Utalizing your tanks:

Utalizing your tanks:

One aspect that many raid leaders miss, is the sucessful management of tanks. If you believe “warriors tank the boss, paladins tank the trash, and druids are only for when your warrior has to take a day off”, you’re doing your raid and your tanks a disservice. Burning Crusade really brought forward different capibilities for each tank and allowed them to shine in different ways. The following is a very basic guide of which tanks can optimally tank each kind of boss. This guide assumes each tank is at least in T4 gear, around the same gear level, and the same capibilities behind the keyboard. You should not worry about this too much for Karazhan.

warrior

Warriors are the best at tanking spell casters due to their ability to spell reflect, and haveing the highest amount of spell damage resistance between all the tanks. They are also great if there is a single point in the fight where you need a big defensive cooldown, or need to stance dance to avoid a fear. Warriors are not great at tanking bosses that have high attack speeds, where they cannot guarentee shield block uptime and are likely to get crushed.

paladin

Paladins are best at tanking fights where there are a lot of adds. They are also excellent tanks at fighting bosses with fast attack speeds, like prince Malchezaar at the end of Karazhan. Finally, remember that paladins can cheese many mechanics with a bubble, that could otherwise wipe a tank. Paladins are not great at tanking fights that require a lot of movement, or fights that silence the tanks.

druid (bear)

Druids are best at tanking fights where there is an unavoidable crushing attack due to their high armor and health pool values, or bosses where there are polymorphing effects (like in Grull’s Lair). Druid tanks in general tend to take spikier damage, as they are crushable and harder for your healers to heal.

Raid Makeup

Hardcore Raiding

In a position where you can guarentee all your tanks show up every week, you’ll want:

  • 1 prot warrior
  • 1 prot paladin
  • 2 feral druids

This gives you the opportunity to have up to 4 tanks when you need it, and down to 2 when you don’t. This is a traditional setup, and there are tons of guides out there that follow this setup.

Casual Raiding

In a more casual guild where you are more likely to have abstances (you should always encourage people to show), I recommend the following setup:

  • 1 prot warrior
  • 2 prot paladins (1 dedicated, 1 flex)
  • 1 feral druid

This gives you the flexability if a tank is unable to attend to clear the content as usual. The reasoning behind 2 prot paladins, is that a lot of the strategies for raid fights (especially T5) rely on a paladin’s AoE capibilities. By having 2 in your raid, you don’t have to worry about changing strategies if one misses a day. You should specify one as a “boss” tank and one as an “AoE” tank. While I have them listed as a tank here, you should be funneling as much ret & holy gear as you can without gimping the rest of the paladins to that AoE paladin, as he should be willing to flex to whatever is needed.

Handling Absences

By following the casual raiding setup above, you can dance your tanks into different positions as needed.

If a warrior misses a raid night, you move your main prot paladin into his slot, leaving the other to manage the AoE duties, and shifting your bear tank to support the paladin (or tank bosses the paladin can’t).

If your main paladin misses a raid night, shift your bear tank into supporting the warrior

If your AoE paladin misses a raid night, shift your bear tank to support the warrior, and your main paladin to AoE duties

If your bear tank misses a raid night… He was extra anyway, have your ret paladin or arms warrior throw on a shield.

Closing Thoughts

Finally, if you have just a normal boss fight, any properly geared tank will do the job, however it is optimal to use either your paladin or warrior as your druid can easily out dps both of them combined. In a situation where you need to use 3+ tanks, it’s generally better to put the bear on the first target to kill, as they generate the most threat and that allows them to get into cat form quicker to contribute DPS to the rest of the fight.