WotLK Top tanks in wotlk

[Funkymusic]

There's no such thing as the "best tank", all the four classes which can fit in the role have their pros and cons. Since they have finally fixed the warrior protection aggro I will definetly roll one of them.

meh. depends on the boss and the raid.

warriors and paladins in retail were shelved for things like HLK. (assuming molten scripts ICC 100%) bears and Dks were just simply better for progressing guilds aiming for their first LoD. although we did use a warrior in every other ICC fight without issue. The debuff just really hurt anything with a shield and smaller health pool.

[Charmanda]

Paladins imo are the best tanks. They have great avoidance, hp, and op passives like ardent defender. However Bear tanks and DK tanks are extremely useful for fights like Sindragosa because of dks have anti magic shell and both druids and dks have a large hp + shield pool.

For heroic lich king his melee swing hits really really hard and your best bet is a warrior or a paladin because of their higher armor and avoidance.

[Sixtyninee]

Which tank is considered to be the best?

Next time just ask which religion is more accurate, you'll get the same results.

[Funkymusic]

For heroic lich king his melee swing hits really really hard and your best bet is a warrior or a paladin because of their higher armor and avoidance.

no one. and i mean no one went warrior for HLK. DK bear and pally. we forced our warrior tanks to swap to dk or whatever we needed at the time when we did our RF LOD on retail. warriors just plain stunk on that fight. they were good in the rest of ICC but terrible on HLK. no one used them. so please dont mislead people with your information.

[Lynea]

Never played a Druid, and I don't care to, but DK blow the rest out of the water when it comes to main-tanking by far. Paladins have raid utility, but DKs are just far superior when it comes to tank utility. By that, I mean CDs and self-sustain. Not to mention threat is much better too. Warriors.... meh.

[Imey]

no one. and i mean no one went warrior for HLK. DK bear and pally. we forced our warrior tanks to swap to dk or whatever we needed at the time when we did our RF LOD on retail. warriors just plain stunk on that fight. they were good in the rest of ICC but terrible on HLK. no one used them. so please dont mislead people with your information.

Well here on warmane its different, due to bugs u want dps, alot of DPS to skip phase3 as quickly as possible, on retail it was the easiest of all LK phases btw.
So what people do here is cut healers for dpsers, on retail you used 5-6 Healer, 2 Hpalas often healing 2 stamina tanks (not even possible here due to Beacon bugs). Now 1 Hpala is expected to take care of 2 tanks, which leads to tanks going EHP instead of straight stamina stacking because 1 hpala would need alot innervates otherwise. Stamina tanks are easier to heal with a lower chance of death but just cost more mana to heal. With LK enrage still being around u need every DPS to pass the last LK phase as fast as possible and u cant afford extra healers.

Never played a Druid, and I don't care to, but DK blow the rest out of the water when it comes to main-tanking by far. Paladins have raid utility, but DKs are just far superior when it comes to tank utility. By that, I mean CDs and self-sustain. Not to mention threat is much better too. Warriors.... meh.

DK aggro on LK = Icy Touch Spam, thanks blizzard for 14x aggro modifier hotfix ( ° ͜ʖ͡°)╭∩╮

[Lynea]

DK aggro on LK = Icy Touch Spam, thanks blizzard for 14x aggro modifier hotfix ( ° ͜ʖ͡°)╭∩╮

Let's not forget the threat potential of an aids-spreading Unholy tank.

Well here on warmane its different, due to bugs u want dps, alot of DPS to skip phase3 as quickly as possible, on retail it was the easiest of all LK phases btw.
So what people do here is cut healers for dpsers, on retail you used 5-6 Healer, 2 Hpalas often healing 2 stamina tanks (not even possible here due to Beacon bugs). Now 1 Hpala is expected to take care of 2 tanks, which leads to tanks going EHP instead of straight stamina stacking because 1 hpala would need alot innervates otherwise. Stamina tanks are easier to heal with a lower chance of death but just cost more mana to heal. With LK enrage still being around u need every DPS to pass the last LK phase as fast as possible and u cant afford extra healers.

