Does a Tankadin make a big difference in BT?

[Daine]

I'm basically just looking for a bit of straight-up advice here. I've been a progess tank since TBC launched, from Prince to Gruul, from Hydross to Vashj, and now from VR to Kael. Being one of the main strategists in the guild aswell (because we all know Bosskillers loves warriors), I pretty much made myself a place in the raid and we blitzed all T5 content, and now finally are about to down Kael now we've restarted after Christmas. Given another week or two to sort attunements, we'll be entering BT and MH.

The 'problem' I'm facing, if it is one at all, is that for certain bosses and trash packs during T5 I'm irreplaceable. I also bring the all important 3rd blessing. The guild seems to love paladin tanking, but I'm not the raid leader - this leaves me doing pretty much nothing on anything besides the few bosses and trash packs I'm needed for despite being the best geared tank we have (The Armoury not being a fair representation obviously). Up until now I guess this seems like a whine post, and I suppose to an extent it is as our MT and RL is probably the worst geared of our 4-5 regular tanks.

The problem is that I know the value of our tanking in Hyjal, I know just how much it brings to the table as it did at Al'ar, Kael, Morogrim and so on. However, is there any such justification to bring a paladin to tank in Black Temple? Most fights don't seem to revolve around burst aggro or multi-mob tanking, and seem to need 3 tanks maximum. If the current situation continues, I may aswell just go Ret and drop my tank spot to save myself the frustration of being a trash tank for the rest of the progression content.

What I'm asking, after my long-winded complaint and biography is a bit of advice from people who have been there to try and get myself an idea of parts of BT that I will make significantly easier, encounters in which we can shine and so on, so that I can continue as I am. Are there any such encounters, or should I bite the bullet and dust off the Ret gear?

[Touchdown]

It goes 'downhill' for us, kind of, in Black Temple, but its not that bad. There are few places where we are nice to have. Otherwise, I just heal the bosses I can't tank/offtank.

Few examples:

-Shade of Akama offtank, AS is VERY nice for getting threat on all 3 mobs at your side, before the rogue is sheeped.

-Few packs before Teron, nice aoe packs, 'nuff said.

-Tanking the Rogue on Illidari Council, We can fairly easily get aggro from afar, and my Spriests love it, when, apparently, the Rogue gets the protection depending who is tanking it. For example, when our Druid tanks, he gets the Blessing of Protection alot, but when I tank, for some reason, the Paladin tends to cast Spell Warding on the Rogue, allowing our casters to nuke the real nuke target harder, since otherwise the Spell Warding usually goes there.

-Aoe packs before Mother, they do channeled Mind Control which breaks when they are damaged. One word: Consecration.

-AoE mobs before Bloodboil.

-We're good tanks for them flames of Illidan.

[Worldie]

Being honest: no.

There's no big reason to bring a tankadin in BT.

There are some fights where you are advantaged but nothing strong like in T5 content.

Najentus -> You can main tank this fight, but i'd rather suggest be healing. 1 extra healer can make a big difference, expecially while learning. Nowadays i admit i go afk on this fight
Supremus -> We have some advantage here on snapthreat and ranged threat to pick him up after phase transition. I'm the standard MT for our guild on this fight. They did it once without me cause i was feeling bad, killed him but the warrior/druids said it was definitively easier with me tanking.
Shade of Akama -> You can AoEtank one side.
Gorefiend -> You can either MT this fight, or go healing. For our guild, i usually pick my Nightfall and cleanse. By being on cleansing job you free one healer from doing that. I've tanked him once but really, it's SO boring that i would not suggest you doing it
Bloodboil -> In this fight we have a couple of advantages. We start with full mana so don't need to be hit to generate proper rage at start. We have a good control on debuffs with our bubble and eventually can Divine Shield if we cant lose aggro and are stacking too many debuffs.
RoS -> Plenty of topics about our advantage in p3
Shahraz -> Big disadvantage, we kinda fail on everything here.
Council -> Can't tank Gathios due to no spellreflect and consecration confusion, can't tank Malande due to no interrupt, we are "stuck" on Veras, where we do good job but nothing really different from a druid.
Illidan -> Not really advantaged nor disadvantaged here. The boss himself is "tankadin friendly", althought many of us tank the flames here and not the boss himself.

