So as a former healer (Druid), DPS (Hunter and Death Knight...I know), what should I expect leveling as a Warrior tank for WoW Classic?
I know how tanking works, though I've never really been able to do it during Vanilla's hayday or during WotLK to Cataclysm (I missed most of TBC) before I got bored and quit the game.
And also what is the actual status of the "sharding" technology they are using for it?
>level as a warrior tank
Do NOT under any circumstances level as prot. You can level as fury or arms and keep a 1h/shield in your bag to tank dungeons on the fly.
Shit will be slow, but it would be even slower as prot.
Leveling on your own when you aren't in dungeons will be very, very, very slow. Warriors are far and away the slowest levelers in Classic. You'll be eating after every pull, be constantly rage starved, and destroyed in PvP. And you won't be leveling as tank. You'll be specced fury, and equip a sword and board in dungeons.
However you will, if you have a good reputation, be in constant demand to tank dungeons. The second you log on you'll be inundated with requests to tank. You'll be able to dictate the rules, only joining the groups you want and even be able to reserve gear that others might want.
Don't worry about max level yet, you're 500 hours /played away from that.
It took me months to level up in Vanilla, but I was playing as a Druid and was honestly full on retarded until towards the end of Vanilla when I got the hang of the game.
Still had a guild mate call me out for not having enough Spirit in my gear (for obvious reasons). But I want to try something different for my one chance to actually relive those days properly. I only got as far as Blackwing Lair before TBC came out.
The bottom line is don't play warrior if you don't want to tank, aren't patient, and aren't prepared to deal with endless retards.
You shouldn't level as protection (which presumably is what you mean by "tank") because it's awful. Warriors are the weakest leveling class to begin with, but by gutting your damage even further, you actually end up taking MORE damage during the course of the fights. There's basically two leveling specs for warriors: arms and fury with 2-handed weapons, the difference primarily coming down to 2h fury having better damage but arms being more resilient to being fucked over by avoidance streaks (improved overpower) or multi-mob pulls (sweeping strikes). I find arms the preferable spec, ideally you get a really slow 2-handed and a swing timer, put hamstring on the mob and weave in and out of melee range to get a hit in. Done perfectly, this doesn't affect your damage but could halve the damage you take. Arms also has 5% parry, which is about as much as defenses as you get from prot anyhow.
Indeed, protection doesn't always get used as the tanking spec even in endgame. You're slightly more durable than fury tanks (just look at the talents though, they are as much of a not big deal as they look like) but fury does better threat. For 5-mans you might do while leveling being protection wouldn't even help you, just use a shield. That's all.
>The bottom line is don't play warrior if you don't want to tank
Warriors are the top dps class.
On the other hand, there won't be too many ferals (even though bears are the preferred tank for dungeons) and even fewer protadins, so warrior population is basically the tank population. You're basically going to use 3 or fewer tanks on vast majority of raid content so maybe not even half of warriors in the guild would end up consistently tanking in raids, but tanks are sorely undersupplied for dungeons.
This is only half the story, the other half is competing against every other dps warrior and rogue for the gear, it will be very time consuming
So Arms would be best for leveling up?
I will do more reading into it but I do really want to be a tank as I want to challenge myself and do something different from the previous iterations of my experience playing WoW. Playing a Tank would complete it imo.
Go fury and use a 2h until you get level 40 then you can go arms and get MS
Arms or 2h fury. I think arms is preferable, but some disagree. Leveling as protection on the other hand would be not much better than leveling as 0/0/0, tricking yourself by also using sword and board would make it worse.
Spirit on druids is mediocre, it's much more economical to have mp5
The only talent points you should be putting into prot are Defense. Everything else can wait until you start running "end-game" dungeons to collect your Dungeon Set.
The majority of Prot talent tree is utility and not actually tanking. All the important tanking stuff is near the start of the tree.
Hybrid Arms has always been the best overall spec for warriors in vanilla due to not having a single useless talent and stance-dancing being the most optimal way to play Warrior. Plus Mortal Strike helps against annoying self-healing/regenerating mobs. The only real restriction is needing a slow weapon so that MS doesn't hit like a noodle.
The only advantage of Fury is not having weapon restrictions once you unlock Bloodthirst. It, much like Prot Tree, has all its good stuff at the start and is bloated with overly situational abilities.
I never understood why Slam was a Fury talent, considering Slam benefits greatly from having the slowest biggest hitting 2h you can get a hold of. I guess its just variety for 2H Fury players.
True, but nobody wants to bring DPS warriors into dungeons, especially pre-60
And levelling/getting ready for raiding is much easier if you can get dungeon groups basically whenever you want
How fast is leveling as pally?
Slower than priest, faster than warrior
Pallies don't have downtime (supposing you use your abilities sparingly, mostly for healing and keeping seals up) and have good ability to solo stuff without dying but have poor DPS. In terms of raw speed, I find them the second slowest, just above warriors. Your mileage may wary on if you actually like the leveling experience.
Enrage is pretty big for starters, although I guess that might be partially private server /sitting tactics. You could say fury has more filler talents but the good ones are better. Honestly, I'm not well-calibrated on how good 2h fury is actually supposed to be. Like I said, I wasn't an adherent in the first place, but on the other hand, some found it preferable even in retail (they could be just wrong of course). Slamming with the talent (and swing timer) is also ought to be good damage, although I don't know whether you'll actually have the rage to use it consistently with leveling gear.
Why do retailfags think you need to specd into prot/healing to tank/heal?
If the game was designed to be played in some specific way, that's what you might well expect in general. Of course, WoW wasn't designed this way and Blizzard just put up some stuff and checked out what sticks, but it's an entirely reasonable assumption (ie. putting >50% probability on "needing protection spec to tank").
It's also bizarre how shit many of the talents are, in ways that you couldn't readily intuit. 10 defense is good, right? If I recall correctly, it's .4% miss/dodge/parry/crit reduction/(block) so you could say it's 1.6% avoidance. What about shield block? The talent looks like you're getting a big increase in uptime and that's true, but blocks in vanilla are basically worthless for anything but pushing crushing blows off combat table. 6s for shield wall duration? Given that at that point you can see the half hour cooldown, it's clear it's not an overwhelmingly great talent, but at that point you don't know there aren't really any situations where it's particularly needed either. Ditto for 10% armor.
In other words, you might reasonably look at the talents and think they look good, to the point that there's a real difference between tanking in prot and not, but that's just not the case.
dont worry. for the first 59 levels you literally just press tab and spam sunder armor.