Spec Comparison: Feral Druid (Tank) vs. Protection Paladin

[Music] hey what's going on youtube it's your man soul here welcome back to the channel you know what it is when you clicked it today we are doing another spec comparison that being the bear druid versus the protection paladin people really liked the first video and i liked it too so i'm happy to bring this other one to you people really wanted to see the feral druid in action so i figured why not pair it with the only other tank spec that i didn't cover being the protection paladin so let's see if the bear can stack up to what's considered the best quote unquote tank in wrath or is the paladin just a bunch of hype without further ado let's jump on in to kick things off let's talk about the prop paladin first things first i know i've spoken about prop paladins a lot in my channel so i apologize if you feel like i'm beating a dead horse but you got to talk about it so starting with the prop paladin strength everyone gather around hold hands close your eyes bow your head and say it with me now utility utility and more utility paladins innately bring a lot of utility to any raid group they have a multitude of blessings debuffs externals immunities you name it paladins got it this is only furthered by the prop paladin who have some pretty unique stuff in their own talent tree so paladins are just utility monsters their next strength is that they're incredibly tanky so pro paladins are the only tanks that have a cheat death in the form of arden defender so it still does reduce the damage that you take under 35 but in addition to that if you did take a killing blow instead of killing you it would bring you back to 20 of your max health on a two minute cooldown so this is really strong this is basically saying a nope to a certain mechanic that you can just kind of plan out right so again incredibly tanky not only that defined sacrifice is now a 50 dr making it basically the same as shield wall and paladins just get like 12 to 15 passive dr from talents and abilities 20 if you take the guarder by light for magic damage but again incredibly tanky in all aspects whether it be physical magic or true damage patterns can take a hit and the last strength i'd like to outline you guys knew this was coming again please bow your heads close your eyes hold hands and say it with me now divine sacrifice now for the uninitiated let me explain what divine sacrifice is divine sacrifices an ability located in the protection palette and talent tree and what it does is 30 of all damage taken by your party members within 30 yards gets redirected to the paladin up to a maximum of 40 of the paladin's health and the damage that reduces the paladin below 20 will instantly break the effect so it cannot kill you now on top of divine sacrifice being great it's also attached to a talent called divine guardian now this is where things get really crazy now divine guardian when talented bolsters divine sacrifice so when you activate divine sacrifice your party or raid members within 30 yards of you key minus that party and raid members take 20 reduced damage for 6 seconds in addition this increases the duration of your sacred shield by 100 and increases the amount absorbed by 20 making paladins even more tanky as if they needed it basically what this means is a paladin or a prop paladin in this case with divine guardian can really sway the battlefield in your favor just by being there because of divine guardian it's an incredibly powerful tool that like i said will just make everyone's lives easier it will save a life it'll reduce the amount that the healers need to heal it'll reduce the damage that the tanks take it's just incredible all around all right now let's talk about the pallet and weaknesses because it ain't all milk and honey for them either starting with their utility now the utility like i said is really really strong they bring a lot of buffs some pretty good externals pretty good debuffs but their utility can be a balancing act chances are you're going to have more than one paladin in your raid group so it's up to your guild to determine how much power are you gaining by adding another paladin this is especially true with pratt because prague tends to bring all of the things that the other two paladins can bring so example a prop paladin can spec into divine sacrifice and get or mastery now obviously that frees up the other paladins in their array group to take other talents but once you get to a certain point of paladins you're not really increasing your rate power that much so it can be a pretty good balancing act especially if you already have let's say two holy paladins and a rep paladin and now you're trying to add a fourth power into the raid tier now some people would say four paladins is the sweet spot because it covers blessing of kings blessing a might blessing of wisdom and blessing a sanctuary and ideally i can understand that but again what are you taking away to add that fourth paladin and is that fourth or fifth paladin in this case adding that much rate power in terms or in place of another class that brings different utilities so utility can definitely be a balancing act and it may not always behoove you to bring more paladins their next weakness is their mobility now i know some people out there watching have seen this meme before this meme being the wheelchair class is more often than not tied to the red paladin but the red paladin and the propellant are pretty equal when it comes to mobility neither of which has instantaneous movement now they do boast pretty good base movement thanks to pursuit of justice but when it comes to moving to a certain area really really quickly paladins aren't the greatest at that so this is really evident when a mob or something spawns out of their taunt or their ability range and they have to stand next to it to take it think of like crusher tentacles on yorkshire on or if there's a spot that needs to be soaked that the tank has to soak that spawns out of position and they need to get there the paladins is taking a long stroll unless they're using rocket boots or like a swiftness potion and rocket boots can fail and if you're using a speed potion in combat chances are you just cut yourself for using a defensive potion so mobility can be an issue for prop paladins the last weakness i'll tie into the prop paladin is the fact that they're mana users and they're susceptible