How to be the Best Tank Ever*

This tanking business can be a bit hectic at times. I've said before that it requires assimilating and processing a lot of information at once, prioritising this and getting round to doing something about it in the correct order in approximately 0.5 seconds.

My poor little brain can't cope with this. I like to use the occasional addon to take the strain and there's none better than Tidy Plates.

What Tidy Plates does is replace the standard Blizzard nameplates that appear above each target; I have heard that not everyone who plays WoW has even the standard nameplates set to show. I can't imagine how anyone can play without them, although that would go a long way to explaining why a lot of people seem to be completely incapable of seeing or applying DPS/threat to slimes/oozes/gas clouds/overcharged Tempest Minions. Without the nameplates, you either have to randomly click on an indistinct mob, tab-target or set up some inane targeting macro. With nameplates activated, you see the plate, you click on it, you go to work.

As I've said, Tidy Plates replaces the default plates with something more appropriate to your tastes, several different skins have been developed, but the one that I'm most interested in is Threat Plates .

Ever been tanking a pack of mobs and not have a clue if any of them is about to take off after that DPS (90% of the time it's a hunter) because they wouldn't know a "/assist" macro if it smacked them in their squishy face? Skada is only going to show you how much of a threat lead you have on your current target, not the other six that you're trying to hang onto. Now, fair enough, normally if a DPS pulls, I'll let them eat it...  but sometimes I'm in a benevolent mood and I'll save them occasionally.

Here's my friend, Mr. Reanimated Crusader, seen from afar. Small nameplate, white border... he's no threat to anyone, just minding his own business.

Let's see what happens when we give him a bit of a poke, shall we?

Okay, I don't think that he liked that...

The small bar shows that I have aggro on him, the green outline is showing that I've got him targeted. I know that the red hit box appears as default on my main target, but it's on the ground and I can never see it when there's a pack of mobs surrounding me. I've got it set up so that if my target is casting something, I get a cast bar too; if it's all yellow I can interrupt it, if it's stripey like the one above there's no sense wasting my time and I'll just have to suck it up.

Mr. Reanimated Crusader decides to bring one of his mates along to the party...

I've not targeted him and I don't have aggro on him. Result? Big, spiky nameplate. This serves two purposes: Firstly, it's totally unsubtle and lets you know that you might want to do something about it, secondly it's easier to mouseover and click the larger plate so you can put some threat on it. There is an inbetween plate that gives you a little hint that you might be about to lose aggro, slightly larger so you can pre-empt problems and generally look totally awesome.

The first time that I used this was in a Culling of Stratholme run and it made the job so easy that it almost seemed like cheating. It doesn't do all the work for you though, if there's another tank in the raid, you are going to be seeing big spiky plates all over the place - you're still going to have to check them out and look at the threat table to see if the other tank has them or if it's that hunter playing silly buggers again...

Threat plates can also be set to work in reverse if you're DPS, big and spiky means that you've pulled the target and you might want to stop attacking it and Feign Death or something. Small plate means that you can do what you do best - just keep an eye on the threat level, okay?



Oh yeah: 4418. Apparently the Addon That Shall Not Be Named thinks that I can do ToC10 now.



*Exclusions apply. Rachkalos Defense Industries accepts no liability should the information presented not result in the reader becoming "The Best Tank Ever". Exclusions include, but are not restricted to: Failure so setup and use addon correctly, lag, hardware performance issues, mouse turning, incompetence and/or being a gnome.

Meet the Alt...

This is the alt.

He's a Warrior.

His personal interests are: hitting things, getting hit by things and yelling a lot.

His zodiac sign is Scorpio.


Okay, so why the alt? Why another tank?

First of all, this is the first character that I ever rolled in WoW... I figured that since all Warriors have to do is hit things, they should be pretty simple to play, right? A few months of playing him and not having a clue as to what I was doing relegated him to a year in the Honor Hold tavern, in the meantime I rolled a Ret Paladin...

These days I've had a while to experience Death Knight tanking, almost geared up as much as I can do given my current raid progression, so I need something else to do; why not take some time to see how one of the other guys tanks stuff? I kind of know what I'm doing in 5-mans and raids, all I need to do is get my head around a different playstyle and grab some gear!

One thing that everyone will have noticed is that there is a desperate shortage of tanks in the game and I'm trying to figure out why. If you're a DPS and you sign up for a random dungeon in the Dungeon Finder, I hear that you can end up waiting 15-20 minutes for a group - I wouldn't know... if I had to wait 15-20 seconds for a group, I'd be thinking that my computer had crashed. In reality, I'm normally waiting 2-3 seconds for a group. This kind of tells me that there aren't many tanks running randoms these days and why would they? Any established tank just chain-ran random heroics as soon as Patch 3.3 launched, geared up and now only run the one random a day for their Emblems of Frost. These days, it seems like you're far more likely to run into a useless tank and/or a DPS that has decided to equip a shield and pretend to be a tank in order to jump the long queue times.

So, why don't more people roll tanks? It seems like the chance to queue jump and attain massive quantities of gear in such a short time would be incentive enough... apparently not. I think that one problem is that it's fine for running randoms and PuGs, but if you're in a guild, there's only enough space for a limited number of tanks to raid. This isn't a problem if your guild is insistent on rotating tanks in and out, but a lot of the time it's far easier to take your established tanks along because (hopefully!) they'll get the job done - in this type of guild you may never get into the raids, so why bother?

