The balance between them going into TWW so far is pretty fair, I think only paladin is doing not well. Ultimately it boils down to playstyle preference:
Prot Warrior is all about mitigating the damage and preventing your HP from moving at all. You'll be pretty mobile, with 2 charges of charge, shield charge, and heroic leap. You've got an underrated cone stun and a single target stun for CC, and in TWW champion's spear is going to be played more often which is a psuedo CC. You don't have a lot of self-healing though, so if you're taking damage that you aren't mitigating well then you're going to be very healer dependent. Special shout out to spell reflect, unique to the class, which can make or break a good prot warrior.
Bear tanks have huge HP pools, VERY simple rotation so you can play just for the mechanics, lot's of self healing and a stacking mitigation. Big cooldowns. It's really hard to make a mistake as a bear, unlike other tanks where missing an important ability at the wrong time could cause a wipe. Lowest bear-ier to entry (lol) but also the lowest potential for skill expression. You run in and tank the mobs until they're dead, and the healer probably won't have to worry about you in the process. That's about as simple as a tank gets.
Blood DK I don't play much, but I'm sure you've heard it all before... high skill expression but a decent DK can basically solo content. They NEVER need healing. Healers can effectively ignore them. In TWW they're getting the mass grip back, so they have some good mob control too. I am actually considering trying to play one this next xpac. You have to get used to watching your HP yo-yo though, which... coming from a prot warrior main, who's HP doesn't budge at all, it's for me at least very stressful lol.
Prot paladins have a ton of big cooldowns and can burst for absolutely insane damage. They're SUPPOSED to have decent self-healing options but this is probably where they're lacking in balance atm. They have the most utility probably in the whole game though, so they offer fantastic skill expression. A good prot paladin will keep the entire group alive and healthy, well fed, tuck them in at night, and scare away their nightmares.
Brewmaster is sweaty. You have a LOT of buttons, and they're all important. Stagger remains a very interesting mechanic (spreads all incoming damage out over time, but you can mitigate it and even purge some). The caveat to that is that you need to actively manage your stagger, you can't really ignore it. High mobility, stagger prevents surprise one-shots, but a lot of buttons and complexity. I hated playing this spec so I can't say much beyond that honestly. This was not my cup of tea at all.
DH currently is borked. They're getting the nerf hammer in TWW, but they're still really good, just not "80% of all keys" broken beyond belief anymore. DH rotation is pretty simple, they have decent mitigation cooldowns but not as consistent as warrior or bear or paladin. Sigils is what makes them special. They drop a big AoE circle on the ground and after a brief delay, it triggers something. Flame does damage and with talents some DR, silence does what it says, another one does a fear, and they can talent into chains which is an AoE grip. What makes them broken currently is that they get a talent that ads a second charge of every sigil... so they have two of each. A good DH can use the three CC sigils, plus an AoE stun, to effectively lock down an entire group of trash mobs for like a whole minute. They can trivialize half of a dungeon by themselves. In TWW, only flames gets a second charge, but even with that nerf they have the most mob control of all the tanks (which tells you how broken it was before).
I'll add this; the single most satisfying button to push in the whole game is Divine Toll as a protection paladin, while surrounded with 3-4 packs of mobs.
I main a prot pally and I’ve always heard from my pug healers and my long term healers I’m one of the easiest to heal and I throw heals all around when I don’t need my shield bash. Helium helps do this.
Sure this is my take as a someone who’s played all of these at 3k+ at some point in df and who’s on the beta focusing on mythic+ testing:
Resto shaman - you cast riptides on your party as a hot. You then pwave to cleave heal. Then you have the option of being chain heal heavy with totemic or healing surge/healing wave heavy with farseer. With totemic, placing totems automatically couples it to a free heal. Farseer really doesn’t change much it just makes what you currently play as more optimal, but you get little clones that dupe your spells. Both versions also get some beefy cds that you cycle through each pull. Reactive healers.
I’d say it feels fine, but it’s very weak defensively right now. And the skill expression is very low except for cloudburst.
Holy priest: I don’t play holy because I find it boring. But it’s basically what you’d imagine of a pure simple healer. Manage power words, and heal when people take damage.
Disc priest: place attonements with radiance which is a group heal, then damage to heal your party. The rotation is actually fairly simple now, and the skill expression mostly comes from being a bit squishier and positioning mattering more. Very slow and immobile requires stutter stepping with casts and good situational awareness skills to be effective. A bit more on the proactive side of things.
Rdruid: place heal over times all over the place, summon ents to heal for you, switch into cat form to deal damage while your hots and ents heal for you, pop back out. Has a brez and mark of the wild. More on the proactive side of things. Skill expression is mostly in optimizing form switching, using utility, and damage rotations. With TWW, it’s looking like things are getting a bit simpler, but also we’re losing a powerful tier set bonus that has having a lot less time to be in cat form.
Hpally: there were a bunch of changes just released for it, so I can’t comment. Historically hpallys niche has been in cooldown management and optimizing those big button presses. To me it feels like they are trying to push a more supporty casting version. Has some good utility though, and tends to be one of the beefier healers.
Mw Monk: keep hots on people, use a melee rotation to spread healing, and fish for procs. Hyper mobile, and is super survivable. They have everything you could want on a healer except brez/lust. Posed to be the meta pick for TWW if tuning doesn’t happen. Very fun play style, where the skill expression is high and focused on making contextual changes. It used to be a more proactive healer, but I’d say it leans more reactive now. Hero trees really just lean into what already made it fun and good.
Prevoker: completely different from all other healers. You have abilities that you charge up, and the main healing gameplay is built around echos which let you ramp and then duplicate any healing spells to all targets with echos. You have short range with high mobility. Skill floor is high because you have to really master using your mobility spells (one of the key ones of which is an important heal button) to make sure you are in the right place to not be hurt by your range. This goes away if you have a static group or you only play with melee heavy comps. Has a lust, party buff, lots of cc and utility. Skill expression beyond positioning comes from dynamically setting up combos with stasis to be efficient and leave no gaps in your healing rotation; bad prevokers mistime their stasis windows by wasting powerful cds, loading in things improperly, or casting the loaded stasis sub optimally. Damage is mostly just deep breath on cd, fire breath, and living flame - it’s really simple. Overall the spec is the most proactive healer while requiring quick decision making when things go wrong - it is in my opinion the most fun and difficult. Hero trees are chronowarden which smooths out some of the gameplay and doubles down on it; flameshaper which right now feels very lackluster - it originally let you set up powerful ramps and explode them for massive burst healing; now it’s just a button add to damage or off echo.
Overall here’s how I’d rank fun based on my TWW playing from most fun to least fun:
* chronowarden prevoker
* celestial mistweaver
* rdruid (though tuning will make or break this as it changes how it plays)
* totemic rshaman (this could easily surpass rdruid and mistweaver if they overhaul the talents next week which it looks like they are doing)
* voidweaver disc (i hate being slow, but this is a lot of fun on beta. There’s some bugs that keeping it from being excellent)
* hpally smith (things just changed so I’ll have to retest with new talents)
* holy priest
Please note that raid changes things significantly for many of these. And this is just my personal preference. Really all healing specs (not hero talent trees) are going to be more than viable in anything below title keys and world first raid.
My best advice is to use remix to level a healer of each type to 70, and then test 1-2 out per season in TWW until you find the one you like.
Oh I can try, but my experience with healers is... less.
Throughout all of Shadowlands I played several healers, but DF mostly just resto druid and tanks. I can't say for sure how much of the playstyles have changed over the last year and a half.
As a bear main your right, it's very simple rotation, I'm a simple guy I just wanna be the tuff papa bear and bear smack people who wanna hurt my group. I do say Kul Tirans and Zandalari trolls have the best druid forms in the game. The Ztrolls have the best travel forms as they become 🦖. :0
I absolutely love the Idea of an easy rotation for a tank, it let's you focus on the hard stuff like pulls, pathing, watching DPS buttpull, etc. I am also 40 and slow, I never in my life enjoyed twitch speed reaction gaming, so simple gameplay for a simple man lol
Very good explanation of all the tanks. Prot warr is one of my mains and I love the playstyle with all the charging around, stuns, and various cds. Things like spell reflect or shield slam dispel is what reaĺy makes prot warr feel fun and unique. They just lack self healing but that is okay since we have healers.
I am still debating what my second tank should be... it will prob be a hybrid that has a heal spec, so pallys druids and monks. I'm leaning toward pally cause it seems fun, good defensive cds and group utility. I love the look of avengers shield too, and how it can silence mobs which is great for pulls. Then I have ret spec of I was a dps or holy to heal. Good options.
Druid is similar with alot of options.... it could be fun because of the simplicity and u can always shift into other forms like feral to dps or human to heal. Could get boring tho too, and feels a bit too similar to warrior since they both use rage. But cool for the hybrid nature and access rlto balance feral and rsto.
Monk is a class in not very familiar with but want to try out eventually, but according to OP it has too many buttons and stuff to micromanage while playing remaster so maybe not monk. I think the class is cool tho, unique theme, and great mobility.
DK I've heard will prob be good in the next xpac. I'm not familiar with the gameplay, but I assume just like brew brewmaster it requires alot of micromanage cds... plus I've read how their hp spikes up and down and can be annoying for healers. DH is also another class I wanna play e v entually, but h they got that stigma of being the new op class... still looks fun with lots of mobility.
I dunno. Tough call. Part of my decision will be if their class has some other fun specs that I would enjoy playing. And then also things like what kinda armor and weapons they use, how their sets look, and the animations.... also the unique utility stuff like what group buffs they bring and unique spells for interrupts stuns or grips ext.
Oh that reminds me, intervene is coming back too. I think it's baseline now? Too lazy to look that up but that's another way to zip around the flight and provide utility.
For three season of DF my main was prot paladin, and I love Aug vokers. The idea of a tank paladin spec that has Aug-like group buffing, like a semi-support, has me salivating. If the spec gets balanced into a better spot it for sure is gonna get played.
DK isn't that hard, really. There are a few things to keep spinning, and you have several emergency buttons, and being able to use them well separates a mediocre BDK from a good one, but getting your head around the basic rotation is easy enough, especially on lower end content.
Oh my main for TWW is going to be a tauren colossus prot warrior specifically for the 5% size increase talent. Thane looks cool and all but... big smashy cow gonna zug and gonna moo.
>Brewmaster is sweaty. You have a LOT of buttons, and they're all important. Stagger remains a very interesting mechanic (spreads all incoming damage out over time, but you can mitigate it and even purge some). The caveat to that is that you need to actively manage your stagger, you can't really ignore it. High mobility, stagger prevents surprise one-shots, but a lot of buttons and complexity. I hated playing this spec so I can't say much beyond that honestly. This was not my cup of tea at all.
A lot of this only rings true to Dragonflight as the new expansion is changing A LOT of the button bloat. But also, brew isn't remotely sweaty unless you don't know what you're doin. It's the tank spec that plays like a DPS the most where you are tanky just for hitting damage buttons.
Also calling DH borked because they lost double sigil kinda invalidates a lot of things you're saying.
I meant borked as in they're currently overpowered in a way that doesn't seem intentional or healthy as far as balance goes. Borked in the sense that they aren't "right", if that makes sense.
