Threat as a paladin tank

[Vaelorian]

Guys really please cut it out about "threat" on a paladin vanilla tank.

I played my spec pretty fucking decent. I was the first and only tank on my server back then who tanked Onyxia. I tanked a multitude of mobs in the open world and even in dungeons.

What people do not seem to get is how the vanilla paladin tank was generating threat.

What did happen:
1. paladin puts on seal of fury
2. paladin judges seal of fury
3. paladin uses consecration
4. paladin puts on seal of righteousness
5. paladin judges seal of righteousness
6. paladin puts on seal of righteousness
7. paladin judges seal of righteousness
8. paladin puts on seal of fury
9. paladin judges seal of fury
etc

What people did wrong here is to put on seal of fury then judge it, then kept on resealing and judging seal of fury. This was also due to the tooltip of seal of fury. It presented itself as a great agro tool. Which it only was when judged.
Hitting a mob with Seal of Fury did next to nothing in terms of threat. Holy damage on a judged mob with fury on it.... THAT created threat.

Look at guides from back then on whatever fora you can find. If you come across a well written one, it will state that once a mob with fury on it, gets hit by a full consecration... it would be next to impossible to agro off the mob.

Therefore paladin tanks in Vanilla had the single greatest agro in the game. But due to mana issues and itemisation... they were not viable.

[Asune]

What if the debuff cap ate your seal of fury?

[Vaelorian]

What if the debuff cap ate your seal of fury?

(judgement of fury)
The debuff cap never happened really, because paladins tanks did not raid - unless those weird people like me who tanked Onyxia for the hell of it to see if it was possible.
But yes that would be an issue. A huge one if a paladin would actually raid tank. During dungeons or in the open world... the cap was a none issue. Obviously like with a warrior... paladins did get a head start with no one attacking a boss for a while. I asked the raid to wait until I did 2 full cycles of judgement of fury. After those I could stand afk pretty much until Onyxia took flight.

[Velerios]

Forget it: In WoW Classic, Warrior are Tanks and nothing more. Maybe druid can tank some dungeons, but Paladins are healer, period.

Played a Paladin in Vanilla, it's simply not possible.

[Waldor666]

Forget it: In WoW Classic, Warrior are Tanks and nothing more. Maybe druid can tank some dungeons, but Paladins are healer, period.

Played a Paladin in Vanilla, it's simply not possible.

this........

[FertsBlert]

We had some awesome Pallys in my guild in Vanilla, knew their class inside and out, they could tank.... unless one of the guilds fury warriors or warlocks was in the dungeon group then outside of Strat Dead or Scholo the warrior or warlock was tanking.

Blame Blizz for not giving Warlocks or Warriors any decent threat dump.

[faithbane]

snip.

No one is saying "Agro" was the only issue with Pally tanks. There were a lot of issues that made them inferior to warriors. The people who actually tanked raids successfully/competitively as Pally back in classic (Which there were only a handful), basically made the job of healers harder and possibly hindered the progress of their guild simply by existing. Back to the many issues:

- Back then there were strong class trinkets that dropped and pally one had no tank benefits
- No pally class set offered tanking bonuses, and Pallies wouldn't be able to get defense capped which made it a lot harder to survive.
- They ran out of mana in any current/challenging content during a boss fight which basically made them sitting dummies. Also many bosses required resistance gear which lowered the mana and regen of the pally tank even lower which made it even worse
- They didnt have the mitigation that warriors had
- Debuff slots were highly competitive and pally tank needed a slot to tank/agro
- Although many bosses were taunt immune, there were switch mechanics on some fights + adds that required taunting which pallies didnt have.

These are just briefly why pally tanking wasn't a thing in classic.

[Vaelorian]

No one is saying "Agro" was the only issue with Pally tanks. There were a lot of issues that made them inferior to warriors. The people who actually tanked raids successfully/competitively as Pally back in classic (Which there were only a handful), basically made the job of healers harder and possibly hindered the progress of their guild simply by existing. Back to the many issues:

- Back then there were strong class trinkets that dropped and pally one had no tank benefits
- No pally class set offered tanking bonuses, and Pallies wouldn't be able to get defense capped which made it a lot harder to survive.
- They ran out of mana in any current/challenging content during a boss fight which basically made them sitting dummies. Also many bosses required resistance gear which lowered the mana and regen of the pally tank even lower which made it even worse
- They didnt have the mitigation that warriors had
- Debuff slots were highly competitive and pally tank needed a slot to tank/agro
- Although many bosses were taunt immune, there were switch mechanics on some fights + adds that required taunting which pallies didnt have.

