Tank balance thread

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Mandatory? No, they’re not. It’s a classic version, gameplay-wise close to the original game, with all its pros and cons…and a certain disbalance is always present. Similar to how let’s say protadins / hpalas were OP in Wrath, BDKs are now and MoP will quite sure have anothers. There will always be classes that are just stronger than the rest, and you could ague that the difference between best and worst should not be that big, but…check out dps charts from later WotLK stages (let’s say ToC to not have brutal dps on rets, furys and cats) and the difference between best and worst…and not nearly everything was “balance-patched.” It just didn’t feel as bad because there are a milion of dps classes, so the scaling goes more smoothly, while with only 4 tanking classes, the differences simply seem bigger.

Didn’t say or at least didn’t mean that the other tanks are dumb “spam one button” arcane mages of WotLK, but considering that all the other classes have mastery that works passively, while the DKs rely on DS, which should be planned, and that the BDK still has more CDs to use (and quite often they do need to be used), I stand by my original statement - which you of course have no obligation to agree with.
Also, you say that if you have some basic class knowledge you can tank raids - well, the way I see it, tanking in cata is in absolutely no way about the aggro, as it used to be in previous expansions (just taking expansions as a whole since we’re all on classic, which always runs the latest patch balance), but rather more about the knowledge of the fight, needed positioning, CD usage and so on - so yeah, I even agree with you on this one, I just don’t think it’s wrong. And yeah, if you only tank normals…it ofc depends on the PoV, beginners would probably find some bosses complicated too, but I’d say that normals are actually supposed to be very easy, or at least they’re made that way intentionally - and no, I don’t really know why the LFR difficulty was introduced, DS bosses are easy on normals too. But stating that basic class knowledge is enough for raid tanking - well, if you’re talking normals, I think that’s deliberate, it’s the HC where you need to be on higher lvl. And I think this goes for all the tanking classes (got experience with more than one as alts).

Again though…the question here doesn’t have THE correct answer, so we sure can agree to disagree :slight_smile:

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Prot Paladin is fine, pugged 10/12 hc and main tank was Paladin.

The issue is that Paladin Tanks only work after they reach a certain Mastery. Theres a break point where they will always dodge, parry or block for a permanent 30% damage reduction or avoid the attack completely.

This means if your Tanks don’t understand this and do optimal gearing in phase 1, they cant reach the breakpoint and get destroyed in HC.

Later phases when the gear is stronger it is easier to Reach the Breakpoint but now in Phase 1 you can’t afford your tanks to be idiots and not itemise properly.

I am willing to bet your tanks weren’t avoidance capped which is a death sentence on Heroic. DKs should still go for avoidance cap but they can actually tank stuff and survive without being avoidance capped.

If your tanks have pre raid BiS gear they should be avoidance capped. Literally everything should have Stam and Mastery or they are hard griefing.

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I don’t believe this is true. I am 358 ilvl, i have mastery on everything (gems, enchant, reforge) and i am not breaking the 90%. And that is with raid gear, i seriously doubt paladins can reach full CTC in phase 1, let alone with pre-raid gear.

In fact, i read everywhere paladins will reach full CTC in firelands. The reason is that we are on rating calculation from patch 4.3, but with gear from patch 4.0.

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With prebis a prot paladin can not get avodiance cap dude. Show me a prebis for prot paladin which reaches avodiance cap :slight_smile:

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I think 90% Mastery is avoidance capped because your dodge and parry should both roughly 20% of the time and the hits that land if you have holy shield is 100% block chance.

I’m not a tank main so I don’t know the exact cap but its around what you are saying.

Blood DK is the strongest but a prot pala and druid with pre raid bis can clear 12/12hc with that gear.

If you can do it with your dk but not your hc geared paladin tank that basically means your healers are trash or your tank is trash or both. If you play META and are average skilled, when you lose your tank that can cheese mechanics, all the holes in your skill and gameplay will show. This is what happened you are clearing because the class is easy and very strong and not because you are good players.

