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Warriors V Paladins: Tanking
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Post by
380852
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Post by
SeaOfHoles
It goes back to what someone said in an another post.
Blizzard did a poor job of balancing the survivability, damage, utility and mobility of classes. That is, if you have high damage, you have low survivability (glass cannon). If you have the capability of 1 shotting someone, you should yourself expect to be 1 shotted (not that 1 shotting is ever desirable in a MMORPG, right DAOC?)
A Warrior as high survivability should be low damage. That seems balanced to me. But you're right, I don't understand the survivability of the Paladin along with its damage capability and utility.
Post by
301983
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Post by
429792
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Post by
Sakkura
Besides, why would you want to do damage as a tank anyway?
Damage kills mobs regardless of who deals it. If the tank does 1k more DPS, that is just as good as a DPSer doing 1k more DPS.
Post by
429792
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Post by
Sakkura
Derp, lets socket strength instead of stamina. I can't think of a good reason why the tanks should be focusing on DPS, lest it be for a try on Hodir hardmode.
That's not what I was saying. The problem is if tank A and tank B are equally survivable, but tank A brings a lot more DPS than tank B. Then you would prefer tank B, because you get the extra damage without losing anything.
Post by
Porcell
I have tested on a few people, some on trying out both a warrior and a pally and the results are always the same, paladins doing much much more damage than a warrior could dream of.
In what situations?
Heroic Instance trash? Yeah, Paladins probably will do more damage in a heroic instance trash (though as a warrior I'm doing roughly 2300 I'd say on trash these days).
Heroic Instance bosses? Can't really say I have any data for this, but unless the boss is undead then the Paladin shouldn't have a real advantage. I can pull around 2800 usually on a single target heroic boss.
Naxxramas? Paladins are way ahead here because there is a lot of trash and all the mobs are undead.
Ulduar Trash? Ulduar trash just really isn't substantial enough for me to worry about. I hold my own on Ulduar trash, but Paladins are certainly good at it too.
Ulduar Bosses? I'm totally comparable to Paladins on the "normal" kind of fights. Looking at things like XT-002, Ignis, Thorim (boss phase), or Vezax. All of the WMOs I've looked at have the Paladin tank at right around the same as the Warrior tanks; ~2500 DPS.
That's pretty much the normal boss-tanking DPS right now, somewhere around 2500. Now if you have something like Kologarn, you could spam cleave (or Hammer of the Righteous for Paladins) and hit Body, Left, and Right arm and have a lot of damage.
In the end though, as nice as the extra damage is, don't get distracted by it. Think about the fight and what it requires. Freya for example; it doesn't matter what your DPS is as the main tank. Hodir; it's much more important that you are prepared and quick to taunt the boss off of the Mages who will rip agro from you. Iron Council Hard; Know your cooldowns, set up macros/vent to call for cooldowns when your shield wall drops.
Being able to take a hit and knowing what is going on in a boss fight is WAY WAY better than focusing on the 2-3% of the raid's DPS you are doing.
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380852
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Post by
363599
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Post by
191597
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Post by
Rekijan
Why can a paladin do almost 1000 more damage per second than a similar geared warrior?
On trash, boss or both?
As a prot pally I have noticed that indeed my damage done and even dps is quite high. But if I start a trash pull with consecration ready I will just naturaly do a lot more damage, not that damage on trash matters.
Post by
Sakkura
C: You bring up damage again, who cares about it when you have aggro right?
The enrage timer cares.
Post by
Zellviren
Funnily enough, paladins are now substantially better tanks than warriors. In practically all the facets of tanking that matter, a paladin does a better job with significantly less effort.
Ironically, though, DPS is not one such area. I've found that on a single target, I'm doing more DPS than my guild OT (paladin). This may be because I'm at the expertise soft cap, using
Heroic Strike
flawlessly or have hit the sweet spot regarding strength and block value.
Hard to say.
But it's in all of the other areas that I feel horribly shortchanged by the developers regarding paladins. Here are some examples:
1) Why does the standard paladin tanking build not make the paladin decide between threat and survivability, when the warrior build does?
2) Why does a paladin do marginally more single target threat than a warrior, despite doing
substantially
more multi-target threat?
3) Why does a paladin have four unique buffs to give raid members while warriors only have two, and with utterly incomparable durations?
4) Why do the paladin cooldowns of
Ardent Defender
and
Divine Protection
have two minute cooldowns in the average tanking build, while warriors have to glyph
and
spec for something similar (losing 20% on
Shield Wall
at the same time)?
5) Why can paladins stack stamina and get threat from it?
6) Why do paladins have a far more reliable resource pool than warriors, one that is constantly replenished by
Greater Blessing of Sanctuary
,
Divine Plea
and
Divine Illumination
?
7) Why does
Avenger's Shield
do more threat on all three targets than
Heroic Throw
only does on a single target, whilst also having half the cooldown?
8) Why does the paladin multi-target taunt have a 12 second (I think) cooldown compared with the three minutes of
Challenging Shout
?
9) Why are paladins saved the hassle of considering block rating by getting a free 30% from
Holy Shield
when warriors get no comparable talent?
My comments have come under the baleful gaze of the "warriors are fine" brigade many, many times. Quite frankly, I don't care; up until now my guild has not been held back by their MT being a warrior because I get the most out of my class and am, put simply, the best tank in my guild.
Warriors
are
fine.
