardcore is an enitrely new way to play the game, and maybe Prot will have more of a place there. I could see it.
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Feign death is against HC rules.
Feign death = delete.
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Only real hunters level without a pet and no bow.
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Don’t do caves. First rule of hard core.
Be aware of your surroundings. Easy to see what other players are doing by looking around first.
Don’t do dangerous mobs in the open world for the same returns you can get by killing easier mobs.
All those dangerous situations you noted can be avoided and just require basic game knowledge. When your party member pulls aggro, you have to adapt on the fly quickly. When the healer gets a CC on them, you need to react quickly and be aware. Sorry, dungeon content is MUCH harder than the open world.
Look, I wish as the tank that I could control the party. I leveled through fresh classic as a prot when there were no carries. I’m a REALLY good tank. Still had unpredictable deaths and decisions from party members. CC can fail on targets and members can be randomly CC’d. This is not retail.
No, tactical mastery is pointless and unneeded if you’re a good tank. I rarely had aggro issues. The extra survivability and defense will be absolutely paramount in hard core.
All the dungeons up to and including SM are pretty easy. since u are the tank urself u have the most impact and by not overpulling the risk of dieing is low. I tanked all dungeon till SM as arms warr with 2h in deff stance. only used shild against hard hitting bosses and when i accidentially overpulled. 2h in deff stance generates amazing aggro and the additional rage from charging and then going into deff is rly nice (if the pull allows it). At lvl 34 arms rly shines as tank. if u manage to pool rage for next pull u can charge → sweeping → serker stance → whirewind → deff stance. if u pooled enough rage and are fast with it u can generate enormous threat like that in like 2 globals and also top the dmg meter.
and ye like said the dung are ez. the big boi in WC is honestly the highest threat for ur HC life until after lvl 40, except maybe for accidential mega pulls in gnomer.
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Dungeons are much more predictable than world. You’ve only got four other players who may mess up your day. In the world you have a multitude of players available to mess you up.
Besides, all I’ve seen is groups requesting you be over leveled to run with them. LFM DM, level 22+ only! Most of the dungeon is green mobs lol.
If you suck astronomically by fearing everything and just going all in in every possible pull sure it is, but not because the content is harder, you just play it horredously bad.
Spell cleave and ravage warriors just make already easy dungeons incredibly pointless lmao.
They only get harder at 60.
Long story short, HC players are cowards.
From what I hear all your characters abilities will be available for Blizz HC.
So choose wisely lol.
this is a very good point. the only time I died in HC was to a lvl 22 patrol in an area with lvl 18 mobs, it caught me by surprise 
you want to kill things and get out quick. not hang around because you’re super tanky but hit like a noodle. the world is unpredictable.
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tactical mastery is the very first talent you go for as a warrior, no exceptions
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When I was leveling in 2020 for classic I got stuck in a “loop” at the Dor’Danil Barrow Den in Southern Ashenvale where I couldn’t make any progress because all I was doing was killing respawns.
Kill spawns > eat/drink, Kill Re-spawns > eat/drink.
After 4 or 5 rounds of that I hearthed out because it was clear I wasn’t ever going to get to the objectives.
Needless to say, I avoided that quest when going through that area for HC.
I suppose other players can mess you up on PvP realms, I play exclusively PvE. Watching other players around you to see what they’re up to isn’t difficult.
As for overleveled, here we can agree! I believe there should be a level cap on dungeons to avoid this. Regardless, you can do the same in the open world leveling on greens as well. So I don’t see this as a counter.
How many people do you actually see doing that. The higher zones 30+ mainly have level appropriate characters questing and grinding. Might see a few warriors who are a bit over level, but that’s it. I think this is overused and a bit overblown.