What is the "best" tank for multiboxing.

[X-Ifist]

Staring a new 4 man group for instance, a tank 2 dps and a healer.

The dps and healer all depends on what tank im gone get, Druid Warrior DK or Pally?

Druid warrior or Pally i prob get a priest healer and 2 hunters, tryed dualboxing 2 survival hunters on PTR and dident rly have anny problem whit Lock and Load.
Kinda fun to kill somone before a pally can get a flash heal up on him^^

If i get a DK tank i will go for 3 shammys 1 resto

[Coltimar]

Paladin requires the least amount of effort. One button spamming ftw! DK's seem a lot of fun, but I AM a paladin, IRL. So I am biased :/

[Xinxo]

Honestly, if you go for a DK, you should not need a dedicated healer. Just make them all elemental, and use 4x lesser heals when needed.

[Hachoo]

If you're going to use 4 shamans, then a DK is the "best". Not necessarily the easiest, but it will give you the most benefit. IMO its the most fun also.

[Siaea]

When I single boxed, I was a bear tank at 70. Now as a boxer, at 80, I am loving my DK.

[heyaz]

I use a pally and like it so far. I like the buffs and blessing, and I have the option of playing her as ret or holy some day if I wanna split off of the group.

You don't need a dedicted healer for a paladin either, I use 4x elemental and just spam a couple lesser healing waves.

I think they are all pretty viable overall, I'd make whatever you prefer the most. Sometimes I wish I had a warrior or a DK. Warrior being my old main, I would respec and play her solo in a hearthbeat. Paladin on the other hand, I don't care too much for ret and I enjoy healing with a priest or resto shaman a lot more

[X-Ifist]

Cheers for input, going for a pally whit 4 shammys and gone try whit a DK when i hit 55.

[puppychow]

DK is best at 80 and geared, paladin is best while leveling and undergeared. This all may change in patch 3.1, due out in 1-3 weeks, as DKs are getting slight nerfs.

[heffner]

I use a pally and like it so far. I like the buffs and blessing, and I have the option of playing her as ret or holy some day if I wanna split off of the group.

You don't need a dedicted healer for a paladin either, I use 4x elemental and just spam a couple lesser healing waves.

I think they are all pretty viable overall, I'd make whatever you prefer the most. Sometimes I wish I had a warrior or a DK. Warrior being my old main, I would respec and play her solo in a hearthbeat. Paladin on the other hand, I don't care too much for ret and I enjoy healing with a priest or resto shaman a lot moreI would base your decision on this - dual spec. I have a feeling both make great tanks. Leveling up is not difficult so all that really matters is what you do at 80. So, IMO it comes down to what off spec you prefer.

Definitely level the paladin to 55 though in case you want to switch to DK. Unless you want a different class to be available of course (I suppose this could also be a factor in your decision, i.e., if you want to have something like a mage or lock to go back to level up some day).

[Bully]

Paladin's bring the most syngery to any group - and have the most "oh shit" buttons.

Ohh shit! Tanker Bubble! WIPE!

[Niley]

Paladin's bring the most syngery to any group - and have the most "oh shit" buttons.

You mean as oppose to dk having(spec dependent) Icebound fortitude, anti magic shield, anti magic zone, instant 30% ghoul heal, lichborne, rune tap, unbreakable armor and more. You can get most of them in one spec too.

[Hachoo]

I'd argue that for a tank + 4 shaman team, DKs bring far more synergy than a paladin - the 13% spell damage bonus is the most synergy you're ever going to get for a group that has 4 offensive casters. For groups without 4 shamans, sure, a paladin probably provides more synergy, but you can't really argue that anything a paladin provides to a group of 4 shamans comes anywhere close to +13% spell damage.

[Lyonheart]

PALY+4 SHAMS=easy ... Paly+one boomkin+3 shams=more dps and still easy ( not as easy as 4 shams though, just better dps ) DK+4 shams= best dps

[X-Ifist]

Thinking of
DK Tank 12%spell dmg
Bomkin druid 5% crit 13% increase spell dmg
Demon lock 10% spell dmg
Elemental shammy 3%crit hit 280 spell dmg 5%haste
Healing priest

can annyone tell if all this will stack? :)

[Hor]

That's actually similar to the group I'm working on now X. Right now I have a DK and 4 Shamans at 80, but I'm dropping 3 Shamans in favor of a Disc priest, Boomkin, and Mage.