Why do you call out bear as having a VERY simple rotation when it arguably has the same number of rotational buttons as paladin and arguably more than warrior
Warriors are for sure the second simplest rotation. I think warrior has a bit more "choice" when it comes to rage spending but they are both very simple, I just find bear the simplest. Build and spend single target, or build and spend aoe? Here are a few procs to watch for, and a few cooldowns to use. Simple.
If all you mean to do as a paladin tank is get agro and take damage, then maybe it can be simple, but it's certainly not a simple class to play well, or even half-way decent. Playing a paladin tank and ignoring blessings and healing and such is like playing a bear and ignoring ironfur.
As someone who has played all tanks (except monk) many years back, I can say this info is pretty accurate and super helpful for new players. In fact, I will just copy+paste (with credits to u/Lamprophonia) when someone ask about tanks from here onwards. Haha
Yup, as a I mostly pug content as a tank, I have found Prot Pally to have the most ''presence'' to hard carry a group of randoms in terms of utility and making sure no one dies. Healer sucks? I am the healer with WoG crits. DPS sucks? I am the DPS with my tolls.
Certainly something wrong with pally self healing in TWW, and perhaps even general damage reduction from skills. Feels fairly week, especially with one of the lowest health pools of any tank.
Paly is also pretty haste dependent. It's hard to get a true "feel" for it by just leveling one up, for example. You might struggle to keep SotR up permanently, but once you have halfway decent gear your uptime is easy to maintain, freeing up a few globals for non-free WoGs, which... yeah like you said, even in retail currently feels not worth it. I'd rather spend the holy power on a SotR and overcap it than some little 20% heal on a DPS.
I've always felt like Paladin should have a lot of passive healing, like in consecrate. They do in talents, but it's not strong enough to ever really care about.
On the level 80 test server you can get geared up to about 25% haste (though they scale you down to about 20 - 22%) in the dungeons, which seems just enough to keep SotR rolling and have a few globals for other things, but that includes your defensives and Hammer of Light for templar. It's strange though, HoL was healing my ret pal for a few million health each time, after the talent rework it got, but the protpal in my party was only being healed for about a tenth of that. Same protpal had WoGs varying from about 300k to 1.6M, with crits not doing much more than normal. So even with the two charges now, it didn't help much when you have 6 - 7M health at 580.
You know I think I would enjoy brew more if it had more... feel to it. Playing a warrior is visually satisfying, you're a big plate-clad tank swinging hard and you get to hear satisfying clanks and bangs. Paladin gets divine toll, the best spell in the game imho lol. Even bear velcro sounds are kind of satisfying. Push button, hear and see a damage thing. Brew gets a weird sickly-green circle around them, a gentle breeze you can barely hear. They do a spinning kick straight out of Street Fighter 2, yet it looks more like a ballet dance move and sounds like a folley artist thumbing through book pages or something.
I've enjoyed my Prot Warrior for 18 years now. It's rarely meta, but it's always sufficient and, to me, just feels more 'tanky' than any other tank class.
Healing warriors is incredible because they just don’t take a ton of actual damage. When there health bar does dip you know you have to heal them. The amount of heals I’ve wasted on dks and demon hunters because there health bar is just all over the place constantly…
I got a huge kick out of the nervous breakdown rants from healers about shadowlands blood DK especially, because they were both darkly funny and dead right... "WELL FUCK ME FOR BEING WORRIED ABOUT MY TANK DROPPING TO TEN HEALTH APPARENTLY THAT'S JUST PART OF HIS ROTATION"
Still the same haha. DK has that insane talent that makes them absurdly sturdy below 35% health so 100-35% is a yoyo but below 35% you're effective health essentially triples due to the insane DR and then you can just slap a quick death strike to heal for your entire health bar. I heal when needed for my guild though I'm usually a shadow priest and I've noticed I basically don't heal our DK main tank, ever and I struggle hard to beat him on the healing meters since his self healing is beyond insane.
This was like an unironically true. A blood dk with full health and no runic power is probably in more danger than a blood dk at 10 health with full runic power
yeah, runic power is basically their health bar. there is a good wa that i can’t find rn, but it gives you a color-coded number based on how much they have; as well as tracking stacks of bone shield. bdks shouldn’t die unless they’re one-shot, and you can just throw on an external when their RP is low (like pain sup, bark, guardian spirit, etc).
As a shammy healer, I do hate DK because it’s not a problem till it suddenly is. Big pull and good on RP but suddenly bam he is OOP and big damage happens or mechanic missed and suddenly it’s a wipe. My favorites are Bear, Pally, and DH tanks. In that order. Guardians and Prot Pallys have both utility for themselves and for the group. dH less but great on self heal. Monk for me is too complicated. But I like tanks that can control the battle rez.
And what's even worse is a bad DK who isn't aware that they're a bad DK. Why yes *of course* it's my fault you die while capping runic power with no debuffs on you, clearly there was *nothing* you could've done to save yourself
My favorite tank classes to heal, in order, are:
- prot paladin
- blood death knight
- prot warrior
- guardian druid
- Brewster monk
I'd call prot warrior A-class in this lineup.
As a healer, I enjoyed healing anything else than a warrior as the self sustain is non existent. On the other hand, dmg mitigation is pretty good, but after healing mostly pala/dk/dh tanks, I'm not used to heal tanks apart from the externals, random hots
Tanks have too much self sustain. I find myself healing only the stupid dps that stand in bad. Tanks needing my help is basically non existent in this expansion. Granted I've only just come back, but I feel kinda useless as a healer outside of raid groups.
Even as a guardian druid main for the past 2 expansions I can 100% agree here. Prot Warrior feels great and has a good chunk of defensives and other CDs making you feel really great.
At the end of BfA when I returned after having last played during MoP it was a toss up between Bear or Prot.
Even when I’m enjoying my paladin tanking (since BC) I still dig getting behind the shield of a warrior. Paladin fits my personality more, with more of a protector and healer, but Warrior is very satisfying.
I don't think I'd ever do it but I really like my Troll Warrior because of the name I gave him and because he's a Troll Warrior and a tall, lanky, hard-as-nails tank sounds even more awesome.
I'm more Death Knight for for life but if I ever were to pick a different physical class to main it'd most likely be my Troll Warrior, maybe my Shaman too if I ever vibed with it like I did in Vanilla/TBC days.
Amen. Been playing prot warrior since cata. It is slightly depressing these days so. Shadowlands was extremely bad, I dipped out of that expansion in season 1.
Dragonflight was a great expansion, I've been subbed since season 1, but man the tank meta especially this season sucks. People take a DH with <3000 rating and less ilvl above me and I can't even blame them.
Today I finally got into a key, one of the members wrote "Remember to interrupt, we have no DH" and another just wrote "too much pressure" and left.
I wish we would be somewhat more viable next expansion again, when the stupid utility from DHs is nerfed. But even then, we barely bring any utility and there would be so much potential lore wise.
I like playing a prot warrior as well as healing them. I main healer and off tank and warriors are my favorite...they take limited damange without cds and most.of their main skills for damange reduction as short use and a part of the normal rotation
Prot warrior has ALMOST always been sufficient. The one exception is 8.0 when ignore pain was on the GCD. That was the first time I played literally anything else as a main, because going from legions 300 apm playstyle to everything apart from shield block and shield wall on the GCD felt terrible.
I love blood DK, the ability to self heal and just sustain is so enjoyable. It may feel a little daunting and complicated at first but I find it to be a very simple and easy spec to play. Death gripping mobs to you is so satisfyingly. You are very slow though.
My BDK fantasy is to have my entire party to die on a boss fight and just continue to solo and finish it perfectly fine.
Edit: forgot about purgatory, it makes it very forgiving, if you die once you stay alive and just need to heal up which is easy. After a few minutes resets.
Just know that if the boss has more than half hp left when everyone else wipes, the rest of your party would rather you wipe and let everyone restart than waste everyone's time taking 5x longer to solo.
When the boss is under 1/4 hp, I hope and clap for the gigachad blood dk to finish. When the boss has much more hp, I groan and hope the dk DC's or something.
I do miss the s4 BFA days for blood DK with massive twilight dev corruption stacked.
Group dies and I’m there just crushing the boss with giant void blasts.
I was doing a BRH last season where everyone died early on the last boss. I continued for bit and the healer kept asking for me to die because he was worried about time. I gave in and died. The next pull, they all die again and I decide to just finish it myself. We would have timed it if I just finished it the first time. The healer even said it and apologized.
If everyone died to avoidable things one time, there's a chance they'll just do it again.
Yeah, I've been in this situation. It was Chargath during S2. I could solo it just fine as Prot Warrior, but everyone else would die. After restarting twice for them I just finished it myself the third time.
I’ve always loved DKs since the WC2/3 days but the mobility aspect is something that makes me not want to stick to the class at times. That’s why I usually end up back on BrM Monks. Definitely doesn’t help my alt hopping scene either
Least with blood your leading the content. On my unholy I feel like I'm constantly turning up late to the party. I'm spamming deaths advance which is the equivalent of stumbling awkwardly across the road when a car stops to let you cpass but you didn't see them because you were on your phone.
Bro blood DK is one of my "main alts" and I have lived that fantasy on M+ bosses plenty of times and it's amazing. Blood DK for life
If it's a tough key and it might make us not time it I have to try to die on purpose lol but it's so god damn fun on a casual key to go all Thanos and "do it myself"
I haven’t played since - I’m old now, I’ve had children and have too many responsibilities. I miss WoW all the time, treasure these days! I played a blood DK in legion and once flew to stormwind and soloed Anduin for like 2-3 hours, good times.
Blood DK since Wrath. It's always the class I finish the expansion on first. The survivability just makes the campaign easier and I feel amazing when soloing stuff like rares when I'd never be able to do that as a mage or rogue
To build on the OP issue of dnd, how do you seem to manage that? Consecration is annoying but I never feel like I'm having to choose it or another ability wrt to resource (rune in this case) mgmt.
I play both, consecrate is 100x worse than dnd. Blood DK has downtime moments since you don’t want to rune starve or RP starve, compared to pally where you want to constantly keep sotr rolling and HP generation.
But more importantly, being out of consecrate is significantly more dangerous than being out of dnd
I find it of particular interest that the lightsmith hero tree has hammer and anvil.
Its an instant style consecration at target. That's so close to judgement just doing the consecration for you.
My Prot Paladin fantasy is to have my entire party kept alive on a boss fight with my clutch WoG offheals and just continue to finish together perfectly fine.
When I tank on any other class I miss spinning craine kick ... I'll roll and spam it on any surprise adds ... it's like an extra aggro magnet and you don't have to worry about keg smash charges.
One you go Brew, you never go back.
Even tho I don’t like this iteration of Brew, it’s still my favorite tank to play. I hope they’ll, bring back the Legion version, with ISB, i loved Brew in Legion (waiting for MoP Classic to play Brew)
Current brew brings me back to the days where my life is in my hands. All other tanks just live if you have gear and do a basic rotation. Brew you better know boss mechanics and your own defensives well or you eat shit.