to silences so being mana users means that they really can't generate their own resource like the other things can like they can't generate like runic power like a death knight can they can't generate their own rage and stuff like warriors and druids so they really are relying on divine plea spiritual attunement mana pots whatever have you like they're really relying on outside or you know little abilities to increase their mana region which can be pretty taxing especially if they're over compensating or overexpending their mana and they run dry early and the fact that they use spells they're really really susceptible to silence and the fact that all of their spells are holy makes this even worse if a paladin gets silence locked they pretty much can't do anything except auto attack until that silence is over so the mana problems plus the silence vulnerability can be pretty taxing all right now let's talk about the bear druid and their strengths starting with the probably the most evident one is that they're high effective health pool and armor values druids are probably going to have the highest effective health pool of any of the tanks and they're going to boast really high armor value this is because they have talents and abilities that just innately boost these values such as the bear form which is an incredible boost to your armor and stamina survival to the fittest which is just an attribute in armor increase thick hide which is an armor increase protector of the package which is a damage reduction so frail tanks are pretty strong when it comes to just boasting and being big meat shields the next strength comes in this form of their utility which is pretty strong it may not be entirely unique but it is definitely strong especially when you count innervate in battle res which is only druid centric only druids can battle rez or innovate someone leader of the pack is also strong and even though that can be brought by fury warriors that's still only one other spec that can provide the five percent crit increase to melee and range dps really being hunters so pretty strong utility there next they have pretty good tank damage like there are no slouches when it comes to single target tank damage and it might surprise you how much damage a druid can dish out while tanking in bear form this is only boasted by the fact that their hybrid power is actually pretty good too if the jewett has the gear and it has the spec for it they can effectively tank and shift into platform and dps while they're not tanking to provide some pretty good damage from a tank that is so don't slouch on their hybrid power don't turn your nose up to the tank damage next and this is probably for the healers their damage intake is very smooth now i'm going to talk about damage variants a little bit later in the druid section but for the most part when the fight is already established judah isn't going to be taking that much spiky damage and this is in large part too so the fact that they have a lot of health so it's easy to soak up some hits and make your damage intake really really smooth and then the last strength i'll talk about is their above average mobility now some people like to say that druids are you know a little bit more mobile than warriors some people say warriors are the better ones i'm gonna leave that for you to decide but one thing that can be said is that druids are above average in the mobility department between feral charge feral swiftness and the kitty dash a druid can get from point a to point b back to point a pretty effectively all right so let's talk about some of the feral druid weaknesses starting with their lackluster cooldown diversity in my opinion now i do want to preface this by saying the cooldowns that the druids have accessible to them really do complement their high health high armor style pretty well it's just i feel that their individual cooldowns when compared to some of the other tanks are pretty weak so let's begin with bark skin so it's a 20 dr on a one minute cooldown which means you can have some pretty high up time on it not gonna lie but 20 really pales in comparison to some of the other tanks who get either a 40 percent in terms of like icebound fortitude fifty percent in divine protection or sixty percent on glyph if uh you're looking at shield wall so those other big dr's are really going to help shave off a lot of the damage especially when there's a tank mechanic that requires a taunt or a stack amount that you're really going to see the other tanks just take less damage than the druid next we have frenzied regen and it's not like tbc frenzy regen this actually is really good it's going to convert a percentage of your maximum health every 10 every second for 10 rage instead of just a flat you know health amount so that change is really good also because jews have high effective health and it's only going to go up which means the strength of this cooldown is only going to go up the problem here is that frenzied regen kind of in the same vein as in rage regen on the warrior side is a slow trickle into your healing now it is every second but you could be taking more than point three percent of your health every second in damage much more so it really kind of neuters the effectiveness of frenzy regen and i'll add to that by saying frenzy region is only really good for like mid sustained damage and not every boss fight does that type of damage to tanks so the effectiveness of the cooldown in and of itself can vary and lastly we'll talk about survival instincts which is kind of like the big cooldown for feral druids now i had mentioned before that it's kind of the same as last stand because it's the exact same cooldown the exact same effect but because again jewels already have high health increasing the health even further just makes their damage intake really really really smooth so it's gonna feel better to heal them the problem with it is that it's just not a damage reduction right it you know you a lot of the times have to couple survival instincts maybe with bark skin or not just those two just in general the druid cooldowns have to be coupled with bark skin or supplemented with park skin at some point like so that's my concern with the druid cooldown diversity it's pretty lackluster individually speaking and they kind of only tailor to a specific portion or type of damage intake this is also coupled by the fact that their damage