[Smoooth]

Thinking of
DK Tank 12%spell dmg
Bomkin druid 5% crit 13% increase spell dmg
Demon lock 10% spell dmg
Elemental shammy 3%crit hit 280 spell dmg 5%haste
Healing priest

can annyone tell if all this will stack? :)No, the DK, druid, and lock debuffs don't stack. You can see which abilities stack here:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=14214.0

[puppychow]

whole lot of factors come into play, including:

3.1 dual spec - DKs can spec between a good tank and good DPS build, and just have to swap weapon runes. Pallies can swap between heal, ret, and tank.
do you want to arena? while 5 boxing arena has proven to be nearly impossible so far, maybe 3.1 will be different. dunno if DKs or pallys would be better.
do you want to raid? ulduar also may be too difficult to multibox, at least for a while

If you just want to clear heroics with minimal wiping and as fast as you can, then DK + 4 ele shamans is best right now and probably will still be in 3.1. For other things, other comps may be better/more fun - for example if you want to rotate raiding on a different character each week, then having 4 shamans sucks (i speak from experience lol).

I've cleared all heroics with pally+mage+3 shamans and about 7/8s of heroics with DK+mage+3 shamans (just havent done hos, AN, and oculus yet) and I can tell you its quite a bit easier/faster with a DK tank than pally tank. I've also MT'd naxx25 as a Prot pally and a unholy DK and its more "easy" as a prot pally esp with the pull threat, plus auras + kings is good for raid. Although its nice on some bosses (Loatheb, Saph) being able to swap to DPS gear and just DPS away as a DK, you are pretty useless as a prot pally on 1-tank fights.

end of the day I switched from a t7.5 prot pally to a new DK, it sucked for the first 3 weeks but now both are nearly equivalent geared and I much, much prefer the DK - don't underestimate the fun of tanking with a giant 2h sword :) I rarely log in to my poor pally anymore :(

[Hachoo]

DK + 3 ele shamans + resto shaman still has more synergy than Paladin + 3 ele shamans + resto shaman because you'll still have 3 DPS classes all getting +13% damage.

Aside from that, the argument that "planning for such and such is bad if something ever changes" can be made for pretty much anything in the world, ever. The fact is, for 5 man heroics its quite easy to do all of them with tank + 4 dps (shamans anyway) and always will be, and for raids they're 10 man plus anyway so you won't need to heal with your 4 shamans.

Paladins still make great tanks - I used one for awhile, as did most people that currently roll with a DK tank, but the fact of the matter is we've all determined that a DK is just better (again, specifically for 4 shamans, or in general 4 caster classes). That being said, all of the content is quite easy with either tank - personally I always tell people to pick the one they enjoy playing more. For me thats definitely a DK, especially when I solo box (IMO a paladin is the most boring class to solo box) and since I plan on soloing with my main account some, I wanted a tank that I would enjoy playing without multiboxing.

[algol]

And I'd argue that a TANK + 4 DPS is not a standard team. You're playing in the 5 Shaman team area that was so popular in BC - and got "nerfed" in Wrath, forcing so many players to rebuild their teams.

The game is designed around the "holy trinity" setup: tank + healer + 3 dps. If you stick to this model, you should be more or less safe from future patches / expansions.
Non-multiboxing teams generally lack the coordination to get away with a "decentralized" healer. And you can always convert one of the shamans into resto when and if needed.

As far as the whole "tanking tree" and "PVE tree" and "PVP tree" argument you seem to be making - a few years ago, I might have bought it. Now it just seems a little like you haven't been paying attention to any patches since before BC came out. Druids and Paladins are hybrids so they still have a "tanking tree"...but that's about as far as the concept goes. Warriors and Death Knights can tank to some degree with any tree...

[algol]

Seems to be going that way for a long time now, anyway. Who knows, maybe they'll about-face on it. But I'm thinking not since it actually did improve the tank problem somewhat.

As far as the retnub...yeah, Paladins are a hybrid class, so their talent trees are more discrete. But with some defense gear and a few prot talents mixed in, I bet he could do it. 80% of holding aggro as a pally is remembering to put on your threat buff, after all...he mostly needs the avoidance gear (+ a few talents) to avoid getting horribly splatted faster than the healer can fix it.

[puppychow]

In patch 3.09 (current wow) DKs have 2-3k more base HP, quite a bit more armor (up to 3-4k), and higher avoidance (via blade barrier, which is up a LOT and provides 10% extra parry) than prot pallys and warriors. Its not a theory, its a fact from EJ, tankspot, etc that DKs consistently parse lowest damage taken on fights like Patchwerk or 3 drake Sartharion. They have much shorter cooldowns on 4 core abilities - Icebound Fortitude (20-40% damage reduction buff based on defense, 1 min c/d and up for 12 secs), AMZ (16k "anti magic" bubble, 2 min c/d), AMS (100% magic damage shield for 5 secs, 45 sec c/d), and Bone Shield (20% damage reduction, 1 min c/d). These are significantly, significantly better than Paladin 50% dmg reduction shield wall on (3, 5?) min cooldown and Holy Shield, or warrior Shield Wall.

