Tanking discussion, Druid/Warrior/Paladin - Page 4

Crowl · 06/03/07, 9:36 AM

Originally Posted by PsiVen

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.

If you look at recruitment posts, the lack of pally tanks is probably down to one simple thing, guilds tend to lack healers and most people would tend to prefer to raid in some manner rather than demanding to be a prot pally and a raid getting cancelled.

Jayde · 06/03/07, 10:01 AM

Originally Posted by Umph

I agree with this. I think a lot of the perceived problems with feral Druids is that many don't realize the best role they can play is that of an off-tank/DPS - everything suggests that this is our intended role, from our tiered gear to our talent trees and shape shifting. Certainly we can main-tank, but it is painfully obvious that this is not what we excel at.

Paladins on the other hand...

I think you've touched on a big factor here that's more or less on the dime.

There seem to be a lot more encounters were you want to shelf your excess tanks for DPS than for healing. While a Paladin could toss on healing gear and backup, that usually isn't the issue. Most encounters are balanced for a fairly static amount of healers, with a variable number of tanks vs. DPS. Druids are good at this because they can swap to DPS gear and do pretty well. Paladins aren't, because they can only swap to healing from a practical sense--which you probably already have enough of.

Warriors don't really "stack" well, and I think Paladins suffer from a similar plight. Druids are a lot more flexible, so they have less problems with the current encounter design.

The main thing an extra Paladin tank does afford, however, is another blessing...which can be pretty nice to have. They also generate very high amounts of threat from my experience, and are quite adept at multi-mob tanking. (When we're on AE packs and I'm on my Mage, Paladin tanks actually make me feel secure that I'm not going to get splattered.)

Branar · 06/03/07, 10:57 AM

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 would have thought more, especially given how little the 20+ holy talents benefit Flash of Light spam, but I'll take your word for it.

Warriors don't really "stack" well, and I think Paladins suffer from a similar plight. Druids are a lot more flexible, so they have less problems with the current encounter design.

Yeah, I guess the bottom line is that situations where you want to trade a tank for a healer going from one fight to another are very rare. That's a very good point...paladin flexibility is almost totally useless.

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.

While I agree with you, I don't that's a reason to say "well, things can just stay the way they are." Just because they can't be perfect doesn't mean they can't be better.

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 would be very surprised. Fury and arms warriors benefit hugely from group synergy - LotP helps flurry uptime, arms warriors get a larger benefit from Windfury than just about any other class (maybe Ret paladins, I guess), etc. It's not just "Oh, the prot warrior does less damage, so when you give him the same force multipliers you end up with a smaller total", it's that prot warrior mechanics simply don't benefit from force multipliers the way arms and fury warriors do. So there's less incentive to stick him in a DPS group, and when you do he benefits less. As someone requested earlier in the thread though, some actual maths are probably required at this point in the discussion.

Jebraltar · 06/03/07, 11:50 AM

Originally Posted by Crowl

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.

Consider also that a Protection Paladin and a Warrior in equal gear have stats that are nowhere near equal.

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.

If this were true, then why would Druid tanks be so enormously common, in spite of the continued usefulness of Druid healers? Druids are also still capable of filling the healer role - were this imbalance promoted simply by a preference for healers over tanks, one should not see enormously more feral Druids filling tank roles compared to Paladins. Also worth noting is that the Paladin is also capable of serving as a healer in any fight that does not require a massive number of tanks - I healed for Prince and Nightbane last week, in spite of being spec'd 0/49/12. A feral Druid is comparatively crippled in healing - meaning that it's the choice between tank/DPS on a fight that doesn't need a tank or tank/healer on a fight that doesn't need a tank, the choice is tank/DPS. I may be missing something here, but I'm not seeing how a lack of healers would lead to a preference for Druid tanks over Paladins.