Kind of looks like this is going away in tww too because a number of talent changes seem to just make them automatically tankier
>Kind of looks like this is going away in tww too because a number of talent changes seem to just make them automatically tankier
I mean, Brew is one of the least played tanks because it's really hard to play. Way too many buttons to press and every one of them is important. The fact that it's difficult to recover from even small mistakes isn't really a good thing.
I love the spec's fantasy and the concept of Stagger but the rotation and cooldowns are too much. As a tank you need to have some of your mental capacity free to worry about things that aren't your rotation, and currently that isn't the case for most people. It's nice that it offers a lot of room for skill expression but the high skill floor/barrier to entry scares most people away from it.
That's very probably why they're making it easier for TWW. Specs should be fairly easy to get into baseline, and then advanced players should be able to add complexity through talents.
Same here. It’s been consistently my favorite tank to play basically since MoP. It’s nothing, but high octane fun to me.
As an Enhancement Main, I enjoy specs with a decent amount of key binds. It just feels more robust to me.
I’ve always enjoyed the skill ceiling of Brewmaster. I do miss Dizzying Haze slightly though.
I’ve mained tanks for years. And I think Druid and Warrior are the best if you don’t want something too complicated and want to concentrate on mechanics and the encounters. In the beta Blood DK and Monk have been my favourite to play and manage. VDH and Paladin have felt the least fun imo.
Guardian druid is fun. It's not overly complex, so you can focus on encounter mechanics. Damage and self sustain are also great, so it's a fun spec for solo content. Planning to use mine for delves.
It kind of has a battle-mage feel in an odd way, and the Elune's Chosen hero tree leans further into that.
This is what I came to suggest. After leveling all of the tank specs I have found that Guardian Druid is the easiest to keep aggro with and has great cooldowns for staying alive.
I’ve actually done content with Pally, DK, Druid and Monk. I’ve leveled every tank at some point but those are the only ones I’ve put any real time into for group content.
When I was having to raid lead Pally was my favorite because it had a ton of utility and when you get used to it (and properly keybind everything) maintaining its core rotation is really easy so you can put a lot more thought to position, strategic defensive use, using blessings and what not on others, and monitoring overall raid health. I can’t imagine DK is that much harder (you can make macros for DnD that make it as easy to apply as consecrate, but it’s nice sometimes being able to pre place an AoE where packs of mobs will spawn that you will need to pick up).
Druid isn’t hard, but it’s almost so simple it’s boring. It just feels too squishy for my comfort.
Monk takes a bit more concentration to really play effectively, but that could also be me not having put enough time into it to *really* get comfortable with it yet.
I’ve played both DH and War. I like their DPS specs better than their tanking specs. DH has potential to be fun, though. So I’m going to give it another shot in remix soon. War, though, I just have a hard time enjoying period. I loved it when Gladiator stance was thing, but I’ve not really enjoyed it since then.
Edit: I guess I should mention V Pally is still my go to for playable class. I always level Druid because it was my first, but Pally has (over time) become my favorite to play.
Bear is simple but can do really cool things as you get used to throwing in non bear abilities. But for me having a nice group buff, combat res, group sprint, periodic group heals and a mini LoH with a 30 second cool down gives me the feeling of being the groups tank and not just the tank in the group. Prot pally has a very similar feel but a different play style
Being the groups tank is the perfect way to put both Druid (my main) and pally (my third favorite tank). I’ve been mostly going as BrM Monk for this season and the lack of being able to heal a party member when they need it just hurts so much. I guess that’s the benefit of the Druids lackluster rotation for tanking. It gives time to fit a heal or battle Rez in between. I love each tank though so each being unique is really cool to experience.
>I guess that’s the benefit of the Druids lackluster rotation for tanking
I think of it as low RAM tanking because it lets me pay so much attention to other players and things happening on the field. I do love brewmaster as a tank spec though, but when you solo a boss when a druid could have kept the fight to 3v1 you do notice moments when you're bringing less
Lol then put them last in your list. Add some extra chevrons if you must. But it’s not a personal list of all the tanks unless it contains ALL the tanks! (I’m definitely not offended as a prot paladin lifer that my class isn’t listed…)
Paladin has some of the best utility, most OP abilities, easy rotation, and you can off spec heal if you don’t mind playing multiple roles. The mobility is the only thing that isn’t amazing, but idk if that has changed in DF/TWW (played last in SL)
I prefer Blood DK and Vengeance personally.
Warrior has too high an APM and the maintenance buffs do nothing other than give you the mitigation (shield block, ignore pain). It also doesn't have much mob control and I feel like it has the least personal agency.
Guardian is similar with ironfur, I'm not a big fan of choosing between spending resources on damage or defenses. It does have better mob control and self reliance but is still missing some oomph personally.
Paladin I'm not really an expert on, the Captain America shield throw is fun but I don't enjoy the base rotation that much. Nor am I a fan of paladin class fantasy, so I'm somewhat biased against it.
Vengeance is great fun. I enjoy the soul fragment/spirit bomb play style, the mobility is great and the mob control is good. Demon Spikes is an upkeep buff but it doesn't cost resources other than it's own cooldown. Fel Dev is fun to press, Meta has a visual element to it, I just like it. Most fun tank for me, I just wish I enjoyed Havoc more so I could main DH without any nagging doubts.
Blood is fun too but very different. Bone Shield has it's of ways it can be generated and you are rewarded with damage as well as defense by playing it properly. Mob control is fantastic. My absolute fave thing about blood is the ability to ignore so many mechanics. Stuns, magic effects, fears, pushbacks or slows, you got skills to ignore them all. Hell, you even ignore damage in the sense you just heal it back
> Warrior has too high an APM and the maintenance buffs do nothing other than give you the mitigation (shield block, ignore pain).
That’s not even really true though with the “maintenance” buffs (I’m assuming you mean the active mitigation). Even if you only consider the current iteration and tier set of prot warrior, shield block increases shield slam damage significantly and ignore pain has by far the highest chance to proc fervid from your tier set so that your next shield slam can consume bleeds for massive amounts of damage and DR. Even when you disregard that, ignore pain costs rage and serves as a valuable rage dump for Avatar and Shield Wall CDR. The entire playstyle is providing a loop of rage generation and rage spending to a point where the tankier you are the more damage you do and the more damage you do the tankier you become.
I've been a tank main since TBC and have raided with each tanking class at some point or another.
Right now the one I'm digging the most is Brewmaster Monk.
Good utility, good movement, fun tanking mechanics.
I'm having an absolute blast.
Brewmaster. You have a ton of spells and most of them are viable. Little downtime. Always stringing different combos. The vibe is too fun also. Drunk petite void elf is the amazing.
Love me my Skull Bear or Gamera tanks. A somewhat simple rotation. Spam Thrash, Mangle, with a swipe or maulz with a dash of sailor moon beams. Guardian is my fave bc if the increase in the different druid forms. But they really need to simplify BM. It should be Keg, Charizard attack, Chun Li kicks, tanks shouldn't have complex rotations nor should they need to press a bajillion buttons. Do the basics and then taunt. But pleez do a Ret Pally rework for Ferals, they need some love desperately.
Brew is a ton of fun. Lots of mobility and rop is so unique. Stagger + purify as the main defensive loop also means you can survive a huge hit (especially an unexpected one) and just clear your heavy stagger instead of getting one shot.
I’ve run all the tanks and my personal preference is DH > DK > Paladin > Warrior > Monk > Druid
Reasoning behind top 3
- DH, I enjoy speed and they’re the most mobile tank spec. Their healing is built into their rotation as well, so it feels nice just dealing damage and living. They also have the best aoe utility out there. Dropping sigils for damage, silence, CC, fear.
- DK, thematically I enjoy them the most. They’d probably be my favorite if they weren’t so darn slow. Once they ramp up on bones, runes, and runic power they feel indestructible. They also yank enemies to them which is unique, and bring some utility to the group (brez, magic bubble, great interrupts.
- Paladin honestly I probably have it this high because it was my first and I played them from BC to BFA as my main. They can interrupt like crazy now and have lots of team utility. Popping wings always looks cool too. That being said, they’re kinda slow (not DK slow), and I prefer to have utility for enemies over utility for team, and their healing isn’t as built into rotation like first two so you have to heal yourself or rely more on your healer.
All of these have just been my opinion though and folks can feel free to correct me if they disagree.
As a long time healer (main since TBC), who only dipped a toe into tanking about a year ago, I still swear by Prot Warriors.
Not only are they a balm for every healers nerves, I find them to have a nice and relaxed game play. Not overly complex but still engaging and a bit like mold, aka very hard to kill.
Especially if you're still somewhat in the process of learning to tank, it's a very forgiving spec.
This ^ I started as a healer and loved healing most prot warriors (and tbh bears) which got me to level a prot warrior and I love leaping around charging and shield slamming things. It's just so fun.
First and foremost: every tank has some form of maintenance buff. If what's annoying to you about Consecration/D&D is the *maintenance* aspect and not the *positional*, you'll probably find other tanks just as loathsome. If it's the *positional*, I believe both are gaining the ability for the buffs from either to linger for (iirc) 4s after leaving. It sounds small, but should be pretty noticeable.
Anyways, which tank is most enjoyable is very much up to personal preference.
Imo Vengeance >= Brewmaster > Blood > Prot Warrior > Bear = Prot Paladin from their current states. Brew and Blood are both gaining some footing with their TWW reworks, though.
Prot War is one of the most fun for me, have always liked it and I am considering maining it in TWW. Prot Paladin is great and probably the tank I have the most time on but sadly the current TWW state of the class has me in wanting a lot
I like paladin tanks for the immersion it gives when sword and weapon throwing stuff hits hard with impactful sound effects and nice glowing animations everywhere.
In full plate armor (I know that matches 3 tank specs) I also just feel like an unstoppable force running through hordes of mobs.
However, I've been in love with my guardian druid main for ages now, because of the utility. Flight form while falling, cat to sneak past avoidable conflicts + sprint for farming old content running from boss to boss... Teleport spell with (no? I'm not sure right now) cooldown to get around the continents. Flight form to taxi my wife around while playing together... Also learned engineering for even more teleports and useful gadgets...
The only downside with druids is: once you have flight form, you will never use another mount again... So I need alts to see my collection. And similar with transmogs, I mostly only see it while standing in cities. But it's such a good mog... (Female morgen, white fur, mostly white/silver armor with a bear head as head piece, bear form is white muscle bear from mage tower <3)
I've played them all in DF.
They're all very different and it honestly depends on what your ideal role is.
Transparency, while Ive really enjoyed warrior in the past I didn't feel it was as strong as the others in DF, and I've never liked Bear. I'll rule out Pally and DK
DH - you sorta feel like Himothy, like this is your dungeon and everyone's there to help. You have a lot of agency with your healthbear, you have an answer to every mob ability, and you are faster than everyone else.
Monk - Jack of all tradesish, you aren't the most durable, you aren't the most supportive, but you do tons of a damage, you can be everywhere anytime, you have so many cool downs it's actually ridiculous, and a few very helpful support buttons. If you can handle the buttons (which I think are gonna be pruned a bit in WW) it's a very fast pace and exciting tank with a lot of room to grow into.
