Huh? I'm sure it was mentioned somewhere in relation to raid content SSC onwards? Am I completely mistaken?

I'm pretty sure the only thing that's immune to TC anywhere raid-wise is Hydross in Nature phase, and that might only be the damage, not the effect. Thunderfury is just so outdated (one of our warriors has it - he uses it for trash because of sheeps and other CC and uses TC and the mallet off lurker for most stuff).

According to the DPS warrior spreadsheet, I do 450 DPS unbuffed as a prot warrior (I have around 1500 AP, 26% crit, and 9% to hit). In reality I do considerably less since I need to wait for 5 sunders (or apply them myself), and do TC and demoralising shout as needed.

Even they buff devestate, there's still one glaring problem with prot warriors, or warriors in general: we cannot tank in DPS gear and DPS in tank gear. There is no flexibility, unlike druids who can switch between the two roles in combat.

The same argument can be made about Prot Paladins--Can't Heal in DPS or Tank gear, can't DPS in heal or tank gear, and can't tank in Heal or DPS gear. We all know Druids have it good, and it's likely not going to change short of another Feral talent re-vamp that splits the tree up again between Cat and Bear sub-specs.

I think the success that Druid's have had is that they are 90% viable tanks and 90% viable DPS (obviously in the right hands, in a bad raid, they look amazing as they're better DPS than everyone else and better tanks too). They can't quite fill that role of a "pure" class, but they still do things well enough to fill in, especially in the tank slot where they aren't as wasted as a prot warrior is once his mob he was tanking is dead.
Prot Warrior's currently are 100% viable tanks, 50% (or worse) viable DPS.
Prot Paladins are ~85-95% viable tanks, 50-70% viable healers (maybe more/less dependant on exact spec). However, in some cases you just don't need extra healing, while extra DPS will never be a bad thing.

I think the majority of Druid synergy is all in one talent - Survival of the Fittest. It means we can skip defence, put a small amount of resillience gear on, and suddenly we're crit immune and in a position to stack DPS stats on (and any stamina we get is a bonus).

IMHO, warriors and paladins really need a skill to change armor in combat, give it a 2 minute cooldown or some such. Only then can their hybridness be discussed in seriousness.

Here's my take on tanking classes:

As a paladin tank, I feel I tank most things fine. I can't survive the same burst as a warrior or druid, but overall take less damage than a druid, and fairly comparable damage to a warrior.

Realistically there's 2 categories of mob who need to be tanked.

1: Mobs who crush.

2: Mobs who don't.

Basically, on any non-gimmick mob, if it can't crush, a druid makes the best tank. If it can, then a warrior. If it's a pack of mobs, then it's paladin.

Warriors and Druids have no real method of tanking large groups of mobs (5-10) while a Paladin can tank anything that a druid can. This means that the necessity of pack-tanking is limited so that a paladin tank is not "required"

But then again, my issue with paladin tanks doesn't come from tanking viability, but instead from raid composition.

Raids are typically based around a static amount of healing, and a variable amount of DPS. To take a paladin in a tanking role, you're saying that in situations where your paladin is tanking, you have 1 fewer healer, and in situations where your paladin is healing, you have 1 more.

When you min-max raids, that's typically associated with minimizing the number of healers slots taken, and maximizing the potential DPS. Thus reducing the duration of the fight, and thereby the margin of error.

A paladin tank would be a boon in these circumstances if it were the case that they could take the slot of a full healer on a boss where they were unneeded, and that you would not be short on healing on a boss/trash where they were needed. But this is not really the case.

The amount of longevity that the holy tree gives means that a paladin specced any way other than holy, even post illumination nerf, still only has 50-70% of the healing capacity of a 41 point holy paladin. This means that a prot pally will never fully replace a holy paladin. And this is understandable and intentional. Why would anyone spec holy if being prot gave the same healing ability, but also made you a viable tank?

Taking a druid, on the other hand, you can place your best healers in a minimum number of healing slots. When the feral druid is not tanking he becomes great DPS. When the feral druid is in tanking gear, he still can maintain a good amount of DPS.

Prot warriors suffer the same issue as prot paladins, in that in a non-tanking role they can not fulfill their secondary role in a capacity worthy of displacing a primary class. Sure, a prot warrior may deal out decent DPS, but it is still not to the capacity of an actual DPS class. Prot warriors do have the stuff that it takes to tank the bosses though. They can remove the chance to be crushed, which a druid can not, greatly reducing the chance of death by spike. (Which is the only real threat to a good raid)

DPS warriors are much more like druids in that they can off-tank non-bosses, and then reach the full capacity of a DPS class in non-tanking scenarios.