As a little aside, would people please stop using raid debuffs/buffs as reasons warriors are better? If you don't have a warrior MT, you'll have a dps warrior who can do Sunder/TC/Demo. Otherwise it's like saying warlocks are better dps because of COE/COS, or priests are better healers because of fort. Would you do any serious raid without those? No, you bring at least one warlock and priest no matter what because the spells are just that good. Same with warriors. Granted, imp TC is probably the #1 debuff you want up there, but it's not hard to get.

The point is that the abilities others claim justify taking Paladins over Warriors are also literally baseilne class abilities. You want a third blessing? Well, bring a 41/20 Paladin. Aura for a group? Ditto. There isn't a single debuff or buff that Protection Paladins bring to the table worth having - their only niche is being able to AOE tank and having a limited ability to tank physical immune mobs. (They lose Seal damage, which is a sizable amount of threat.)

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.

It's not an integral part - but it's yet another advantage. The point is, any time that a mob has an ability designed with a counter in mind, which class possesses the counter? Almost invariably Warriors.

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.

Attumen's curse affects ranged and spell miss - it actually provides a double whammy for Paladin threat in that it can cause both melee swings to miss (preventing Seals from landing) and increases the resist rate on Seals. Probably not the best example.

(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).

Paladin fear is a 1.5 second cast - if the Paladin is using that fear, he's not tanking.

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.

They are not the sole problem - but they compound it. Would you rather have a class that interrupts tanking a Mag channeler? Yeah, if it's available. Would you rather have a class that can disarm tanking a disarmable boss/mob? Yeah, if it's available. Where are the "bring a pally, it helps!" abilities? All we see is "if this mob hits more than twice every five seconds, a Paladin is less likely to be crushed." How many dual wielders are there, honestly, in the raiding game? How many mobs with flurry, etc? On how many of these is burst really the problem?

Sunder is replicated by Expose Armor.

D'oh.

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.

Generally around 60%-70%. If the fight involves heavy burst damage, since I lack the ability to use Light's Grace to throw out a quick Holy Light, likely less than 50%. (Also, Holy Light is not even close to efficient without Illumination, so it will destroy my mana pool.) If the fight tests longetivity, perhaps 50% - I can literally heal for more than three times as long without running out of mana as a Holy spec. Healing on Nightbane, I hit a potion on every cooldown in order to avoid running completely out of mana as Protection spec - healing as a hybrid of Holy/Protection, I hit a potion one to avoid running out of mana. As full Holy, experience suggests that it would have been a waste of mats for me to even have been carrying potions for that fight.

There is a massive difference between healing essentially forever with Super Mana Potions and healing for ten minutes with them. (There are more than a few occasions where I've noticed that my mana hit 60%, taken a mana potion, and only had my mana hit 60% again after the pot had cooled off.)

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.

The Protection Warrior can do Thunderclap, Demo, and help stack Sunder faster, saving both DPS Warriors and the MT rage, allowing the MT to build more threat and saving the DPS Warriors from generating as much. Roughly the same reasoning as having a MT with Thunderfury in the age of 100 DPS 1h'ers.

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.

I think that this is a problem that results directly from Blizzard's choice of continuing with their current gear mechanics - particularly, since Warriors and Paladins generally want the same gear, why give Paladins the gear to tank with when the Warrior OT can pick up the gear and be prepared if you later need a MT? Even with class sets, one needs to choose gearing up a Protection Paladin over gearing up a Holy Paladin or members of several other classes. Druids, t4 tokens aside, suffer less from this because Druid tanking pieces are rarely useful to anyone else. There's also the obvious fact that they are damn good at the OT/DPS role - far better than a Warrior.

If you look at recruitment posts, the lack of pally tanks is probably down to one simple thing, guilds tend to lack healers and most people would tend to prefer to raid in some manner rather than demanding to be a prot pally and a raid getting cancelled.

This assumes that the need for healers is far in excess of the need for tanks.

I would have thought more, especially given how little the 20+ holy talents benefit Flash of Light spam, but I'll take your word for it.

