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Paladin vs Druid tank

Mark (newsgroups)

2/19/2011 12:43:00 PM

Not sure if there are any druid tanks around. I've mentioned that my
druid was my main for a long time, and was a tank in TBC. Since WotLK I
changed to resto. Recently I've tried to get back into druid tanking and
found it quite tough. With some of the pulls in Cataclysm dungeons not
having a ranged interrupt makes things a bit tricky. I pretty much
stopped tanking after a particularly bad day of trying Stonecore normal.
Could not get the groups to understand I needed time to generate threat
and position mobs away from the CCd targets (ie. the Earthshapers).
Always losing aggro, getting blamed for being a fail tank etc. Keep in
mind, not blowing my trumpet or anything, but I tanked countless TBC
heroics which were tougher, but players were more willing to coordinate
and listen in those days. So that was it for my feral tanking, I went
back to playing my disc priest and levelling my paladin alt.

So, my paladin alt dings 80 last week, I spend a while gearing him up
through questing, and have now started running dungeons. So far I've
done BRC and ToT several times. No problems. At level 82 I got put in to
VP, which I didn't even think possible. It was at the last three trash
packs too, which are quite tricky, but we managed with no issues and end
boss one shot too (though he is simple). Dinged 83 now.

I find that paladins just have so many more tools to deal with the
typical awkward situations. Someone pulls another pack by accident? I
have a few snap aggro and ranged aggro utilities. Poison or disease?
Also no problem. Three interrupts for trash, two for bosses. Silencing
ranged pull, etc. My druid is 85 with 114k HP in bear form. My paladin
when tanking these dungeons was 82 with 65k(ish) HP, and I still feel
much more comfortable.

Not sure what the point of this post is, but perhaps bears could do with
some loving. I fully realise that with a bit of practice I'm sure I'd
get the handle on feral tanking again, but at the moment just much
prefer the paladin so can't be bothered.

Perhaps people have some tips for feral tanking at 85?

Also, wouldn't mind some commentary on my paladin gear. I'm happy with
the spec, it's great foe aoe tanking which I find is needed in pugs. But
even after reading the paladin forums and elitistjerks I'm a little
unsure about the stat weighting of stamina/mastery/parry/dodge.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/shattered-halls/trubbl...

For example, the stamina trinket from end boss in Stonecore. Armory is
down at the moment so I can't see what it's called, but it's something
like 325 stam and 2k increased armor when reduced below 35% HP. Is this
a good trinket for protadins or should I stick with a +mastery and dodge
on use trinket which is quite a few ilvls lower?

Btw, I do not like missing or being dodged/parried as it affects my holy
power generation so I'm trying to keep my hit and expertise at
acceptable levels.
5 Answers

Ashen Shugar

2/19/2011 8:06:00 PM

0

On Feb 19, 11:43 pm, "Mark (newsgroups)" <marknewsgro...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>
> Not sure what the point of this post is, but perhaps bears could do with
> some loving. I fully realise that with a bit of practice I'm sure I'd
> get the handle on feral tanking again, but at the moment just much
> prefer the paladin so can't be bothered.

I haven't done all that much tanking in Cata on my druid, but the few
times I have done it I thought it sucked too. Trash at least. Single
target it's not so bad.
And unless I missed something, bears don't get *any* silence effect.
Which means the only way we have to round up casters is to skull bash
them, hope we didn't mistime and miss interrupting the spell they were
casting and hope they don't have a spell in a different school of
magic they can cast. Oh, and then we have to quickly move to where we
actually want the caster to be before the 4 second spell lock out runs
out because while skull bash is ranged, it moves us into melee range
of our target so until we move away, the caster isn't going to go
anywhere.
And considering that it appears to me that mobs that have had their
casting interrupted and silenced sometimes take a second or two to
decide they should try and run up and melee their target, skull bash
feels very limited in its ability to maneuver casters.

Better bet for multiple casters is to CC them, even in regulars where
the extra damage from having more mobs un-cc'ed my not actually be a
problem.
Other option may be setup Feral Fairy Fire for use via clique or as a
mouse-over, and while you're attacking one caster, use FFF on the
other caster you set as your focus to at least cover healing agro.
Then as long as the dps aren't nuking it too, you should be okay.
Unless there's 3 casters/ranged in the pull all spread out.
On the other hand, in a regular, running around, continually changing
targets so you can spread your threat around and taunt the mobs as you
lose agro *can* actually get you through the instance with the group
vaguely in one piece. Though even *I* find that sort of tanking a bit
stressful.

> Perhaps people have some tips for feral tanking at 85?

