There’s a few ways I can see melee dps retaining usefulness in TBC raids, as grisly as they might wind up being for them as they are specced now and en masse. One of which is stacking resilience so that they don’t get buttblasted by a random crit. Another is being specced in something that greatly extends their survivability like Subtlety. Yet another is simply having a solid amount of appropriate resistance for raid bosses that deal loads of consistent magic damage.
Finally, there’s something a few dps specs can do with enough coordination that I’ll dub as “lead tanking” for now - a melee dps pulling a raid boss with more opening dps than proper tanks can while immediately using their defensive cooldowns (personal followed by trinkets) to tank the boss for 20-30 seconds before the main tank steps in. From early BC talents and trinkets I can see each of enh shaman, surv hunter and arms warrior pulling “lead tanking” off. Shamanistic Rage is a 30% damage reduction spell for 15 seconds while shamans still retain the defensive talents they already had, whereas hunters get a lot of new extra innate tankiness from BC talents as well as a way to refresh Deterrence; either way both classes do much more raw damage on pull than standard tanks thanks to ranged abilities. Arms sports a 16 second Shield Wall thanks to a deep talent, which when combined with a slow 2h and Retaliation should deal a massive amount of damage during that window.
What “lead tanking” would require is the dps in question being uncrittable - ideally involving a solid chunk of Defense and not just pure Resilience - plus Power Word: Shields as well as a Paladin to cast rank 1 BoP on them once defensive cooldowns are up and the MT is ready to overtake threat. Misdirection of course is another requirement, granted Hunters will be using it on every raid boss anyway. From admitted guesstimations it would probably cost “lead tanks” ~20-25% of the dps they could do otherwise, and having at least one designated OT would always be more valuable than just one MT and a conga line of lead tanks; one or two should be the limit. Still, giving tanks considerably more time to not have to deal with bosses and adding a bit more burst to the start of raids should be a boon to BC raid nights, not that it will absolutely be the meta or otherwise.
Or we can all look at how classic went down, and realize that this is not the way. Play what you want to play, only look up info for quests and how you want to plan your talent options for leveling, as well as working on professions.
Foresight is the issue here. Just enjoy it. Don’t try to push for 1hr clear times or w/e. Just enjoy yourselves. WE are basically seeing retail lite.
That is correct, shield wall/reck/retal didn’t become separate cooldowns until Wrath. You cannot use shield wall with a 2h equipped, but you CAN switch to a shield, pop shield wall, and then swap to a 2h while keeping the damage reduction.
But, it’s not really worth it for tanking. You’ll lose many globals and several autos doing so which could have been used for threat generation via instants/heroic strikes. So, you’ll end up doing less threat than you could have if you had just done a normal rotation with a 1h+shield.
In PVP? It can sometimes be a worthwhile trick to pull, but generally blowing reck or retail will serve you better.
We know Blizzard will have talent and ability fixes in place from later patches.
However they waited on content and profession release by phase and some bug fixes didn’t come until later.
I do agree though, I think we will get 2.4.3. At the very least 2.3.2.
With that being said, strolling in as a tank in regular instance gear thinking I’m gonna AE this Heroic instance into the ground right away…probably gonna get a few people dead
AoE boss mechanics don’t crit in the first place, so this is useless. Even if it worked, stacking resilience would be a significant DPS decrease to specs that are already 30% less DPS than Hunters/Warlocks.
Survivability isn’t the issue. All of these mechanics are easily avoidable through proper play, and immediately lethal without. Being specced Subtlety isn’t going to save you if you consistently stand in mechanics.
It will also MASSIVELY gimp your DPS.
Pointless. The main tank can just go in with a Misdirection -> Aimed Shot, take less damage, need less healing, etc.
Evasion won’t save a Rogue “tanking.” They lack the armor and overall avoidance, even with Evasion up, to survive tanking a boss for any period of time. One unlucky crit and that rogue is instantly dead with 30k overkill.
A Warrior could put on a shield and go into Defensive Stance, maybe using Shield Wall, but that’s a huge waste considering the Protection Warrior will easily outpace the DPS Warrior’s threat while doing significantly less DPS than the DPS Warrior could be doing in the Protection Warrior were tanking instead.
Shamanistic Rage is vital to an Enhancement Shaman’s sustain, and using it right at the pull when you’re full mana to avoid dying because you want a DPS Shaman to tank temporarily instead is beyond retarded.
Stop spreading this fallacy, Meelee suffer on some fights,not all of them. There’s also fights where ranged have more issues than meelee.
Boss Spells don’t crit. If they did then Kael would be a race between your DPS vs when the boss pyro crits your MT’s face off.
Theres these things called resto shamans, they have chain heal.
If you have to co-ordinate this sort of thing you’re raiding with tanks that can’t generate threat properly. Loot council the drops the tanks need and this goes away, give the tanks threat sets or tell your dps to cool their jets till the tanks get 2 shield slams off. Alternatively run a bear tank.
Uhhhhh, every raid will need melee DPS, you just need to move out of the fire and not be braindead like players can in Classic. You won’t be “tanking” secondary damage as a melee, you’ll just die, and eventually stop being invited to raids.
Not that I’m aware of. Maybe at level 10, yes, but not at 70.
They can get up to 10% avoidance from talents and Ghostly Strike (15% dodge for 7s - 20s CD). 5% base parry. Base -0.63% dodge.
20 Agility for 1% dodge.
18.923 Dodge Rating for 1% dodge.
19.712 Defense Rating for 1% avoidance.
Even a Druid, which gets 1% dodge from 14.7 Agility, can’t reach unhittable status with full avoidance gear in T6. They get up to 60-70%, but that’s it.
I remember having around 70% dodge on my rogue in BT in my arena gear as Sub. That’s with Ghastly Strike buff up. I could damn near tank bosses, I had enough hp to survive being hit too. I specifically remember having to tank bosses after our tanks died and I would get aggro and I saved us at least 3 kills this way while we learned fights.
On topic. Stop talking doom and gloom for melee in TBC. If you aren’t in a hardcore sweaty speed running guild absolutely nothing will change and all classes will have equal representation.
Okay, so I’m guessing he used that because of Scorpid Sting (5% miss) and Insect Swarm (2% miss) not being on the boss yet.
At 1,250 Agility, he’s at 62.5% dodge. 10% avoidance from talents. 7% miss from debuffs. Night Elf also gives him 1% dodge.
He’s getting 7.16% parry and 7.16% miss, presumably from Defense. That’d be ~423 Defense Rating. That’d also give him 7.16% Dodge, so he’s getting an extra 5.65% dodge from somewhere.
Between Evasion, Preparation, and Ghostly Strike, you could have 102.4% avoidance pretty easily with that setup, but not forever, and I don’t know where that 5.65% dodge is coming from otherwise.
I’d wager he actually doesn’t have it, because he gets one shotted at 4:53, but Cheat Death saves him. It’s possible he turned his back when moving away, but you can dodge at 180 degrees, and his was definitely keeping Gruul in his frontal cone.
Suffice it to say, you’d have to specifically spec for this, and an actually useful Rogue specced to DPS would A) not be Subtlety because it’s a terrible spec, B) not have 10/10 avoidance talents because they’re useless for DPS, C) not be geared specifically for avoidance because that’s useless for DPS, and D) would not need to tank because you have real tanks available.
