Despite the general difficulty finding tanks in the game, on most WoW-related forums you will see the TBC-old war about class tanking superiority (or alleged lack thereof) erupt every so often, akin, for that matter, to the similar perpetual arguments you’ll find amongst healers.
This is, often, fueled by the world’s top Catassing Few achievements and vids, who, for all their speed and efficiency, also contribute to keeping classes, in particular hybrids, pigeonholed into just one narrow specific role – something which is probably systemic to how their own well-oiled machinery operates, but causes its own lot of grief to said classes – after all, if Death & Taxes doesn’t use pallies as anything but healers, they’re bound to know best, don’t they?
(Sidenote: This, among other things, why I disagree with Rohan and Fate about seeing Nihilums and Curses and D&Ts and all the other top Catassing Few as important to the game. I’m utterly convinced the publicity and aura surrounding them, beyond concentrating top raiding on fewer and fewer servers, brings more cons than pros to the game. But I digress and this can’t be helped anyway).
The problem with the notion of the Main Tank as too many guilds and players see it is that it’s a one-size-fits-it-all monolith. Too often, the designated MT will tank a whole zone from instance door to clear, with a certain amount of backup tanks intervening on a couple of fights. As MT is in this context equated with Boss Tank, the prestige of holding the boss and keeping the raid out of harm’s way may just be the biggest factor hindering a more subtle yet much more efficient approach to raid tanking.
No matter how you slice it, the three tanking classes are quite well differentiated and each have their strengths and weaknesses. A short (and necessarily limited) summary :
- Warriors are good at holding slow-hitting single targets over a long period of time, come with the best means to mitigate magical damage and bring the highest avoidance scores to the table. Their primary weakness is multi-mob tanking, which takes immensely more effort than for a druid or a paladin, and on fast-hitting bosses they remain open to crushing blows. Further, a full protection warrior has, unfortunately, little practical use when he’s not tanking.
- Druids excel in soaking fights, having both the highest HP Pools and the highest armour – for obvious reasons, as they cannot become uncrushable, their goal is to outlast whatever else happens. Druids also have the best single-target aggro generation, are much better at tanking 3-4 mobs at a time than warriors. In exchange, they are weak against magical damage and in general resist fights put them at a disadvantage.
- Paladins in turn are second to none for AoE tanking, can front load a ton of threat for early damage and provide complete crushing blows immunity against fast hitting bosses. Their trade-off is a lower health pool (patch 2.3 will help here), the least tools for reclaiming aggro, and lower single-mob threat generation than their druid and warrior peers. Silencing mobs are particularly challenging, the lack of charge / intercept type moves makes it harder against spread out ranged opponents, and their itemization headaches provide no room to help in resistance fights. They also make bad Offtanks, as much of their threat requires them to be hit, which usually doesn’t happen if you’re only second on the threat meter.
While details of how the Death Knight will fit into this are probably still several months off (I expect late beta before a reliable pattern emerges), a possible venue of implementation may be either a specialization against high magical environments, or perhaps an experimentation to create a parry tank (a current tankadin qualifies as a block tank) which would go pretty well with the dual-wielding or 2H tanking. But again I digress.
The three current tanking classes are sufficiently specialized in their capabilities and limitations to allow, in return, breaking up the monolithic MT role into situational specialization, like:
- Resistance Tank
- Soak Tank
- Heavy & Slow Hitter Tank
- Fast Hitter Tank
- Caster Tank
- AoE Tank
- OffTank
- Aggro-Regain Tank (meaning fights where aggro dumps are frequent)
And probably a couple more I’m leaving out. My point is, for each of these specific tanking duties there is one class ideally suited to the task and which will, all things being equal, have an easy time, one class which is going to have a hard time no matter how, and one in-between. Using the right tank(s) to address the right situation will make things simpler for the whole raid, as the requirement to have one single very highly skilled player with a good connection and outstanding gear lessens (not to say that you can take talentless e-Bayers in greens instead but you get my drift), merely good players knowing how to play to their strengths will do the trick.
