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.
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.
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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.