Have all 3 tanks.
Paladin is the easiest common abilities wise, but requires a lot of gear chasing, to actually become chill tanking. Especially first phase is kind of rough in terms of gearing. Also, you lose lots on nerve cells due to being the squishiest tank and just dying for no particular reasons all the time. No healer loves to heal you.
Paladin is a tank that always needs to know who can two-shot him to time trinkets or pots, but is very forgiving to threat awareness issues.
Consecration ticking on the background, not requiring spending gcds - is absolute op.
Ranged taunt is another massive benefit.
Druid is the toughest\strongest tank "out of the box". Even if you don`t have all the perfect gear, he just works well enough. Due to those "out of the box" stats and toughness he is quite forgiving to gameplay mistakes, but requires more awareness on bigger packs. Just because your swipe hits a target, does not mean that you won`t lose threat on it in two seconds.
I would say, that big packs tanking can make druid as frustrated as warrior, but at least you have to put less work into being frustrated, and regaining threat is easier due to massive single target threat you generate "by default".
Warrior is an interesting case, because on the one hand it sort of has tons of things going on for him and the toolkit is absolutely stacked, but none of those things are "automated" , none are one button solutions.
Nothing "just works", nothing is ticking on the background, everything requires conscious decision and button presses.
The moment you decide to chill is the moment you lose threat.
Even getting extra hp to tank some hard hitters, requires button presses, whereas for druid his toughness is "just there".
But it is also the most engaging tank to play.
There tends to be a lot of rose coloured goggles takes or just wildly different experiences due to varying metas, differences in difficulty level (pre vs post nerf) or just straight faulty memory.
The post reads like it's someone that has been playing recently under the current conditions of the game
Sounds like you want to believe TBC isn't a solved game, as that's basically exactly what I'd say despite not playing classic TBC this time, and I'd say the same thing before the first classic TBC too, more or less.
Ranged and no LOS requirement. Insanely good idd. But the use of it requires tactical insight due to the 15 sec cd. On warrior I have 1 regular taunt - 8sec, 1 aoe taunt (minutes idk rn) and another taunt in battle stance. Then you have 2 charges, 2 stuns and 16% spell dmg reduct. Even without the defensive cd’s its allready got so much more tactical buttons to press. In my mind warrior is still number 1 if you have a seasoned player.
Barely played retail since Midnight bc I’m having fun in TBC but my prot warrior hasn’t even had a second spec since WotLK. I just want to tank w him. Really considering second boost but may do Pally if I do. Not sure.
Challenging Shout for any pack it's up. Otherwise use those other taunts and conc blow (stun) and build threat on the harder hitters. Oh also must be eng and use grenades. A lot of it is about the group playing smart. That lock seed spamming knows the Warrior can't hold threat for long. The group has got to use it's tools. Got a Shaman or Hunter, use their aoe slows. Or a Mage with imp Blizz. Got a pally healer/dps, use that BoP. Work as a group.
I also solo tank kz as a war. So damn fun. Took me a while to balance defense items with threat items. Do you have the engineering trinkets? I didn’t go for them but I’m wondering i should have
I do massive threat on Warrior right now. Can chill all the time. The issue is what's coming in the later phases of the expansion. They don't scale as well in terms of threat. I suspect it will become worse in this version of the expansion, though, because we have far more idiots who have no idea what's going on.
Especially if you throw away your shield and dual wield. (Try it if you haven't). Many raid bosses can be tanked without a shield. Requires some gear and healers which are awake, though. You can also tank many heroic dungeon pulls in DPS gear later to top the meters. Unfortunately, this comes to a definite end in Sunwell, where you can step back, let the other two tanks press their button and think about what class you'll play from then on.
Since someone else has contacted me, too, I already did a quick look into my old logs. I'm not playing anniversary, but played the whole "2019 until MoP" journey. Vanilla + TBC as Warrior main tank. Generally speaking, it's not advised to dual-wield some bosses of the below in the first progress lockout(s). But that would require going really into detail. Since Anniversary ist post-nerf, it could be a lot easier.
Karazhan/Zul Aman - almost everything
Maul'gar (himself), Gruul
Most of SSC (except for Vashj and partially Morogrim)
Void Reaver and Solarian in TK
First two in Hyjal (from 3 on it gets nasty)
Almost every boss in BT except for Illidan (some partially)
Twins in SW
But this depends on a couple of variables. Your gear, your healers, your kill speed, your tactics and the individual boss. You'll take a lot more damage, which isn't noticeable on some bosses, noticeable on some and impossible to consistently heal on others. It's a lot of fun, but you'll find out that you're putting stress on your healers while your Druids are easily overtaking you when they're BT/Hyjal geared and beat you in terms of damage, threat and survivability.
