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.