The other reason is that tanking is seen as being a hard thing to do. Not necessarily true - it just requires a different mindset and focus from DPSing. As the Great Tank Philosopher Hafrot once said:

"The difference between being a DPS and a tank is like the difference between being a parent and having a son or a daughter. If you have a son, you only have to worry about one dick in town. If you have a daughter, you have to worry about every dick in town."

Wise words, indeed...

The focus of being a DPS is a very individual thing, getting rotations right in order to maximise your damage output; as a tank you're keeping an eye out for what you're doing, what the monsters are doing, what the floor is trying to do to you as well as what everyone else is doing. If you're not particularly good at DPS, all that tends to happen is that number on Recount isn't as big as the other people's -  fail to tank properly, everyone dies and you get to hear about your lack of tanking skill in no uncertain terms!

So, just to see how long it takes to get a tank raid-worthy, I'm embarking on a little project...

A couple of weeks ago, the Warrior was level 70. Some heirlooms, some questing and the odd random normal dungeon sees him ding 80 a couple of days ago.

Some more dungeon running and a bit of help with a couple of craftable items sees him with a Gearscore of 4049 - that's 36 hours after hitting 80.

Yes, I installed Gearscore... I don't feel good about it, I don't know what the numbers mean and it's getting disabled whenever I don't need it. Unfortunately, it's going to be the easiest way to track my alt's gear accruing progress.

Let's see how long it takes to get a tank ICC10 ready, shall we?

Talking Tank: Reloaded

One of several WoW related podcasts that I listen to is Rawrcast. The hosts, Stompalina and Hafrot - spectacularly amusing in their own right - end up covering a multitude of topics, but raiding and guild leadership are always in there somewhere...

Several months ago, they put together a special edition of the show, entitled "Talking Tank".  Haf was joined by a panel of knowledgeable tanks from the WoW community to explain some of the whys and hows of tanking.

This podcast was the reason that I started tanking.  The research began, the gear was accrued and Rachkalos took his first bewildered steps into Utgarde Keep with his shiny new tank gear and four patient guild members behind him.  It's definitely worth a listen to by everyone that tanks, is thinking of tanking or would simply like to know what goes through the head of your favourite meat-shield (as well as Saurfang's Axe, I mean...).

Recently, the Rawrcast crew got together to record a second special episode on tanking - "Talking Tank: Reloaded". It has just been edited and made available for download; it's getting listened to on the way to work, tomorrow!

The thing that grabbed my attention was the panelist line-up: Haf is joined by Veneretio of TankingTips.com, as well as Lore and Satorri of Tankspot.com fame. Satorri basically wrote the book on Death Knight tanking, which is essential reading so I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

This is one of the few times that I've actually looked forward to driving to work!

Blood Bomb!

Woah!

I didn't see that one coming.

Let's cut to the chase. The (proposed) Death Knight changes in Cataclysm are getting announced tomorrow, but one change was considered to be so big and would threaten to overwhelm all the rest of the changes in a nuclear fireball of a flame-war, that is was released a couple of days early to get people to simmer down a bit and focus on other things as well.

So, what is this change?

Blood is going to be the Death Knight tanking spec in Cataclysm.

I was rather surprised by this, not because people haven't thought that a particular spec could become a tanking spec - they have on many occasions; the reason that I was surprised was that every time that it got mentioned, people would loudly proclaim that Blizzard would never do it and the whole point of the Death Knight class was that Blood, Frost and Unholy were designed to be viable as both DPS and tanking specs.

Here's how tanking specs have worked in Wrath so far: first of all you set up your "unholy trinity" of 5/5/5 (or preferably 5/8/5 if you had any sense), this was absolutely mandatory - no arguments allowed, you don't have these talents and you're not allowed to outside to play with your friends...

After that, you zoom up your tree of choice depending on how you want your tank to work:  High survival with self healing, larger HP pool and excellent cooldowns for Blood, snap AoE aggro and more avoidance for Frost or crazy AoE disease threat and a pet ghoul for Unholy.  You chop and change between your survival and threat generation abilities as well as picking up the odd useful ability from low down in another tree.  The thing that I've liked about Death Knight tanking is the design flexibility, there's no cookie-cutter tanking spec - you pick and choose to match your needs and preferences.

After four years of gameplay, Blizzard tried to introduce a class with a flexible talent tree.  After two years of tweaks, buffs and nerfs, they've thrown in the towel.

There are two obvious reasons for this that I can see:

 The first being the constant nightmare of a balancing act that the designers have obviously had in trying to make everything viable, resulting in drastic changes since the class launch which are then inflicted on the players.  I've heard that coping with these changes has been described as "a challenge".  The end result as of patch 3.3.3 is that if you want to tank end-game content, you go Blood, if you want to blast though 5-man heroics, you go Frost, if you want to have small children stare at you and throw stuff at you, you go Unholy...

The second obvious reason is going to be the Mastery stat that is coming along in Cataclysm.  With Mastery basically making you better at what you do (depending on your main tree specialisation), how do you get it to differentiate between having to do two things at once?  With a pure DPS tree, it's easy - Mastery just makes you better at killing things, a pure tanking tree lets you survive and generate threat better... how on earth do you get Mastery to work with this system?

The answer has finally been revealed:  You can't.

So, whilst we've lost some flexibility and customisation, hopefully we'll have some stability with Blood being the tanking tree, Frost being the Dual-Wield and Runic Power tree and Unholy being the disease and pet tree.

Not that it affects me... I'm a Blood tank and a Dual-Wield DPS Frost offspec anyway...  Unlife continues as normal...