Tanking 101

I have been tanking as a paladin in WoW a long time (since about 2005). Not as long as some of you, but longer than most. I regularly tanked Blackrock Depths, Stratholme, and Scholomance before Burning Crusade launched. I tanked Kara and Zul’Aman pre-nerf during Burning Crusade, and I have tanked every encounter in Wrath.

Over the past couple of months, using the Random dungeon tool, which is awesome (thanks Blizz!), I have encountered many people who either don’t know how to play, or don’t care to know how to play. While leveling alts, I usually queue as DPS. In the randoms that I have done as a DPS player, I have seen some truly terrible tanks. I have also seen some good ones, but those seem like they are getting few and far between as the need for Frost Emblems dimishes.

So I decided that I wanted to do my part to try and impart some wisdom to the new tanks in the game. Sometimes these are converted DPS’ers that enjoy the quick queue, sometimes these are new players who have only recently gotten their first character to level 80. Either way, there are certain things that every tank (regardless of class) needs to know and do.

Here are my top 10 keys to being a successful tank:

10. Do your homework – Right or wrong, as a tank you are generally looked at as the leader. This means you need to know the bosses abilities. You more than anyone else need to know the fight’s mechanics. This is the role you have chosen. Take some extra time and make sure that you perform at your best by preparing beforehand.

9. Learn to position mobs – You need to understand that how you position and move mobs will directly affect your party member’s ability to DPS those mobs. Especially if you have a melee DPS’er in your group, don’t move mobs unless absolutely necessary. The less the mobs move, the more your DPS’ers can actually DPS, and the quicker the mobs go down.

8. Face the boss away from the party – This goes hand in hand with Mob positioning, but I felt it was so important that it deserved its own entry. Most bosses have some kind of frontal cone damage ability (cleave, breath, fireball, slime spray, flamethrower, etc . . .). It is imperative that only the tank get hit by these abilities.

7. Learn to strafe – This is important to everyone, not just tanks. Moving backwards is at 50% normal speed. Except for certain specific situations, there is pretty much no reason to ever walk backwards.

6. Know your threat “rotation” – Rotation is in quotes because only one tanking class currently uses a true rotation. The others use a priority system where their abilities are prioritized from most effective to least effective when it comes to generating threat. Get to know how your class most effectively generates threat. Then commit it to muscle memory so that you can generate threat without thinking about it.

5. Learn to produce threat while moving – Once you have that whole strafing thing down, and have committed you threat “rotation” to memory, then learn to combine the two. Get good at moving the mob and continuing to produce threat while moving them. This can be the difference in holding threat or losing it if your DPS’ers outgear you by a sizable margin.

4. Be mindful of your healer – There are few things that frustrate a healer more than a tank that can’t be bothered to wait for his healer to refill their mana pool. One of those things, though, is a tank that constantly moves out of LOS (Line of Sight) of their healer. In any challenging content, the last thing you want is a frustrated healer. So, before starting that next pull, take a peek at your healer’s mana pool. Also, don’t grab a pack of mobs and immediately then duck around a corner. Both of those are bad, m’kay?

3. Never give a boss your back – If you need to run away from a boss, or move a boss, NEVER turn your back to them and run away. You cannot dodge, parry, or block (if a shield user) from behind. Also, you can do little or none of your threat moves (depending on class) while not facing the boss. If you need to move, strafe instead. You move just as fast, but can continue producing threat and will not gimp your dodge and parry.

2. Situational Awareness – “Keep your head on a swivel.” That is what my old football coach used to always tell us. Know where you are, but also know what is going on around you. As a tank, it is your job to grab the attention of every mob that is engaged. DPS’ers tend to do more damage when they are a.) not running for their lives, or b.) still alive. If you are tanking a group and a ranged mob aggros to your healer, you have to do something about that RIGHT NOW. Any mob hitting your healer is a priority.

1. Don’t be a “Rockstar” – This is something that I never would have added before, but there is a new attitude with tanks recently, kinda like most of them think that their shit don’t stink. They figure since tanks are in such demand, that they can act like asshats and still get a group anytime they want. Remember that as a tank, you are still part of a TEAM. Whether it is a 5-man, 10-man, or 25-man, a team is only as strong as its weakest member. I know I would rather group with a tank that has a 4k gear score that is polite and knowledgeable rather than a “rockstar” with a 6k gear score.