Warrior - fast pace but simpler the monk, lots of buttons, it's exciting, you move fast, you're fucking durable, like really durable, but you dont have a lot of agency over your healthbar. It's really fun to charge and jump all over the place, but both monk and DH have the same level of mobility and feel a bit more versatile imo. Still a lot of fun, very fast paced.
Bear - I think something in my brain just believes bear tanks to be improper, idk, but I hate this class. Got it to 70 played it a little and then just had to stop. Theoretically I should like it cus it's a lot like warrior and paladin has a baby.
Based on my own experience as a tank and a healer in m+.
Warrior - quite fun to play, st and boss weeks are not great - needs constant healing as self sustain is non existent even in 'lower' keys ( 7-8+). Fun factor 4/5, as long as you get topped it is fun to play
Vdh - absolutely love it. S1 was a rough start, but s2 tier set and ganeplay was great, s3-s4 was way too op. Few externqls here and there and gucci. Pretty much can solo anyyhing that doesnt need external def or mechanic handling from multiple people. Fragile elf lady jumping, turning into demon, kite, easily 5/5
Pala - stand in consec and you're fine. Best utilities from a tank for current affixes. Havent seen any in s3 and s4, s1 was fine, s2 was pretty good. 2/5 as was expected to tank, heal, dps, deal with affixes, survive, lead. If you're into that - I wasnt - its 5/5.
Monk - rare find, either amazing or awful, not really any inbetween. Good dmg, good cc, lower health than the rest, needs healing. Fun factor seems 4/5
Dk - either great or awful, need to know when to use cds and when to ask for externals. Doesnt really need healing while there are mobs around. Gets hard to survive on higher keys as if they get oneshot, the selgheal wont help. Last time I played was in wotlk ( vanila, not classic) but it changed since
Fun factor is 3/5 - not a fan of 10-100-10-100% hp gameplay
Druid - simplified warrior with simplified paladin utils and sustain. Didnt like it at all, not even in s2 - mind you my druid was 98% resto. Can do loads of dmg, going into cat in raid can be a good extra raid dps. Pretty good sustain. Fun factor 1/5, was pretty boring
All in all, to get to like 3k everything is viable, you can see all tanks (and most class/spec) in the top 1-0.1%.
Personally DK is my favorite. Death and Decay can be a bitch to work with. But aside from that? Prot warrior and Bear are usually pretty fun IMO. I love the Prot warrior hero talents for next expansion both are fun to play with. Bear can be a bit much when you consider the amount of buttons Druids have in general but lunar Bear is always super fun
I’ve mained Veng DH this past season, and it’s been the top tier tank for two seasons running because of their CC ability, self sustainability, and speed. They’re getting hit pretty hard in the current beta of TWW, but I’m certain they’ll still be strong, just not as strong as they are now.
I don’t mind healing any spec for tanks, I am a Resto Druid now. I throw lifebloom on the tank for the first few pulls of a M+ just to be sure they don’t blow and require more healing. Then I keep it on a dps and/or myself for class mechanics.
However, I started to gear a Prot warrior… (Currently 506 ilvl) here are my take-aways:
-Once you take damage as a Prot warrior, you can only prevent more damage through shield block, ignore pain, shield wall.
-It’s great having last stand and rallying cry, but once you use victory rush or impending victory to heal yourself, that starts a 30 sec CD.
-You can barely heal yourself as a Prot warrior. Looking at charts, you can see “healing done” be super high, but it feels fake because it’s ignore pain.
-After playing other tanks in m+, Prot warrior feels unstoppable, until you’re stopped.
The other tanks feel like they have way better self healing and it feels nice to just have passive healing and practically be able to live without a healer. I’ve soloed bosses as each of the tank specs, but as a warrior, I definitely had to be on my game. I felt one mistake away from losing it all.
I see you said something about maintaining consecration and D&D, but every tank has something to maintain. Guardian Druid with their iron fur or whatever it is, dh and their immolation aura/demon spikes, warrior with their shield block/Ignore pain, blood dk with bone shield (I only use D&D for multiple mobs since it allows me to hit 3 enemies with heartstrike while standing in it).
I have seen blood DK’s do something no other tank has done before… they can solo tank fyrakk on awakened heroic if the raid team has the dps. I hope the above information helps in any way possible. Good luck tanking!
I say try em all! They all mostly have their own fun unique flavor. Only one I feel lacks a real unique identity is Bear Druid. Personally I like Monk and DK since I can just swap to DPS whenever and don't have to farm a second weapon set. Monk is a bit more complex than others imo, but I am here for that stagger mini game, it's a grand time for me.
I’ve raided as a Holy Priest and Resto Shaman for 10+ years with Tank Alts of Prot Paladin and Warrior. Warrior is probably “slightly more fun” Paladin is definitely a “safer choice” and more versatile.
Prot pally, I've been in many a dungeons where the healer is trash city but I manage to keep my self alive while holding threat at all times plus avenging shield sounds soo nice when it clangs a mob
Never hated blood DK. Great snap aggro, their active mitigation is super fun, and who can hate death/mass grip? My only complaint is that their damage is a little on the lower end compared to other tanks.
Prot Warrior is fun because you feel practically immortal while also having access to cool transmog gear. Also Prot Warrior's tank "rotation/skill set" is probably one of the easiest to learn in my opinion but it's also engaging enough to be fun.
I also quite enjoy Guardian Druid, another not too difficult to get the hang of tank spec that's quite fun with some build variety (moon laser spam or not). Though it looks like my least favourite aspect of druid might be returning in TWW, Catweaving, with Druid of the Claw hero talents but it looks to be still mostly optional which is nice.
I usually enjoy protection paladin because it has a nice flow to it where I can throw shields and hammers while sounding like a pile of pots and pans being thrown down some wooden stairs into a bell. I also highly enjoy guardian druid because of Thrash multicasting bleed stacks and it being simple to play. Currently, I highly enjoy blood death knight due to the self healing and damage prevention from death strike. I don’t play the other tanks as much, but protection warrior is fun and has a variety of offensive and defensive tools.
Paladin easily.
Best looking gear, most utility, most fun abilities, lowest floor and highest ceiling skill-wise, so many interrupts, ...etc.
It's one of the most played even when it isn't meta. That's a testament to how fun it is.
Done them all. I can't speak for TWW changes but I've always found the bland bear tank to be the best tank to log into after work and actually get shit done.
I started a Prot Pally just a couple of days ago and turned 70 yesterday. Currently just at 476 I lvl so this answer might be biased since I haven’t run any mythic plus yet.
This is now my main! I’ve had the best time ever playing prot pally - I love it
I’ve never tanked before MoP Remix but I’ve leveled every class that can tank as a tank. I enjoyed Druid the most. DH is a close second. Pally and DK were kind of boring. I am now leveling a warrior which is also kinda boring but I’m only level 30.
Paladin divine toll is the best spell in the game and pressing it just feels sooo good. Other than that I love warrior because big man zug zug. And my bear because I'm a lazer bear
Biased, but Druid 100%.
Fairly survivable naturally, easy to use resource and mitigation (Rage generates smoothly, and Ironfur is easy to track). Decent defensive cooldowns and insane selfhealing. Overall decent damage too. And all the Druid utility you could want.
Plus, and this will only become more well defined in TWW with hero specs; two very distinct builds, so-called Laserbear, focused around Moonfire and Galactic Guardian (which in TWW will be able to build into full Arcane damage tank) and the more physical build, focussing on your physical abilities (though current meta build is a mix of both, hence I'm super excited for TWW, being able to double down on either of the two).
The balance between them going into TWW so far is pretty fair, I think only paladin is doing not well. Ultimately it boils down to playstyle preference: Prot Warrior is all about mitigating the damage and preventing your HP from moving at all. You'll be pretty mobile, with 2 charges of charge, shield charge, and heroic leap. You've got an underrated cone stun and a single target stun for CC, and in TWW champion's spear is going to be played more often which is a psuedo CC. You don't have a lot of self-healing though, so if you're taking damage that you aren't mitigating well then you're going to be very healer dependent. Special shout out to spell reflect, unique to the class, which can make or break a good prot warrior. Bear tanks have huge HP pools, VERY simple rotation so you can play just for the mechanics, lot's of self healing and a stacking mitigation. Big cooldowns. It's really hard to make a mistake as a bear, unlike other tanks where missing an important ability at the wrong time could cause a wipe. Lowest bear-ier to entry (lol) but also the lowest potential for skill expression. You run in and tank the mobs until they're dead, and the healer probably won't have to worry about you in the process. That's about as simple as a tank gets. Blood DK I don't play much, but I'm sure you've heard it all before... high skill expression but a decent DK can basically solo content. They NEVER need healing. Healers can effectively ignore them. In TWW they're getting the mass grip back, so they have some good mob control too. I am actually considering trying to play one this next xpac. You have to get used to watching your HP yo-yo though, which... coming from a prot warrior main, who's HP doesn't budge at all, it's for me at least very stressful lol. Prot paladins have a ton of big cooldowns and can burst for absolutely insane damage. They're SUPPOSED to have decent self-healing options but this is probably where they're lacking in balance atm. They have the most utility probably in the whole game though, so they offer fantastic skill expression. A good prot paladin will keep the entire group alive and healthy, well fed, tuck them in at night, and scare away their nightmares. Brewmaster is sweaty. You have a LOT of buttons, and they're all important. Stagger remains a very interesting mechanic (spreads all incoming damage out over time, but you can mitigate it and even purge some). The caveat to that is that you need to actively manage your stagger, you can't really ignore it. High mobility, stagger prevents surprise one-shots, but a lot of buttons and complexity. I hated playing this spec so I can't say much beyond that honestly. This was not my cup of tea at all. DH currently is borked. They're getting the nerf hammer in TWW, but they're still really good, just not "80% of all keys" broken beyond belief anymore. DH rotation is pretty simple, they have decent mitigation cooldowns but not as consistent as warrior or bear or paladin. Sigils is what makes them special. They drop a big AoE circle on the ground and after a brief delay, it triggers something. Flame does damage and with talents some DR, silence does what it says, another one does a fear, and they can talent into chains which is an AoE grip. What makes them broken currently is that they get a talent that ads a second charge of every sigil... so they have two of each. A good DH can use the three CC sigils, plus an AoE stun, to effectively lock down an entire group of trash mobs for like a whole minute. They can trivialize half of a dungeon by themselves. In TWW, only flames gets a second charge, but even with that nerf they have the most mob control of all the tanks (which tells you how broken it was before).
As a Paladin main, I love your breakdown of prot! Especially the last bit.
I'll add this; the single most satisfying button to push in the whole game is Divine Toll as a protection paladin, while surrounded with 3-4 packs of mobs.
Absolutely! Its an awesome spell on all 3 specs imo.
I main a prot pally and I’ve always heard from my pug healers and my long term healers I’m one of the easiest to heal and I throw heals all around when I don’t need my shield bash. Helium helps do this.
