shaman tanking (A story)Follow

So despite beliefs otherwise, it looks like shamans can still tank.

(if you have a really good healer, at lower levels)


First some background: if you tl;dr, skip it.
Seriously though, I've been getting a little bored with endgame content. I do the ICC raids with my guild on weekends, but other than that, I'm kind of bored with grinding the same endgame dungeons.

So, looking for something else to do, I decided to start leveling an alt, something I really haven't done much of. I heard from people that the new LFG makes it fun. Oh boy does it! You can get groups for all sorts of mid-level dungeons, which is a great break from quests, and neat because a lot of these dungeons I only ever got to run once or twice back in the day leveling- you couldn't find parties for them come BC because everyone just skipped them.

So, as you can probably guess by my post here, my alt is a shaman, and good lord! Hulk smash! Come 40, when you finally get dual wield, then stormstrike, then lava lash, you just destroy things. Mobs become a fine red mist before you.

Well, I've been doing lots of dungeons. Basically I go out questing and put myself in the queue and do the dungeon when it comes up then back to questing. Well, i'm up to Zul'Ferak by now. We got a party which was me and another enhancement shaman, a paladin tank, druid healer, and a mage. It's obvious right away the paladin is new to tanking. That's ok, everyone's a newb sometime, and I'm much more leniant at mid-levels than endgame.

Basically she's running up to the mob group, swinging, and only bothers to consecrate about half-way through the fight. I think her best tanking tool was hammer of justice. What's annoying the party though is that she's going _slow_. Like fight a group, stand stand stand stand.

So basically me and the other enhancement shaman take things into our own hands and start pulling and just going full force through. And man did it work! We utterly destroyed things. The tank sort of stopped tanking, or even attacking, I think. Just sort of followed along as this other shaman and I blew up ZF. Battle on the steps, bosses, it didn't matter. Our damage mitigation technique was make the enemies dead quick.

The tank even left after we killed the 'end boss', but we went on to kill the hydra. We didn't even bother getting another tank, just 4-manned it with two shamans taking the damage. It was kind of awesome.
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So if you TL;DR, start reading here again.

This reminds me of two things.

1) Shamans are freaking awesome. I don't understand why they're the least played class. They mop the floor. I kill orange level mobs on my shaman about the same speed I killed yellow mobs leveling other classes.

2) I kind of laugh when people complain about higher level dungeons being too easy. Maybe they don't remember the managed chaos that was low level instances. One thing that's fun is that it really is a mana endurance marathon, like they're promising in cataclysm. It's not twitch healing where it's reactiontime, it's smart heals to keep your mana going. If a dps pulls aggro, he'll get hit, but it's not one or two shots kill, but it does add up to the healer needing to heal more. And you know what? It's tons of fun!

Edited, Dec 30th 2009 3:52pm by digitalcraft

25k ding post? Come on man, I wanna see that.

Did you have a 24k?

I just thought that 25 was a big one, but if you did a 24, then no, don't do a 25. XD

3k DPS from the "tank" and the DPS had to limit themselves to max 4k?

Meh, my Druid only does an average of 2.5k-2.8k in heroics, but he can hold aggro on 5k DPS easily. Assuming he wasn't in PvP gear, he was not crit immune and thus a bit harder to heal. Other than that, all he'd have to do would be to drop Healing Stream Totem and use Healing Wave or Chain Heal every 5 Maelstrom, right? And of course use Shamanistic Rage constantly.

When a tank survives a wipe at 40% on a boss in a heroic and solos the rest, now, that's skill.

Not only that, but "real" tank classes get threat bonuses. Righteous Fury, Defensive Stance, Frost Presence and Bear/Dire Bear form all come with innate threat modifiers. As a general rule, a tank doing 1k single target dps is producing 1.6-1.9k tps due to their threat modifiers. A dps doing 1k single target dps will be producing 700-1000 tps depending on class and chosen talents. Assuming the enhancement shaman had specced out of Spirit Weapons so they could mess around with tanking means that their 3k dps would allow for up to roughly 4k dps from the others in the group with threat reduction talents.

Lvling in AV the other day, there were 2 enh shaman who didn't want to wait for the tank at Bel, so me and another shaman said "gogo, we'll heal!" A mage pulled off of them at one point, but hit MI to let them keep the threat. It was neato. :) 4 shamans ftw!