Now of course patch 3.1 coming out soon changes a lot - the tank abilities of DKs are changed a bit, feral druids have had their HP reduced a bit, warriors got some new stuff, prot paladins had some stuff worked around. So far top guild parses for hard mode bosses suggest still DKs are the best tanks as far as survivability is concerned but the differences are smaller now, and its unlikely tank changes are going to happen before patch 3.2 now (six+ months away).

The biggest issue is that shield block is not a very good tank ability right now. Its great when you pull 50 low level mobs and watch in glee as they kill themselves attacking you, but it doesn't do much when you are fighting Hodir and he melees for 18k a swing followed by 40k magic damage - woot, I blocked 1800 out of a 18k swing, but damn that 40k breath killed me. Thats where DKs with a big arsenal of anti-magic damage tools really shine. The Blizzard designers have acknowledged that there are significant flaws with shield block, and I wouldn't be suprised to see it reworked in patch 3.2. But again, thats a long, long, long ways off.

The original question is whats the best tank for multiboxing, and unless you love paladins for some reason the answer still stands that 99% of the time Death Knights are the best tanks currently in 3.09 and most likely in patch 3.1, barring any last minute changes in the next few weeks.

This is from someone btw who has a 4/5 t7.5 prot pally who was my main for 2 years and MT'd every raid instance except Sunwell, I rerolled a DK 2 months ago and it is really a lot better tank. Just for example with my prot pally Utgarde Keep - Skadi is hit and miss, the adds can do significant damage in the first few seconds of the fight to my pally, whereas I can go a good 40 seconds without a heal on my DK (this is the farm 5 harpoons and do it all at once strat).

[X-Ifist]

The DK tanks ability arent getting changed they are getting nerfed:P

[Niley]

Aside from that, the argument that "planning for such and such is bad if something ever changes" can be made for pretty much anything in the world, ever.

Tell me which scenario is more likely to happen:

1) The removal of the ability to tank heroics / raids from the Protection Tree. (Paladin)

2) The removal of the ability to tank heroics / raids from the Unholy Tree. (Death Knight)



the answer here is neither, blizzard will not remove tanking from unholy/frost or blood, and I'm willing to bet all my 80k gold on that.
Problem with pally tanking is that most utility that it gives to boxing is not really needed, wisdom? kings? don't really give much when boss in heroic dies in 20s? (which are what most of boxing population is doing now).
Even after the nerf DK+4 ele shamans, will provide highest dps boxing team for pve content. Pally only gives longevity buffs, which are nice for starting team, but not for someone who is already decently geared.

There was a thread about DK tanking on Ej, and few people run some tests on patchwerk, even created a simulator just for that one fight, DK was avoiding 70% of the damage, while other tanks were eating hits, They scale to good, the nerf is justified. I raid with both my Dk and my pally, my dk can tank one of the horseman with zero heals, damage coming in is minmal, and i have millions of thing to pop, on very short cooldowns, on my pally on the other hand, I can well pop loh, and bubble...that's it, I'm still taking constant damage. Also its funny how my Dk fully buffed in stam set has as much hp as druid tank, show me pally tank with 46.6k hp(btw my shaman is still my main).
This is just one of the examples why DK right now is superior to any tank, they made them too good for a reason, now that everyone tried one, and has one, they will nerf them down to keep them in line with other tanks, I completely understand it.

[Hachoo]

the answer here is neither, blizzard will not remove tanking from unholy/frost or blood, and I'm willing to bet all my 80k gold on that.

Quoted just for documentation.

We'll see how things pan out in the future. ;)And I would put my entire pot of gold on the exact same thing Niley says. It's pretty silly to think after the dozens and dozens of blue posts and news articles and "hype" leading up to the death knight being able to tank or dps out of any tree, that they would suddenly say "oh, nevermind we don't want DKs to tank out of the unholy tree". Besides the fact that it goes the exact opposite of everything Blizzard has ever said, it just makes absolutely no sense. If that was possible, they'd be just as likely to take tanking out of the Frost or Blood tree, or for that matter convert the protection tree for a paladin into a "survival" tree that has nothing to do with tanking but is more like the hunter survival tree. (All 4 of those options sound equally absurd).

Bottom line is they "could" change anything in the game - they could remove mages from the game if they wanted - will they? No.

