Feral Druid tanks are not the best tanks in WoW Classic, but they offer niche abilities that make them a good choice for some raids. While Warriors are the dominant tanks for most content, Feral Druids can be decent for specific roles.
Druid tanks have a low damage output compared to warriors, which can be compensated with innervate and more armor. Most warriors will be able to use Feral Aggression as an exception, but it is a negligible benefit and not worth the 5 points. The only other potential option is Natural Shapeshifter, if you plan to use it.
Druid tank single target performance is the worst of all tanks by far, and they have zero AOE threat capability. OG bear form is also weak. Druids lack the ability to tank as primary tanks in end game content, except for bosses with poor melee attacks.
This guide covers Druid Tank changes in Season of Discovery, Viability, Strengths and Weaknesses, Best Specialization, Spell Rotation, and more. Druid tanks are great in Classic due to their high threat and sustain, unlike Paladin tanks. Travel and Cat Forms increase Druid’s overall speed before level 40, and their Heal over Time Spells minimize downtimes. Regrowth is not recommended, as it is expensive and results in useless overheal.
For dungeons, Druid tanks are preferred due to their less stressful nature for DPs and the amount of threat they generate.
📹 Classic WoW Tanking and Threat Guide
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📹 Guide to Feral Druid for DPS in 106 Seconds
Feral Druid DPS Guide WOTLK Cat Snake Weaving Feral Cat Feral Druid Talent Build: …
Hey, everyone here is a link to view and comment on the PowerPoint slides. Enjoy. Also, timestamps and corrections are below: drive.google.com/file/d/1bg3wA54Z8a1qrNOzqKiRtkyUiyF3NKOJ/view?usp=sharing Here are the corrections (errata): 1) 6:43 the voice-over says, “your abilities accrue 1.3x more damage than the damage they produce” when I meant to say 1.3x more threat than the damage they produce. 2) 9:34 on the “Threat Generated by Damage” slide, the Defensive Stance example text says “Battle Stance modifier” in it instead of “Defensive Stance modifier” 3) 14:48 the text and voice-over, I say that shaman’s Grace of Air totem reduces threat, when it should be Tranquil Air totem 4) 23:44 the voice-over says that crushing blows only come from enemies 4 levels above you. The correct number for Classic is 3 levels above you (it was changed to 4 in WotLK). Here are timestamps: What is a tank’s role? 0:49 Who can tank? 1:34 Basic Tanking Cycle: 4:28 What is Threat? 5:21 How is Threat Generated? 6:13 How else is Threat Generated? 7:27 Threat generated by Damage: 8:44 Threat generated by Healing: 10:02 Threat generated by Buffs/Debuffs: 11:31 Threat generated by Power Gains: 13:00 Threat generated by Classes, Talents, and Abilities: 13:48 Threat generated by Buffs, Items, and Enchants: 14:36 Balancing and Maximizing or Minimizing Threat: 15:37 Transferring Aggro: 16:22 Setting up Your Pulls: 18:26 How to Engage Mobs: 20:19 Tanking Single Mobs: 21:47 Tanking Multiple Mobs: 22:23 How to Mitigate Damage: 23:16 Situational Abilities: 24:59 Conclusion: 26:11
Basic basic basic tips for everyone grouping classic: Dps: wait a few seconds for the tank to build threat (and rage) Tanks: watch the full group, not just what’s in front of you, and watch the healer’s mana Healer: don’t stand in melee range when healing or it increases your threat, and let dps die if it means saving scraps of mana for the tank.
Biggest issue being having to explain all this every time you find yourself in a PUG with clueless dps that don’t have a threat meter. But instead only care about being on top of their only addon, the dps meter. They start attacking as soon as you fire your bow to pull, they don’t attack the marked targets and they aren’t paying attention to what’s around them and therefor pull extra packs. And then blame their deaths on you or the healer. Having to type it all out in a simple enough way for them to understand it, keeping their attention for all that time without them just spamming “go go go” in chat. It’s often very infuriating. Being able to stay calm as a tank, having tons of patience and being able to communicate well is very important.
Something warriors can do on pulls: after you entered combat by doing a range pull use Bloodrage & Battle Shout. That will give you some additional threat right from the beginning and may save your healer some trouble if he/she used a HoT on you too early. Edit: same goes for druids – HoT yourself up before you starfire your target.
