I want to get some solid numbers and/or input from the community surrounding the use of various types of tanks (Warrior/Druid/Paladin) on mobs which are unable to land a crushing blow. This stemmed from a semi-argument/discussion I had with our warrior MT last night regarding letting our Feral Druid MT Azgalor.

It really is an age old argument which I fully assume has been discussed many times over several of the tanking class threads, though the information is so far spread out that its like a minefield trying to find some decent comparison's. Also that many Horde guilds are still not all that familiar with the Paladin class, specifically Protection Paladins, that a lot of incorrect information is probably circling around.

Going off my guilds tanks, we are 4/5 Hyjal and haven't been in BT yet - very early T6 guild.
All unbuffed.

Posting their stats as a relative guide for discussion, this isn't a "zomgz halp me n my guild" thread.

Warrior (Troll =/)
16,864 hps
21.7% dodge
17.09% parry
27.02% block
506 defense
18,079 armor
59 hit rating
11.20% crit
6 expertise
0 resilience


Druid (Tauren) - armory shows him not in bear form, ill try to find health/armor/dodge converter from a Druid thread
11,460 hps
33.96% dodge
420 defense
7,291 armor
82 hit rating
17.92% crit (without LoTP)
0 expertise
0 resilience


Paladin (Blood Elf)
15,437 hps
15.22% dodge
16.17% parry
26.31% block
499 defense
15,981 armor
25 hit rating
4.29% crit
5 expertise
0 resilience

40 spell hit rating
458 spell damage
6.15% spell crit




All three are relatively equally geared, and looking at these stats and knowledge of each tanking class and their abilities/talents to deal with crushing blows, which would be the superior tank for a boss who is unable to crush?

Going by some quick napkin math, the Druid has the highest amount of effective HP, after factoring in mitigation from armor:

Warrior

16864 HP
18,079 armor (63.13% reduction, 271% increase in HP)

45,741.91 EHP

------

Paladin

15,437 HP
15,981 armor (60.22% reduction, 251% increase in HP)

38,803.99 EHP

------

Druid

14,325 HP
29,164 armor (73.42% reduction, 276% increase in HP)

53,896.38 EHP

Keep in mind though that this does not yet factor in pure avoidance and mitigation from block, and my figures for the Druid may not be accurate (I simply multiplied his HP by 125% and his armor by 400%).

Its a little more complicated then just hps and armor, a bear druid will always win on that.

Warriors can parry and block 700-800 of each attack (depending on gear).
Druids have much higher dodge rate and I think their dodge scales better with GoA?
Paladins can .... ?

You cannot really put a value to Last Stand and Shield Wall - but on Azgalor for example, my idea surrounded around the Druid MTing, Prot Paladin taking Doomguards and the Warrior intervening during silence if needed (while keeping debuffs up).

Dodge doesn't scale better with GoA, I'm not sure I understand what that means anyway since GoA is a fixed amount of Agility. But if you meant to imply that Druids have a fantastic Agility to avoidance conversion, then you'd be right, and we receive a good amount of avoidance from GoA.

Prinsesa, that's an incorrect way to get Bear Form armor and hp. Bear Form doesn't affect hp directly anymore, it affects Stamina (the 25% multiplier is right, though). The Heart of the Wild talent also affects Stamina (by 20%) in Bear Form. Then, there's also the Survival of the Fittest talent which, aside from it's ultra useful crit reduction, also has a stat amplification component, 3% at 3/3. The Stamina enhancers we get don't affect base hp.

For armor, multiplying caster form armor by 4 as you've done is also not correct. Firstly, it's an increase of 400% (x + (400/100) * x) = 5x so you need to multiply it by 5. Secondly, the Thick Hide talent increases this contribution by another 10% which is multiplicative, and so the correct multiplier is 5.5. But, caster form armor includes armor provided by Agility (remember that 1 point of Agility gives 2 armor), so you need to subtract this before you can multiply. As well, if he's got any enchantments, such as armor to cloak, armor to gloves, the Saphiron shoulder enchant, or any of the other shitty low level armor kits, you need to subtract those as well before you multiply. Neither of those are affected by the Bear Form multiplier.

