[Ciderhelm]

Source: Worldie There's absolutely no encounter in TBC that requires a prot paladin or a feral druid. There's plenty of encounters where a warrior is superior to all the 2 due to bad design, or eventually done on purpose.

To be clear, what you're saying is:

1. Paladins and Feral Druids can tank anything, but aren't required.
2. Protection Warriors aren't required, but can tank anything.

You did not flatly say Protection Warriors were required in your second sentence, which means both statements are saying essentially the same thing, you're just making one sound more sinister.

Nevermind which is preferable by encounter; there are clearly encounters where each of the three classes is superior. The question of requirement is based off your usage of the word.

[Krashtork]

I have to agree with Cider. I've been benched for bear tanks and protadins before. Some fights favor a certain class of tank, but few, if any, require one of the three tanking classes.

Oh and to be clear:

Against bosses, the difference between the expert and average warrior tank is much smaller.

I find this to be very wrong. It's a matter of perspective really. To YOU it may seem like there isn't much difference, but to any other warrior who knows his stuff, there are countless details that we can see to evaluate another warrior's performance.

I have had my fair share of "padawan" tanks who look up to me and learn from me, and it's easy to see their mishaps and awesome saves. They are fairly average or even above average. But the MT of my current guild is truly a master of what he does, and i can see a night and day difference on the same bosses.

Make no mistake: there is a HUGE gap between average and expert warriors tanks when it comes to bosses. To see it you just need to know what to look for.

[Ciderhelm]

Krash, just bouncing off what you said, I will back up what you said 100%. The difference between an expert Warrior who's genuinely in tune with his class and a newer Warrior who's still learning is enormous. That's part of what is so attractive about Warriors -- you can improve beyond the basics and you can pull of fairly miraculous accomplishments. There's always room to improve.

[Tenraiel]

Nothing much new to add, but I just wanna say that I agree that homogenizing the tanking classes prompts me to expect gruesomely boring encounters or gameplay. I fully understand the need to cater to the more casual players having difficulty finding tanks ... but how will they do that without running away those of us who take pride in the skill we've developed for the unique class we chose to roll.

[Roana]

Source: TomHuxley This isn't about preserving some perceived advantage of one class of one of my toons. It's about retaining diversity in gameplay so that it's fun to play more roles. I really wanted to level a DK for magic-specific fights, but it it will tank equally well as my warrior, what's the point. Continuing down this pat will be a disaster, and I really hope Blizz climbs back up that slippery slope before they fall off.

I see it as advantageous: To be blunt, Blizzard hasn't been able to make the "different but equal" approach work -- not because it couldn't be made to work, but because minmaxing is too ingrained a philosophy in the playerbase even where it isn't necessary. Too many people aren't willing to try Jan'alai without a paladin or Nightbane without a warrior, even though it's perfectly doable either way.

At this point, substantial class differences do not lead to diversity, they become obstacles and exclude certain classes from certain content. To make it work, you would have to change the playerbase, and I don't know how that could be accomplished.

My guess is that Blizzard is tearing down the class differences not because they wouldn't like more diversity, but because players are unwilling to deal with it, and only see it as a tool to minmax raid composition. Recall that minmaxing means you get rid of the weak links of something and emphasize the stronger ones. Except that in this case, the "weak links" are characters played by actual people who would like to see the raid encounters Blizzard spends so much time crafting and not just an obscure talent that doesn't feel hurt if it gets ignored by minmaxers.

What you get out of this change is that players can play the class they want -- and there are still pretty large differences in playstyle -- without having to fear that they are "not wanted" for certain parts of the game.

I like that. I couldn't care less about abstract concerns for game aesthetics. I care a lot more for the actual people behind the characters having actual fun, rather than abstractly admiring the wonderful raid encounter they never get to see until it's on farm status because their raid leader sits them for somebody else.