These are just briefly why pally tanking wasn't a thing in classic.

It was a response to people talking about paladin tanks... (in terms of agro) while it was generally a lack of being able to play the paladin tank well in terms of agro.... many responses in threads popping up about paladin tanks... are saying: paladins lacked threat... which was most def. not the case. So I made a topci about it. I know full well that paladins were worse suited to tank then for example: bears were.

[faithbane]

It was a response to people talking about paladin tanks... (in terms of agro) while it was generally a lack of being able to play the paladin tank well in terms of agro.... many responses in threads popping up about paladin tanks... are saying: paladins lacked threat... which was most def. not the case. So I made a topci about it. I know full well that paladins were worse suited to tank then for example: bears were.

In truth, pure aoe threat wise paladins were the best it was everything else that I listed that made them a subpar tank. Last boss of BWL had pallies that tank just to grab agro of all the adds or healer pallies with agro buff on just spam healing and warrior picking adds off of them

But raids mostly consisted of small packs of trash or solo boss fights + in dungeons half the packs got CCed and trash had kill order to support the warrior so it didnt matter.

[Vaelorian]

In truth, pure aoe threat wise paladins were the best it was everything else that I listed that made them a subpar tank. Last boss of BWL had pallies that tank just to grab agro of all the adds or healer pallies with agro buff on just spam healing and warrior picking adds off of them

But raids mostly consisted of small packs of trash or solo boss fights + in dungeons half the packs got CCed and trash had kill order to support the warrior so it didnt matter.

Honestly AoE tanking in Vanilla was a very hard job. As I said... seal of fury did nothing. It was the required judgment that made it all a hassle. I mean... the debuff lasted 20 seconds irrc. So you had 2 judgements of seal of fury per 20 seconds... because judging cooldown was 8 or 9.
So lets say you had 3 targets... right?
target one gets judgement and has a debuff for 20
target two gets judgement and has a debuff of 20 while judgement one has a remaining jugdement of 12 seconds
target three gets a judgement and has a debuff of 20 seconds while judgement one has a remaining judgement of 4 seconds and judgement two has 12 seconds...

Ofcourse.. at a certain period... and I am not sure if this was already during vanilla... we got that fury buff. And that actually made AoE tanking viable. So if you were "late" into BWL while (just to set you in the correct time frame) the rest was running AQ and Naxx. But I could be wrong with the buff... without it it was insanely tedious...

[VyersReaver]

Forget it: In WoW Classic, Warrior are Tanks and nothing more. Maybe druid can tank some dungeons, but Paladins are healer, period.

Played a Paladin in Vanilla, it's simply not possible.

This. Just forget it. If I would play Classic, I'd still go Paladin though. Retribution PvP one-shots be baws. But for raiding I'd be a buff-bot.

[Vaelorian]

Forget it: In WoW Classic, Warrior are Tanks and nothing more. Maybe druid can tank some dungeons, but Paladins are healer, period.

Played a Paladin in Vanilla, it's simply not possible.

Not sure this comment was related to this thread. Again: This is about other uninformed players about paladin threat.
This isn't about if the paladin was viable. HE WAS NOT VIABLE - period.

[HordeFanboy]

Forget it: In WoW Classic, Warrior are Tanks and nothing more. Maybe druid can tank some dungeons, but Paladins are healer, period.

Played a Paladin in Vanilla, it's simply not possible.

You havent played paladin. Prot palas were very good in 5-mans

[Vaelorian]

You havent played paladin. Prot palas were very good in 5-mans

Not very good... just doable I had fun with dungeons

[HordeFanboy]

Not very good... just doable I had fun with dungeons

Lol prot was very good because of consecration

[Echoherb]

I don't know why anyone would play a vanilla Paladin, what an awful class to play. I'd only play a paladin if it were after TBC.

[Velerios]

Lol prot was very good because of consecration

Prot was NOT good because prot couldn't hold THREAD against any Healer. Believe me, i played both, and i didn't knew any prot-paladin that could hold aggro against a decent healer. And Healer-Aggro was there much much much higher than later in the game. Prot was maybe useful in 5 mans, but only with some raid-epics, or T0.5 when you outgeared the content, but not while leveling. Paladin only became viable in BC when they got the extra-thread from the buff.

And for AoE you simply had more prot-warriors. Heck, Even Bear-Druids were better at tanking than prot-paladin, and i don't even mean feral, i mean resto-druids in bear-form.

Still: Prot was not a viable spec, and blizzard would either need to balance all classes (give for example prot-paladin the same passive aggro-increase as prot-warrior) or if they go full vanilla people need to accept that they are either healer or Blessing of Kings-Buffer. Heck, some even went only ret for BoK, and still had on full healer-gear to heal.

