Shaman tank feedback

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

So I decided to try something entirely new this time since thats whay I believe SOD is all about.

The good:

  1. Nice high armor when 5 stacks of shield mastery are up. I guess the concept was to make a block based tank that does dodge/parry much but has good steady damage input. This usually is a good thing for tanking since its manageable healing.

  2. Being critical immune without the need for defence on gear. It allows for gear flexibility down the line.

  3. Good AOE aggro in the form of molten blast. Feels really nice in dungeons.

  4. This is a personal thing but the fantasy of a shaman tapping into the power of earth to become a powerful tank is a nice idea.

The not so good/bad/bad in the future.

  1. Mana is still an issue and will be more if we stay at 20% base block. Right now even with using water shield instead of molten blast (which feels bad) you cant sustain yourself in single target fights and sometimes with bad rng you get no blocks and mana drops even in multiple target fights. The solution is not to increase mana provided by shield mastery rune but simply add another rune next phase than increase our block chance A LOT with a high uptime. My suggestion is to make Lightning shield to increase block chance by 70%, cost 50% less mana and have 10 stacks. This way we will not be forcd into water shield which simply put feels bad for a tank shaman. However there is still the risk of running OOM when not tanking anything since our mana regen is based on block. But I guess if you are not tanking you can hold back a little bit anyway.

  2. Low block chance can cause shield mastery stacks to fall off. Pretty much the rootcause is similar as above. Bad RNG on single target fights and sometimes more target fights make our block so unreliable.

  3. Spell + hit tank combination. It might not be an issue now, but unless we get some passive hit/spell hit rating down the line as tanks I cant imaging being able to hold aggro at all. This will 100% be an issue in raids and will make shaman unviable if not adressed.

  4. Spell based fights. In case we are facing a boss that casts spell, as shaman tank we are uselless. We wont be able to block anything and also run out of mana asap. My suggestiong here is to add another run in the future on another slot that basically allows shamans to block spells also. This will establish the shaman as the BLOCK tank and make it the core theme of the spec.

  5. This is not for shaman tank but its a general thing. Having 1 weapon enhancement (in this case rockbiter) prevents anything else from being used. I guess its time we are able to benefit from sharpening/weightstones, windfury from totem/druid etc while having our own tank weapon enchancement.

Overall I believe shamans will do very well on mitigation. Threat and mana will definately be an issue in bosses especially at higher levels if not addressed. Overall I hope the spec turns out to be great and fun and we are able to tank some bosses. I personally cant wait for it.

2 Likes
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I like the Lightning shield = x% block chance idea.
The spell block idea would be too broken imo, we should add that only half of block rating will effect spell blocks, so we still have some spell mitigation but dont become the non plus ultra tank.

Adding to “way of earth” that earth shock has a x% increased chance to hit would be an easy fix.

3

Your feedback regarding block gave me a notion… It would be awesome if Blizz eventually designed the tanking runes around different mitigation types for all classes. Shamans/Palas could be primarily block tanks, Rogues primarily parry tanks, Ferals & Warlocks primarily dodge tanks and Warriors could have a healthy mix of the three.

EDIT: Technically, I believe that’s how it is now, but I’m not convinced it’s fleshed out enough.

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Mana regen / block chance does feel a bit unreliable sometimes, but on the other hand you don’t actually need to use many spells to keep aggro, if any. You get a lot of aggro just from auto attacking, and if you’re tanking your job isn’t to be top dps. You can downrank spells for better sustain, earthshock taunts and interrupts just as well on rank 1 etc.

1 Like
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Yea I already use rank 1 earth shock. I am not worried about now. I am worried about max level tanking. Right now I tank like a king. But mana issue is already popping off and block is unreliable. Anyway we will see how it goes. Devs said they wanted to listen to the players so I posted feedback. I said both the good and the bad.