At first I thought I’d go into too much detail about the strengths and weaknesses of each one but I found it too easy to get into a rant about why warriors are hard to play and the other tanking classes are easy.
But really, I like all my tanks. Even the two who are poorly-disguised healers.
So instead, I looked at what they have to do while tanking a boss and see how they differ, both in terms of what they have to do and what they can do.
First of all, I’m ignoring any buffs that should never have to be refreshed during a fight. Druid and pally buffs don’t add complexity to the tanking experience.
Secondly, I’m ignoring debuffs that automatically get applied by abilities that would otherwise be used. Warriors are going to hit Devastate anyway but they are only going to Thunderclap a boss for the debuff.
Finally, the death knight info is based on my death knight, who is a Blood tank with Glyph of Disease. Therefore, the DK info is not quite as general.
With that said, here are the abilities each tanking class has to juggle when something large is trying to stomp them into the ground:
Update: Based on a comment from Kaethir I’ve updated the druid rotation, moving Feral Faerie Fire into the rotation and out of the manual debuffs.
Update 2: Based on comments from Paona and Javan I’ve updated the druid rotation to include Swipe.
Warrior | Druid | Death Knight (Blood) | Paladin |
One self buff | No in-combat self buffs | One self-buff | Two self-buffs (one maintained automatically in continuous fights) |
Two debuffs | One debuff | Two DOTs (refreshed with one button with glyph) | No manual debuffs |
Next-strike ability | Next-strike ability | Next-strike ability | No next-strike ability |
Four ability priority system | Four ability rotation | Three ability rotation | Five ability rotation |
Interrupt (off GCD) | Interrupt | Interrupt (off GCD) | Interrupt |
Spell reflect | Spell resistance cooldown | ||
One minor avoidance cooldown | One minor damage reduction cooldown | One all-purpose cooldown (defensive or threat) | One major threat cooldown |
One major damage reduction cooldown | One major threat cooldown | One major damage reduction cooldown | One major damage reduction cooldown |
One major health buff cooldown | One major health buff cooldown | One major health buff cooldown | Instant self-heal (shared cooldown) |
Health regen cooldown | Health regen cooldown | Health regen cooldown | |
Bonus health regen cooldown (via pet sacrifice) | Party-wide damage reduction cooldown |
So if you look at everything but the main rotation, pallies seem to have the least to do. Warriors seem to be the busiest, though I’d guess some DK specs are at least on par.
But there is also a lot of complexity hiding in the number of abilities that make up the rotation. These are the buttons tanks actually spend the most time pressing, so let’s have a look at what the tanks are actually doing.
Warrior priority system:
I’m going to pretend patch 3.3.3 has hit and so Revenge is back in the warrior toolbox. With my current gear it is still in mine, anyway.
- Shield Slam — six second cooldown which has a 30% chance of being refreshed by Revenge and Devastate
- Shockwave — twenty second cooldown
- Revenge — five second cooldown, available only after a dodge, parry or block
- Devastate — no cooldown.
Because it’s a priority system, you need to pay attention to what is available to be most effective. Also, for boss fights where rage is never an issue you can macro Heroic Strike to all four of those if you want.
Druid rotation (updated):
I’m not entirely sure if this is a rotation or a priority system, but this is what I do when I’m single-target tanking.
- Mangle — six second cooldown
- Feral Faerie Fire — six second cooldown
- Lacerate — no cooldown
- Swipe — no cooldown
It’s basically Mangle, FFF, Lacerate, Lacerate. I guess you could macro it if you wanted, though I think you’d still need a second button to keep Maul up, so macroing Maul probably makes more sense.
Update: Based on feedback it seems that even for single-targets Swipe is better than Lacerate if you don’t need to keep the DoT from falling off.
Death Knight rotation:
I’m going to fudge this one a bit and ignore the application of the diseases. I’m not counting Demoralizing Roar in the rotation, so this seems fair. With Glyph of Disease these are refreshed by Pestilence anyway.
- Heart Strike — needs a Blood or a Death rune
- Death Strike — needs a Frost and an Unholy rune (or two Death runes if you need the health)
- Death Coil — no cooldown but needs 40 runic power
My DK actually uses Death Coil a fair amount. I suspect with more avoidance I’ll hit more Rune Strikes and therefore not have spare runic power as often.
