Burning Crusade Classic Tank and Healer Rankings: PvE Tier List for Phase 1 of TBCC

TBC Posted 2021/05/18 at 1:25 PM by perculia

Disclaimers About These Tier Lists

S: Valuable on every encounter, bringing strong throughput, exceptional survivability and universal utility.

A: Excels in most situations, but have some weaknesses on one or two encounters with your throughput, survivability or utility.

B: Solid choices, which may have a niche on some encounters but lack the throughput, survivability, and/or utility of stronger classes.

C: Viable, but without strong throughput, survivability or utility.

D: Suffers from several weaknesses and are only prioritized when there aren't better options available.

F: Generally considered unviable.

Tank Tier List for Phase 1 of Burning Crusade Classic

Ranking

Spec

Writer Comments

Protection Warrior

Comments by TheKrugLife

Feral Druid

Comments by NerdEgghead

Protection Paladin

Comments by Askalon

Tank Rankings and Explanations for Phase 1 of Burning Crusade ClassicS Tier Specs

Overall Rating: S

The Protection Warrior is no longer the only viable tank option in The Burning Crusade but, especially when it comes to the main tank position, it still outshines both Druid and Paladin and remains on the tanking throne. Warrior tanks will never be labeled as "situational" because the simple truth of the game is that, Warriors have the most complete tanking kit for overall tanking and they even excel and stand out in their own unique tanking categories. Threat, mitigation, utility, and excellent gear scaling all come together to make the Protection Warrior an S-tier tank.

One thing that truly separates Warrior's from the rest is their access to such powerful tanking cooldowns like Shield Wall and Last Stand that can be utilized to smooth out damage intake or simply be used as panic buttons to stay alive. Even beyond these larger active mitigation cooldowns, Warriors also have access to Shield Block which allows them to have some form of active mitigation (in the form of block) active at pretty much all times. On the topic of blocking, Warriors gain a massive benefit from the stat that really isn't matched in any of the alternative tank classes which once again sets them on such a high tier, Shield Slam increases in damage (and threat generation) with the more block value you have and items like Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600 pair extremely well with the Warrior.

One major improvement that Warriors received with burning crusade was a quality of life change to Thunder Clap which can now be used in defensive stance as opposed to being limited purely to battle stance. While we won't see the AoE threat capabilities that are present in modern WoW, we start to see the winds change in that direction with the release of TBC, you now have more options to maintain threat on several mobs. There's even a new shield that you can get from reputation in the form of Petrified Lichen Guard that'll help you keep aggro in AoE situations.A Tier Specs

Overall Rating: A

Bears are exceptional tanks throughout the entirety of TBC. They have the highest effective health pool (EHP) of all three tanking specs due to amplified armor values on all feral gear and the amazing armor scaling from Dire Bear Form and Thick Hide, allowing bears to soak large damage spikes from bosses with ease. Bears also pack a ton of avoidance from Dodge due a generous Agility-to-Dodge ratio and an abundance of Agility on leather. Finally (and perhaps most importantly for the Classic meta), feral tanks can generate the most threat per second (TPS) and damage per second (DPS) of the three tank specs by a significant margin. The DPS advantage of feral tanks is especially large when not actively tanking, as cats and bears use the exact same talent build and also share a lot of gear, making ferals excellent off-tanks in raids which use protection warrior tanks.

In Phase 1 specifically, a bear in BiS mitigation gear packs over 19,000 health, 74% armor mitigation (almost capped), and 58% avoidance when fully raid buffed, while being immune to critical strikes via a combination of Defense and Resilience. By swapping to more threat-skewed gear (using pieces that ferals will already have for DPS) and giving up uncrittability, the TPS of a Phase 1 bear can be increased from ~1250 to ~1550, enough to hold threat against competitive warlocks and fury warriors, while still maintaining 66% armor mitigation and 53% avoidance. Note that gearing for crit immunity is particularly easy for ferals in Phase 1 without making too many threat or mitigation sacrifices, as the level 70 epic PvP offset contains several high value tanking pieces with loads of Resilience, and the Survival of the Fittest talent significantly reduces the amount of Defense/Resilience needed for uncrittability compared to warriors or paladins.

