WoW Stratics IRC Chat

[Cybit]

I'm still scared that if Druids were given prot spec level warrior tanking abilities, prot warriors are gone. It happened on SR when TBC first released. And if prot warriors are made better, but every encounter is designed with a druid tank in mind, prot warriors will be brought in to make the encounter easier then intended. Then what? I think answering that question would lead to a fix...

[Skandranon]

That's an assumption. It's not even true.

You're making stuff up now. Keep to the facts?

You know, I was going to provide an even, reasoned response, but you're getting so grossly insulting that I can't bring myself to do it. You're not even implying it - you are flat out accusing me of lying. What benefit would I accrue by lying to you? I don't want to beat you down with credentials, I'd much rather do so by explaining why druids are better, but I don't know whether you're inclined to listen. Is there anything I can say which will make you believe me? Because whenever I relate an experience I've had raiding, you say I'm lying. What basis you have for such outrageous accusations, I don't know, since you clearly haven't seen the encounters yourself.

Ask Tal, ask Mav, ask any of the Lurkers around here who know me. I don't lie about encounters, and certainly (and verifiably, go search) not on this forum. I'm telling you the truth - would you like to hear it?

[Brista]

You know, I was going to provide an even, reasoned response, but you're getting so grossly insulting that I can't bring myself to do it. You're not even implying it - you are flat out accusing me of lying. What benefit would I accrue by lying to you? I don't want to beat you down with credentials, I'd much rather do so by explaining why druids are better, but I don't know whether you're inclined to listen. Is there anything I can say which will make you believe me? Because whenever I relate an experience I've had raiding, you say I'm lying. What basis you have for such outrageous accusations, I don't know, since you clearly haven't seen the encounters yourself.

Ask Tal, ask Mav, ask any of the Lurkers around here who know me. I don't lie about encounters, and certainly (and verifiably, go search) not on this forum. I'm telling you the truth - would you like to hear it?

You said this:

Two prot warriors is basically the max for any encounter in SSC/TK, to fulfill the "get-beat-on-by-main-boss" requirement of the fight. For all the rest of the tanking, a warrior would struggle or be outright incapable of pulling it off. When you want something for the boss to target, a warrior is the best choice. For everything else, go druid, and in some cases paladin.

From WoWwiki:

Al'ar

Three to four tanks need to stand relatively close on those spots and run with the boss when he switches position and goes to a spot that is near them, effectively intercepting him
....
Each time Al'ar switches position, he will summon 3 adds that need to be offtanked away from the rest of the raid and dpsed down as soon as possible (before the boss is able to summon more). A feral druid should be able to handle them easily, they don't hit very hard but once they are killed they explode for quite a lot fire damage so healers need to be on their toes and react fast.

So 3-4 tanks for the boss and heavy magic damage from the adds. Yet you claim a third warrior would struggle or be incapable here

Void Reaver

Use 3-4 tanks on him building threat

High Astromancer Solarian

Heavy arcane damage fight. Druids lack Arcane resists and Paladins lack life and Warriors have an innate spell damage advantage that can be augmented further by talents

Kael'thas Sunstrider

Heavy fire damage fight. Druids lack Arcane resists and Paladins lack life and Warriors have an innate spell damage advantage that can be augmented further by talents


No one is suggesting you're deliberately lying but I honestly think that your desire to win this argument is preventing you from being objective

[Taelas]

You know, I was going to provide an even, reasoned response, but you're getting so grossly insulting that I can't bring myself to do it. You're not even implying it - you are flat out accusing me of lying. What benefit would I accrue by lying to you? I don't want to beat you down with credentials, I'd much rather do so by explaining why druids are better, but I don't know whether you're inclined to listen. Is there anything I can say which will make you believe me? Because whenever I relate an experience I've had raiding, you say I'm lying. What basis you have for such outrageous accusations, I don't know, since you clearly haven't seen the encounters yourself.

Ask Tal, ask Mav, ask any of the Lurkers around here who know me. I don't lie about encounters, and certainly (and verifiably, go search) not on this forum. I'm telling you the truth - would you like to hear it?

