What’s the difference between a good tank and an exceptional one?

Business Time recently went through a lull where it felt like our team was not pulling in the same direction.  It was as if the team was no longer striving to achieve the same objective.  There was laissez faire, an obnoxious aura of accepting less than our best.  The officers met and we decided to meet with everyone one on one and do a review of their performance with notes on where we’d like to see some improvement, whether it be attitude or performance.  The results were good, there was noticeable improvements in the whole team’s performance.

The reason why I bring this up is because as the Tanking Officer, I was asked to review the performance of our little team of three.  So before I could do these reviews, I had to figure out for myself what is our goal.  What do we, as tanks, need to achieve?

We need to aim to be exceptional.

Alright, exceptional is all well and good, but what does that even mean?

I’ve been fortunate to tank with excellent tanks in the past.  Noodlestein and Idkittens were tanks who could turn a complete mess of an attempt and somehow pull a victory even if 7 out of 10 players lay on the ground at the end.  I remember an example of Id’s quick thinking on our first Halfus heroic kill when we had lost all the healers in the last few percents and he activated Slate (not part of the plan) who stunned Halfus just long enough for us to pull a kill.

Those two guys, I would always assign them the toughest jobs because I knew they’d learn it faster than anyone else.  These examples and many others are to me what denotes an exceptional tank.  I often refer to players like these as people who make their class sing.  It’s sheer beauty to behold.  This should be any tank’s goal: To be the one that is always asked to do the toughest jobs.

A good tank will generate solid threat.  He/She will know the fights, know how and when to move the bosses and where to position them.  They will use their cooldowns and communicate well with their teammates.

Where an exceptional tank shines is in the small details that while sometimes not necessary will make the fights smoother and sometimes will change the tide of a battle.  They will be lightning quick on picking up those adds on Rhyolith.  Their dps will be high, contributing favourably to the teams goal of beating an enrage timer.  When not being the active tank, they will switch to berserker stance, drop righteous fury, switch to cat or frost/unholy to help with the new tank gain aggro while still hitting as hard as they can.  As a warrior, you can also intervene the tank you’re taunting off of to lower their threat, maximize their dps and mitigate some damage.  They will be able to kite a boss around a room so fast as to make the healers swear.

The list could go on.  For us, we made ourselves a list of things we wanted to improve.  For one, it was to practice his kiting and his movement as a whole.  He needed to learn not to back up or turn his back to a boss to kite him.  Turn 90 degrees and strafe.  Then go and learn to strafe and change direction while remaining in control at all times.

We all have things to work on.  Even great tanks have things they can improve and I think that is one big thing that separates the greats from the good.  They keep working at it.

As for me, you’ll excuse me but I need to go and tank some pugs.  Is there any better environment where chaos can break any time a hunter misfires?  Raiding feels very controlled in comparison, until it’s not.  And this is when, I hope, that this practice will help.  And maybe, one day, I’ll be closer to being considered an exceptional tank.

Recently in a podcast near you

Summer has come and gone.  This summer was filled with crazy times at work and with a fair amount of raiding to keep the Raid Leader in me sane.  I have continued waging wars on Twitter against the paladins and the Horde in general with belves in particular.  I encourage everyone to find belf pallies and make them your nemesis.  It is quite amusing to remind them that they need a giant yellow ally to be able to tank properly when we do it on our own.

Apart from these wonderful and entertaining distractions, I’ve also been the honoured guest of the Double O podcast twice in the past couple of months.

The first podcast’s topic was Guild Leadership.  The other guest was my own fearless leader, Vidyala from Manalicious.

The second one was also about one of my favorite topics: Tanking.  Ophelie and Oestrus organized a round table with a tank from every class.

I had a lot of fun participating and I hope that you’ll be able to find some useful information other than the fact that I have a horrible accent.

Tanking Basics

The Call to Arms changes to the Looking for Dungeon tool have encouraged many to give tanking a try.  Since many of these new tanks have had little experience in that role,  I think a post about the basics of tanking is needed.  In this post, I’ll go through the different parts of tanking:

• The tactical review of the fight
• The pull
• Generating threat
• Tools to help

Tactical review

The first thing that a tank needs to do for each encounter is assess the opposing group in terms of their composition. Are the mobs casters, melee or ranged?