With the rune system you essentially share cooldowns between attacks, disease-refreshes and some defensive moves, so you probably can’t do it all with a macro.
Paladin rotation (updated):
I’m far from certain that this order is correct. Then again, I’m also not certain that it matters much.
- Shield of Righteousness — six second cooldown
- Holy Shield — eight second cooldown
- Hammer of Righteousness — six second cooldown
- Judgement of somethingorother — eight second cooldown
- Shield of Righteousness
- Consecration — eight second cooldown
- Hammer of Righteousness
- Holy Shield
- Shield of Righteousness
- Judgement
- Hammer of Righteousness
- Consecration
It actually looks kind of complicated when written out but with a bit of practice it isn’t bad. And if you really want you can put the whole thing in a /castsequence macro.
Personally, I have the “X of Righteousness” abilities in a castsequence macro (with a six second reset) because while I don’t think it matters much which of those you use at any given time, the other three abilities I occasionally want to actually prioritize. Actually, I have two macros: a single-target one that favours Shield of Righteousness and a multi-target one that favours the Hammer.
Apart from the fact that the rotation can be reduced to a macro, the thing that makes the paladin rotation simple is the fact that one you start it you get locked into a cycle where the next button you should press is the button you can press.
Additionally, the rotation is the basically the same for single-target and multi-target tanking.
Update: Thanks to Druidoff for pointing out I had the cooldown lengths wrong for a couple abilities.
Conclusion:
I think that tanks with a rotation are just going to be easier to play than tanks with a priority system. You get into a rhythm, stop to debuff, interrupt, etc. and then get back into the rhythm.
I find the warrior to be a lot more work than the other three. This can make him the most fun to play or the most stressful, depending on what content I’m doing and how I’m feeling.
With the death knight, I have to get the first few seconds of the fight right but after that things seem to take care of themselves.
If I haven’t tanked on the pally for a while I sometimes mess up the first pull because I’m not in the rhythm, but once I find the rhythm it becomes kind of hypnotic.
And the bear just feels like you have the most freedom to focus on things other than putting out threat.
At any rate, the differences between the tanks adds some nice variety for people who like tanking. I should dual-spec my death knight and give dual-wielding frost a try.
In your druid rotation, you’re forgetting FFF, which is actually quite useful both because it does damage and because it’s a better threat generator than Lacerate (especially if Lacerate is already at 5 stacks), *and* it applies a debuff. Also, if you don’t macro Maul, it becomes sort-of a part of your rotation.
*shrug* good rundown, tho. Thanks!
Good point. I think of FFF’s threat as being useful for keeping the attention on ranged mobs but hadn’t quite thought of it for use on bosses. Makes sense, though. Will update.
And yeah, I wasn’t sure how to deal with Maul and the other next-attack abilities so I noted who had them but didn’t include them in the rotation.
Right. Most keen bears will macro Maul into Mangle/Lacerate/Swipe anyhow. But it should be noted, if you don’t run with Improved Mangle, and I’m borrowing heavily from a Tankspot video I saw, it is possible for Mangle/Faerie Fire down, with a full-duration Lacerate, at which point you default to spamming Swipe.
My personal experience tells me that as far as AoE threat goes, mashing a macroed Swipe while tabbing around to make sure everything has the Infected Wounds debuff is usually the way to go.
[…] Our friends over at The Wayward Initiative write some very good articles, and earlier this weekend Brokentree, one of the troika wrote his own take on all four tanking classes, from the point of view of someone who has played the… […]
Excellent post. I think all classes should read this and see how much we are actually doing while tanking. Some people think its just a press 1 buttons and you are set type of deal.
I read this, and it is helpful to compare, but I almost wish your chart had a Cliffs Notes version, where in the sidebar or something you list out what the ability names are that you are referring to for each class.
Also, as a new druid tank (just dual specced at lvl 54) I don’t have a clear idea of WHERE or HOW I should be macroing Maul.
My DK is a DW Frost tank, so I can’t really compare there, but for the Pally I agree, it is nice to be able to pretty much maintain a rotation regardless of what I’m tanking.