You're looking at druid tanking through rose-colored glasses. I have both a warrior and a druid and while I tank stuff just fine on my druid, I did it better on my warrior. On my warrior, I can gulp consumables when things go bad or pop Shield Wall. On my druid, I'm a sitting duck. I can watch my healers get incapacitated and my health bar go down and there's absolutely nothing I can do. I could risk a double-shift macro which drinks a potion instantly then goes back to bear form (takes less than a second to carry out if done right and with no lag), but even though it's very fast, I'm removing all of my armor to do this. I can only really do this on bosses with no sudden damage.

You can keep on claiming druids are better tanks, but it is just not true. Druids have two actual advantages over warriors when tanking: Swipe and less rage-intensive moves (and more damage = more rage). The first doesn't come into play in raids, and the second actually encourages us to off-tank rather than main-tank. Do you want me to list what advantages warriors have over druids?

I'm not saying you're lying about encounters.

This is what I have issues with:
"Why shouldn't a warrior be the best at it - since non-warriors are the best at other tank jobs?"
What other tank jobs? Off-tanking? 5-mans? Sorry, but if you're already bringing more than one Protection warrior, the first job is taken, despite that I'm supposedly better at it. As for 5-mans, they've gotten much better in TBC, but I still don't really care about them. Any loot I can get in a non-Heroic 5-man will be replaced by raid gear. As for Heroics, that's currently the only place where I can really put my skills to use.

"For all the rest of the tanking, a warrior would struggle or be outright incapable of pulling it off."
What is a warrior OUTRIGHT INCAPABLE of tanking? How is claiming something like this NOT making stuff up?

"For everything else, go druid, and in some cases paladin."
Not if it's a spelldamage heavy fight. Not if it's something that needs to be tanked throughout the encounter.
And really, when would you ever go paladin instead of a warrior?

[oldmandennis]

Quotes from Wowwiki aside (jebus, thats authoratative), can I try and break this thread before it gets more personal?

1)Warriors are the premier raid main tank. They have been since Luci. The designers will keep it this way, that one off hand, taken out of context comment aside.

2)Either druids or paladins have no real problems tanking most heroics, and any 5 man.

3)Paladin raid tanks need work.
3a) Either deep prot has to push their single tank abilities to the warrior level (not likely)
or 3b) AOE tanking needs to be a more consistent part of the raid game AND deep prot needs to affect AOE tanking more.
or 3c) Some completely new mechanic needs to be put in deep prot to encourage it (I suggest buffing BoSac)

4)Feral druids are an integral part of most raid groups. Weather it's OT'ing Gruul, picking up the first channeler on Mag(in cat gear, for max initial threat and max dps on mag later), or picking up Hydross adds, Druids are mathematically far superior at many raid jobs. These are not usually trivial parts of the encounters.

5)If you want to be stubborn about it, Druids can MT everything. The 15% (10%? 20%? not really sure, doesn't really matter) difference between a warrior and a druid seems huge when you are on one side of an encounter, and trivial when it's on farm.

6)Any miscommunication on the relative strengths of tanks is pretty minor in the scheme of other miscommunications. Leveling a toon based on it, given their history of not fully understanding end game roles, and a complete lack of math supporting druid as MT, is really pretty silly.


Does that cover it? Can we move on?

[Brista]

Quotes from Wowwiki aside (jebus, thats authoratative),

You find a post stating basically Warriors suck at tanking in SSC and TK except specifically on single big bosses and I know this because I've been there as a Mage more authoritative than Wowwiki? If you care to research something more authoritative that would prove that 2 is the maximum amount of Warriors any guild should take to those instances it would help this thread along. But I doubt that EJ or some such side has such a claim. I strongly suspect that Skandranon is the only person on the planet who thinks that.

No one levelled to main tank raids as Druid. I levelled to see what end game has to offer. Now that I've seen it I found it disappointing in terms of the new role we have been given since February (or if you like the revival of our old role). I appreciate that it's not easy for Blizzard sharing out the pie to all the people who want a piece but the fact that there are more level 70 Warriors than any other class would suggest that Warriors got a fairly large piece

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?s...servertypeid=-1

[Arethor]

You said this:
From WoWwiki:

Al'ar
So 3-4 tanks for the boss and heavy magic damage from the adds. Yet you claim a third warrior would struggle or be incapable here

I think you are slightly blinded by the word "tank" we use 2 Prot warriors and 2 DPS warriors. Bear druid tanks an add, a warrior in DPS gear tanks the other in phase 2 until the first is dead.