Switch to heals/dps? ; )

> Also, wouldn't mind some commentary on my paladin gear. I'm happy with
> the spec, it's great foe aoe tanking which I find is needed in pugs. But
> even after reading the paladin forums and elitistjerks I'm a little
> unsure about the stat weighting of stamina/mastery/parry/dodge.
>
> http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/shattered-halls/trubbl...
>
> For example, the stamina trinket from end boss in Stonecore. Armory is
> down at the moment so I can't see what it's called, but it's something
> like 325 stam and 2k increased armor when reduced below 35% HP. Is this
> a good trinket for protadins or should I stick with a +mastery and dodge
> on use trinket which is quite a few ilvls lower?

I once healed a regular Grim Batol run on my Shammy where I hardly had
anything to do at all. Chatting with the pally tank after the run,
they'd mentioned they'd gone for stacking a ton of mastery. For that
run at least it had seemed to work pretty well.

Heh, on my tanks, I don't actually have a very good feel on how well
my gear is doing. I suppose if I thought to look, Recount could tell
me how busy the healers had been trying to keep me alive, but even
then, with PuG's and random healers, you can't be sure how much might
be your gear sucking and how much might be the healer sucking.

They need to make training dummies that can hit back, a bit like those
ones in the Argent Tournament, so tanks can test out their armour.

--
Ashen Shugar

C J Campbell

2/20/2011 4:41:00 AM

0

On 2011-02-19 04:43:17 -0800, Mark (newsgroups) said:

> Not sure if there are any druid tanks around. I've mentioned that my
> druid was my main for a long time, and was a tank in TBC. Since WotLK I
> changed to resto. Recently I've tried to get back into druid tanking
> and found it quite tough. With some of the pulls in Cataclysm dungeons
> not having a ranged interrupt makes things a bit tricky. I pretty much
> stopped tanking after a particularly bad day of trying Stonecore
> normal. Could not get the groups to understand I needed time to
> generate threat and position mobs away from the CCd targets (ie. the
> Earthshapers). Always losing aggro, getting blamed for being a fail
> tank etc. Keep in mind, not blowing my trumpet or anything, but I
> tanked countless TBC heroics which were tougher, but players were more
> willing to coordinate and listen in those days. So that was it for my
> feral tanking, I went back to playing my disc priest and levelling my
> paladin alt.
>
> So, my paladin alt dings 80 last week, I spend a while gearing him up
> through questing, and have now started running dungeons. So far I've
> done BRC and ToT several times. No problems. At level 82 I got put in
> to VP, which I didn't even think possible. It was at the last three
> trash packs too, which are quite tricky, but we managed with no issues
> and end boss one shot too (though he is simple). Dinged 83 now.
>
> I find that paladins just have so many more tools to deal with the
> typical awkward situations. Someone pulls another pack by accident? I
> have a few snap aggro and ranged aggro utilities. Poison or disease?
> Also no problem. Three interrupts for trash, two for bosses. Silencing
> ranged pull, etc. My druid is 85 with 114k HP in bear form. My paladin
> when tanking these dungeons was 82 with 65k(ish) HP, and I still feel
> much more comfortable.
>
> Not sure what the point of this post is, but perhaps bears could do
> with some loving. I fully realise that with a bit of practice I'm sure
> I'd get the handle on feral tanking again, but at the moment just much
> prefer the paladin so can't be bothered.
>
> Perhaps people have some tips for feral tanking at 85?
>
> Also, wouldn't mind some commentary on my paladin gear. I'm happy with
> the spec, it's great foe aoe tanking which I find is needed in pugs.
> But even after reading the paladin forums and elitistjerks I'm a little
> unsure about the stat weighting of stamina/mastery/parry/dodge.
>
> http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/shattered-halls/trubbl...
>
> For example, the stamina trinket from end boss in Stonecore. Armory is
> down at the moment so I can't see what it's called, but it's something
> like 325 stam and 2k increased armor when reduced below 35% HP. Is this
> a good trinket for protadins or should I stick with a +mastery and
> dodge on use trinket which is quite a few ilvls lower?
>
> Btw, I do not like missing or being dodged/parried as it affects my
> holy power generation so I'm trying to keep my hit and expertise at
> acceptable levels.

Our guild is very Druid heavy. Any given instance or raid is likely to
be at least half Druids. We do have Druid tanks that tank regularly for
us. However, they will not tank PUGs for the reasons you have cited.
Druid tanking is trickier now and for that reason alone you have to be
careful who you group with.