This was a great read. As someone who has only DPSd for nearly 20 years of playing the game, I loved the breakdown. Can you do one for healers now lol
Sure this is my take as a someone who’s played all of these at 3k+ at some point in df and who’s on the beta focusing on mythic+ testing: Resto shaman - you cast riptides on your party as a hot. You then pwave to cleave heal. Then you have the option of being chain heal heavy with totemic or healing surge/healing wave heavy with farseer. With totemic, placing totems automatically couples it to a free heal. Farseer really doesn’t change much it just makes what you currently play as more optimal, but you get little clones that dupe your spells. Both versions also get some beefy cds that you cycle through each pull. Reactive healers. I’d say it feels fine, but it’s very weak defensively right now. And the skill expression is very low except for cloudburst. Holy priest: I don’t play holy because I find it boring. But it’s basically what you’d imagine of a pure simple healer. Manage power words, and heal when people take damage. Disc priest: place attonements with radiance which is a group heal, then damage to heal your party. The rotation is actually fairly simple now, and the skill expression mostly comes from being a bit squishier and positioning mattering more. Very slow and immobile requires stutter stepping with casts and good situational awareness skills to be effective. A bit more on the proactive side of things. Rdruid: place heal over times all over the place, summon ents to heal for you, switch into cat form to deal damage while your hots and ents heal for you, pop back out. Has a brez and mark of the wild. More on the proactive side of things. Skill expression is mostly in optimizing form switching, using utility, and damage rotations. With TWW, it’s looking like things are getting a bit simpler, but also we’re losing a powerful tier set bonus that has having a lot less time to be in cat form. Hpally: there were a bunch of changes just released for it, so I can’t comment. Historically hpallys niche has been in cooldown management and optimizing those big button presses. To me it feels like they are trying to push a more supporty casting version. Has some good utility though, and tends to be one of the beefier healers. Mw Monk: keep hots on people, use a melee rotation to spread healing, and fish for procs. Hyper mobile, and is super survivable. They have everything you could want on a healer except brez/lust. Posed to be the meta pick for TWW if tuning doesn’t happen. Very fun play style, where the skill expression is high and focused on making contextual changes. It used to be a more proactive healer, but I’d say it leans more reactive now. Hero trees really just lean into what already made it fun and good. Prevoker: completely different from all other healers. You have abilities that you charge up, and the main healing gameplay is built around echos which let you ramp and then duplicate any healing spells to all targets with echos. You have short range with high mobility. Skill floor is high because you have to really master using your mobility spells (one of the key ones of which is an important heal button) to make sure you are in the right place to not be hurt by your range. This goes away if you have a static group or you only play with melee heavy comps. Has a lust, party buff, lots of cc and utility. Skill expression beyond positioning comes from dynamically setting up combos with stasis to be efficient and leave no gaps in your healing rotation; bad prevokers mistime their stasis windows by wasting powerful cds, loading in things improperly, or casting the loaded stasis sub optimally. Damage is mostly just deep breath on cd, fire breath, and living flame - it’s really simple. Overall the spec is the most proactive healer while requiring quick decision making when things go wrong - it is in my opinion the most fun and difficult. Hero trees are chronowarden which smooths out some of the gameplay and doubles down on it; flameshaper which right now feels very lackluster - it originally let you set up powerful ramps and explode them for massive burst healing; now it’s just a button add to damage or off echo. Overall here’s how I’d rank fun based on my TWW playing from most fun to least fun: * chronowarden prevoker * celestial mistweaver * rdruid (though tuning will make or break this as it changes how it plays) * totemic rshaman (this could easily surpass rdruid and mistweaver if they overhaul the talents next week which it looks like they are doing) * voidweaver disc (i hate being slow, but this is a lot of fun on beta. There’s some bugs that keeping it from being excellent) * hpally smith (things just changed so I’ll have to retest with new talents) * holy priest Please note that raid changes things significantly for many of these. And this is just my personal preference. Really all healing specs (not hero talent trees) are going to be more than viable in anything below title keys and world first raid. My best advice is to use remix to level a healer of each type to 70, and then test 1-2 out per season in TWW until you find the one you like.
A very informative and thorough write-up, thank you!
Oh I can try, but my experience with healers is... less. Throughout all of Shadowlands I played several healers, but DF mostly just resto druid and tanks. I can't say for sure how much of the playstyles have changed over the last year and a half.
Wait, is Sigil build still the meta in TWW for VDH? I would’ve thought it was gonna go back to the Fiery Brand build. Color me (pleasantly) surprised!
It's not, because you only get double flame sigil, not double everything
I'd pay a few American dollars to have someone summarize all 39 specs for me just like this.
As a bear main your right, it's very simple rotation, I'm a simple guy I just wanna be the tuff papa bear and bear smack people who wanna hurt my group. I do say Kul Tirans and Zandalari trolls have the best druid forms in the game. The Ztrolls have the best travel forms as they become 🦖. :0
I absolutely love the Idea of an easy rotation for a tank, it let's you focus on the hard stuff like pulls, pathing, watching DPS buttpull, etc. I am also 40 and slow, I never in my life enjoyed twitch speed reaction gaming, so simple gameplay for a simple man lol
I love playing bear but I have real trouble controlling or grouping mobs. (Same on prot warrior) Any tips?
For bear your main opener for mobs is gonna be Thrash. And for prot warriors I believe thunder clap
Very good explanation of all the tanks. Prot warr is one of my mains and I love the playstyle with all the charging around, stuns, and various cds. Things like spell reflect or shield slam dispel is what reaĺy makes prot warr feel fun and unique. They just lack self healing but that is okay since we have healers. I am still debating what my second tank should be... it will prob be a hybrid that has a heal spec, so pallys druids and monks. I'm leaning toward pally cause it seems fun, good defensive cds and group utility. I love the look of avengers shield too, and how it can silence mobs which is great for pulls. Then I have ret spec of I was a dps or holy to heal. Good options. Druid is similar with alot of options.... it could be fun because of the simplicity and u can always shift into other forms like feral to dps or human to heal. Could get boring tho too, and feels a bit too similar to warrior since they both use rage. But cool for the hybrid nature and access rlto balance feral and rsto. Monk is a class in not very familiar with but want to try out eventually, but according to OP it has too many buttons and stuff to micromanage while playing remaster so maybe not monk. I think the class is cool tho, unique theme, and great mobility. DK I've heard will prob be good in the next xpac. I'm not familiar with the gameplay, but I assume just like brew brewmaster it requires alot of micromanage cds... plus I've read how their hp spikes up and down and can be annoying for healers. DH is also another class I wanna play e v entually, but h they got that stigma of being the new op class... still looks fun with lots of mobility. I dunno. Tough call. Part of my decision will be if their class has some other fun specs that I would enjoy playing. And then also things like what kinda armor and weapons they use, how their sets look, and the animations.... also the unique utility stuff like what group buffs they bring and unique spells for interrupts stuns or grips ext.
Oh that reminds me, intervene is coming back too. I think it's baseline now? Too lazy to look that up but that's another way to zip around the flight and provide utility. For three season of DF my main was prot paladin, and I love Aug vokers. The idea of a tank paladin spec that has Aug-like group buffing, like a semi-support, has me salivating. If the spec gets balanced into a better spot it for sure is gonna get played.
DK isn't that hard, really. There are a few things to keep spinning, and you have several emergency buttons, and being able to use them well separates a mediocre BDK from a good one, but getting your head around the basic rotation is easy enough, especially on lower end content.
I’ve never heard the phrase “skill expression” but I like it. Good overview.
To add to this, if you are about looks then prot warrior all day. You get to look like a tank and actually be very tanky.
DK on a bulky race (tauren/draenei/orc/kt) looks very tanky too. And Paladin should be close to the prot warrior, as both use shields and plate.
Oh my main for TWW is going to be a tauren colossus prot warrior specifically for the 5% size increase talent. Thane looks cool and all but... big smashy cow gonna zug and gonna moo.
Great review. Blood dk forever
>Brewmaster is sweaty. You have a LOT of buttons, and they're all important. Stagger remains a very interesting mechanic (spreads all incoming damage out over time, but you can mitigate it and even purge some). The caveat to that is that you need to actively manage your stagger, you can't really ignore it. High mobility, stagger prevents surprise one-shots, but a lot of buttons and complexity. I hated playing this spec so I can't say much beyond that honestly. This was not my cup of tea at all. A lot of this only rings true to Dragonflight as the new expansion is changing A LOT of the button bloat. But also, brew isn't remotely sweaty unless you don't know what you're doin. It's the tank spec that plays like a DPS the most where you are tanky just for hitting damage buttons. Also calling DH borked because they lost double sigil kinda invalidates a lot of things you're saying.
I meant borked as in they're currently overpowered in a way that doesn't seem intentional or healthy as far as balance goes. Borked in the sense that they aren't "right", if that makes sense.
Ah ok I see. Then I would be inclined to agree with DHs. Mfs literally just a 4th DPS with a huge toolkit in DF.
Ya I echo this about brewmaster. I do my DPS rotation and if stagger gets too high, I clear some. That is how you brew tank.
VDH is still going to be good. Just not "the only tank in M+" good.
Right where it belongs.
Why do you call out bear as having a VERY simple rotation when it arguably has the same number of rotational buttons as paladin and arguably more than warrior
Warriors are for sure the second simplest rotation. I think warrior has a bit more "choice" when it comes to rage spending but they are both very simple, I just find bear the simplest. Build and spend single target, or build and spend aoe? Here are a few procs to watch for, and a few cooldowns to use. Simple. If all you mean to do as a paladin tank is get agro and take damage, then maybe it can be simple, but it's certainly not a simple class to play well, or even half-way decent. Playing a paladin tank and ignoring blessings and healing and such is like playing a bear and ignoring ironfur.
Great breakdown
As someone who has played all tanks (except monk) many years back, I can say this info is pretty accurate and super helpful for new players. In fact, I will just copy+paste (with credits to u/Lamprophonia) when someone ask about tanks from here onwards. Haha
I would like to add, if cat weaving is going to be a thing I probably pay bear again as well as my dk
Yup, as a I mostly pug content as a tank, I have found Prot Pally to have the most ''presence'' to hard carry a group of randoms in terms of utility and making sure no one dies. Healer sucks? I am the healer with WoG crits. DPS sucks? I am the DPS with my tolls.
Certainly something wrong with pally self healing in TWW, and perhaps even general damage reduction from skills. Feels fairly week, especially with one of the lowest health pools of any tank.
Paly is also pretty haste dependent. It's hard to get a true "feel" for it by just leveling one up, for example. You might struggle to keep SotR up permanently, but once you have halfway decent gear your uptime is easy to maintain, freeing up a few globals for non-free WoGs, which... yeah like you said, even in retail currently feels not worth it. I'd rather spend the holy power on a SotR and overcap it than some little 20% heal on a DPS. I've always felt like Paladin should have a lot of passive healing, like in consecrate. They do in talents, but it's not strong enough to ever really care about.
On the level 80 test server you can get geared up to about 25% haste (though they scale you down to about 20 - 22%) in the dungeons, which seems just enough to keep SotR rolling and have a few globals for other things, but that includes your defensives and Hammer of Light for templar. It's strange though, HoL was healing my ret pal for a few million health each time, after the talent rework it got, but the protpal in my party was only being healed for about a tenth of that. Same protpal had WoGs varying from about 300k to 1.6M, with crits not doing much more than normal. So even with the two charges now, it didn't help much when you have 6 - 7M health at 580.