Very nice, generally detailed guide. One critical omission though (at least I can’t find it), is that you don’t explain *how taunt works*. To quote wowwiki: “(Taunt) is a single target debuff which forces the mob to attack the warrior for three seconds, generating enough threat so the warrior matches the current top entry in the mob’s aggro list.” This knowledge is vital. When you taunt, you MATCH the CURRENT top threat, and it’s forced to attack you for 3 seconds. If the previous top keeps producing more threat than you, you might lose aggro again (at 110%/130%) after those 3 seconds.
I remember when Battle Shout’s threat was not divided by the number of enemy mobs. My guild used it on Phase 1 Nefarian, trivializing the phase. We all stacked up on the tanks while they just spammed Battle Shout, producing enough threat to hold aggro on all the mobs. Battle Shout was nerfed just a few weeks later.
Really nice article and great initiative. It would be awesome if you made more and went into more details. Maybe make a article for each of the 4 tank classes and how they play out and operate? I’m not complaining here, I’m just saying it would be really appreciated since you hardly spoke of Paladins and Shamans at all compared to how much time you spend on Warriors and Druids. And even Druids didn’t get so much attention there when it came to how abilities worked. 🙂 On the Defensive parts I would have liked if you had mentioned how Paladins have in talents 30% increased block value and Shamans have 25% increased block value, which are important. Also there is a trick for the Druid tank where you let a Warrior momentarily taunt the boss off you, jump out of bear form to cast Barkskin, then jump back into Bear form and taunt the boss back, making you have an amazing mitigation-or-“oh shit”-tool with a mere 1 minute cooldown! Insane…That will be of use several times during the same raid boss fight… On Private Servers, Paladin’s can use the /sit function to keep a 100% upkeep of Redoubt, regardless of the amount of mobs. /sit would also proc Reckoning, so sitting is a significant mitigation and threat boost for the paladin. Especially since Paladin has 30% increased block value in talents. And that also works in raid encounters and raid bosses. As long as the Paladin is above like 70% health give or take depending on gear and consumables/buffs. A crit wont kill a tank on a raid boss if at high percentage healthpool, and since the paladin will be defence capped, the only crits received will be controlled by the paladin.
All I remember from classic is full prot Warrior’s mt, fury hybrid ot, oh and better have a full set of fire resist gear, maybe some shadow resist peices, Druids were basically brought for enervate and they group healed.Paly’s were for buffs and tank healing. Typical pull: hunter pulls for tank, feins death+tank taunts, raid wide white dmg while tank stacks sunders, ot keeps demo shout and thunder clap up, 20 min later “ok yellow dmg”, then Omen threat meter came out lol. Good times!
I bought WOW in November of 2004 and played a priest and mage. IN burning crusade, i finally decided to tank, but, if you guys remember, pally tanking in BC was a bit of a joke. You throw the shield, hit three mobs, burn the ground beneath you and just spam your cleave. So when classic came out, i decided i’d make a warrior tank on the side and my god is it a lot to digest. This guide was beyond awesome. Great job dude and thanks so much for posting.
A great guide and as always nicely produced and well researched. I would add whirlwind to the stance dance bit as well though. Just like thunder clap it should be used early if you have excess rage left over from your previous pull or if you charged in. I personally prefer thunderclap though, for the damage mitigation.
Nice guide! All warriors should be able to tank if asked to, it’s not that hard. Some additional tips not mentioned: 1. Save your resources! Adding threat to mobs that are about to die is utterly pointless. If you can you want to have a full rage bar before every pull for shouts/high initial threat. It will boost clearspeed significantly and make every pull really safe. 2. Make a macro that toggles autoattack every time you tab to a new target. A super simple macro that will make tanking a walk in the park. You can greatly increase your tanking efficiency with various macros if so inclined, but that is the only one required. 3. You don’t necessarily have to tank the whole pack. If the skull is a squishy clothie that dies quickly or does little damage to a dps warr/rogue you might wanna leave it alone and focus on more important targets
Amazing article, really appriciated you posting this! Started as a human mage but got burned out by first day snaps and overcrowding. So I decided to just go on a server with low queue and roll a Orc Warrior. I haven’t played WoW before so at my current level of 19 I have about 30-40 corpse runs to my name. But at about level 16 I got invited to run RC in Orgrimar as a tank. So from my first two-three runs I managed to figgure out most of this, (obviusly not the math or other classes) but this will level up my tank game for sure. Again thank you so much.