The only tank balancing they should do is buff Warriors. Druid is very strong and paladin is decent now but scales really well. Warrior is the only over-massively behind.

DK is S Tier,
Druid is A Tier,
Paladin is B but will probs go into A in Firelands or DS with more gear.
Warrior is D for the entire expansion.

You can only justify buffing Warrior and maybe a tiny tiny buff to Prot Paladin of it is even needed. This tank gap gets less big as the expansion goes on so phase 1 is the biggest it will be. Warriors urgently need help though. They should get buffs on Par what they did the Ret in Ulduar.

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I agree with this. Even with BWD/TOTFW/BOTs broken releases and insane difficulty.
People cleared it with Warrior tanks back in the day.

Focus less on pumping dps and more on handling mechanics & using your cooldowns properly. You’re prob gonna wipe for many attempts, might aswell try and git gud in the meantime.

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When i say 90% avoidance, i meant block + dodge + parry + 5% miss.

No one get 90% block chance alone, even in Dragon Soul heroic gear. 90% block chance is insane, especially factoring in the diminishing return on secondary stats.

And Holy Shield does not increase chance to block, that’s from TBC/wolk. In cataclysm, holy shield increase increase the amount you block by 20% for 10 second. And holy shield had a 30 sec CD, so you can only at best have it up 33% of the time

ht tps://www.wowhead.com/cata/spell=20925/holy-shield

Do you understand what the word “pre-raid” means?

It means before the raid, it means gear accessible before the raid open. That means a bunch of 346 from heroic dungeons + some craft + some rep gear and a couple of valor gear.

Tanks will not clear 12/12 hc with that gear, especially nefarian. I understand some of the best in the world manage to clear tier while being undergeared, but even them they do have some item dropped in raid on them.

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That’s not the problem. You’re a DK, i’m a paladin, we’re going to be fine. But the dude playing a prot warrior is not. Prot warrior are going to get rejected by many PUG. Even if the group is wrong to reject the warrior, that doesn’t change the fact that the warrior is not finding a group.

Guild wise it’s the same. I’m a paladin in a guild, i’m set. But the prot warrior looking for a good HC guild is going to have a hard time. I see the recruit message in the capitals, no guild looking for warrior, if there’s a tank spot open, it’s often paladin or druid, not even DK since there’s so many of them.

Perhaps the warrior will find a friendly casual guild, but that means he can say goodbye to any heroic ambitions.

Look at those stat, pay attention to the number of parse
ht tps://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#class=Tanks

above 31k parses for DK and under 2k for warrior. Prot warriors are disappearing this expansion. It’s not a “git gud” issue. People playing warrior as tank will have to either reroll or wait for MoP.

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No you dont reach avoidance cap with pre-raid bis. On my prot warrior, main specc, I am still 29% away from avoidance cap. With everything correctly gemmed and so on. 41% Mastery, 17% parry and 13% dodge. So there is still a long way to. Maybe with almost full heroic gear you can reach avoidance cap, but going for avoidance cap before you start doing HC is a pipe dream.

Fact is as a main prot warrior I will always be relegated to OT. Unless blizzard buffs prot warrior. Which is sad because I really dont wanna reroll because of it. So I have put alot of effort into gearing my OS so that I can bring good dps on fights that only require 1 tank.

However I think prot warrior dont need much to be strong. A better defensive cd/tool or better scaling with Mastery and it will be fine.

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The issue you guys are having with Blood Death Knight is how they mitagate.

They mitagate with a massive heal that when overheal converts to a shield. This means even if they use their mitagation at extremely bad times, they still usually get 100% value out of hit because the shield will block the next attack. On top of this they have extra Defensive CDs as they have less % mitagation than the other Tank specs. This design means if you are braindamaged but roughly press the right buttons you can tank any boss.