variance is pretty high now what do i mean by that well from boss pool to boss pool or in trash groups or in dungeons from mob to mob druids can either take very little damage or very high damage it just depends on rng and this is even more of the case than you know the infamous death knight who can really just take a lot of damage variance depending on pull to pull but because the druid doesn't have as many cooldowns as like a death knight they can't really cover the damage variants as well so it can definitely be a hindrance on them the next weakness is that a lot of the utility really can't be used while actively tanking so if a druid is taking a mob or taking the ad or just needs to be in bare form to do other things or just take hits like on patchworks hateful strikes they can't come out of form and use their innovate or their battle rush which really diminishes their utility power so you got to think about if you're bringing a feral druid and they can't get out of form to use their utility it may be better just to bring another speck to the game to have that utility instead of relying on the bear the next weakness also in the same vein as utility is that their utility is not exclusive to the bear form like i said before the other specs of druid can bring innervate in battle res and if you have a feral dps you'll essentially have everything that the beard can do because that's what feral is frail is a shared speck between their damage and their tank forms so if you have a feral dps they can provide fairy fire leader of the pack innervate and battle resin they don't have to worry about whether they need to tank or not tank to use any of their utility and the last weakness i'll talk about which is kind of a culmination of the previous two is that overall that the impact that they have on a raid is pretty minimal your power level really doesn't go up too crazily if you include a druid or not include a druid especially if you have more than one druid from other specs included in your raid group like a bear isn't really going to increase your rate power too significantly this can be pretty damning especially when you compare to some of the other tank specs because the whole point of you know raid group diversity and versatility is the fact that you bring different classes to cover different bases so if the druid can't really cover the same things that a prop warrior can you probably would be better off bringing the prop warrior instead all right it's comparison time now in my previous video i outlined the strengths and weaknesses and compared them separately however in this video i've just combined them and we're going to outline each of the individual categories that i have listed for both tanks starting with their talents so they get a lot of strengths from their talents a lot of passive modifiers that we're going to show here and i just want to outline them for the druid and the paladin respectively so starting with the druid they get a 370 armor boost from bare form a 10 armor boost from thick hide a 33 armor boost from survival of the fittest they get a 25 stamina boost also from bear form a six percent stamina boost from survival of the fittest a 10 stand boost from heart of the wild and then a flat 12 damage reduction passive from protector of the pack so totaling a 413 armor boost a 41 stamina boost and a 12 dr to both physical and magical damage now obviously you can look at this and say okay the druids are just meant to take physical damage just by the high armor values they got the high stamina plus protector of the pack so that's really where the druid niche really lies and it doesn't change i've been saying that the whole video now let's go to the paladin so also like i said in the video paladins are just riddled with small little passives that culminate into a lot of dr so let's outline this starting with the improved righteous fury which is a six percent flat dr blessing of sanctuary which is a three percent dr and his 10 boost stamina ardent defender which is a 20 dr wants your sub 35 so this is a little bit tricky this really isn't a passive vr if you don't go below the threshold you won't really see arden defender but i had to outline it here just because i don't want to cause any confusion i want to keep things consistent next we have a six percent stamina boost from combat expertise a four percent stamina boost from sacred duty uh three percent damage reduction from shield of the templar a three percent damage reduction from glyph of divine plea and then the shield user so it can also block damage also they get a six percent magic dr from guarded by light if you max it out so this culminates into about a 15 physical damage reduction a 21 magic damage reduction thanks to guarded by light in a 20 stamina boost now you could kind of multiply these two as well if you include art and defender once the paladin's at 34 health but paladins or tanks in general aren't chilling at low threshold so you shouldn't always see art and defender unless you're just consistently getting slapped but these are just basically the outlines for sturdiness of the paladin and when you look at it side by side it's a lot closer than what one would assume because the druid boasts more armor and more stamina than the paladin but the paladin's just taking less damage flatly and when you have things like that before you get to buffs or before you get to cooldowns or before you get to abilities the paladin just is more a little bit more tanky now there's another comparison i do want to make for both the paladin and the druid and that's when you compare savage defense to sacred shield so savage defense is a new druid passive where each time you gain a critical hit while in bear form you gain a small shield that will reduce the next damage you take from a physical attack by 25 percent of your attack power so this is just kind of like a small little shield that you can shave off of damage when you're getting physically hit and for sacred shield it's a buff that the paladin puts on himself and each time the target takes damage the sacred shield will proc absorbing x amount of damage scaling upwards and increasing the paladin's chance to hit with a flash of light to spell by 50 for six seconds now they can't gain this effect more than once every six seconds so on fast hitting bosses like you're not just going to be getting secret shield over and over and over and the buff lasts 