It is a lot of fun, though, to run a raid with 10 Druids. Maybe our
guild should have been named "Guild Orange." Although I have <ahem> 12
alts in the guild, though, only one of them is a Druid -- a
Balance/Healer type. If I ever tank, it will have to be with my Pally.

--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

Mark (newsgroups)

2/20/2011 10:02:00 AM

0

On 19/02/2011 20:06, Ashen Shugar wrote:
> On Feb 19, 11:43 pm, "Mark (newsgroups)"<marknewsgro...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Not sure what the point of this post is, but perhaps bears could do with
>> some loving. I fully realise that with a bit of practice I'm sure I'd
>> get the handle on feral tanking again, but at the moment just much
>> prefer the paladin so can't be bothered.
>
> I haven't done all that much tanking in Cata on my druid, but the few
> times I have done it I thought it sucked too. Trash at least. Single
> target it's not so bad.
> And unless I missed something, bears don't get *any* silence effect.
> Which means the only way we have to round up casters is to skull bash
> them, hope we didn't mistime and miss interrupting the spell they were
> casting and hope they don't have a spell in a different school of
> magic they can cast. Oh, and then we have to quickly move to where we
> actually want the caster to be before the 4 second spell lock out runs
> out because while skull bash is ranged, it moves us into melee range
> of our target so until we move away, the caster isn't going to go
> anywhere.
> And considering that it appears to me that mobs that have had their
> casting interrupted and silenced sometimes take a second or two to
> decide they should try and run up and melee their target, skull bash
> feels very limited in its ability to maneuver casters.

Yes, this is exactly it. In TBC it was the same, so I would have to use
LOS, CC or ask a friendly mage to counterspell at the start. Mostly that
was fine, as I said previously, people knew that if they got over eager
even trash mobs would one shot them so they pretty much had to wait for
the tank to position things. It's not the same now, try asking a pug to
wait for los with that charging warrior, aimed shot "I don't know what
misdirection is" hunter.

Druids definitely need a silencing pull, all the others have tools to
deal with this.

> They need to make training dummies that can hit back, a bit like those
> ones in the Argent Tournament, so tanks can test out their armour.

Was thinking about this the other day, it's an excellent idea.

Jason Tinling

2/22/2011 5:04:00 PM

0

>
> Also, wouldn't mind some commentary on my paladin gear. I'm happy with
> the spec, it's great foe aoe tanking which I find is needed in pugs. But
> even after reading the paladin forums and elitistjerks I'm a little
> unsure about the stat weighting of stamina/mastery/parry/dodge.
>
> http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/shattered-halls/trubbl...
>
> For example, the stamina trinket from end boss in Stonecore. Armory is
> down at the moment so I can't see what it's called, but it's something
> like 325 stam and 2k increased armor when reduced below 35% HP. Is this
> a good trinket for protadins or should I stick with a +mastery and dodge
> on use trinket which is quite a few ilvls lower?
>
> Btw, I do not like missing or being dodged/parried as it affects my holy
> power generation so I'm trying to keep my hit and expertise at
> acceptable levels.

Gear wise:

Do the Gnomebliteration chain in Uldum. Starts with a drop from
killing a Crazed Surveyor/looter/engineer, 4 quests, easy upgrade.
Plus, fiery gnome Katamari death.

Look in to the Hardened Obsidium BS pieces. Often folks trying to get
rid of some cheap on the AH, or you may have a BS in guild who's made
them while leveling. Hat and Chest particularly.

Start the Dragonmaw chain in TH, there's an excellent tank hat at
Revered, and you can solo all the dailies easily as a prot pally. Do
the Chain of Command quest out of Bloodgulch for an upgrade on your
weapon (no love from the Amphitheater quest in TH). Also some DPS
plate gloves at Revered w/ Dragonmaw that can be reforged to decent
tank pieces. Plus, they have your epic tank boots at exalted.
There's also a DPS plate chest at the end of the Krazzworks chain that
can be repurposed for tanking.

Run through Hyjal, it's quick and easy at 84, and you will want to get
them to exalted for the tank cloak. Questing through the zone will
get you part way through revered.

Looking at your feed, you picked up the tank ring from Therazane, good
choice. Hyjal also has a plate DPS ring at honored that has a good
chunk of mastery on it, and can be reforged to more tankiness.

Find a LW (or check the AH) and see about getting a Cloak of War. Put
your Heirloom on before turning in quests, if you really need the XP
boost.

Existing gear -

Buy your appropriate head and shoulder enchants, and use them.

Buy some cheap leg armor (even the LK epic) and put them on your
pants.

