The Right Stuff (best classes to pt with)Follow

As much as I refine my Spec and my armor, I find that nothing more greatly determines the ease which I can do an instance then the party I'm in. So I decided to start a semi-playful conversation about what the best and worse classes to instance with are. We all know that much of a party is about skill and demeanor, and obviously the more skill your friends are the better. But, what classes give you guys the most or least trouble.

I do more tanking then anything else, and the worse class I ever had to deal with is the Mage. I find that my options for AOE tanking are limited. Swipe is AOE, Challenging roar is on a cool down, and thorns requires the enemy to hit you. The limited options seems to make it more difficult for me to cover the mages AOE style of damage dealing. Especially, when you get the mage who opens up every fight with an AOE attack even before, the mobs have hit you once.

On the opposite end, the best DPS I have dealt with is the rogue, who's mostly single target dps and bleed attacks seem uniquely suited for the druid style of tanking. Their usefulness is moderately hindered by their lack of a suite of party buffs, however, being a melee class dps class, they can make excellent use of all of our buffs, including MOTW and Leader of the pack.

I tend to prefer priest to druid healers on technical grounds, though my fellow druids will always be preferred :) MOTW is redundant, where as the stamina boost is very helpful. On similar grounds, I like to party with shamans and paladins because the suite of buffs they bring to the table help improve the entire party.

I tend to prefer Melee based parties in general because of Leader of the pack.

What are your thoughts?

I must admit, a druid's hots are much easier on the mind then the typical priest heal style. I can't tell you how many times i had a priest healing the group with my shaking hands nervously hovering over my emergency buttons as my health dropped near the unrecoverable point before the priests healing mechanic snaps into place.

I agree with you on the mage thing, a good mage will chill out on the AOE with a druid tank. and any mage or other nontank that hits a mob before the tank gets to it deserves what he gets. But I can't help but think, with our limited AOE coverage that we just don't allow the mage to quite reach his damage potential. So what would be your Optimum party?

I like to have a shammy, a pally, a priest and a hunter or DK.

Then I get buffs out the **** and all the leather I want.

This is why I am glad they gave us out of combat rez. I've told my mage friend its his new aggro dump. He still refuses to give me more than 1-2 GCD's to build threat. It works out fine about 90% of the time. The repetitive x pushing over his body before I rez is my little reminder.


All kidding aside, I'm glad the no Nature's Reach is doing good for you. :)

I have found that Cat Form is the best form to teabag with. :D

It's all about being in average to smart group. There are alot of combos I like. I do agree if you are bear tank it's better be in melee group. I agree silly mage can get a group wipe but then so can other class like a hunter have pet on aggess or just idiot don't listen. With average to smart group there alot of group combos that can work.

With Misdirection and Feign Death, I think Hunters have little excuse for pulling aggro. (Unless the tank is really crappy I guess)

Back in BC when I was resto I used to have to bres my buddy on his warlock almost every single trash pull because he thought it would be fun to load up as many mobs as possible with Seed of Corruption. After we found the best pally tank our server has to offer I no longer had to res him as much, but sometimes I made him do the corpse run just because it was a nice little punishment for pulling aggro.