Aside from that, people change classes on this forum twice daily half the time anyway :) - people are asking what is the best now, not in 5 years - the bottom line is for a 4 shaman team the DK is (for min-maxing) the best tank, overall. I also find it to be the funnest as do most everyone that has tried one (as an MB tank). If that changes to something else in a year or two, I'm sure a boatload of boxers will roll a new tank at that point (I wouldn't - people told me on this forum for a long time that it would be nearly impossible to do half the content I did without a resto shaman but I didn't even find most of it difficult, much less impossible).

I'm just annoyed at the "A DK tank might not be the best tank in the future, so you might want to roll a Pally instead" talk. This is what is absurd - as I said it could be said for anything. The future is never certain.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

As a multiboxer, the easiest tank to gear up is a paladin by far. Even playing solo at the moment (argh...GIMP) I managed to hit 538 defense not 5 hours after hitting 80. My druid with a lot more instance runs and time has nowhere near the tankability that he does. And every DK I'm seeing tank instances lately is overgeared by a fairly wide margin. I mean, voidwalkers can MT raid bosses with enough gear. Question is how far do you want to be able to progress the quickest. I'd say start with a paladin and go easy mode until your group settles down, then figure out the DK thing once your DPS/healies get more gear. It'll help make gearing the DK a lot easier.

And I'm with fur on where things are likely to go. I doubt they'll nerf any tanking on any of the 4 (DK, druid, pally, war) but I thought that about druids and it appears they're nerfing them to hell and back in 3.1 if the numerical data is backed up when it goes live.

[algol]

Don't remember the Hunter Spirit Wolf pet ninja nerf do you, after a blue confirmation post stating that it would never happen?

Repeat after me: "We don’t make promises. And when we do, we are being dumb."

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15671125153&sid=1&pageNo=23#447

Watch what they do, not what they say.

[Niley]

Promises about small aspects of the class are a bit different from changing whole class, ie implementing tank tree, pvp tree and pve dps tree. Not gonna happen. There was NEVER a change like that in this game, and they're not dumb enough to do it.

[Stealthy]

And I would put my entire pot of gold on the exact same thing Niley says. It's pretty silly to think after the dozens and dozens of blue posts and news articles and "hype" leading up to the death knight being able to tank or dps out of any tree, that they would suddenly say "oh, nevermind we don't want DKs to tank out of the unholy tree".

*cough*

Don't remember the Hunter Spirit Wolf pet ninja nerf do you, after a blue confirmation post stating that it would never happen?

Or how about the camoflauge drama in beta? (here, gone, here, gone, here, gone...etc...)

"The left hand does not talk to the right hand"
Not sure if you can really compare the removal of a pet, or an ability that never made it past beta to the wholesale change of a class tree. In addition, Blizz has been much more forthcoming about the changes they are making, and more importantly the reasoning behind the changes. That's not to say undocumented changes won't slip through, but that a major change would be communicated to the player base before it happened.

Now, lets talk about how BoW won't be stacking with mana totems in 3.1. :P

Ok, seriously though - both Pally's and DK's make good tanks for multiboxed groups:
- Pally's give you ezmode one button tanking and some nice buffs and "oh shit" options, a solid choice for a beginning boxer.
- DK's require a bit more interaction, are a bit harder to gear, but can ultimately provide more dps for you group - good option for experienced boxers, or if you want to dive right into the deep end.

Cheers,
S.

[algol]

Given the "rolling in money" status of WoW, I'm going to come down on the side of "they probably did okay with the whole beta thing" instead.

[Seldum]

Druid tanks FTW!

DK's are gay - only because everyone have one.... the classic characters rule - period!

[Rin]

I'd argue that for a tank + 4 shaman team, DKs bring far more synergy than a paladin - the 13% spell damage bonus is the most synergy you're ever going to get for a group that has 4 offensive casters. For groups without 4 shamans, sure, a paladin probably provides more synergy, but you can't really argue that anything a paladin provides to a group of 4 shamans comes anywhere close to +13% spell damage.This is correct. If you're going with 4 shamans, then you should go for the +13% damage increase from the unholy DK. If you're going with 3 shamans/druid .. then a Paladin will get you more mileage (Kings), since the Druid will bring the +13% damage enhancer and a handful of other useful buffs (thorns, mark of the wild, etc.).

[Bigfish]

You know, I think BigFish tried using a Ret. Pally for an offtank while 10boxing.. didn't work out so well if I recall correctly.

It was Ret pally maintanking, and no, it didn't work out so well. It works on a level if nothing hits you for any significant damage, but you'd still like some mana to tank the stuff, but the added squishiness SUCKS.