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As a raiding prot warrior, I was told early and often that paladin tanks were for trash mobs, and warriors and feral druids were boss tanks. I must admit that the game design bears this out somewhat, with abilities like Shield Wall and Last Stand, and a druid's high health and armor, compared to the paladin's extra charges on shield blocks to withstand constant trash mob battering. But I also know that Blizzard has always been abysmal at class balancing, and that player skill can overcome many encounters that are deemed near impossible from a design standpoint. Certain encounters are skewed toward certain types of tanks, and this is as it should be to keep everyone viable. No one wants to see their character made useless after a certain point by narrow minded content design. By the same token, any encounter that rigidly requires a specific class and spec is poorly designed. WoW players should be free to think outside the box and experiment with different raid compositions to see what works best for their group composition and gear.
However, after working with a few excellent paladin tanks, I have a newfound respect for the class. Warriors and druids often dismiss paladin tanks as needing no skill to play, because they appear to simply spam one power to effortlessly hold aggro on huge mobs. They regain mana every time they get healed? Why can't we do that with rage? For that matter, why can't we sit on 10 rage points instead of having to start every fight with an empty tank? And what's this about their shield block having eight charges while ours has only two? And a long distance Taunt? This class is grossly unfair! The list of perceived injustices goes on and on.
But the fact of the matter is that paladin tanks have had to struggle with awful itemization, cobbling together gear sets with warrior gear that often had the wrong stats for them. They were saddled with lower health, and they had to choose talents very carefully and use a precise rotation to optimize their threat generation, just like any other tanking class. Luckily, patches and badge gear have begun to address these issues, but the bias that paladins make inferior tanks remains. I still use Bosskillers to study up on every boss simply to learn the nuances of the fight, but I have noticed that this and many other guides are skewed almost exclusively toward warrior tanks and strategies built around them. In all fairness, this could be because some of the guides are old and were created at a time when paladin main tanks were less viable, but even so, there is no excuse not to update those guides to reflect tactics made possible by recent patches.
In any case, I have no ego whatsoever as a main tank and am all about whatever gets the job done best. I have found paladin tanks to be markedly superior in some situations, both as main tanks and offtanks. One reason why warriors and druids are frequently MTs while paladins are OTs is simply because the former classes starve out of rage and find themselves unable to effectively generate threat in an offtanking role, whereas paladins excel as OTs even when they are not taking steady damage. But anyone who has ever seen a paladin trash mob tank in action in Hyjal (or even Shattered Halls), or main tanking Prince or Tidewalker, is unlikely to ever question the validity of the class again. In short, I love working with paladin tanks, and feral druids, too. They each bring tremendous versatility to any raid if everyone is willing to put their bias aside and pull together as a team. And that, I suppose, is the real joy of endgame raiding. :-)
- Larsson, Antonidas
Last edited by Midnite Cruiser; 02-06-2008 at 01:11 PM.
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