The primary disadvantages of feral tanks are the lack of strong AOE threat generation (similar to warriors), the absence of defensive cooldowns, no protection against crushing blows, and the inability to block with a shield (which is important on a few key encounters in later phases such as Kael'thas and Illidan). However, none of these disadvantages are game breaking: Swipe now scales with attack power in TBC, so holding multiple targets as a bear is a lot more viable than in vanilla for a skilled tank despite not matching the capabilities of a paladin. Similarly, despite no innate defensive cooldowns, the sky-high passive avoidance of feral tanks allows on-use avoidance trinkets such as Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch and Badge of Tenacity to function essentially as strong defensive CDs. In fact, when wearing Agility gear, bears can become completely immune to physical hits when avoidance trinkets are activated, providing buffer against big damage spikes or boss mechanics. Crushing blows are also not a significant concern, as the massive health and armor levels achieved by bears are tuned around the fact that damage intake will be spikier than for warriors or paladins.

Given the strengths mentioned above, the reason for an "A" rather than "S" rating in Phase 1 is due to the significant gear advantage that protection warriors have relative to bears in early TBC progression. Warrior Tier 3 gear is on par with level 70 dungeon gear and more than good enough to take straight into Karazhan and 25-man raids. In contrast, feral gear from vanilla is a far cry from TBC raid gear, as Blizzard did not figure out how to properly itemize for ferals until TBC. As a result, bears will be a lot squishier than warriors in the first few weeks of TBC raiding prior to picking up Tier 4 gear, but should still have no issues tanking Karazhan right at 70. For initial Gruul and Magtheridon kills, however, a warrior tank can be more beneficial as the defensive toolkit of a warrior can compensate for being undergeared. By the end of Phase 1, bears are perfectly competitive with warriors as main tanks for all raid content, and are in fact preferred over warriors in threat sensitive scenarios. In later phases, bears will far surpass the other tanking specs in TPS, as prot warrior threat scales poorly with gear unlike ferals, and bears also end up outclassing the other tanks for damage mitigation due to their absurd avoidance scaling with Black Temple and Sunwell gear.

Overall Rating: A

For Phase 1 of TBC, Protection Paladins will excel the most compared to other tank classes when tanking dungeons and heroics, and be very viable for raid tanking. Most, if not all of the optimal raid compositions recommend having a Protection Paladin in their tank roster due to their massive AoE threat, buff utility, and survivability.

THREAT:
The threat generation of Protection Paladins is primarily dependent upon their Holy damage dealt due to Righteous Fury with the talent Improved Righteous Fury nearly doubling threat from Holy abilities.
Protection Paladins are the preferred tank for encounters that have numerous mobs due to the massive AoE threat generated by Consecration which is unrivaled by any other tanking class. This enables AoE damage classes such as Warlocks and Mages to be extremely liberal in their use of AoE spells for quickly eliminating trash packs.
For single-target threat generation, Paladins can rely on damage from Seals, Judgement, and Holy Shield, which can be significantly amplified using Avenging Wrath. Compared to other tanking classes, Paladins also have the strongest threat burst at the start of pulls thanks to Avenger's Shield, an excellent ability for starting off fights in raids and dungeons due to its large damage, long range, and ability to hit multiple targets. In heroics and raids, Paladins can also rely on additional, passive threat from mana restored by Spiritual Attunement due to the heals received while tanking.

UTILITY:
Paladins offer great utility to their groups and raids through their Blessings, Judgements, and Auras. Greater Blessing of Kings in the Protection talent tree is one of the most sought-after raid buffs, as it can greatly benefit all classes and roles. The debuff from the Judgement effect of Seal of Wisdom provides excellent utility for mana users in the raid, as they can get a significant amount of mana restored from their damaging abilities on enemies with the debuff. If specced into Improved Seal of the Crusader, a Paladin Tank can also significantly increase the damage of the raid with the +3% crit bonus from the Seal of the Crusader Judgement debuff. When it comes to coming to the defense of your allies when they have aggro on enemies, Paladins have Righteous Defense for taunting multiple enemies simultaneously and Blessing of Protection for temporarily removing aggro your friendly target, allowing you to rebuild aggro on them.