Anyway, interesting read, nice breakdown, thanks!
for the macroheads, a line in the druid macro casting !maul will enable maul if it’s up, and won’t disable it on a successive button press…
i have maul bound to my mangle (will change that when mangle goes to a 60 second debuff)
/cast mangle
/cast !maul
Swipe is set in slot 1,
Lacerate is set in 2
maul is in 3 (for visual que mostly)
manglemacro in 4
FFF in 5
growl in 6
other things can be tossed in situationally, but these are my main buttons
Trash = swipe spam
Boss = FFF, Growl, then lacerate, mangle. FFF has a long duration, but can be tossed for free threat anytime cooldown is up.
depending on the group i’m rolling with, i might have to add FFF and Growl every time they are up.
Would you not want to use Growl first? (if at all?)
If FFF is being used to pull, growl will have no impact thereafter. It doesn’t generate threat – it just causes a mob to attack you, assuming it isn’t already.
Unless, of course, you were referring to Maul?
I also usually hit mangle prior to Lacerate because of the threat gen of Lacerate and I’ve got it stuck in my head that the debuff should be up before adding “bleed” effects.
Also once at a certain gear level (fairly low) swipe generates more threat then lacerate, so your rotation generally goes
mangle, FF, swipe, swipe
mangle, FF, swipe, lacerate
Rinse and repeat (this is once you have a 5 stack of lacerate up already). Many bear tanks simply just spam the second line.
—————————————-
Paladin, one minor correction the rotation is 9,6,9 but the Cooldown on all your 9 abilities is actually 8s.
It’s probably worth mentioning that warriors and DKs have off-global cooldown interrupts. Where pallies and druids have on global interrupts.
Nice post ^^
The timing for me to read it is a bit on the bad side (0.51 in the night here). But from what I read about the classess I know tanking with a bit (paladin mostly and warriors a bit) I think you described them pretty well ^^
Should you still think you need more info tho (Advanced tactics, gearing advice, etc) then you can always poke the sites like tankspot.com (general tanking and boss tactics) or maintankadin.failsafedesign.com (mainly paladin tanking, but there is some offspec for other classes if you search a bit) 🙂 Really good and reliable sources for tanking if you ask me, should at least be worth to be mentioned ^^
Your stealth reading paladin Hibur (since i`m to busy to respond a lot lately… Sorry i`ll try and comment some more on posts!) ^^
The druid rotation should definitely have Swipe in it. While Swipe has modestly more rage cost than Lacerate, Swipe will hit for a statistically significantly higher amount of damage than Lacerate’s initial application, so once Lacerate is applied, Swipe is a better tool for most of your GCDs than Lacerate. Both have similar threat generation after Swipe received a 50% increase in its threat generated a while back, and it will mean an overall increase in your DPS, which means an overall increase in threat generated.
Depending on your talents in Improved Mangle, you want to:
Mangle, FFF, Lacerate, (Swipe) (repeat until Lacerate at 5) then
Mangle, FFF, Swipe, (Swipe) (refresh lacerate when it has ~2 seconds left)
The (Swipe) is if you don’t have talents in Improved Mangle and have an extra GCD before either Mangle or FFF are off CD.
Threat-wise and damage-wise priority, Mangle > FFF > Swipe > Lacerate. Lacerate’s debuff for Maul along with it’s period damage is the key reason to keep it in the rotation, but you only want to use it enough to keep the stack from falling off.
Not to derail an otherwise great post. Having played a druid tank to 80 (up to and including tanking ICC-10), a DK tank to 80 (up to and including tanking ToC-10), and now a paladin tank (currently 71), this is a great comparison and I found it an excellent read. 🙂
Paona: Interesting. I hadn’t looked at Swipe as being useful for single-targets. The damage is certainly higher than the up-front damage from Lacerate, though Lacerate mentions “additional threat” in the tooltip.
It would be interesting to see if Lacerate is lower damage but higher threat and if this changes with gear. Not sure how much of your attack power each one gets.
Kattrinsaa: Useful tip. I use !Heroic Strike on my warrior’s boss-tanking toolbar.
One question about your use of Growl, though. My understanding of Growl’s mechanics is that it gives you slightly higher threat than the mob’s current target and forces them to attack you for a short period (three seconds?). This makes Growl not very useful when mobs are already attacking you.