Based on past theorycrafting I've seen, that was taking a standard bear and a standard warrior with full raid buffs etc, saying that a bear will get crushed for about 20% more than a warrior blocks for, and about get hit for about 80% of that:
The only case in which a warrior will have better survivability on a boss that can't crush is if:
1. Attacks are very weak that the blocking is a significant part of the damage.
-or-
2. Boss deals meaningful magic damage (periodic will be enough assuming it makes a significant portion of his "max burst" capability)
-or-
3. Boss has some special ability that can only be countered by a warrior.

Note that the prescesnce of commanding shout will also affect your comparisons - a druid has to have a shout-bot in his group while a warrior tank doesn't really need the druid - however if the fight/gear conditions favor the druid enough it might not matter.

Of course having the accurate stats of the tanks with full raid buffs (including ironshields!) is critical, as well as how much the boss actually hits for, as blocking is highly affected by it.
For example AOE tanking is awesome by a prot pally as he will block a minimum % of the attacks (due to redoubt) which will reduce a significant part of the damage, as each attack doesn't hit for much. That goes on top of the paladin's ability to generate threat independant of how many mobs he's tanking.
Paladins are also best against weak, fast attacking bosses (wether they crush or don't) due to the fact their blocking ability will stay up more than the warrior's.

As for Azgalor, I have not done the fight, but your answer most likely depends on how much RoF dmg your tank actually takes, and how likely you are to need a last stand/shieldwall/healthstone to get through a badly timed silence, as well as the actual tanking stats of your warrior and druid, with full raid buffs and consumeables.

What I mean is that don't Druids get more % dodge out of 77 agility from GoA then Warriors?

That is correct. While I'm unsure of the exact conversation rates, 77 AGI gives more Dodge to Druids than Warriors.

@seminarca: I was completely aware that my numbers would be off, since my attempts at conversion were very simplistic, hence the disclaimer. Thank you for pointing out just how much they were off by, though, as I completely missed the HoW and SotF multipliers, as well as correctly multiplying a 400% armor increase. I'm aware that Dire Bear form affects STA instead of base health, and that enchants/AGI are exempt from the armo multiplier.

In this particular case, taking some rough numbers (I'm assuming Azgalor hits for 30k unmitigated, I've never done this fight but a quick glance at random WWS puts this in the ballpark?). Giving the Warrior 100% Ironshield uptime and both of them Imp Devo (I hope I armoried the right people?):

the Druid (Canthuus) has 37,382 armor and is capped at 75% mitigation

the Warrior (Turbak) has 18,079 + 1,205 + 2,000 = 21,284 armor = 64% and a further 10% from Defensive stance with 536 BV (+100 for 1 attack after each SBlock)

From the unmitigated 30k hit, Druid takes:
(30000 * 0.25) = 7500 dmg

The Warrior takes (I hope I got the sequence of multiplications right, correct me if I didn't Warriors):
((30000 * 0.36) * 0.9) = 9720 dmg normal hit
((30000 * 0.36) * 0.9) - 536 = 9184 dmg normal block
((30000 * 0.36) * 0.9) - 636 = 9084 dmg block after using SBlock (set bonus)

Now consider that Inspiration and Ancestral Fortitude are entirely wasted on the Druid, whereas, when either proc on the Warrior, his armor goes up to 26,605 (69% mitigation) and his new values become:
((30000 * 0.31) * 0.9) = 8370 dmg normal hit
((30000 * 0.31) * 0.9) - 536 = 7834 dmg normal block
((30000 * 0.31) * 0.9) - 636 = 7734 dmg block after using SBlock (set bonus)

So, with good Inspiration or Ancestral Fortitude uptime on your Warrior, liberal use of SBlock (he should be using it even if the boss doesn't crush), liberal use of Ironshield potions and an Imp Devo aura, your Warrior won't take that much more damage than the Druid per hit.

Both have roughly the same base avoidance (~38%, Bear Form gets an extra 4% dodge through a talent). The Druid will gain more hp and avoidance from raid buffs than the Warrior will, the Warrior will have much higher chance to be missed (due to higher Defense), with raid buffs we can call it a tie.