My question to those people, though, as well as the developers is this:
"Why should warriors be inferior to the other three tanks, paladins particularly?"
Our threat used to be better. That's been reversed.
Our damage mitigation used to be better. That's been reversed.
Our cooldowns used to be better. That's been reversed.
What do we have?
Warrior mobility is often touted, but you don't do a lot of charging, intercepting or intervening on boss fights. Sundering armour is another favourite, but a DPS warrior or rogue could do that for you. We also have the ability to reflect spells, but the bosses that actually works on are terribly scarce.
Add that to the fact warriors have
far
more work to do while tanking, I wonder exactly what the developers think they are getting right with tank balance.
I'm not an FotM re-roller and will continue tanking with my warrior because I'm good at it and love it. But why should there be distinct advantages to taking a paladin, druid or death knight to a fight, with no discernible advantage to taking a warrior (assuming equivalent gear, experience and skill)?
Answers on a postcard, please.
Post by
121564
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Post by
181908
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Post by
Sakkura
2) Why does a paladin do marginally more single target threat than a warrior, despite doing
substantially
more multi-target threat?
5) Why can paladins stack stamina and get threat from it?
To be fair, blizzard are adressing those two points in the upcoming patch. Paladins will get their threat self-buffed changed from +90% to +80%, while their stamina -> spellpower conversion will be changed to a strength -> spellpower conversion.
Post by
Zellviren
However, Blizzard is playing a cute game with tank balance. Their statistics show that warriors are still tanking everything in the game in high enough proportions and with enough success that they don't feel the need to buff them at this point. The warrior does the job; it might take longer or be more painful, but the bosses go down.
I am often asked about this by my guild if I complain;
is the guild being held up by you tanking?
The answer to that question, of course is no; as previously mentioned, I put a lot of effort into being a good tank with both playstyle and gear choices getting my attention. I also frequently change spec (including glyphs), depending on the fight, in order to make things easier on the raid as a whole. My point is that why on earth should I have to go through all of that, while a paladin can simply pick up a standard tanking spec, have better tools in every category and, put simply, do everything better? They have no choices to make between threat and endurance and they don’t even have to change glyphs to remain a better overall choice than a warrior.
This isn’t an “L2P” issue. No matter what a protection warrior currently does, he cannot compete with a protection paladin. However you slice it, this is an in-game flaw on the part of the developers and needs fixed.
Obviously this is not because warriors are in great shape compared to the other tanks. It is almost certainly because a) many hardcore guilds have had their warrior tanks for years and see no reason to make a change, and b) there are more skilled warrior tanks available, because they were the only viable tanks for a long time.
Personally, I think it’s more option one but both are viable reasons for people sticking with their warriors.
Blizzard is on record as saying that if it looked like warriors were being dumped wholesale in favor of paladins or death knights or druids, they would rebalance accordingly, but as long as they are getting the job done and guilds are continuing to use them on progression fights, they don't see any need to buff them.
I recall reading Ghostcrawler’s commentary on the difference between warriors and druids. To be honest, I could barely believe what I was reading. There was a whole piece about the numbers game you correctly allude to, yet it was utterly ignorant of the fact that
druids can only be picked by two races in the game and have four viable raid roles
.
In comparison, warriors can be picked by nine races (all but one) and have only two viable raid roles. All things, therefore, being equal, you will see a
substantially
lower number of druids than you will warriors.
Therefore, his entire argument was based on logical fallacy; something we’ve come to shamefully expect from Mr. Street. Even ignoring logic entirely, it’s a wholly awful way to balance things. If they believe tank balance wasn’t correct in the past, then they should simply draw a line in the sand and say “the tanks will now be balanced”, as opposed to this
FotM
approach based on numbers. Their approach lacks continuity, direction or genuine understanding of their own figures. To me, that’s not easily forgivable when I’m actually paying them a monthly subscription to do their jobs right.
In saying that, I don’t necessarily think warriors should be buffed. I do, however, think the other classes should be toned back in order to keep tanks in line. To this point, warriors have consistently been the weakest tank throughout
Wrath of the Lich King
.
As far as I'm concerned warrior tanking is substantially more interesting than death knight tanking, and many times more interesting than druid tanking (I don't have a high-level paladin so I can't speak to that). I run mostly heroics, for which the warrior is outstanding, and the occasional non-hard mode raids, none of which have made me feel inadequate. If the druid or the paladin tank ends up holding all the trash in Naxx, who cares? I'm three apples high and I have Warbringer, let's see Lord Fancypants do that.
You touch on a couple of points that make me never want to leave my warrior behind. But when you’re playing with your raid, you pull a pack of mobs using
Charge, Thunderclap
and
Shockwave
, then start cycling to fit in your
Cleave, Devastate, Heroic Strike, Revenge
and of course
Shield Slam
, it’s incredibly demoralizing to see the paladin wake up, waltz over, hit
Avenger’s Shield
and
Hammer of the Righteous
, pull everything off you and take less damage than you were.
And there is nothing,
nothing
you can do that will change that.
Post by
361722
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Post by
Sakkura
Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin's strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin's stamina.
From what i read from the pally forums about this change is most tanks have roughly half the str as stam. so they will be loosing very little spell power.
Yes, the change from stamina -> spellpower to strength ->spellpower is not much of a nerf, but it does mean that paladins can no longer stack stamina and get threat from it. Which is what I was replying to.
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