Ragnor

This quote sums it up for me...

"Of all the Hybrid class's an yes I consider Warriors/Priests to be Hybrid were the only one limited to one viable Raid role. A WoW Hybrid currently is anything that can do more than just DPS. That's just how the game has evolved.

In this case its clear that Ferals, Warriors, Shadow Priests, Shaman are all viable Raid DPS. Paladins however cannot not due to balance reasons. Too much survibility to have high DPS. Same reason Bear Druids were toned down.

But what this causes then is Paladins start to look at Protection as being a way out of the pure healbot lock down. Now other Hybrids can escape cause their roles are viable. Protection Paladins cant cause they are 100% replaced by Warriors at some stage even a DPS Warrior spec'd warrior with full tanking gear will have better mitigation/stm/etc.

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

www.retpaladin.com

 

◊ Cathela

A decent chunk of that gap would go away if our gear was halfway intelligently designed. Megor is falling short in part because he has to pick up items that have part of their budget wasted on strength, and because the fellow who designed the T4 tanking helm apparently decided that a reduced itemization cost for stamina was a great way to put more intellect on it.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Fiola

While I can understand the disappointment in being passed over for the role of MT due to the mitigation difference, how is this remotely surprising?


Gear provides equal benefit to both classes at best. So if one looks at the base mechanics of the class - the warrior's advantage is in single target mitigation. The guy you linked discovers this (baseline def.stance, shield wall, last stand, etc), and is disappointed that he cannot out-warrior a warrior. Good luck with that, if that's your goal.


Because you enjoy playing as Prot paladin, perhaps? With 9 classes to min/max, *some* spec is going to be left out as the "best raid spec". I'm certainly not wanted on a raid for DPS as a Ret paladin, nor do I expect to be.


The Prot paladin's niche in tanking right now is their strong baseline and scaling threat generation, and solid AoE threat generation. This is not a sexy or obviously desirable niche for raiding purposes. Maybe it should be expanded. But lack of raid desirability (which is often based on bias) does not indicate a broken talent tree.

 

dloko

At this point I find myself at an impasse as a paladin. I don't want to be a healer/cleanser, simply because I find it very boring and monotonous. It's like some office job!

On the other hand, I don't want to force my guild into having a protection paladin as a tank in raid instances when there could be a protection warrior or a feral druid doing a much better job. I could - I'm an officer - but it would just be silly.

Right now I'm considering just quitting PvE and going PvP, at least we're good at that.

 

Bobness

That would be more pertinent If Feral Druid's could not Approach "Warrior" Type Mitigation (Albeit via Better Armour Class More Dodge & higher Health Points)

Warriors & Druids are different but Equally desirable for many encounters.

Paladin's at present seem to be more of a Warrior-Lite


Druid's were seen to have too much Damage in a Tanking role. This has been followed by a reduction in those Damage abilities.


Warriors were seen to be suffering from Rage generation issues & poor Multi Target Threat Generation. This has subsequently been Hot-fixed.


Even Forgetting differences in Pro-active Tanking Abilities.
Paladin Tanking Itemization is poor as was pointed out eloquently by the OP
Paladin Base Health is an unnecessarily Low (For Prot Spec Paladin's)

 

Kharzaljim

Somewhat of a curiosity question here. How realistic/feasible is it to obtain ~70% dodge/parry/block/miss for paladins? Second, depending on the mob, can you reasonably expect to have either holy shield or redoubt up 100% of the time?

Paladins have lower HP than warriors, but is it possible to remove 100% of crushings as compensation? Warriors can remove 2 blocks per 5 seconds, paladins have 4 per 10 controlled, and then there's redoubt.

I don't know enough about warrior tanking to know how frequently crushings get through. If paladins cannot realistically push off 99% of crushings with current gear, is it perhaps something to look towards with gear upgrades? Or will redoubt/holy shield be too unpredictable and make the idea impossible?

