Crowl

Thats more a question of balance though, rather than the actual idea being fundamentally flawed, some guilds would still swap out a prot warrior on a fight where they didn't need to tank anything in order to fully minmax everything, but your average guilds would be more than happy to leave that extra prot warrior in the raid since they weren't a complete liability in any dps race kind of fight.

 

◊ Oggie

All of the above is true, understood and clear, but it also sort of misses the point; in a not entirely min/maxed raid but where you do have freedom (or a simple lack of dps warriors) to throw a prot into a stacked melee dps group, exactly how bad is thier real dps?

Bad enough that you should never contemplate bringing one over a real dps warrior (all else being equal)? For the sake of class balance I'd hope so, but I honestly am curious how far below that they really fall.

Anyone want to pay your local Fury warrior 100g to respec prot for a couple raids (as dps)?

I know that this is derailing but I think it's a valid sideline; precisely how hybridized are prot warriors right now, and how much can that afford to change?

 

NicotineJones

Right now, if you remove crushes and rebalance the tank classes around that properly, you're going to annihilate the current ability of druids to tank anything that *doesn't* crush. Down to and including heroics.

 

suicuique

TF

I'm not that sure about that anymore ... I have a blazeguard (with mongoose) and kings defender in the bank. I have opted not to upgrade blazeguard and pass on the mallet of the tides. The heavy armor of most bosses makes the NR damage part of TF still worthwhile. It saves me some point for speccing improved TC. It does not break CC. And it procs like mad.

Perhaps glancing blows change in 2.1 could make me reconsider, but most of my DPS told me the single mob aggro I do with TF is still comparable to blazeguard tier weapons. And I say that as someone who had already mothballed TF since becoming Lvl70. Only recently I have rediscovered it. As of now the pure DPS advantage of the new weapons doesnt play out the way as I thought it would.

YMMV

/derail

@Daboran: As for "TC slow" immune Mobs in SSC ... haven't met any

 

suicuique

I agree that Karathress is a "lone island" ^^
But on the other hand you dont need all the mitigation skills for him. He hits like a wussy. In fact I'd say he could be the one most likely of the encounter to be tankable by a paladin

 

Phantom

I like your ideas, and agree with you they need to give prot some healing utility. I had a rough idea I posted awhile back, of a deep prot talent that reduced the cast time of a paladin's healing spells by .5 seconds for 10 seconds when a paladin took damage, stacking up to 5 times. When tanking, it could be used for some self heals. But if the paladin is not tanking, he could utilize it by keeping blessing of sacrifice on the tank to trigger the ability, keep judgement of light up to heal that damage.

But yeah, Paladins need to be near equal to warriors on the base stuff; 10% damage reduction, 16% magic reduction, health. What should differentiate them, then, is the extras they bring beyond that. Warriors have shield wall, last stand. Paladins can AoE tank and have their 8 charge holy shield for better crush protection.

 

Fogel

A simple change that would affect both prot and ret viability in raids would be to remove vindication immunity from all mobs. Obviously some rebalancing of the ability would need to be taken into account but it would go a long way to improving the use of paladin offspecs in raids.

 

Plea

Prot outdamaging fury isnt that bad, on a second thought. Any serious dps warrior would be fury specced anyway. Prot dps is threat capped very, very hard. We would be leveling, tanking, and farming in prot spec, yeh; but would it be really overpowered? There's more than one class who levels, farms, and raids with the same tree.

 

Daine

Perhaps a bit of a derail incoming, but I felt it was relevant to this topic and since being dropped into a very unique position tonight due to yet another of our MTs quitting the raid scene, I'm looking for a bit of advice. With the launch of TBC, I was adamant I wanted to tank with my paladin; I specced for it, geared, excessively enchanted and socketed but was eventually 'forced' to respec Holy as we had a shortage of healers, and as I raidleader I felt it necessary to lead by example. This is the tank set I've built up anyhow:

http://armory.wow-europe.com/#charac...erhood&n=Daine

Needs a couple more Solid Stars, but it's generally a pretty solid set for where we are at. Seeing the previous droprates of Wrynn Dynasty and T4 gloves, it's more than likely I could pick both of those up very soon. However, tankadins still have a stigma attatched to them, and despite being the (now) best geared regular tank, I do wonder whether my time would be better spent gearing/repping my warrior:

http://armory.wow-europe.com/#charac...hood&n=Alariel

She's pretty fresh to 70, took her to a few Kara's and generally enjoy the feel of warrior tanking and what it brings to the table over a paladin. However, it's gonna take a while to get this warrior where I need her to be, despite the obvious headstart she has in the hitpoints department, but she lacks avoidance and armour. To my knowledge, no paladin has ever successfully tanked Magtheridon, and this is what worries me - even with the best gear available to Daine which I'm not far off attaining, am I still going to be destroyed post-Gruul, and can I even handle Gruul whom we haven't killed yet? Some advice would be much appreciated.