Now if you play a Prot Paladin or Warrior you have 2 issue compared to this. You have less mitagation CDs and rely heavily on Holy Shield and Shield Block for you Mitagation. Your CDs are way stronger than a Blood DKs but have longer a longer Cooldown and they are time based. This means if you press your buttons at a bad time you can just straight up die as you run out of mitagation, where the DK will just keep their shield mitagation up even if they use it wrong time.

So you can see if you aren’t playing a DK you have to understand the fight and use your CDs properly. If you use them properly there isn’t much difference between the Tanks but a Blood DK can get away with being bad where the other Tanks can’t.

The tank I know cleared full HC as every Tank but hes obviously a very skilled player and can play all 4 classes pretty optimally. Cataclysm is honestly the first expansion with the philosophy of bring the player rather than the gear. Classes are designed in a way now that good players far out-shine average ones as most classes are more complex and with the large amounts of utility and needing to adjust rotations on the fly is what causes this.

Before if you played someone with more gear but they were worse than you they usually out dpsed you in classic but this is not the case anymore in Cata.

I feel you didntl’t read what I said as well because I said Prot Warriors needed a urgent buff like Rets got in Ulduar. Prot Warriors are funny because they excell at other things the other tanks don’t like mobility and crowd control. They also are actually very tanky vs Physical Damage when geared enough but are paper vs Magic Damage with is pretty common Damage type.

They need something that makes them not get deleted by magic damage. They should be careful when buffing them because like I said they really excell at valuable things like mobility, CC and damage so patching their weakness too much would make them outshine the others. They definitely need a big buff but Blizzard needs to be able to tone it down if they go too far.

Another thing they could do is just buff all Tanks accept Blood DK.
Do a large Buff for Warrior,
medium buff to Prot Pala,
Small buff to Feral Tank
And obviously not touch DK.

This would close the gap and make it so DKs don’t have to get nerfed. I really happy for Blizzard to do changes and people who are against that usually have weak or really dumb reasons but if they are gonna adjust things they need to be able to go back on some changes if they overbuff or take things too far. I’d prefer this method.

Overall, it is clearable and yes if you are a Prot Warrior you better have some insane Logs and skill if you want people to risk a lockout for you. Everyone else though is fine.

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They always get a shield, no matter when deathstrike is used.

2 Likes
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Yeah I mean’t that but you can see how theres no timing aspect to it. You always will get 100% use out of your mitagation as a Blood DK. The other Tank specs can mess up using it at a bad time and get punished way more hard.

That’s why you have to be a stronger player to Tank HC on the other Tanks. Less leanacy and higher skill/knowledge check.

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Sometimes it´s more benefitial to hold of the Deathstrikes for until after you have sustained massive damage as the shield will be bigger than what you´d gain from the base percentage.

But overall, i agree with you, sometimes, when i ran out of CDs on my pally, i feel a bit like paper^^

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Thats an issue with classic in general.
Not with Cata.

Previous expans same thing. No prot palas in classic.
Certain tanks took precedence in wotlk/tbc to.
Same with dps.

It is a gitgud issue, in able to perform with Prot Warrior. Because it’s not impossible or borderline impossible. People are just being attracted to the best performing specc/Class, fotm if you will.

They won’t be able to remediate the effect it has already done. But they can buff prot warriors a bit to not make it worse.

MoP will have the same with some tanks not being chosen. And in pugs people suck extra hard, so they try to compensate by taking fotm, hoping that even if you’re horrible at popping cds. You can survive better because Dk. Or taking dps that just naturally does more dmg even if you screw a bit with the rotation.

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Yeah the room for error is much smaller for prot warrior. But a weak tank also means that healers and other support abilities has to be better timed. This is honestly the biggest issue and a big reason imo why people rather not risk a MT Prot warrior over a BDK. Which is sad. Because of the “easyness” of bdk, other classes get the eaiser aswell. So sometimes healers might get suprised by the difference in nature of different tanks. Because twice in normal raids I have had to take the MT roll because the bdk didnt know tactics and so on. But that is an issue with community perception.

