I'm currently playing a Paladin, and have MT/OT'd up to Curator in Karazhan - 14k armour, 500 defence, 14 dodge/14 parry, 9.7k unbuffed health. 7/44/10 build)

However, i'm finding it a real pain when it comes to doing anything but either tank or heal (with specs), and the findings of Donar from beta (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=1) makes me wonder if in true 25-man end-game and 5-man heroic if I'll be able to tank competently.

So I'm considering re-rolling and it will be to either Warrior (hybrid spec with 17 in Prot) or Druid (Feral spec). Both offer damage outside of raids and both offer solid tanking utility. Druid gives the additional bonus of caster dps and heals.

I'm finding it quite difficult to make a decision, I have both around L40 so wouldn't be too much of a grind to push either to L70.

Was hoping I could garner some thoughts from here before making a final decision.

I wouldn't recommend going with a warrior. If you want to be MTing then you really need a full tanking spec for warriors, meaning your solo viability will drop to zero. Go with a druid, they are incredibly potent and got awesome solo viability in their tank spec.

Has anything official been said regarding the current tanking potentional of druids? Reading the various comments, from the involved three tanking classes on these and other boards, I cannot imagine that Blizzard is not going to nerf the druid tanking, either by nerfing them directly or by buffing either the armour on plate or otherwise buffing warrior and perhaps paladins.

With that in mind, is re-rolling at this point a good idea? I'd say wait at least one patch.

That's totally not true. I had no trouble leveling from 60 to 70 as mostly protection, soloing or otherwise. It all depends on who you can group with and your gear. Get the right gear and protection does fine. That said, there's no reason to make the trek from 1-60 as anything other than arms or possibly fury. After that you respec, it's not a big deal.

To the OP, Druids are going to have some of the same problems you think paladins will have. No one class is the optimal tank in all situations. Warriors are probably the best generalists, but they have a devil of a time with more than 3 mobs. Druids and Paladins have a bit more flexibility (they can also heal, res, etc.) and can handle multiple mobs better. Play what you want, there is no "supertank" class.

Druid tanks are amazing for OT'ing mobs while not getting hit as they have great rage gen or are great for 5 man/multimob tanking. However where they lack is their avoidance. For example we were attempting to do the muchly bugged prince malchezaar and had a druid tank with full tanking gear and full tanking feral spec, he had circa 17k armour and 30% dodge and 15k health iirc, with imp layon hands he capped armour down to 75% dmg reduction but he was still taking huge dmg.

After 4 or 5 failures and as many soft resets, we both went and respecced me to full prot him to full resto, and killed the prince first try due to the fact my high mitigation through dodge, parry, miss's having quite high defence. It was so much less healing during the duel wield stage and then i picked up tier 4 head and have now been forced into staying full prot which makes even doing quest chains for attunements a pain

I think thats why he said solo viability... key word solo.. You cant tell me that you can solo grind better than a feral druid... The feral druid will be done with his fourth mob before you get done with your first.. He'll heal, shapeshift grind some more and pop a heal every once in awhile. Furthermore all the benefits you get from grouping with people the Druid does too so from that stand point its moot. However from a solo perspective the feral druid has the advantage.

I think your missing his and my point, or maybe just mine. I am suggesting that grinding/questing would be better as a Druid vs a Prot Warrior because of the damage output. In otherwords a mob that takes a prot warrior 5mins to kill can be done in 2 or less by a feral druid. You dont think a prot warrior can match the DPS output of a feral druid do you?

And no you didnt imagine those suggest 2 or 3 player quests, I did them too. Difference was I was melting faces hitting 2500+ shadowbolts and conflags.

Being able to outlast a mob vs burning them down are two entirely different things, rightnow a prot warrior can only outlast them while a druid in direbear form can do both.

No, I understood you just fine. I bet it's a lot more competitive than you think when I'm not in defensive stance. A druid is certainly not killing things twice as fast as me, maybe 10% faster. That's not enough of a difference to matter when you're dealing with 8k HP mobs, particularly when you factor in travel time, etc.

I get:
- 10% extra damage to all attacks as long as I wield a 1h weapon (similar to a druid's naturalist ability)
- 10% more strength (which is 20% more AP from strength itemization, similar to heart of the wild except I'm not in cat form and I get 5% more stamina on top of it)
- 12 rage executes doing 10% more damage than a standard warrior
- Victory rush (35% of AP * 10% for 1 attack every 15 seconds when I'm "grinding")
- A very efficient rage -> damage ability with shield slam (not to mention good burst)

I can kill mobs faster than my charge cooldown. Victory rush, focused rage, vitality, and shield mastery changed things. That's my point. It isn't wow 1.0 anymore. All you need is crit, block value, strength, and ~5% hit. You don't dps in tanking gear, but some of it can translate well.