With that in mind, using a warrior to clear up trash pulls without discrimination is needlessly slowing down the raid – a paladin could do the trick faster and safer on multi-mob pulls for instance, or, if none is around, a bear would still be more efficient than a warrior – to put it in 5-men perspective for my non-raiding readers, compare for instance the first hallway in Shattered Halls between an average warrior tank and an average bear or tankadin – in the first case the successive orc lines are needlessly difficult, in the latter cases painlessly easy.
Equally, aside from the prestige tied to boss tanking, having a tankadin on adds instead of the boss for a slow heavy hitter is making thing easier on the raid. A properly geared Bear might be your best choice for an enraging boss or a fight where burst DPS must be applied in a short time frame.
Undoubtedly, this type of reasoning is being used successfully by several raiding guilds, and the above is nothing new to them. There are, however, still plenty of players, including otherwise competent raid leaders, who will scoff at the notion that any raiding instance will have fights where a specialization-driven approach is much more efficient than a monolithic MT-oriented bullheaded mentality.
There is today ample video-supported proof demonstrating that any tanking class can overcome any challenge in the game. In terms of overall progression, a specialization-driven approach to tanking may, however, bring faster results to your raid, keep repair bills lower, let people who have a passion for tanking no matter their class have more fun, and perhaps more importantly, create a proper Tanking Corps. A pure old-school MT is the loneliest job in the game, but a team of specialists sharing duties towards a common goal may diminish tank attrition and burnout.
Caveat Emptor: My regular readers will remember that I’m not even attuned to Kara yet, so yes, you can dismiss this whole thing as the ramblings of someone theorycrafting out of his belf arse. If you do not and disagree with my points, though, I’d love hearing your reasoned objections.
A special thanks goes to Of Teeth and Claws author Karthis, who was kind enough to provide me with the insight into the specific strengths of the Bear tank.
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Well said. As my guild’s “Main tank” and a Paladin tank to boot, I can agree with your points about having a Paladin tank the trash in Karazhan. We bring along at least one warrior (have yet to be able to find a Bear spec feral druid) for a number of the fights that I can’t tank, but I do end up tanking most of the fights in Kara. Fights where the warrior takes over tanking instead of me are Maiden, Tito (silence bad), Julianne, and the elementals in Curator’s room. He also assists me on the two mob pulls leading up to Prince’s room.
Now, before you say that I should let the warrior tank other fights, such as Attumen or Curator, I agree, but right now our only full-time (non-DPS) warrior is a relatively recent 70 and wearing a mix of greens, blues and I think 1 or 2 Kara Purples. In other words, he’s still too weak to replace me in any fight I don’t do too badly on. As soon as he gets his hands on some really decent tanking gear I’ll start standing back for some of those fights.
What you are proposing is how the system should work. For example, currently the best way to structure a healing team is by including 2 of each healing class.
The issue with tanking is slightly different: What do you do with a surplus tank on a one-tank fight?
If the extra tank was a Fury/Prot warrior or a Druid, they could switch forms/gear/weapons and add reasonable DPS. A paladin would add mediocre DPS or mediocre healing.
Honestly, much the same problem happens to the second Protection Warrior in the raid. Fights that don’t require a second tank leave him doing nothing useful.
Yeah, a Prot paladin is great on AoE packs and trash, but she’s not that useful the rest of the time. And currently, Protection Warriors are just plain better suited to tanking the big, hard-hitting boss.
It’s not so much about what you are contributing when you are tanking, it’s about what you are contributing when you are not tanking.
Also, you may disagree with me about the effect of the hardcore on the game, but Korgath used to be a dying server. Then Death & Taxes transferred onto it, and the server was revitalized. That’s pretty powerful evidence of their impact.
The hardcore don’t play the game as it should be, they play the game as it is. If something changed, and paladin tanks became hyper-powerful, the hardcore guilds would switch to that, and switch their warriors to DPS. For example, the status of Druid Tree of Life healers changed significantly in the patch that altered Lifebloom, and the hardcore led the way in that change.