Void Reaver
Once again, A MT warrior in Tank gear, Bear Druid and other warriors building secondary threat, but I can't remember ever having more than 3 Prots in the group for this fight, and I think that was because we were slim on people that night.

High Astromancer Solarian

Heavy arcane damage fight. Druids lack Arcane resists and Paladins lack life and Warriors have an innate spell damage advantage that can be augmented further by talents

Arcane resist is available if you're willing to think a little outside the box. Our Bear can get somewhere around 400+ Arcane resist. Yes, it's not an "MT" kit, but resist is still out there.

Kael'thas Sunstrider

Heavy fire damage fight. Druids lack Arcane resists and Paladins lack life and Warriors have an innate spell damage advantage that can be augmented further by talents

Haven't seen the fight yet, but see my comment for Solarian.

[TheDragoon]

From my experiences druids are far superior to warriors in multi-mob tanking situations. Even with a full prot spec thunderclap simply doesn't seem to hold mobs as well as a druid's threat building capabilities.

You've brought this up several times and I'd like to say that I simply don't think it is true. As someone who has played a Druid tank alongside a Warrior tank when there are things we're just trying to multi-target tank, I can say with surety that Thunderclap blows swipe away for aggro generation. I have basically never been able to hold aggro with swipe spam versus Thunderclap spam without switching targets. And since a Warrior can always just switch targets, as well, I'd say this is a wash. :)

I bet you're thinking back to pre-nerf Druids where swipe really did reign supreme. Now it does significantly less damage and so less threat. In my experience, Swipe by itself is a terrible way to try and hold aggro if there is a significant amount of healing going on. Eventually I tend to lose aggro to a healer if I'm not swapping targets to hit everything with a Maul or two. It's not a big deal, but realize that Swipe was significantly nerfed a few patches ago and it is not longer as good of an answer.

Druids also have massive physical damage reduction and can also hit a very high dodge number. Our Druid tank loves to use his 2 minute cooldown "Bear Wall" where he pops his trinkets and has ~70% dodge.

A while back I plugged some numbers on comparably geared Warrior tanks versus Druid tanks and found that Druids tended to have about 2-3% better physical damage mitigation than a Warrior if there are no crushing blows. If there are crushing blows, that difference is negligible. And, of course, the Druid's damage is going to be a bit more spikey due to the crushing blows.

Druids also need less +Def to hit the uncrittable cap. Without the concern of crushing blows, druids would simply reign supreme on physical damage encounters.

If by "reign supreme" you mean "be 2-3% better damage reduction" then yes. :P I would hardly call that "reigning supreme."

Also, Warriors clearly dominate in an environment based upon magic damage, so, frankly, I think that the removal of crushing blows would tend to make things more fair than they are now. Druids would have slightly better physical damage reduction, Warriors would have much better spell damage reduction and Paladins would no longer have to dump on loads of mitigation gear (so they could get more life) or worry about their ping while tanking.

[Tal]

You've brought this up several times and I'd like to say that I simply don't think it is true. As someone who has played a Druid tank alongside a Warrior tank when there are things we're just trying to multi-target tank, I can say with surety that Thunderclap blows swipe away for aggro generation. I have basically never been able to hold aggro with swipe spam versus Thunderclap spam without switching targets. And since a Warrior can always just switch targets, as well, I'd say this is a wash. :)

Bro I'm not just hitting them with thunderclap to hold them all. I'm also cleaving and sundering each and using Demo Shout.

[Mirajj]

I'm still scared that if Druids were given prot spec level warrior tanking abilities, prot warriors are gone. It happened on SR when TBC first released.

The SR situation happened because pretty much every warrior (We used to have around 10) decided to wander off except for a couple. The only folks who WOULD tank anything were druids. It's not that folks didn't want warriors tanking, it's just that all the tanks left. Or warriors themselves refused to tank anything, only accepting an invite if they were in a dps role.

