We had a prot in our raidFollow

See, now you are taking deductive reasoning and sodomizing it to a point beyond recognition. Paladins *should* tank bosses because they rock balls at it. Not because they can.

You are entitled to your tragically flawed opinion, but if you continue to repeat it I strongly suggest you repeat it at http://www.failsafedesign.com/maintankadin/viewforum.php?f=2 and sufficiently lubricate your colon to handle what is to come.

i went Tankadin because of all the sucka$$ warrior tanks. playing a ret pally and mage it was very frustrating having to lower my skill to that of the tank. with a pally i can go to town almost off the bat. with a warrior i'll usually give him about 12 sunders...which is great because during this time i can bio or make a sandwich, so my personal downtime is nil.

The best players, the best raiders, are those that are fully aware of their strengths and weaknesses. You may hate it all you want, but Blizzard has point blank specifically said that boss encounters that are designed to be melee tanked, are designed to be tanked with a warrior.

However, this does not mean that a warrior is the optimal tank for every occasion. Tidewalker, as one example, would be better tanked by a paladin. Holy Shield's charges mean the Paladin most likely won't get crushed, while a warrior probably will since the Earthquake attack still removes a shield block charge. Ferals work ok but they take more damage from the earthquake and tidal wave than a pally or warrior does. A prot pally also works very nicely for tanking weapons during Kael, and then there's always the well known Hyjal trash.

However there are also points where pally tanks (and feral tanks) just don't work. With the nerf to fear ward (3 minute cooldown) and the unreliable pulse nature of Tremor Totems, anything that uses a fear is going to be damn near impossible to tank. This starts in Karazhan but continues in SSC (fear immunity can help if striders get loose on Vashj. Feared tank = one more loose mob) as well as TK (one of Kael's advisers)

Prot pallies do "just fine". Just like Feral druids do "just fine" and your average warrior will do "just fine". To go around acting like pallies are the perfect tank for every occasion is, well, as stupid as warriors who go around acting like they're the perfect tank for every occasion.

Must be nice having fear ward... Do alliance tanks even know how to stance dance?

If you're going to quote stuff from last January, you may just as well quote from the original class description or from whatever happened during beta or watever. Things change, patch 2.1 did change a lot for tankadins. I'm the first to plead for using the right tank for the right job, but such blanket statements is something I find hard to endorse, moreso since ferals will typically contend very easily with the warriors for the top single-target threat generation.

Things change. MM hunters were once the best raiding spec. Pallies were once just buffbots. Shammies used to dominate PvP. Locks were completely broken. Moonkins used to be an utter joke. A 10-months old statement by a CM who doesn't even work for Blizzard anymore is hardly indicative of what the game has evolved into.

Nice, but if I wanted to rate you down I would have. Well now I have but your earned it.

Since when do blue posts mean the absolute truth? Go look, Tseric hasn't posted since 5/13/2007. I see blues post nonsense all the time, sometimes that nonsense represents their own beliefs or reasonings.

While I don't have the Super High Level raid experience that others have, and my paladin isn't even 30 yet, I felt like I should comment on the issue.

I was off-tanking Kara on my druid with a Prot Pally MT'ing and the raid went very well. The only boss fight that I main-tanked was Maiden simply because of the silence. So as long as there is nothing that prevents a mana-based tank, paladins will be there taking care of it.

There's no anti-warrior paranoia here but there's putting the January quote you used to back up your argument about warrior being the baseline tank into its temporal context.


You mean a welcoming community is one which lets a silly point go by unnoticed? Right, the pally community isn't as welcoming in that respect.

Like someone said above, I wish people would get past the mindset of MT = tank for whole raid. And I wish people would get past the idea that only tanks who excel at raid bosses are 'real' tanks.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had instead Boss Tanks and Trash/Add Tanks, so you could bring along a Prot Pally to be the main tank for trash and adds, and a warrior for boss tanking? I bet the raid would go a lot more smoothly. And as long as no one made any asinine comments about which tank was 'more important' or 'better', the whole raid would be more efficient and we'd finish raids faster and everything would be hunky-dory.

When I'm healing, I don't give a s&^% whether I'm assigned to do tank healing, off-tank healing, general healing, whatever - as long as what I'm assigned is what I'm good at, and it's the best way I can help the raid. Sometimes on bosses we'll change healing assignments and dps assignments to play to people's strengths, why should tanking be any different?

My point exactly.

For any obstacle to tank there is, among the three primary tanking classes, an ideal choice, a worst choice and one in-between. The objective should be efficiency and speed of clearing, not pointless inter-class battles of who is, by default, the best jack-of-all-roles. Ego, e-peen, and WoW-1.0 outdated thinking often get in the way of using the appropriate tool to get the job done best, safest and fastest. There's plently of fights out there where you'd be a fool to use a pallie unless you like to make things unnecessarily hard on 24 other people. But conversely, there's also a rising number of situations where sticking to the warrior-fits-it-all stereotype is self-crippling. And I'd go on a limb and venture that this is, actually, by design.

I kno pally that tanks VR alone despite knockbacks

You two and the link posted win.

Dilbrt wrote:



No offense, but even though you are very highly rated, this kind of feels like a trolling post. The truth is that any of the three tanking classes can tank exceedingly well in most situations. Each has their respective strengths and weaknesses. It could easily be argued that warriors are the weakest tanks whenever they have to deal with more than one mob. Paladins also have a unique taunt that functions in places and on mobs where warriors are disadvantaged. You may have an excellent warrior tank, but there are many, many other paladin tanks who do just as well despite class differences.

A lot has changed since release, and if it's important, I could go out of my way to link several blue posts and Blizzard write-ups declaring the paladin class as a premiere tanking class. The problem with declarations like the one you made above:



...is that people read things like that and come away demoralized. They look at their 50ish protection paladin and start to realize (falsely) that guilds aren't going to accept them as main tanks. The truth is that they are just as viable as warrior tanks on 98% of the encounters they run into, and while warriors shine in certain places, paladins easily surpass warriors in other situations. Player skill is a much bigger factor than class differences.

This is also a great time to bring up things like:

* Paladins have a second, immediate taunt usuable 1.5 seconds after Righteous Defense. We also have Avenger's Shield in case the bubble doesn't work

* Paladins can generate much more threat than a warrior is able to manage at the start of the fight. DPS can open up sooner. We also support AOE dps much better, and given a proper playstyle, we get through instances much faster than warrior tanks do. This is countered slightly by the need for drinking.

* Paladins gear harder to get uncrushable, but they stay that way more often than warrior tanks. We have many more charges on Holy Shield than warriors have on Shield Block

* We have auras and blessings and plenty of other perks, like Lay on Hands (how many warriors can bring themselves instantly back up to full health?)

The point is that you're talking about two classes, who each tank equally well in most instances; there is a small amount of raid content that favors having one or the other class around for tanking (and was intentionally designed that way), and it shouldn't be a factor in labeling "main" main tanks.

Our guild has a protection pally main tank, a dps kitty who slips into bear for offtanking (when needed), and an Arms/Prot warrior who can step up in the cases where Spell Reflect starts to shine.