Were shamans ever a tank?

Classes Shaman
21

We are still confusing old scholl vanilla with the reboot. The reboot or current vanilla wow has proven that the VAST majority of thought/belief in hiw the game SHOULD be played was and is wrong.

All the content was proven trivial even TBC
All the bosses were proven trivial even TBC

2H enhance was proven trivial as the only people you were deleting were extremely undergeard players when you were extremely overgeard. Don’t believe me? Where are all these super amazing current videos of this. Meanwhile there is a crap ton video of viable shaman tanks.

22

The guide you pointed out literally shows it is a MUST to use things like the enchant ring that reduces dmg ( instead of a real tank cooldown ), being the right race for more dmg protection ( tauren ), using tons of engineering items and alchemy items, external cooldowns from friends and world buffs, etc. You know…stuff that can be used to prevent wipes, save party members, gain mana regen,…stuff that is just generally is better used elsewhere.

I specifically love the part in the guide you posted bout allies needing to reduce their threat more than normal and use all of their outside abilities to not pull threat off the shaman “tank”, because they just don’t generate enough threat. Thus limiting the dmg they can/will even do and forcing them to waste their utility on a bad tank just so they can survive a mechanic that is easy on a properly geared tank class.

"Other Shamans can Earth Elemental Totem to help with a pack of mobs." ROFL. If you cant deal with the pack of mobs already you lack the toolkit to be a tank. period. Might as well just stack 5 shaman and rotate EE each pack of mobs rofl.

AOE threat part basically says you need thorns and various potions/externals, and actions per minute to build enough threat early on, combined with a potion pop and literally using the entire toolkit to get any threat of significance. They then struggle to maintain said aggro in hopes people kill the things fast enough. Meanwhile people are pulling off you by doing a fraction of their dmg potential, or waiting for 20-30 sec while the shaman ramps enough threat. Not to mention the downtime waiting for this shaman to mana up, or what happens when they run out of mana mid combat. I guess you would waste mana regen abilities on them too and force healers to use abilities so they dont get one shot. Queue up them innervates and MTT’s rofl…

So thanks for confirming what I just said: They literally cannot tank without a ton of external assistance through other players class abilities or by using tons of profession and potion items. Though it is possible under extreme circumstances ( which no one was arguing here ) and if the shaman is carried through many mechanics via external help and buffs.

Like I said it is doable, but you’ll never see them in game outside of friends messing around to see if it can be done and they will already have tons of gear they had already farmed from end game content on their main spec. You are literally asking your whole group to cater to someone just cause they have an ego trip and want to do it…just because.

Sham tanks are not to be taken seriously, even if someone made it work with tons of buffs, external/outisde class abilities used on them and the party to maintain threat, the end game gear they farmed on their main spec prior to, and just a ton of extra crap no one wants to deal with. They cant even deal with large pulls or “oh crap” situations like other tanks.

Im wondering if you are just defending X elitists guide and have even ever tried to sham tank yourself. It’s not fun for anyone outside of the shaman tank being carried and helped with tons of externals. 99% of people will just find a real tank sans the ego problem. No one needs to put this much extra junk on their group or themselves just to make something work that barely works to begin with.

23

This combined with over gearing things made them just barely viable, combined with all of the externals people need to use and very specific race/profession combos/on use items. Doesnt mean they are good tanks. a sub optimally geared warrior, paly, or druid will always be better if they know how to use their abilities, minus needing a ton of extra min max to make them just viable.

24

If you were over geared, in trivial content, with an entire group playing differently than normal to compensate.

Sure. You could “tank”.

2 Likes
25

Back in the day, early vanilla and pre launch. Almost never.

26

Pretty much this

27

The only thingni didnt see mentioned above is that offtanking was a role youd use for some things in vanilla.

But the main point is, no, we werent. And neither were paladins.

28

Feel free to point out where it says in the guide something NEEDS/MUST be done. Everything in the guide are things that can/could be done, not must.

Why not have all the options on the table and you decide what could be feasible for your specific group?

This sentence is literally in the guide: " offer an ideal comp without overstepping", “With the raid leader’s consent, suggest ideal Debuffs without overstepping.”.

29

Shaman were a tank in the same way that Druids and Paladins were tanks in classic.

Realistically, Warriors were the only ones that had a full tank kit. Druids COULD tank in molten core with gear because they did get a taunt.

Both Paladins and Shaman had threat increasing abilities, but lacked an actual taunt. The reason they both had these was to add an additional “tank” for leveling content…since Paladins could, Shaman were their counterpart and needed to have it as well.

Once TBC came around, and Paladins and Shaman were on both factions, Blizzard decided to push Paladins into a tanking role for both factions simply because it had a better defensive toolkit, whereas Shaman were more offensive.