What happens if something like that happens again, and all the warriors decide to up and leave or re-roll? Who picks up the slack left over? That is the danger of making something so only one class/spec can do it.

[Mavfin]

<mod hat on>

Some of you need to settle down a little and get less personal. A couple of you are pretty bitter over the druid changes *still*, and that was what, a month ago? One person's singing the praises of druids in end-game raids, and a couple others won't let go of 'omg we got nerfed'. If that's all we can accomplish here, I can lock the thread. Discussion, not bitterness, please.

<mod hat off>

Ok, as far as the comment of "I don't care about heroics or 5-mans". Fine, but, remember, a very small fraction of WoW players will ever see Gruul/SSC and beyond. Blizzard doesn't balance classes *solely* for the raid game. There's much more to WoW than raiding (don't take offense, Skan, I'm not putting you down at all), and that affects balance choices, too. The fact is, druid and paladin tanks *are* viable MTs in everything not 25-man, if geared well enough. As was pointed out, Kara has been MTed, Prince and all, by a druid already. I'm sure a pally with enough Kara gear could do it, if needed. Now, that's 'equally viable' in a huge chunk of content.

I have a feeling we'll laugh at this discussion in 6 months, when druids have tanked all of SSC/The Eye as MTs, as gear goes up. Pallies? Pallies right now can't quite get the hp for the really big-hitter fights. I'm not sure Blizz intends to fix that hitpoint gap, either. Sad, maybe, but, in the name of balance it will probably remain, leaving paladins out of the hardest-hitting encounters, at least till they're on farm. However, pallies are freaking awesome in other areas than 25-mans. Once again, 25-mans are not the whole game.

Here's the other side of the prot warrior vs druids/pallies in 25-man raids.

A protection warrior can 1) tank 2) do mediocre DPS (depending on gear, 300-500, probably, if they have the DPS-boosting talents deep in prot)

A feral druid can 1) tank 2) go cat and DPS a ton better than the protection warrior, *even in tank gear* 3) toss an extra heal or two, or do good work in heal gear, if known before the fight starts. 4) innervate a healer. 5) combat res 2, 3, 4, and 5 are limited if tanking.

A prot pally can 1) tank 2) buff 3) heal 4) cleanse.


Here's where I think balance comes into play. Blizzard, IMO, looks at this, and figures that if druids or paladins can tank *everything* as well as a protection warrior, rather than all of the game outside 25-mans, and all but a few fights inside them, as it is now, then very few raidleaders in high-end raid guilds would ever bring a protection warrior to a raid. For the record, I have a feral druid *and* a protection warrior, so I can see both sides of the discussion.

EDIT: I would be in favor of removing the current crushing-blow mechanic. That would level the playing field a lot between the 3 classes in raid content. That would make the classes more 'different but equal' than it is right now.

[ima_nerd]

Ok, as far as the comment of "I don't care about heroics or 5-mans". Fine, but, remember, a very small fraction of WoW players will ever see Gruul/SSC and beyond. Blizzard doesn't balance classes *solely* for the raid game. There's much more to WoW than raiding (don't take offense, Skan, I'm not putting you down at all), and that affects balance choices, too. The fact is, druid and paladin tanks *are* viable MTs in everything not 25-man, if geared well enough. As was pointed out, Kara has been MTed, Prince and all, by a druid already. I'm sure a pally with enough Kara gear could do it, if needed. Now, that's 'equally viable' in a huge chunk of content.

I have a feeling we'll laugh at this discussion in 6 months, when druids have tanked all of SSC/The Eye as MTs, as gear goes up. Pallies? Pallies right now can't quite get the hp for the really big-hitter fights. I'm not sure Blizz intends to fix that hitpoint gap, either. Sad, maybe, but, in the name of balance it will probably remain, leaving paladins out of the hardest-hitting encounters, at least till they're on farm. However, pallies are freaking awesome in other areas than 25-mans. Once again, 25-mans are not the whole game.

The problem that I see is that sure, a Druid can MT Kara. After he has some Kara loot. Gruul? No problem. Once he gets Chestpiece of Awesomeness. Off Gruul. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems that taking anything other than a Warrior for the first attempts on something would end badly due to the lack of early itemization. Although, I'm not totally against that...

