 We had a simple question today, about a heroic mode tank who got parry-gibbed by Sindragosa. Melee dps need to remember that whilst parry-haste is mostly off in ICC, which I wrote about in February, it is on for Sindragosa and Deathwhisper, but it’s really Cindy for whom this risk is real due to her melee damage hurting. Here’s a diagram to help your dps. June 24th, 2010 | 2 comments |
 From: Tanking in general |  Tags: expertise, icc, parry haste, parrygib, sindragosa, tank I have raided as a maintank and as an off-tank. I don’t really mind, as long as the encounter is interesting. Some people don’t like the term “off-tank” or think it’s out-of-date. Others don’t want to think of themselves as an off-tank because it implies you are of secondary importance. I like the term, because everyone knows it means “the tank who is not on or is the secondary tank for the big boss”.
 I have the skull bound to a mouse button. One side button is skull or shift-click for X, the other is Ventrilo push-to-talk. It makes 5-mans really smooth because I can mark up a skull so quickly, the DPS see it before I engage. This can help if you’re tanking in Blood spec and want to establish threat with its weaker AOE. DPSers generally follow markings. I need a new fancy gaming mouse, will get one Blizzard, in the developer chat, has asked the tank community for some discussion and feedback on whether threat is fun. Q. You talk a lot about changing how we heal tanks, but will aggro ever come back as a challenging part of the game? A. Not sure. This is something we discuss a lot. I even had a meeting on it this week! On the one hand, some tanks really felt like the way to Tanks do a lot of taunting off one another. Last week I was reflecting on a post from Chev about taunting. He has tabulated the number of debuffs your fellow tank should have before you taunt. What’s remarkable is that a standard table, without many footnotes or explanatory exceptions, is able to capture this taunt dynamic. That’s because there usually isn’t much more to it than simply “at x debuffs, do the tank switch”. On some fights, you could Posting here on parry-haste, the proc nerf and following me on Twitter. The other day I posted about preliminary findings which show ICC has parry-haste mostly turned off for the raid bosses. Theck’s confirmed that now, and my gratitude to the original writers Tbdsamman (parry-haste addon) and Clifton (wrote the log parser). Boss Can boss parry-haste? Marrowgar no Deathwhisper yes Deathbringer Saurfang no Festergut no Rotface no Putricide no Prince Valanar no Prince Taldaram no Blood-Queen Lana’thal no Sindragosa February 11th, 2010 | 11 comments |
From: Raid and 5-man guides, Tanking in general | Tags: avoidance, dual wield, expertise, icc, parry haste, parrygib, tank, theck 1. A clever nerd wrote an addon which checks if the boss you’re fighting has been parry-hasted. 2. Another clever geek wrote a script which parses logs to determine if parry-haste was seen. 3. Combined conclusion so far is that the only boss in Icecrown with parry-haste turned on is Deathwhisper, and possibly Saurfang. Read the thread discussing it and download the addon from links within. If you’ve got matlab you can also get the code to February 9th, 2010 | One comment |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: avoidance, dual wield, expertise, icc, parry haste, parrygib, tank, theck In order:
I used to be a pally tank too, so I know what I’m missing when I do Halls of Reflection: no gaps in the AOE threat and reflective AOE threat. Rhidach enjoyed himself in Plagueworks last night, with a sidenote on the AOE awesomeness that is Paladin. Over the last week, I ran the Blood tank spec for 5-mans (includes death and decay glyph and corpse January 7th, 2010 | 23 comments |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: aoe, blood, frost, halls of reflection, maintankadin, paladin, threat Progression tanks, before the next wing is opened: I recommend you get this new version of TankTotals, get familiar with it, give the author some feedback and then use it when the next wing of ICC is live. It’s out of alpha/ beta and released now. The new effective health calculations from Theck and implemented by Reynard will let you do post-wipe analysis to optimise your gear choices before the next attempt, the best example being swapping stamina trinkets January 4th, 2010 | 3 comments |