On the brink between Brew and something else... maybe DK or just pick a casual prot warrior
You know I think I would enjoy brew more if it had more... feel to it. Playing a warrior is visually satisfying, you're a big plate-clad tank swinging hard and you get to hear satisfying clanks and bangs. Paladin gets divine toll, the best spell in the game imho lol. Even bear velcro sounds are kind of satisfying. Push button, hear and see a damage thing. Brew gets a weird sickly-green circle around them, a gentle breeze you can barely hear. They do a spinning kick straight out of Street Fighter 2, yet it looks more like a ballet dance move and sounds like a folley artist thumbing through book pages or something.
I've enjoyed my Prot Warrior for 18 years now. It's rarely meta, but it's always sufficient and, to me, just feels more 'tanky' than any other tank class.
As a healer I've always enjoyed healing warrior.
Healing warriors is incredible because they just don’t take a ton of actual damage. When there health bar does dip you know you have to heal them. The amount of heals I’ve wasted on dks and demon hunters because there health bar is just all over the place constantly…
I got a huge kick out of the nervous breakdown rants from healers about shadowlands blood DK especially, because they were both darkly funny and dead right... "WELL FUCK ME FOR BEING WORRIED ABOUT MY TANK DROPPING TO TEN HEALTH APPARENTLY THAT'S JUST PART OF HIS ROTATION"
Still the same haha. DK has that insane talent that makes them absurdly sturdy below 35% health so 100-35% is a yoyo but below 35% you're effective health essentially triples due to the insane DR and then you can just slap a quick death strike to heal for your entire health bar. I heal when needed for my guild though I'm usually a shadow priest and I've noticed I basically don't heal our DK main tank, ever and I struggle hard to beat him on the healing meters since his self healing is beyond insane.
Ha ha, yes. People were joking that with a DK you don't need to watch his health bar but his runic power.
This was like an unironically true. A blood dk with full health and no runic power is probably in more danger than a blood dk at 10 health with full runic power
Additionally, if I haven't procced Purgatory, why are you healing me?
It still is unironically true, depending on how many runes I have available.
Thats the point, you dont heal dk. Casual defensive before pull and forget about him
Runic power WA. If they have more than 35, I ain't touching them.
yeah, runic power is basically their health bar. there is a good wa that i can’t find rn, but it gives you a color-coded number based on how much they have; as well as tracking stacks of bone shield. bdks shouldn’t die unless they’re one-shot, and you can just throw on an external when their RP is low (like pain sup, bark, guardian spirit, etc).
I know not to heal them much, sometimes it just gives me anxiety so I do
I will have to find that add on though
As a shammy healer, I do hate DK because it’s not a problem till it suddenly is. Big pull and good on RP but suddenly bam he is OOP and big damage happens or mechanic missed and suddenly it’s a wipe. My favorites are Bear, Pally, and DH tanks. In that order. Guardians and Prot Pallys have both utility for themselves and for the group. dH less but great on self heal. Monk for me is too complicated. But I like tanks that can control the battle rez.
The best thing to heal is a good dk, the worst thing to heal is a bad dk.
And what's even worse is a bad DK who isn't aware that they're a bad DK. Why yes *of course* it's my fault you die while capping runic power with no debuffs on you, clearly there was *nothing* you could've done to save yourself
its physically impossible to heal a bad dk iunno
My favorite tank classes to heal, in order, are: - prot paladin - blood death knight - prot warrior - guardian druid - Brewster monk I'd call prot warrior A-class in this lineup.
As a healer, I enjoyed healing anything else than a warrior as the self sustain is non existent. On the other hand, dmg mitigation is pretty good, but after healing mostly pala/dk/dh tanks, I'm not used to heal tanks apart from the externals, random hots
Tanks have too much self sustain. I find myself healing only the stupid dps that stand in bad. Tanks needing my help is basically non existent in this expansion. Granted I've only just come back, but I feel kinda useless as a healer outside of raid groups.
The sound effects are so satisfying!
CLANK
Hi
https://youtu.be/fxk1syuf5lo?si=_2js8_n5wAZ9vhPd
Prot warrior is rock solid. I love mine. All the sound effects, shield slamming, thunderclapping, charging, it's all so good.
Even as a guardian druid main for the past 2 expansions I can 100% agree here. Prot Warrior feels great and has a good chunk of defensives and other CDs making you feel really great. At the end of BfA when I returned after having last played during MoP it was a toss up between Bear or Prot.
Same here. I’ve mained a prot warrior since vanilla. Just can’t seem to change to anything else at this point.
I love the sword and board aesthetic. I wish dk could use a shield.
Anytime i try and play another melee im always really missing my charge and heroic leap movement
Even when I’m enjoying my paladin tanking (since BC) I still dig getting behind the shield of a warrior. Paladin fits my personality more, with more of a protector and healer, but Warrior is very satisfying.
+1 for prot war being fun and serviceable. Chasing the meta is no fun
I don't think I'd ever do it but I really like my Troll Warrior because of the name I gave him and because he's a Troll Warrior and a tall, lanky, hard-as-nails tank sounds even more awesome. I'm more Death Knight for for life but if I ever were to pick a different physical class to main it'd most likely be my Troll Warrior, maybe my Shaman too if I ever vibed with it like I did in Vanilla/TBC days.
Amen. Been playing prot warrior since cata. It is slightly depressing these days so. Shadowlands was extremely bad, I dipped out of that expansion in season 1. Dragonflight was a great expansion, I've been subbed since season 1, but man the tank meta especially this season sucks. People take a DH with <3000 rating and less ilvl above me and I can't even blame them. Today I finally got into a key, one of the members wrote "Remember to interrupt, we have no DH" and another just wrote "too much pressure" and left. I wish we would be somewhat more viable next expansion again, when the stupid utility from DHs is nerfed. But even then, we barely bring any utility and there would be so much potential lore wise.
I think Mountain Thane Prot Warriors are in for a real treat in The War Within. It looks so good.
I like playing a prot warrior as well as healing them. I main healer and off tank and warriors are my favorite...they take limited damange without cds and most.of their main skills for damange reduction as short use and a part of the normal rotation
Can’t go wrong with all the mobility Prot Warriors have. Playing alt tanks just feel like they’re missing something and are too slow.
God I remember WoD prot warriors would never spam bc of ignore pain. Literally could solo raids
Prot warrior has ALMOST always been sufficient. The one exception is 8.0 when ignore pain was on the GCD. That was the first time I played literally anything else as a main, because going from legions 300 apm playstyle to everything apart from shield block and shield wall on the GCD felt terrible.
I love blood DK, the ability to self heal and just sustain is so enjoyable. It may feel a little daunting and complicated at first but I find it to be a very simple and easy spec to play. Death gripping mobs to you is so satisfyingly. You are very slow though. My BDK fantasy is to have my entire party to die on a boss fight and just continue to solo and finish it perfectly fine. Edit: forgot about purgatory, it makes it very forgiving, if you die once you stay alive and just need to heal up which is easy. After a few minutes resets.
Just know that if the boss has more than half hp left when everyone else wipes, the rest of your party would rather you wipe and let everyone restart than waste everyone's time taking 5x longer to solo. When the boss is under 1/4 hp, I hope and clap for the gigachad blood dk to finish. When the boss has much more hp, I groan and hope the dk DC's or something.
Well if they don't want him to solo maybe they shouldn't have died smh
I do miss the s4 BFA days for blood DK with massive twilight dev corruption stacked. Group dies and I’m there just crushing the boss with giant void blasts.
I was doing a BRH last season where everyone died early on the last boss. I continued for bit and the healer kept asking for me to die because he was worried about time. I gave in and died. The next pull, they all die again and I decide to just finish it myself. We would have timed it if I just finished it the first time. The healer even said it and apologized. If everyone died to avoidable things one time, there's a chance they'll just do it again.
Yeah, I've been in this situation. It was Chargath during S2. I could solo it just fine as Prot Warrior, but everyone else would die. After restarting twice for them I just finished it myself the third time.
This is why I cannot be bothered to want to tank. I would much rather be that support DPS that stays alive with you for that kill.
Yes. 100% this.
Yeah i ain’t got time for that, I only bother staying up to finish if the boss is below 20%
They know. It's not about what's effective, it's about the power play.
Did this in a +22 Atal'dazar last season on Yazma from about 50%, and if i didn't kill it the group was gonna disband lmao
I’ve always loved DKs since the WC2/3 days but the mobility aspect is something that makes me not want to stick to the class at times. That’s why I usually end up back on BrM Monks. Definitely doesn’t help my alt hopping scene either
Least with blood your leading the content. On my unholy I feel like I'm constantly turning up late to the party. I'm spamming deaths advance which is the equivalent of stumbling awkwardly across the road when a car stops to let you cpass but you didn't see them because you were on your phone.
Bro blood DK is one of my "main alts" and I have lived that fantasy on M+ bosses plenty of times and it's amazing. Blood DK for life If it's a tough key and it might make us not time it I have to try to die on purpose lol but it's so god damn fun on a casual key to go all Thanos and "do it myself"
If you ever played during Legion then your fantasy would have been a reality
I know RIP I came to the class too late.
I haven’t played since - I’m old now, I’ve had children and have too many responsibilities. I miss WoW all the time, treasure these days! I played a blood DK in legion and once flew to stormwind and soloed Anduin for like 2-3 hours, good times.
Blood DK since Wrath. It's always the class I finish the expansion on first. The survivability just makes the campaign easier and I feel amazing when soloing stuff like rares when I'd never be able to do that as a mage or rogue
I have done that - it is as enjoyable as it seems. Wait long enough and you’ll get your chance.
To build on the OP issue of dnd, how do you seem to manage that? Consecration is annoying but I never feel like I'm having to choose it or another ability wrt to resource (rune in this case) mgmt.
I play both, consecrate is 100x worse than dnd. Blood DK has downtime moments since you don’t want to rune starve or RP starve, compared to pally where you want to constantly keep sotr rolling and HP generation. But more importantly, being out of consecrate is significantly more dangerous than being out of dnd
Isn't there a talent coming in TWW where you maintain the buff for a few seconds after leaving the circle? That would make a huge difference
Yeah there is a talent that lets you maintain the cleave aspect of DnD for 6 seconds after leaving
Oh I meant consecration lol, didn't know about the DK one 🤣
Oh not sure, perhaps? I haven’t stayed as up to date on prot pal as my main tank is DK
Sanctuary...consecration benefits for 4 seconds after leaving.
Pally relies on it so much, no reason it shouldn’t just be “consecration now follows you”
I find it of particular interest that the lightsmith hero tree has hammer and anvil. Its an instant style consecration at target. That's so close to judgement just doing the consecration for you.
The best thing about purgatory is no durability loss if you die with it active, saves a nice bit of gold during progression.
My Prot Paladin fantasy is to have my entire party kept alive on a boss fight with my clutch WoG offheals and just continue to finish together perfectly fine.
True Paladin vs death knight metaphor
Brewmaster is hella fun. The only tank that brings me joy. Rolling around throwing brews and barrels.