Here's the other side of the prot warrior vs druids/pallies in 25-man raids.

A protection warrior can 1) tank 2) do mediocre DPS (depending on gear, 300-500, probably, if they have the DPS-boosting talents deep in prot)

A feral druid can 1) tank 2) go cat and DPS a ton better than the protection warrior, *even in tank gear* 3) toss an extra heal or two, or do good work in heal gear, if known before the fight starts. 4) innervate a healer. 5) combat res 2, 3, 4, and 5 are limited if tanking.

A prot pally can 1) tank 2) buff 3) heal 4) cleanse.

That's how I see it. If they make Druids and Pallies able to tank as well as a Warrior, what happens to the Warrior? If a Pally can't find a tank spot in a guild, he can spec to heal. Same for a Druid. That may not be what they rolled the character for but they have the option of doing it to get into a guild. The Warrior has no alternatives. And if Pallies and Druids are taking his MT spots, his chance of finding a guild has greatly decreased.

[Frag]

The Warrior has no alternatives.

*steps lightly onto the minefield.

Well, warriors can talent the Nightfall-bitch.spec and still earn a spot pretty easily (having someone maintain Imp. Demo, Imp. Thunderclap, Imp. BS/CS & Nightfall proc is sexy) or spec fury and bring solid dps and both have OT'ing capability. Warriors aren't one trick ponies, they're hybrids.

Cheers,
~Frag B)

[Mavfin]

*steps lightly onto the minefield.

Well, warriors can talent the Nightfall-bitch.spec and still earn a spot pretty easily (having someone maintain Imp. Demo, Imp. Thunderclap, Imp. BS/CS & Nightfall proc is sexy) or spec fury and bring solid dps and both have OT'ing capability. Warriors aren't one trick ponies, they're hybrids.

Cheers,
~Frag B)

None of those are something you're going to bring a protection-specced warrior into a raid for, though. Fury/Arms can do solid DPS unto themselves for a raid slot, and can OT some, albeit not as well as a feral druid or prot pally, usually. If that's all warriors can do well, the protection warrior is standing outside, looking in. So, I don't see those as applicable to the MT discussion, IMO.

[Skandranon]

Al'ar
So 3-4 tanks for the boss and heavy magic damage from the adds. Yet you claim a third warrior would struggle or be incapable here

We've killed Al'ar. I used? Two prot warriors, and a DPS warrior backing them up on the top stage and another one backing up the feral druid on the adds. I'd have used a second feral druid on the adds if I'd had one, I just didn't have one. Faerie Fire is ridiculously powerful on Al'ar phase 2, I kid you not.

Void Reaver

Everyone spends time in the off-tank position on VR. Our single Feral druid winds up tanking him about 60% of the time despite deaggros and is often the only thing standing between VR and our shadow priests. I would tank him with four bears and zero warriors if I had that available to me.

Heavy arcane damage fight. Druids lack Arcane resists and Paladins lack life and Warriors have an innate spell damage advantage that can be augmented further by talents

The current version of this fight doesn't involve anyone tanking anything...look, are you trying to stress your inexperience here? Or are you blindly believing Wowwiki - neither of which are good things?

No one is suggesting you're deliberately lying but I honestly think that your desire to win this argument is preventing you from being objective

Sigh. On what basis do you think I'm not being objective? Wowwiki's numerous inaccuracies are well-known. Are you really going to believe them over someone who's been there and beaten the fights?

[Taelas]

You've brought this up several times and I'd like to say that I simply don't think it is true. As someone who has played a Druid tank alongside a Warrior tank when there are things we're just trying to multi-target tank, I can say with surety that Thunderclap blows swipe away for aggro generation. I have basically never been able to hold aggro with swipe spam versus Thunderclap spam without switching targets. And since a Warrior can always just switch targets, as well, I'd say this is a wash. :)

I bet you're thinking back to pre-nerf Druids where swipe really did reign supreme. Now it does significantly less damage and so less threat. In my experience, Swipe by itself is a terrible way to try and hold aggro if there is a significant amount of healing going on. Eventually I tend to lose aggro to a healer if I'm not swapping targets to hit everything with a Maul or two. It's not a big deal, but realize that Swipe was significantly nerfed a few patches ago and it is not longer as good of an answer.

