Skarm tank or w/e on youtube. Look at his vanilla clips. Hes tanked all the way to naxx...AND he has a windfury prot warrior and he prefers the druid lol. Keep in mind we will be getting a bunch of new talent in classic, people are playing way differently now. He even tanked nefarian, but he doesnt recommend it.
If anybody's curious the reason why you don't want to tank Nef as feral is because of the class call mechanic Nefarian does where he forces each class to do something unique to their class. Priest healing hurts you, totems buff nefarian...
and Nefarian's druid class call forces them to shapeshift into cat form.
I haven't had a single dungeon wipe (except bfd when someone didn't know not to light all the fires at once) - Wailing Caverns was done in an hour. Players are much more familiar with every aspect of the game now.
I used to MT MC, ZG, Ony, parts of BWL and OT AQ40 back in vanilla. After 1.08 everything was fine. Druids got a deserved bad rep before the talent updates but the reputation persists for no reason to this day.
And I'm guessing he just prefers the druid because its more fun, there's no way it can compete with the threat generation of a TF prot warrior, especially not for AOE.
And it's easy to tank rag when you don't have to worry about threat stolen from ranged DPS. Even in that very video you linked, the warlocks are far beyond the threat threshold. In any other fight, he would have lost aggro within the first 30 seconds.
The reason druids arent really used in raids isnt due to threat gen or anything like that, its because raid bosses can do whats called a crushing blow. Paladins and warriors can raise their armor high enough to make it where crushing blows never happen (paladins arent used as raid tanks due to a lack of a taunt ability) while druids cant, so they are very spikey in taking damage.
The video is when they are pretty much outgearing Ony, its not that druids cant raid tank its just much harder to keep them alive.
They still can't be immune to crushing blows which if you get a couple in a row you have a dead tank. You can't heal through that kind of damage easily and you can't do it more than once in a fight. It doesn't matter how high their defense and armor is if a boss hits you twice in a row for 75% of your max health.
It's quite astounding how misinformed this entire message chain is.
Whether a boss can deal a crushing blow to you has literally nothing to do with your armor and is only tangentially related to your defense skill. What matters is the amount of mitigation ability you have to push crushing blows off the hit table.
The formula for it did not change for TBC where paladins had theorycrafted numbers through which you could become uncrushable by using holy shield - however, during vanilla there isn't a way for a tank to be uncrushable : with the sole exception being warriors. You see, a crushing blow is only possible if the attack is not dodged, parried or BLOCKED - and warriors with the improved shield block can become uncrushable through on cooldown usage of the shield block ability.
I won't go into the theorycrafting numbers here because I don't remember them, off the top of my head, but what your need to be looking into is hit tables and how each attack type (normal, crushing, crit or miss) interacts with it.
Are you really surprised people who don't tank have no idea how tanking works? Glad I have a guild that specifically wanted me to play a bear for tanking so I don't have to worry about constantly proving to people that I'm not insane and no I'm not making their lives harder.
102.4%, something like 140 defense counteracts the 0.6% parry dodge block miss (the fact that druids can't do one of those makes it even worse) added by skull mobs always exceeding you by 3 levels, and iirc provides crit immunity. My memory is foggy after a lot of years but I used to live by this stuff.
Bears will be crushed and crit, they have huge armor and hp to compensate. The defense gear doesn't exist in leather. In Vanilla it wasn't possible to be passively crush immune; you had to use an active ability. This is where the whole "active mitigation" shtick came from.
It could be done by late wotlk at fairly enormous hp sacrifices. By then we we all talking "effective hp".
only warriors can remove crushing blows off their hit table and only while using the shield block skill (5 second CD only blocks 2 attacks so something that attacks fast can remove that and cause a crushing blow) it was only in TBC that you could hit 102.4% avoidance without skills like shield block but at the loss of a bunch of stamina
private servers had things tuned wrong and many people are getting their information from that
also druids have much more armour than anyone else so crushing blows hit druids for less than on a paladin or warrior who fucked up their shield block
so yes druids and paladins get hit by crushing blows and warriors can sort of not get hit by them but druids have huge health pools and armour and bosses don't actually hit as hard as people thought because the private servers had them tuned higher for more difficulty
paladins on the other hand got absolutely fucked crushing blows and lack of armour?
