I really don't know about tanks in my guild. But I have noticed a sharp decline in warriors tanking for instances or group quests. Seems everytime I go looking for a tank, I find a druid. Most of the warriors I find aren't specced for tanking and usually refuse to tank because of that. Not that I am complaining, having the druids in instances has been a breeze. After a dificult fight its nice when the druid shifts out of bear form and assists in healing the group so e can move on from boss fights much faster.

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I got so frustrated with my warrior that I left her in thrallmar, where she is still chilling in her full tbc epic gear (probably having a big party with Nazgar and boozing it up...but i digress).

Warrs arent much fun to play these days. My guild's warrs hate leveling. When they are specced for dps, they can't hold aggro for the life of them and when they are specced prot, solo leveling and farming is hell. In pvp, they get owned by classes that used to be ezmode for them. All in all, not much entertainment to be had as a warr.

We're lucky in that we have a few reliable warrs who stuck it out to 70...I can see where some guilds could have trouble though.

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pre-tbc epic gear rather

doh

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Protection tanks are broken. I don't blame them for re-speccing or rolling another toon.

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hehe on venture co (US alliance) we seem to have that problem. luckily so far my bestest buddy is a warrior and he tanks in instances and DPS's when questing. I'm a healer specced druid so its an awesome combo. The guild I'm in will be heavily relying on both of us.


Mabye warriors dont like tanking cause its expensive. You cant just go by with gear in the 30s when your lvl 55. (haha yes i do that). My buddy upgrades at least 2 pieces of gear each lvl. Hes constantly broke because he needs to buy the new piece of armor that boosts his armor 200 here 400 there. Then the extra stats. I know of some non warrior tanks that dont do that and you notice a big difference bettween my buddy and them.

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Major shortage of tanks, yes. Minor, sometimes shortage of healers.

I think the biggest reason is straight numbers. In a 40 man raid, we needed usually around 5 tanks, so guilds were built around this number. Take those same 40 people, split them up in to 5 man groups and send them off to run 5 mans, you need 8 tanks. But there were only 5.

On my druid, I went from resto to feral to level up in BC. The plan had been to group and instance my way as a healer, but couldn't get groups often enough, thus the feral approach for viable soloing. I have been tanking 2-3 or more instances every night since going feral. Nevermind that my tank gear isnt all that great, people just want a tank. Often when I log on, 2 or tells come within minutes for groups.

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Being the warrior class leader, and MT, for my alliance guild on Skullcrusher I have certainly always seen a shortage of protection-spec warriors. Specing protection is not desirable for many warriors, especially those that enjoy PvP, because it's really limiting.

Getting a warrior to spec protection can be like pulling teeth and while we are a raiding guild we do not require our members to spec any particular way. Because of this I don't make a habit of making my warriors play their classes in a way that they do not want to, they are the ones paying their subscription fees, not me.

That being said some times someone has to bit the respec bullet and step up to the plate because I can't be there every single night.

As for the writer's abundance of priests, I wish we had that problem.

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I just don't have fun playing a warr alone. Maybe you guys should go run around with your tanks to help them level faster. Man is it annoying to sit and hack away at a mob as a war.

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I was full-protection going into TBC after MTing in UBRS and OTing ZG and AQ20. Post-2.0, when the damage regulation nerf happened, I noticed that, even pre-TBC, my regular technique no longer did the same job at holding aggro that it used to. I had to start asking the hunters to turn off all their pet's aggro abilities, and even then I still had a hard time. This used to not be a problem, and I never really did that much damage to begin with using my Fiery Retributer.

I think that Blizz needs to show prot warriors a little love and encourage their growth by giving Devastate a damage boost. All things considered equal, Devastate does considerably less damage than Shield Slam or Heroic Strike, but still supposedly generates more aggro.

Make Devastate a Mortal Strike junior; no debuff, just instant-attack goodness on par with the damage done by Heroic Strike. I mean come on, Blizz, it's a freakin 41 point ability.

Really...

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We don't have a shortage of protection spec tanks in our guild. In fact, we have too many in my opinion. The number we have is fine for while the guild is concentrating on the 5 man instances (we have at least 4 or 5 prot spec tanks), but once we start raiding places like Karazahn there will be a big problem. A 10 man instance...where only one or two of the 5 prot spec tanks that WANT to go can be in the raid.... We are quickly going to get into a situation of "haves" and "have nots" where the prot spec warriors who get into the first several runs are going to out gear the other several prot. tanks...the rich get richer...