Great article, well put together and loaded with good tips. One significant correction however – Crushing Blows. Prior to 3.0, Crushing Blows could occur if you were fighting a mob only 3 or more levels above you, not 4 or more. So in Vanilla and TBC, raid bosses (effectively level 63 & 73, respectively) could still Crushing Blow max level tanks unless the tanks pushed crushes off the hit table with avoidance percentage. 3.0 increased the level gap to 4 levels before crushes came back onto the table to reduce the importance of avoidance, which was a significant buff for Feral Tanks in end-game viability.
Hunters with an owl/bat/carrion bird can provide a lot of additional mitigation by using Screech. Its basically demoralizing shout that stacks with DS. It generates a lot if aggro, tho, so watch your pet’s health. Personally of the 3, I prefer Carrion Birds, specifically Spiteflayer(has a 1.2 attack speed) from the Blasted Lands. Carrion Birds have no dps penalties, an armor bonus, have access to both bite and claw for dumping Focus, have Screech to replace Claw when it’s safe to debuff, and eat fish, which is much much cheaper than the Meat only diets of Owls
Funky to see these guides about topics that was the most basic of basics in WoW anno a over a decade ago. Gives a rather interesting perspective as to how the game has progressed and evolved the last years when it’s clearly assumed people don’t know these things any longer. When BFA started I did hope to see a few things become challenging again, but it’s generally not been except for a rare few times and those are usually in the timewalking dungeons when older content was assumed to be AoE fests as most anything is today.
Hi! Not bad. All of the information provided is correct and needed, just a bunch left out. Why not use target my target’s target? This can be easier than skull x. Also, most of classic dungeons have 5 or more mobs. As a tank I cannot focus on x but must spread attacks around. Finally, tanking is all about when things go sideways. What do you do when the mage pulls aggro? What do you do when a level 60 mage is in a group with a level 40 tank? Having a large range of levels is much easier to have in classic because there is no dungeon finder.
Wrong Growl in the article: It says 100 range, but in classic it is melee range. Also Druid has basically the same AOE Taunt as warrior has, and something that works similar to bloodrage, and then there is power shifting (+ Wolfshead Helm), which makes sense right before a pull or even right after pulling with moonfire and then going into bear form with a 10 rage, while the moonfire ticks have a 1.3 threat multiplier.
Nice article, but I would have liked to see some more discussion about prot pallies. I know prot pallies are not quite as common or effective in a raiding environment, however I was hoping you may have explored their ability to tank a bit more thoroughly and offered some tips or advice around that. They are unlikely to main tank, however there is a possibility of off tanking a mob or tanking aoe packs. I would have liked to see some discussion surrounding those topics as well as spells to utilize, method of pulling, where there niche lies, and some gearing tips and tricks. Either way, great article!
Thx for the basics. There is only one thing that I missed: Offtanking mobs. In many dungeons in vanilla, I did not hold aggro on the first target (skull) till the end. So I lost aggro, but it didn’t matter, because skull died a few seconds later. Either it ran to the casters and died on its way to them, or the melee got hit 1-2 times. It made my life much easier, as I could build up threat on the second in the list and the other mobs. If the group is trustworthy, I could even just stun skull as a warrior and concentrate on the rest of the pack, as the mob dies in the duration of the stun anyways.
As i recall correctly, in 1.12 when you tried to obtain initial threat on mutiple (3+) mobs, u had to use battleshout, as it was bugged (or designed like this dunno..) a little and it generated like 50 threat on every npc multiplied by every friendly target who gained the buff, so in theory if you were able to buff everyone in the party with BS then u generated like 250 threat on each npc u pulled, but demoshout only generated like 50 on each mobs. That 250 threat was almost equals with the threat of 1 sunder as i remember, revenge and shield slam was higher threat but still was a good start at pull. Btw make your own group and take mage/hunter/rogue dps-ers to CC 1-2 npcs all the time, it helps a lot if u only need to worry about 2-3 npcs not 5, and dont forget to remind ppl to give enough time for the tank to gain threat. in vanilla as a dps you cannot go full ham nuke at the begining of the fight, especially if the tank has to swap target to make sure the healer wont get aggro. And dont forget to take healers with talented threat reduce, later on when u will have proper weapon and gear it wont really matter, but in questing greens / blues it can couse trouble when the healer starts to burst heal without any threat reduction at pull, priests are the bests if they use Fade properly, that spell is amazing at pull 🙂
For someone who is a Shaman expert I’m surprised that you don’t know that earthshock is their taunt (double threat). The number of times I had to stop new shaman using earth shock in dungeons because the kept pulling threat each time the shocked. Also Rockbiter weapon was the Shaman passive threat generator.
