In all of WoW's history, what was the most likely to kill the tank?

[thunderdragon2]

1. The Tank

this so hard i feel like this is the only correct answer, the tanks own competency

[danki1337]

Health Reaching 0.

[D3athsting]

Princess Huhuran hands down, at berserk phase it was a race to kill before all tanks died

[Dranged]

ICC elevator boss, hands down.

I remember the elevator in Blackwing Descent being far more lethal than the two elevators in ICC together.

[voskopoula]

Everyboss fight where you have to handle (as tanks) 3 debuffs or more :P
Oh wait i have something better.

What can kill you most? Your offtank!

[Loveliest]

LK hc maybe.
Design of tanks up to and including Wrath was weird. You had a lot of health but the risk of getting oneshot was pretty high. Devs made a post about it too, how it was not the best design and proceeded to change it in Cata. Tanks started becoming more self sufficient, thet could survive several attacks without external help. They also changed dps and healers health so they wouldn't be mowed down in an instant If the tank died. You had brez but by the time the tank was up, half the raid was already dead.

I say LK but it might be another end boss from Vanilla or TBC. I only played starting Wrath, so I remember from that at the end having 70k health and being meleed by LK HC with 40k hits. They sometimes aligned with his sword ability that was doing 60k.

But now that I think about it, maybe it's HC Ra-Den. If you were not above 70% health iirc, you were getting oneshot. If you did not have your active mitigation up on his big hit (when his energy was 100%, roughly every 10s), you were oneshot. It was a scripted mechanic, you could not avoid it it with any other defensive, it just checked for he health and AM. That was a one tank 4 min fight so one mistake and it was a wipe (weekly max 30 tries). The most stresful fight I have experienced as a tank. And yes, it was pretty easy, we had 27 pulls compared to the 300 we had on hc lei shen but this was way way more stresful as a tank because of the risk of getting oneshot every 10s...

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Tier 12 (Firelands) for blood DK’s. Due to how blood shield was tied to hit, we could be one-shot by raid bosses when our death strike failed to land.

Later that was changed that even if DS missed, you got your shield, and even later, our abilities just don’t miss at all. I remember many normal/heroic 25-man wipes in Firelands as a blood DK from being one-shot.

Oh yeah, I remember a healer downright refusing to heal on my DK offtank's side on Alysrazor. Good times.
Speaking of DK, it was kinda impossible for them to do hc Ra-Den too, because the blood shield was the active mitigation and it was getting eaten before the hit. We also benched the DK on our first hc lei shen kill because of the lack of speed.

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Vengeance in Mists of Pandaria was a solid contender. Even if tanking was incredibly easy in that expansion, I've seen my share of tanks doing dumbass shit like sitting to force crits to generate more vengeance and getting gibbed for it

That was tactics. Had the entire raid avoid killing adds for me to gain more vengeance on the twins, we were basically counting on me doing insane damage for that fight.

[Nymrohd]

Didn't think of it before but

The Tank's pet cat. My cat has killed my raid enough times that it now has to stay outside the room during raid time

[Cronovey]

A few off the top of my head as a DK tank player specifically:

Wrath:

• Patchwerk in Wrath Naxx, specifically because people always thought it was a walk in the park and you'd get gibbed because everyone was doing it in lowish gear.
• Algalon and potentially Trio in Ulduar, although DK's had an easier time on trio with the super short IBF cooldown back then.
• The one that sticks out the most to me is Gormok the Impaler when progressing in ToGC; parry hasting him in the slightest basically instant killed me when combined with his Impale back then. I'd go 100-0 in less than half a second on progression there, I got benched for a tank with a shield instead. Incredibly frustrating.
• ICC elevator bosses

Cata:

• Blackwing Descent elevator. This one for whatever reason is far more deadly than any other elevator I've ever seen in the game, so much so that it has its own death counter in the Statistics tab of your achievements under Statistics > Dungeons & Raids > Cataclysm.

After that it really all came down to just stupid tank mistakes. Most boss designs post Wrath didn't include a lot of things that could 100-0 a tank super quickly without egregious misplay on the tank's part, unless the encounter was designed around it with tank swap mechanics that you chose to ignore for some reason.

