Basics of Tanking

[Varibash]

This tank sucks!

February 13, 2009 by Keaton

We’ve all been there. At some point between your first Ragefire Chasm run and that recent Heroic daily debacle, you’re almost certain to have met that tank. His heart may be in the right place, but that doesn’t get you any closer to that shiny new belt you’ve had your eye on. You relate the situation to your guildies who double over with laughter as you swear off PuG’s for the 4th time this week. There’s always tomorrow right?

…but what if you are “that tank”? You’ve been reading all the guides on the class forums explaining your maximum hate rotation. You’ve copied that cookie cutter spec to the T. You’ve equipped yourself will all the best addons to enhance your awareness and have cleverly keybound all those handy macros you’ve heard aboot. Yet none of that seems to change the fact that the holy priest is complaining that he needs to drink after every pull, or that the resto druid says he has all his HoT’s ticking on you, yet he still can’t keep you up. What do you do?

First, it’s entirely possible that you’ve just happened across that healer. If this is the case, there really isn’t much you can do. Write it off as another failed PuG and try again tomorrow. But if you find that this rare occurrence seems to be growing more and more common, then the issue may be you after all.

Lucky for us, there are a few things we can do to fix this. One of the greatest things aboot tanking is that half the battle is fought before you even zone into the instance. Though you may have a few abilities to ease the blows or stall your downfall until your healers can save you, there is surprisingly little you can actively do to alleviate incoming damage. What you can do is select pieces itemized for the stat that you are lacking, or regem to enhance a certain area of performance.

One important thing to realize is that there is no such thing as “one set of gear.” As tanks we find that we desire a great variety of stats. While pure DPS classes are mostly content picking the hat the comes with more spell power, or that bracer with slightly more attack power … often times our upgrades come with at the cost of a trade off. That said, next time you upgrade your ilevel 200 chest to an ilevel 213, don’t be too quick to find that vendor in Dalaranwilling to pay you a few gold to melt it down into scrap metal. While it may be an upgrade overall, chances are that one of the two pieces is more focused on avoidance, while the other is itemized for effective health. But that is a lesson for another day entirely…

Before you can start to strengthen your toon and lose the reputation of being that tank, you need to determine what is killing you. Short of the obvious exceptions like forgetting to move out of the shadow fissure, line of sighting your healer or your healer deciding that you’ve been “hogging the heals” all night and its time to let other people have some too (seriously … this happened to me in Mara once), there are three ways for a tank to die. Each is attributed to a very different area of stats; enhancing your toons abilities in one of these areas doesn’t make you any less likely to die from the other two methods. They are as follows:

1) Burst in 2 seconds -

A burst is a sudden influx of damage. It is not a normal occurrence but rather a series of events that will stack together infrequently. The most famous example of this is the textbook Onyxia style, breath + cleave combo. This is the single most dangerous threat in any encounter as healers are powerless to save you.

The Solution

The reason you are dying is because your healers don’t have enough time to react. You need to be able to survive long enough to receive that Holy Light or Greater Heal crit. The only way to combat this problem is to stack more stamina. With enough life, these dangerous bursts won’t be able to kill you instantly. Focus on gemming for more stamina and select pieces which grant higher HP pools.

2) Incoming damage -

In between all those dodges and parries, you are going to get hit. Since you cannot rely on avoiding an attack, you need to depend on your mitigation. The more damage you are able to mitigate, less healing per second will be required to keep you alive. If you are receiving too much incoming damage, healers will be overwhelmed. Slowly you will be able to witness your health drop, moving farther from that full position and ever closer to that fatal zero.

The Solution

Although having more healing output from your healer(s) would solve the problem, this is not an action that you can take personally. Thus the onus is on you to up your mitigation. Mitigation (not to be confused with avoidance) is anything that reduces the amount of damage dealt by a given attack. Armor is the most significant manner in which to do this. Ensure that you are using your correct “stance” (defensive stance, bear form, righteous fury or frost presence) as well as taking full advantage of any relivant mitigation talents such as toughness or thick hide.

3) Healers running out of mana (OOM) -

During the course of a fight you are going to be taking a huge amount of damage. The single best way to reduce the damage that a given attack deals, is to not receive. If you receive too many hits, healers will not be able to find a healthy rhythmm and will be forced to burn through their mana reserves. An OOM healer saves no tanks.

The Solution

Even though you can’t rely on avoidance to save you at that crucial moment, it is the singlemost effective tool in lowering overall damage. Simply put, avoidance is the act of avoiding an attack. This would be miss, parry and dodge (blocked attacks don’t prevent damage, they reduce it; this makes block a proc-based mitigation stat). To ease the stress on your healers, focus on pieces that itemize for more defence, dodge, or parry. Never gem for parry. Instead gem for defence and dodge as these will yield a higher return.

It’s hard to learn a new class. It’s intimidating to enter a group as a different element than you are used to … but everyone starts somewhere. My first toon was a Human warlock because I thought my voidwalker was the coolest thing ever. Yet today I find myself main-tanking for a progression guild. So don’t lose heart when your group falls apart. Don’t take it personally when your healer rants at you for being the worst tank hes ever seen. Figure out what’s killing you, learn how to fix it and resolve to never become that tank.

Source: http://feralconfessi...his-tank-sucks/

[Unholyfaith]

Newma! I love you, but read this. =)

[Teeks]

Newma! I love you, but read this. =)

Lol.