We use one or two bears in every raid. They're good at tanking and they're useful during the fight after whatever they were tanking has died.

Multiple protection warriors would likely work out alright if you're willing to have them swap in and out of a lot of fights.

As a healer I don't see a dramatic difference between our high attendance bear and warrior main tanks. I feel if they die it's because I fucked up not because of class balance issues.

What's irrational about saying that if you gave a pally all the oh shit options of a warrior, that people would always go for a pally, you have taken away a warrior's advantages and the pally has kept his and would thus be far more flexible and useful. (Note, I think you might have missed the bit I was replying to with my comment, they mentioned paladin stand and holy wall and I was responding to that)


Incapacitating two classes? While there do seem to be issues for a pally, if you played a feral druid you would know that they very clearly aren't incapacitated.


Shadow priests offer a clear advantage over the status quo with their changes for tbc, if the changes that made pallys and druids viable tanks didn't offer a clear advantage they would simply stick with the experienced tanks they already had and just minmax things by swapping out prot warriors when their dps harmed the raid on fights where they didn't need to tank.

Whats so different about normal guilds, they are just as likely to have had the same tanks for quite some time, so why would they throw away all that experience just for the sake of change, you make changes when they benefit you e.g. whenever possible our OT in raids is a druid because quite frankly they absolutely destroy a prot warrior for usefulness in that role if you do not intend to minmax and bench unneeded tanks on certain fights.

I was considering the bumping Paladin mitigation aspect up moreso - but even including the Paladin Stand and Holy Wall, there are still a number of abilities for either class with no corresponding ability for the other - fear still means "use a Warrior." What would be nice, however, would be if "boss doesn't have a 1.0 attack speed" didn't mean "don't bring a Paladin." The mitigation advantage, and, to a lesser extent, the "oh shit" buttons, make it far less viable to bring a Paladin on an encounter where heavy mitigation is needed - and preferable to bring a Warrior over a Druid.

Last Stand and the mitigation differences are not even close to the only reasons to bring Warriors as tanks over Paladins. They're a great deal of the reason that you would almost certainly never choose a Paladin as a main tank over a Warrior, certainly. They alone do not define the extent of Warrior abilities. Sunder is useful. Thunderclap is useful. Demoralizing shout is useful, and the only out of those three abilities that is duplicated by other classes. Challenging Shout is enormously useful. Battle Shout is useful. Are these Protection-only abilities? No, they can be provided by DPS Warriors as well...but consider this: What does a Protection Paladin bring to a raid that any other Paladin does not? (Apart from filling a tank spot rather than a healing spot.) What does a Feral Druid in bearform bring that any other Druid could not?

Why bring a Warrior over a Paladin when the Paladin can AOE tank and rival him for single target mitigation / HP? Let's consider another angle: Why bring a Paladin over a Warrior when the Warrior can Shield Bash a heal and rival him for single target mitigation / HP? Why bring a Paladin over a Warrior when the Warrior can avoid a fear and rival him for single target mitigation / HP? Simple: Because it usually doesn't matter. AOE tanking situations are at least as rare as fears, interruptible spells, reflectible spells, etc. They are not the primary concern when selecting a main tank - having a flexible tanking corps will obviously benefit you, but your main tank isn't chosen by gimmick fights. If he is, then good luck choosing a main tank who combines all of the gimmicks into one class.

The fact is, saying that Paladins should be inferior to Warriors as tanks because they have so much more utility is rather ridiculous. The benefits of having a Paladin in the raid over a Warrior are not pronounced, and they are less pronounced with each Paladin that you add to the raid. (Salvation, Kings, Wisdom/Might for DPS/healers; Kings, Wisdom/Might, Light for tanks; What other buffs make a big difference? Many guilds cover those buffs with their healing Paladins alone...)

True, I do have certain melodramatic tendencies.

What I was attempting to emphasize by saying "old guard" guilds was that even newly-formed guilds are leaning towards Warrior MTs. With the amount of guild turmoil that's taken place in BC, shouldn't there be at least a few guilds in SSC formed post-expansion with Paladin MTs if they are viable? There are some Druid MTs - though they're rare compared to Warriors - but there are no Paladin MTs. (Or so few as to be effectively none - similar to the old number of feral Druids tanking in BWL...)

