One of the most common things you hear as a hybrid class specialized in tanking is that utilizing you in a raid group will “slow the speed of progression”, or “hold a guild back” compared to a more traditional setup of purely warrior tanks.
The argument essentially goes that “while a paladin tank may possess advantages in certain fights, there are multiple encounters in the game that a paladin is physically incapable of realistically tanking (which is true) due to silence, or requirements for spell reflect. A warrior is capable of tanking every single fight in the game, and therefore is the only choice as a guild’s tank. Any guild which uses a non-warrior as it’s Main Tank is hurting it’s own ability to progress at it’s fastest potential speed.”
I think this argument is flawed in a couple respects.
Firstly, it pretends that if a guild is to make use of a Paladin Tank, that paladin would be somehow replacing a warrior tank. This is simply not realistic.
The days of only one tank being required for a guild ended in BWL. A tanking core will consist of maybe three to four Main Tanks in a standard guild setup. There will always be a highly-geared, experienced, available Warrior Main Tank as part of progression raids that is perfectly capable of tanking those few encounters which warriors exclusively own.
Additionally, if one of your Main Tanks will always be a warrior regardless, there is very little benefit of multiple additional warriors when the advantages warriors possess as tanks can already be brought to bear by the first.
Incorporating a Paladin Tank into the tank core has no negative effect on the ability of your talented Warrior Tank(s) to dominate every encounter they are suited to. It only has the positive effect of opening up the hitherto unavailable options and advantages Paladin Tanks can provide which can be brought to bear as well.
Secondly, this position tends to both exaggerate the universality of warrior tanking as well as exaggerate the quantity of fights the Paladin is truly unable to overcome.
Paladin tanks are a relatively new thing, and it can be difficult for an outsider to really see the advantages they possess in different situations. Back in the early stages of the expansion through the present day, Paladin Tanks have been on a virtual quest to prove wrong the sequence of statements of different encounters being “impossible”.
It can be very easy to go read bosskillers.com and see that every strat on it requires that your tank be able to intervene or intercept in order to initially pull Hydross and avoid him crossing the line where he’d spawn adds. The natural conclusion is that the tank for Hydross must be a warrior and that the fight would be “impossible” for a Paladin Tank, who lacks fast-movement abilities.
It took a Paladin popping a Potion of Greater Invisibility and walking right up to the boss before this sentiment was quelled.
People used to say that a Paladin tank could never effectively tank Magtheridon, because they lack Shield Wall to survive the phase transition where the roof collapses for massive damage.
Then it was discovered that Divine Shield didn’t deaggro the boss if used at this transition, meaning a Paladin Tank would receive no damage at all during this dangerous point, as compared to a Warrior with 75% reduction from Shield Wall.
It was said that it would be “impossible” for a Paladin Tank to survive the Pyroblasts of Kael’thas Sunstrider without warrior panic buttons, until the encounter was defeated with a Paladin MT taking the first two Pyroblasts as normal using the Shield USE: effect, followed by a Nightmare Seed and Super Fire Protection Potion, and then Bubbling so that a waiting demo warlock with his own Super FR Pot who had specially placed himself at #2 aggro would tag-team the deadly third Pyro.
It is regrettably easy and common to analyze the amount of damage a classic Warrior Tank takes on a fight, and then project that onto a Paladin Tank’s different mechanics and find it lacking.
Warrior Tanks were given tremendous trouble by the bosses Prince and Morogrim Tidewalker. The damage intake they saw when progressing through these fights was intimidating. Many of you may remember the uproar over a Warrior who actually geared himself for passive uncrushability for Morogrim, doing so at a resulting extremely low total health.
Players saw these fights and projected the damage intake their Warriors were experiencing on Paladins and declared that such bosses would be “impossible”, the Paladins would get ripped apart.
And so it went….
The tankadin community would work to improve its self, would research, experiment, gear, regear, argue, try, fail, try again. Each month that went by we would make great strides.
And each achievement we made was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
First we would be told that a boss was “impossible”.
Not long would go by, and a tankadin would tank that very boss successfully.
But the story would abruptly change.
Now the “impossible” boss would suddenly be insignificant. It would be “old news”.
If a world first kill had been made using a Warrior, than even progression kills afterwards on that boss seemingly had no meaning.
If a Paladin managed the encounter with a demonstrate able advantage over alternative tanks, the “impossible” boss would suddenly be dismissed as “easy”.
If a Paladin can make a unique and powerful contribution by handling adds on an encounter, the reaction would be belittlement for only tanking the adds.
If a Paladin eases clearing trash in a zone, allowing more boss attempts and faster, smoother clears, it would also be dismissed as meaningless.
If a Paladin tanked a boss, the next one would simply become the “impossible”.
On and on it went.
And we learned and experimented. We challenged the declarations of our inability to defeat each new fight.
Sometimes we would uncover a basic advantage where we actually were more effective than a warrior.
Sometimes we would discover the opposite.
Very, very seldom did we ever find a fight that was truly impossible. Mostly merely disadvantaged.
First Prince, who we excelled at.
Then Nightbane, who we came up with clever ways to outthink.
Then it was Hydross and Morogrim, who were dismissed as old news.
Then Fathom Lord Karathess, who was derided as easy.
Then Void Reaver, who we held overwhelming agro on while our boss mods screamed over and over than a healer was being targeted so they must be taking orbs.
Then Leotheras, on whom we demonstrated dramatic control and while other classes chased him around all over the room.
Then Vashj was “impossible”, and Kael’Thas too.
Then Hyjal.
Then Black Temple.
A guild on Proudmore just got a server first kill of Illidan.
They used a Paladin as their progression kill Main Tank.
They tried it previously using a warrior MT.
the warrior took a maximum of 11561 damage when he tanked, the paladin a maximum of 10872.