[Joanadark]

What would be particularly interesting is to see the balance of skill vs simplicity have equivalent balance. Currently there is only a marginal difference between expert and average paladin tanks in AE tanking, while there's a very big difference between expert and average warrior tanks doing the same. Against bosses, the difference between the expert and average warrior tank is much smaller. Wouldn't it be interesting if the emergency manuevers for paladins somehow was the mirror image of this, where expert paladins would rise head and shoulders over the average in succeeding against bosses, independent of gear and healing support?

I found this to be a very interesting comment.

To a certain extent, YES you are right. Any mouth-breather clicker of a prot pally can roll his face on consecrate and successfully AOE tank at a level a warrior player can only accomplish with skill and difficulty.

However, to say that the same is true when you stick a pally in front of a single target...or multiple cleaving mobs he can't throw a shield at while there is CC going on within consecrate range...is a completely different story.

The difference between a novice and an expert protadin against a single, or merely a couple sensitive targets, is similarly HUGE. Not every paladin knows how to exploit ambient threat mechanics. Not every Paladin knows how to seal-weave. Not every paladin is capable of picking up and holding 2-3 targets without misdirects when he isn't able to consecrate or avenger's shield.

Not every paladin can keep up with skilled warriors on single-target threat.

Yes. I went there. And believe it or not, it's the truth.
Any monkey playing a warrior can hit and expertise cap and put out incredible numbers on single target with a halfway decent rotation.
But here is where the paladins who just roll face on consecrate fall short.

Here also lies a major flaw in the paladin class which still exists today, even after our many improvements. Paladins have still just barely not quite caught up to warriors in things like mitigation and avoidance for the simple fact that pushing 800+ spell damage (plus bucketloads of useless int on our gear) is a HECK of a lot more expensive itemization-wise than the few expertise skill that a warrior accomplishes the exact same threat output with.

Just as it takes a good warrior to keep up with a paladin in aoe tanking with difficulty, so it takes a good paladin to keep up with a skilled warrior on single targets (espeicially hard-hitting ones) with difficulty.

I consider myself skilled at threat-gen for a paladin.
I've pretty much found that I've reached my cap as far as my threat out-put in some of the best t6-level gear out there, short of stupidity like gemming spell power. With great difficulty and a stacked group, I can just-quite-barely not break 1700 TPS on something like Teron. As far as paladins go, thats a pretty respectable number to hit. My Judgement of Righteousness' crit for up to 3k with wings up. A 3k JoR is "Holy Shit"-worthy.
But then go look at a Xav parse, or something by Firstblood's druid, or any of plenty of other high-level skilled warrior and druid tanks.

There is balance. It's just hard to see sometimes because AOE tanking is so novel and flashy and sexy, and because people don't always run with a DPS team skilled enough or geared enough to really take much advantage of single target TPS beyond like 1200-1300 anyway.

[Joanadark]

I'd also note that in the expansion, with a threat rotation far more complex and challenging to master and maximize, the difference between novice and skilled protadins will be far more tangible.
They are also heavily nerfing Consecration through exorbitant mana costs, which may or may not be sustainable with damage-intake mana returns without heavy downranking.


Additionally, there are two types of "AOE tanking".
1. Holding adequate threat on all targets to hold them over ambient threat of the healers while each target is focus-fired down each in turn.
2. Holding aggro on all targets well enough to support mindless Seed-spamming and other AOE in order to kill the group.

Yes, Paladins are capable of doing the later, but ALL tanks are fully capable of accomplishing the former and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with it as a method of eliminating a group of mobs. Certainly it is more efficient at reducing the damage-intake of the tank compared to the second option.
Style #2 is only so attractive because it permits laziness by all involved.

[Jasra]

Let me take another stab at clarifying myself, because it seems that my points are being missed in the details for the most part.

Source: Roana Even historically, there have been plenty of encounters where the boss is the lowest threat, and dealing with the adds has been the primary focus, going all the way back to Majordomo Executus in Molten Core.