I don't even.......

[Inda]

Well here on warmane its different, due to bugs u want dps, alot of DPS to skip phase3 as quickly as possible, on retail it was the easiest of all LK phases btw.
So what people do here is cut healers for dpsers, on retail you used 5-6 Healer, 2 Hpalas often healing 2 stamina tanks (not even possible here due to Beacon bugs). Now 1 Hpala is expected to take care of 2 tanks, which leads to tanks going EHP instead of straight stamina stacking because 1 hpala would need alot innervates otherwise. Stamina tanks are easier to heal with a lower chance of death but just cost more mana to heal. With LK enrage still being around u need every DPS to pass the last LK phase as fast as possible and u cant afford extra healers.

People cut healers because of overgearing of dps making fights last way shorter then they did in retail progression, which makes mana an irrelevant factor in most cases, as well as the overgearing of tanks minimising damage taken and overgearing of healers making their throughput and sustain much more reliable. The fact that many of the mechanics that do not work in the WoTLK raiding scene make healers lives a lot easier also plays a huge role (ie. no harvest soul debuff damage in heroic frostmourne, PP in general and twilight precision during the Halion encounter). So whilst you are right in that running the extra dps slots instead of healers helps cheese some mechanics, it's not to meet dps checks which are almost non existent with the state of raids in end game guilds or push certain phases. You also mentioned only the negative impacts with current beacon bugs, forgetting that the healing through beacon double dips with most modifiers making it easier for 1 hpal to keep tanks topped, even those stacking stamina instead of ehp.

As far as the whole "which tank is better" debate, I've played all at an end game level and in my opinion the synergy between DK's and either a Paladin or a Druid is too valuable to not run. The self sustain of a dk in conjunction with their high number of low cooldown defensives is quite amazing in certain encounters, such as shadow tanking p3 Halion, reaper taunting and shambling frenzies. The current broken state of AMS makes Death Knights invaluable in any magic damage based encounters (Sindra, Halion and P3 LK). However, a majority of healers often see them as quite squishy in regards to physical damage in comparison to a paladin or Druid when they have no defensive cooldowns up, making their damage taken quite spikey. Due to this, whilst I see DK's as the best tanking class in 3.35, I prefer paladins or druids as a main tank on heavy physical based encounters, such as P1+P2 LK, especially when at higher item levels making their ehp values insane.

TL;DR opinions and shiz

[Jijipls]

Well here on warmane its different, due to bugs u want dps, alot of DPS to skip phase3 as quickly as possible, on retail it was the easiest of all LK phases btw.

Do you actually mean phase 3? "Skipping" phase 3 would be what, killing the boss? I don't get this part. Anyways, Phase 3 should be as hard as Phase 2 and tbh depending on what happens inside FM things can get really bad for your raid. Phase 2 is always the same (provided everything worked like on retail), but P3 has RNG factor inside FM along with heavy AoE heals and heavy heals on soaking tank/MT outside, so it's a pretty rough phase. P3 is basically knowing how to keep DPS uptime as much as possible to make it before the berserk after a long P2, and then you have to deal with FM - survivability, constant movement and heavy AoE healing.

So what people do here is cut healers for dpsers, on retail you used 5-6 Healer, 2 Hpalas often healing 2 stamina tanks (not even possible here due to Beacon bugs).

You cut healers for DPSers because of 2 things:
- Old Molten phase 2 tactics consisted of Hero/BL -> push 2.5 ASAP. For that you needed the highest DPS you could to have only 2 waves of Valkyrs, reducing the chances you lose important players, resulting in compositions with a lot of Fire Mages, MM Hunters, minimum amount of melees and healers. This is outdated as you can easily kill Valkyrs on the current state of the scripts (and in a few months, hopefully properly scripted).
- There is nothing to heal. Seriously, P1/P2 is Infest (which is singlehandedly convered by the disc + maybe a bit from rsham/rdruid) and tank-healing (covered mostly by hpal and rsham). The only AoE healing you need is on transition phases, and even then you can get AMs, Dsac, Sacs, Spriest's Divine Hymns and so on. LK is easily 3-healed here by average players.