SURVIVABILITY:
Protection Paladins have a large set of abilities and talents for maintaining high survivability in dungeons and raids. Paladin tanks are able to have an extremely large health pool due to Sacred Duty, Combat Expertise, and Greater Blessing of Kings increasing their stamina from gear and buffs by an additional 28.2%. The talents Improved Righteous Fury, Toughness, Deflection, and Anticipation can also improve a Paladin tank's survivability through additional damage mitigation and avoidance.
Paladins are extremely gear dependent for achieving uncrushability and defense cap, however, with the right gear and Improved Holy Shield, Paladins are able to maintain uncrushability for up to 8 blocks within 10 seconds, which is excellent for surviving bosses with fast attack speeds or thrashes.
One of the largest drawbacks of Paladin tanks is the lack of powerful defensive abilities, such as the Warrior's Shield Wall and Last Stand, which can be crucial for surviving emergencies when at low health or when taking extremely high damage. However, for surviving emergencies, Paladins have the talent Ardent Defender for passive damage reduction at low health, Divine Shield for instantly removing debuffs that may be extremely dangerous such as Mortal Strike, and Lay on Hands for instantly restoring oneself to full health.Healer Tier List for Phase 1 of Burning Crusade Classic

Ranking

Spec

Writer Comments

Restoration Shaman

Comments by Woah

Priest

Comments by Vaelis

Holy Paladin

Comments by Dunraven

Restoration Druid

Comments by SixPackyx

Healer Rankings and Explanations for Phase 1 of Burning Crusade ClassicS Tier Specs

Overall Rating: S

The Restoration Shaman is one of the best group healers and the most useful healer of TBC Classic, and it all starts with being the only source of the new Bloodlust / Heroism effect, which you can never have enough of in any group!

They are great supports for both melee and casters groups, bringing the physical damage totem staples, Strength of Earth Totem, Windfury Totem and Grace of Air Totem, and also the new Wrath of Air Totem which increases the spell damage done by their group. Unique to Restoration, Mana Tide Totem will continue to refill Mana bars of other healers and mana-hungry DPS alike and the new Earth Shield provides some extra passive healing to anyone taking consistent damage, as well as a way to lower spell pushback on demand.

They also bring a lot of other situationally useful tools: Tranquil Air Totem, Purge, Tremor Totem, Earthbind Totem and Grounding Totem, as well as poison and disease removing totems that can automate the process in fights where these debuffs are consistently applied to your party.

In regards to healing, Chain Heal gets a new rank at Level 70 and a new talent, Improved Chain Heal, that pushes its healing even further! The new stat, Haste also works really well with the long Chain Heal casts, and its full effect will be even more felt in the later tiers. As before, the single target healing available is good, but limited to hard casts.

Thus, the main weakness of Restoration is that it has a hard cast requirement on almost all of its healing spells. This limits mobility and makes the spec vulnerable to interrupts and spell pushback, at least when Healing Focus is not maximized and Earth Shield is not present on the Shaman. Fortunately, in PvE these limitations are easy to overcome, making Restoration a powerhouse with few downsides.A Tier Specs

Overall Rating: A

Priest Healers bring the most versatile toolkit of all healers—Circle of Healing and Prayer of Mending for raid healing, Renew healing over time effect as an equivalent of Druid's Rejuvenation, Power Word: Shield to prevent incoming damage, if at terrible mana efficiency. Being jack of all trades, however, they are master of none—at least for now, their time to shine is yet to come in further phases!

Utility brought by Priest Healers is immense, but requires just a single Priest to use it to full extent—any Priest Healer over that is redundant in terms of buffs. The buffs include Prayer of Fortitude (virtually always boosted by Improved Power Word: Fortitude) and Prayer of Shadow Protection.
If 2.4.3 database present in Beta is not reverted to 2.2 or below, Fear Ward will be accessible to every Priest race. This is not of huge import since Fear mechanics are not very abundant in PvE content, but every subsequent Priest brought to raid will linearly improve amount of people fear-warded—the buff now lasts 3 min and has a 3 min cooldown, meaning only a single instance may exist per each Priest.