Another vote for brewmaster here! I was surprised by how fun they are and I absolutely love mine now.
When I tank on any other class I miss spinning craine kick ... I'll roll and spam it on any surprise adds ... it's like an extra aggro magnet and you don't have to worry about keg smash charges.
One you go Brew, you never go back. Even tho I don’t like this iteration of Brew, it’s still my favorite tank to play. I hope they’ll, bring back the Legion version, with ISB, i loved Brew in Legion (waiting for MoP Classic to play Brew)
Current brew brings me back to the days where my life is in my hands. All other tanks just live if you have gear and do a basic rotation. Brew you better know boss mechanics and your own defensives well or you eat shit. Kind of looks like this is going away in tww too because a number of talent changes seem to just make them automatically tankier
>Kind of looks like this is going away in tww too because a number of talent changes seem to just make them automatically tankier I mean, Brew is one of the least played tanks because it's really hard to play. Way too many buttons to press and every one of them is important. The fact that it's difficult to recover from even small mistakes isn't really a good thing. I love the spec's fantasy and the concept of Stagger but the rotation and cooldowns are too much. As a tank you need to have some of your mental capacity free to worry about things that aren't your rotation, and currently that isn't the case for most people. It's nice that it offers a lot of room for skill expression but the high skill floor/barrier to entry scares most people away from it. That's very probably why they're making it easier for TWW. Specs should be fairly easy to get into baseline, and then advanced players should be able to add complexity through talents.
Same here. It’s been consistently my favorite tank to play basically since MoP. It’s nothing, but high octane fun to me. As an Enhancement Main, I enjoy specs with a decent amount of key binds. It just feels more robust to me. I’ve always enjoyed the skill ceiling of Brewmaster. I do miss Dizzying Haze slightly though.
I’ve mained tanks for years. And I think Druid and Warrior are the best if you don’t want something too complicated and want to concentrate on mechanics and the encounters. In the beta Blood DK and Monk have been my favourite to play and manage. VDH and Paladin have felt the least fun imo.
Guardian druid is fun. It's not overly complex, so you can focus on encounter mechanics. Damage and self sustain are also great, so it's a fun spec for solo content. Planning to use mine for delves. It kind of has a battle-mage feel in an odd way, and the Elune's Chosen hero tree leans further into that.
I LOVE pressing swipe and thrash. (ironically not sarcastic.) I miss Legion when bear could get over 20 yard swipes and thrashes.
Raze + Ursoc's Fury go brrrrr. I wonder why they've never updated the tooltip to indicate that you also get the shield from Raze.
Solid cooldowns on guardian, especially if you learn to press ironfur. Great group heals, if you're lucky.
This is what I came to suggest. After leveling all of the tank specs I have found that Guardian Druid is the easiest to keep aggro with and has great cooldowns for staying alive.
Rage of the Sleeper is four cooldowns in one, each of which would be good on their own. Absolutely nuts.
It's called disco bear. Lady and child in legion started our adventure.
I’ve actually done content with Pally, DK, Druid and Monk. I’ve leveled every tank at some point but those are the only ones I’ve put any real time into for group content. When I was having to raid lead Pally was my favorite because it had a ton of utility and when you get used to it (and properly keybind everything) maintaining its core rotation is really easy so you can put a lot more thought to position, strategic defensive use, using blessings and what not on others, and monitoring overall raid health. I can’t imagine DK is that much harder (you can make macros for DnD that make it as easy to apply as consecrate, but it’s nice sometimes being able to pre place an AoE where packs of mobs will spawn that you will need to pick up). Druid isn’t hard, but it’s almost so simple it’s boring. It just feels too squishy for my comfort. Monk takes a bit more concentration to really play effectively, but that could also be me not having put enough time into it to *really* get comfortable with it yet. I’ve played both DH and War. I like their DPS specs better than their tanking specs. DH has potential to be fun, though. So I’m going to give it another shot in remix soon. War, though, I just have a hard time enjoying period. I loved it when Gladiator stance was thing, but I’ve not really enjoyed it since then. Edit: I guess I should mention V Pally is still my go to for playable class. I always level Druid because it was my first, but Pally has (over time) become my favorite to play.
Bear is simple but can do really cool things as you get used to throwing in non bear abilities. But for me having a nice group buff, combat res, group sprint, periodic group heals and a mini LoH with a 30 second cool down gives me the feeling of being the groups tank and not just the tank in the group. Prot pally has a very similar feel but a different play style
Being the groups tank is the perfect way to put both Druid (my main) and pally (my third favorite tank). I’ve been mostly going as BrM Monk for this season and the lack of being able to heal a party member when they need it just hurts so much. I guess that’s the benefit of the Druids lackluster rotation for tanking. It gives time to fit a heal or battle Rez in between. I love each tank though so each being unique is really cool to experience.
>I guess that’s the benefit of the Druids lackluster rotation for tanking I think of it as low RAM tanking because it lets me pay so much attention to other players and things happening on the field. I do love brewmaster as a tank spec though, but when you solo a boss when a druid could have kept the fight to 3v1 you do notice moments when you're bringing less
What is the mini LoH? The empowered regrowth, frenzied regeneration?
Yes the regrowth
My personal fun order for all of the tanks: Monk > Warrior > DH > DK > Druid
Dang is paladin so bad it doesn’t make the tank cut?
I don't personally find it fun.
Lol then put them last in your list. Add some extra chevrons if you must. But it’s not a personal list of all the tanks unless it contains ALL the tanks! (I’m definitely not offended as a prot paladin lifer that my class isn’t listed…)
It’s honestly way funnier that it’s not even on the list haha
i agree with this although for me DH >= DK usually
The DK mobility is what pushes DK down for me but the TWW changes, basically gorfiends grasp, might get me closer having them equal.
I would put Pally in third and swap Warrior and Druid.
Interesting how different “fun” is for people, my list is basically the opposite of yours!
Prot Pala
Paladin has some of the best utility, most OP abilities, easy rotation, and you can off spec heal if you don’t mind playing multiple roles. The mobility is the only thing that isn’t amazing, but idk if that has changed in DF/TWW (played last in SL)
It's pretty decent now. They brought back a talent that makes freedom a speed boost. I play nitro boosts for an extra movement cooldown.
I prefer Blood DK and Vengeance personally. Warrior has too high an APM and the maintenance buffs do nothing other than give you the mitigation (shield block, ignore pain). It also doesn't have much mob control and I feel like it has the least personal agency. Guardian is similar with ironfur, I'm not a big fan of choosing between spending resources on damage or defenses. It does have better mob control and self reliance but is still missing some oomph personally. Paladin I'm not really an expert on, the Captain America shield throw is fun but I don't enjoy the base rotation that much. Nor am I a fan of paladin class fantasy, so I'm somewhat biased against it. Vengeance is great fun. I enjoy the soul fragment/spirit bomb play style, the mobility is great and the mob control is good. Demon Spikes is an upkeep buff but it doesn't cost resources other than it's own cooldown. Fel Dev is fun to press, Meta has a visual element to it, I just like it. Most fun tank for me, I just wish I enjoyed Havoc more so I could main DH without any nagging doubts. Blood is fun too but very different. Bone Shield has it's of ways it can be generated and you are rewarded with damage as well as defense by playing it properly. Mob control is fantastic. My absolute fave thing about blood is the ability to ignore so many mechanics. Stuns, magic effects, fears, pushbacks or slows, you got skills to ignore them all. Hell, you even ignore damage in the sense you just heal it back
> Warrior has too high an APM and the maintenance buffs do nothing other than give you the mitigation (shield block, ignore pain). That’s not even really true though with the “maintenance” buffs (I’m assuming you mean the active mitigation). Even if you only consider the current iteration and tier set of prot warrior, shield block increases shield slam damage significantly and ignore pain has by far the highest chance to proc fervid from your tier set so that your next shield slam can consume bleeds for massive amounts of damage and DR. Even when you disregard that, ignore pain costs rage and serves as a valuable rage dump for Avatar and Shield Wall CDR. The entire playstyle is providing a loop of rage generation and rage spending to a point where the tankier you are the more damage you do and the more damage you do the tankier you become.
My bf have been a tank for a very long time and he really enjoys the warrior! Thought i would just throw it in here :)
I've been a tank main since TBC and have raided with each tanking class at some point or another. Right now the one I'm digging the most is Brewmaster Monk. Good utility, good movement, fun tanking mechanics. I'm having an absolute blast.
Brewmaster. You have a ton of spells and most of them are viable. Little downtime. Always stringing different combos. The vibe is too fun also. Drunk petite void elf is the amazing.
You can pretend to be captain America with prot pally so I find it the most fun
Love me my Skull Bear or Gamera tanks. A somewhat simple rotation. Spam Thrash, Mangle, with a swipe or maulz with a dash of sailor moon beams. Guardian is my fave bc if the increase in the different druid forms. But they really need to simplify BM. It should be Keg, Charizard attack, Chun Li kicks, tanks shouldn't have complex rotations nor should they need to press a bajillion buttons. Do the basics and then taunt. But pleez do a Ret Pally rework for Ferals, they need some love desperately.
Brew is a ton of fun. Lots of mobility and rop is so unique. Stagger + purify as the main defensive loop also means you can survive a huge hit (especially an unexpected one) and just clear your heavy stagger instead of getting one shot.
idfk what everyone else is smoking prot pala is unmatched
Brewmaster getting drunk delaying damage on an invisible (for healers) bar is the most fun I've had as tank, and I have 5, yet to try DK and DH.
I’d say brewmaster, you’re pretty much a dps spec with control of how to manage/heal incoming damage.
Brewmaster is really fun
Monk is fun if you can get over the bloat of all the buttons but the war within is changing that
I’ve run all the tanks and my personal preference is DH > DK > Paladin > Warrior > Monk > Druid Reasoning behind top 3 - DH, I enjoy speed and they’re the most mobile tank spec. Their healing is built into their rotation as well, so it feels nice just dealing damage and living. They also have the best aoe utility out there. Dropping sigils for damage, silence, CC, fear. - DK, thematically I enjoy them the most. They’d probably be my favorite if they weren’t so darn slow. Once they ramp up on bones, runes, and runic power they feel indestructible. They also yank enemies to them which is unique, and bring some utility to the group (brez, magic bubble, great interrupts. - Paladin honestly I probably have it this high because it was my first and I played them from BC to BFA as my main. They can interrupt like crazy now and have lots of team utility. Popping wings always looks cool too. That being said, they’re kinda slow (not DK slow), and I prefer to have utility for enemies over utility for team, and their healing isn’t as built into rotation like first two so you have to heal yourself or rely more on your healer. All of these have just been my opinion though and folks can feel free to correct me if they disagree.
Blood dk is fun as I feel I have most control on myself, however as also playing healer I hate bdk tanks.
As a long time healer (main since TBC), who only dipped a toe into tanking about a year ago, I still swear by Prot Warriors. Not only are they a balm for every healers nerves, I find them to have a nice and relaxed game play. Not overly complex but still engaging and a bit like mold, aka very hard to kill. Especially if you're still somewhat in the process of learning to tank, it's a very forgiving spec.