From: Addons, Tanking in general | Tags: addon, effective health, eh, gear choice, progression, tanktotals, total effective health Hopefully your hunters know this. They can misdirect a volley. Thanks QQ for the tip. Tanks, note this change: you won’t see the misdirect buff until your hunter starts shooting. Have you hunter verify on /p or /ra he has misdirected. December 22nd, 2009 | 5 comments |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: 3.3, hunter, misdirect, tank, threat There’s a maturity cycle that tanks progress through. One of the marks of a mature, experienced tank is they know the encounters and they plan ahead. Newer tanks are usually focused on their action-bars and rune cooldowns, on the mechanics of acting. Mature tanks handle the basic threat actions without much conscious focus, and instead expand their awareness to the whole game field, and planning for what’s coming up next. One thing paladins enjoy is a fairly consistent action November 28th, 2009 | 2 comments |
From: Tanking in general, new to tanking | Tags: experience, maturity, planning, runes, tank To close this series of posts on balance, I wanted to use a few diagrams to outline the problem. This will be my last post on this topic for a while (in case you’re losing interest in it). (As an aside, I’m going to do my bit to improve the quality of tanking in the world, too. We’ll publish more how-to articles and guides in the future, and you’ll see the site navigation is already changing to accommodate that content). I also want to highlight that most tanks just want to tank: switching between dps and tank specs works technically, but quite often (not always), tanks want to stick to the one mode of thinking. You get into a ‘tank zone’ mentally, and it’s better to stay in that zone than flick out to dps. Sure you can do it, sure it’s not hard, but it’s not fun for most tanks. So to illustrate the ratio question, if you look at it in terms of a realm population, how many tanks are there available and willing to tank at any time? I expect the cross-realm LFG system will really help PUGs, but not guild-raids. I think casual raid guilds pay a bigger penalty from the varying ratios needed in a raid than a hardcore guild. Casuals don’t like to bench, don’t tend to stack raids (by swapping people in and out during the raid), and so the inconsistency of a minimum tank number makes it tougher to try settling on a ‘right sized’ number of tanks within the guild. Anyhow, here’s the illustrative diagram. The essential problem is the difference between the ratios across raiding, 5-mans and the actual characters on the realm.
The number of tanks is a function of supply and demand The other issue I wanted to close on is that the tank situation we’ve talked about has at least a supply and demand side to its equation. November 23rd, 2009 | 2 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, Tanking in general | Tags: balance, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, comparison, pve, raid, tank Quite a lot of discussion on tank balance, not just pwnwear, wow.com had a (good) post on effective health and also Ghostcrawler’s posted on it. Here’s an extract from GC, but he said a lot more, worth checking the source too. On Sartharion +3, cutting-edge guilds who normally tank with a warrior would (perhaps somewhat begrudgingly) use a DK to tank instead because the benefit was so massive. The same thing happened on Vezax where good guilds replaced their I hear anecdotal evidence of DK tanks being benched so that our tanking brethren do the business instead. Whilst promoting the rawr:tankDK article in official wow forums, I read a thread there asking “where did all the DK tanks go?” (being the official forums I would normally immediately disregard everything as drivel)… but remembered long-time reader Kenshi commenting he’s now 3rd tank (he’s in a progression guild). He’d shown a picture from guildies too. They’d read the “warriors are swiss army, DKs are from lego” November 18th, 2009 | 32 comments |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: comparison, pve, raid, roster, rotation, tank A lot has been written about why you should not keyboard turn (it’s too slow), and that you should keybind. I wrote about how PvP improves your raiding too. I’m going to skip that preamble and just talk briefly about keybinds.