Newly-formed guilds will go for a mt based on the same criteria as anyone else though, they will decide based on skill, gear and experience, if the first two are fairly equal then warriors will tend to win quite easily on the 3rd one and thus its logical that there are far more warrior MTs than druids. The absence of paladin MTs doesn't automatically mean they are not viable, but it would seem to imply there was no compelling argument to choose a prot paladin over a warrior or druid.

One thing however, being the most efficient healer in the game prior to 2.1 won't have helped the cause of prot paladins, many guilds will lack healers a lot more than they lack tanks. I am not saying paladins are fine or anything like that, they do seem to have mitigation issues, but overlooking all the other factors affecting things would be shortsighted.

Well, let's be clear here. Guilds like Death and Taxes are always going to min/max - you don't want to balance the tanking game around them. Things like "flexibility" are of little value to them - they can attract enough quality players that if they have to have 4 protection warriors one fight, and replace three of them the next, it's no big deal. If one of their protection warriors doesn't like it and quits, they can almost certainly get another - and they don't recruit people who quit over that sort of thing in the first place, really. Unless you've got evidence that they bring 4 protection warriors to every single boss mob (which frankly, would be impressive - even D&T has to deal with the enrage timers liberally sprinkled throughout TBC), it's probably not worth discussing.

Well, come on now. Most mobs that you're tanking who require interrupts can be interrupted by a rogue, a mage, or someone else...or be dispelled by someone if the effect buffs them. Heck, for Mag's channelers (the only mob that comes to mind where you're probably tanking mobs that can't be easily interrupted by someone else) our feral druids don't get any interrupt assistance...the fact that there are only 2-3 people in range of the shadowbolt volley means that its damage is relatively trivial. They aren't really harder for our bears to tank at all, despite the volleys getting through. And if they were, we'd assign rogues, DPS shaman, or whatever to assist them. I'm sorry, but I don't see the ability to interrupt mobs as a very integral part of the warrior tanking advantage.

And to be honest, I think that's an example of the sort of advantage tanks SHOULD have over each other: something that's easily compensated for. If you're a paladin, yeah, maybe you need one of any of the 5 or 6 other classes with an interrupt ability to stop a mob's heals...but if that's all that's wrong, it's perfectly tankable by a paladin. And a warrior can get by without one of those 5 or 6 classes.

Another example of 'acceptable' tanking advantage: Attumen's curse that increases your chance to miss by 50% for 10 seconds. It's a curse, so it's not a huge deal if it hits you, since it can be dispelled. And even if it isn't dispelled, it's hardly an insurmountable threat loss. Warriors can reflect it, which gives them a slight advantage in the mitigation department; but paladins are impacted by it landing even less than warriors, because a high percentage of their threat is non-melee (holy shield + consecrate). A great balancing situation, IMO - anyone can tank it, warriors have a slight advantage, and the paladin mechanics mitigate their disadvantage so it's managable. Druids probably fare the worst of all, but it's hardly overpoweringly bad, since there's always the final solution of simply dispelling the curse.

If you're talking about the curse, see above. If you mean because he can be disarmed...it's 10 seconds out of every 60. I really think it hardly qualifies warriors for "much better tank" status. And, as far as I know, it's the only boss fight from Kara onward where disarm is functional (Moroes' adds, I guess, but since they can be paladin feared you'll have a hard time convincing me that paladins are at a disadvantage on that encounter).


Again, let me reiterate: Paladin tanks need help. But I don't think that the very situational warrior abilities - some of which only help on a few mobs, some of which are easily replicable by other classes - are really the problem here.


Agreed. Super Healing Potions are, I think, perfectly adequate along with healthstones and bandages for healing AOE/environmental damage. But tanks need something more at this stage of the game.


Sunder is replicated by Expose Armor.

Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout are certainly useful, true. But I think your comparison of warrior core abilities with paladin core abilities is a bit skewed.

