Shaman tank balance

[Verox]

As a veteran player with two decades of high-level main tank experience, I am writing to provide constructive feedback regarding the current state of the Shaman tank archetype. I have main tanked for my guilds in turtle on both paladin, warrior and shaman. I tanked as a high parse druid in Classic. We farmed kara40 in turtle with me as one of the main tanks, a shaman tank.
While the specialization is fundamentally viable and highly engaging, as demonstrated by successfully tanking Kara40, specific mechanical friction points prevent it from reaching its full potential. Right now I would say a shaman tank is the weakest of all the tanks in most areas. But not in all areas. They are a jack-of-all-traits tank with high opening threat.
Below is a structured breakdown of my core issues, categorized by severity.

Major Issue
* Total Lack of Gear Progression: There is no cohesive itemization path across the game's tiers for a mail-wearing tank. Aside from Tier 2.5, the specialization is entirely neglected in loot tables. This kills the joy of progressing and leaves the shaman tank with very few options. There is a severe, absolute lack of tank-oriented mail gear for specific slots, most notably belts and wrists, forcing reliance on suboptimal stats. There are trinkets, rings, etc., but no real tank totem-item untill kara40. Naxx is one of the worst places as a shaman tank to get gear.

Moderate Issues
* The Bulwark Design Flaw: The mechanical shift with the Bulwark change to rockbiter was an unwelcome change; while it can be managed and overcome with effort, it remains poorly optimized. Relying on high avoidance alongside a mediocre Armor and Health pool creates dangerous volatility. During pull openings, before Bulwark stacks can be generated, a single crushing blow or critical strike can instantly deplete most of the Shaman's health, causing immense panic for healers. I have listed 3 ways to finetune the bulwark, but only one of them is enough to ”fix” the inconsistency. Ither one is fine.
* Suggested Tier 1 Talent Redesign, change the "Noob-Trap": The current Tier 1 tank talent that is providing 5% block and increased block rate functions as a "noob-trap" in modern PvE design. 5 useless points, unless you can reach crush reduction. I do not propose a rollback of Bulwark, but rather a buff to this Tier 1 talent: it should additionally grant 15% extra block chance when Rockbiter Weapon is active. This targeted change ensures high utility in high end PvE to reach crit/crush immunity, while remaining completely negligible in PvP. Having a 100% crit/crush immunity in high end gear would be a unique abilitie for the shaman. I reached it in turtle, but at a high stat cost and access to full BiS gear.
* Rockbiter parry/dodge reduction: By leting rockbiter ignore 15% Dodge and parry from the target, we could give the bulwark a more consistent uptime. Right now it generates the least bulwark where we need it the most - on a boss. Parry, Dodge and glancing blow is a heavy penalty for any tank to generate bulwark stacks. The bulwark duration should also be increased slightly.
* Earth Shock bulwark generation: Another way to fix the bulwark would be to include earth shock damage. No sane PvP player uses a potential spell-interrupt abilitie to take 15% less damage anyway.

Minor Issues
* Absence of Active Defensive Cooldowns: The toolkit lacks a dedicated, hard defensive cooldown to mitigate predictable spike damage or recovery phases. Having a cooldown to use makes tanking more fun and engaging. Most DPS have a defensive cooldown to use. Shaman tanks don’t, unless they choose tauren. To solve this cooldown deficit, I propose making Spirit Link a baseline talent available to all Shamans at level 30. This would provide a much-needed active cooldown that scales perfectly for both the tank and healer playstyles without cluttering the specialization spec trees.

- Verox the Shaman tank

[Joyson]

unfortunately shamans were never supposed to be able to tank. just because they can wear a shield and earth shock generates high threat doesnt mean they should actuall consider tanking. i think the shield thing is just flavor, not an actual signal to go tank

[Pizzazz69]

unfortunately shamans were never supposed to be able to tank. just because they can wear a shield and earth shock generates high threat doesnt mean they should actuall consider tanking. i think the shield thing is just flavor, not an actual signal to go tank

Maybe check out the rebalancing efforts that Turtle (& Octo) has put into the Shaman class.

They can't just "wear a shield and earth shock generates high threat". They have a single target taunt, group taunt, several ways to mitigate damage, and a multitude of talents that increase threat generation and further buff damage mitigation/absorption. That's clearly tank design. They simply fall short on some fronts (as Verox pointed out) but are obviously very capable of tanking (as Verox also pointed out).

I also don't see how restricting access to tanks is healthy for the game. Player agency is key. WoW always had chronic tank sparsity. More tank options is a good way to combat that.

To the original post:

I think tying Bulwark to Earth Shock is a great idea. Aside from the threat generation, it often is a suboptimal shock choice unless you're specifically fighting a spellcaster. This would really nail down its "tank shock" identity.

I also like the idea of making Spirit Link a baseline ability. You correctly pointed out that shamans in general lack a defensive cooldown. This would fix that in a fun way, and it's a unique ability. The only "issue" I see is that it's strictly tied to group play and unusable in solo scenarios.

It also frees up that final slot in the Resto tree. Resto shamans could really use fun new ability. Not that they're bad, they're just kinda boring compared to other healers imo. A water-themed heal could be cool, like a healing "pool" as a localized HoT zone or something.