The problem there is that a Paladin has to trade 5% parry, a large increase in threat (hard to quantify the 2 second decrease on Judgement cooldown without math'ing out a cycle), and a great deal of mana efficiency when in the tanking role in order to even pick up the first 20 Holy Talents...Sure, a 20/41/0 Protection Paladin has some tanking ability - I OT'ed for a while as 30/31/0 in Karazhan. They still sacrifice quite a lot of it in exchange for flexibility - would a 0/30/31 Fury/Protection Warrior have some tanking ability? Yeah, but he'd be lacking a lot compared to a more raid-tanking spec'd Warrior. There's also the simple fact that Flash of Light spam is useful, but insufficient for many fights - particularly the ones where you would want to trade tanks for healers.

Now, that's not to say that Flash of Light spam isn't a good thing to have or that Protection Paladins are so awful that they can't pull it off for more than twenty seconds or anything of the sort. However, the difference between me being Holy spec and me being Protection spec...well, I feel like I could solo heal Nightbane between air phases with a Holy spec and mana potions. I chain-drink mana potions and hope that I don't run out of mana before the fight is over as a Protection spec.

Crowl · 06/03/07, 1:53 PM

Originally Posted by Jebraltar

If this were true, then why would Druid tanks be so enormously common, in spite of the continued usefulness of Druid healers? Druids are also still capable of filling the healer role - were this imbalance promoted simply by a preference for healers over tanks, one should not see enormously more feral Druids filling tank roles compared to Paladins.

With the increased use of enrage timers, if you have adds that need tanking, having a class that can switch to doing useful dps after their add is down is a huge bonus for druids over pallys and warriors, not to mention the shadowpriest synergy for holy pallys.

This assumes that the need for healers is far in excess of the need for tanks.

That doesn't seem an unreasonable assumption though.

Lord BEEF · 06/03/07, 4:24 PM

Yeah it's pretty clear that something fundamental needs to change to make protection paladins worthwhile. Right now they're similar to prot warriors in that unless they're tanking 100% of a fight you're better off swapping them out.

Druids are in a very enviable position where their gear makes them do strong dps even in tanking gear due to how agility and strength help both tanking and dps, and their tiered gear has healthy chunks of both.

Defense, dodge, and block rating/value don't do a damn thing for a paladin unless you're tanking.

For all classes to be viable tanks they need to either move paladins to the druid model where they're good at a secondary role when not performing their primary, or dethrone warriors as the best main tank and have paladins be as good as prot warriors, which I don't think is the best solution.

Personally I'd "feralize" the paladin protection tree such that the talents that improve tanking also improve healing to some extent (not nearly to the level which holy does of course). Things like giving mana/5 based on a % of your block value, additional stamina from your +damage gear or whatever.

Aett · 06/03/07, 4:34 PM

Originally Posted by Crowl

With the increased use of enrage timers, if you have adds that need tanking, having a class that can switch to doing useful dps after their add is down is a huge bonus for druids over pallys and warriors, not to mention the shadowpriest synergy for holy pallys.

I would like to point out that the shadow priest synergy unique to holy paladins is mostly gone in 2.1 because of the spiritual attunment nerf.

I don't think that the sentiment that, "If class X can cast a heal, then they should be healing" is still an accurate assessment. For this reason, using the argument that there aren't too many pally tanks because healing is more needed holds much weight. It was pointed out earlier that feral druids are a big example that breaks this notion. Moving beyond that, there are plenty of non-resto shamans and non-holy/disc priests out there in raids.

Shadow priests in particular have become almost a required slot in raiding due to their synergy with caster dps. In my opinion, if a raid is going to have one priest, it's better for that priest to be shadow because of the added dps they bring.

The last few raids I've been on with my guild have been lacking a shadow priest. The general sentiment afterwards was, "damn, it would be nice if we had a shadow priest". I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone missing what a prot pally brings to the table, except maybe on a few select fights.

