The hardest available challenge in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands at the moment is almost undoubtedly Mythic Nathria. While players could certainly push a Mythic+ key to extreme heights to challenge such a statement, it remains that the raid is likely the ceiling of challenge for most players.
So when challenging Mythic Nathria, it’s best to know as much as one can possibly know in order to increase their chances of success. To that end, Wowhead has been discussing what tanks players should bring if they want to be successful.
Tanks in general are in a strange spot with Shadowlands, still working to even out their spots after the changes of the prepatch. While many feel that threat generation remains low in Mythic+ content, Nathria is a much more straight forward tanking experience.
Wowhead discusses Protection Warriors first, highlighting their high damage mitigation abilities as one of their most powerful features. With such intense damage going out repeatedly, the numerous defensive cooldowns of Prot makes them a great choice.
The trade-off there is that Protection Warriors in Nathria are significantly lower in damage than other specs are. While their damage is high in dungeons due to AoE, the encounters in Nathria are mostly single-target, lowering their damage considerably.
Brewmaster Monks are topping charts for the same reason, with stagger being an extremely useful damage mitigation mechanic for the physical-damage-heavy fights. They also pack a great deal of damage, putting them above Protection Warriors on most charts.
The third option they outline is the Vengeance Demon Hunter, which is seeing a great surge of dominance due to the newly-popularized Fiery Brand build. This helps fill the gaps left in the downtime of Demon Spikes and Metamorphosis.
As you may expect, the combinations they call for are any combination of these three, though they mostly highlight Demon Hunter and Warrior or Demon Hunter and Monk. The combination of Monk and Warrior leaves something to be desired for magic damage resistance, it seems.
This is primarily due to mobility, as Demon Hunters bring a great deal of movement to the movement-heavy fights you’ll see later on in the raid. Fights like Artificer, Sludgefist, Generals, and Denathrius require a good deal of movement, so having a tank that can do so quickly is highly sought after.
Warrior and Demon Hunter is a pick that they still highlight, though it seems to be less popular than the other options. Having a warrior for the raid-wide buffs of Rallying Cry and Battle Shout can prove vital at times, and putting one in the tank spot means getting a higher Melee DPS spec to to take the spot that a DPS warrior might have taken.