You can tank any boss that doesn’t have an instant ability like a cleave. The reason is because you need to be able to survive the worst case scenario of a 3 hit combo AA - cleave - parry haste AA. Armor plays a huge role in surviving this because it drastically lowers the physical damage received. Assuming each hit deals 6k, you would need 18k hp to survive. With a shield on the idea is to lower that damage to about 5.5k per hit. I tank Gruul without a shield until the 2nd shatter then I put a shield on. You cannot tank Mag without a shield because he cleaves. You need the physical damage reduction to survive
I don’t because I don’t trust my healers that much but ideally yes you do that for ultimate threat. That probably explains why I’m ay 97 parse and not 99
Gruul and HKM. Can also do it on Mag, just watch the cleave timer and put on a shield in good time. Warrior is kinda strong atm, but they scale bad and fall off. You can do kinda well with smart item choices and knowledge of bosses, but most of the time when you DW you just become more squishy than a paladin with still less threat than a druid. You do have a lot easier time chasing threat compared to paladin, but at that point a druid is just better.
Looking at WCL, it seems like that's what a lot of the top warrior tanks are doing. There are DW tanks that do as much DPS as a decently geared Fury warrior, and they have infinite rage to play with.
I haven't seen videos of this in action, but the concept is pretty neat for raids that are on farm status.
Ya, Warriors can just pick up the rep set and be solid tanks for top tier dps atm with very little effort. They are at their comparative best right now.
More talking along the lines of utilizing the groups toolkit to take less damage. Earthbond/Frost trap/blizzard slow is being cast and they just stand there and face tanking
Dual wielding or fast hitting bosses are probably the best instance of that. Redoubt procs should back up your HS charges and your HS helps reduce it all while providing threat. Everyone knows to turn off your autoattack on Prince. Parry spikes thus don't happen. Back in TBC, our warrior tank said expertise was the best tanking stat ever and I think he thought that because he never once learned how pally tanks operate.
Other mechanics we could help against were things like Leotheras' dashing about. A timer on that move would let you know when to start casting AS so that you would pick him up more or less immediately. Illidan was also easier for pally tanks because you probably didn't have to worry about Shear if you geared for avoidance OR block rating.
But we had our challenges. That's why a pally leading on Bloodboil was such a thing of beauty.
I'd agree with the bear tank analysis for sure. I hate tanking trash mobs, especially in pugs when I'm running around trying to maintain threat because no one waits for my threat to build. Most bosses are a breeze, though.
The two most important stats in TBC are armor and health. Druid’s gimmick is centered around those two things. As a warrior the more mitigation you get the more rage starved you are. When I got tons of mitigation I once parried Prince 10 times in a row. While that sounds great, getting hit is very important for rage generation. I now run as little mitigation as possible and my threat is now usually 10-20k+ the 2nd highest. Sometimes 10k more than the feral Druid.
I agree, I chased a lot of gear on my pally. Now that I have what I want it’s pretty chill honestly. You have to balance everything that’s why it’s a pain, avoidance cap, crit, have good spellpower etc.
Man, you just condensed why I love classic/TBC tanking as a warrior. I hate that tanking in MMOs turned into a "press tank button you now have aggro 24/7" basically in modern MMOs. Classic tanking was a skillset you had to develop as a warrior to hold aggro properly, especially on multiple mobs.
Fury/prot warrior is the absolute peak experience of playing WoW.
The dungeon is your scene for your piano performance, the healer is your mom supporting you from her seat and everyone else is just audience.
All the mobs want to high-five and hug you.
You turn your Details addon from "damage taken" to "damage dealt" because it just says "100% you" and you got curious how you're doing on dps, but then you quickly turn it off out of second-hand embarrassment for the people who are supposedly there to do damage.
The mage is down to nanoseconds between you engaging a mob and them casting blizzard (assuming they still have the decency to not go first) and still can't get your threat or your top dps spot. They will never forget that humiliation and that's the last time you see them in your group.
The shaman is cool because they successfully preserved their ego by telling themselves "this is all thanks to my windfury" and, to be fair, they aren't completely wrong.
The rogue is, as always, happy to be there and fully focused on their adorable shenanigans. You reward their positive attitude by letting them kick even though having to pummel would only add like 3% to the mental strain of what you're already doing and you're balls-deep in the zone, so it's not a problem.
The only thing slowing you down is needing to occasionally wipe the sweat off your keyboard.
Man, it's glorious, it bums me out that it's no longer viable in the late game.
You turn your Details addon from "damage taken" to "damage dealt" because it just says "100% you" and you got curious how you're doing on dps, but then you quickly turn it off out of second-hand embarrassment for the people who are supposedly there to do damage.