As a tank it’s great to know what is optimal rotation in any given situation, because occasionally you will get some pro in your pug who just loves to point out that you might be 5% less efficient than you could be or sin of sins, you are a total noob because the healer got aggro for a second ten minutes in, causing said healer to sustain that crippling 7% damage. Salt aside, if you are a good tank and people know it, they will continue to push your abilities, as tank I loved this and was one of the great challenges in vanilla. Especially levelling, when you would have a core 10-20 guys you always instanced in, and the chaos was always walking the line but ultimately contained. It’s always the hunters who can’t use their pet properly or the pushy mage trying to get gnomes done in 25 minutes who caused the wipes, ultimately adding many many minutes to the run. All good fun though, no one is so bad in wow these days that they can’t modify their play style to suit the group dynamics, and if they are they quickly get jettisoned.
7:08 is 0,8 coefficient from vanilla? 8:06 i’ve thought this talent made you receive 145% threat on whie damage not 149,5% 11:19 where have you taken that paladins get reduced threat on healing? 15:01 don’t get them – they are trash 22:34 blocking (if you have a block cap 25% gear + 75% active shield block) will prevent crushing blows not crits. To prevent crits you need defence cap.(300 + 140)
The one change I would like to see is them getting rid of crushing blows. Its a mechanic intended to keep people from cheesing higher level content. But it is a mechanic that would have been game breaking had warriors not had improved shield block. One point in that one talent prevented the game from being broken at release. If warriors hadn’t had improved shield block you would have seen crushing blows removed or moved from mobs 3 levels higher to 4 levels higher (which happened in wrath) in the first patch after guilds started end game raiding. Crushing blows are a game breaking mechanic that by pure stroke of luck didn’t break the game because one class by pure chance had a single talent the negated the mechanic. If you think the devs included improved shield block with the purpose of pushing crushing blows off the table I have a bridge to sell you. It was by total accident that crushing blows didn’t break end game entirely. Without crushing blows druids and paladins become move viable raid tanks. Druids more so of course.
For DPS players: Threat is super easy to do well but super difficult to min max. Don’t try to min max it if you don’t know what you are doing. If you fuck up you probably caused a wipe and wasted 39 other peoples time. EDIT: About 10:09 I came up with a very cool strategy for Hydross in SSC utilizing the ‘Threat from healing is evenly distributed between all enemies’-mechanic. The issue is that Hydross healing is VERY spiky around the transition between phases so you can’t really stop all healing. This leaves us with the risk of healers getting aggro on Hydross rendering him out of position and chaos emerges with the aggro swapping threat thresholds etc etc etc. The trick is to not kill the adds. Instead you kite them using a protection paladin with spell dmg + Frost resistance gear (to resist the freeze stun) and a piercing howl warrior to slow the adds. If the paladin gets frozen after all he can just bubble + cancelaura macro it off. This will mean you will need a SS on the warrior. I did the math roughly on how likely it is to wipe due to RNG, and it’s sub 1%. Actually pulled the strat off consistently.
great vid man im just starting to lvl tank now on classic. as i only went to tank in tbc on a druid. i was rouge all of classic back in the old days. i do under stand threat as i was a rouge back then and have tanked for many years on druid. but tanking in classic is lot diff to wow from tbc and up to mod wow so i really did find this vid very helpful . im finding warr a bit slow but i know it gets lot better once i get past lvl 40.