"On retail you used 5-6 healer, 2 hpalas". That happened but it's not true for every single guild, not even the majority tbh. And definitely not after +10%. Comparing that to Warmane while looking only at the scripts is being naive. You have the +30% buff. You have raids 90% made of overgeared characters. Under these circumstances, on retail you could do the same (2 tanks, 3 heals and 20 DPS):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO8KFr6oIZ0

A working FM + not overgeared tanks and healers = you need at least 5 heals.

With LK enrage still being around u need every DPS to pass the last LK phase as fast as possible and u cant afford extra healers.

It doesn't make any sense. Guilds here are used to pop Hero during phase 2 and pretty much 90% of them are completely ignoring Valkyrs, making P2 really short resulting in a lot of time to kill the boss during P3 (sometimes you can even Hero again before the Berserk). Why would LK enrage be the reason to "need every DPS to pass the last phase" if it's just a few seconds of DPS down-time (melees, basically, and provided you have a brained hunter able to kite the boss during its whole enrage)? Also it doesn't even enrage all the time, people gotta die to trigger it. If you were talking about skipping phase 2 because of Valkyrs and that being the reason you need a lot of DPS I'd understand, but phase 3 isn't about that and enrage definitely doesn't explain your reasoning.

[Imey]

good points. going to be interesting to see 0% wrynn on lordaeron and the guilds raid setups. also i was more talking about the risk minimization for a wipe. with that much dps you have only 2-3 FM's in phase 3 and the chance that one dumbo wipes defile or dies on spirit burst is less likely on a shorter fight, but since glorious Judgement of justice hotifix ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ its true that phase 3 is a joke, but before JoJ it happened quite often that people died during enraged LK.

[pototiroti]

Amazing how this thread went from "Best tank world" to HLK tactics in 2 pages. :3

On topic, if you want a faceroll tank with not much aggro problems. Roll a paladin. RF is ridiculous.

Paladins imo are the best tanks. They have great avoidance, hp, and op passives like ardent defender. However Bear tanks and DK tanks are extremely useful for fights like Sindragosa because of dks have anti magic shell and both druids and dks have a large hp + shield pool.

I think the reason Bears are chosen as Sindi MTs over paladins/warriors (DKs AMS just makes the tank faceroll) is because they can easily switch to frost resist gear without gemming for def just to hit the cap and sacrificing much valuable HP.

[ZickZak]

The best mitigation, AoE threat and Ardent Defender make It a Paladin.

I used to play a DK because I miss good looking tower shields. I don't like the puny ones.

[minijesus12]

So, I guess I should reroll my Warrior to a Paladin..

[Kelthuzzad]

So, I guess I should reroll my Warrior to a Paladin..

Haha no you clearly should not... The tank debate is very subjective in my opinion since a lot of tanks brings different things to the table but some raids just favor other tanks... Warriors are one of those who got the **** hammered in ICC due to the buff but other tanks are holding up pretty well... I'm not sure if Paladins has really ''the best'' midigation considering at least dicussing with my friend that paladins are one of the classes that takes the most damage (due to relying souly on block since it surrounds Holy shiled + that rebout talent). Also Warrior tanks are WAY more fun to play then stale boring Paladin tanks (for someone who played paladin tank and hated it altho it was convient it was boring).. Still since i think Armor is working propelly on Lord (which it didn't on old wrath realms at least according to my friend that i talk to), Warriors are defently not useless..

TLDR; Some tiers has better flavor tanks and some do not but Warriors are still reliable... They should not be marganalised just cause some other tanks are better. Also ask people around and do some research before making a sudden change of tank classes :) Just a thought!

[Sixtyninee]

dicussing with my friend that paladins are one of the classes that takes the most damage (due to relying souly on block since it surrounds Holy shiled + that rebout talent).

Were you both high at the time? Because it looks that way.