30 seconds and it can't be on more than one target at a time so the druid might see more uptime than the paladin would because the druid savage defense is really only contingent on getting a critical hit there's really no delay time there's no small icd but sacred shield doesn't work just on physical damage it works on both physical and magic damage so sacred shield will reduce a lot more damage because it's not you know held to just stopping one type of damage like savage defenses savage defense just might have a little bit higher up time so both are pretty close when it comes to effectiveness i gotta give the notch a secret shield though because savage defense just doesn't do anything when you're taking magic damage and there's a lot of magic damage to be taken so i gotta give the knot to sacred shield and as far as overall sturdiness again it's pretty close the stamina or the high stamina i should say that the druid has kind of closes the gap on a lot of just the passive dr's that paladins give but a dr is a dr like why take damage when you can just not take damage right why take damage you can just take less damage so the paladin has to get the knot for sturdiness but as you can see when you outline things together it's a lot closer than what people might assume the next comparison comes in the form of the druids mobility versus the paladin's lack of mobility but usefulness and ranged abilities so like i've mentioned before in both of the druids strengths in the paladin's weaknesses druid is a lot more mobile than paladin drews can get from point a to point b back to point a pretty effectively where paladins have a little bit of a harder time doing that without some externals however paladins are also blessed with a lot of ranged abilities to where they really don't need to go too far to get to where they need to be or to attack something right unless there's like a far off stack point the paladin's weakness and mobility can be varied now the druid's effectiveness in mobility can also be varied because a lot of the mobility that the druid has requires them to be in cat form and because you can't just shift out of bear from like i said in the jewish weaknesses it kind of staggers their usefulness when it comes to using that mobility so in this case i would like to say this is more of a tie than anything because while the paladin is still slow they have a multitude of ranged abilities that they don't really need to be fast avenger shield judgment two targeted taunts exorcism like they really don't need to move from point a to point b very often and if they do they can use those externals even if it's a risk now the druid is faster than the paladin but they just have to make sure that they're not uh tanking something and they're able to get out of their form to actually move so if they can manage that then their mobility is a boon if they can't then it really becomes non-existent so both have pretty glaring downsides to their strengths so i think i got to give it a tie whereas the the druid can't use their mobility really unless they're a cat form and despite all of the ranged abilities of the paladins they're still slow so the last thing i want to compare is the comparison of utility and when i was looking at these two classes side by side it really kind of boiled down to just comparing their active utility versus their passive utility now what do i mean by that well the passive utility is just the debuffs and buffs that they bring right so mark of the wild leader of the pack demo roar infected wounds blessing the kings wasn't a might no vindication things like that and then the active utility is the external so battle res innervate tranquility divine sacrifice handle protection hand of freedom things like that and when it comes down to it i think it's closer than what people might assume but i gotta give the nod to paladin if anything really because of divine sacrifice having a raid wide dr is just really really impactful it really just makes fights just so much easier and i'm not even talking about the fact that they can also bring aura mastery so it's just yeah i can't give the nod to druid knowing that the paladin has divine sacrifice amongst other things in its arsenal now like i said it's a lot closer than what i would assume or what i think people might assume because as an example the paladin has to talent into judgments of the just to bring their attack speed slow they have to talent into vindication to bring the attack power debuff whereas the druid only really has to talent into infected wounds and it's not even that big a deal for either class because you're gonna have somebody giving that attack speed slow but the druid innately already has their demo roar so you can kind of like split hairs and kind of put it under a fine microscope but the bulk of the situation looking at it from afar the paladin is just better in terms of utility and like i said in the beginning of the video prop paladins just really will increase your rate power so in conclusion you know i don't think this was a big surprise to anyone but i gotta give the nod to the paladin um they're just too utility focused and provide too much power to your raid group to ignore now that by no means says that the bear druid is a slouch when it comes to utility it's a slouch when it comes to raid power i'm not saying any of that i'm just saying that the paladin is just too domineering in the terms of raid utility for it to be discounted but that being said in the comments below guys tell me what you guys think do you guys think i got you know i got it all the way wrong and i just fell into the hype beast that is the paladin or do you think i was fair and you know i just kind of compared them side by side and i gave the clear and even winner the nod you let me know what you guys think in the comments below also let me know if you want to see another you know class comparison or spec comparison doesn't only have to be tanks even though i'm pretty good at tanks i don't mind doing the research in some other specs you let me know what you want to see in the comments below i'll try to get it out to you guys but that being said as always you guys have been great i've been sold and i'm out peace you

Channel: SOUL

Views: 7,969

Keywords: wow, classic, wotlk, feral, druid, tank, protection, paladin, raid, 3.3.5

Id: uMRqEjYe484

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 09 2022