Yes, Growl’s effect last 3 seconds.
Brokentree – They server-side hot-fixed in the additional threat to Swipe but never changed the tooltip, which may be why there was confusion.
You are correct on Growl – I don’t recommend having it in your actual rotation – it doesn’t generate threat, it puts you on the top of the threat table if you aren’t already holding aggro.
There was a mathematical comparison at different attack power, crit, and hit levels that I found a while back that discussed FFF vs Mangle vs Lacerate vs Swipe. The priority chain I mention above was correct until around 200,000 attack power, which is when it goes from Mangle > FFF > Swipe > Lacerate to Mangle > Swipe > FFF > Lacerate
http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/2009/05/druidthe-net-threat-value-of-faerie.html
It’s about a year old, but most of the bear abilities haven’t actually changed much since then.
New-ish tank: I wondered whether to list the abilities in the table but thought it might make it a bit cumbersome. If I get a chance tonight I will try and put in links to the abilities.
Druidoff: You’re right about the paladin ability cooldowns. I knew Judgement got down to 8 seconds fully talented but didn’t check the others. Fixed now, along with note about off-GCD interrupts.
Javan: Thanks for the info. I’ll update my druid rotation. I always felt like I should be pressing more buttons in bear form. {8^)
Personally, I play 3 tanking alts: A paladin, a druid, and a warrior. All of them are geared for heroics/ ToC-level raids, except the paladin, who is geared for ICC-level raids.
While your comparison and observations are right, I feel that it would not be complete without a more in-depth discussion of AOE tanking.
As you rightly pointed out, paladin tanking for single target or groups require essentially the same rotation. The same is true for bears, with the possible exception of FFF. For both of these classes, I can essentially focus on one target, and all the rest will stick to me like glue.
Not so on my warrior. With both TC and Shockwave on a CD, timing them badly can be disastrous. Even when both TC and SW hit all my targets correctly, I need to tab and devastate my targets to get sunders on them, so that I don’t lose them to aoe threat. This is made a bit more difficult when some of them are standing just out of melee range (casters like to do this), and I need to move to them before I can sunder them up. Overall, I find aoe tanking on my warrior viable, but a whole lot of work more than on paladins and druids.
I entirely agree with you about the issues with warrior tanking. When everyone had Naxx-level gear it was fairly easy to out-threat AOErs but with current gear levels this is a lot trickier.
I was thinking of doing a second post about trash / 5-person instance tanking.
One reason I started with boss tanking is that all four classes can do it about equally well, some gimmick-fights and survivability considerations aside.
No problem, happy to help!
I’ve found that of my 3 tanks, the DK has the most going on after I made the two paladin macros (the 6-sec abilities, and the 9-sec abilities, so I just hit 2-3-2-3-2-3 for most fights…), but the bear feels “just right” of the three – although that may be because I’ve tanked as a bear for the past roughly 18 months, and as a DK for maybe 3 months, and as a paladin for not even 1 month.
That is as a frost DK, tho, which has a pretty convoluted priority-based system.
That’s right, Swipe to fill those gaps when Lacerate will be up for more than 2 GCD, and both FFF and Mangle are on cd.
Did you include Demo roar/shout into rotation?
For druids you dont have to manually queue Maul, you can add /cast !Maul to your macro and it will go off on every white attack provided you have the rage.
I would add something about wind up time/resource mechanics for the different types of tank. I should add that I only have a level 80 Druid and DK as tanks although I am working on a Paladin.
For Druids and Warriors the complicating factor is always going to be rage, especially on the pull. This isn’t much of an issue in end game Raids but while tanking low level instances or even Heroics it is. You must learn to manage rage generation and use and may have difficulties in the first few seconds of the fight.
For the DK the management of runes becomes essential. A decent UI mod for rune display should be a requirement.
This is actually the reason I am looking at the pally right now. Having access to all of your abilities from the very first moment of the pull is very tempting to me.
Dual-wield Frost DK tanking is awesome! The only reason I didn’t keep my DK going is because Runes feel a little too restrictive to me, but hitting a Howling Blast, then Obliterate into Rime and another Howling Blast, woo… that makes numbers fly. =)
“I find the warrior to be a lot more work than the other three. This can make him the most fun to play or the most stressful, depending on what content I’m doing and how I’m feeling.”
