My voyage to 60 and lessons learned

[nodoze]

You are correct about fiery shield and thorns, in the first iteration of my initial post, I had changed the warlock for a mage in my ideal setup, which is probably the explanation for the wording.

Not sure what you mean about warriors being much better tanks though? When we're talking 5-man instances, I don't really see much of an advantage?

Yes, I could. I've considered that often, but he does account for a good deal of the DPS of the warlock though :-/

Thanks for doing this thread and the lessons learned. I fleshed out my above post while you were responding as to why I agree with Apathiest that Warrior may be better than either Druid & Paladin Tanks for some teams depending on the goals.

If you are committed to regular crawling through dungeons (which is fine for many people) Druid may indeed be optimal for some people. Higher health (especially Tauren), higher innate base mitigation regardless of facing, and less buttons to press/time make a lot of sense for a boxer who already has enough to deal with... That being said other tanks, especially Warriors, can open up larger pull options with better party gear.

I think you're underestimating how much damage reduction warriors receive from defensive stance, block and parry. Druids have a higher health pool and more armor but they take significantly more damage than warriors. On dungeon bosses warriors and druids will perform roughly equivalently but on those big pulls while you're level grinding or farming warriors will survive where a druid would have died. Not to mention the bears have no tanking cooldowns and you can't use consumables in form. No healthstones, no armor potions or engineering gadgets, etc.

Your AE threat as a warrior also ends up being better than a druids since there are a bunch of items like shield spikes, razor gauntlets, etc. If you can get your hands on a couple of https://classic.wowhead.com/spell=22...-reactive-disk they are incredible for AE threat.

Those shields are great but I ended up having 4 of them on my tank as they broke so damn much.

[Apatheist]

Those shields are great but I ended up having 4 of them on my tank as they broke so damn much.

True but the threat it provdes is amazing. You can swap between shields for different proc effects or on bosses where you don't really need the AE TPS. Warriors just have way more tricks than druids and are better itemized for tanking throughout classic.

One thing I want to test is how much threat piercing howl causes. I don't have a trinity group but if piercing howl causes similar threat to battle shout, which it should because it's just a standard debuff, being able to cause decent AE TPS while kiting and taking no damage is pretty OP.

[Moorea]

I solved most of my "damn pet pulls random next group" using this macro:
/stopmacro [noexists][noharm][dead]
/startattack
/petattack
/castsequence reset=target/15 Immolate, null
/castsequence reset=target/15 Corruption, null
/cast Shadow Bolt

the first line stops the macro unless the lock already has a target (is assisting), otherwise /startattack /petattack will pick the next nearby target


And about pally healer: I find my pally healer great for single target heals but having nothing fast nor any group heal is an issue so I am not sure you'd really want to swap your priest for a pally when you have mages that may get aoe aggro (or locks that are doing hellfire))

[Apatheist]

And about pally healer: I find my pally healer great for single target heals but having nothing fast nor any group heal is an issue

This stops being an issue when you get decent gear. With enough +healing paladin can spam downranked flash of light literally forever. Outside of rare circumstances where everybody in the party is below 50%, paladins are actually better at spot healing groups.

I have flash of light R1 bound to the same button as my single target DPS keymap set to heal mouseover if exists otherwise target of target. That way, it just autoheals whichever character the mob is attacking or my mouseover target. It's so cheap wasted casts don't even matter.

The only real advantage priest has is the inspiration buff.

[nodoze]

This stops being an issue when you get decent gear. With enough +healing paladin can spam downranked flash of light literally forever. Outside of rare circumstances where everybody in the party is below 50%, paladins are actually better at spot healing groups.

I have flash of light R1 bound to the same button as my single target DPS keymap set to heal mouseover if exists otherwise target of target. That way, it just autoheals whichever character the mob is attacking or my mouseover target. It's so cheap wasted casts don't even matter.

The only real advantage priest has is the inspiration buff.

Paladin is especially awesome for Melee Cleave (in general great due to Seal of Light but go into turbo mode if they get a full T1 set).

... And about pally healer: I find my pally healer great for single target heals but having nothing fast nor any group heal is an issue [edit:] so I am not sure you'd really want to swap your priest for a pally when you have mages that may get aoe aggro (or locks that are doing hellfire))

With Mages and Paladin reducing their threat this should rarely be an issue if you have a proper Tank. If running Warlocks I would think Priest should be better as they will damaging themselves plus you may also have pets.