Basically this means that you want your paladins Holy, you want only enough prot warriors as there are bosses to tank (Typically 1), 1-2 DPS warriors, enough feral druids to cover the rest of the adds who need tanked, and that's it for tanking classes.

If crushing blows are removed, then it will be prot warriors who will be out of a job.

I had a dream that druid armor was changed into Anathema/Benediction style items. At the risk of going all Sluggy Freelance, what would such a warrior skill be called? "Emergency Pants Breakout"? More seriously, though, maybe something like "Meditate" where you can force yourself out of combat so long as you take no damage with a channeling time (the visible invisbility, if you like).

I think the more realistic hope is for Heart of the Wild / Nuturing Instinct / Survival of the Fittest style talents.

This is why I usually don't reply to threads like this, people get all worked up over one aspect of tanking and don't bother to consider every other variable that impacts a tank's survivability.

We'll just ignore the 16% magic damage reduction, thunderclap (20% attack speed reduction that no other class can give you), demo shout, commanding/battle shout, disarm, spell reflect, spell interrupt/silence, shieldwall, last stand, healthstone/nightmare seed/ironskin pot, weapon buffs, lower cooldown taunt, 3 taunts, and overall tanking flexibility the protection warrior gives you. If you ignore all that stuff, a protection warrior sure is useless.

Let's be practical here, very few fights are 100% physical, and there are a multitude of fights that an ability like Last Stand and Shieldwall are invaluable. I sincerely doubt they'd remove crushing blows and not take a long hard look at the base AC on plate or find other ways to close the gap.

There's a multitude of reasons people are using warrior's to maintank, and it shouldn't just be their resistance to crushing blows.

Indeed, if Crushing Blows were the only issue well-informed guilds would actually all be using Paladin MTs with the 2.1 patch.

I actually agree with the removal of crushing blow. Then, perhaps, the tanking classes can be balanced without having to always take account of this one gimik

This is my complaint. Its awesome that druids can tank and offer a different style of tanking. But they don't sacrifice anything to tank. As a warrior when spec'd for tanking, that's all we can do effectively. I'm not talking about grinding/solo play, but when not required to tank in a raid setting how can I justify my raid slot when my dps in prot is so poor.

What this guy says is exactly why Prot Paladins won't ever have a serious role in any progression based raid. This on top of the static healing #'s mentioned earlier gets straight to the crux of the issue. Raids are too inflexible to ever have any fight where one of your tanks becomes gimpy healing. However having one of your tanks become fairly good DPS on top of Imp LOTP is a worthwhile tradeoff. Not to mention Crez/Innervate, and the ability to tank on the fly providing they are wearing a modicum of resilience gear.

-Warriors are bar-none the best raiding tanks in *almost* all situations.
-Druids are the best offtanks in *almost* all situations.
-Paladins are the best tanks in *two* situations. Mobs that dual wield AND crush incredibly fast, and large packs of mobs. But you'd probably fare better with having 2-3 Feral Druids spamming swipe.


Don't get me wrong - I've been collecting my tank gear, picking up everything that is tank-like and rotting on every KZ/T4 zone run, I'm uncrushable if I spec prot and can tank normals/heroics with the best of them. I'm just quickly seeing the reality that we'll never tank in a min/max environment - which is what raiding boils down to. Tank/Heal are just two roles that are too static for too many fights, and flexibility between the two is novelty at best.

Until they give Protection Paladins a new, viable method of healing/Damage Reduction while Prot (maybe a way to help prevent damage to the MT, or to the entire party?) this probably won't ever change. Think BoSanctuary - but bigger and proactive like PW:S.

p.s Thunderfury is still a really good OH isn't it? TC is overrated. TF is still a way good MH for any tank, specifically for trash, and it isn't too shabby on raid mobs either considering the DPS it puts out that is unmitigated, plus the added bonus of not having to waste rage on TC's.

Ok, I was being a bit dramatic.

But...

Thunderclap, commanding and battle shout can be provided by a DPS warrior. Disarm as well. Shield wall has an unreasonable cooldown, interrupts can be done by DPS warriors, healthstones are a minimal amount of health return.

