What you need to know about tanking in WOTLK Classic

tanking in for the lich king changes massively from tbc as we know it today the amount of damage you deal as a tank goes up threat becomes less of an issue and i'm not gonna say it's a non-issue but certainly becomes less of an issue especially if we think about external sources of threats such as tricks at a trade whereas before we would only rely on misdirection from a hunter now we also have our yellow rogue friends being able to misdirect a lot of threat to us as well but the single biggest change to tanking really comes from the fact that crushing blows is no longer a thing in wrath of the lich king or it is but it only applies to mobs that are four levels higher than you which basically means if you're max level doing a max level raid crushing blows are off the table looking at this well wiki page you'll see an important note that as a 3.0 which is wrath of the lich king the crushing blows mechanics has changed the thing that's worth noting here outside of the fact of what's already been mentioned where we've said that it's only mobs that are four or more levels above you that can deal crushing blows there are still mechanics on boss fights such as unbalancing strike which can cause you to still be crushing blowed but these particular special debuffs that come on certain buses are so few and far between it's really not worth worrying about and the ultimate takeaway from this video should be crushing blows are no more now the reason in particular that i'm doing this video is i found an amazing article back from 2000 and when was it 2009 and i want to break it down i want to go through this article we're not going to go through it word for word but i'm going to bring up important things that you need to know about crushing blows and actually some of the older design philosophy around wrath of the lich king and how it actually changed and what we're going to expect for example a very big reason for adding death knights was due to tank shortage and actually spoke about this recently on a podcast it was actually a historic post by the developers back in the day saying they had to introduce another tank class just due to how dungeons heroics even raids and stuff like that was going during tbc and they knew we needed an additional tank class but some of that is going to be covered in this article right now before we get any further just want to say a quick thank you to all you guys who have either joined as patrons because there are patrons now so thank you guys and to everybody in the scrolling banner below who has joined the channel as a member more on how you can support the channel at the end of the video starting in this article with why crushing blow was important one of the biggest differences pre-wrath and raft tanking is the absence of crushing blows if you're unfamiliar with a term then as a very simple explanation any given raid boss had a 15 chance per melee hit to perform 150 damage attack this was also known as a crushing blow it was typically a big damage spike and could lead to a wipe on progression content as we know with healer struggling to compensate in the small window of time before the boss's next attack landed burst damage is very unwelcome and as often is the greatest contributing factor to tank death this is why reaching crit immunity is still so important to all tanks and while the ability to avoid or absorb crushing blows was a fundamental part of pre-raph tanking mechanic and all of that is absolutely correct as we know getting crushing blowed is awful and absolutely can lead to a tank almost going from full health to oh my god i'm dead and as we know that magic number 102.4 as it goes on to say the only means of avoiding a crush was pushing your dodge parry block over 102.4 percent which would nullify the boss's higher weapon skill and render the tank immune to crushing blows and this is how tanks dealt with that individually so warriors use shield block currently as we know paladins use holy shield as we know and bears would eat it prayer was often involved as well so yeah bears is all about just high mitigation you know from armor and stacking a massive massive health pool and being able to eat the crushing blows you know they're not normally much of an issue just due to you being an absolute meat shield there's of no form of avoidance beyond dodge because crushing blows were the last attack to be pushed off a boss's hit table i will link this full article in the description below for you to go and have a look at the next section talks about becoming unhittable as a bear tank which we're not really that interested we know that can become a thing but also so confront can become a thing you know as a druid in higher levels of gear during some well if you want to become basically unhittable like a rogue can if it's a heavy physical damage fight then it's great but because of all the other stat loss your threat is just rubbish so we're going to skip all that bit because we're focusing on raph so the approach of wrath and the new tanking paradigm one of blizzard stated aims with the introduction of death knight and the overhaul to the existing tank specs was to address the chronic tank shortage on most realms good to see that nothing's actually changed they did this by reworking the protection warrior tree extensively introducing the ability to front load threat and cc in the form of shockwave generate better reflective damage and improving thunderclap to function as a relatively good form of burst aoe threat protection paladins were altered to have better single target threat and more controllable aggro generation which somewhat addressed their relatively weak off-tanking capabilities bears overall were changed least in their basic threat mechanics but were given occasional burst aoe threat in the form of berserk the removal of the target limit on swipe and the cooldowns in the form of bark skin in forms and survival instincts the net effect was to improve tank damage soloing capacity and threat scaling in an attempt to make tanks a little more user-friendly and fun to play i would argue that in most respects blizzard has accomplished that goal so increasing damage by removing things like a target limit on swipe giving warriors shockwave in their talents where it just stuns everything and does a ridiculously high amount of damage because it really does and obviously protection paladins while seem extremely overpowered which they are don't get me wrong when we start to get through this article you'll start to realize actually these big meat shield tanks like druids and death knights are extremely strong because block don't really do that much in wrath of the lich king there's only really one encounter off the top of my head that i can think of where block is actually useful and that's anna barack they introduced a two-handed weapon tank who lacked the ability to block and that would have been a problem for the concept of the crushing blow in the absence of block death knights would be unable to become uncrushable without increasing their total avoidance from parry and or dodge beyond 85 increasing their armor or health to the level of a druids would have also made