[Defiant]

Major Issue
* Total Lack of Gear Progression:

I hear this complaint a lot and it's generally from Shaman Tanks that just wear full mitigation gear at all times. That's not really how you should be gearing in my opinion. Looking at *most* Tank classes, they all wear a mixture of mitigation and threat gear, and it should be the same for Shamans. I actually really liked how so much of our Tank stats were isolated to a 5pc set. It allowed us a lot of flexibility in swapping between various sets of gear for different situations. For example the Shaman Tank in my guild would solo tank one side of Twin Emps. He was able to put together enough Physical Mitigation and Shadow Resistance to make it work consistently. The downside being that he would occasionally have threat issues there, but not needing to have another Warlock swap over to Tanking gave the raid composition more flexibility and if the DPS need to watch their threat for one fight because of that it's a fair trade in my eyes.

You mention a lack of a Tanking belt. Therazanes Link is an excellent option for a Tanking belt. 24 Stamina is pretty solid. 1% Crit / AS is really strong. T2/T3 Bracers with +5 Defense isn't horrible, but yeah I'd agree the Bracer slot is one of the weaker slots-- so just go all in on a threat piece for that slot instead. We don't require every slot to be mitigation to be prepared even for the fights that require "full mitigation". Our Shaman Tank for example routinely tanked Hateful Strikes on Patchwerk, and was more than capable of tanking Saph.

I get that there are less raw mitigation pieces for us than other Tank classes, but raw mitigation gear isn't really what you should be wearing most of the time anyways. It's harder for us to reach 440 defense, sure, but you also don't need 440 defense as a Shaman. We have other defensive layers and for example magic mitigation that other classes don't have.

I didn't tank full time but I did have a proper Tank set for my Shaman, I was a healer main, and one of my main tanks was a Shaman. I never felt stressed healing him tbh. I honestly felt more stressed healing most of the Bear Tanks I ran into than Shaman Tanks. Individual skill expression obviously factors in here though, for sure. I would also acknowledge that Shaman Tanking is probably *harder* or takes more effort at least than say a Paladin Tank.

All of that said I do feel like Shaman Tanks could maybe use a slight buff, I would in general prefer Paladin Tanks, but I would also prefer Paladin Tanks over the other Tank classes as well-- although to be clear you do want a mixture. You can't just have pure Paladin Tanks for all your Tank roles. And I'm still not sure if that's a "Shamans need a buff" as much as "Paladins are overtuned".

But yes, make Spirit Link base line and give Resto Shamans Riptide lmao.

[Joyson]

why dont they just make earth shield or whatever give +10% armor or something. "10%" can be any number btw, whatever enables these shamans to tank

[Sagabal]

The bulwark change was seriously very silly. I get wanting to differentiate Shaman tanks some more but needing them to land multiple hits before being able to achieve a sustainable damage reduction just doesn't make sense. The first proposal, to triple (quadruple? unclear if this is on top of the +5% from taking the talent base) the talent's block chance while rockbiter is active would be a great change, I'd like to see that tested. Maybe a mix of a weaker version of that with the third suggestion could be more elegant.

Ultimately the lack of gearing upgrades between Kara 10 and Kara 40 outside of the alternate 2.5 set hurts a lot, but bulwark is what caused a lot of shammy tanks I saw to just stop trying the build.

[Sagabal]

why dont they just make earth shield or whatever give +10% armor or something. "10%" can be any number btw, whatever enables these shamans to tank

Before the change to elemental weapons that introduced Bulwark, the effect of rockbiter weapon with that talent was "Rockbiter: Reduces your damage taken by 4/7/10%." It was reworked into Bulwark in the same patch that removed the Funny Molten Blast split tree fire build.

[Verox]

Defiant. You don’t main tank with just one gear set. You wear the gear needed for the next pull. You don’t use 8 hit in a dungeon or use aoe tank gear on Parchwerk. You equip the aoe tank gear to tank the ravens in kara40 and you equip the onyxiascale cloak on some bosses in BWL. As a main tank you have preset gearsets keybound and ready and you swap between those gear sets in a tenth of a second with those keybounds. Every raid you evaluere the gear you use for the boss you tank. Did you have enough threat? Do I need more stamina? And so on. But to do that you need the gear to swap between. Having the gear to swap between and progressing your gear also makes the game more fun. But right now I have to wait 1 year for aq40 to open to even get a tank set, since there is no real pre t2.5 option besides some creative pieces here and there.

Oh, and the Earth shield is not a good option for a shaman tank. The healing is applied before you take the damage, causing overhealing in a dungeon or a raid. Quite good when soloing big stuff tho.


- Verox the shaman tank

[Reiker]

unfortunately shamans were never supposed to be able to tank. just because they can wear a shield and earth shock generates high threat doesnt mean they should actuall consider tanking. i think the shield thing is just flavor, not an actual signal to go tank

This is both wrong and irrelevant.

Wrong because it's clear that tanking was part of the Shaman design at some point in development since they have threat abilities.

Irrelevant because the whole point of Turtle / Octowow is fleshing out the vanilla specs further. You could also say that Paladins weren't "meant" to tank but the fact that they can is why people play this server.

[Duraluminium]

Shamans are too OP in PVP on lvl 60 atm.
They are OP to the point that there are 8 of 12 players on AB playing as shamans (on the PVP server).
They just take those tank talents to become very tanky. They frostshock you to reach you and kill very fast, almost no way to escape. They need to use like 4 buttons for PVP.
Shamans need to become less tanky asap.