I think it’s sheer bloody FUN when you’re tanking one or two mobs, maybe up to three, be they bosses or the tough trash from Frozen Halls. Trading blows with Oversized Thing of The Week and possibly one or two of his siblings rocks, and there’s no worry about keeping threat as long as you do things properly. That’s what Warriors were made for.
It’s when you start getting more things than you can tab-target that it’s stressful to me. Warrior tanking is generally single-target tanking, even if you’re spamming Thunderclap and Cleave (in itself a stressful thing due to Rage not being infinite in Trash). Make it so I have to tank six mobs individually instead of one *ahem* mob of six mobs, and then it stops being fun.
(Also, is tab-targetting broken or what? I keep going from Mob1 to Mob2 and back to Mob1 when I thought I’d go to Mob3…)
Great post! I like seeing that sort of comparison between classes that do the same function (tanks vs tanks, healers vs healers, DPS vs DPS). The more people talk about it, the more likely Blizzard will do something about certain classes and perceived issues (Zzzzzcane Mages and their two-ability rotation for example).
The cooldowns on the spell interrupts have a lot to do with the feels of the tanks. Bears have a 3 minute cooldown, so that they can’t always bring casters to them, while pallies have a 1 minute cooldown, and warriors have a 12 second cooldown. I haven’t tanked a DK so not sure about the mechanics there.
So if we’re running through PoS, chances are the bear has to leave a caster in the second group on the ramp hanging out (and faerie fire him to hold aggro away from the healer), while the pally and warrior could interrupt the caster and force him to come to you. If someone decides they’re going to go all out on the second caster, then chances are the bear’s gonna lose aggro or at least have to run back and forth to keep it.
I’m assuming the avoidance cool down for warriors is shield block… which if that is the case isn’t quite accurate. Shield block gives you a 100% chance to block any attack that isn’t avoided but you will still take damage from it. So it is a damage reduction cooldown since you don’t avoid any more attacks through it.
Shield block is also a threat cool down because it increases your block rating by 100% which increases the damage of your shield slam. Which in turn generates more threat.
Also concussion blow should be part of the priority system on any fight where a stun isn’t required (pretty much every boss fight)
Maybe mention something about paladin seal utility? SoC for cleave, SoV for single target, and SoL for self healing. They are kind of a constant heroic strike/cleave ability for paladins.
Resource management too? Druids, warriors limited by incoming/outgoing damage, dk’s cyclic resource, paladins nearly constant resource.
Concussion Blow was recently nerfed so it is now pretty much only useful as a stun. Before that (and the simultaneous Devastate buff) it was at least on par with Revenge for single-target damage.
Fair point about Shield Block being slightly more complex than my table indicates.
You’re also right in that resource management adds some complexity to the different classes, though I’d say only DKs really need to manage it while tanking a raid boss.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to do a part two looking at 5-person / trash tanking, so will touch on Seals there.
They nerfed the damage component of concussion blow while increasing the threat component. The result is about the same when it comes to threat and is still worth using over revenge or devastate.
The resource management for rage classes becomes an issue when offtanking. Thankfully most bosses these days don’t actually require the offtank to be second in threat but it is still worth noting that druid and warrior threat is greatly diminished when not taking a lot of direct damage.
Even some straight foward bosses can be problematic, I run out of rage when rotface slime sprays and jaraxxus is damn near impossible to keep rage up on due to the time he spends casting and relatively weak melee. I often find myself out of rage… in fact last time I told the dps to stop interrupting fireball so that I could actually generate some threat.
Dk’s lose some threat due to not being able to use runestrike and pallies from no holy shield procs (though they can drop holy shield from their rotation in favor of exorcism or avengers shield while off tanking) but their resources are relatively unaffected while offtanking.
I’ve been playing around with Concussion Blow a bit. According to the patch 3.3.2 notes, the damage was halved while keeping the threat the same, so presumably the threat is about twice the current damage.
With a full stack of sunders, my Devastate does pretty close to twice the damage of Concussion Blow. With the extra chance to crit Devastate has this should push it above Concussion Blow on threat overall, unless there is some extra threat that was already built-in.
