How different is tanking in Classic

I have been enjoying Blood DK in retail, but i don’t get the new player feeling anymore, so i’m thinking about changing to classic. But the question is how different tanking is in classic and do you guys enjoy it?

It’s very enjoyable. I haven’t played retail for several expansions so can’t compare. But in Classic, tanking is easily the most challenging, complex and engaging role to play. Having to balance multiple considerations throughout a fight, is really engaging. imo most DPS and Healing classes are both pretty boring in classic.

I think on Retail, threat is not a part of tanking? Threat in classic can be a real challenge and it’s very satisfying when you are able to out-threat your team mates.

The only downside of tanking is you can kind of suck in other roles like e.g. PVP depending on your class or spec and you don’t have dual spec like retail does. Oh the other downside is gear management for tanks is stupid crazy.

The last time i played Blood DK, it had high damage and a lot of self healing. there isn’t really an equivalent in classic, although fury warr tanks can do some good dps while they tank. Druids can do some good melee DPS but only in cat form so not while you tank.

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i love tanking in both retail and classic, but classic is far more enjoyable in my opinion (i tank on warrior, paladin and DK in retail and warrior, paladin and druid in classic)

classic is very different from retail when it comes to tanking (especially if you come from a DK). but it is far more engaging in my opinion then retail when it comes to aggro management and maintaining threat.

one, there’s no real AOE threat for anyone except a paladin, and a paladin aoe threat is not enough to snap aggro off of anyone else’s aoe.

two, there’s no self heal for any tank except a druid emergency heal which is weak in any raid environment. so you’re absolutely dependent on healer and sometimes CC from your party/raid for survival.

three, threat is an issue. in equivalent gear, any dps going all out with CDs will out aggro you eventually, some, like warlocks and warriors will do it fast while others like rogues and hunters can reset and lower their aggro. again group cooperation is required in order to progress, especially in raids.

each tanking class have their strengths and weaknesses. a warrior has the best tool kit for tanking, with a lot of snap aggro and high aggro moves, but has the weakest aoe threat toolset and hardest time dungeon tanking. a paladin has the best aoe threat but has no taunt and is mana starved for any sustained fight, a druid has the best threat generation and is the best dungeon tank of the three but has the least variable toolset and no emergency tools to survive.

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Just be aware, tanking sucks until end game mostly. I went 1-60 prot spec knowing it would be painful.

on the flip side, you don’t really need to be prot in order to tank the 1-60 dungeons, a knowledge of your abilities combined with knowing when to put on a shield will suffice for most dungeons

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I love Paladin tanking with Hand of Edward the Odd as you insta heal yourself upon procs. Also insta holy wrath on undead and hammer of wrath below 20%. With Seal of Righteousness activated the procrate is quite decent.

If your used to retail you will think tanking sucks.

Threat is a big issue if you want to be a tank to raid your pretty much going to be a warrior,druids have some use as they are good on threat but they die to certain bosses due to crushing blows and paladins are great for dungeons and suck for raiding due to the fact you cannot taunt and have to do stupid things like spam your kings buff for threat as you don’t do enough.

if you tank as a prot warrior and wear tanking gear the DPS will always overaggro once they get some good gear you are threat capped but u will tank like a beast as you will be a breeze to heal.

Which then leads you to the only viable tank the fury prot warrior they mostly tank using 1 handers and wearing crit gear so u take DPS gear from DPS wars they do put a sheild on and mitigation gear occasionally but they do less threat with a sheild in mitigation gear than prot in mitigation but do more when wearing crit gear which leads to paper tanks that do great single target threat but die really fast as 100%-0 in two seconds from crits and crushes and if they don’t sheild block or wear a sheild on a hard hitting boss due to crushing blows and crits they can sometimes be one shot.

defence cap is kinda obsolete as sheild block makes you immune to both of these plus it’s difficult to hit the cap anyway

healers have to always pump a fury prot tank or bear tank on hard hitting bosses due to crits and crushes expect to die in pugs or non hardcore guild runs

Tanking on retail is about doing mechanics and using cooldowns.

Tanking in Classic is about preparation, gearing, knowing nuances.

I honestly wouldn’t call it complex. It’s no different to playing other classes and managing your CD’s to perform to the best of your capability. It’s even less skill intensive nowadays then it used to be in vanilla as tanks actually stance danced back then to break fears whereas nowadays at least on Alliance you can just chain fear ward and have DW.

I have played every role in Classic thus far and have done it to a high standard and I will say right now that being an efficient Healer is definitely the most challenging role out of all of them and it’s a lot easier to tell the difference between a baller healer and a terrible one.

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I agree with Salt.

The tank was the boss of Vanilla. In Classic, it’s the healers.

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Tanks can also play big part imo tanks and healers are equal as long there is a good cooperation between those 2 but that’s my idea am playing an endgame tank also played tank in vanilla

Agree to disagree then, I find tanking a lot more fluid in terms of adapting to the situation. The only complexity to playing a healer is managing your mana bar, but most of the time with healer allocation each healer just spams 2 buttons. Not very interesting or challenging and more often than not is just a gear check.

I play warrior tank and holy priest and that’s just my opinion :slight_smile: although both roles are a lot better than DPS.

Tanking has only become hard in retail and classic because DPS has become sloppy… They used to only target the tanks main target, now they just hit whatever the hell they want… Tanking hasn’t become harder, DPS has lost focus of the rules.

If you are unlucky you will get players who blow their cooldowns at the start of a fight the second you engage, and wonder why they have pulled aggro off you. They will then blame you for it. These are called refailers, there are far too many of them in Classic.

You are not an efficient healer then if you just spam 2 buttons as a Healer it’s more to do with predicting incoming damage and cancel casting to preserve mana as well as good judgement on fights that require heavy healing on who to heal as well as down ranking heals to be as efficient as you can. Healers also have to adapt on the fly if assigned healers go down.

I could say the same about Warrior it’s often just spamming your rotation and using survival CD’s on certain parts of boss fights/when needed. Overall Classic isn’t hard I don’t think any class has a particularly challenging rotation other than perhaps Feral Druid (Cat DPS) with power shifting. I just feel the Healer role is a lot more reactive to situations than any other.

But we can agree to disagree. :slight_smile:

There is far too many of them in the game all together, all dpsers seem to just aim to top the DPS charts now which is great… If they were attacking the right bloody target, the rule of attack the tanks target has gone then the tank has to try round up the trash spreading to all the dpsers and it’s a bloody nightmare… I have only just got back into the game since cata and it just seems like the dungeon “rules” have gone out the window and all the new players since then didn’t carry the rules on and has just made tanking a nightmare and toxic because of the group just blames the tank or the healer for not keeping them all alive

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