them the single most powerful tank in the game against any form of damage which was problematic for blizzard's effort to standardize the tank quality developers were probably already concerned about the potential effect of death knight tanking talents on pvp balance as we later saw the death knight's impressive mitigation and avoidance cooldowns coupled with frightening damage and self-healing has made them an unwelcome and often resented opponent in battlegrounds and arenas no one likes seeing a death knight and being just uh tugged all over the tub i don't know why i've done that with my hand it tugged all over the place whatever if you cannot change the class to suit the game mechanic then the solution is to change the game mechanic to suit the class this is where crashing blows was gone so crashing blows can now be performed only by npcs four levels are higher than the player character as the highest level npc you'll encounter in a 10 or 25 man raid is 83 crushing blows functionally disappeared from the game and this next section is really great how it actually breaks down that the biggest portion of damage is always going to be spell damage now because there's no crushing blows or there shouldn't be any crushing blows the biggest thing that you need to try and mitigate is big spell damage attacks even give some examples and examples of those would be things like sarfarian's flame breath malagasy's arcane breath which none of the three classic bc era tanks mitigate particularly well magic damage cannot be pushed off the boss's hit table it cannot be dodged parried blocked or for most raid bosses interrupted or spell reflected because the majority of your gear talents and abilities are completely useless versus the damage the two things that matter most are your health the more the better and your cooldowns should you have them so on these big spell abilities we've got warriors that just eat the damage which they're not designed to do we've got paladins that eat the damage which they're not designed to do we've got bears that eat it which they were designed to do when burst damage was nearly all physical in nature so what it means by that is a bear was there to soak massive massive hits from a physical swing of a bus not really spell damage and then finally death knights use cooldowns to mitigate most of the damage such as anti-magic shell which is precisely what they were designed to do as i say there's a lot more to that article than what we've looked at so i do encourage you to go and read the whole thing but that's where i'm going to leave it with the article but now we'll discuss so this is where the big differences in tanks actually come and the reason why protection warrior is particularly weak as i've said there's not many possibilities that can actually be mitigated by block you just want flat damage reduction flat damage reduction cooldowns and like the article says when you've got these really big spell hits there's only really the dk that then really shines because they can more or less absorb every one of them they can use a cool down which i'm not going to say completely eliminates the damage but it will absorb a significant amount so this is why we know dks are going to be strong tanks and we know the vast majority of people when you look at any warrior related video i've done any paladin related video i've done everybody who plays on private servers or has played on private servers or even remembers raf back in the day will say prop paladin and dk are your tanking duo they're the two tanks that you want and it's for that reason so we know the paladin only eats those big spells those that big spell damage their aoe tanking is very very very good and if they try to eat a big spell and it doesn't quite work out for them they'll die but they won't will they because they've got a second life because of ardent defender coupled on top of that their single target fret's great their aoe frets great they get divine sacrifice to be able to do a damage reduction cooldown for the entire raid a paladin is of course very strong and then you've got your dk for those big hard hits coming from spells and the fact that they're single target threats incredibly strong their aoe is not too bad but their single target is where they really shine you probably think well hang on what about death and decay and blood boil and all of that yeah if they can aoe they can aoe but a paladin's aoe is still going to be better but a dk single target is going to be better than the paladin and it's those big hard-hitting single target bosses that use spells which is where your dk's going to step in is that true is it true that all we all we need is prop paladins and dks because a druid can achieve massive massive amounts of health obviously as you would expect and they still achieve high amounts of armor so from a pure damage mitigation perspective a druid tank is absolutely solid still as well because they don't rely on block they just rely on just hit me yeah hit me i'm gonna take it which is where the warrior gets pushed aside a little bit because if you've got a feral cat let's say your main tank is a prop paladin and a blood decay they're your two main tanks and then you've got a feral cat that switches the bear when needed you've got the perfect tank in trio to basically be able to achieve anything in the game tell me in the comments what you think is the best combo of tank both if you need two tanks or you need three tanks and what's the best solo tank so on a fight where you only need one tank what is that one tank that you would prefer i thought that was a great article i thought it was worth sharing because it does covers a lot of commonly asked questions around tank and wrath so i hope you found it useful be sure to like and subscribe for lots more raffle the lich king content and everything else beyond check out scotty j.com it's coming along it's still nowhere near finished but i'm working on it and roll the outro there's lots of ways you can support the channel to keep me here putting out world of warcraft content and covering all future mmos consider joining the channel as a member you get access to emotes everyone will know you remember when you comment on future videos because you get a nice icon next to your name and you get access to members only videos which i'll be putting a lot of on the channel throughout the year additionally there's a patreon link in the description as well thank you for watching all the way to the end and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Scottejaye

Views: 101,038

Keywords: Wow, tbc, classic, wotlk, wrath, of, the, lich, king, scottejaye, scottejaye87, world, Warcraft, Blizzard, mmorpge, mmo, new, fresh, server, Druid, PvE, PvP, feral Druid, feral, item, raid, guide, how to, bg, instance, dungeon, heroic, mythic, resto, metagoblin, Kargoz, warlock, rogue, warrior, hunter, priest, shaman, Dk, deathknight, lk, ulduar, naxx, 3:3:5, hard, mode, end game, Raiding, cat, Feral, DRUID, dps, Resto, healer, change, best, quest, tier 6, items, for, glyphs, lock, p1, arms, fury, prot, protection, pvp, pve, paladin, tanking, pala, DK, blood, p2

Id: CFNJAJ57GdA

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022