[Klimpen]

Source: Joanadark -gimmick encounters where Silence and Mana-burn mechanics are in play, as well as where spell reflect is required to merely survive. -Inability to break fears under high-pressure circumstances like Archimonde (other examples of fear such as Nightbane can be worked around without too much trouble) without reliance on fear ward or double tremor totems.

Just wanted to highlight these two points as major failings in the game as it stands right now, and I'd prolly add Magic-Immune to the first.

Any encounter which requires a specific Class (not Role) is a bad one, in my opinion. I'm quite sure that it would be near impossible for a Paladin to tank a progression Archimonde without FearWard/Tremor, which it would be significantly easier for a Warrior to.

[Centx]

Source: Joanadark There is no itemization impediment to paladins tanking bosses. Nothing in our gear prevents us tanking. In terms of effective health, there is a difference indeed. There is a 1.2k ish baseline hp difference, combined with the stam you get from your gun slot (though that must be balanced with the 90 block value we get in that slot). Now compare that difference to that between you and a bear.

The Difference in My Effective health, and my druid tanks is not incredible, as druids can easily cap armor reduction in Kara and are left with Stamina and Dodge, While Warrior's and Paladin's continue to obtain more of these stats as guilds progress, signifigantly lowering the gap in effective health, For example, The feral Tank I have been Raiding with since Kara, has no upgradeable piece of gear from content we have taken down, and I nearly match him in hp ( a few hundred off) and am only about 8% behind on dr through armor, couple that wiith the additional mitigation from block and parry and there you go. Druid's don't scale as well beyond the earlier content, while our classes do.

Source: Joanadark We are the antithesis of the druid approach. Warriors are strong by nature of falling somewhere in the middle.

I could not agree with this statement more, and it is one of the reason's I made the argument in the first place. If you go back, I speak of pushing content beyond your gear level's, Why would a guild gear the Druid, or the Paladin in top end tanking gear, when the Warrior does exactly what you said, he falls right in the middle, his crush immunity is less reliable, but eh has it. His Threat Generation (from what I have seen) on single target boss encounters is higher than other available tanking classes. He has those "Oh Shit" button's that we all know and love.

This is, as I said before, How I feel about New Content

Source: Joanadark The REAL limiting factors are: -lack of cooldown abilities like shield wall and last stand to recover from disasters. This is something blizzard has acknowledged working on and word is should be addressed in the patch following Zul'Aman. -gimmick encounters where Silence and Mana-burn mechanics are in play, as well as where spell reflect is required to merely survive. -Inability to break fears under high-pressure circumstances like Archimonde (other examples of fear such as Nightbane can be worked around without too much trouble) without reliance on fear ward or double tremor totems. -Less damage mitigation against elemental magic, though in the first place that is something warriors are directly suited for as we are directly suited for fast-paced physical damage mitigation, representing a healthy difference not a crippling factor, and in the second place a large number of anti-spell casting tanking is more commonly done by warlocks than by any of the tanking classes.

-The way I understood Seal of Protection ( think this is what you are reffering to) is that it gives you 30% additional hp over 58 seconds(unsure as to the 18 second time given to reach the 10 maximum stacks is factored into the 40 second duration, which would mean only 22 seconds of 130% hp, assuming the mobs attack speed was 1.8) he Judgment however seems incredible, assuming this wasn't capped, Like ap reduction. I think it would increase the inclusion of prot paladins exponentially, wether they were actually tanking the boss or not.

-A problem for Blood Elves with no fear ward, Can be worked around with tremor totems, But if possible I would not bother with it.

-Nothing to say to the last one.

Source: Joanadark If you argue that Paladins have the disadvantage of taking a larger amount of damage in a given encounter, I might agree with you. However, in that same encounter, the paladin may have the simultaneous advantage of being easier to heal and keep alive, due to their superior control over damage inflow.

Taking Larger amounts of Damage can be death on New content, but a Paladin is a strong choice for content of your current gear level.

Source: Joanadark And it would be possible to continue arguing that the paladin has the disadvantage of requiring greater discipline from the healers (although steady damage intake tends to mean the truth is the reverse), and I might agree with you again. However, there would be the consideration of the Paladin's higher threat-potential in terms of initial lead as well as sustained, as well as ability to control the boss, leading to a faster kill due to fewer casualties as well as freeing threat-capped DPS to push harder.

There are pros and cons to both approaches here, and I think it should be done more on a case by case basis, as it depends on healer composition/skill etc.