On average hits taken, the Paladin had 500 less damage taken compared to the warrior per attack.
The Warrior outgeared the Paladin.
Now, there are plenty of examples of fights where a Paladin Tank is disadvantaged. Warriors shine on every stage of content.
A major stumbling block for the acceptance of Tankadins was the fact that Gruul, the pivotal transition 25-man raid encounter, who a very large proportion of players have experienced compared to deep in SSC or in Hyjal, was a hallmark example of a fight disadvantaged for Tankadins.
It is certainly not impossible, even as progression content, but our tanking class is disadvantaged on Gruul, and it was from this fight that a large number of players’ ideas about end-game were formed.
There is often little reason to use a Paladin tank on a boss over a Warrior tank, or it may simply be that the Paladin can be better used in another capacity on the fight, but the relevant point was that there is generally little reason to the reverse either.
There IS a balance.
To bring your Tankadin into SSC to AOE tank Morogrim’s Murlocks, and then subbing him out while having trouble on Hydross or Leo or Vashj is a waste of your Tankadin.
Yet many guilds will simply count the number of AOE tanking fights and say that is the number of encounters a Tankadin is advantaged for.
AOE Tanking is one of our most dramatic and visible tools, but it is hardly our entire class.
It seems to me that there is somewhat of a double standard.
Several encounters make use of a demonology speced Warlock tank. In these cases, the Warlock is used because a Warrior is physically incapable of tanking that particular target realistically.
Yet this does not get tallied up and held as evidence of Warriors’ unviability. Indeed, it would be wrong if it was.
Yet these are in fact examples of Warriors in the same position a Tankadin is in on a fight requiring Spell Reflect.
Warlock Tanks will be dismissed as a gimmick of the encounter in the same breath as denying Tankadins have value because of a gimmick of yet another encounter.
The point I have tried to make in all my writings is that Paladins DO bring plenty of real advantages to many different encounters, as well as possible encounter designs in upcoming instances.
And if this is the case, then the most effective progression tank core will be composed not of all the same class, but of a sample of each.
When assembling a raid group, one does not bring ONLY Shamans.
While Shamans are powerful healers and have many useful tricks up their sleeve, a group of four Shamans will hardly be as effective as a group of one Shaman, one Druid, one Paladin, and one Priest.
The same holds true with tanks.
If one option has advantages in a portion of the encounters, and disadvantages in the remaining ones, and a second option as disadvantages in the first batch but advantages in the later, it MAKES SENSE to have both options and select the choice of tank encounter by encounter based on their strengths.
It should be the case that a raid group with a Paladin Tank and a Warrior Tank available should move no slower at progressing through an instance than a raid with only Warrior Tanks.
In fact, the first raid group should, ideally, be capable of conquering the content faster.
That’s the theory.
Yet we are told time and time again that we will “hold our guild back”.
I wanted to see if that appeared to hold true on my old server’s guild progression, just as a thought experiment.
On Spirestone, there were three raiding guilds who used a Paladin Tank as part of their line-up, two Horde and one Alliance. The Horde guilds are <Agony> and <Prevail>, and the Alliance one is my own previous guild <Pizza Warriors> who I served with.
I rationalized that there should be a trend, if I was correct, of the guilds using Paladin Tanks defeating progression content on which Paladin Tanks are an advantage at a faster speed than similar guilds which do not use Paladin Tanks.
I chose the boss Leotheras the Blind, as it represents a very challenging encounter, one that Paladins have an advantage on, yet for which there was no real alternate work-around strategy which counters the benefit the Paladin brings. It was also one of the hardest bosses which all three guilds with a Paladin Tank had defeated.
I went back and sifted through pages and pages of progression threads, making a timeline.
For comparison, I tracked a sample of several other guilds, both more advanced and less advanced than the Paladin Tanks’ guilds, who did not make use of Paladin Tanks themselves.
Since it would be impossible to know precisely how much actual raid time was spent by each guild working on the boss before the kill, the best variable I could think of to compare was the length of time separating the most recent previous boss kill for that guild and defeat of Leo.
It was assumed (note: Assumption) that it would be safe that time spent following a previous kill would be allocated to learning the one that followed. All the listed guilds have a fairly equivalent raid schedule, which brought a certain amount of equivalency to the results.
The varying levels of current progression for the guilds that were being compared was intended to eliminate the possibility of some guilds merely having more skilled players than others, explaining faster kills.
Some of the guilds reached and began working on the Leo fights before others, and some after, and I was careful to include variety there. None of the guilds were working on Leotheras the Blind before he was nerfed however.
Here are the guilds which made use of a Protection Paladin:
Agony (7/2-7/12)
10 days Prevail (9/19-9/26)
7 days Pizza Warriors (10/9-10/15)
6 days
And here are some guilds that didn’t use a Protection Paladin:
Guild 1 (7/08-8/08)
31 days Guild 2 (5/03-5/24)
21 days Guild 3 (10/04-10/22)
18 days Guild 4 (10/07-???)
23 days and counting
Technically Leo took only 2 raiding nights for Pizza Warriors, as we had a couple off-days which happened to fall in between the kills, and the previous one had happened right before a reset which meant we spent an additional day reclearing instead of on progression, but I put down 6 to keep consistent. Since such circumstances were the case for the guilds using Paladin tanks, it isn’t showing an intended bias against the comparison guilds which may have had such circumstances too.
As a disclaimer, there are plenty of additional variables which go into it which I was incapable of eliminating.
But I think it is safe to say that making use of a Paladin tank on progression certainly has the POTENTIAL to result in faster success, and certainly will not “hold your guilds back”.
P.S. yes, I rewrote this thread.
I, personally, think that the idea of hero classes was a completely retarded one, simply because it implies that they will be upgrades over the original nine.