Yeah I agree prot warrior dont need much. And as soon as prot warrior get a bit better gear, the issues are not that big.
I find that really magic damage is the only issue. I almost always save shield block for magic damage, which I think doesnt feel great. So the fix I would like to see is to give prot warrios some more way to have magic damage reduction. Maybe a glyph or spell or talent that increase magic damage reduction, other than shirld block.

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Reminder to buff prot warriors. It sucks to feel like the black sheep in the tank family

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Don’t worry its almost 100% certainty Prot Warriors will get buffed.

They said after TBC they are happy to go and fix the outliars if there was good enough reason too such as no other spec that performs well or is a different role. An example would be Arms Warrior being strong but Fury being weak, Blizzard will not buff Fury because Arms is viable and strong and it fits the same niche as Fury.

But for Prot Warrior, theres nothing you can do than Reroll you entire role or class so they are 100% gonna intervene. This criteria was why they buffed Ret in WoTLK because it was reroll your class or change your role which feels like a lose-lose situation.

The buff will probs be on the ZA and ZG patch to try the buffs in T11 Raids so they can do more buffs if needed before Firlelands or nerfs if they overbuff it.

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Did you account for difference of incoming damage that other tanks mitigate using shield or other ways?

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People look at Blood Dks selfheal. People dont look at Dmg taken.
I dare you to play Halfus 25man HC the way i play it, with me as a warrior just tanking everything besides Halfus. I have basically zero reliable selfheal as a warrior, but if i tank multiple Dragons hitting HARD, having the strongest consistent physical dmg reduction in the game is way better than having selfheal. And that is even before having enough 2ndary stats allow me to run around with a minor shield wall active for 100% of the time.

Much truth in here.

Yeah, please buff me!

*laughs maniacally

Just out of interest, but on what bosses do you encounter magic dmg that makes you feel you need to safe shield block for it ?

Shield wall is 40% on 2 min CD. Given fight lengths, thats often times better than having 50% on 3 min cd.

Shield block with talents is 30sec CD.

I mean, i played Protpally for the whole of TBC and Wotlk, so i wouldnt mind playing an OP tank AGAIN in cata, but in all honesty, protwarrior does not need buffs.

I main a Protwarrior. Prot is fine. My dmg intake has never, and will never be a problem in Raidprogression.

I need more healing on low tank dmg encounter than my DK tank mate.
I need the same amount of healing on medium dmg encounters like Omnitron, where i mitgate about the same amount of dmg that my DK mate heals/selfabsorbs.
And if we speak about hard hitting encounters, well, Protwarrior has an edge there, same with multitarget encounters.
While dks selfheal and absorb get stronger the more dmg he takes, he still is suffering from rune availability. A protwarrior is constantly having huge dmg reduction.
And with more gear, it will only get more distinguished.
Once you reach unhittable, you will be at shieldwall levels of physical dmg reduction, permanently, will having even more during shieldblock (you will reach ~60% critblockchance during shieldblock once unhittable, giving you 62% dmg reduction on blocks).

As mentioned, i tank everything besides halfus on halfus hc, all together. I equal or top a million selfheal/absorb during that short window of extreme dmg intake via blocking, chaining shieldblock into shieldwall into stand+frenz into shieldblock.
Its like having a DK with 25k+ hps for extend periods of time.

There is once thing, and one thing only tho i would love to see changed/buffed on warriors.

Give us more singletarget Dmg as Protwarriors.
While i main Protwarrior, i also play BloodDK, and Protpally.
Protwarriors ST dps is really bad in comparison (at least in what is achievable), gimme moar.

On multitarget, specially big groups, protwarrior is amazing, currently reaching up to 90k dps on big trashpulls.

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Gierscore is me btw, in case someone feels the need to logcheck or anything.