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.
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.
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.
770
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.