Purely from a dps’s perspective it feels like druid tanks are better than warriors, at least in 5 mans. Feels like they hold aggro better and take less damage.
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From a healer perspective, they are better at AoE tanking when you have bad DPS that can’t stick to the primary target or feel every pull is an opertunity to spread dots on every thing as fast as they can / go nuts with AoE before the tanks first auto attack can land.
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comparing the two:
druid tank = more threat, more dps, better aoe threat due to cleaving abilites.
warrior tank = better magical mitigation, crush immunity (only applies in raids)
the druid physical mitigation is on par with a warrior (no parry, but smoother damage curve due to higher armor on average)
for anything other then a raid druid will be better or equal to a warrior.
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Every tank has a speciallity, it’s not just wars beat all…
Wars are gods of ST fights (raids)
Druids are gods of AoE (dungeons)
Pallys are gods at self sustain (PvP)
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That’s not exactly true - when enemies are 4+, I’d expect warriors to have an easier time than druids.
Though yeah, for dungeons druids are the better option for a lot of reasons.
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It’s one of the main mistakes and as you put it on the top it can be assumed that you are just out of clue what it means to “tank”. But nothing personal - very big fraction of players don’t understand what is the function of tank and how tanking should work.
There actually is a way to tank through DPS but then usually this tank is not that much needed anyway as this type of tanking is viable in overleveled groups where group just AOE blaze through content and tank is just grabbing initial agro to give few seconds for the rest to lay down their damaging skills and finish mobs. As a result you’ll almost certainly get kicked or won’t get into group if you are on the level edge or bit below the instance you are aiming for - people don’t want to think about tactics, correct positioning, crowd control and similar things - they just want to run through instance in 15 minutes and get onto their next “Fortnight” session 
In reality tank can have the lowest DPS of all group (apart of healer may be) and still do great job as his goal is not to do the highest amount of damage, but to keep mobs’ attention on himself and get as low injuries as possible while doing that to make the healer’s job easier. Trick is that most damagers these days won’t let that happen. If you’ll try to pull mobs back, most of the times some paladins will stun the mob being pulled midway to his intended position, warrior will charge in right after first pull shot, mages would certainly frost nova mob ASAP, and warlocks will dot them to hell before tank even gets a chance to start tanking. Therefore a lot of tanks start hopeless competition with damagers for DPS in hope to win over the agro by overdamaging. When I play my tanks I just let these kinds of damagers have their agro and even die, if they are stupid enough and just pull next target untill they let me gain the agro properly (especially if tanking as warrior or druid, as these classes need to have mobs on themselves to have enough rage for skill rotations and whatnot).
Going back to the topic - druids need to make more DPS as they have less agro control skills and talents in Vanilla. Warriors can maintain agro by applying less actual damage. Druid tanks also get more incoming DPS as they tank through high amount of overall HP - warriors tank more with damage mitigation.
All in all classes are different (and this is one of the best features of Vanilla WoW - not that much of a Classic as it already got twerked to please Retail fanboys, but still there are some good things remaining) and comparison of classes by one feature or characteristic is IRRELEVANT.
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The best tank in dungeons is a fury warrior in dps gear. Amazing threat can’t take aggro from him, dps is insane and dungeons are done at lightningspeed
All true BUT the group should be outleveled an/or outgeared for the content - otherwise that poor fury tank will die a lot and the run will be sluggishly slow and annoying.
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I would say in dungeons druids are usually better. You find sometimes a warrior that knows what he is doing and they are amazing, but there is too much dual wielding bulls•
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I think he meant to say in threat gear cause dps gear for warrior is mostly leather. I have 3 sets full mitigation deathbone, threat with valor set items and the pure meta BIS gear.
That’s true, and this makes a huge difference for a healer. As a priest healer I can go through all the instance regenning mana on a go with almost no downtime (did some runs without drinking a single water) with proper tanks. And on the opposite case I might need to sit and drink mana almost after each pull with tanking
and tank’s health going up and down at a lightnig speed too Just had a Maraudon run where I needed 4 stacks of water for one run - luckily there was a pet mage at hand
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A good tank knows when to change to shield even mid fight if its taking to much dmg. Alot of times you have to dual wield to do more dmg cause the dps in the squad wont wait for the tank to get agro or focous only on 1 target. Making everything harder for the tank.
Yea that’s quite true.
warrior aoe tools:
- cleave (sacrifice rage from attack)
- whirlwind (requires berserker stance, 4 targets, weapon damage dependent)
- thunderclap (requires battlestance, 4 targets)
- demo shout.
- battle shout.
- challenging shout.
other then the shouts only cleave can be used in defensive stance for the aggro multipliers.
on the other hand, let’s look at the druid toolset:
- Healing and hots (very risky as it requires shapeshift dancing)
- swipe (3 targets)
- demoralizing roar
- challanging roar
other then healing all abilities can be used by druid in bear form, also druids generate much more rage then warriors on average so they can swipe spam
you also need to consider the following:
the rage you get from being hit in dungeons is absurdly low, and the more resilient you become as a warrior, the less rage you will get from each hit.
as a warrior your offensive rage comes from white hits, and even with a slow 1h your rage will just trickle in. druids, on the other hand, when they go for tanking, generate rage from their crits as well, which usually makes their go to aggro tool (swipe) cost reduced by 30-100%
the only places a warrior is superior to a druid is either a magic damage boss where armor is irrelevant and the only things that matter are flat % reduction from def stance and the dodge and parry % which are higher for warriors on average. or a raid boss that will hit the tank hard enough (and for the record, the last time i tanked onyxia i was wearing mostly my pre-bis def gear with some FR mixed in, and she was hitting me so low i was actually rage starved during some points in phase3)
No.
Druid tanking is good and viable but warriors have some big advantages.
Windfury - Is a godlike buff, far outweights grace of air for a druid.
Inability to gain extra weapon skill on druids, dodges/parries etc can’t be reduced which in vanilla is quite frustrating.
Can’t use consumables/barkskin in bear form - Pots/engi bombs and other things (strat water etc) are a huge boost to warriors.
Fury/prot threat gen: Druid cheese is grinding pummlers from gnomeregan for bosses etc. Fury/prot warriors have better aggro at lower gear levels (post MC -> AQ40).
Initially though for 5 mans a druid in mostly blues (as MC has very few drops for them) would be better than a warrior in full prot spec with a similar gear level.
True, in theory. In practice (personal experience ofc, but I’ve already healed quite a number of dungeons in classic), the average druid tank does a better job than the average warrior tank.
There are too many warrior tanks that go into a dungeon thinking about the dps meters instead of tanking well, and this makes the healer job considerably harder and frustrating.
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Interesting post from a fellow mage, I personally dislike this type of tank, prefer druids with their AoE swipe.
Its easier for a druid to become a good tank, but when a warrior gets really good gear he becomes a better and more versatile tank.
I think anyone knows that. For dungeons this amazingness is not necessary, and druids do their work very well.
the problem is that, at least for warriors in dungeons, the proper gear is not the defensive gear, but the dps gear.
you have to get hit as a warrior, and hit hard enough, to get your rage up. the better your gear, the less you’re hit, and you get hit for less, so your rage generation drops.
i’ve taken to tanking in some mail pieces lately just to take a bit more damage so i can get the rage i need for sundertab spam