The easiest by far to tank are melee creatures.  Just say hi to them (shooting/throwing something at them) and they’ll come towards you.  Charge one of them and the others will mass around you.  Like I said, very simple.  The second easiest is a caster.  Casters will try to fight you where they stand but this is where investing 2 points in the talent Gag Order is worth it.  Simply throw your weapon at them (Heroic throw) or go to them, pummel one of their cast and see them trying to melee you for the next few seconds.  The real threat is archers.  These cannot be interrupted, silenced, or anything.  You have two recourse then: Crowd Control or Line of Sight.

The next thing to see is the location of those mobs.  What are the obstacles that you could use to break line of sight? Are there patrols that come in the vicinity?

To tank is to do this analysis for every pull.  You need to quickly assess an encounter and put together a tactic for it.  Even a lowly trash encounter can easily overwhelm a group if the casters are left to target the healer, or worse, if a patrol joins the fray.

The Pull

Now this to me is the real fun part of tanking. As a warrior, you have the following tools to start a fight:

• Heroic Throw – Generates a good amount of threat and if talented, silences casters and forces them to come towards you.
• Shooting/Throwing – Generates a tiny amount of threat, mainly used to just get the mob’s attention. Very useful before having the talent Warbringer if you don’t fancy Stance dancing.
• Taunt – Ok, never ever use taunt to start a fight. The most uncertain time in a fight is right after the pull when your aggro is tenuous. This is when you might need your taunt to do what it’s meant for, taunt back from an overzealous dps.
• Charge/Heroic Leap – This is the trademark pull for the warrior.  Puts you in melee range right away so you can start building up aggro.
• Facepulling – Just move close enough, it will make them attack you. After the taunt pull, this is the worst way to pull as a warrior as you start the fight with almost no rage to work with.

See? Even the casters run during a Line of Sight pull. Voss is well hidden in the corner there after using Heroic Throw to pull. Technically, I should be turned towards them and not facing the corner...

Pulling by throwing your weapon, shooting, etc.

The simplest version of this pull is simply target a mob and shoot at it.  The melee mobs will come to you while the others start attacking from range which can create a mess very quickly. It works only with a group that’s all melee or with one caster if you use heroic throw and have the talent gag order to silence him and force him to run towards you.

Line of Sight pull

This is one of the best technique out there.  You shoot/throw something at a mob and then break line of sight by using the top of the stairs or a wall. The enemies will need to go up the stairs/go around that wall to get to you.  It groups them all up in one neat pile for you to AoE.  It works on all types of enemies, be they archers, casters or melee.  The one thing that makes this a success is for you to inform your group of your intentions so that there is no healing (unless the healer is behind the tank) and no dps until the enemies are where you need them to be.  Communication is always important when tanking, but in the case of the Line of Sight pull, it’s not even an option.

Note: Lara at Root and Branch has a great series of primers (Primer and Intermediate) about threat which include diagrams for Line of Sight pulls and a plethora of other useful information.  I strongly encourage you to go and give it a read!

Pulling with a charge

There are a few ways of doing this:

The classic charge – Pick a target, click charge.

The charge and turn charge. – This one is a bit more complicated. You basically jump up before the end of your charge and while in the air, you mouse turn 180 degrees.  You should now be behind your target, facing it. Your target will turn to face you and thus have its back to the melee dps running to join the fight.

Combining the styles

What truly will make you a pulling master is to combine the pulls mentioned above.  There’s the:

Throw a weapon/run away/charge

This technique uses a simple thrown weapon to grab the enemies’ attention. Then turn and run away, forcing even the caster and archers to run after you as you move out of their range.  Finally, turn back and charge them when they’re where you want them to be.

This works especially well when you cannot line of sight the enemies but do not want to fight them where they stand because of possible patrols.

Line of sight/charge

This one is very simple.  You line of sight the enemies but strafe away from the corner.  When the enemies turn the corner, charge in.  You have them where you wanted them and you got the rage bonus from the charge.  Simply awesome!

And here they are, all grouped up in range of all of your attacks. They'll stick to you until the end now.

Generating Threat

This one is pretty simple, most of what you do will generate threat, even using battle shout. How to generate the maximum amount of threat is fairly linear.

For a single target pull, Shield Slam.  Early and often. Revenge on cooldown, devastate to push your three sunders.  After that, I’d say it depends on your group.  I most often run with groups with incredible dps and so I need to keep generating threat as much as possible.  When you have a small cushion, you should use demoralizing shout and Thunderclap and keep those debuffs up.

For a multiple target pull, I most often thunderclap while still running, position the mobs quickly and then hit shockwave to lock them in place. I then apply rend and thunderclap again and spam cleave when the rage is available.  You should of course distribute shield slams, devastates and revenge while switching target to solidify your aggro, but cleave and thunderclap (especially if you are talented into blood and thunder) should be able to keep the group on you.