Check the AH for enchanters who are using scrolls to level, and get
some enchants on your boots, bracers, chest, etc. Grab Heavy Savage
Armor kits if nothing else.

Check the AH for a crafted relic (Etched Dragon's Horn) and if the
price is reasonable, pick it up. If it's not reasonable, get the mats
on the AH (except the horn, buy it from the vendor in TH) and have a
scribe craft one for you.

Stats -

Stamina stacking is not as desirable as it was in LK. Prismatics
should get pure Mastery gems, blue gems should be mastery/stam, yellow
gems mastery, and red gems parry/dodge and mastery, unless the set
bonus is crap, then pure mastery or mastery/stam. With the changes to
holy power generation in 4.0.6, make sure you have a comfortable level
of hit and expertise.

Tradeskills -

Get on 'em, or get out of 'em. Enchanting is ok as a tanking
profession (more stam) but at 135, you can drop it not too painfully.
If you want to keep herbalism, recommend switching to alchemy or
inscription. Neither is a huge self buff, but they're as good as or
better than enchanting (from a pure self buff standpoint). If you
want to jump whole hog, I'd go dual crafting if you have other toons
who can support your materials needs (JC/BS) or a complementary gather/
craft combo like mining/JC or mining/BS. Engineering has gotten a
little more love this expac, so it's a viable, though less beneficial
option if you want a little more fun in your tradeskill.

Da 4 Horsemen.

2/27/2011 1:35:00 AM

0

On Feb 19, 4:43 am, "Mark (newsgroups)" <marknewsgro...@yahoo.com>
wrote:
> Not sure if there are any druid tanks around. I've mentioned that my
> druid was my main for a long time, and was a tank in TBC. Since WotLK I
> changed to resto. Recently I've tried to get back into druid tanking and
> found it quite tough. With some of the pulls in Cataclysm dungeons not
> having a ranged interrupt makes things a bit tricky. I pretty much
> stopped tanking after a particularly bad day of trying Stonecore normal.
> Could not get the groups to understand I needed time to generate threat
> and position mobs away from the CCd targets (ie. the Earthshapers).
> Always losing aggro, getting blamed for being a fail tank etc. Keep in
> mind, not blowing my trumpet or anything, but I tanked countless TBC
> heroics which were tougher, but players were more willing to coordinate
> and listen in those days. So that was it for my feral tanking, I went
> back to playing my disc priest and levelling my paladin alt.
>
> So, my paladin alt dings 80 last week, I spend a while gearing him up
> through questing, and have now started running dungeons. So far I've
> done BRC and ToT several times. No problems. At level 82 I got put in to
> VP, which I didn't even think possible. It was at the last three trash
> packs too, which are quite tricky, but we managed with no issues and end
> boss one shot too (though he is simple). Dinged 83 now.
>
> I find that paladins just have so many more tools to deal with the
> typical awkward situations. Someone pulls another pack by accident? I
> have a few snap aggro and ranged aggro utilities. Poison or disease?
> Also no problem. Three interrupts for trash, two for bosses. Silencing
> ranged pull, etc. My druid is 85 with 114k HP in bear form. My paladin
> when tanking these dungeons was 82 with 65k(ish) HP, and I still feel
> much more comfortable.
>
> Not sure what the point of this post is, but perhaps bears could do with
> some loving. I fully realise that with a bit of practice I'm sure I'd
> get the handle on feral tanking again, but at the moment just much
> prefer the paladin so can't be bothered.
>
> Perhaps people have some tips for feral tanking at 85?
>
> Also, wouldn't mind some commentary on my paladin gear. I'm happy with
> the spec, it's great foe aoe tanking which I find is needed in pugs. But
> even after reading the paladin forums and elitistjerks I'm a little
> unsure about the stat weighting of stamina/mastery/parry/dodge.
>
> http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/shattered-halls/trubbl...
>
> For example, the stamina trinket from end boss in Stonecore. Armory is
> down at the moment so I can't see what it's called, but it's something
> like 325 stam and 2k increased armor when reduced below 35% HP. Is this
> a good trinket for protadins or should I stick with a +mastery and dodge
> on use trinket which is quite a few ilvls lower?
>
> Btw, I do not like missing or being dodged/parried as it affects my holy
> power generation so I'm trying to keep my hit and expertise at
> acceptable levels.

I quit tanking as well ..concentrated primarily on moonkin. Too many
jerks and a lot of pressure when tanking..and tanking with druid is
tough. Even though it was easier..I miss hitting maul and swipe to
get aggro. Single targets are not too bad but multiple mobs is tough.