Tank and DPS Composition Question

[PhantomRogue]

So I am considering changing up my group...
Right now my Toons are this:

80 Mage
72 Druid
70 Resto Shaman
70 Ele Shaman
70 Ele Shaman
62 Paladin

One of the Ele Shaman and the Paladin are on the same account.

Im torn on making the Druid a Boomkin and Trading a Paladin for Ele Shaman, or Making the Druid a Feral Tank...

Anyone have any suggestions or previous experience using Feral vs Prot pally as tanks? I see a lot of people use Prot Pally, but I don't really want to stall the 70s from leveling much further to get the Pally up to snuff (and gear wise to be able to tank).

[Svpernova09]

So I am considering changing up my group...
Right now my Toons are this:

80 Mage
72 Druid
70 Resto Shaman
70 Ele Shaman
70 Ele Shaman
62 Paladin

One of the Ele Shaman and the Paladin are on the same account.

Im torn on making the Druid a Boomkin and Trading a Paladin for Ele Shaman, or Making the Druid a Feral Tank...

Anyone have any suggestions or previous experience using Feral vs Prot pally as tanks? I see a lot of people use Prot Pally, but I don't really want to stall the 70s from leveling much further to get the Pally up to snuff (and gear wise to be able to tank).


Gearing a Feral to tank is stupidly easy, the downside, until you get a little gear, you'll require more healing. I've always run a feral tank and have never found anything that was game breaking or required a paladin. About the biggest difference is a paladin has better AoE snap (and residual / passive) threat. But after 2 swipes from a bear, that argument is out the window.

[shaeman]

I love my druid tank, he's proven to be just as capable as a pally.
About the only thing I miss is the Avenger's shield for caster pulls (got to love that silence),
but I either move the fight to the caster, or use line of sight to pull the caster to me.

At the moment I hold aggro with just swipe spam and the odd maul, but I'm working towards a macro that should up the dps/tps.

The druid has talents that make you crit immune at 80 so I felt the gearing up process wasn't as painful as the pally.
(this was pre ToC so running that on normal is apparently a good way of gearing up quickly).

Buff wise the pally wins.

The druid also has some nice abilities to help out when damage is high - Barkskin (use this alot on multi mob pulls), survival instincts and frenzied regen can help tide you over if somethings taken your healer out for a few seconds.

Definitely give it a go.

[PhantomRogue]

Thanks for the replies.
Ill respec the Druid to Feral and give the Tanking a Go, that way I can try to start on some Heroic BC instances and see how I do there. Appreciate the feedback.

[Ualaa]

From a boxing point of view, a 96969 macro on the Pally is very strong.
You have superb AoE threat, and great single target threat as well.

I've found it really hard for a druid to macro as much threat to both the kill target and the aoe around them.

As far as single boxing either as a tank, I have no issues with either.
So once the macro is worked out, either can tank as well as the other.

My solution at the moment is to put my click castsequence spam on buttons 1-3.
Then the druid gets three hotkeys:
1)
/Castsequence reset=5 Mangle, Maul, Maul

2)
/Castsequence reset=target Faerie Fire, Null
/cast Lacerate

3)
/Cast Swipe

On the druid I manually click Growl, Challenging Roar, Demoralizing Roar, Feral Charge, Berserk, Survival Instincts and Frenzied Regeneration.

I pull with the Faerie Fire / Lacerate button. And have the option of Lacerate on subsequent clicks, for extra single target threat.

The Mangle/Maul button is fairly decent threat for tougher mobs. The Swipe button lets me spam that on larger pulls to hold threat a lot more so.

Prior to breaking these into three keys, I would frequently have one of my DPS pull threat from secondary targets off of the druid, especially Chain Lightning which in the click castsequence was being cast every 3.5 seconds.

I was using....
/Castsequence Faerie Fire, Demoralizing Roar, Null
/Castsequence Mangle, Lacerate, Swipe, Mangle, Maul, Swipe

The new macros, with three dps keys seems to be working well so far.

The druid is crit immune from talents alone.
The paladin requires a lot of defense to achieve this.
In Cataclysm (which I'm guessing will be out Nov/Dec of 2010), every tank will be crit immune from talents alone.

[daviddoran]

My vote goes to level both up, and try it out both ways. I prefer my pally tank, but am leveling a 5 druid team with the plan of making one a bear and one a tree.

You could have 2 comps, Pally tank, Boomkin, mage, Ele sham and Resto sham, or bear tank, 2 ele shams, 1 mage and 1 resto sham. Either way you have a very strong PvE team, and probably pretty good in pvp as well.

[Svpernova09]

From a boxing point of view, a 96969 macro on the Pally is very strong.
You have superb AoE threat, and great single target threat as well.

I've found it really hard for a druid to macro as much threat to both the kill target and the aoe around them.

As far as single boxing either as a tank, I have no issues with either.
So once the macro is worked out, either can tank as well as the other.

My solution at the moment is to put my click castsequence spam on buttons 1-3.
Then the druid gets three hotkeys:
1)
/Castsequence reset=5 Mangle, Maul, Maul

2)
/Castsequence reset=target Faerie Fire, Null
/cast Lacerate

3)
/Cast Swipe

On the druid I manually click Growl, Challenging Roar, Demoralizing Roar, Feral Charge, Berserk, Survival Instincts and Frenzied Regeneration.

I pull with the Faerie Fire / Lacerate button. And have the option of Lacerate on subsequent clicks, for extra single target threat.

The Mangle/Maul button is fairly decent threat for tougher mobs. The Swipe button lets me spam that on larger pulls to hold threat a lot more so.

Prior to breaking these into three keys, I would frequently have one of my DPS pull threat from secondary targets off of the druid, especially Chain Lightning which in the click castsequence was being cast every 3.5 seconds.

I was using....
/Castsequence Faerie Fire, Demoralizing Roar, Null
/Castsequence Mangle, Lacerate, Swipe, Mangle, Maul, Swipe

The new macros, with three dps keys seems to be working well so far.

The druid is crit immune from talents alone.
The paladin requires a lot of defense to achieve this.
In Cataclysm (which I'm guessing will be out Nov/Dec of 2010), every tank will be crit immune from talents alone.





Try this: It lacks a bit in intial aoe aggro, but as long as your DPS isn't opening with CL or something similar, you should be fine:



/cast maul
/castsequence reset=3 Mangle (Bear)(), Faerie Fire (Feral)(), Lacerate, Mangle (Bear)(), Swipe (Bear)(), Faerie Fire (Feral)(), Mangle (Bear)(), Lacerate, Swipe (Bear)()

[Ualaa]

Basically, the priest does nothing until I click a heal key.
The mage does Arcane Blast x4 then Arcane Missiles, simple sequence.
The shaman does Flame Shock, Lava Burst, Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolts, priority except for the shock which is when the dot expires.
The warlock goes Haunt, Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction, Immolate and then Sh.Bolt spam, priority but only refreshing dots as they expire.

So the Shaman doesn't Chain Lightning until the 3rd click.
In the above example, the Druid doesn't Swipe until the 5th click.
The Priest can take heal aggro, but the Mage and Warlock are casting single target spells at the Druid's target.
It might be a nice macro overall, but the Chain Lightning on the 3rd click requires some AoE threat very early from the druid.

[Naysayer]

Drop the mage for the other Elem. Tank with the pally and get the boomkin buffs.