So shaman moved away from any type of tanking abilities into a straight dps/healer role. You still had people making shaman tanks utilizing things like defense gems, but it was a rare scenario, and they often had to work three to four times as hard as actual supported tanks, oftentimes abusing certain items like n.e.r.d.s and other things to generate the appropriate threat.

You can see Shaman tanks in classic even into ICC, but the game never supported it beyond Vanilla leveling dungeons.

That said though, thematically, an earth-based tanking spec would make sense for the shaman class, even though there isn’t one.

30

Not officially, but shamans were able to viably tank in Classic. It got trimmed out as Blizzard clarified that it wasn’t intended. However, if they added a 4th spec to give shamans tanks, I think it would solve some problems regarding the lack of tanks in the game.

31

Did you read the guide? You know the guide states all of this inside of it when you read it, right? A guide by definition “shows or indicates the way to someone”. This guide shows you how to “tank” on a shaman, but you need to do a bunch of other stuff to achieve this goal, all to still not even be close to a real tank spec/class.

Take a look. The link is in the thread you necroed.

No raid leader outside of a bunch of friends on the same page will ever consent to this in a real environment/content that isn’t on very quick farm. Very counterproductive, your real tanks lose out on items, your shaman pretending to be a tank isnt playing as optimally as they could if they were dps or healer, etc

32

Didn’t one of the recent interviews state that adding 4th specs isn’t something they are looking to ever do. As was pretty obvious, druid just was the exception.

2h enhancement is still a strong part of shaman class fantasy despite how long its been since it was usable, far more so than shaman tank will ever hope to be. More people want 2h back than would ever tank on a shaman. Weapon restrictions should be removed from all melee specs on the basis of character customization and expression and the gameplay should be able to facilitate this even if it is sub-optimal.

33

You can do this right now. The gameplay does facilitate it. Go grab a 2h, put windfury on it and auto-attack. You actually have more melee abilities than classic because you can Crash Lightning with your 2h. Gameplay facilitates and and its sub-optimal. Enjoy!

34

Was talking about more than just enh here, similar would be that survival should be able to dual wield. Design should support what the player wants to do. There is no reason Enh shouldn’t be able to stormstrike with a 2h and if blizzard is really committed to player choice than this should happen. Weapon choice should belong entirely to the player.

It’s not going to happen anytime soon(or ever) but I’d go as far as to support the use of guns/bows to facilitate a player’s choice between ranged and melee. Paladin wants to use a gun? Sounds good to me, have fun. Enh shaman dual wielding wands, whatever twinkle-toes, knock yourself out.

I believe a lot of wow’s design decisions for classes are overly restrictive. I also find it really weird that none of wow’s classes can utilize a spear/shield combo with how iconic that look is.

35

This is just pure speculation as the rest of your statement.

So sub/assn rogues should be able to dual wield staves just because you say so based on the idea that they are melee so its okay?

36

I’d say that dual wielding 2h weapons falls under the fantasy of the fury warrior class so no, but they should be able to use a staff if they so choose. Choice of weaponry should be up to the player and the choice of weapon should have an effect on gameplay rather than being meaningless stat sticks. There should be a difference between choosing to use a mace over an axe for example.

37

They have games for that playstyle and as seen with the most recent a lot of stuff is OP then nerfed into the ground. Making balance incredibly hard.

38

Considering what I propose would require blizzard to rework spec design from the ground up, I understand nothing I’ve stated here will ever come to pass or even be considered. I do nevertheless believe wow has a very bad approach to how weapons and classes interact with one another. It would be very difficult for Blizzard to change this, but I do believe that if they did, it would be healthier for the game. Weapon choice would be one more thing that the player gets to interact, play around with, and customize and one with a strong impact to appealing to each individial player’s character fantasy.

39

This is just asking for the ESO system isn’t it?

I found that incredibly horrible.

And the suggestion of an enhance shaman dwing wands just doesn’t make sense. Classes preferring certain weapons is typically seen as a core aspect of rpg games.

40

No where near ESO, that has weapons being their own mini-classes with their own skill tree. I didn’t like ESO either. I would just say that your choice of weapon would have an effect on your skills. Hard to say what exactly that would be but there should be some difference between them.

Yeah, enhance with wands is really dumb but then again, wands in wow are really dumb. They should rework wands.(and make characters hold them better) Obviously some classes would favor certain weapons so it would make sense for the effect that weapon has on your skills to be numerically superior by some margin. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be able to play around and try to make some goofy nonsense work for them.

I, personally, think weapons shouldn’t have any stats other than melee damage and should have hit effects instead. A lot of this sentiment stems from the fact that stats in WoW are boring and weapons are a special part playing any fantasy game and should be interesting past just equipping what has the biggest number. All gear should but I’d settle for just weapons.