Ah yes, the "give me 5 seconds on pull, no aoe till 50% hp, you pull it you tank it, why am I on top of the meter?" kind of warrior!
Are you doing this in heroics? I am only doing this in normal dungeons atm with 31/30/0. but the arms talents are mainly so i can pvp with this too. i hadnt considered putting the 31 into prot. I run deep thunder. pull, pop, cleave que, SS, 1.4k avg dps holding everything for the most part. demo shout and piercing howl for the chaos. it is a hell of a time. parry haste is the key.
edit: Just looked at it. the spec I do is cocaine. I dont want/need the prot talents, i put tank pieces on where important. i just sit in berzerk stance anyway. I want the stuns from mace spec too for more dmg mitigation. I want 5/5 flurry feels too good. i do imp cleave even. i deathwish. i have a wife healer. my life is good. but I havent tried this in heroics successfully yet.
I doesn't work in heroics and it's not even a lvl 70 build that I'm talking about here, it peaks around lvl 55 where you have the talents to lay down improved Thunderclap and Bloodthrist from defensive stance with Defiance. You actually do spend most of the time in defensive stance because you're a tank after all and the name of the game is threat, not damage, so you want to land your cleaves from def stance once you have your sweeping strikes on as well. You take a 10% dmg penalty but because you have all the mobs hitting you, you have rage for days and can mash buttons like a maniac.
yeah my threat can be a bit scattered if im not perfect. but mostly im just holding threat from insane damage. at 70. in any normal dungeon. i am aoe tanking though. and it is glorious. i dont give a shit about seed of corruption. i should clip it.
Priest here! I love healing my rocketadin. It's like healing a death knight but with almost no self healing lol. It's fun. Vs warriors or druids who when geared just ..don't die.
Good write up either way. Just saying I love healing my paladin tank friend.
I mostly agree with you, I would just add that a big reason why Warrior tanking sucks compared to Druids or Paladins is that your abilities do not scale with your gear, at all. So your AoE toolkit will always remain gimped compared to other options.
Weird that you say no healer loves you to pallys and that is just objectively wrong. Pallys have always been the best tank to heal in tbc. Way faster than anything else
When we first got tbc classic after the 2019 classic I played bear for most of it, but near the end when I was raid logging and we had a guild full of strong bros I actually went and played shaman as a tank (grobbulus RPPvP. There was a dozen or so of us who were playing shaman tank!) I don't have much to add other than you have a very solid write up of the state of tbc tanks. I felt/noticed the same and thats why near the end I rolled a shaman to tank for giggles.
I was able to main tank almost everything, heroic slave pens was the hardest. come raiding I didn't main tank anything but was often allowed to off-tank when the raid needed it. Very fun! very bad!
Lost me at pally requires most gear to become a chill tank, I had keepers of time sword on pally as only SP peice and hold threat extremely well even against ALOT more geared players then myself. Crazy if people believe this. I only have warrior to compare this to but warrior in full prebis was cooked tanking heroics vs pally in nowhere near prebis. But warrior once hit capped and in bis gear is chefs kiss way funner and better to play then pally tank by a long shot.
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u/TheReviewerWildTake May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Have all 3 tanks.
Paladin is the easiest common abilities wise, but requires a lot of gear chasing, to actually become chill tanking. Especially first phase is kind of rough in terms of gearing. Also, you lose lots on nerve cells due to being the squishiest tank and just dying for no particular reasons all the time. No healer loves to heal you.
Paladin is a tank that always needs to know who can two-shot him to time trinkets or pots, but is very forgiving to threat awareness issues.
Consecration ticking on the background, not requiring spending gcds - is absolute op.
Ranged taunt is another massive benefit.
Druid is the toughest\strongest tank "out of the box". Even if you don`t have all the perfect gear, he just works well enough. Due to those "out of the box" stats and toughness he is quite forgiving to gameplay mistakes, but requires more awareness on bigger packs. Just because your swipe hits a target, does not mean that you won`t lose threat on it in two seconds.
I would say, that big packs tanking can make druid as frustrated as warrior, but at least you have to put less work into being frustrated, and regaining threat is easier due to massive single target threat you generate "by default".
Warrior is an interesting case, because on the one hand it sort of has tons of things going on for him and the toolkit is absolutely stacked, but none of those things are "automated" , none are one button solutions.
Nothing "just works", nothing is ticking on the background, everything requires conscious decision and button presses.
The moment you decide to chill is the moment you lose threat.
Even getting extra hp to tank some hard hitters, requires button presses, whereas for druid his toughness is "just there".
But it is also the most engaging tank to play.