Warrior has Shield Wall & Last Stand, Druid will typically have higher threat, both have access to potions/healthstones etc while tanking. Druid can dps if he's not tanking, Warrior can .. well .. debuff and Intervene?

I'd just put the Warrior on Azgalor, get the Druid to DPS, but give the Warrior everything he needs, Improved Devotion aura, Blood Pact, tree aura maybe, make sure he's chugging Ironshields etc. Alternately, if you don't have access to Inspiration or Ancestral Fortitude on the maintank, use the Druid.

edit: Oh, the Warrior will also take 16% less damage from the Rain of Fire.

fakeedit: Prinsesa, didn't mean to come across as an asshole, just wanted to keep the information straight ><

We should take WWS examples and look at average hit inc.

Azgalor boss in my guild:

Full t5 druid: Beefsauce - WWS
Average dmg inc: 5900

Warrior: Taurentina - WWS
Average hit inc: 7000

Examples from best kills in WWS:


Warrior: Ararat - WWS
Average hit: 6200

Druid: WWS Loading...
Avergae hit: 6200

Yes, you guessed and armory'd the correct people, but I didn't think a Warrior would ever really reach a Druid in pure armour mitigation - I wasn't factoring in inspiration/ironshield/devo when considering it. Your rough estimate of his melee hit looks accurate.

I do not yet have our Azgalor WWS parse uploaded (first kill the other night), but aside from his melee attack, he does a cleave which is independent of his auto attack timer and hit our MT for ~9800 (with SB up) from memory - again I will know more then we get our parse uploaded.

I would think that a raid buffed bear Druid's avoidance (dodge) would surpass a Warrior's (dodge+parry) substantially enough to make it sway a little more in their favour, and with the uptime of inspiration/ancestral fortitude the Druid could mix a few items in it with more agility and less armor? Whereas a Warrior cannot really sacrifice anything other then SB value to gain more.

We generally never find threat a problem with any of our tanks so I pretty much never consider it.

This discussion came up in my Guild back when we were learning MH, we ended up using a Feral for Kaz'rogal and Azgalor for the following reasons:

Kaz'rogal: Constant stuns denying Dodge/Parry/Block gave the edge to the Feral with his higher Armour/Health.
Azgalor: We did the simple maths for damage income between me and our Feral MT and due to the fact Azgalor can't Crush the Feral came out at significantly lower average damage per hit (with his Dodge rate matching my Dodge/Parry at the time). When learning Azgalor we found the Feral really did survive healer Silences better.
I am racking my brains trying to remember the actual numbers but we did get an accurate figure as to the difference in incoming damage and it was in the region of 10% I think.

Other non-Crushing Bosses where we use a Feral:
Mother Shahraz: the Feral tanks in pure physical mitigation gear, both Protection Warriors act as Saber Lash soaks and wear 200 or so SR and rely on our Improved Defensive Stance for additional Shadow mitigation.

Non-Crushers were were we use a Warrior (these are probably obvious to you):
Archimonde: Stance Dance for Fear useful though you can use Totems of course. Another Warrior advantage here is that during the damge spikes I get during Fear/Soul Charges I have more options than a Druid to help keep mysely alive.
Illidan: Shield Block needed for Shear.

I remember you guys from back when I was on Bronzebeard. Glad to hear you're progressing nicely. Anyway, this dicussion came up in my guild back when we were first doing Azgalor. We had him tanked by our resident feral on our first kill, and then changed to having me tank him with the feral and another warrior doing the doomguards. My reasoning mainly came down to what the feral can bring to the raid if he is NOT tanking Azgalor.
First of all, unless you have a DPS warrior thunderclapping and demo shouting (DS being a DPS warrior staple, thunderclap however requiring a less effective DPS stance to apply requiring either rage-wasting stance swapping rather frequently or just plain staying in a weaker stance) for the feral, the feral will take more damage overall than the warrior simply due to the boss attacking at his normal swing speed and not having the AP reduction. If you use the warrior to intervene during the silences, who is tanking the doomguards? You don't want your warrior within 100 yards of Azgalor himself when the Doom cooldown is up, and after the first Doomguard, each one tends to come as the other is near dead. You could not, as I see it, reliably have Turbak softening up the boss for your feral without risking him getting Doomed. And additionally you would be requiring two people (the warrior and the feral) to do what one (the warrior) could do only marginally less effectively. With the feral tanking Doomguards (assuming you have two doomguard tanks) you can use the feral's battle rez on someone who gets doomed, or his innervate. Basically you have to look past the numbers, because the difference is so slight. (Some effective health vs. the ability to wear two use-trinkets and rotate popping them during silences, the ability to buff/debuff for himself, and the benefit to the raid of having the feral's utility available rather than MTing)