If something changed, and paladin tanks became hyper-powerful, the hardcore guilds would switch to that, and switch their warriors to DPS.
Not at any time. Even Nihilum cannot take a healadin, just respec the guy and have him tank, they still have to gear him up. In the race to drive the Worldfirstmobile on new content, unless their traditional line-up gets severely nerfed somehow, they won’t change a winning team at the risk of missing first kills. Only when there is a lull like between BT and SWP like now do they even have the luxury of considering other means of actions.
And again, from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. If your main warrior tank happens to be one of the world’s best players who has spent two years honing his skills, why change it? He will still have two years of experience at tanking any and all content. And that’s fine, it’s also not something I argue against.
My point is that due to their visibility, they reinforce stereotypes by their example. Using different tanks for different tasks isn’t something you have to consider when you have both the best players and the best gear at your disposal. My call is to the guild and raid leaders who are stuck with the notion that a warrior is one size fits it all while they are actually struggling from Kara to TK because of that.
The question about what do you do with a paladin tank on a one-tank fight when the warrior is MT is a bit of a strawman, you even go to mention that a two-warrior raid won’t know what to do with the second prot warrior either, so it’s not as if the raid was worse off in any way – and with a gear switch, while the pallie remains a mediocre healer, he can still lend a hand here and there, even if it’s only healing hunter pets so they stay on target longer to add DPS.
The question about what do you do with a paladin tank on a one-tank fight when the warrior is MT is a bit of a strawman, you even go to mention that a two-warrior raid won’t know what to do with the second prot warrior either, so it’s not as if the raid was worse off in any way – and with a gear switch, while the pallie remains a mediocre healer, he can still lend a hand here and there, even if it’s only healing hunter pets so they stay on target longer to add DPS.
A hardcore raid will not take 2 Protection Warriors to a raid. They will take 1 Prot, a Fury OT, and a Druid. If they need a second Prot warrior, they will leave him outside the instance, and summon him when necessary.
As for gear, most of their paladins will be collecting Prot and Ret gear from the leftovers. Heck, I have pretty decent Prot and Ret sets, and I’m a primary healer.
Finally, gear is not as important as it once was. Remember that Nihilum beat BT and Mount Hyjal in mostly T5 level gear. They didn’t need to spend time farming the instance to gear up.
Key word you’re using is hardcore. The hardcore will take what works best with them, tend to have been established since BWL or AQ40 and are a well-oiled machine geared for eating up content.
What is most efficient to them is continue working with the most experienced tank they’ve had since Nef or C’Thun, not to experiment. On a recent thread on their own boards about tankadins, the Nihilum GL plain stated that he would never consider anything but a warrior as the MT. And that’s fine.
My plea isn’t aimed towards guilds which can clear a 25-men within 3 weeks of its release, or even 10 weeks. It’s for the “normal” raiders who blindly rehash what the top 5 are saying… forgetting that if their tank was as skilled as Nihilum’s, he wouldn’t be playing with them, or they would have cleared BT & Hijal in July.
My plea isn’t aimed towards guilds which can clear a 25-men within 3 weeks of its release, or even 10 weeks.
Replying to myself is bad, m’kay, but who would I be fooling anyway? I have nothing to say which could be remotely of interest to them in anyway. As it is, the raiders in the worldfirstmobile and me could just as well be playing different games altogether.
Most “normal” raiding guilds have enough trouble getting 3+ good (geared/keyed) tanks, 8 divisions is a bit overkill. Resources would be spread so think it would gimp the guild in the long run. Most have to take what they can get and do what they can to make sure they are up to spec.
I’m not saying you need 1 tank per specialization but with the three tank classes you should be able to match specialized tanking tasks to each class which is best suited for that particuliar one. If you have 5 idle tanks in your guild, I’m sure another one would kill to get them
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