As you can see, we have actually no advantage on most bosses if not a disadvantage. There's few fights in which we are good to have, but nothing gamebreaking like on Morogrim, Al'Ar, Solarian and such.
Neither we do on trashs, there's some "AoEpacks" on the way to Supremus, to Shahraz and to Bloodboil, but the only ones that really get benefit from us are the ones to Shahraz, rest of them hit like girls even on clothies.

If you have been a "progress tank" before, you will probably be a progress tank in BT as well. Expecially if your gear is considerably better than the other tanks' ones, in that case you might end up tanking bosses more often than you can imagine.
Bare in mind that most of BT requires 3 tanks anyway. Druid+Pala+War is the best combo, althought for later parts, Pala+2 Warriors is better.

[Afraithe]

Worldie got it nail more or less.

I hate how BT treats us Paladins, I mean the AOE packs is a joke and not exactly simpler the way MH is with a Prot paladin.

Najentus, heal.
Supremus, soak HS strikes and keep improved JotC up, Warrior tanks.
Shade, tank one side, this fight is over in like less than 2 minutes.
Teron Gorefiend, heal/cleanse and look happy.
Blood Boil, a time to show off your offtank threat, one of the more fun fights actually.

RoS screws us royaly, yes I could tank P3 (haven't tried it yet, noone thinks it can be done with a pala for some reason), but I dont, our Warrior can do it, I help heal instead (I don't even help tank in P1, no point really, our rogues eva tank enrages with bear and warrior tank), im more usefull through the entire fight as healer in healing gear.

Mother Sharaz has to be the most stupid offtank jobb in the game, ffs, dude who designed that needs to be shot in the head.

Blizzard game designers:
"I know, lets have 2 tanks just stand there and look STUPID"
"And hey, lets throw in a silence aoe to!"

Council... well... we usually have 1 warrior, 1 druid and 1 paladin tank, and this is the fight where you will want 2 warriors. We have had nights where we have wiped 3 hours on Council, and went up to oneshot Illidan, thats how stupid, random and totally retarded this fight is, not to mention LONG AS HELL. A warrior on the priest will mitigate a ton of damage due to extra interrupts. We can't tank the Paladin, cause our melee will run like rabbits down a shooting range if they see Concecration. (Btw the spellreflect is a myth, can't reflect anything the pala does, at least thats what our warrior says). The druid could maybe be on the paladin, but he has no spelldamage reduction at all, so probably takes more damage than the warrior.

And the Rogue, yes we are a good tank on that, but so is a druid, in our guild, we have the warrior MT, druid is #2, and since we need a warrior for the priest... guess who is the odd one out. Also, I can keep the druid up healing as Prot (lol). THANKS ALOT.

And then we come to illidan, lets see... we know have 4 tanks since we needed an extra warrior on Council... and ofc everyone has full res gear... and we don't want to waste time respeccing a warrior, guess who is in healing gear? THANKS ALOT!

Frustrated... thats a good word, yes... frustrated.

[Worldie]

Our MT confirmed you can spellreflect Judgement of Command on Council and that's 7k less damage taken.

Yes BT quite sucks for us. Quite ironic compared to the other t6 istance... o wait there's Archimonde...
It was quite shocking for me to pass from 3 places where they would never go without me (SSC-TK-MH) to a place where i don't really see any reason to choose me over a warrior except the fact that we only have 2 prot warriors.
Well, at least ghosts on gorefiend are funny.

[Afraithe]

But isn't JoC kind of random and instant?

Aa a side note, for an optimal raid, you can have 2 tanks all the way up to Mother Sharaz, or even Najentus (dps warrior in prot gear could offtank Mother), so if you can pull off Najentus -> Mother Sharaz in one night and get a 3rd tank the next day, that is the most optimal way of doing BT.

Maybe even Council could be done with only 2 real tanks and a DPS warrior or something on the priest.

BB can be tough with 2 tanks though, if you are unlucky.

[Questioner]

The issue with the above posts is that they are focusing on us not exactly being better than another tank in our place.

You have to look at the bigger picture. There will probably already be a warrior and a feral druid in the raid, and in most cases it is better to have a prot paladin in the 3rd spot than another of either other class.

There are no real screaming prot pally fights in Black Temple (although the Worldie mentioned many, I don't know why he really put them down) unlike there were T5 and Hyjal. This doesn't make you worse than another class.


Btw, Afraithe, RoS Phase is significantly easier with a prot pally.