It was nerfed, yes. It's still much, much less of an issue to tank 3 mobs for a druid than a warrior. Like I said--I can swipe-tank heroics (with a good healer). And I don't even have the Idol of Brutality. At most, I switch targets to add a maul or a mangle.

Of course, Thunderclap has a CD, whereas Swipe doesn't.

It really is that easy. I pull in caster with Wrath, add a Moonfire on my secondary target, another Moonfire on the third target if I can manage it, go bear, Demo Roar, and start spamming swipe like crazy, adding those occasional maul/mangles. It's enough.

[Skandranon]

I'm not saying you're lying about encounters.

This is what I have issues with:
"Why shouldn't a warrior be the best at it - since non-warriors are the best at other tank jobs?"
What other tank jobs? Off-tanking? 5-mans? Sorry, but if you're already bringing more than one Protection warrior, the first job is taken, despite that I'm supposedly better at it. As for 5-mans, they've gotten much better in TBC, but I still don't really care about them. Any loot I can get in a non-Heroic 5-man will be replaced by raid gear. As for Heroics, that's currently the only place where I can really put my skills to use.

A feral is always my first choice to off-tank, even if another Prot warrior is in the raid. I do what's optimal, and offtanks where threat is required to be maintained are perfect for druids. I know you don't believe that druids generate more threat than warriors in the off-tank position, but it's true. Multiple KTM records from months of Gruul and Void Reaver kills confirm it. Hell, I always assign our feral to tank the first add on Magtheridon because DPS can go all-out even though the first add hits lightly.

I will admit that I haven't got a Druid or Prot warrior of my own, but I do know when I tell the Druid to do the job, it gets done, and when I tell a prot to do it, it doesn't. And these are good protection warriors: every one of them has been with us since BWL and tanked 4h, Kel'Thuzad, and every difficult encounter up to now.

"For all the rest of the tanking, a warrior would struggle or be outright incapable of pulling it off."
What is a warrior OUTRIGHT INCAPABLE of tanking? How is claiming something like this NOT making stuff up?

Let me explain. Morogrim Tidewalker has a "murloc phase" where he shakes the ground and twelve murlocs come barreling into the room, hitting for about 1800 on cloth. They do need to be tanked and AoEed down.

There are twelve of them. How, without using Challenging Shout, is a Warrior supposed to hold aggro on all of them? TC hits four targets and you can't even pick which ones. Murlocs come every 40 seconds on a 10 minute fight so Challenging is out. Demo shout and Piercing Howl can't hold aggro against more than one or two Seeds of Corruption.

A paladin? Just drops consecration, and he's got them all without a fuss. Healing himself through the subsequent attacks with RF on is all the tanking the murlocs need. A warrior simply can't do that. He's outright incapable of simultaneously controlling twelve mobs in a repeatable fashion. We don't have a protection paladin, but I wish we did, because I am forced to assign two protection warriors and our feral druid to control the murlocs. Yes, this is a use for prot warriors, but suboptimal by any stretch of the imagination - I have to get three people to do one person's job, and any of the tanks on their own would be outright incapable of doing the job.

This is only one example, but I think it illustrates my point well. There are many unconventional tanking situations in new raid content, and some of them are really bad for warriors.

[Skandranon]

You find a post stating basically Warriors suck at tanking in SSC and TK except specifically on single big bosses and I know this because I've been there as a Mage more authoritative than Wowwiki? If you care to research something more authoritative that would prove that 2 is the maximum amount of Warriors any guild should take to those instances it would help this thread along. But I doubt that EJ or some such side has such a claim. I strongly suspect that Skandranon is the only person on the planet who thinks that.

God damn it. Brista, I'm the raid leader for my guild, not just a mage wandering around offering observations. Which do you think is more likely?

1) I'm wrong, and my guild's success is despite my incredible incompetence in the raid leader role, despite wrong strats and wrongly issued orders during the fight.

2) Your incomplete experience is causing you to draw incomplete conclusions about the role of druids in end-game.