 

Jebraltar

That's a very good tanking set! I'd recommend getting a Vengeance card (Furies deck), obviously Wyrnn Dynasty Greaves, Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable, and T4 gloves. I'd also keep using Bracers of the Green Fortress over Bracers of Dignity. Oh, you should also probably pick up the Heroic Badges ring - your avoidance should be sufficient to handle it over Elementium Band of the Sentry and it's a great boost to HP/armour.

As far as your Warrior goes, yeah, reasonable gear for starting Kara - you'd obviously have to gear it up in there, which would be quite the pita.

Actually, a Paladin has tanked Magtheridon - I distinctly remember the topic on the WoW (American) Paladin forums about it. He also stated that it was his guild's first kill (and it was pre-nerf), if my memory serves. I may be mistaken.

You should be able to handle Gruul, but it's going to have close, close margins for error. Whether or not you can take it probably depends more on your healers than on anyone else at this point. (Particularly if you change a few slots to aim for higher armour/stamina so you can soak big hits.)

It will almost unquestionably be easier if you switch to your Warrior, but it will take longer - if you're planning to recruit another Warrior, I'd recommend sticking with the Paladin for now. If you're planning to simply take over the MT role yourself, it's probably worth the investment to gear your Warrior and switch mains.

 

PsiVen

I am absolutely confident that I could tank Mag without issue, but there's no reason for me to. I'm more tailored to avoidance and tanking a late add, plus I wouldn't have shieldwall for the insurance at 30%. With stamina gear you can handle Gruul (the silence + holy shield issue can pork you somewhat, but DS could save your life at the cost of another in late growths). You should have a couple of prot warriors in the guild, but don't think that you're at a massive disadvantage HP-wise -- the gap is only getting smaller.

 

• Theras

Magtheridon would be no harder than Gruul to tank, which I do every week. The only reason I don't currently tank Magtheridon is that about 1 in 4-5 of his attacks is a giant Cleave that can't be a crushing blow, making him a premier Feral target.

 

Ivriniel

It was said before, making the tanking tree higher dps than the dps trees... makes the dps trees obsolete. Fury is already pretty limited in raids due to ferals being way superior OTs, and only bringing imp TC as raid buff. Next to that the decently geared fury warriors start getting threat capped already. Arms brings a bit more, if specced for Blood Frenzy and Mortal Strike (yet to see a fight in 25mans where healing can't be interrupted tough).


As was mentioned before, the whole tanking disussion seems to depend on alot of class features or flaws:
- Prot Paladins and Prot warriors are useless when not tanking that's just how it is.
- A warrior who tanks an add that dies early is pretty much useless after that.
- Prot warriors are superior Maintanks for end game raiding when compared with prot pallies.
- Druids are a shapeshifter, not a hybrid and have their dps + tank tree in one, hence they can switch to cat and dps somewhat okish in their bear tank gear, toss innervates, cres, or do some heals (weak ones)

I think a more interesting part of the discussion is, why does none of the tanking classes properly scale with gear? If you outgear an encounter as tank it gets more and more difficult to actually hold aggro, shouldn't that get easier?

 

• Daboran

Actually for Druid if you outgear the encounter it gets exponentially easier from my experience. Sure, in theory you get less rage from being hit (against raid-level mobs this is irrelevant) but Druid gear tends to come with upgrades to agi, str as well as armour/sta/def. More damage and crit = more rage for Bear tanks. I'd assume the key for Warrior/Paladins is not to purposely outgear the fight.

Looking at the extremes, on one end you have a next-to-impossible to kill tank with no threat, on the other you have a paper tank with massive threat. Part of being a tank is (as far as possible) to pick your spot in between those two to suit the encounter.

 

Jebraltar

It's generally not so bad for Paladins - they can sustain ability use for a good deal of time even when taking almost no damage, simply due to the initial mana. They also tend to get spell damage upgrades each time that they pick up a piece of Paladin-oriented taken gear, which is generally worth doing in raids. It's mostly irritating when you outgear trash as a Paladin, actually, since it leaves you drinking after almost every pull. (Particularly irritating for everybody else in my Kara group. )

 

Branar

I think this is a good point. The "15-20 points in Prot" offtank is really almost obsolete in the 25-man raiding game at this point; either you don't need any offtanks at all for the encounter (in which case those 20 points in Prot are wasted), or you can field enough offtanks through druids (or paladins, on specialty AOE encounters).

I mean, I guess it's good that it exists as an option. If your guild had no/few feral druids then one of these would be a decent (if less flexible in terms of switching roles mid-fight) substitute. But you're replacing a class who could tank better and then DPS better with a class who'll be a slightly worse tank, and probably significantly worse DPS (without the opportunity to swap gear).

Maybe it's offset by the superior (?) dps a 0/4x/15-20 warrior could put out on fights where no offtank was required.