I have said before, I have yet to see either sustained, or lead in threat greater than either of my Warrior's I run with (provided we don't miss etc, so perhaps more situational) but it could be the gear/skill of my current prot pally ( my original reason for posting here, perhaps I got off topic)

Source: Joanadark The point is that these things are relative. While it is true that paladins will never be as good at being warriors as warriors are, using a comparison purely based on your own strengths will give you a conclusion that is both incomplete and potentially self-limiting. People have used warriors to tank for a long time. They are used to them. Raiders and Raid Leaders know what works with a prot warrior.

I agree that we should not judge other tanking classes based on the warrior class, each has its strengths and weakness's, warriors generally being somewhere in the middle. Which is on reason, I think, they are used as often as they are.

Source: Joanadark A progression raid can figure out that their prot warrior can successfully begin the Hydross encounter by making use of Charge or Intervene. It is an easy, and sadly all too common, trap to fall into to conclude that this strategy is then necessarily the easiest or the best way, and that it's reliance on the abilities of the tank they happened to use implies that only such a tank will work for the encounter. I've heard a great many stories of guilds getting a disorienting wake-up call when, say, a prot paladin comes by and tanks hydross by simply popping an invisibility potion and walking up to him, no warrior abilities required.

I personally do not use intercept on hydross, I will pop a speed pot, invis pot, or even have an eye of kilrogg Misdirected while I run up and grab him. These pulls have less room for error in my experience. I Believe a prot paladin has a better use on this fight however, and that is aoe tank the adds, you say to work towards your strengths, if aoe tanking is a strength why use why stick another tank in your place when you could do a better job at it.

Source: Joanadark A common one I hear is that people use a warrior tank on Prince, and see him getting hit incredibly hard, and then unthinkingly project their experience of the warrior's damage in-flow onto the paladin's health pool and concluding that the encounter is beyond him, when, in fact, against that boss he is superior in damage mitigation to the warrior in every respect.

I agree, his thrash is nasty and the additional charges on holy shield make this fight easier.

Source: Joanadark When BC first came out, no one would believe we could tank Prince. So we did. And then it was we would never manage to tank Gruul. So we did that too, both pre and post-nerf. Then people reached SSC and TK. And we showed how these two instances are a prot paladin's playground. Now there are guilds who refuse to run Hyjal without their prot paladin, and in both Hyjal and Black Temple a paladin has progression main tanked every single boss the game mechanics physically permit us to, up to and including Illidan himself.

I was one of the doubter's at first, but my opinion has changed, and while I will always maintain pushing new content, A warrior is the better choice. A paladin has a place in all my 25 man raids, as well as a feral Druid.

Source: Joanadark Misunderstanding the prot paladin is quite forgivable. In many ways we are still learning to understand ourselves.

This is one of the most insightful things I have read on these forums to date.

[Centx]

Source: Klimpen Just wanted to highlight these two points as major failings in the game as it stands right now, and I'd prolly add Magic-Immune to the first. Any encounter which requires a specific Class (not Role) is a bad one, in my opinion. I'm quite sure that it would be near impossible for a Paladin to tank a progression Archimonde without FearWard/Tremor, which it would be significantly easier for a Warrior to.

I am not sure I agree about silencing effect's, they perform a function in encounters that are difficult to work around, thus making encounters more challenging without truly effecting necessary itemization requirements before the encounters can be tackled, just creative strategies

Fear ward becoming a class ability would fix fear issue's, and as priest racials are incredibly unbalanced as is I wouldn't be surprised to see a reworking.




I generally Try and keep him with a shaman for WoA, I beleive he always has an oil up, and we are working on Leaotheras in hopes of getting him the fang (we have been very unlucky with Bloodmaw drops, To be honest tanking drops in general.)

In TK it is an issue with trash being close together, but in SSC, where we have mainly had the issue (He tanks first kill here, and genereally doesnt in tk, due to some mobs that silence) I generally have him pull to the ramp, while other tanks/cc happen on the actual patforms so he ahs room for consecrate, however it could be possible that he is being extra careful, or the cc targets are not geting cc'ed in time.

[Joanadark]

There are pros and cons to both approaches here, and I think it should be done more on a case by case basis, as it depends on healer composition/skill etc.

This is the kind of relationship that I would ideally want to be reached. If you are, as the raid leader, asking yourself with each new encounter and raid composition who of the available choices is most suitable due to the variations and differences between them, tanks will have reached equality.

Alot of players cry to be revised closer to warrior mechanics, given a Shield Wall by another name, have Holy Sheild increased to 75% block chance, etc.
That would be a step in the wrong direction, in my mind.

Just as shamans, druids, priests, and paladins all heal completely differently from each other, they are all effective healers.
And just as a healing core is stronger for having a diverse distribution of all the healing classes, so too does a tanking core become stronger for the availability of different options.