I have to admit I only has a drood/pally/dk tank (and I sort ofrefuse to tank on the DK unless 100% necessary)
But one of my warrior friends for aoe tanking actually went down the tree far enough to pick up improved cleave, added nearly 1 dps to their aoe/multiple mob tanking, and a huge amount of threat for groups, not sure if this advice helps in any way or if it’s actually worth it.
I also think the tanking classes are more similar than your chart suggests, I’d say there’s less a rotation for the classes than as is stated a priority system, warriors just have some more proc based abilities than the other classes, so the other classes can eventually become a rotation but anything past 4-5 skills/buttons seems to be a kind of convoluted rotation, that you sometimes can’t manage during an encounter.
Other thing is I considered the enraged regen/frenzied regen to be more like lay on hands, and the pally ‘second chance’ to be more like survival instincts/last stand.
I also think charge should be mentioned somewhere in bear/warrior tanking and intercept being menteioned in warrior, since both these abilities can mean a lot of difference in play style, I also consider feral charge an interrupt >.>
Pretty sure Concussion blow is one of those abilities that states “Causes a high amount of threat” so I do think it has higher threat modifier than devastate.
On a side note… OMG REVENGE HITS LIKE A TRUCK.
I have to play with it more but there is a possibility that revenge may become a higher priority than shield slam.
On my warrior, it’s more damage then Shield Slam unless Shield Block is active. Then it’s still more or less on par.
So with 2+ targets it’s definitely Revenge > Shield Slam.
Additionally, any way to connect Omen to Recount and get detailed threat per ability breakdowns?
Only thing I can think of would be to aggro something then just use whatever ability and watch how much threat it creates in omen and how much damage it does in recount
Was looking at Tankspot yesterday at posts around when 3.2.2 hit and the consensus seemed to be that Glyphed Devastate was definitely higher in threat (I guess the extra Sunder application contributes) and that non-glyphed it was a little lower than Concussion Blow but close enough that you could probably drop it as a threat move.
That makes sense… but I use glyph of blocking so I’ll stick with concussion blow.
Actually the pally is half a rotation and half a priority system. If its a boss I’m going to prioritize shield over HoR on the 6 second cycle, and shield over judgement over consecrate on the 9 second cycle. On a pack the reverse. Then add in:
Hand of sacrifice (save fellow tank, or squishy with horrible dot on him when the other tank has the boss)
Sacred shield (always keep it up, it makes healing easier)
Prayer (mana is good, 3% less incoming damage is VERY GOOD)
Hand of Salvation (kick 2nd highest threat back a bit)
Hand of Protection (3 min cooldown, save/clean raid member)
Trinket and bubble/divine cooldowns
and taunt and shield toss to drag adds to the boss to get tanked down you often have interrupts or reasons to miss a part of the cycle.
Also, for all that many say the pally is fire and forget, if I have multiple mobs on me you BET I’m going to be spreading the hate around, not resting on my two ae abilities. I’m constantly aiming the high threat single moves at varied targets, watching relative threat by target switching (mousewheel = next/prev hostile) and tossing it where needed. God knows which mob the idjit hunter picked to unload on this time, but it wont be the one I marked.
So yes, the pally setup may be the eaiest to do ok at, but if you want to be better then that, there is still work involved.
Thanks for the input. Working on a multi-mob post next.
I might argue that the prioritization is done before starting the cycle since the cooldowns keep you from changing the rotation too much.
I was counting Sacred Shield and Divine Plea as the two self-buffs but didn’t include the various Hand abilities in my table.
I’d agree about the cooldowns not changing the rotation much except so many of the fights in ICC involve moving the bosses around. All but the judgement ability are on very short ranges which means you often can’t unload them when they’re up if the boss lags following you at all to cast.
So between that and the other items above, you’re constantly restarting your cycle. The ability that gets skipped most is consecration which is a mana hog. Even tanking a boss I need divine plea running ( which it might not be if I’m saving it for the Tier 10 4piece bonus) or I’m going to go oom using it at every cooldown.
On the other hand with three mobs, no movement, interrupts or adds, yeah it’s a rotation and a pretty mindless one.