I’ve thoroughly enjoyed having my shaman tank be my little meme pet project throughout both vanilla and tbc classic. It’s just a stupid, yet fun, goal to shoot for when you’re otherwise all caught up with the current content.
The issue is that Blizzard seems to always be attempting to actively discourage it from happening, which I never understand. In TBC, they decided to make it so that Shaman can’t parry unless they take a 30% melee threat reduction. They could have EASILY tied that threat modifier in with the dual wield talent rather than the Spirit Weapons talent, but it seems they did it to specifically make shaman tanking more difficult. I have no idea why they would just randomly hate on it. It’s not like the existence of a meme shaman tank was impacting the game in any negative way. Now that we’re moving into WotLK, they’re giving absolutely massive threat buffs to all tank classes, so that they can compete with the insane amounts of threat that dps will be throwing out, but there is no way for Shamans to also achieve this threat boost.
It seems kinda hypocritical for Blizzard to be making changes to WotLK Classic, in an attempt to make the game retain some of its vanilla/tbc feel, and then at the same time remove a long standing meme spec from the game for no apparent reason at all.
Shaman tanking was only ever intended to fill in for regular dungeon groups in classic. With crusade, paladins can now do a much better job (actually best tank), so shaman was bounced out. It would have been nice to have another tank though because classic/crusade are seriously short on them. I can’t wait for wrath where there will be far more tanks thanks to the flood of DKs, which I’ll be playing as well.
“he tank shortage has nothing to do with the amount of classes that can tank”
-That’s as far as I read because it was too ignorant to justify reading any further. The amount of classes/builds that tank is a huge factor.
“Now look you can have a million dks but that doesn’t mean they’ll tank.”
-This is true but we’ll still have a ton more tanks in wrath than we ever had in classic or crusade. This is the reality I don’t think you guys realize.
The tank shortage has nothing to do with the amount of classes that can tank, just look at retail. Also, the flood of dk tanks are going to be absolute garbage and honestly I wouldn’t invite a dk tank for the first few months unless you know them.
If a group runs with a shaman tank it won’t be optimal! That is a cardinal sin in today’s wow. RP, experimentation or just plain fun must not threaten the optimization gods.