Verdigris Chain Belt

Verdigris Chain Belt

What a beautiful piece of equipment this is. I have to say that it is one of my favorite pieces of gear that I have ever gotten. Not because of it's stats, which are AMAZING mind you, but because when you put it on, it looks like you are wearing a Professional Wrestling Championship Belt (the model viewer on Wowhead is not displaying this item correctly, but you can see the screen shots).

It looks fly on my dwarf. Just thought I would share with you guys.

BG's.....here I come!

Battleground and Honor Changes on the Horizon

This sounds awesome to me. I have always enjoyed doing battlegrounds loads more than Arena.

Battlegrounds are fun, and simulate the war effort between the Horde and the Alliance (some simulate better than others).

Arenas, for me anyway, are just a big ball of stress and frantic button mashing.

If the random BG option has the same effect on my as the Random Dungeon tool did, then I suspect I will me pvping a whole lot more in the coming months than I have up until this point during Wrath.

I am pretty excited about this change, and can't wait to load up the PTR to check it out.

Russian UI

lkbuff.jpg (1600�1000)

This UI is freakin' sweet! How do I get it? Anyone know?

This should be required reading

Big Bear Butt Blogger � Tanking Test! Druid vs Paladin II

I am struck at how accurate I feel this blog post is. I think everyone should read it (and Part 1) just to try and understand their fellow tanks better.

That is all.

To the ground baby!

Tanking and Survivability Changes - Wowraid

So today Paladins got a stealth nerf while DKs got a stealth buff.

Now my first reaction (of course) is to be pissed. I mean, who likes getting nerfed?

But let's look at this logically. Paladins do scale better with stamina than warriors or DKs. There is no denying that. But there is also a reason for that. Warriors, DKs, and druids have a base health (Warrior/DK=8121 at level 80, Druid=7417 at level 80) that is higher than a paladin's base health (6934 at level 80). As a side note, paladins actually have the lowest base health of *any* class in the game at level 80 (see for yourself http://www.wowwiki.com/Base_health). So before stamina is even considered, warriors, DKs, and druids have the upper hand in health. Another thing to consider is that warriors also have a slot for extra stats that paladins do not get. The ranged slot, also known as the proverbial "stat stick". So a warrior has more health to start with, and can equip extra stamina that paladins can never get. So Blizzard gave paladins a higher stamina modifier in our tanking tree. Seems like it should balance out.

Well, at ilvl245 (the original intended top end of this expansion) it was balanced. But as we all know, the top tier of gear is now ilvl277 (there are eve some ilvl281 pieces from heroic Lich King). Now, all of the sudden, the extra stamina on the higher ilvl gear is scaling too well for Paladins.

I first time I noticed things were amiss was when I noticed that I had more health than my bear co-tank.

Now I don't want anyone to think that I am QQing because I agree that this nerf was needed. But it really didn't have to be. Back during beta for WotLK, the paladin community screamed to have our base health brought in line with that of the warrior. The Devs refused, and opted to instead give us better stamina scaling to make up the difference.

Well, I guess this will teach them.

Or not.

Ensidia gets World 1st Arthas-25 kill......not.

Hit the link and then come back.....

Ensidia suspended for 72 Hours

As you can see from the link above, Ensidia got the world first kill on 25-man Arthas. Then, Blizzard promptly banned all accounts involved 72 hours and revoked the achievements and the loot. I may sound like a fanboy here, but in this case I do not think that Ensidia deserved the ban.

For anyone that does not know the details, apparently there was a bug in the encounter where the use of "siege damage" greatly minimized a mechanic in the encounter. Because this particular fight was NOT available on the PTR, how was anyone supposed to know that the fight was not working correctly? Even if they did notice some buggy mechanics, that's nothing out of the ordinary for a new boss fight.

The source of the "siege damage" was a rogue using Saronite Bombs. Now on MMO-Champion, you can see that the rogue did NOT use Saronite Bombs for this encounter only. It is an item that they use regularly. As a matter of fact, according to ElitistJerks, rogues have been using Saronite Bombs as part of their rotation for months.

I just wanted to put my opinion out there. Hopefully Ensidia still get the world first after their 72 hour ban (although I seriously doubt it).