Tools to help with tanking

Vigilance – While technically it’s not a tool but one of your abilities, it’s very important to put it on the dps that seems to have more threat than the others.  It’s a free taunt and some vengeance when he gets hit, always useful.

Tidy Plates – It replaces the nameplates with its own custom version. It’s incredibly useful as you can configure it to show you which enemies is casting, about to run to a dps or is already hacking away at one of the other melee.  I would say that most raid tanks are now using this or something similar to it.

The green circle shows an enemy on which I have the primary aggro. The Yellow circle shows one where Vidyala had the most threat. It's an easy visual way to see if you have complete control of the group or if any enemies are slipping.

Omen or Skada – You need to know how much cushion you have on the next person on the threat scale.

A Heads-up Display – This one is optional but I personally love to have information about my enemy right in my field of view.  I know many tanks use IceHud but others prefer a cleaner interface.  The main thing to remember is you need to customize your interface to how you like to play and what challenges you are currently tackling.  You need to remember though that the tank needs to be able to react very quickly to additional mobs coming in battle, a patrol, etc.  And so whatever you do with your display, make sure that it’s clean enough for you to have an excellent view of the battle.

Conclusion

The only real way to get better at this is to practice a lot. Get some guildies to go with you or even go and solo lower level instances and practice.  Try out the line of sights, the pull and charge.

One thing I did not talk about today is the importance of crowd control.  I’ll keep that part for another post but try to get to know the different types of crowd control present in your group and use them.

Hope this little post can help out.  Have fun and good luck!

Why should you play a warrior? (Edited and reposted)

Edit: This is a repost with some edits of my first post at Sword and Board. This is the first of a series of posts focusing squarely on the warrior in Cataclysm.  I will go through the basics all the way to current raiding levels.

Wrath of the Lich King is where, to me, the protection warrior really came into its own.  Mind you, my experience with the game started only a few months before the end of the Burning Crusade and thus I cannot relate to prior versions.  I leveled this first character as a protection warrior teamed up with first a priest and then a mage.  Leveling was slow, the amount of damage I could generate was quite laughable as I was reminded of once when I went to PvP as Protection.  The tauren shaman just looked at me, proceeded to wipe out my colleagues and even took the time to laugh at me before leaving me, alive, unharmed but properly dishonoured.

The Wrath of the Lich King patch changed this dramatically.  No longer were we the indestructible peashooters of old.  We were now juggernauts of raw, unstoppable power!  Even raiding at the end of the expansion changed dramatically.  One did not have to respec to complete puny dailies; you could do it as a tank using tank skills, gather the enemies and grind them down using our impressive arsenal of tricks.  I leveled as protection in Wrath of the Lich King and the experience was completely different from my first 70 levels.

A juggernaut of unstoppable power!

On our old server, a protection warrior was first to reach 80 and it was no surprise to me.  I was the first in our guild to achieve this new plateau.  I have been tanking every encounter available in this expansion since.  Some patches were quite disappointing, others were like candy.  Tank classes went up and down.  Through it all, the warrior remained a solid choice: never being the worst but also never the favourite.  In Cataclysm, the warrior has been strong while not really being on top except for a little while at the beginning when our cleave was simply devastating and has since been nerfed.

I have tried a few other classes in the meantime with only the Death Knight making it to 80 and going on to become a Kingslayer.  The DK was fun and each class has their strengths and weaknesses (yes, even pallies, my old nemesis).  They were interesting but they always seemed to be lacking something.  I’ll try to explain now what is so wonderful about the warrior with a specific focus on the protection warrior.

The Mobility

The warrior has unmatched mobility in the field.  The protection warrior (through the talent Warbringer) does not only have the ability to charge – it can also intercept an enemy or intervene back to a raid member.  I would suggest that this is really what defines a warrior tank.  They feel fast.  Suppose a patrol comes in behind your healer; just charge at them, thunderclap, and then intercept back to your original group.  The other tanking classes have tools to do something similar. Death Knights can put Death and Decay at a distance to get the attention of the new pack, and pallies can throw their shields.  Yes, any of those would work, but they could never feel as active as the warrior’s technique.

Our Tools

For many new players, the warrior feels overwhelming.  I use about 36 buttons to control all of my abilities.  When changing stances, it will add even more to the number.  It is a wonderful challenge to master them.  For me, the iconic raid instance showing the raw power of the warrior tank is Trial of the Crusader.  No one else could stun lock any mob like the warrior can.