I could give a grocery list of similar proportions to explain why a prot paladin is useful. Like your list, many of the things I would list could be doled out by a 41/20 holy paladin.

The issue I see is more that both paladins and warriors spec into a role that's diametrically opposed to their secondary role.

A prot paladin loses a significant amount of healing. A prot warrior loses a significant amount of DPS.

A druid gains a significant amount of DPS by speccing into feral.

In any fight worth worrying about, you're going to have at least 1 tank. This means that a single prot warrior is not currently a wasted slot in a raid. In fact is currently quite a necessity as they're the best suited to stand up to current raid bosses. The reason for this is simply because the burst potential on druids is high due to no ability to stop crushing blows. The spike death potential on paladins is high because of low HP pools. Rarely would you choose a tank based on the list of justifications you gave in your above post.

If holy was a spell damage DPS tree, and prot was a Tanking/Healing tree, making prot pallies the strongest healing spec, you would see a lot more paladin tanks.

This is currently the case with Druids. Feral being a Tanking/DPS tree means that they're the only class that can fully spec into hybridity.

If a feral druid ever encroaches onto the "Primary MT" role, then prot warriors will be instantly marginalized. Prot warriors make poor OTs for the same reason Prot Paladins do. Just because when they're not tanking, they're operating at half efficacy.

Likewise, if somehow stuff got changed around so much that prot paladins ever encroached on to the "Primary MT" role, prot warriors would be just as marginalized. Druids would still be the OTs, Paladins would be the MT, and warriors would spec into DPS.

As long as druids are operating at full power as a DPS class in the same spec as their full powered Tank spec, paladins have no chance at being OTs.

If Druids ever became the favored MT class, prot warriors would feel the same as I am atm.

Can anyone give me a situation where you would bring a Prot Warrior as an OT instead of a feral druid assuming both were available?

This is the same complaint as Prot Paladin, yet we do have the "not good enough to even be required to tank to begin with" stigma... (in comparison).

When factoring gear, there is only 2 warrior that are better tanks than my paladin in my guild. 1 of them has better gear than me, the other, i outgear him a little bit. If neither of them is online, i'm the best replacement. But that's unfortunatly all i am, a replacement.

The only significant thing Paladins have as an advantage in Raid tanking is crushing immunity longer and more reliable than warrior's. Removing crushings just kills the Paladin's tanking purpose. I don't think they'll change them much, let alone remove them..

Don't forget that Paladins are by far the worst OT in terms of TPS since most of our threat is generated via blocking.

Fearing mobs?! (I kid.. I kid...)

I'd love to agree with you but I'm afraid I can't.

A warrior is rarely, though occasionally, in the position to take a CB.

A paladin is rarely, though occasionally, in the position to take a CB.

I don't care about IHS. HS has a 10 second duration and a 10 second CD. If the mob swings after it cools down but before the command to refresh is sent back to the server you can still take a crush.

Despite that, even assuming the paladin's always uncrushable we still have lower mitigation and a large HP deficit. I have good tank gear, uncrushable and solid stars in all sockets, typically focus on HP over avoidance and I'm still running 2k or so below our warriors.

The occasional CB on a warrior vs the occasional CB on a paladin where 1 class has a slightly higher chance to be crushed, but the other had a higher chance to die when crushed, the warrior still wins.

In my opinion, tanks die to burst damage over anything else.

Improved TC, Demo Shout, Curse of Weakness reduce burst damage. Those can happen regardless of who's tanking.

The amalgam of Damage reduction, Hit points, ability to remove crushes, block value all reduce chance to die from burst. These are dependant on who's tanking.

The bottom section for paladins is weak compared to warriors. The ability to block 4 more attacks in 10 seconds is nice, but not enough to completely negate the difference in HP and mitigation.

A druid on the other hand has higher DR and hit points to start with.

By OT I mean add tanking, not building secondary threat.

So rarely are you required to build secondary threat that I don't mind that. Moroes is fine due to the fact that he hits me when MT's gouged. Aggro swapping mobs are fine for the same reason. Gruul, not so much.

I mean more holding aggro on a warder/channeler/naga/murloc etc.

And I suppose that's the crux of my point.

I don't mind being a tank for trash, and only occasional tank for bosses, and then going back to healing on most bosses. But my healing is mediocre as prot.

A druid fills my role better because if they're not tanking, their dps is great as feral.

