[10man] So I switched - Blue Tracker

#1 - April 16, 2013, 10:48 a.m.

Hello.

I recently returned to the game and joined a couple of friend's raiding guild as one of their two tanks, me being a brewmaster monk and the other being a guardian druid. From the getgo here - we can see that there's a flaw; item distribution - neither of us will utilise plate gear which means it will either go to someone as offspec gear or be dusted.

But that's just how our scenario might have been looking, what I want to discuss here is that even though my monk has pretty good gear (average ilvl of 513 in tanking - we're 1/13 hc atm) I could not justify playing on it, because it would halter our progression. I switched to my protection paladin, and let me tell you why:

The gear issue, as noted above. No longer will we throw away strength-based tanking items & our DK will have competition for pieces with haste on them
The viability of a protection paladin compared to a brewmaster monk. It's quite ridiculous really, my monk has fairly good mobility and a little bit of raid utility (occasionally guard's people and two mediocre raid cooldowns, zen meditation and the short-range raidwall/redirect. But if you compare this to a protection paladin, it's ridiculous. For example, watch the video of Tortos 10 hc provided by Fatboss. What do we see here? Well, halfway through the video the tank is at the-/near the top of the damage. Not that uncommon, vengeance makes that scale for sure. But, he's also at the top of the healing. Now ponder that for a moment, is there any other tank with the same ability?

Now, I am not saying that brewmasters are unviable, but I will say that for 10-mans, they are quite a lot worse off than their plate-clad counterparts. Monks work well in 25-mans, perhaps because they have access to more raid-wide cooldowns or that the burden of each player bringing something incredible is smaller. I'm not sure, I don't play 25-mans any more so I will leave that out of this.

If you look at the top 10 or probably top 20 10-man guilds in the west, you'll see something in common; they are ALL playing with a protection paladin (I did not include or look at russian guilds) - some even have two. And why wouldn't you? Seal of Insight provides about half of a normal healer over a fight, at the cost of nothing. Hand of Protection/Divine Shield allows you to bypass so many mechanics that are of a great annoyance/strain on the raid. Great examples: The entire Heart of Fear instance is trivialised by Hand of Protection. In ToT? I haven't been there so long, but I could divine shield out of the debuff provided in Phase 3 Lei shen and you can remove the horridon tank debuff on Horridon, I guess you could even one-tank that fight if you wanted to.

And then there's aura mastery, or devotion aura as it's called now, you know for those times when there's a large amount of element based damage (quite often, I might add). But at the end of the day, the tank has to be sturdy, right? Monk is all right in many ways, but both classes are probably fairly similar in their sustained damage intake. But what happens when the boss has a big ol mega physical hit planned? The monk readies his guard, puts on finger on the purifying brew button and makes sure elusive brew is up. Maybe it misses, maybe it hits. Who knows? What does the paladin do? Simple, use 3 holy power on a shield of righteousness. I mean, why not have a short-time shield wall integrated into your rotation at all times, effectively allowing you to choose when you'll mitigate a large amount of physical damage?

I'm sorry if this became too long, I just feel like I had to write something about the subject because I don't see any discussions anywhere. I like my paladin, but at the end of the day I had more fun playing on my monk, but I cannot justify playing a subpar tank at the cost of progress, which I'm sure is fairly common in 10-man guilds. You have to squeeze in as much as possible into each player - I mean, why do you think Paragon ran with 3 druids at the start? The answer is simple, triple symbiosis and tranquilities.

Class stacking overall is still too rampart in 10-mans, but my focus lies on the tanking aspect.

What are we going to discuss in this thread; Are these claims correct? Do you agree and if so, do you have any proposed fixes?

Draztal

Community

#25 - April 17, 2013, 3:54 p.m.

The viability of a protection paladin compared to a brewmaster monk. It's quite ridiculous really, my monk has fairly good mobility and a little bit of raid utility (occasionally guard's people and two mediocre raid cooldowns, zen meditation and the short-range raidwall/redirect. But if you compare this to a protection paladin, it's ridiculous. For example, watch the video of Tortos 10 hc provided by Fatboss. What do we see here? Well, halfway through the video the tank is at the-/near the top of the damage. Not that uncommon, vengeance makes that scale for sure. But, he's also at the top of the healing. Now ponder that for a moment, is there any other tank with the same ability?

On Tortos specifically, any tank tanking him will probably be able to stay on the top of the meters. Even more so if they also DPS bats :)

On the other hand, while solo tanking those bosses might be helpful in some cases, trying to pull it off on Megaera (for example) will probably be nasty, especially if you have to tank frost + poison.

At the end of the day though, there's something that's more important to keep in mind...

16/04/2013 11:48Posted by Allana
I like my paladin, but at the end of the day I had more fun playing on my monk, but I cannot justify playing a subpar tank at the cost of progress, which I'm sure is fairly common in 10-man guilds. You have to squeeze in as much as possible into each player - I mean, why do you think Paragon ran with 3 druids at the start? The answer is simple, triple symbiosis and tranquilities.

If you have more fun with your monk, you should definitely go and play it. There're no tanks at this point that you could arguably say they're subpar. Especially if you do the fights the intended way (rather than trying to solo tank them). By doing that, not only will you help your raid team (because the day their prot paladin that solo tanks Tortos for them is gone, they'll have trouble) but you'll probably be happier with your experience in-game.

And also, don't take Paragon, Method, Blood Legion and other bleeding edge guilds as a mirror to look on and decide on how, what and why you should play a certain way.

These guilds are where they are among other reasons because of their skill, coordination and ability. However, and despite common belief, very often they're fighting Heroic bosses while undergeared which means they may need to come up with those strategies in order to overcome something they could have with more gear.

They're in a race for world first, so it's understandable they'd rather try to find another way than wait for that gear to come. You, however, on the other hand, don't have that much pressure. So there's definitely no harm in doing the things the proper way, and the more comfortable you feel with your character choice, the more fun the experience will be.

Draztal

Community

#65 - April 18, 2013, 12:57 p.m.

Thanks draztal for telling me that even you guys don't understand how imbalanced tank-classes are atm.

When I posted yesterday on this thread I did with the sole intent of telling the OP that if he'd rather tank with his monk, he can do it. There's no tank class that can't tank this content and plenty of guilds are progressing without using them. That much is true. And I feel it's always better to have fun over efficiency.

I apologize to those of you that were expecting to see a blue post addressing your concerns about paladins, I didn't realize how important it was for many of you participating on the thread. Unfortunately that's something I don't have an answer to.

Draztal

Community

#103 - May 15, 2013, 3:25 p.m.

"Nice necro!"
I know, I know, but I haven't managed to find a thread where where we could share the answer we got from the developers about Paladins in Throne of Thunder as you were discussing here, so apologies for rising this thread from the dead!

This is what they've told us: Paladins are quite useful but they feel cases like solo tanking Heroic Megaera (which was mentioned on this thread) has more to do with how encounter mechanics work than the way the class is designed. It's something the developers will work on to be more careful in the future.

Also, with patch 5.3, there'll be some adjustments to certain Paladin abilities, including a nerf to Shield of the Righteous and Glyph of the Battle Healer (which was meant for Retribution Paladins to begin with).