I never suggested that one is necessarily more threat than another. Only that I justify pure tanking comparisons in terms of boss/AE because they are mechanically quite different. What I was trying to say is that doing AE threat is something quite different than doing single threat , and likewise for boss survivability vs AE survivability (technically, big slow hits vs fast lighter hits, although there are of course exceptions). Because the tools we're given tend to be biased towards being particularly suitable for one or the other, and because tanking responsibilities typically fall into one of these two categories pretty neatly, AE vs Boss seems to be the most sensible basis for a broad-brush tanking comparison.

Source: Krashtork I find this to be very wrong. It's a matter of perspective really. To YOU it may seem like there isn't much difference, but to any other warrior who knows his stuff, there are countless details that we can see to evaluate another warrior's performance.

For my argument to make any sense, you have to kind of go along with the understanding that I'm talking about relative values and not absolute or its difficult to convey my meaning. I'm not trying to say that skill doesn't make a difference for warriors against bosses, only that *relatively* speaking the difference between an expert and average warrior tank is much larger in the realm of AE tanking than it is in boss tanking. If you can more or less go along with that premise, then the argument about creating a similar challenge for paladins against bosses is more interesting.

Joanadark's comments are interesting and a reasonable counterargument on the face of it, although I've very rarely known a paladin to have threat problems against a single target. Nevertheless, I can accept that there's probably some truth to it, even if we don't see the same degree.

[Worldie]

Source: Ciderhelm To be clear, what you're saying is: 1. Paladins and Feral Druids can tank anything, but aren't required. 2. Protection Warriors aren't required, but can tank anything. You did not flatly say Protection Warriors were required in your second sentence, which means both statements are saying essentially the same thing, you're just making one sound more sinister. Nevermind which is preferable by encounter; there are clearly encounters where each of the three classes is superior. The question of requirement is based off your usage of the word.

What i meant to say is that in current incarnation of bosses, warriors are always preferable bar in 1 encounter (ros p3) where a paladin would outperform and 1 encounter (brutallus) where a druid would outperform.

Every other single encounter "can" be tanked by any class (aside from gimmicks like Illidan), but all favour warriors over the other two. You can clear all the content without a prot warrior. The point that makes me angrier isn't much however the advantage of warriors, since that's anyway small usually and doesn't make a big difference. It's that the few encounters that would "require" a prot paladin, can be easily done by any holy paladin without even respeccing (actually, they got superior threat compared to prot ones), and there's no encounter which actually requires a druid, feral or not feral.

[Senpuu]

Source: Worldie If that means remaining like it's now, where you need 0 prot paladins and 0 feral druids in a raid to be effective, but you absolutely need 1 or 2 prot warriors and if you do without any, you are making the encounter harder. M'uru, Brutallus, Kalecgos are perfect examples of this, without even considering things like RoS p2. There's absolutely no encounter in TBC that requires a prot paladin or a feral druid. There's plenty of encounters where a warrior is superior to all the 2 due to bad design, or eventually done on purpose. No thanks. That's FAR from balance. I'm however perfectly fine with the balancing they are doing in WotLK. No advantages, just different tanking styles, and some speciailities for every class. Niche is good, gimmick tank is horrible.

That's simply not true.

In fact, it's the exact opposite. Kalecgos can be done with 3 of any tank class, doesn't matter which. Brutalus we do weekly with myself and a very capable protadin tanking, but any two tanks can do it regardless of class. Felmyst can be done by any tank class, but p2 adds REQUIRES a paladin. Twins can be done by any two tank classes. M'uru REQUIRES a protadin for the void adds that spawn from Sentinal deaths. A warrior is prefered for the sentinals, but is *not* required. The side adds are feral prefered, but any class can do it. And I'm afraid I am rather ignorant about the KJ encounter just yet, but im pretty sure there are no strict tanking reqs at all.

So, the only tanking class you MUST have to do SWP is paladin.