Since you mentioned pet tanking, in Cata leveling my Gobo hunter in a 5 man (Sunken Temple). On dragon boss, tank gets pissed after a wipe and bails. Pulled out my newly acquired White Gorilla from STV pet, and told the healer to heal the pet. Told the other dps to wait a few seconds after I send the pet to build aggro, they do. Using healer heals, the occasional hunter heal, and perusal our dps to let the pet keep aggro, boom! Boss goes down with a pet tank. Then we did the undead wind serpent boss the same way. 1 shot, bam! Another easy boss kill! If dps watch their dps and everyone lets the pet keep aggro, I’m betting we could have done the whole instance with my gorilla tanking!
paladins can bubble the other tank and salvs them to switch threat, if theres another pally bop on cd, they can also reapply the bubble if needed while the prot pally is still gaining aggro, also prot pally has holy shield, so they can block 30% more than a warr at all times. its actually not hard to tank as a pally especially in tier 1 content, but its just not dumby proof for them because they dont have taunts like warriors or druids when they fail to keep aggro. often times i see warrs using taunt on CD because they simply dont understand threat. a good pally keeps threat with very meticulous methods and min maxing dmg that being said, no warrior or druid comes close to a pally in dungeons
I do wish that blizz fixed the shaman tank spec to make them viable back in Vanilla. That way it could have been ready for classic release. Same for pallys even…. i think it was lazy to make them not have taunts, less mana cost on ability useage, and for shamans a damage mitigation in mail like what druids got for leather in bear form.
So from someone who has never tanked but always played a dps class following behind the tank, tips for brand new to tanks when you dont know your way around the dungeons? vanilla dungeons can be huge mazes. Also, I recommend all dps to at least play a few levels as a tank type class. I’ve been leveling a warrior, doing some dou leveling with a brand new player trying a dps class and been learning a lot about getting aggro and building rage and really see the issue when dps just starts hammering the mobs before giving the tank a chance to get aggro before trying to burn them down.
I think the example with the hunter pulling aggro and passing the melee range of a mage is off: When the hunter pulls aggro another player then needs 110%/130% of the hunter’s threat to pull aggro right? So the mage, as soon as the mob enters his melee range, would need 110% threat of the hunter, which currently has at least 130% of the tank, meaning the mage would need 140% threat of the tank in order to pull aggro. By that point he would have aggro anyway.
One error blocking does not reduce critical strikes only crushing blows. Critical strikes are calculated before avoidance and mitigation. A critical strike cannot be avoided or mitigated by blocking. A critical strike cannot be blocked, dodged, parried, or miss. The only way to avoid critical strikes is by increasing defense which reduces the probability of a mob getting a critical strike based on your defense rating relative he mobs expertise.
What do you guys think the addon scene will be like? Since they are using the modern client and infrastructure, I am thinking that addons will be much better and precise than original vanilla addons. I am looking forward to a better threat meter than Omen. Would be nice to have raid tools too and O-Pie for quick marking.
In my humble opinion it isn’t the fact that Paladin’s don’t have a taunt that makes them not viable as raid tanks. Yes it is partially due to the fact that they run on Mana which is a limited resource but also that there is no gear in the game within rating that is aimed at Paladin tanks. If there was gear they would my opinion be completely viable except for fights like four horsemen where you need to taunt.
“Only ever played classic just before tbc so never really got to play. But so excited to be able to play it. Big question though is if I go Allie. I want to be a gnome tank. As I love the char looks etc. Big thing. So if I don’t go human for the 5 wep skill or nelf for the dodge increase. Will it really cause the havoc of getting into groups at end game etc that much
Good guide. Stupid question, say I am dps:ing in a raid as a warlock, there is a Skull and an X target. I cast a dot, corruption, on the X target while shadowbolting Skull target. Will I get placed higher on the Skull targets threat list because I have a dot ticking on the X target? Or does the dot on X not affect my threat buildup on Skull?
First of all: Great explanation! Thanks for putting this together, I think every WoW player should know this stuff, at least the general concepts. However, I’m missing one topic: The concept of Aggro Affinity. I’ve read elsewhere (see link below) that the player initially pulling a (group of) mob(s) via threat-generating actions will not fall under the 110%/130% percent rule for regaininig aggro. Instead that player will only have to generate >100% threat to regain aggro: reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/bif380/a_warriors_guide_to_threat_aggro_and_tanking/ “Aggro affinity is the reasoning behind why it can be so difficult to get aggro back on a target that somebody else attacked first. The first person added to the mob’s hate list (the person with aggro affinity) only needs to match the highest amount of threat on the mob to pull aggro; they do not abide by the normal 110% and 130% metrics!” Is this concept of “Aggro Affinity” simply something you’re not aware of or do you think it is nonsense?
