by Arlos » Mon Feb 05, 2007 3:05 pm
Bear Tanks will always be at a disadvantage so long as they have no mechanism for avoiding Crushing Blows, like warriors & paladins can with shield blocking. Also, there's a distinct lack of +defense items available to leather wearers as compared to plate wearers.
One area where Warriors will ALWAYS be necessary is for mobs where the use of Shield Wall is essential. Doomwalker, for example, who enrages at 25%, does untankable levels of damage, plus doing an unresistable and undispellable/uncureable 4-tick large AOE dot that does 4000hp/tick. ONLY a warrior with an active shield wall will be able to survive that level of incoming DPS.
That said, there are cases where druid tanks do well, and other cases where pally tanks can shine. For example, I am FAR better at holding aggro on a large group of mobs at once than either a warrior or a druid. I can literally hold 8-10 mobs at once while mages are going full-out AOEing, and never lose aggro onto the mages. I've had a warlock in my group with near 1000 +damage gear deliberately TRY to pull aggro off of me, stacking 4 seeds of corruption and then hellfiring on top of it, and he couldn't do it.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with most of the changes they've made to hybrids. Before the expansion, we were all strictly relegated to healbot roles, period. Druids are the best-done example of this, really. Moonkin can do good spell DPS, and their group buff is an EXCELLENT damage increaser for other casters. As resto, they are fully competant main healers. They lack fade, but there are trinkets you can get that mimic the effect of fade anyway. As feral, they become that true "jack of all trades, master of none" role, able to tank OK, do decent DPS, etc.
For paladins, we could still use some diversity, as we've really only got 2 roles: Healbot and Tank. Even a fully retribution pally won't touch even a arms warrior's DPS, unless they have THE best gear in the game and completely abandon all pretense of even being a paladin. I knew one pally like that pre-xpac, with dark edge of insanity, etc. who could sometimes crack the top-10 DPS list, but had like 1500 mana, wore leather and chain for the atk power & crit benefits, etc. Right now, the +% melee crit from the enhanced judgement of crusader means having 1 retribution pally along is useful, but no more than that.
-Arlos