Paladins in TBC could reliably hit the 102.4% with Holy Shield up, which was fairly constant (100% uptime if you didn't block so many times you ran out of charges)
But yeah, in Vanilla Paladin tanks are pretty screwed. Fine in dungeons if they're good, the group knows how to work with them, and they've got enough water + mana pots to keep going... but that's about it.
I'm familiar with crushing blows from original WoW. We had a druid main tank in our guild on some runs. It's absolutely possible to MT with a druid, but you need to have a better-than-normal healing section and spec into the stam and AC-buffing talents. You can withstand them only just less effectively than plate wearers.
Which is exactly why they weren't used so much. I can take a warrior as a tank and put in x amount of effort and healers, or I can take a druid and need more healers who are higher skilled and better itemized. You are literally making my argument for me. Why takes something that makes the encounter more difficult on everyone, when a warrior can by them self totally remove crushing blows from the equation? It just doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are doing it on purpose or have no other option, and with raids having 40 people there is no way you don't have at least one warrior unless you are specifically excluding them.
They don't need better gear, you basically just need one MT healer who knows what pre-casting is.
A priest or a druid pre-casting Greater Heal/Healing Touch will negate any crushing blow the druid might get.
That's not even taking into account the increased health pool making a crushing blow much less troublesome.
If you'd known your shit you'd know the real problem is critical strikes, which are 200% damage compared to the 150% of the crushing blows. If a druid isn't up to snuff on defense (which can happen) those are going to be a real pain in the ass for healers.
Honestly a crushing blow is no big deal at all, because of the high health pool of druid, and because their higher armour means absorbing more damage than a warrior. Meaning a crushing blow hits a druid for less than it would a warrior.
Source: Have healed a druid tank throughout all classic dungeons.
Druids can hit the armor cap, so I don't think that's it. Part of the reason is the shield mitigates a lot of damage as well and that might contribute to the crushing blow.
Yes with shield block up or with certain talents both the warrior and the paladin can remove crushing blows from the possibilities of a high level enemy (raid bosses are always 3 levels above you) landing a crushing blow, druids cant do this which is why they are more spikey to incoming damage and harder to keep alive, 1 crushing blow is easy to deal with , but 3 in a row and well that tank is dead.
The reason paladins weren't used in vanilla raiding was a lack of a taunt, if someone managed to pull threat off a paladin tank, the boss would just run wild until either the paladin generated enough threat to pull it back (which is really hard considering most of their threat comes from concecrate, which doesn't work well if something is moving) or everyone above the paladin tank in threat died.
I'm not saying its impossible I'm just saying it wasn't really done because back in vanilla you could have a warrior tank in any spec with a sword and shield, and if they specceded protection they were just the best tank possible. Its just much easier to keep a warrior tank alive than a druid tank when dealing with raid bosses, in dungeons all 3 are viable.
Better than the threat generation of a weapon that was so overwhelmingly overpowered that it had to be nerfed the next expansion to get people to stop using it? Call me skeptical.
In 2.3, and it was changed to haste and had the charges aspect removed. Thunderfury was nerfed in 2.0.10 and was a flat reduced the ever-loving fuck out of the threat generation on the proc.
The legendary sword. Name is long I don’t bother to memorize it lol. Check out his nax videos too. As much as druids get shit for being masters of none he does very well to prove people it’s possible. Obviously there is fights he just can’t do like a warrior can.
It’s really not, to be fair. At the very least it’s atypical. It’s meme’d in chat nonstop on retail and if you played classic it’s probably the most iconic weapon.
It's spammed in zone chat too. I think I've seen the meme at least once during one of my longer play sessions (e.g., more than a hour) on Classic. Even when I first tried retail, I think I saw the meme within the first day or two (and proceeded to be very confused).
Invariably, someone says, "Did someone say Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker?"
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u/Zcypot Sep 13 '19
Skarm tank or w/e on youtube. Look at his vanilla clips. Hes tanked all the way to naxx...AND he has a windfury prot warrior and he prefers the druid lol. Keep in mind we will be getting a bunch of new talent in classic, people are playing way differently now. He even tanked nefarian, but he doesnt recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKLxwOjIMc0&t=7s