Hey guys, here’s a question: is it worth leveling in prot spec if you have a pocket healer with you? I mean, you can pull multiple mobs at once and maintain good survivability and aggro while generating lots of rage and being healed. Or maybe you can do the same thing in dps spec and prot is completely irrelevant in any situation while leveling?
Yesterday I was tanking mines and I had a pally and another warrior as dps and they stayed right with me spamming everything they had trying to make that dps look pretty and charging in at the same time and kept pulling large groups sometimes the whole room ffs when I tried to only pull 4 or 5 at max and a mage that was 3 levels above everyone else spamming aoes constantly as their main source of attack and a priest that kept going afk. But once I told them that the stuff they was doing was screwing me over as the tank and it was starting to bug me they said I was just having a hard time with the dungeon and was bad at the game. Even though the 2 dps said they was new to wow. The priest going afk during pulls was annoying as crap as well. I see why it takes so long to find tanks when people play the game and don’t know or stick to the roles they have. I was leveling at the time so all I had really was sunder and strike and a shout or 2 for threat didn’t have cleave and all that yet it was just a really frustrating group of people to do a dungeon with. Made me reconsider doing the whole tank thing honestly, because people play the game without trying to learn or understand how it works.
Warriors were the only raid viable tank because of crushing blows not taunts. Only a small minority of bosses had agro wipes on the tanks and needed to be taunted, Shazz was the first you would encounter. Warriors were the only viable raid tank because they were the only tank that could push crushing blows off the hit table and could do it with only a single talent point. 1 point in improved shield block and a pre-raid BIS warrior was uncrushable. It worked like this. Mob attacks have a priority. First priority is critical strike. The bosses percent chance on critical strike chance for a skull boss was about 5% and defense skill reduced this chance. You needed 420 defense skill to be immune from crits druids, and pallies could achieve this too. After that bosses still had 25% chance to land a crushing blow that dealt 150% damage. To become immune to crushing blows you had to push them off the table. Damage avoidance Miss, dodge, and parry, and block were calculated before crushing blow. Avoided attacks could not crush (obviously) and blocked attacks could not crush. Blocking didn’t completely avoid damaged but reduced it by the block value and a blocked attack could not crush. So the goal was to raise your total avoidance + block over 100%. If every single incoming attack was either missed, dodged, parried, or blocked you could not be hit with a crushing blow. It was one single talent point in improved shield block that made warriors the only tank that move you over 100% and push crushing blocks off the table.
Please make a article about the difference between retail dps and classic. Retail has ruined dps habits for tanking in classic because thunderclap and other abilities in retail generate aoe threat such that dps rarely has to worry about grabbing aggro in retail. A threat meter is almost superfluous in retail. I turned mine off in retail. Blizzard has invested all the difficulty in retail in mechanics. As a result dps in classic don’t feel a need to consider threat. This is a huge problem with players in retail coming to classic. I’m constantly getting complaints about aggro and why I’m not using my aoe. They don’t understand this is not retail. Thanks.
Which tank would you say is more fun? Warrior or Druid? I know that they likely get different roles but I kinda wanna tank in classic because I tank in retail, but its quite different here and seems more challenging. Warrior seems ‘stronger’ as a tank, and gets to use awesome raid sets. Druid seems more flexible outside raiding and in doing outdoor content, tribute runs etc. Which do you rate?
You talked so much about the threat generation, but i didn’t see a word about the different amount of threat gained between sunder armor and revenge/shield slam. If you watch articles of random tanks in dungeons/raids, most of all prioritize these wrong! Shield slam produces the most threat, by far more than sunder and revenge gives you the best threat/rage, while also being way better than sunder tps-wise. One other point is thunderclap for dmg mitigation. Adds deal 10% less dmg to you, when you used that spell. It also produces AoE threat, even if you have to switch to your battle stance. IMO it is very important to use your thunderclap and it has a much stronger impact than some ppl might expect. If you receive 10% less dmg and the healer can save his mana, you can pull much faster through dungeons, next to making each addpack easier.
