How hard is vanilla dungeon tanking?

[Itori]

Tanking in vanilla wasn't hard, especially as a warrior, the hardest part was keeping DPS from running in full derp face and pulling the world and then attacking everything the tank didn't have threat on.

[ifrah]

Devastate is BC only. Tab target and spam sunders. Shield slam often. Not sure if Revenge is more threat per GCD compared to sunder. Heroic strike does additional threat. Thunder clap and demo shout as threat allows so you take less damage.

Revenge should be more threat than sunder armor, and most of all its rage cost is less. With only few mobs giving you a beating your rage won't be sufficient for that much of an all in threat generation. According to some table the baseline threat of shield slam is less than sunder armor does, however the damage most likely puts it well ahead. TC and especially demo shout won't give that massive threat, but are decent tools to tag the mobs to you for the tab+x mashing.

And also keep on spamming that shield block...A lot.

[chrisnumbers]

People really underestimate today's gamers.

[ingsve]

Tanking is easy. You just have to conserve your mana so you can keep spamming Searing Pain since you don't have a taunt.

[SirCowdog]

From what I remember, it's not so much that tanking in Vanilla is difficult, mechanically speaking. It's more that you have to deal with surviving crushing blows and crits, but while also keeping up with no-filter DPS going full power with no consideration of threat.

"Wait for 3 sunders" used to be the rule of thumb. Not sure if that will hold up to modern standards of ADD players gouging their eyes out if they can't "GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!!" from the beginning.

[Vlaid]

If you can tab target and get a general feel for how much threat you have on multiple targets, vanilla tanking is easy. The hard part of tanking is CC and getting people to use and not break it, you can't aoe tank most stuff unless you overgear it.

It's significantly different from retail though so it may seem hard to some I guess.

[apples]

yaknow how in retail, you can pull more if you use your defensive cooldowns appropriately? how a smart tank will be a lot more effective than a tank who doesnt know his class?

in classic thats not true at all. defensive cooldowns dont exist in any real capacity and they cannot be relied on to do anything. the big "challenge" of classic is keeping threat, and even thats not hard. tanking is a slow slog where if you try anything funny youll kill your group and yourself.

the best tanks were geared fury warriors. they can solo 5 man dungeons np and if theyre real smart also the 15 mans.

[Ihazpaws]

Roll druid tank and you won´t have problems with dps going crazy with the dps from the start. 1 Maul (specially crit) does enough threat to pretty much keep aggro from the start from every dps class. If you use Manual Crowd Pummeler before pull you most likely won´t lose threat ever.

[Gratlim]

It will mostly depend on the dps in your group. They they know and understand that threat meter is king in Classic and not dps meter you will be fine. If they don't warrior is in a pretty bad place compared to say Druids who have a burst high threat aoe.

Warrior need time to tab sunder etc. With pugs of modern wow gamer, this might be pretty hard the first few weeks.

[Laerrus]

Please use LoS in areas where it may be needed.

[Gref]

If I remember correctly you had sunder and shied slam. nothing else. If you wanted to thunderclap it was only available in battle stance? also you had another taunt called mocking blow which required you to be in battle stance again so you would stance dance. berserker rage to break fear also required you to be in berserker stance. so with the stance dancing and nearly 0 aoe threat abilities it will be difficult I think. It is not going to be as easy as it is now.


NO throw weapon as your base skill. You better carry a gun/arrow/throwing axe and the ammo necessary with it with you at all times. otherwise it will be pain in the ass.

oh and you are gonna have so much good time when your opener misses, gets parried or dodged lol. I remember missing shield slams a lot and boss going everywhere.

I don't know, people disagree with me I think but as a warrior now, now's tanking feels much much much more easier. It can be the experience of playing since day 1 though.

[RamGuy]

As I'm going into WoW: Classic as a Troll, Warrior without any guild and just one of my friends is planning on playing but will be unavailable for the first two weeks I fully expect it to be a sh**show doing dungeons as I bet there will be a ton of players that never played Pre-Cataclysm, and a lot of players that simply have forgotten how things worked in Vanilla.

The thing with tanking in Vanilla (even though I have never played as tank myself, so this will be my very first time..) is that you are rather limited in-terms of generating threat. Even "Taunt" doesn't give you any additional threat, it simply forced the target to start targeting the Warrior.

What this does is it makes it more like a game of "cat and mouse" so to speak. On live/retail/BFA DPS-classes can just pour out maximum amount of damage and the tank will still have threat 99% of the time. It's more about mechanics and less about balancing threat. In Vanilla it's more or less all about balancing threat. If the DPS or the healer goes all mayhem all the time you as a tank are pretty much incapable of keeping aggro and things will go bad rather quick. And I bet it will take a while before everyone actually figures this out so be prepared to have some funky situations in dungeons while your DPS and healers are generating way too much threat giving you a hard time.