[Monkey]

Let me explain. Morogrim Tidewalker has a "murloc phase" where he shakes the ground and twelve murlocs come barreling into the room, hitting for about 1800 on cloth. They do need to be tanked and AoEed down.

In TBC, Blizzard seems to have done a lot to reduce the idea of a min/max "Best" across the board. IANAR, but in the complex raid encounters of TBC, Blizzard's designers have room to build in a role for every tank class. And it sounds like they're succeeding without resorting to something like Tranq Shot to do it.

Because of encounters like the one Skandradon cites, the different tank abilities of each class can mean that comparing tank classes is more like comparing vectors than integers. The difference between swipe vs. thunderclap vs. consecration isn't just 'flavor' or artwork. They're real differences which may (or may not) be important in a given encounter. So raids benefit from fielding a variety of tank classes.

It might frustrate folks who want to be the best at everything, but it's good for the social health of guilds and raid groups. Too often in the MC days, I saw guilds fold because their MT defected to another guild. Or other warriors would become frustrated because they wanted to tank Magmadar/Onyxia/Foo. Not to mention the paladins and druids who rarely got to tank anything. In other words, the more places that Blizzard builds in large comfortable niches for all kinds of tanks, the less drama that is produced by raiding.

As an aside, why do Horde side have the best names? I mean, 'Stormcaller' versus 'Blade of the Archmage'...

Because the Horde is the Best faction?

/ducks

[Taelas]

A feral is always my first choice to off-tank, even if another Prot warrior is in the raid. I do what's optimal, and offtanks where threat is required to be maintained are perfect for druids. I know you don't believe that druids generate more threat than warriors in the off-tank position, but it's true. Multiple KTM records from months of Gruul and Void Reaver kills confirm it. Hell, I always assign our feral to tank the first add on Magtheridon because DPS can go all-out even though the first add hits lightly.

I've stated several times that druids DO generate more threat. I know this.

Protection warriors are perfectly capable off-tanks, however. I get relegated to dealing DPS because the Protection warrior can get the job done, and I'm much better at DPS than he is.

I will admit that I haven't got a Druid or Prot warrior of my own, but I do know when I tell the Druid to do the job, it gets done, and when I tell a prot to do it, it doesn't. And these are good protection warriors: every one of them has been with us since BWL and tanked 4h, Kel'Thuzad, and every difficult encounter up to now.

Whenever we have more than one Protection warrior in the raid, the second Prot warrior off-tanks. I don't understand why your Protection warriors fail to do the job, though I suppose it could be due to the level of content.

Let me explain. Morogrim Tidewalker has a "murloc phase" where he shakes the ground and twelve murlocs come barreling into the room, hitting for about 1800 on cloth. They do need to be tanked and AoEed down.

There are twelve of them. How, without using Challenging Shout, is a Warrior supposed to hold aggro on all of them? TC hits four targets and you can't even pick which ones. Murlocs come every 40 seconds on a 10 minute fight so Challenging is out. Demo shout and Piercing Howl can't hold aggro against more than one or two Seeds of Corruption.

A paladin? Just drops consecration, and he's got them all without a fuss. Healing himself through the subsequent attacks with RF on is all the tanking the murlocs need. A warrior simply can't do that. He's outright incapable of simultaneously controlling twelve mobs in a repeatable fashion. We don't have a protection paladin, but I wish we did, because I am forced to assign two protection warriors and our feral druid to control the murlocs. Yes, this is a use for prot warriors, but suboptimal by any stretch of the imagination - I have to get three people to do one person's job, and any of the tanks on their own would be outright incapable of doing the job.

This is only one example, but I think it illustrates my point well. There are many unconventional tanking situations in new raid content, and some of them are really bad for warriors.

If a single paladin can tank them without dying, it sounds like a gimmick encounter to me. It's pretty much what mages were forced to endure in Molten Core and BWL (Majordomo, Suppression Room).

And if they hit for ~1800 on cloth, they'll hit for ~1000 on plate. 12 murlocs on one paladin? It's a bit of a stretch. He'd have to spamheal himself as well as getting spamhealed by at least one other healer, if not two - and if they are higher than level 70, he'll get crushed (can't keep Holy Shield up). I suppose it's possible, though.