We don't make a BIG difference in BT, but I'd say the spot is earned.

[Afraithe]

Btw, Afraithe, RoS Phase is significantly easier with a prot pally.

I would not say "Significantly", at least for us, if we get to phase 3 with a full raid or only 1-2 dps down, we kill him. Problem is usually P2 if interrupts are bad or Deaden is kicked all the time.

[Worldie]

But isn't JoC kind of random and instant?
.

Gathios has a cast bar for judgement, something like 2 seconds iirc (got the gathios tank on Focus for ninja LoH so i see his target casting), so you can easily spellreflect it when he's casting it and has Seal of Command active.

JoB didn't seemb to be reflectable, we're trying the grounding totem today to see if it helps.

[Mithos]

I would say it's singificantly easier (RoS p3), I can just nuke threat as the boss doesn't hit that hard, and soul scream barely dents you even if you are sitting with 2/3k mana.

I would agree with the stance of "we don't make a gamebreaking difference but you definatly earn your spot" tbh, that seems to me how it should be, although I think some fights could accentuate on our strengths more in future rather than our weaknesses (mother....), so that on more bosses it's clear we are better, but overall I'm quite pleased with it.

[Dorvan]

My perspective as of now (4/9 BT, just started Bloodboil last night) is that there aren't a whole lot of "wow" reasons to bring a Pally tank, but really no reasons to exclude them either aside from the general problem that BT has more single tank fights than previous instances, which affects everyone. In BT, we're "just another tank".

[Mithos]

Yeah, the fact that we're "just another tank" is pretty good tbh, it's fun when theres highly specific "lol we own at this" fights but it would be stupid if every fight heavily favoured one class over another, the odd few fight is needed though imo.

[Worldie]

The point is that, except for RoS p3, we are "just another offtank", not another tank.

As long as there's a properly geared prot warrior in raid there's no big reason for having us doing anything different than healing or dpsing in a boss fight.
Or afking on shahraz.

[QuantumDelta]

Hmm....
We're pretty liberal about which tanks do what and we've tended to gravitate toward:


Naj: Feral.
Sup: Me (Snap agro + burst TPS)
Akama: 3 (War/Druid/Pally - War in the middle).
Teron: Me (Highest TPS - 1157 last night without trying - not including MDs/power gains (cuz I don't know how to calc'em) \o).
Bloodboil: Me/War/Feral(OT) - Most attempts go better if I have agro for the majority of the time since I can clear debuffs and have the easiest time managing my agro both as catcher up and as the tank at the time.
RoS: Shrug@P1/P2 but there's a reason why the first time we ever even SAW P3, we oneshot it. I count as a freaking DPS in that fight let alone the tank, 1k DPS? Hello? I was so far ahead on threat there was no way in hell anyone was gonna catch me.


Far as we got so far, currently they want me to MT Shadowwench which I'm a bit sceptical about, but eh whatever.

Council will be roguelolz since that's what I'm stuck with really.
Illidan will be the man himself.

I waltz into trash in BT the same way I did in SSC/TK.
*QD Pulls and stands there consecrating for 8 seconds humming to himself whilst waiting for OTs to taunt shit cuz I'm bored.*

I ain't seein why anyone is worried about our usefulness, we're more useful for some stuff, and less useful for other stuff.
Isn't that the way it's kinda meant to be according to blizz?

[Afraithe]

A good tank is always better than a bad tank.

Our MT did 1350-something average TPS on Teron last try, sure maybe I could do more, but our DPS wasn't exactly threat capped, and I contribute a lot more as healer/decurser in this fight, than a prot warrior would do as DPS. If im decursing, it frees up a full holy pala do just MT heal, good tradeoff imo.

It is only viable to say we are more useful at some stuff, if there actually is a problem with that in your raid. Like if threat is to low on Teron, or snap aggro on Supremus is a problem (never been for us). We also have no problem killing RoS if we get a full raid to P3, no matter who is tanking, its a DPS race and even without Seathe our Warrior tank has kept aggro through P3.

Sure, we could think about ourselves and just convince or force ourselves to MT as much as possible, but when you think about optimal raid performance (clearing BT and MH in 2½-3 days), except for in MH, Paladins fall short. Come to think of it, another druid in BT should be better, our druid offtank can push 1000 dps on Teron... thats impressive.

But hey, GL MT:ing Mother Sharaz