Discipline is not favored as a PvE spec due to loss of Circle of Healing and a significant chunk of healing output, but brings neat utility such as Pain Suppression, Power Infusion and Divine Spirit. Improved Divine Spirit is not recommended—its effect is greatly diminished by fact that casters never stack Spirit. Pain Suppression and Power Infusion are nowhere near mandatory for PvE raid content, but protecting against burst damage and increasing fellow caster's burst damage respectively is absolutely amazing for Arena PvP, granting the spec a place high in the meta.

While on basis of wearing cloth armor they lose a lot of physical defense, they make up for it to some degree via Inner Fire. Choosing Human or Dwarf grants access to Desperate Prayer, an awesome life-saver when things to awry. Night Elf can use Elune's Grace, helping survive non-caster burst in Arena PvP. Other races unfortunately lack in means of self-defense.

Overall Rating: A

Remaining largely unchanged from Classic, Holy Paladins remain consistent with what they bring to the table: strong tank healing, buffs, and utility. Generally speaking, raid comps will run one holy paladin per raid team, seeing a significant decrease from the 3+ that were brought for Classic raids. This is due partly to the reduced raid size but also because the other healing classes are improved upon in The Burning Crusade whereas Holy Paladins seem to gain the least amount.

One of the biggest changes Holy Paladins will notice is the decrease in mana returned from the talent Illumination, changing from 100% mana returned down to 60%. While this change is certainly a nerf to the talent, the gear itemization is much better in The Burning Crusade, allowing more sustain on a lot of the best pieces. There is also the addition of another cooldown to use in the form of the talent Divine Illumination, reducing the mana cost of all spells by 50% for 15 seconds. This talent, coupled with Divine Favor, will allow some creative ways to manage mana during raids as well as figuring out the best way to utilize the cooldowns. Finally, the new talent Holy Guidance increases spell damage and healing by 35% of your total Intellect creates another dynamic to consider when gearing. All these changes help to make Holy Paladin players a bit more engaged than they were in Classic.

Of course, the bread and butter of paladins is their strong buffs and support. Holy Paladins will have the easiest time picking up Improved Blessing of Wisdom and Improved Blessing of Might. Another quality-of-life addition is the talent Aura Mastery, increasing our auras an additional 10 yards. The other staples, like Guardian's Favor, help round out the true utility offered by Holy Paladins. While they may not be the flashiest healers, Holy Paladins will still be sought after, especially considering the changes to the Protection and Retribution specs potentially making the Holy spec a bit more of a rarity compared to Classic. B Tier Specs

Overall Rating: B

Resto Druids get some fantastic changes in TBC. The addition of Tree of Life and Lifebloom bolster the iconic HoT playstyle. With the increase to buff cap, healers can now comfortably use all heal-over-time effects without worrying about knocking off buffs. On top of that, HoTs stack from other players, meaning that if there are two Resto Druids in the group, both can apply Lifebloom or any other HoT to the same target.

And yet, Resto still falls behind the other healers. It can do considerably good tank healing and decent raid healing, but not as well as some other healing classes. Even though Resto will bring all the utility of a Druid (Innervate, Rebirth, Faerie Fire, Gift of the Wild), the other Druid specs can be considered more crucial to the raid roster. However, Resto Druids who talent into Tree of Life do bring a unique party-wide buff that increases all healing received by 25% of the Druid's total Spirit.

While Resto Druid is a completely viable, realistically good, and extremely fun specialization for TBC, the fact that it is simply outmatched by the other healing classes moves it a bit lower on this list. That doesn't mean we won't see some stellar Resto Druids topping the meters at times.