Shaman tank……i dont think so. There was no mob marking in vanilla, the only mark was hunters mark. To sum up in a few lines..if you are dps hit the tanks target only, manage your dps output for paladins only.when target is down, wait for the tank to pick the next target then dps that, just forget about any aoe on elite mobs in dungeons only the tank does aoe. The end.
first global cd should be Shield Slam (highest threat generating move) followed by 5x Sunder armors. and save taunt when they actually pull aggro. If taunt resisted then mocking blow. Effective tanking is about armor/hp. its about how much damage u can take not about how much damage u can avoid. Simple as that.
I’m going to bold this so all the healers and dps can see it: DO NOT RUN AWAY IF YOU GET AGGRO. YOU CANNOT GET AWAY, MOBS DO NOT DROP AGGRO IN DUNGEONS. ALL YOU ARE DOING IS MAKING IT HARDER FOR THE TANK TO RE-ESTABLISH AGGRO. ROOT THEM AND MOVE OUT OF MELEE IF YOU CAN. IF YOU CANT, STAND STILL AND TAKE YOUR LUMPS UNTIL THE TANK CAN GET THEM OFF YOU. USE THIS TIME TO REFLECT ON HOW YOU CAN BETTER MAMAGE YOUR AGGRO.
I part I miss most is back in true classic. dps would wait 3-5 sec for agro build up. but these days people are so impatient that as soon as you charge in they are on your heels pumping and wondering why you cant keep threat, this isn’t retail I don’t get instant 1k threat and you can go ape shit. sigh. ill always play a rogue now.
You left out magic mitigation. I have 5 sets of armor in my bags. In classic there is no Jenkins or mount with repair. In long instances I have a backup set of armor as a tank such that after four deaths in say BRD then I can switch to fresh armor. Then I have various rings, trinkets, and necklaces that I switch configuration for mitigation magic. Armor value has no magic mitigation at all. You need to watch the combat log and if damage is all nature or fire then you are naked without magic mitigation. Dps should have at least 60 of everything. Tanks should have at least 150 for fire and shadow. This will mean different leg and chest pieces. My bags are full of armor and weapons depending on the fight. Please mention this in your next tanking guide.
Stop confusing DPS with DD. “The DPS” is NOT a role like Tank or Healer, but an attribute like armor or health. Every class has a DPS attribute that is calculated by the damage output per attack multiplied by the attacks per second. DPS is the damage per second. The class with the highest DPS is then called “DD”, for Damage Dealer. Rogues, Mages and Hunters usually have the highest DPS and are therefore the DDs of the group, while Priests or Paladins usually have low DPS. So, the three classic roles in a group of adventurers are Tank, Healer and DD. There is no “The DPS” when talking about character roles in a party.
I was prot warrior in vanilla and went as far as nefarian and this is a cumbersome basic guide, there were certain classes that needed salvations from paladins badly, like warlocks or combat rogues with thunderfury and to be honest, it’s not a big issue in raids you had like 4 tanks and one of them is bound to be below you on ktm, unless some dps had a wild streak. in dungeon runs, you ask the dps to control his threat nicely at first and focus your target, aoe threat was much difficult, and to be honest bear druids were practically non-existent in raid content, the sets themselves were resto based, i was undead but i heard prot paladins go oom midfight even if they had the gear. and for fights that had some unstable threat tables wiping like onyxia, the MT had to be dpsing onyxia all the way to 99% before any dps had to touch it, they can wand at it ofc but not really heavy dps. and for tanks to get onyxia to 99% was like 3-4mins
If the tank is a paladin let them go in hard as they can, if the tank is a warrior or druid then let them go in first… go refill your beer… pee… feed the cat… make sure the appliances are off and unplugged… check the dryer lint trap is clean… once they are done building threat then start dpsing.