Yesterday the little survey I did on myself included a snippet which Perditio commented on, saying he had the same binds! Spooky because they’re not the most obvious ones. Movement I move with ESDF. If you are still on WASD I recommend you spend the next month getting your muscle memory into ESDF instead; you gain QAZ as keybind options. Take your time with keybind changes, you need muscle memory to set in before you move onto the next change. Do one thing at a time; this could take months. Movement keys particularly took me ages to get used to. Rebind non-combat actions set by the default UI to shift or alt equivalents (alt is better since it’s usually an awkward key to use in an action binding). So you’d change ‘reply’ to be shift or alt R. Rebind ‘open all bags’ to alt-B, ‘open character panel’ to alt-c, ‘pvp panel’ to alt-h and so on. Bindings
Emergencies: Blood tap and ERW should be easy to get to, since you will use them for an emergency tank cooldown or a snap DnD. I have shift-1 is blood tap, shift-2 is ERW (all rune reset). November 6th, 2009 | 26 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Tanking in general, new to tanking | Tags: aoe, keybinding, macro, pvp, tank There’s a game bloggers play where you pass an idea or question from one to another. Normally, I don’t follow along because I’m stubbornly independent and don’t like being part of a crowd. These ‘memes’ can be very self-serving group-hug techniques used to brown-nose. This one however is pretty cool because it’s all about tanking! November 5th, 2009 | 7 comments |
From: General chat, Tanking in general | Tags: paladin, tank, tank love The race change feature is now available. You can’t create any of the new race/class combinations in Cataclysm, but you can at least change race. I have already written a detailed head to head analysis of all races, from a tanking perspective. Update March 2010: expertise only has avoidance value outside of ICC raids, so don’t worry about it. What is missing, though: some of the new calculations on the avoidance value of expertise, which I’d discovered more recently. In my last column for pwnwear, I discussed the mindset of the DPS DK stepping into the role of OT. Today, I wanted to follow that up with a simple summary of fights that require offtanks, and what your role will be. I won’t review Naxx, as that content is being pugged on most servers and isn’t really a ’serious’ raid any more, but Ulduar and T9 content certainly is. I’ve offtanked (25 man) and/or maintanked (10-man) almost all of these fights (except Algalon – we haven’t faced him, and some heroic fights), so let’s take a look and see what we have! If you get called on to OT in Ulduar/TOC/Ony, what will you be doing? Often fights have several viable strats and I won’t be covering them all. I’ll mention the main adds that need to be OT’d and what to expect. Variations are up to your raid leader. I’ll often skip hard modes as you’ll likely know the fights well if working on those. I also assume some familiarity with these fights from a dps perspective. Warning! This is a fairly long post. Ulduarresist gear is not needed in Ulduar, so OTs should concentrate on the best mix of survivability and threat stats/gear. Exceptions – maybe – would be frost resist on Hodir or Thorim hard mode. 1. Flame Leviathan: no tanks 2. Razorscale: Three tanks typically. Usually, the MT will pull the Sentinels off to the side for range to kill. OTs gather the other Dark Rune dwarves together for aoe, making sure to stay out of fire. As OT, you’ll need to be ready to taunt Razorscale when she stays on the ground and the other tank gets 2 stacks of Fused Armor. Kite her facing away from the raid and out of flame patches. 3. Ignis: We do the burn method of tanking Ignis in the water and kill him fast, but in any case 1-2 OTs should grab the constructs when they spawn and kite them through scorched areas, then to water when they turn molten (10 stacks). Be careful, they hit hard, which is why some guilds use a hunter to ‘tank’ the constructs. If you’re within 10 yards when the construct is blown up, you may die to the aoe. October 14th, 2009 | 6 comments |
From: Raid and 5-man guides, Tanking in general, new to tanking | Tags: crusader's coliseum, off-tank, onyxia, tank, ulduar Here’s a guest post from a reader, who became a regular commenter, then blogger! – G I AM DPS, HEAR ME ROAR!!!!! Along came LK and Death Knights. As I discuss in my blog, I wanted to have a class capable of tanking, but really, I just loved the mechanics and playstyle of DKs, so I became a DK convert. The guild I was in when LK dropped had a good number of tanks and I did top dps, so I was never asked to tank, and frankly, tanking made me very very nervous. I knew I was good at dps, but I also knew that at least initially I wouldn’t be stellar at tanking, so I never really ended up doing it. I still amassed some tanking gear when it would have been de’d otherwise though. Lo and behold, when I returned to the game and found a new guild, they needed me to tank! Now what? Oh, shit…… they need me to tank. September 24th, 2009 | 6 comments |