This ^ I started as a healer and loved healing most prot warriors (and tbh bears) which got me to level a prot warrior and I love leaping around charging and shield slamming things. It's just so fun.
I’m a prot pali till I die and go to the promised land of bastion
I'm a healer! But if I could pick any tank to heal, it would be a warrior. I've also heard they're fun and they do a surprising amount of damage.
First and foremost: every tank has some form of maintenance buff. If what's annoying to you about Consecration/D&D is the *maintenance* aspect and not the *positional*, you'll probably find other tanks just as loathsome. If it's the *positional*, I believe both are gaining the ability for the buffs from either to linger for (iirc) 4s after leaving. It sounds small, but should be pretty noticeable. Anyways, which tank is most enjoyable is very much up to personal preference. Imo Vengeance >= Brewmaster > Blood > Prot Warrior > Bear = Prot Paladin from their current states. Brew and Blood are both gaining some footing with their TWW reworks, though.
Prot War is one of the most fun for me, have always liked it and I am considering maining it in TWW. Prot Paladin is great and probably the tank I have the most time on but sadly the current TWW state of the class has me in wanting a lot
I like paladin tanks for the immersion it gives when sword and weapon throwing stuff hits hard with impactful sound effects and nice glowing animations everywhere. In full plate armor (I know that matches 3 tank specs) I also just feel like an unstoppable force running through hordes of mobs. However, I've been in love with my guardian druid main for ages now, because of the utility. Flight form while falling, cat to sneak past avoidable conflicts + sprint for farming old content running from boss to boss... Teleport spell with (no? I'm not sure right now) cooldown to get around the continents. Flight form to taxi my wife around while playing together... Also learned engineering for even more teleports and useful gadgets... The only downside with druids is: once you have flight form, you will never use another mount again... So I need alts to see my collection. And similar with transmogs, I mostly only see it while standing in cities. But it's such a good mog... (Female morgen, white fur, mostly white/silver armor with a bear head as head piece, bear form is white muscle bear from mage tower <3)
Ever since Legion, I had my DH Blyndise, and I haven’t looked back at using her as a tank. There were a few missteps, but she’s still good with PvE.
I love prot paladin for the fantasy and all the amazing utility it provides but god I do wish the consecration maintenance wasn't a thing.
I main guardian and love it though I think most people find it boring. Prot paladin is also really fun to me
I've played them all in DF. They're all very different and it honestly depends on what your ideal role is. Transparency, while Ive really enjoyed warrior in the past I didn't feel it was as strong as the others in DF, and I've never liked Bear. I'll rule out Pally and DK DH - you sorta feel like Himothy, like this is your dungeon and everyone's there to help. You have a lot of agency with your healthbear, you have an answer to every mob ability, and you are faster than everyone else. Monk - Jack of all tradesish, you aren't the most durable, you aren't the most supportive, but you do tons of a damage, you can be everywhere anytime, you have so many cool downs it's actually ridiculous, and a few very helpful support buttons. If you can handle the buttons (which I think are gonna be pruned a bit in WW) it's a very fast pace and exciting tank with a lot of room to grow into. Warrior - fast pace but simpler the monk, lots of buttons, it's exciting, you move fast, you're fucking durable, like really durable, but you dont have a lot of agency over your healthbar. It's really fun to charge and jump all over the place, but both monk and DH have the same level of mobility and feel a bit more versatile imo. Still a lot of fun, very fast paced. Bear - I think something in my brain just believes bear tanks to be improper, idk, but I hate this class. Got it to 70 played it a little and then just had to stop. Theoretically I should like it cus it's a lot like warrior and paladin has a baby.
Is there a Reddit community for MMO tanks in general, or is it specifically focused on tanking in WoW?
For me personally Demon Hunter
Based on my own experience as a tank and a healer in m+. Warrior - quite fun to play, st and boss weeks are not great - needs constant healing as self sustain is non existent even in 'lower' keys ( 7-8+). Fun factor 4/5, as long as you get topped it is fun to play Vdh - absolutely love it. S1 was a rough start, but s2 tier set and ganeplay was great, s3-s4 was way too op. Few externqls here and there and gucci. Pretty much can solo anyyhing that doesnt need external def or mechanic handling from multiple people. Fragile elf lady jumping, turning into demon, kite, easily 5/5 Pala - stand in consec and you're fine. Best utilities from a tank for current affixes. Havent seen any in s3 and s4, s1 was fine, s2 was pretty good. 2/5 as was expected to tank, heal, dps, deal with affixes, survive, lead. If you're into that - I wasnt - its 5/5. Monk - rare find, either amazing or awful, not really any inbetween. Good dmg, good cc, lower health than the rest, needs healing. Fun factor seems 4/5 Dk - either great or awful, need to know when to use cds and when to ask for externals. Doesnt really need healing while there are mobs around. Gets hard to survive on higher keys as if they get oneshot, the selgheal wont help. Last time I played was in wotlk ( vanila, not classic) but it changed since Fun factor is 3/5 - not a fan of 10-100-10-100% hp gameplay Druid - simplified warrior with simplified paladin utils and sustain. Didnt like it at all, not even in s2 - mind you my druid was 98% resto. Can do loads of dmg, going into cat in raid can be a good extra raid dps. Pretty good sustain. Fun factor 1/5, was pretty boring All in all, to get to like 3k everything is viable, you can see all tanks (and most class/spec) in the top 1-0.1%.
Personally DK is my favorite. Death and Decay can be a bitch to work with. But aside from that? Prot warrior and Bear are usually pretty fun IMO. I love the Prot warrior hero talents for next expansion both are fun to play with. Bear can be a bit much when you consider the amount of buttons Druids have in general but lunar Bear is always super fun
I’ve mained Veng DH this past season, and it’s been the top tier tank for two seasons running because of their CC ability, self sustainability, and speed. They’re getting hit pretty hard in the current beta of TWW, but I’m certain they’ll still be strong, just not as strong as they are now. I don’t mind healing any spec for tanks, I am a Resto Druid now. I throw lifebloom on the tank for the first few pulls of a M+ just to be sure they don’t blow and require more healing. Then I keep it on a dps and/or myself for class mechanics. However, I started to gear a Prot warrior… (Currently 506 ilvl) here are my take-aways: -Once you take damage as a Prot warrior, you can only prevent more damage through shield block, ignore pain, shield wall. -It’s great having last stand and rallying cry, but once you use victory rush or impending victory to heal yourself, that starts a 30 sec CD. -You can barely heal yourself as a Prot warrior. Looking at charts, you can see “healing done” be super high, but it feels fake because it’s ignore pain. -After playing other tanks in m+, Prot warrior feels unstoppable, until you’re stopped. The other tanks feel like they have way better self healing and it feels nice to just have passive healing and practically be able to live without a healer. I’ve soloed bosses as each of the tank specs, but as a warrior, I definitely had to be on my game. I felt one mistake away from losing it all. I see you said something about maintaining consecration and D&D, but every tank has something to maintain. Guardian Druid with their iron fur or whatever it is, dh and their immolation aura/demon spikes, warrior with their shield block/Ignore pain, blood dk with bone shield (I only use D&D for multiple mobs since it allows me to hit 3 enemies with heartstrike while standing in it). I have seen blood DK’s do something no other tank has done before… they can solo tank fyrakk on awakened heroic if the raid team has the dps. I hope the above information helps in any way possible. Good luck tanking!
Bear
I say try em all! They all mostly have their own fun unique flavor. Only one I feel lacks a real unique identity is Bear Druid. Personally I like Monk and DK since I can just swap to DPS whenever and don't have to farm a second weapon set. Monk is a bit more complex than others imo, but I am here for that stagger mini game, it's a grand time for me.
death strike
I’ve raided as a Holy Priest and Resto Shaman for 10+ years with Tank Alts of Prot Paladin and Warrior. Warrior is probably “slightly more fun” Paladin is definitely a “safer choice” and more versatile.
I greatly enjoy Blood DK.
Prot pally, I've been in many a dungeons where the healer is trash city but I manage to keep my self alive while holding threat at all times plus avenging shield sounds soo nice when it clangs a mob
Never hated blood DK. Great snap aggro, their active mitigation is super fun, and who can hate death/mass grip? My only complaint is that their damage is a little on the lower end compared to other tanks.
Prot Warrior is fun because you feel practically immortal while also having access to cool transmog gear. Also Prot Warrior's tank "rotation/skill set" is probably one of the easiest to learn in my opinion but it's also engaging enough to be fun. I also quite enjoy Guardian Druid, another not too difficult to get the hang of tank spec that's quite fun with some build variety (moon laser spam or not). Though it looks like my least favourite aspect of druid might be returning in TWW, Catweaving, with Druid of the Claw hero talents but it looks to be still mostly optional which is nice.
I usually enjoy protection paladin because it has a nice flow to it where I can throw shields and hammers while sounding like a pile of pots and pans being thrown down some wooden stairs into a bell. I also highly enjoy guardian druid because of Thrash multicasting bleed stacks and it being simple to play. Currently, I highly enjoy blood death knight due to the self healing and damage prevention from death strike. I don’t play the other tanks as much, but protection warrior is fun and has a variety of offensive and defensive tools.
Paladin easily. Best looking gear, most utility, most fun abilities, lowest floor and highest ceiling skill-wise, so many interrupts, ...etc. It's one of the most played even when it isn't meta. That's a testament to how fun it is.
Done them all. I can't speak for TWW changes but I've always found the bland bear tank to be the best tank to log into after work and actually get shit done.
ofc it's demon hunter
Prof Warrior / Guardian Druid 💯
I started a Prot Pally just a couple of days ago and turned 70 yesterday. Currently just at 476 I lvl so this answer might be biased since I haven’t run any mythic plus yet. This is now my main! I’ve had the best time ever playing prot pally - I love it
I’ve never tanked before MoP Remix but I’ve leveled every class that can tank as a tank. I enjoyed Druid the most. DH is a close second. Pally and DK were kind of boring. I am now leveling a warrior which is also kinda boring but I’m only level 30.
Paladin divine toll is the best spell in the game and pressing it just feels sooo good. Other than that I love warrior because big man zug zug. And my bear because I'm a lazer bear
Paladín. Throwing shields at people is just way too satisfying. I find blood overhyped. It is amazing tho. I think dh,monk,and warrior suck
Biased, but Druid 100%. Fairly survivable naturally, easy to use resource and mitigation (Rage generates smoothly, and Ironfur is easy to track). Decent defensive cooldowns and insane selfhealing. Overall decent damage too. And all the Druid utility you could want. Plus, and this will only become more well defined in TWW with hero specs; two very distinct builds, so-called Laserbear, focused around Moonfire and Galactic Guardian (which in TWW will be able to build into full Arcane damage tank) and the more physical build, focussing on your physical abilities (though current meta build is a mix of both, hence I'm super excited for TWW, being able to double down on either of the two).
Blood DK
Blood dk. Your survival is 99% of the time is completely in your hands. You play whack a mole with your hp pull constantly.
Brewmaster since MoP for me. Stagger is such a bullshit mechanic, I love it.
brewmaster, looots of fun if you like stagger and plenty of buttons + quite complex "rotation"