You also have to remember to pay way more attention to other members manasituation. Regeneration is terribly slow and you have next to no way to gain mana during combat so if your healer or ranged DPS is starting to go low on mana you wait otherwise you will mostly cause a WIPE.

[Piesor]

Most difficult thing will be to keep everybody in line without anybody leaving the group. I would also avoid guild groups that are just looking for a tank because you will often be made responsible for everything that goes wrong.

[Rapti]

In all honesty, its not too hard. It only gets harder if you have people spreading dps on all targets.
For leveling all you will need is shield and a 1h weapon (and prot stance when acquired) and you will be fine.

[Tojara]

Here's the thing about warriors in Vanilla. Rage is generated based on damage done or damage received, including being the victim of a critical strike. If you're going full sword and board, especially during *most* dungeon content, you're actually not going to be getting much rage at all if you play with the mindset of not wanting to take much damage. Essentially, if you want to use abilities, you have to force critical strikes on yourself to get any sort of rage, which sort of defeats the purpose of taking less damage to begin with.

Solution? Just play fury or arms while doing dungeons. Threat is super easy to come by, and you don't need to force sit because you're already taking more damage and getting critically hit from time to time by virtue of having less avoidance and no shield. You'll do a metric shit load more damage, shit will die faster and you really aren't that hard to heal. Playing like that means literally jumping between stances to do things like improved overpower, or using whirlwind on CD, while mostly sitting in defensive stance.

Tank damage sucks in Vanilla and is like 20% or less of an actual DPS classes damage. If you play fury/arms for tanking dungeons and intelligently know how to jump between all three stances, you're going to be doing competitive damage, which means virtually zero threat problems. While it happens, Vanilla has very few sources of group damage in both dungeons/raids, meaning that a lot of healing is just being dumped into the tank to begin with. If you're doing dungeons with essentially 4 DPS instead of 3 and a healer, your healer can just bomb you while you destroy packs.

[Freezzie]

No kidding. I remember I tanked Wailing Caverns and the turtle boss dropped the shield, only to have the hunter ninja it. His reasoning? He wanted to vendor it.

you could have bought it off him at vendor price, right?
and then spread the news how cool a player he actually is.

[stresskiller]

mark your targets ! with skull it will help tell them what crowd control you want / need and where

[cparle87]

You can tank as Fury 1-60 as Fury. Early levels even with 2 hander(up-to like 40) since threat is more of a deal breaker than damage intake.

There is nothing inherently difficult, just make sure you have some nameplate addon that shows if you have threat on a mob.

I'd suggest at least having a sword and board from the get-go, cause if I recall classic warrior will have two interrupts. Shield bash, which, you guessed it, requires a shield. And later pummel which requires dancing to berserker stance. If you see a spell you really do want interrupted, like a powerful nuke or heal, about to go off it pays to let it happen. As far as survivability and such, though, you are correct the defenses from a shield aren't strictly necessary so early.

[RoKPaNda]

As a prot warrior, challenging depending on the group. Prot warriors are perfect for boss tanking and don't do well with aoe tanking. Prot paladins, however, are king in dungeons, just be wary of mana usage. You can OOM just as easily as any healer.

I can't wait to see people trying to tank with a prot paladin. That is going to be entertaining.

[Jazzhands]

Really easy if you're a prot paladin or Druid, and it's actually kind of fun.

If you're a warrior, have fun, you can't use charge or Tclap in prot stance, you basically just sunder sunder tab sunder sunder tab sunder sunder tab over, and over, and over, and over.....

- - - Updated - - -

I can't wait to see people trying to tank with a prot paladin. That is going to be entertaining.

There are numerous videos of it on Youtube already, have fun. They work just fine, the lack of taunt only matters when DPS are shit, and if they can't even use a threat meter they deserve the repair bill. Paladins builds such great AoE aggro that DPS can actually AoE/tab target without worry, makes groups go pretty fast.

But wait, let me guess, "Have fun drinking every 3 pulls!" Guess who also have to stop and drink? Healers and caster DPS. You end up spending maybe an extra 2 mins per dungeon for a few extra drink breaks.

"You can't pull you have no range!" Hunters/Mages pulled in Classic to start proper CC, so... nope, not a problem again.

It gets even better when you run Stratholme, and can use your huge undead based AoE and Exorcism. They do more damage than a prot warrior would, which makes up for any potential extra drinking breaks.

Have fun waiting for a prot warrior while I'm already half way through my dungeon by the time you even get there.

Also don't forget the phrase "Wait for Sunders", the same time it takes for a warrior to Sunder a single mob is all it takes for a paladin to glue the entire pack to him.