Think of it this way - if you're a protection paladin, what percentage of the holy paladin's healing do you think you can put out? Assume a fight where you can wear whatever gear you like (e.g., you're not required to tank something beforehand), and the other healers let you handle whatever style of healing is most optimal - for a prot pally, I *think* that means spamming FoL on the tanks, since they'll almost certainly have blessing of light. Are you 80% of a healer? 70%? 50%? I've honestly got no idea, but I suspect the number is probably well above 50%, varying some based on fight.

A protection warrior is simply not going to put up numbers even remotely close to a fury or arms warrior when everything is taken into consideration. There's maybe one or two fights - Aran, for example, where low armor and liberal doses of rage thanks to the RSTS spells helps even the playing field - where you can be competitive with the right gear, but overall if you're a protection warrior DPSing, you're a wasted raid spot. TBC melee DPS is built around group synergy. You don't bring Improved Battle Shout for the rogue group, you don't bring Blood Frenzy for the physical DPS, you don't benefit from windfury like an arms warrior would...in short, you're just not pulling your weight anymore. Better to let an arms or fury warrior do thunderclap, demo, and sunder - which they can do as well as a prot warrior - and sit the fight out for someone who's bringing something to the table.

Heck, BEEF says it:

Protection warriors simply aren't any good if they're not tanking. Sunder, Demo Shout, and TClap justify *one* warrior, DPS or Prot.

A Paladin with no talent points spent can heal better than a Warrior with no talent points spent can DPS. A Warrior with no talent points spent can tank better than a Paladin with no talent points spent.

This is, I believe, the crux of the issue and why it's so hard for Blizzard to balance these different classes which have differing strengths without any talent points spent.

I agree here. I've never quite understood why some paladin tanks are always hung up on utility stuff like shield bash.

Having switched back and forth between Prot and Holy in the last few weeks I can say the number is between 50% and 60%. You lose a fair bit of throughput and you lose a ton of longevity. I'm certain that an intelligent Prot warrior who's doing dps in a raid situation can perform more than comparably relative to an arms/fury warrior.

I just dont think it will ever be balanced or work right, ever.

Someone will lose, and there is no way you can balance these three classes, and my honest opinion is that we will all be playing the next MMO before they or anyone gets a grip on that fact.

Not unless they were willing to just make everyone the same. Full t6 everyone has 19k armor, has 7 abilities, doing an average of 500 threat or whatever. Takes the same damage, Bears have a 15 second 'rageofthepandabears" and all damage is reduced by 75% etc etc. Paladins gain Power of the Furious Justice and only gain this righteous anger when they hit a mob or take damage.

Then I see everything working out. Or give warriors mana, that could work too.

I think most bears are satisfied at the moment, the OT role feels perfect and personally I think bringing 1 resto and one feral to a 25 raid fits nicely if you look how on the popularity of the class. I think Nihilum usually brings that, so I assume feral off tanks are doing pretty decent in end game.

Only fear is of course if we can keep that role when we start to hit the armor cap.

For our Vashj kill last night, we used one of each tanking class. Same for Leotheras earlier this week (plus a bear). There are some annoying mechanics, but really I'm more surprised than anything by how few guilds seem to be using paladin tanks. The bottom line seems to be that you have to be an acceptable substitute as MT to be treated seriously in any other tanking role.

About the crushing blows thing, I found the comment in the Stratics chat to be completely out of left field and doubt very much that anything would change with the mechanic. There would have to be massive changes to all three tanking classes, which means we'd be purely speculating on possibilities.

I think it's going to be impossible to get a better summary of this threat than this. On all accounts Bears are very useful as an OT (having the choice to lower migation for threat), and in some limited cases as MT (big yellow non crushable hits), which can still be handled by a warrior without a problem most of the time. Paladins on the other hand...

On removing crushing blows. I believe the idea of crushing blows right now is to enable diversification between tanks. Perhaps the streakyness of the damage is unintended. Changing it so curshing blows to happen 30% of the time for 1,25% of normal damage would be a "change" which hardly changes the interclass balance.