What Might Have Been

I've often wondered what life would have been like if Paladins had been better tanks in the Pre-BC world.

I got a little bit of a chance to find out when I went to Molten Core on Saturday night. Our SSC raid was called because we lacked enough people.

Initially there were only about 4 or 5 of us but eventually we grew to 15.

I had done MC back in the day, but it was a 40 man raid back then. I was assigned a Warrior to heal and basically had to keep cleansing everyone constantly. Luckily, there was a mod called Decursive back then that figured out who needed to be cleansed and cast the spell for you. Just bind your Decursive to a button and spam away.

What I discovered was that MC would have been very hard on Paladin tanks, but with a couple of places where we would have really helped. First of all, there is a ton of magic damage flying around from nearly every mob. The Crushing Blow mechanic would have had to have been removed from most of the bosses for Paladins to be able to tank them.

In the trash pulls one of the mobs has a long silence that must be cleansed. This shut down my ability to produce threat. There were also mobs that dropped threat or had some odd aggro dynamic. The long cooldown on my taunt was not appreciated.

There were a couple of AoE trans pulls with a whole bunch of little dragonkins. I gathered up two groups and went to town. That was fun! The screenshot should have shown more but their bodies despawn rather quickly.

First up was Lucifron. The trash leading up to her would have been a dream spot for a Tankadin. You have 5 or 6 Core Hounds and they all have to die at the same time. AoE situation, AoE tank.

The only annoying thing about Lucifron was his curse that makes your abilities cost double. This could have actually played to the Paladins favor. Rage based tanks have a fixed resource, 100 rage. Mana based tanks can change the size of the resource pool. So if you have an ability that cost 10 Rage, against Luci it will cost 20. That means going from costing 10% of your resources to costing 20%. The equivalent example for a Paladin would be an ability that costs 500 mana, about 10% of a Tankadins mana pool. Now that ability costs 1000 mana or 20% of the pool, but the Paladin can now change his gear to have a 6000 mana pool instead of 5000. The ability cost is still doubled from 500 to 1000 mana but now it only takes 16% of the resource bar instead of 20%.

Next up was Magmadar. He possesses a spammable fear. With the changes to how fear works, this would be less of a problem but Paladins still find themselves disadvantaged in fear fights to stance dancing Warriors.

Next up was Gehennas. Gehennas would have been another fight that favored a Warrior as most of his damage is magical and he is casting about 50% of time and doesn't melee much.

Finally, we tried Garr. Garr is probably the boss that just screams "Paladins aren't meant to tank me". He has an aura that dispels your buffs. Bye bye Righteous Fury, bye bye Seal of Righteousness, bye bye Blessing of Kings.

The best part of the evening was that I got nearly all the Firey Cores and Lava Cores I need to craft a Nightfall Axe. Now if I can just find a crafter on AoS that can make one.