The other fight in this instance that showcased the warrior’s abilities was the last fight against Anub’Arak.  No, the fun part of the fight was not fighting Anub himself.  It was fighting the adds – those giant ants that spawned on often opposite sides of the room.  Who better to pick those up than a warrior using his charge?  That same warrior could then control the adds and stop their shadow strike by stunning them with shockwave

Here are some of our tools:

• Shield Slam (Massive damage plus dispell on effect from the target)
• Concussion Blow (Nice little stun)
• Pummel (10 second interrupt. Can be talented to silence)
• Heroic Throw (talented to silence)
• Shockwave (Our best tool for stunning targets. Conal effect, unlimited number of targets, 4 seconds stun)
• Charge/intercept/intervene
• Intimidating Shout (Mass fear)
• Piercing Howl (Mass slow)
• Spell Reflection (Ask a mage or warlock how they like this one in PvP)
• Heroic Leap (A 45 yard charge including thunderclap)

Again, keeping track of them all is not the easiest.  The warrior even came with his own fear breaking ability.  Who can ask for more?

The Rage

Now this will sound bizarre for most as the rage is one of the things warriors complain about the most.  The tank starts a fight with nothing to fuel his abilities?  Yes, it can be as bad as it sounds.  Having a pack of new enemies charging your group as you stand there, not enough rage to thunderclap, no range to charge, berserker rage on cooldown, shouts on cooldown…  No, not fun at all.  This also makes the warriors a rather poor off-tank when he’s not receiving damage.  No damage means little rage and so your dps is very limited (It is much better in Cataclysm with the advent of Vengeance and getting extra rage when hitting something that is not targeting you).  But the warrior is also the only tank who actually becomes stronger as a fight goes on.  Once that rage bar is close to full, heroic strikes come in and its aggro generation is quite remarkable.  To me, the rage that many consider an issue, is actually another great challenge, a tactical puzzle to figure out for each fight.

Other reasons

I could go on and on about other reasons why the warrior is the best class out there but I think the main reason is it’s a very active and complex playstyle.  It’s definitely not for everyone.  I raid with some tanks who actually have the time to chat while tanking.  To a warrior, this is almost impossible to fathom as every global cooldown is important which is probably a reason why protection warriors seem to have a reputation as being all business.  Or it could just be me.

Halfus Wyrmbreaker

How to win

(in one paragraph)

Halfus is harder to explain than he is to kill.  Select a drake killing order, kill the drakes, beat the enrage timer, …, profit!

Basic Instructions

Each week, you will have a different set of 3 drakes to deal with (inactive drakes have a stun-animation over their head). Each drake gives Halfus an ability, and when released, will apply a unique debuff to Halfus before attacking you.  You have choose which order to release the drakes in.

	Buff/Ability	Debuff	Notes
Slate Dragon	Halfus stacks a healing debuff on his target.	Periodically stuns halfus.	Low release priority. Switch tanks at 6-8 stacks.
Nether Scion	Doubles Halfus’s attack speed.	Greatly reduces Halfus’s damage output.	High release priority, especially when combined with Slate Dragon.
Time Warden	Proto-behemoth shoots fireballs at raid members.	Fireballs slow down, become dodge-able.	Medium release priority – raid damage is heal-able.
Storm Rider	Halfus casts Shadow Nova.	Doubles the cast time of Shadow Nova.	High release priority.  Shadow Nova must be interrupted.
Emerald Whelps	Proto-behemoth breathes on the raid.	Decreases breath damage.	Medium release priority – raid damage is heal-able.

Releasing each drake also causes Halfus to take more damage.  Since the fight has a tight enrage timer, you will always want to release all three drakes.  The fight proceeds like this:

• Engage Halfus.  Immediately release your first drake.  Burn it down ASAP.
• Release and burn the second drake.
• Release and tank the third drake.  DPS focuses on Halfus now.
• Below 50% health, Halfus periodically chain-stuns the raid. If Shadow Nova is in play, someone must always break the last stun and interrupt it.

Continue reading for more specifics…

The nerf that was needed

The expansion has now been around for a month.  Can you believe it?  It’s only been 36 days since that very cold night stuck standing outside EBGames (Gamestop for you Americans).  How have you been enjoying your expansion so far?

I’m still of two minds about the expansion but one thing I’m definitely clear about is that the Protection Warrior is OP; and no, not just the players in this case.