 

Kink

A: You just need to accept that only prot warriors will be chosen as main tanks unless one of the two hybrids are much much better geared.

This is the same problem us druids were worrying about once the armour/hp nerfs were announced. A lot were really upset because they were playing their druids to be a MT, and Blizz just basically said that prot warriors will alllwwaayyss be ahead of us for tanking bosses. So some got upset and quit but most accepted the fact that they will just have to be offtanks.

Personally for me I am happy as a cat/bear offtank. I guess a prot pally could spec as an offtank/healer maybe. You just need to adjust what you thought would be your ideal raid role.

And dont forget that just because a feral may offtank better (even tho this is definately not 100% true, its very circumstantial) a pally has his own advantages with mass AE aggro generation, an easy to refill rage bar that starts full and the possibility to get crushing immune (I am sure i read in the karahzan thread about prot pallies getting crush immune). Also as I was saying, just because it seems a feral tanks better than a prot pally doesn't mean a prot pally cannot also do the job. The difference is probably not so huge and the added AE threat holding ability on some AE packs in various instances is also quite useful indeed. Not to mention the heals, cleanses etc that you can still perform as an emergency while tanking.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

◊ Wraithlin

Why do people keep talking about AoE tanking as if it is required outide of non-heroic 5mans and a small selection of mobs in kharazan ? AoE tanking is not a viable role, its not even a role at all; even less so with the changed to thunderclap.

Paladins make terrible offtanks because as an offtank they lose their reflective damage (holy shield and retriobution aura) which are very significant percentiles of the total threat generation, and they do not garner enough healing to maintain their mana pools. (Before you mention OT damage on gruul, please consider that paladins have the lowest HP the three classess, and quite possibly the least mitigation too; we are by far the weakest class to act as soaks for spike damage)

Currently protection paladins have it just as bad, if not worse, than Feral druids in vanilla wow with respect to itemization and efficasy.

 

◊ Cathela

It can definitely be done; many of us do it. What you need is 65% base avoidance and a Libram of Repentance (conveniently among the cheapest of the heroic token rewards). At that point, Holy Shield alone will eliminate crushing blows as well as Shield Block. When Holy Shield is down, Redoubt alone won't push your avoidance to 100%, but it will push it to 95% which eliminates 2/3 of the crushing blows you'd take without it (reducing crush chance from 15% to 5%.)

At 70% base avoidance, Redoubt will push all crushes off. I believe this is possible with raid gear and raid buffs, but I haven't actually achieved it myself yet.

This does give paladins a decent advantage over warriors against fast-attacking mobs such as Moroes, Romulo, or Malchezaar. Neither class will be able to eliminate all crushing blows, but a Paladin will take substantially fewer, since Redoubt + Holy Shield will deliver more blocks than Improved Shield Block (even in the 65% case.)

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Fjord

What we really need is an antifear. We can't even fill the role of secondary tank on the majority of encounters. Allowing blocks while casting would also be excellent, not only would it make the hybrid gear blizzard creates useful it would actually give us quite an interesting role. Sure we wouldn't heal for much in tanking gear but with spiritual attunement fueling us we would be able to do a significant amount of healing while tanking.

Wraithlin is absolutely correct, AoE Tanking is not a role. I mean the root of the problem right now is when you compare paladin and warrior tanks, aside from their buffs where paladins clearly have the advantage, all the differences between them boil down to aggro and more importantly mitigation, areas where warriors force paladin tanks into obsolescence. Antifear Tank and Tank/Healer are roles and I really hope we get to fill one.

 

◊ zeidrich

Depends on your definition of offtanking.

If by offtanking you mean holding secondary threat on a mob, yeah, we're not the best at it, but warriors and druids have problems getting rage in those situations as well.

If by offtanking you mean tanking a different mob from the main tank as a means of crowd control, then we do just fine, as we're being healed, and generating threat from our reactive abilities.