Crowl · 06/03/07, 5:42 PM

Originally Posted by Aett

I don't think that the sentiment that, "If class X can cast a heal, then they should be healing" is still an accurate assessment. For this reason, using the argument that there aren't too many pally tanks because healing is more needed holds much weight. It was pointed out earlier that feral druids are a big example that breaks this notion. Moving beyond that, there are plenty of non-resto shamans and non-holy/disc priests out there in raids.

I didn't say it was the only factor, but up until the nerf in 2.1 holy pallys were so superior with that synergy that they would clearly need to offer some significant benefit for people to want them to move out of what was probably also their role before tbc.

Feral druids and shadow priests both offer significant benefits with their specs and thus the pool of healers is reduced still further since you now probably have a feral ot and a couple of dps'ing priests that were quite likely to be healers before tbc.

Branar · 06/03/07, 6:56 PM

Where are the "bring a pally, it helps!" abilities? All we see is "if this mob hits more than twice every five seconds, a Paladin is less likely to be crushed."

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on these. I could continue on about how I've seen paladins both fear and tank Moroes (thanks 5-10 sec break while he vanishes), how the curse from Attumen can still be dispelled (though I must say I didn't realize it affected spells - I'll have to pay more attention to the tooltip), how disarm is limited both in use and in damage reduction, etc. But it doesn't really seem like this is a productive line of discussion, since you insist that they're significant contributors to the difference in tanking ability. I don't know what else to say.

I should note that Berserker Rage is exempt from consideration here, because it very literally does make it so that warriors can tank things (well, just Nightbane from what I can see) that paladins and druids can't. Probably fear removal should be an ability shared more liberally through other classes - if tremor totem were reliable, every priest had Fear Ward, and they maybe handed some anti-fear ability out to some other class (e.g. give rogues a "rabbit ears" ability, that renders any fear ability the mob uses in the next 5 seconds impotent) Berserker Rage would be balanced...the same way I think shield bash and Attumen's curse is balanced, because there are so many replacements/counters for those abilities.

The Protection Warrior can do Thunderclap, Demo, and help stack Sunder faster, saving both DPS Warriors and the MT rage, allowing the MT to build more threat and saving the DPS Warriors from generating as much. Roughly the same reasoning as having a MT with Thunderfury in the age of 100 DPS 1h'ers.

The difference is that Thunderfury doesn't take up a raid slot.

Come on, it's like saying "the prot paladin can cast blessings even if he's not tanking!" Neither of these things is a good enough justification for bringing tank who's not tanking. Yeah, you save the MT a bit of threat, and yeah, you let the DPS warriors spend every last point of their rage on DPS, as opposed to only 95%...but the fact of the matter is that when you say that, what you really mean is "Since Protection warriors aren't really contributing anything meaningful while not tanking, they're free to handle the basic tasks that any warrior can perform".

That's not enough to justify your spot in the raid. Paladins and warriors and druids who tank all need to be able to say "While I'm not tanking, I can X well enough to justify not swapping me out" where X is either DPS or healing. X can't be "do the trivial things that anyone of my class could bring to a raid and do with little or no effort!"

Prot warriors currently do not DPS well enough to fit that bill. Druids do, but aren't prime choices for main tanks (something I think should change, personally). Paladins I *thought* healed well enough to fit the bill, but apparently don't (in which case I agree with BEEF - give them some feral-style talents that improve healing abilities - maybe with a focus on Flash of Light, since Holy seems very Holy Light oriented). But come on, Sunder, Demoralizing Shout, Thunderclap, Blessings, Fairie Fire - these aren't ROLES a player can fill, they're single skills. If that's the *major* thing you're bringing to the table, you're not pulling your weight.