With regard to leveling, I leveled very quickly as a fury Dual Wield warrior. I loved that build, but it became OBVIOUS to me that in the harder 5 man instances (arcatraz for example) that I needed to be protection spec to MT. I COULD MT as fury, but the amount of healing needed to keep me up was prohibitive. We found that we had to bring 2 healers to keep me up...and in our guild...

...we have a severe shortage of lvl 70 healers. we have only 2 lvl 70 priests...several of our druids have gone feral, and only one shaman who is resto...

About half the time we have 4 people in a group looking for a healer for an instance. This problem has only gotten worse because the several lvl 70 healers we DO have are overused to the point where they are tired of running the same instances to get everyone keyed to heroic or Karazahn. They've started doing Karazahn runs with other guilds...making them unavailable for OUR runs.

Argh. Where are all the Priests and resto Druids when you need them!

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pre-BC I was one of our guilds MT's. There was 2 of us who the entire guild counted on most of the time and I was one of them.

Now with BC I have not done a single new instance and I'm only lvl 64. Almost 65. Lvling slowly because of real life things. Plus since I use to do a lot of raiding I'd rather just enjoy the quests and than pound out 5 mans over and over because I'm a good tank who knows my shit.

I have switched from 41 prot to Arms+Fury to lvling.

The only thing I find that sucks is not much non-instance blue gear and weapons, limited selection of 2H'ers ,and even dual-weilding is kinda meh now.

When I was prot I use to dual-weild Eskhandar's Right Claw and The Lobotomizer with dual crusader for DPS/farming.

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@9 The reason devastate brings more aggro is cause your supposed to have a full stack of sunders on the target... devastate alone is pretty much garbage....

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@12.

I know. Even with a full stack, Devastate is less devastating when compared to a regular old Shield Slam or Heroic Strike.

Basically, I'm looking for Devastate to be somewhat viable as a soloing skill for Prot tanks who don't want to respec again and again, like me.

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One of your tanks can't afford to get a new game card? What are you in a guild filled with 12 year olds?

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I am a lvl 70 Prot warrior and i leveled entirely with prot spec. I play on a Quel thalas an european server and i got to 70 within a week and and a half. I did have 2 weeks holiday so i spent a lot of time playing wow on my holiday lol. I did not find it hard to lvl being a prot spec and i did get a lot of good loot for tanking on quests.

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We've definately noticed this trend as well. Pre-BC we would have about 8 warriors with 4-5 tanks in rotation for raiding. Post BC we dropped to about 3 warriors, 2 tanks due to server transfers, new guilds starting, quitting etc...

But I must add that the other tankable classes have really picked up the slack. Having a group of Shadow Priest, Oomkin, Pally Tank, Mage, and Holy Priest made for fun and easy instance runs. We still love our warriors, we just dont have to sit around with our thumbs up our nether regions waiting for one to log.

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I've commented on this so many times in so many places it's become tedious for me. So I'll keep it short.

The expense is part of the issue, yes. Also, the necessity of carrying two sets of gear around everywhere you go (which is why I laugh at druids bitching about it) and the fact that, unless you respec after every run, you'll be gimped in one of the only two things you can do as a warrior. If you're an Arms or Fury warrior, you're not even remotely as good a tank anymore (before the 2.0 patch, Arms and Fury warriors could tank anything in the game, but rage normalization helped put an end to that) and if you're full prot, you can forget questing and grinding solo outside of an instance. A feral druid doesn't have to respec to DPS, a warrior does.

My current guild is small, so I don't have to worry about raid tanking anymore. My level 70 human warrior is full prot, and he's basically sitting on his ass doing nothing while I level my Shaman and Hunter. Let druids tank everything. Let them experience the fun of MTing in raids. Let them be blamed for every wipe and have to deal with PuG's that won't wait five seconds for aggro to be established.

Druids and Pallies can do everything a warrior can, and can heal themselves and others. Warriors have gained no utility to compensate for this. So why should I tank?

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I was the main Tank for two guilds before BC now I switched to DPS build to level to 70. I still tank for most of the elite quests,I must say much better then our "tanking" druid. I don't know maybe he doesn't know how to play but the priests hate him tanking. Anyway, for a protec spec warrior the lvling grind can be slow. Way to slow for me and I'm really liking the arms 2Hand DPS I can deal, I may not switch back soon....

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I should have added that I was full prot up to BC but changed to Arms for the grind to 70. Man...I love being 2h Arms, it makes questing so much easier.

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@18 that druid sounds like he doesn't know how to play his class. We have one druid in our guild that has made his WoW career out of being an offtank (with hopes of being a MT). He's good.

The only thing I don't like is being full protection and not being able to tank as well as him in some cases. Nevermind the fact, that when the instance is over he's not gimped for solo questing like I am.

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