The fact that druids are on the same tier as paladins is funny. Warriors are only tier 1 because shield block is knocks crushing blows off the table. If not for this warriors druids and paladins would all be tier 2. Hell buff holy shield by 30% and paladins would also be able to push crushing blows off the table done deal GG. Futhermore paladins can sustain their mana indefinately if thye make proper use of Consumables which is expensive. but can be done. The only flaw of the paladin is they do not have a 10 second cooldown taunt. Taunts do not work on most raid bosses anyway. but Paladins do have a 3 minute cooldown taunt like ability. Called Blessing of protection which will drop the threat of that target. sure it still requires you to be second on the table, but honestly, prior to patch 1.6? Taunt and growl only gave you target priority for 3 seconds and you had to build enough threat in that time. Only after this patch or whatever patch it was, made taunt give you top threat instantly was taunt a viable and useful ability. In other words paladins got fucked because Togle and Furor are assholes who hated paladins from everquest and purposely pushed them into the healing role after the Tier 2 rework. Furthermore never adding in Spell plate for ret or Prot. If there were paladin plate pieces of gear in AQ and Naxx for Ret and prot they would have been very viable.
Leadership role should not always be a tanks job, this idea that the tank should lead is always why servers lack tanks, just cause your healer or does doesn’t mean you can’t lead, I lead 5 man’s at 60 with my paladin Holy, as well as into tbc my rogue also lead five mans. Get out there mark targets learn LOS pulling, as well as seperate your self from the healer in 5 man’s as a ranged you should not stand with the healer as when you pull aggro a cleave may kill that healer and wipe your group.
I’m sorry, but Shamans can’t tank unless they’re extremely overgeared / overleveled for a particular instance. We’ve had some really high-quality approximations of retail classic in the form of private servers such as Nostalrius, and you never saw Shamans tanking on those servers. The only conceivable way they could tank is to out-DPS everyone else in the group. I’d kill to see a Shaman try tanking something like DM-N. He’d get owned within the first pull without amazing CC / cheese tactics.
What classic made nice was also the ignorance you had about the game. It isnt even released yet and every wow tuber thinks he has to make 100 guides about this game. I feel like as soon we start to play, at high level there is no room for mistakes, because they expect you have all this knowledge. First I watched a guide or two but now im like heck, fuck that. Its the 2018 style of gaming where everyone wants to be Faker and what not. Im just gonna play it, trust my guts when picking a character and just enjoy the game. I hope I will feel noob again.
i cant help but feel like this guide is kinda useless to brand new players, i have done 3 dungeons ONLY EVER in any MMO and every time the dps and even healers are taking the aggro from me as a tank because i am new, they wont let me play my role or even learn my role and this seems to be a common theme but at the same time those same losers wonder why no one new is playing the game
Interesting, but the article should have been 10 minutes instead of almost 30. You cover threat per ability and modifiers, which is great, but then for some reason feel like you need to explain what a tanks role in a group is? Who is the audience for this article? There should be one article for “Beginners Guide to Tanking” and another article for “Threat Mechanics”. Also, your mic is pretty poor quality for a content creator.
I mean for a 2 minute article I guess it’s not bad but missing 2 keys things which are probably the most important part of a feral rotation. Also what makes it the hardest dps class to play is that you never ever ever want to apply rake or rip before they fall off you want them to always fall of before applying or you are going to be a sad cat looking at your damage, Savage roar>Rip but you can cast Roar under 5 cp if you need to make sure you have 5 points ready for rip to apply it as soon as it falls off
Setting aside that bear weaving needs its own guide, its important to let all bleeds fall off completely before repplying them, as the last tick happens at the moment it falls off so you would lose damage. For example rake ticks 3 times during the 9 seconds, so if you reapply it before it falls oss you lose 1/3 of its bleed damage
There is a flaw to this guide, ferocious bite, u should always ferocious bite whenever you can afford it without getting penalized with SR or Rip/rake, that said all other things is the way it’s done. When done right, Fb is actually giving u a significant DPS gain but can give u a significant DPS loss done wrong.
30 seconds into the article, and already a major flaw on how to open fights: You never should press Berserk while your Tigers Fury is not on cd, as while Berserk is UP, you are not able to press TF. Not pressing TF before the berserk kind of leaves you 1 TF use short during the boss fight. Id make the article last +5 seconds more, but with that idea clearly communicated =)
Stop telling ppl to NEVER do ferocious bite. There will ALWAYS be a room for a good ferocious bite if u do it in a proper time, it only depends on how much crit u got and how much time left u have for savage roar and rip til they fall off. Just check top guys in warcraft logs, right now to be the best, u have to mix bearweaving with a good ferocious bite timing.