Personally, I find myself a bit lower than a warrior in terms of mitigation, and I'd love to see those issues resolved. It looks a lot better with tier 5 than it did before, and I am hoping that they'll make some changes to tier 4, so I've been collecting my set.

Basically I see the difference between paladins and warriors ultimately as this: A prot paladin and a prot warrior are both viable classes to have in a raid. When the prot warrior is not tanking, he can do moderate damage, when the prot paladin is not tanking he can do fairly good healing.

Primary roles are the same, secondary roles are different.

The issue is only if there is a zone where for the entirety you only need a single tank for any content. If you start to need a secondary tank for whatever reason, you can bring a prot paladin, and when I'm not tanking I can either deal as much or more damage as a prot warrior, or else I can heal. And in a situation where there's only a single tank, healing is likely to be higher anyways to compensate for the control you'd have over the situation. (Things without adds hit hard).

I suppose if you need someone to tank half time, you have to choose between a prot warrior, who can do poor damage in the off time, an dps warrior who can do nice damage, but will have lower surivivability than a defensive specced paladin/druid, or a prot paladin/feral druid who can choose between DPS or Healing in their non-tanking time.

Personally I don't mind the role. On single tank fights like curator I heal, on multi-tank fights like morose and R&J I tank. If I were a warrior but not MT, I would do the exact same, except replace heal with DPS.

I just wish I had some compensation for some of the tools I"m missing, like no thunderclap, no demo shout, no shield block, no disarm, no last stand, those sorts of toys.

But as long as I can OT (not secondary tank like the above quote was talking about) I'm fine with my role.

 

◊ zeidrich

I guess this is the sort of attitude I'm curious about.

I agree that warriors and paladins need to be close, I mean it would be a failing system if for everything that needed 2 tanks in karazhan you were required to bring 2 warriors, or everything that required 3-4 tanks in 25 mans you'd need to bring 3-4 prot spec warriors.

Personally I don't mind being behind a prot warrior in a typical (non-gimmick) MT role. In that, if there's one boss monster and he's going to be on one tank the entire time, that it's going to be me that takes off my tanking gear and puts on my healing gear. This is assuming that in order to get to that boss, or get to the bosses past him that there's going to be situations where they need me to tank.

I don't think we need to be able to heal while we tank. I think that the fact that we can heal when we're not tanking is good enough.

Antifear tank I agree with, fear break is one of those things that warriors get, and is just another strike against paladins. I'm alliance so we have dwarf priests of course, horde can't say that. I can break 2 fears every 5 minutes, between trinket and bubble. A nice ability would be a fear-break that triggered forebearance, but had only a 1 minute cooldown on recast. And maybe even a talent that offered passive fear resist, we'd not be able to break a fast recasting fear, but it would be something. Holy warriors trained in fighting undead and demons shouldn't be the unable to deal with something spooky.

I think the fact that paladins bring more utility to the raid while they're not tanking makes them a more valuable second tank than another prot warrior. The fact that I can dish out another line of blessings all the time, and can be a backup healer when I'm not tanking makes more more valuable than another warrior who can battleshout his group when he's not tanking.

As long as I don't fall so far behind that I can't qualify as a decent offtank, I think despite the fact that I might be a bit behind the ultimate mitigation of a warrior, I make a more valuabe asset than the second warrior. If I could tank as well as a warrior, and offer a line of blessings, and LoH myself and heal, res and DI, then it would be warriors who would become obsolete.

That said, if Blizzard were to ask me, paladins are and always will be behind warriors just because of their current suite of skills. If the skills stay the same, paladins should always stay behind warriors.

BUT

Blizzard needs to fix our items. If we're being held back by lack of skills, and we're being given crappy items it will eventually get to the point that we're too far behind to even act as an offtank, and if we can't fill that role, it's time to start stacking warriors again, and all the paladins will end up respeccing back to holy.