Edited: Sorry, missed where you said you would just have the paladin doing doomguards with Turbak staying and assisting on the boss. But that just gets back to you basically 24-manning the fight. Why have the druid tank at all? What if Turbak gets Doomed? Then Azgalor is unslowed and un-debuffed and un-sundered (which is obviously a substantial melee DPS increase) unless you waste a combat rez on the warrior who' doing 300 DPS with his tanking gear on so that he can Intervene during silences (with the possiblity of getting a bad RoF tick+melee+cleave combination in a worst-luck situation). Anyway, popping avoidance trinkets with every silence (or as I've done lately, saving them for if there's a RoF going on my area that's too centered on me to get out of without major repositioning), saving Last Stand for whatever, and saving Shield Wall for just in case, I've not come close to dying on this fight since months ago. If you really feel comfortable having just the Paladin doing the doomguards, why not have the druid DPSing and doing 4x as much dps as a protection warrior in tank gear would do in the process of enabling the feral to tank?

To address other non-crushing bosses...
Mother Shahraz: I could understand using a feral here I suppose, but the ability to last-stand/shield wall, as well as the feral's potential ability to battle-rez (Saber Lash having a 5s cooldown, it's certainly doable) combined with the only dangerous (IE non-routine) burst here coming from magical damage, makes this seem to me like an easy choice. We've never had any real issues with me dying except when I was trying with NO shadow resist gear as opposed to my usual neck/bracers and got gibbed by a poorly timed and entirely unresisted beam.

Archimonde: Same argument again. Feral can Tranquility his melee group, can battle rez if need be, can innervate, and can do a LOT more dps on a fight where melee is so dominant - not to mention not being a detriment to the raid by requiring a fear ward (which is MUCH better applied on any healer or shaman or priest) or a shaman able to stay consistently in melee range to be able to survive.

Illidan: Obvious answers.

We've only ever used a feral MT on Archimonde, and only before the fear ward changes.
Kaz'Rogal doesn't hit too hard even while stunned and ferals our better DPS than a prot warrior, while also having innervate and battle rez available.
Azgalor really needs those battle rezzes and with their better aoe tanking, we decided to put the feral(s) in the raid on doomguard duty.
On Shahraz the ferals soak saber lashes and again provide innervate and battle rez if needed.

I was under the impression that defensive stance was additive? But perhaps I am mistaken and misread it somewhere.

I agree that with the addition of Imp TC and Shield block the relative DPS incoming on the tank will be less on a Warrior tanking it alone than a druid tanking it alone.

Also warriors can get more use out of the new expertise stat, thus reducing one source of tank-killing spike damage: boss parries.

To satisfy discussion, we killed Az just fine 3rd or so attempt with Warrior MTing and all melee on Doomguards - so the loss of DPS from no sunder for melee wouldn't have been an issue (though for Hunters is a different story).



I don't really want to turn this into an Azgalor specific thread, trying to keep it more general for non-crushable bosses.

Not to continue dragging this into just an Azgalor discussion, but you might try having your melee get some of the badge FR and leave them on Azgalor. Even though we had our melee stay on Azgalor all along, doing this increased our raid dps by almost 15% thus shortening the fight and reducing the stressors of attrition. Though whatever works for you works for you.