I'm talking about healing in healing gear vs dps in dps gear. Not so much healing in tank gear vs dps in tank gear.

Warlord Karathress and High King Maulgar are prime examples where the logic above fails. I can be one man on an island and provide all the buffs/debuffs I need to stay alive. Are you going to pull someone off dps to buff/debuff when you'd be much better off adding a dps? Who's going to heal this debuffer through those spitfire totems? What's the opportunity cost of having a warrior stuck debuffing when he could be bloodthirsting, executing and whirlwinding?

Similarly, what rogue is going to be stuck using expose armor in these examples? Is he going to spend 2 talent points and thus spec sub-optimally for his own dps (and not be a pure combat daggers build) or are you going to sacrifice the better armor reduction that you get out of sunder vs untalented expose armor?

The slightly better tanking you might get by having a druid be MT comes at the price of the raid's physical dps. That may be important if you're trying to tackle a boss that doesn't have an enrage timer, but that's about it.

Druids will never be favored over warriors as the primary tank in most encounters for all the reasons I listed earlier. In addition, a Druid's flexibility is their strength. If I'm min-maxing a raid I don't want them tied up as the tank on the last add when they could do more dps in cat form than another tank trying to dps when his add is down (not to mention the fact that he is now free to shift out and cast spells in a pinch).

Several people hit the nail on the head, Paladins need some hybridization of their prot tree (either dps or healing focused). They have a stranglehold on multi-add (4+ mobs) tanking, but unfortunately that's their only real niche and they can't do anything else really well.

The warrior protection tree could really use a buff to its solo/pvp dps, but given all the survivability in the tree I can see why they're hesitant to go too far. I also like the suggestion of some way to change gear in combat. That would help both paladins and warriors.

We've derailled quite far down the main topic wich was, i beleive, the effects of Crushing blows possibles modifications on the Tank class (im)balance.

That being said, on the derailled topic, i think all 3, paladin, warrior and druids.. the best tank overall (ie: without gimmic fights into account) should just be the better geared one. It should be that simple no?

What's to stop a DPS warrior from putting up sunder? Thunderclap is a point conceded, but only on encounters where there's multiple bosses to tank.

See this is what I'm worried about. It's something that neither a paladin or a warrior can claim. You put a warrior on the last add mostly because your druids add something to the fight while the warriors don't. Once the warriors add is down he can worry about clicking, but dps? not so much.

I agree completely that paladins need some hybridization. I think the difficulty is, how do you make prot paladins effective healers without marginalizing the holy tree? Or how would you make them effective dps without making ret useless. I suppose the answer is by putting utility in holy/ret and raw power in prot, so that holy/ret synergize better with group buffs/auras, but prot still can hold it's own, though giving less raidwide benefits, but gaining the ability to tank.

But it's the same with warriors, how do you give warriors more damage in prot without marginalizing their DPS trees? When the devastate change was put in, prot warriors were outdamaging fury. It would make the dps trees inviable.


If I had to make a suggestion to help give prot pallies more raid viability I would like to see more passive healing benefits.

Improved Judgement of Light: Increases the healing done by judgement of light by 50/100%

Blessing of Healing: 100 health/5secs for 15 minutes.

Improved Seal of Light: While under the effect of Seal of Light, your melee attacks have a chance to heal your party for 133 hp.

Fervor of the Light: Your melee attacks grant you 15% of your stamina as +healing for 10 seconds. This effect stacks up to 5 times.

Something like that. This would give prot pallies something to do that benefits the raid, takes healing burden off crosshealers to an extent and offsets the loss of healing ability from speccing prot, but does it in a different way than holy.

Probably not because I haven't itemized a proper DPS set because I find it rather... Boring to be honest (DPS). I pick up stuff as it drops for now still pretty weak, something like 9% hit, 1200 Attack power and 25% crit or so base. I have at least the L2 Blacksmitthing one handed axe so that helps a good bit too.

Regarding the group composition and proper buffs: It makes zero sense to provide percentage based increases to people that don't do much damage (Totems). For that fight I think I had Might and Kings, not much else to get, and no where near threat capped. Plus being designated Demo/Thunderclap warrior to save rage for tank/"real" dps folks.

I can't really expect to ever have a proper group built around maximizing my/my groups damage as any DPS (arms or fury) warrior will demolish me no matter what.

The parse was almost completely on my own (maybe LoTP?) and I don't really see it changing unless I respec.