This int, mana/5secs, and even to an extent spell damage needs to go. Give us the same defensive skills as warriors, give us as much or more stamina, and spend the same amount on our +damage as you do on warrior's STR, the same amount on our +spell crit as you do on warriors +agi, the same amount on our +spell hit or +hit as you do on warriors +to hit, and then I will be happy.

If they continue to give us items with 80% stamina, and 80% as much defensive skills, combined with spell stats that are completely useless when we're tanking, then combined with our lack of utility skills we become very unappealing for even off-tanking.

 

Ragnor

Blizzard have worked pretty hard to make every tree useful for most classes... but I just can't see the point of protection paladin in end game pve and certainly wouldn't let one MT anything serious or new in 25 man content which brings us why give them T4/T5 for tanking pieces over a warrior or even druid.

This is exactly what Megor is talking about later in his thread. He cares about his guild, raid team and their progress and feels it's a waste of a precious drop at this stage for him to take tanking gear right now instead of healbot gear when.

In this sense the protection tree fails as a tanking tree. Protection is just a utility tree for arena healers at best.

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

www.retpaladin.com

 

Deth

Alright so I see a lot of people proclaiming the end of the Pally tanking role, citing current endgame progression and some trends seen in hardcore raiding guilds. This is then reinforced with math discussions on differences in crushing blow mitigation and baseline values.

What I ask is for everyone to stop looking at what values all classes can obtain and then just looking at the best values. Instead take a step back and look at the DIFFERENCE. Anyone that has had a good root in the game understands that warriors were always meant to have the easiest time gearing up for the tanking role. Hybrids will have to spend a little extra time as well as spec for it. But in the grand scheme of things, and the question we really should be asking, is whether or not with equivalent gear a Paladin's baseline stats lag so far behind that its just not worth it. So far in my experience my stats only lag behind slightly, about 2-3% total at the most. The largest difference i've seen is baseline hp values, but that can be remedied through a little more effort.

From the PoV of forming the best single raid, then yes I can understand picking a warrior over a paladin. But like most guilds, there is a need to form multiple raids. Why pigeonhole the guild into multiple warrior tanks, when druid or paladins are available and almost as good. An ideal switch of a 40 man raid to BC would be 5 parallel karazhan raids. Would you like having 10 warriors in those raids and then telling 4 of them to sit for the 25 mans. Or would it be better to have some druid/paladin tanks as secondaries that can fluidly fill other roles as needed.

I don't think Paladin tanking is dead at all. Granted to be equivalent to warriors, we will need better gear overall. But that has how its always been for a hybrid, it shouldn't be surprising or interpreted as the doom for the role.

Max

"Death is only the Ultimate Excuse"

 

PsiVen

I reached this mark in my +defense gear (not stacking block%) last week in Karazhan. Unfortunately, I'll need some new pants to hit it again without GoA.

Alas, I observed that unless I overshot the mark by ~2% in my character screen, I was still crushable at a low rate. With 2.0.10 I now understand why -- my helm enchant no longer shows up in my char sheet either, and I'm convinced that it has no effect at all.

 

• Galatea

It is definitely doable. In my current gear, I have:

16.95 Dodge
16.16 Parry
18.48 Block
10.4 Miss

= 61.99 unbuffed.

I don't actually need 70, I need ~65% beacuse Libram of Repetence boosts my Holy Shield to around 35.08 percent. So My dodge/parry/block/miss for + HS is 97.07.

Once you add in .5% dodge from raid buffs, ~.6 dodge for the cloak enchant I have not had time to farm up yet, and in some dodge gems, or change my shield enchant to block, and I am uncrushable. So it is doable in current gear.

If you want to see my tanking set: http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...nash&n=Galatea

 

◊ Cathela

Ohhhh. Well that does explain a few things. I was noticing an occasional crush in my combat log recently.

I suppose a good rule of thumb then is that if you appear to be at the uncrushable point unbuffed, you really will be there with an agility elixir, BoK, and MotW (or some other combination approaching 2% extra dodge).