Anyway, if you look at the subject as a discussion of the reduction of a tank's incoming DPS reducing usage of raid resources (taking 10% less damage per swing is a received DPS reduction, but what is the raid DPS reduction of having a feral tank as opposed to a warrior? If you're going to have a bear tank and a prot warrior in the bear's group buffing the bear and debuffing the boss you could just as easily have the warrior tank and bring in another healer) or from a standpoint of their increased effective health providing a buffer against bad luck all of my particular opinions regarding that fight stand for any boss that cannot crush (or any boss period). Due to a warrior's ability to self-buff (Commanding) and boss debuff, A feral MT will not perform to the level of a warrior MT without a warrior OT assisting, which on "multiple boss" bossfights is impractical and gimps the versatility and utility of having the druid in the first place, and on more tank-and-spank boss fights reduces raid DPS.

Forgive me if I've totally missed the point of what you were asking. The problems inherent in this topic are, to me:
1) it is not a simple comparison of numbers. On paper comparing A to B the druid will take less damage in a purely melee fight. But there are far more factors than A+Q=C compared to A+Q=B; to me it's more an issue of raid resource allocation.
2) the simple fact really is that for any current content, barring fights where a warrior gimmick is absolutely required, it really doesn't matter who tanks. A druid can tank any fight but Illidan just as well. But, as with so many things in life, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

To give our Warrior MT a rest we are now going through farm content variously using Warrior/Druid for tanking (no Prot Paladins in our guild).

The no-brainers for us are:

Azgalor - learning the fight the Warrior "oh shit" buttons were invaluable, plus Druids make great Doomguard tanks due to Feral Charge and high mitigation. Whether it's because we are now comfortable/outgearing the fight or not I don't know, but using a Feral MT this week made it ridiculously easy for the MT healers.

Archimonde - now that Horde have Fear Ward and because the MT group tends to have a Shaman with Tremor plus random melee dps in it we found our last Archimonde kill to be much easier with a Feral MT. Proviso here - it helps a lot if the Feral equips both the BEM badge and Moroes' trinket for those moments when every healer is either running from Doomfire, Feared or Airbursted. The smaller hits make the Feral a lot easier to heal and/or survive periods of low incoming heals. Of course tanking isnt a huge component of the fight in any case.

Regardless, the main thing to consider is that you give up a combat rez, Innervate and a lot of dps compared with a Prot Warrior tickling the boss with his pointy stick. For these reasons alone I would suggest Warriors remain the best choice for 95% of progression raiding content and there's no contest when magic damage is a major component. This depends on what type of damage your healers are better at healing though - the healer experience for a Warrior MT differs from a Feral MT considerably and it's worth trying both to see which one they prefer.

Aye, HP comparison of all classes should be taken after adding all standard 25 ppl raid buffs.

Reason is different increase of HP while stacking STA for different classes - it's the best for druids, then come paladins and warriors are the last ones. Additionally it looks like paladin is wearing his aggro gear instead of best damage reduction gear. If it's not the case, his gear is significantly worse then the one warrior got.

I just wanted to put in my two cents.

My guild just recently killed Kael, and we are making the preparations for Hyjal. That is the frame of reference for my comments.

@ Xei
I think that your druid's avoidance may be too low.

I am not spectacularly geared, 2pc t5, 2pc t4, vengeful chest, but during boss fights with full buffs (including Kings, GoA, Major Agi Elixir), I find myself with something to the tune of 56-60% dodge, depending on whether my Idol procs. This is with approximately 32k armor, as well as 20k HP and some change.

So my question is this: Given these different values for avoidance, how would a druid stack up against these non-crushing bosses?

I've always been of the understanding that against a non-crushing boss, the druid's high HP wins out over the other kinds of tanks. Even taking block and parry into the equation, warriors don't get close to the armor cap whereas druids do.

This gap tends to only get bigger on bosses that hit really hard (Azgalor's cleave etc.) since the % decrease of such a large hit (from a druid's exceptional armor) is going to out-scale the static # BV that a warrior has.

The only time I can see a warrior passing a druid on mitigation on non-crushing fights is on farm after the warrior is max geared.

But that's just me, and it's really hard in this case to have numbers to back this up, since BV is a # as opposed to armor which is a %.

In addition, the shield mastery spec needs to be accounted for (30% increase in block value). So, t5 set bonus is actually giving an additional 130 SBV, not the flat 100. If the tank is not specced into shield mastery... you'll have a new set of problems =P