Actually that's something i really loved of Vanilla and up to WotLK: specs weren't as divided as they are now, that's one of the things i wish to return. Hybrid still felt like hybrids, and not fixated to their specs (a shadow priest still was a priest for example). Talent trees didn't completely make or break a class; althrough i hated the pure +damage/healing talents, i loved that you still could somehow decide of something.

To come back to topic: if they balances the classes a LITTLE bit like giving Paladin extra-thread, then yay, but if it is pure vanilla, then no, it will not work.

[Deleted]

Prot was NOT good because prot couldn't hold THREAD against any Healer.

Wrong. Go to any private realm's forums and you'll find several guides on Paladin tanking, plus videos of Paladins tanking every dungeon in the game.

Don't make the mistake of believing all those Vanilla memes you've heard about Warriors being the only possible viable tank. That only holds true for raid main tanking on modern Blizz-like private servers.

[Velerios]

Wrong. Go to any private realm's forums and you'll find several guides on Paladin tanking, plus videos of Paladins tanking every dungeon in the game.

Don't make the mistake of believing all those Vanilla memes you've heard about Warriors being the only possible viable tank. That only holds true for raid main tanking on modern Blizz-like private servers.

My experience is from vanilla, and no, it wasn't possible there. Beside this, i believe that good player can do it nowadays, especially the ones who are so decicated to play on a private server. Probably the more hardcore bunch of people.

But here we go, presenting vanilla to the masses, and mediocre people won't make it with a Prot-Paladin. And why for example would you want to raid with a Prot-Paladin when you can have a Warrior that is much better in all cases than the prot-paladin. So for the average person i don't believe that they can tank with Paladin very well, dungeons might be no problem, especially when you outgear the content. I could tank better with my shadow priest than with my Paladin thanks to Mind Blast giving the extra-aggro.

But back to nowadays: i believe that people might have it much easier now than before because everything is known, there are tutorials how to do it with certain spec certain ways for years now; something that wasn't really available at this time when wow was released. And addons are also much better now than then; and certainly there will be much better tools nowadays than we had before.

So all in all: Was paladin tank viable in vanilla: no, certainly not, might they be now, maybe. But i doubt they will be much viable in a raid-situation without outgearing the content massively. And even then, DPS might need hold back compared to a Warrior.

[Vaelorian]

My experience is from vanilla, and no, it wasn't possible there. Beside this, i believe that good player can do it nowadays, especially the ones who are so decicated to play on a private server. Probably the more hardcore bunch of people.

But here we go, presenting vanilla to the masses, and mediocre people won't make it with a Prot-Paladin. And why for example would you want to raid with a Prot-Paladin when you can have a Warrior that is much better in all cases than the prot-paladin. So for the average person i don't believe that they can tank with Paladin very well, dungeons might be no problem, especially when you outgear the content. I could tank better with my shadow priest than with my Paladin thanks to Mind Blast giving the extra-aggro.

But back to nowadays: i believe that people might have it much easier now than before because everything is known, there are tutorials how to do it with certain spec certain ways for years now; something that wasn't really available at this time when wow was released. And addons are also much better now than then; and certainly there will be much better tools nowadays than we had before.

So all in all: Was paladin tank viable in vanilla: no, certainly not, might they be now, maybe. But i doubt they will be much viable in a raid-situation without outgearing the content massively. And even then, DPS might need hold back compared to a Warrior.

Again:

Tankadins weren't viable indeed. No itemisation at all. You could maybe tank tier 1 because of blues that you "stole" from your fellow warriors. But you would run oom and needed to chuck manapots.
Dungeons were ok.
Sometimes I laugh at the question about the lack of taunt paladins have. It is true that paladins did not have taunt. But honestly they were rarely needed. Blessing of Protection was good enough. The cooldown sucked. Just explaining a bit more... if you bless someone with BoP, the agro would drop off and back to you (if you were the 2nd highest on agro of course).

Still you could do it (raid) if you had healers that were awake and paid attention to the spikes on my health... It just was a bit pointless.

Still the AoE tanks... paladins weren't AoE tanks... unless you let them "AoE" for a long time. I cannot say about private servers... and I know that during vanilla I was tanking AoE sometimes in dungeons... but in raids? Especially BWL (as people are saying) that shit was just not possible.
Sure... being a holy paladin... I stood near a warrior tank... (on him) and pumped Consecration out every cooldown... to help out with agro staying in the same area.. instead of those mobs running rampant.... maybe people remember that. But you did not bring a tankadin.