Comment by SassyBeardThese rankings are always terrible.Comment by KeristraszaResto B tier are you kidding me lol.Comment by TambardI legitimately hope these people are contributing for free...Comment by RageIronfistI had to laugh like mad at the "amazing warrior" comments
Especially "excellent gear scaling"

Someone is very high on copiumComment by AesiriaShaman > paladin > priest > druid imo :)Comment by ratdumdumThanks for a good laugh. Next time get somebody who has actually played the game to write this.Comment by SaejitoThis article is pointless and really low effort. Generic ratings like this don't do anyone any favors. I echo what Beanna said above. The quality of the information on Wowhead has severely decreased recently and I've found myself using other sources for a lot of information and only using Wowhead for the database feature.Comment by RageIronfistEspecially if they let the same guy that was spouting nonsense and missleading people in classic contribute delusions againComment by Momoiyeah no warrior tanks are awesome for later phases and mandatory for illidan or magtheridon but not so awesome in p1 like protection paladin also having 2 prot warriors wont be fun for kara have fun with nightbane :) and the trashComment by kennethwowi rolled a better healing tier list moran.
rolled in order, leaves rdruid as 1
https://i.imgur.com/9wekEDy.pngComment by RisutoaI see so many people saying "lol this is garbage" but have yet to provide reasons. Kind of funny and sad at the same time.Comment by scart35Oh man...why. Lot of things just wrong.Comment by pcmnonameI see so many people saying "lol this is garbage" but have yet to provide reasons. Kind of funny and sad at the same time.Comment by FascThe Tank rankings are unbelievably biased. Looking at just Druids, a serious consideration made was between pre-raid gear for Druids and for Warriors by comparing what each class has carrying over from Vanilla. I get it that Tier 3 is fantastic for Warriors and lasts well into lvl70, but AQ40 gear isn't exactly behind on that front either, despite the raid difference. Notably, Druids have a tremendous number of excellent BiS alternatives from simply questing. Umberhowl's Collar, Manimal Cinch, Verdant Gloves, etc, are packed to the gills with Strength, Agility, and Stamina, along with raid-levels of bonus armor. A Druid doesn't even really need to do 5-mans, let alone Heroics, to deck themselves out for T4 content. Again, ilvl differences are not a reason to discount the effect these items have on the classes that use them. Mark of Tyranny is still a valuable EH trinket for crying out loud.

I get that Warriors aren't exactly the cream of the crop anymore, but lack of Block (which has zero bearing on T4 content), defensive CDs (nothing bursts that necessitates them), and Crushing Blows (Druid EH laughs at this notion), is just grasping at straws to try to find a reason to downgrade Druids below Warriors. The Paladin ranking is no better, especially noting that Paladins have superior EH compared to Warriors and better threat/damage. Plus, Paladins will have to work just as "hard" to get pre-raid gear as Warriors, so there really isn't any hurdle.

So so silly.Comment by KoalasamaCan you give examples of wrong and bad things in this article ?Comment by IvanGeddonI mean, the healing tier list isn't wrong. Resto druid is subpar when compared to the other healers. Not the worse of course but definitely not as good at tank healing as a Holy paladin and not as good at raid healing as a resto shaman. All raids will run 1 Resto druid max, and some won't run it at all for a reason.Comment by MomoiI see so many people saying "lol this is garbage" but have yet to provide reasons. Kind of funny and sad at the same time.Comment by ShwabI agree with this list for the most part. Resto druid isn't that great in PVE but are absolute kings of PVP healing.
As for the tank tier list. If they think Warrior is S Tier they definitely have issues. Feral is definitely the King Tank this expansion and they become the best tank in the game in the long run. Prot Paladin is definitely an A Tier tank for now and that is where they stay the whole expansion. They are the AoE kings for sure but prot is still a tiny bit better in single target.Comment by KrohnutzWhile I think people are being overly booty hurt by only being an "A" level tank (seriously, did he say you were an unviable "F" tank?) the truth about TBC tanks and healers are that all have a solid place in the raid. It is one of the better expansions in that aspect. You could literally have summed up this entire article with "they are all viable, just diversify yo bonds." Somebody queue up a photo of Wu-Tang Financial.Comment by KrohnutzI cannot comment on druids pre-raid and tier 1 raid gear... However, I can say that by the time we were in Sunwell, our bear tank had so much health and avoidance Blizzard had to zone wide penalize dodge because bears were just so insane. They were dump trucks, furry and large, just ridiculous.