From: Tanking in general, new to tanking | Tags: dps, guide, situational awareness, tank Oh man, while googling for a screenshot of a paladin tank, I found this disaster of a GUI. Talk about information overload and obscuring vision. See if you can beat it. I’ll give US$2 via paypal to whoever produces the worst tanking UI. Use the vote buttons to say who has the best of the bad (ie. thumbs up means, this is a really crap screenshot). This isn’t democracy but it’d be fun to see votes. Yes, that’s a This deserves more discussion. One of the difficult balances a leader has to manage is the number of tanks required in a raid, or the guild, as a proportion of the total guild. The problem is largely caused by the ratio required of tanks to others:
That’s half as many tanks for 25-man raiding as for 10-mans. The problems this brings are manyfold:
Also tanks need to be amongst the better players in your guild. They need more situational awareness, better reaction time, often more leadership personal characteristics. Luckily, you don’t need a lot of tanks, but good ones can be hard to find. Tanks tend to stick with their guild, they’re not chopped and changed so freely as deeps, which in turn means a tank will guard his raid slot more. He’ll try to attend more nights and be more active. No doubt, dual-spec helps us all with this problem, but doesn’t solve it. Tanks want to tank. Personally, I don’t enjoy dps. So this complicates the roster management for leadership, since you are juggling people’s personal desires too. Point is: the divergence of ratios between tanks:rest whilst a guild is growing from 5, 10 to 25 man raiding is a pain in the ass for guild leadership. Here’s the blue post that reminded me of this prevalent issue. » continue reading September 18th, 2009 | 4 comments |
From: Guild management, Tanking in general | Tags: dps, guild, healers, raid leader, roster, tank I was tanking Utgarde Keep on my reroll DK ‘Industry’ earlier. Did it because I saw “LF1M tank, UK” on general chat. I really enjoyed the run. I was in my blood dps levelling spec, so I had just a few tanking talents to draw on. Went fine. There was a funny moment. The party did wonder about me, when I suddenly died before even zoning in. Dead tank outside the zone Anyhow, clearing UK got me wondering, September 14th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: raid leader, tank Two comments from Ghostcrawler recently are clearly pointing at a design change which means we’ll have a more strategic playstyle for Cataclysm tanks and healers.
The significance of this is exciting! It means healers will have time to choose slower heals. Your tank won’t die if you go for greater heal because you will have the time. Whether boss fights also become longer in duration is unclear, but that would be a nice change for the better; to feel more epic and to be consistent with a strategic gameplay. » continue reading September 4th, 2009 | 2 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, Tanking in general | Tags: avoidance, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, ghostcrawler, healers, player, raid, stamina, tank Which race has the best abilities for tanking? Which racials help a tank more so than a PvPer or DPSer? Before DKs were born, I wrote this analysis so I could choose my race. Now with Cataclysm coming out, all tanks have more choice than before. New tanking combinations mean a new tank has great options. The new tank mixes are:
The Worgen and Goblin both have gap-closing abilities, for arena balance obviously. These mobility skills can be very useful for tanking. Warrior choices are interesting: a Worgen Warrior would take the throne as the supreme mobility tank, and a Blood Elf Warrior would be the best anti-caster tank. For Cataclysm, Goblin racials are over-budget, they have so many good racials. Worgens look about right. Definitely I expect some change before live to even these out. Tauren HP racial needs a buff too. It’s basically a flat HP increase in disguise as a percentage: it scales at each level of experience, but not by your gear. At L85, the Nelf racial will be proportionally even stronger still. So… let me give my conclusion first, details last. » continue reading August 25th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Tanking in general, choose race | Tags: bank, race, tank Warrior tank specs I presume any tank reader on my site knows Veneretio well, he’s posted the warrior tanks specs he’s running. No more badge gear tank upgrades Last night, I got my last tanking badge-reward upgrade from Conquest. Kind of wierd feeling. I’m at 33.7K HP unbuffed and 55% avoidance without the Black Heart trinket, which I’m deliberating getting to replace my Ignis dodge trinket. Not like a casual raider like me needs more HP. What to do August 19th, 2009 | 4 comments |
From: News discussion, Tanking in general | Tags: 3.2, emblem, gear, heroics, tank, warrior |
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