Editorial – Which World of Warcraft Class makes the best Tank?

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Editorial – Which World of Warcraft Class makes the best Tank?

Posted October 19th, 2009 by Messiah

How does your class stack up as a tank?

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When you group in the World of Warcraft there are three sets of characters: Tanks, Healers, and DPS. They are listed in that order, as that is the order of importance in any group. Without a Tank, you can’t realistically group. Without a Healer, you may as well not have a Tank. DPS, while important is a very distance third in importance to your main party members. So when forming a group, you know you need to get a tank, but which one? Which of the four possible tank classes are best? Should you pick the AOE based Paladin or Death Knight, or should you pick the more single target based Warrior or Druid?

Paladin – This class was initially not that great of a tanking class. While they could tank, they had some serious issues pre-BC. Even when the Burning Crusade was released they still were not that great, but then patch 2.3 hit and Paladin tanks took over. In their current state Paladin tanks have good health, mitigation, and avoidance. In addition Paladins can supply some amazing buffs to the rest of the group and have some very solid cool downs. Lastly Paladins have the best threat generation for AOE groups and very solid threat on single targets as well.

Byron “Messiah” Mudry looks at the various options for tanks that exist and their current viability in the World of Warcraft in his editorial Which World of Warcraft Class makes the best Tank?

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an awesome article

Don't completely agree with the deathknight, agree on the complicated part.

Due to blizzard 'toying' around with the class, we are now reduced to a CD class other then a tank class with CD's. We are harder to keep up and our tanking tree (honestly it used to be frost) has been taken hits since launch and now they are introducing some wierd dual wield tank viability that we still can't take due to the number of expertise/hit needed to make it work and keep high threat.

My issue with the DW ...

I have always been partial to a warrior tank. Then again I started playing in vanilla when they were the only true tank spec. My warrior has been tank specced since that time and I had actually started a "DPS" warrior in the TTH guild to really get into that aspect. I am always just most comfortable with the class in that aspect. I did tank as a druid and paladin in TBC with those classes and liked certain aspects but again my comfort level was highest on my warrior.

I personally lik...

Good article, and a pretty even assessment.

I've always thought that the Pally tanks need to be toned down a bit - they should have some limitations on their abilities like the other classes. Druids have to shape-shift, DKs have to change presence, and warriors have to stance dance if they want to use all their abilities, but Pally's have no such limitation.

If they had some equivalent 'mode' change, I think they would be a lot more balanced... /rant

our threat generator used to be on a timer, but the fixed that.

does that count?

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