I'd actually identify Feral Swiftness as one of the single biggest advantages a druid has while grinding/questing. 30% movement speed when dealing with mobs that die relatively easy and are moderately dispersed does make a huge difference, even more so if you're able to stack one of the 15% speed set bonuses on top of it. Flip side of course being that a warrior will have charge.

Flight form's also worth noting for grinding/questing too once available. Even with an epic flying mount I still find it useful for those quick 'fly up this bank', 'skip these two mobs to get to what's behind them', 'avoid combat here' sort of stuff that with an epic flying mount would be a bit more hassle/not always feasible due to the mounting time. It's a small thing but a convenience I've very much come to appreciate.

Am I the only one who has noticed that Victory Rush hits for the exact same amount as Bloodthirst?

Anecdotal evidence time: the 2nd fastest person to hit 70 in our guild, and possibly the server, was a full prot warrior, who i've never seen loot any DPS gear pre-TBC. Given that he likely had few people to group with, I expect he soloed quite a bit. The warlock who beat him to 70 by 12 hours or so was semi-competing with him, so I don't know if they grouped with each other much.

I'd be surprised if a smart prot-warrior can't grind just a well as any other class, druids included.

One of our first level 70s was a Protection Warrior as well, though a few people followed quickly after him since he nearly exclusively levelled by doing instances. He has been doing quests recently though, which certainly leads to some amusement.

'Hey, scavenging this wood and metal for this Goblin in Hellfire Peninsula sure is easy if you have a epic flying mount!'

With Regard to one of your Questions about Paladin Tanking viability


All the Tanking classes can reach crit immunity with relative ease

However a paladin has a relatively Low Hit Point pool. In a best case scenario you will have probably have 30% less health than a bear Tank & 20% less health than a Prot Warrior.

Secondly I have yet to see any evidence that you will be able to Pro-actively push Crushing Blows off the table. Holy Shield is the only Pro-active ability that a Paladin can utilize. Redoubt is only a chance on hit proc & as your dodge & parry increases Redoubt becomes less effective.

Whilst Bear Tanks can't utilize Block or Parry they are able push 40% Dodge and in addition they receive a much greater benefit from Armour as well as a much larger Health pool.

Again Warriors can push Crushing blows off the table with relative ease.

With regard to spell damage Warriors receive 16% mitigation as opposed to the 10% Paladin's can acquire. Pro-actively Warriors can use Spell reflection & Shield bash. In Alpha there were indications that Paladin's would receive Blessing of Spell Warding (immunity from spell Damage for 12 sec's but silences the caster) but that never made it to any of the public testing phases.


Itemization is also a big Problem for Paladin's. They require the following Stats

Stamina
Defence
+Damage/Healing
intellect
+Mps

Tier 4 & Tier 5 Tanking set's are low on Stamina, an area Paladin's are already weak in. I'd suggest avoiding intellect & consider stacking +Damage/Healing.

Your Alternative is to go for non class specific Warrior tanking plate although this will potentially make your threat sketchy.


Ardent Defender is also indicative of Blizzard's inability to offer Paladin's useful skills. In your unbuffed Scenario Ardent Defender is potentially worthless where you can be hit for approx 1940 or more


From a game mechanic's point of view I’d surmise that any Guild will look at the survivability of it's Main Tank's. Given a three way choice with optimal Spec & gear you will always come at the bottom of the list of three.


Lastly becomes the issue of perception. Again take a look at this forum to see the paucity of serious debate about Paladin Tanking. I know you understand Paladin Tanking & I know that everything I’ve said above is old New’s.

As it currently stands I personally believe that whilst Paladin Tanking has clearly been Buffed it has been more of a PR exercise to quell the disquiet of many Paladins whose main roll pre TBC has been Spam Healing/Decursing. I have nothing against the people who enjoy that role. But I believe it will take additional tweaks to Your Tanking abilities to get other people of that mindset.


I hope you persevere with your Role, without dedicated Prot specced Paladin's the real issues of Lack of Health, Pro-active defensive mechanics & lack of mitigation will continue to Blight the Paladin Class.

What I meant was not that it was impossible to grind as a prot. warrior but it is not efficient. I was in a raiding organisation with alot of prot. warriors, (I think we had like 6-8 active ones at the same time.) and most of these began to level to 70 as protection. All of us who tried out other specs though immediately noticed how we could grind much faster and much more efficiently. Yes, protection warriors can grind mobs down but our total killrate/hour is very low. Oh, and just for the record, I spent most of my time 60-->70 as a prot. warrior just because I like grouping too much and in groups with T3 DPS you need the prot. spec to hold aggro efficiently.