♦ Oggie · 06/03/07, 7:44 PM

Originally Posted by Branar

I should note that Berserker Rage is exempt from consideration here, because it very literally does make it so that warriors can tank things (well, just Nightbane from what I can see) that paladins and druids can't. Probably fear removal should be an ability shared more liberally through other classes - if tremor totem were reliable, every priest had Fear Ward, and they maybe handed some anti-fear ability out to some other class (e.g. give rogues a "rabbit ears" ability, that renders any fear ability the mob uses in the next 5 seconds impotent) Berserker Rage would be balanced...the same way I think shield bash and Attumen's curse is balanced, because there are so many replacements/counters for those abilities.

I can't even honestly relate how frustrating it is to have to call a raid because a geared feral and a geared druid are available but Fear Ward isn't, making it basicly impossible to tank Nightbane. Just...'something' needs to be done about fear.

That's not enough to justify your spot in the raid. Paladins and warriors and druids who tank all need to be able to say "While I'm not tanking, I can X well enough to justify not swapping me out" where X is either DPS or healing. X can't be "do the trivial things that anyone of my class could bring to a raid and do with little or no effort!"

Prot warriors currently do not DPS well enough to fit that bill. Druids do, but aren't prime choices for main tanks (something I think should change, personally). Paladins I *thought* healed well enough to fit the bill, but apparently don't (in which case I agree with BEEF - give them some feral-style talents that improve healing abilities - maybe with a focus on Flash of Light, since Holy seems very Holy Light oriented). But come on, Sunder, Demoralizing Shout, Thunderclap, Blessings, Fairie Fire - these aren't ROLES a player can fill, they're single skills. If that's the *major* thing you're bringing to the table, you're not pulling your weight.

I will say that from seeing DMs and seeing people do it, I honestly feel (and I've brought it up before, but it was long enough ago I don't think I'll get in trouble for it!) that prot warrior dps is vastly underrated. It's not that of a pure geared dps class, and it obviously takes a secondary gearset, but I would go so far as to say that Prot warr dps is significantly stronger than Protadin healing capacity (assuming the prequisite gear swaps), with dps clocking in at ~80% while healing is closer to 60% of primary specs. I want to emphasise that this is just my opinion and I don't have hard WWS logs to back this up; merely what I've noticed on DMs after raids and certain fights lead me to this.

Which is not to say that I don't think both specs could use 'something' so they're not quite so much a drag on the raid. While I realize the vast majority of the people reading and posting on these forums are hardcore raiders who think nothing of swapping raid members, it's not a realistic option for a lot of guilds because of social conditions and overall makeup. I don't have any issue with min/maxing to the extreme being both highly desirable and profitable for the raid group, failing to swap members feels to me too much like a penalty, and that irks me.

I'm also not entirely certain how to fix it. Another debuff for prot warriors (say, 50 extra AC per sunder?) might fit the bill without making Fury and Arms look like bad raid choices, but that's a really fine line because once you make prot dps equal to either of the other two the desire fore them in a raid rapidly plumets to zero. It's perhaps easier for paladins: giving some healing or better yet some mana regen based explictly off of a tanking stat might let them hyrbidize a bit further; however since paladin aggro is so ridiculously reflective I'm not sure if even that would help overmuch. Protadin's horrible mana-in and aggro-out while not being hit by steady (blockable) physical hits.....it feels almost like painted into a corner because of the very nature of thier aggro mechanics to excell at a single type of encounter.....that warriors and druids are at least comprable if not better at (depending on fights of course).

I realize that there's a lot of opinion in the previous three paragraphs and it's slightly tangentalizing but I'm not entirely sure I can address the OP's point without getting deep into 'what if' land.

Cathela · 06/03/07, 7:57 PM

Originally Posted by Lord BEEF

Personally I'd "feralize" the paladin protection tree such that the talents that improve tanking also improve healing to some extent (not nearly to the level which holy does of course). Things like giving mana/5 based on a % of your block value, additional stamina from your +damage gear or whatever.

This would be fantastic, and I'd welcome it. I wouldn't mind being a demonstrably inferior tank to a warrior/druid in most situations if speccing that way didn't also have such an enormous negative effect on my healing.