I remember back before Cataclysm came out, patch 4.03 nerfed us by a good huge percentage.  We were not happy with the change but there had been reports that with proper gear, we were outdpsing our DPS in raid instances on the beta.  So the nerf came and made our levelling rather slow.  My first instances were not the most enjoyable either.  Threat was a bit of an issue and our damage was low.  The Death Knights in our group were doing much better at the time especially with their overpowered self healing.

Oh how things have changed! The warrior, like a fine wine or our almost limitless rage bar, gets better with age and mostly, with better gear.  I believe my gear is now about iLevel 350 and the difference is enough to make our guild dps have rage bars of their own.

I’ll give you a couple of examples:

- In Bastion of Twilight.  The first trash pull, I did 21k dps, leading the raid in damage done.

- On our Valiona kill, I was doing 11k dps.  40% of that damage was heroic strike.

- I would rarely use Inner Rage and instead kept the rage to be able to spam Cleave and Heroic Strike.

A nerf was most definitely needed and it’s coming with 4.0.6.  Here are the current patch notes:

Warriors

• Charge now shares diminishing returns with stun effects.
• Cleave damage has been reduced by 20%.
• Hamstring now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
• Heroic Strike damage has been reduced by 20%.
• Inner Rage has been redesigned. It now reduces the cooldown on Heroic Strike and Cleave by 50% (to 1.5 second) for the next 15 seconds. 1-minute cooldown. It still cannot be used during Deadly Calm. This ability was originally designed to help warriors with rage capping, but the Heroic Strike and rage normalization changes seem to have solved that problem on their own. This new design will still allow warriors to burn off excess rage faster, at their discretion.
• Slam cast time is now affected by haste.

• Talent Specializations
  
• Arms
  • Juggernaut no longer increases the cooldown on Charge, but instead increases the duration of the Charge stun by 2 seconds. In addition, Charge is usable in all stances, however, the talent now causes Charge and Intercept to share a cooldown.
  • Lambs to the Slaughter: Instead of granting 10/20/30% damage to the next Mortal Strike, Overpower, or Execute, it now grants a 10% buff to any Mortal Strike, Overpower, Slam, or Execute that stacks 1/2/3 times.
  • War Academy no longer buffs Heroic Strike or Cleave. It now buffs Mortal Strike, Raging Blow, Devastate, Victory Rush and Slam.
• Fury
  • Bloodthirst damage has been increased by approximately 30%.
  • Raging Blow weapon damage percent (at level 80+) has been increased from 110% to 145%.
  • Unshackled Fury (Mastery) now grants 5.6% benefit per mastery point, up from 4.7%.
• Protection
  • Charge’s stun continues to not trigger diminishing returns for Protection warriors who have the Warbringer talent.
• Glyphs
  • Glyph of Rapid Charge has been changed from a 7% reduction to Charge’s cooldown, to 1 second off of the cooldown. This change is primarily to clarify the exact cooldown reduction this glyph provides.

At first glance, I think this looks good.  Reducing the damage by 20% and further reducing it by removing the buff from War Academy seems to be the correct way to go.  We’ll need to see the results from the PTR but I think this should bring our damage back in line with the other tanks.

I also like the changes to War Academy which will now buff Devastate and Victory Rush.  It might be time to see if Impending Victory is worth its cost.

The only change I’m dubious about is the change to Inner Rage.  Granted that I was rarely using it now, just reducing the cooldown on Heroic Strike and Cleave, meh.  Will it be enough?  One thing for sure, Heroic Strike and Cleave are staying on my mouse wheel!

Magmaw

How to win 

(in one paragraph)

Add management is the hardest part of this fight – master that and you win.

Basic Instructions

Phase 1

• Dodge flame pillars. If you stack all but one player up with the melee dps, that player can control flame pillar placement.
• Snare, kite, and optionally kill the groups of worms. AOE snares are your friend.
• Run out of half-the-room fire breaths.  If stacking on the melee, return to your original position once the breath is over.

Transition

• Magmaw will chew on the tank – heal through it.
• Two (25 man: 3) melee dps should ‘board’ his head (it’s a vehicle) as soon as possible and throw chains (the vehicle’s only ability) at the spike on the ground in front of him. Do this until you are kicked out of the vehicle and enter phase 2.

Phase 2

• Dps Magmaw’s head as fast as possible.  Save all cooldowns, including Heroism, for this phase.
• Switch tanks when he returns to phase 1 – the chew-toy will have an armor debuff.

Continue reading for more specifics…