When it comes to survivability between paladins, warriors and druids I would say that for MTing, it's warrior or druid all the way. Druids probably got the best survivability at the moment closely followed by warriors and then we have paladins a bit behind. The problem here is that paladins are heavily block focused and slightly weaker than prot. warriors overall. Block diminishes in value heavily as you enter raid instances due to the lower fraction of incoming damage blocked. Warriors greatest use from block comes from pushing crushing blows off the table with shield block, the block value itself is of less concern when the mob hits for 5k+.

Anyway, try to have fun while playing. I guess that's what is most important.

Thank you for writing this.

You're totally correct in that I cannot push Crushings completely off the combat table, and while I've been fortunate thus far to not die from one it's my most damning criticism about the class that it's designed on procs and passive mechanics.

Ardent Defender while a beautiful concept..just doesn't work. I can't recall it really saving me where you have trash hitting for 1.5k and bosses for in excess of 2k. It gets leapfrogged and it's a well-timed heal that keeps you up, not the ability.

Regarding itemisation I have to work much harder than a Bear/Warrior as I have to juggle stats. While I'm in the nice situation of using a Thunderfury which allows me to strip down quite far on spell damage I am using some Righteous Armour pieces for their bonus. I load up on stamina and traditional tank stats yet I see our main warrior with comparable gear with 1.5k more health and taking on average 8% less damage per run, which gets pretty frustrating.

Sure, I'd like the ability to MT with a Bear/Warrior however having tanking viability end-game is more important to me than necessarily having to be MT all the time.

I'm swaying towards warrior at this time, having spoken to some people, the good damage with a fury/prot spec, the pro-active tanking abilities - SB/SW/LGG/LS/Spell Reflect is a lot of utility that you are in control of, and of course extremely nice itemisation.

I healbotted for 2 years, cloth/leather, whatever it took to be at the bleeding edge of Paladin healing. Pre-TBC 1100 +healing and nice regen coupled with it...but I saw TBC the opportunity to champion the class in tanking. Safe to say if I'm having the concerns I mentioned at this stage of the expansion it's potentially going to get a lot worse the further down the line we progress. Hence, if I 'm gonna re-roll it's best to do so now before my guild get far ahead and i'm left all alone sailing my own ship.

So to get the fun back, I think a re-roll is on the cards. While I have some neat tricks as a Paladin tank..AOE tanking is really nice and the threat solid..the prospect of Heroic Drake or a Crushing from Maulgar doesn't fill me with confidence.

Thanks for the replies, i'll stop rambling :)

I think this problem is one of perception from the itemization development and lack of clear thinking from a large number of paladins.
Given that on a 5 man boss a paladin takes enough healing he can use SoR, JoR, Consecration and HS indefinately, paladin sets do not need intellect for tanking raid bossess. Similarly paladins produce enough threat before they wear a single piece of +damage, that they should not be putting this on their gear at the expence of mitigation and hp. There already exist gem slots into which hp/defence cannot be placed, and spell thread enchants for legs which are a better way to pick up the small amount of int and spell damage that might be desired. I honestly believe the best way to euip yourself as a paladin tank is to wear warrior gear, and a sword with +125 spell damage combined with the +40 spell enchant. With base mana, Arcane intellent, MotW and BoK, BoW, and JoW intellect will not be an issue for any paladin attempting to tank a raid boss.

A) Lack of Mitigation - both classes have similiar Defense and armor totals given similiar gear levels, and I'm assuming that any competant paladin tank is going to be wearing mostly non-class specific tanking gear, such as timewarden's leggings, the only difference you're looking at is the 10% for defensive stance versus 6% for righteous Fury. As far as shield bash is concerned, if the mob is capable of being silenced, there are shadowpriests, warlocks, mages, rogues, and hunters all capable of doing that same effect. Given that no one really is wearing Tier 4 yet, I don't see the big difference here. And even more importantly, how often do you actually run into Warriors that are full protection specced outside of guild main tanks, most of them have some kind of hybrid fury spec that they are ok with, a paladin, specced for tanking, isn't losing out on dps by speccing for it, I actually gain a decent chunk of DPS when I'm tanking in fact.

B) Threat isn't a problem, granted, I've only tanked as far as Scholomance, and I don't even have the "tricks of the trade" yet, like a good spell damage sword (more aggro than any 60+ dps 1hander) But whenever I'd encounter a warrior while I was leveling up and running an instance, I'd often allow them to tank the first few pulls, and invariably, mobs would get loose and I'd "offer" to take over. Threat is so easy to maintain on a Paladin, Consecrate is more than adequate for the aggro generating by healing, and seal of righteousness had no problems holding single target aggro. I never have even had to bother with Blessing of Salvation in my groups, except when doing alot of AE packs, like when I did Uldaman last week, in which case Salvation was a godsend for the mage in the group.