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

tooth

There are a number of posts in this thread suggesting that paladin and all hybrid tanking is a misguided farce.

Tseric has this to say :
Of course, it's up to Blizzard to make good on their promises and we're assuming that Tseric is not spouting rot again...

 

Nich

It'd be too much for Tseric to actually say what they wanted paladin tanking to be at, eh?

I still live in hope that I haven't wasted weeks chasing up tanking gear, to the detriment of healing gear, for the ability to only farm 5-man instances :\

 

◊ Wraithlin

If warriors were ment to have "the easiest time" then why is it that DRUIDS who hit their mitigation cap along with astronomical hp and dodge with greens and blues ? Druid tanks were/are easily the easiest tank class to gear up prior to the last patch.

You mean hybrids like... warriors the tank/dps hybrid ?

Improved RD vs Defensive stance is a 4% difference, thats more than you "2-3% total" right there. Base hp difference is 1200, which on a fully buffed tank is going to be 6-10%; thats pretty damn significant too.

I cant name a single Pre TBC guild that broke down from a 40 man raid into 5 Khara runs. Most brokes down into 2 or 3.

It IS Doom for the role.
What you are saying is the equivalent of:
"Its ok guys, you just need Tier 2 to tank MC, but thats balanced because you are a hybrid"

Green/blues and non-raid drops only get so far, after that all progression for tank itemization will be via raids. There is no way an individual can "work harder" or outgear the warrior, until his raid as a whole has outgeared that entire section of raid content, AND THE NEXT so that the paladin can significantly outgear content that is now dated. What you are proposing as "OK" would be the death of protection paladins, and resign us to tanking old content that has long been on farm beause the warriors are bored and want to play dps (hi there tank/dps HYBRID).

Paladins give up at least as much as warriors to spec deep protection, and far more than druids; yet our base abilities, our base stats, and our talents are leaving us in third place by a significant margin. This will only get worse with the current itemization path; expecially with the incoming buff to druid tanking itemization.

Edit
Another straw man argument is that of buffs and judgements. This is a non-sequitur. Noone is proclaiming that protection warriors are the best tanks because of demo-shout, commanding shout, thunderclap or sunder armor. Protection warriors provide many valuable buffs/debuffs in addition to their tanking prowess. Therefore it NOT acceptable for paladins to be a second rate tanking class with the caveat "Well you bring buffs, and judgements so that balances being a weaker tank". The main tank will always be decided in terms of survivability (HP, mitigation and "oh shit" buttons), and threat generation. Anything outside that might make for a reasonable argument over your second or third tank, but not your first.

Why would it be unacceptable to reach this medium:
- Druids - High spike tanks (Patchwerk, broodlord, Gruul), high mitigation and large HP make them excellent tanks for fights with high spike damage which cannot crit.
- Warriors - "Shield wall tank"; Any fight with where shield wall, spell reflect, stance dancing, last stand are key fall into this category
- Pladins - DPS race tank; the same hp/mitigation of a warrior without the "Oh shit" buttons but better threat generation.

All fights should be tankable by any of the 3 healing classess with some fights having elements that obviously favour one class over the other IMO.

 

slitz

nm, someone posted it already

 

Iol

Since this thread is about itemization.... What's up with Vambrace of Courage and the Class: Warrior on it... I havent found other bracers for tanks that compare and/or have sockets and/or is epic...

 

Cire

Yeah, those bracers are annoying.

I've been tanking stuff in Khara just fine for a couple of weeks now.. There is plenty of stuff out there that we can use, that fits the OP's requirements exactly. Not really sure what the point of this thread is.

 

Harmonics

This is the reason that I dropped my druid after 2 year of playing her. Being "alright" and "will do in a pinch" is not enough for me. Sorry to interject.

.

 

norg

Probably something to do with the Tier 4 & 5 sets being misguided rubbish?