[Northern Goblin]

Was alluded to earlier but Lich King's Soul Reaper was a particularly nasty tank killer in Wrath. Tank got smashed with a hit, followed by a debuff that caused a chunk of extra damage 5 seconds later.

This forced a tank swap as the LKs basic + reaper secondary effect would global a tank. So you needed to heal up the tank who just ate the reaper strike before the secondary effect kicked in while the other tank suddenly starts taking a chunk of damage. Ontop of other abilities going off at the same time on the whole raid, it could cause some easy tank deaths.

[Tojara]

First few expansions it was a combination of healers, DPS and the tank themselves. Healers for falling asleep at the wheel, DPS for parry hasting and tanks for not hitting their buttons properly. In earlier iterations of the game the amount of buttons that tanks had to keep themselves alive was pretty minimal. Your job (mostly) was to face towards the one mob and save your CDs for scripted moments. As the game progressed tanks have far more scripted moments and CDs to compensate, all the while actually (more or less) having a rotation (or rotation lite) they have to adhere to keep both active mitigation up or resources up to react to big hits.

As such the answer is literally the tank themselves. Poorly played tanks just get themselves killed more often than not and there's still a large portion of people who tank that like to 'save' things for when it's quote 'needed'. Some tanks die if you don't proactively use CDs, and finishing encounters or wiping on encounters (raid/dungeons, etc) while you have something not used isn't a good look, but it's pretty common.

This isn't uncommon in the WoW community and extends to both healers and DPS as well. DPS holding onto CDs exclusively for bosses in dungeons and healers saving CDs for when it's 'needed'. These things aren't necessarily bad, but if you find yourself in a pug situation or very little organization it's almost always better to just keep things on CD and get in the habit of using things routinely as opposed to letting them rot. If you're organized obviously you throw that advice out the window, but most people aren't that meticulously organized or play that way.

Personally happy with tank design and how it's evolved over the years. Having absolutely zero control in raiding content or very minimal control over whether you live or die just feels awful.

[Nymrohd]

Was alluded to earlier but Lich King's Soul Reaper was a particularly nasty tank killer in Wrath. Tank got smashed with a hit, followed by a debuff that caused a chunk of extra damage 5 seconds later.

This forced a tank swap as the LKs basic + reaper secondary effect would global a tank. So you needed to heal up the tank who just ate the reaper strike before the secondary effect kicked in while the other tank suddenly starts taking a chunk of damage. Ontop of other abilities going off at the same time on the whole raid, it could cause some easy tank deaths.

Wait, you did not have a combination of 3 Holy Paladins and Disc Priests with legendaries in your guild? What is tank damage

[Northern Goblin]

Wait, you did not have a combination of 3 Holy Paladins and Disc Priests with legendaries in your guild? What is tank damage

No, and most guilds wouldn't either. A lot of guilds dropped Ulduar by that point.

[kamuimac]

if i had to guess ? uncleared debuffs its the only way of blizz to combat effectively immortal tanks who know how to play their game.

[garicasha]

Eh I shoulda made the post more for bosses.

For players going through the content at the time it was current:
--Ragnaros Your chances of surviving on progression in 2004 were very, very low. Onyxia sure got her fair share of tank kills as well
--Didn't Broodlord Lashlayer have a habit of wrecking tanks in vanilla?
--Pretty sure Patchwerk 40 progression was pretty intense. (I didn't play AQ40 or Naxx in vanilla.)

--I outgeared Gruul by the time I was doing it
--I'm guessing Illidan crushed some tanks
--Brutallus, and I don't know what specifically about M'uru was so hard

--Sarth 3 progression in 2009 probably had a bunch of tank deaths, although DKs were SO overpowered
--General Vezax still makes me nervous even at the end of the phase in 2023
--Algalon is just on a different level for tank damage
--Lich King hits super hard but by then we'd kinda figured out the whole holy pally + disc priest being overpowered thing

--In a pug, your chance of surviving Ozruk as a tank in Deepholm or whatever the dungeon was called was ZERO. This is probably the hands down winner for 5 mans.
--Never did Heroic Firelands Ragnaros but I know it was a great fight