For example, The feral Tank I have been Raiding with since Kara, has no upgradeable piece of gear from content we have taken down, and I nearly match him in hp ( a few hundred off) and am only about 8% behind on dr through armor, couple that wiith the additional mitigation from block and parry and there you go.

For the sake of comparison, I am at a slightly lower gear level than the warrior main tanks in my guild, mostly due to drop rate inconsistencies.
If I got the two or three items I've been waiting for which would bring me up to an equal gear level with my collegues, I would sit at:
*about 400-500 hp less than the warriors (note that they get 1213 hp more than me baseline)
*slightly less pure avoidance
*my physical mitigation much more focused on Block Value while theirs is more focused on Armor, giving roughly equal physical damage reduction on most of the content we do.

Outstanding would be the 9% advantage in percentile damage reduction the warriors enjoy from Defensive Stance's 15% reduction over my 6% from Improved Righteous Fury (8% verses magical damage).


While the differences in EH, mitigation, damage reduction, and avoidance stats should not be discounted, they certainly aren't unreasonably high.

[Centx]

Source: Joanadark Alot of players cry to be revised closer to warrior mechanics, given a Shield Wall by another name, have Holy Sheild increased to 75% block chance, etc. That would be a step in the wrong direction, in my mind. Just as shamans, druids, priests, and paladins all heal completely differently from each other, they are all effective healers. And just as a healing core is stronger for having a diverse distribution of all the healing classes, so too does a tanking core become stronger for the availability of different options.

I tend to agree, Each of these healer's are effective as healers, while they can also outperform each other in certain situations, Tanking should be the same.

[Joanadark]

I generally Try and keep him with a shaman for WoA

Lucky guy. That's one I normally don't get to enjoy too often.

we are working on Leaotheras in hopes of getting him the fang (we have been very unlucky with Bloodmaw drops, To be honest tanking drops in general.)

Yeah, that was one thing I noticed, his sword isn't the greatest. Fang should represent a pretty large difference in his TPS-output.

[Joanadark]

I personally do not use intercept on hydross, I will pop a speed pot, invis pot, or even have an eye of kilrogg Misdirected while I run up and grab him. These pulls have less room for error in my experience. I Believe a prot paladin has a better use on this fight however, and that is aoe tank the adds, you say to work towards your strengths, if aoe tanking is a strength why use why stick another tank in your place when you could do a better job at it.

This is something I constantly try to push for. Many aspiring prot paladins get this idea of "Main Tank or Bust". It's an unhealthy and unhelpful attitude to take, and in a many cases, in fact in the majority of cases, there is something more useful for a prot paladin to do than single-target tanking the boss himself.
There shouldn't be some kind of stigma about being a Main Tank or being an Off Tank, nor should there be prestige issues getting in the way.
I'd think that most take this attitude because the feel they have something to prove, and have to demonstrate their ability.

Regarding that issue, as well as the topic of Paladin single-target threat generation, I started writing out a personal anecdote as a response, but it ended up evolving into a new blog post.

Take a glance at my blog when you get a chance.

[Joanadark]

this thread is amazing by the way.

=)

[Centx]

I have to say it truly is, I just read over your blog also. The problem is, all tanking classes generally want to be the "MT", There is a certain amount of Prestige, and the fact that in most cases the "MT" gets priority on loots doesn't help.

At this point in time, I do most of the management for my guild, I lead all progression Raids basically on my own, and do most of the leading on Farm content (other officers helping here because they are now familiar with the content) and I generally Tank the boss's, It would be good for me to have someone else be able to tank them, so I can focus more on who is doing what wrong/right etc., If my Prot paladin steps up to the plate, that would be wonderful.

[Centx]

WWS

WWS of our VR kill tonight, wiped twice (I don't see how people can get hit by orbs, it looks/seems so easy, must be nice to just dps) The first attempt he did not have Wrath of air, the second two he did, however, i think it was the first that he died. All three fights, he had initial aggro

WWS

There is one from the week before, I don't believe he had wrath either tries there, and he also was not the initial puller. What I gather from this is it doesn't matter wether he is the initial puller? I did notice an increase in his original TPS, but over time it dropped off a bit, iirc he sat around 650-800 on ktm, I normally don't see any but my own, but being pink it stands out to m, I could be mistaken.


Also, he and I both talked a bit about how we can more effectively use him on pull's, and some of the threat issues were pointed out to me by him, Whe I originally posted here, I had a vague understanding of the mechanics behind paladin tanking, especially where they exceled,I did some reading on my own, and through these post's, said reading, andd conversation with the Paladin in question I believe i can help him to be more succesful on threat by adjusting positioning etc, and some group composition.

All in all, this has been a very interesting and informative thread, I hope for others as well as me. I look forward to more just like it.


Edit: Also, this kill we had only 3 tanks, the kill before we had 4.