What is the easiest tank to play?

[skitzy129]

Lots of "LOL DK" tards in here.

DK is pretty easy in something irrelevant like 5mans, but it's much harder to play at a top heroic progression level.

Paladins are easiest in all forms of tanking. Scenarios/5mans/10mans/25mans/Heroic progression, all of it.

[Raugnaut]

I had a max lvl of each tank, exception of monk, at max lvl during Cata, and a bit after 5.0 came out. Ive also lvld a monk to about 60 as a tank.

For easiest, I have to say Paladin. You can essentially have a 1-2-1-4 rotation with 3 thrown in sometimes and do fine. You have one major mitigation button, and everything after that is essentially passive, with the possible exception of WoG.

Druid/Warrior are about on the same level after that. Druids have an extra mitigation button, warriors have an extra rage gen button that one needs to keep track of.

DK is after that. Sure, you can DS-DS-BB-BB-RS-RS ad infinity, and you can easily tank any casual content with a half-sleep healers. You have to do a ton more then that to tank top content.

Monk is the final. You have quite a bit of stuff to look after, and if you dont press the right buttons, you can easily take double the damage any other tank would.

[Kebren]

Paladin is pretty simple too mostly because of the reason that if you just stand there doing nothing you dont really get much higher dmg than when you actually play. block doesnt require you to press any buttons.

I take it you haven't played a Paladin tank in awhile?

Most Paladins now a days have very low block. A good number of are stacking haste, which makes the rotation very fast paced and very much dependent on your ability to press the right thing at the right time. Trying to time a 3 second buff around the swing timer of your enemy is as hard if not harder than timing Death Strikes.

The new Paladin is far from faceroll.

[Thelxi]

Paladins with DKs coming in close 2nd.

[Tziva]

I would like to point out that it seems like all the people are commenting based on what generates threat or is easy to level or whatever, and not actually on how to be a good tank. Maybe this is why like half the PuG tanks I encounter feels like they are wearing cloth; a lot of folks seem to not understand all that being a good tank entails.

A good tank, of any class, uses its survival cooldowns optimally. All tanks of every class have much more active mitigation now and cooldowns need to be used frequently since the changes made in 5.0.4. It's not about spamming Death Strike or Devastate or Consecrate or whatever anymore - it's about managing your survival. This is what separates the many, many bad tanks from the good ones. There might be some minor variations in what tanks have more buttons than others (I will admit I have not tried them all since the changes), but generally they are all pretty similar in this regard.

[Nemah]

I've been saying this for a while Death Knight is the easiest to be good at, but the hardest to be great at.

This.

Monk is also easy to be good / passable at with all the self healing it has....but tough to "master."

[TheWindWalker]

Monk is also easy to be good / passable at with all the self healing it has....but tough to "master."

It has a 15s cooldown on its normal selfheal. It heals for about as much as deathstrike which doesn't have a cooldown. It also has one you have to manually target a spot on the ground with, that's not a good thing during progression. The other is orbs spawned around them passively they have to go find. I'm sure you know this, but the biggest problem with comparing Monk self healing to Wa/Pa/DK healing is that those GCDs used on self-healing sometimes come at a direct loss of parry and dodge. A paladin can get an instant-cast heal proc and at no point is he no point is he risking losing 30% dodge/20% parry, but a Monk does.

The only tank comparable to Monks when it comes to how hectic it is to stay alive is Bear Druid, and that's because both of them can have a few second lag spike and end up dead because their ability to shrug off attacks can abruptly stop if they aren't pushing buttons. No lag spike will take a Paladin or Warrior's block or the ungodly high parry chance of a DK.

[Enosh]

or the ungodly high parry chance of a DK

wait what?

[luckybeer]

Warriors have weaker aoe threat and require pretty good management of aoe abilities and tab targeting in order to hold large packs. Our active mitigation is good enough that we can bonehead our way through poor cooldown usage most of the time but there are some fights where a lack of coordinated cooldowns will result in a death.

In heroic 5 mans all of the tank classes are simple to use once you move into raids and heroic raids, warriors have a slightly steeper learning curve than paladin/druid/dk.

[Deleted]

Trying to time a 3 second buff around the swing timer of your enemy is as hard if not harder than timing Death Strikes.

The new Paladin is far from faceroll.

who does this? O.o