Let us tank better, or let us hybridize better. Either way works for me.

Cathela · 06/03/07, 7:58 PM

Originally Posted by Branar

I would have thought more, especially given how little the 20+ holy talents benefit Flash of Light spam, but I'll take your word for it.

You're correct about that, but (a) Flash of Light doesn't cut it in as many situations as it used to, and (b) speccing for raid tanking means zero points in Holy until you reach at least a solid T4 level.

Savos · 06/03/07, 8:49 PM

In regard to protection warrior damage in a non-tank role:

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=yqz2inh4izqqc (until June 18th or so)

Now, I'm not that great at doing damage really and don't have the gear for it (blues/green quest rewards). Only 317 DPS. I can barely beat a Beastmastery hunter pet (Bowmin). I suppose I can get better though I don't generally practice raid DPS roles very often.

Defac and Adrik both running Arms at the time, otherwise would have moved up a significant number of places.

Jayde · 06/03/07, 9:13 PM

Originally Posted by Savos

In regard to protection warrior damage in a non-tank role:

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=yqz2inh4izqqc (until June 18th or so)

Now, I'm not that great at doing damage really and don't have the gear for it (blues/green quest rewards). Only 317 DPS. I can barely beat a Beastmastery hunter pet (Bowmin). I suppose I can get better though I don't generally practice raid DPS roles very often.

Defac and Adrik both running Arms at the time, otherwise would have moved up a significant number of places.

I really do wish the Devastate change from last patch had gone live, so that Prot Warriors would have a chance at at least being somewhat useful when not tanking. Right now, it's a big handicap for them. That's one point where Druids really excel--our primary tanking Druid, for instance, has pulled nearly 700 DPS on Gruul with a simple gear swap and no consumables.

In regard to the prospect of Prot Paladin "hybridization", I'd say that it might not be a bad thing to see more of this in both Paladin and Warrior trees really. I guess the issue in regard to Warriors is that with 2 trees already dedicated to "damage", it feels a bit strange to have damage-oriented elements in Prot too--but, realistically, something needs to be done about the inability to stack Prot Warriors to any resonable degree.

I also agree with some of the seniment that it would be nice to see Pallies have some more reliable anti-fear mechanism. It would make sense. I hate having to call raids if we don't have a Warrior or Dwarf. It's just a bit too narrow for today's raiding environment at times.

Eylirria · 06/03/07, 9:17 PM

I think that by now we're all pretty aware of what each class can/can't do. What it excels at, what it falls behind at, what class X
could use some work on, and at what class Y should be doing better at.

Personally, I'd like to see all 3 classes being viable and inter-exchangeable between the multiple tanking roles (MTing, OTing, AE tanking),
all with their respective perks and scenarios they're not so great at, but without ever hitting a wall where they couldn't tank an encounter based
on their own class available skills.

I'd love to see a druid being able to MT a fear-based encounter without needing to rely on Fear Ward for reliable tanking. As I'd love
to see protection specced warriors being able to offer more than they currently do while they're not tanking. Same for paladins.

I'm not saying all three classes should be a copy of each other. Besides paladins, I'm happy with how Druids/Warriors fare when compared
to each other -- they both have unique traits to how their tanking plays out.

This is obviously not easy to balance around, otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here talking about this even though the game has been
out for more than just a couple of years now, so, my thoughts on this are equally either just as good as the next person's, or worthless,
depending on your point of view:

Look at how they changed the Warrior 'Revenge' this patch, and what they similarly did to the Bear 'Mangle', reducing the innate threat value
and giving it more raw damage power while maintaining an equal level of threat generation. Maybe that's one thing to consider for warriors:
Shift the balance between 'damage:threat' on their skills, even add damage to currently 'pure threat' skills (all while taking into account
armor mitigation) so that when it's not about the TPS, their DPS doesn't come so abysmally behind everything else.