C) Warriors can stop 2 crushing blows every 5 seconds, with 75% to block. Paladins can only maintain a constant 40% block rating indefinatly, With redoubt and Holy shield combined, we're just as crushing blows immune as a warrior, but granted, we can't control redoubt proccing, but on any 5+ mob encounter, chances are, the mobs aren't going to be crushing anyways, but redoubt would be up constantly anyways.

D) I don't see the lower health pool arguement, granted, there is a small amount of base difference, but as far as talent's go, 6% compares favorably to the warrior's 5%. Sure, Donar, in the beta, had less hitpoints by a fair amount than the Warrior MT'ing Kharazan, but that was also before they added the 6% mitigation and 6% hitpoint boost, which would have quickly closed the gap from about 1000 hitpoints, to more like 200 after buffs.

E) Argent Defender is far from useless, while it may not stop a hard hitting raid-boss from being able to 2-shot you, Warriors likewise don't have any ability to stop that from happening. But it will stop the pack of 5 elite +2 level mobs from being able to break your passive regen due to a alot of HoT healing. Hell, it's even easy enough to see when solo'ing, I become virtually invincible with just seal of light and judgement of light once I hit 20% life, even if there are still 4 or so mobs alive out of the original pull of 7-8m and I'm 100% positive it's kept me alive while tanking in 5 mans.

C) I don't Think a Paladin's ability to AOE Tank is in Doubt. That is a niche we can adequately fill where chance based proccing is of benefit. However 75% block on 2 attacks every 5 secs is "guaranteed". Removing that degree of uncertainty. I'd take a Warrior over a Paladin every day of the week. Let's be clear Paladin's cannot Pro-actively removing crushing blows from the Table.

D) Naked Stats indicate about 1200 points base difference between Warriors & Paladins. Assume that both Tanks wear "Optimal" i.e Class specific Tanking sets & that margin grows by an additional 500 points. In that scenario 5% > 6%.

If you are a "Tanking" paladin I would suggest you take a good hard look at the numbers. As the Original Poster states if at this early stage of TBC Paladin's are struggling to Tank the first 10 man Raid instance it doesn't bode well for the future.

No one would dispute that Paladin's are a capable Tank for 5 man instances. What really matters is are they viable for a Tanking raid spot ?

C) Dabiri's Enigma + Holy Shield. Granted, it's on a 1.5 minute cd, however, to say we have no way of pushing crushing of table isn't true. I use that trinket on every pull. Further, Shield Block is only superior in situations where the attack speed is around 2.0. Once you factor in instant attacks, warriors are vulnerable to crushing blows as well; both classes have sufficient means to prevent them to make them a rare occurence. Just from anecdotal evidence I can tell you redoubt seems to be up the vast majority of the time against most bosses, who generally have various instants, dots, or fast attack speeds.

D) Optimal tanking set for a paladin is not the same as the class specific one. There is an itemization issue present, in that too much stat budget is wasted currently in int and spell damage. This is avoided by simply wearing more warrior oriented gear. Threat is not an issue if you have even 200 spell damage at this point. Since our threat comes from blocking, we do gain a small but noticeable amount of threat / s by wearing +block rating gear.

To answer your question, paladins are a completely viable tank in 10 man instances. Donar is well known for tanking all of Karazhan in beta. 25 mans we have been shown in come up somewhat short in raw stamina, as you suggest. 90% of the issue with paladin tanking currently is itemization. We are currently somewhat suboptimal tanks as a result. Suboptimal =/= nonviable.

I think the devs are afraid of making an overpowered healer/tank. Ie, they might be afraid a paladin would pick up stoicism, guardian favor, imp conc aura etc, wear rediculous spelldamage/sta/int or mp5 gear and act as an unkillable healbot. While the paladin would not gain any sort of pve tanking ablilities, he would still be able to use pve tanking gear and heal with it. Given that almost 450 of your +healing comes from weapon/shield combos, warrior like health will be quite overpowering to bring down.

What they could do is introduce a gimmicky aproach a la lifegiving, ie a trinket or talent that causes "Targets hit by avenger's shield cause 5% less damage against you for ten seconds", or "While your holy shield is active you take 5% less damage from physical attacks" or "While your holy shield is active priest or druid heals on you have a chance to increase your maximum health by x / x% up to x"

I doubt this is it. Granted, I might be impossible for a warrior to kill in my tanking gear, but even a rogue can just stun(though I doubt I would lose to one solo, stuns remove most of the benefit from tanking gear). All the defense gear in the world does nothing for magic, and the best way to shut a paladin down remains counterspell. I'm not sure 15000 hp instead of 16000 hp makes a huge difference in pvp anyway.

And if that were the case, they wouldn't have given us ardent defender, which is great in pvp, but comes into play rarely in pve. Prot is probably the worst tree for pvp overall, although with reckoning is not terrible.

On the other side of the coin - warrior or druid question, here's quote from the WoW boards that has me thinking

From: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=5