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.

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.

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!

The end of casual instancing

Cataclysm happened a bit more than a week ago and strangely enough, it is leaving me feeling of two minds about it.  I find the world to be superbly done.  The quests have never been better.  The humour found in many of them, the raw emotions of some of the NPCs make for a delight of a time.

Now, for people who know me, these above comments will sound very strange.  I hate levelling.  I do not alt.  I do not quest.  I have levelled a total of two characters to max level in 31 months and one of them is a DK.  I have never enjoyed this part of the game and yet this time, I feel like I want to achieve loremaster of Cataclysm.

If I strongly disliked the above, I completely and truly loved tanking.  Whether it was in instances or in raids, I never really felt as happy in this world as when I was getting my face smashed in.  Somehow, this too feels like it is changing.

I have run every single instance on normal and a few of the heroics.  The instancing world has changed.  Gone are the days of the heroic quickie.  These new instances take a long long time to finish.  I actually don’t mind it being harder even though they do feel harder than they did when I started heroics in BC.  Trash does matter and I love the challenge.  I’m using shield wall on most pulls where we can’t CC enough mobs and I’m truly enjoying this.

What I do not enjoy is the sheer length of them.  I loved in Wrath that I could, even at the beginning, start an instance and be done within 45 minutes to an hour.  Now, it feels like I might have a much harder time doing even a heroic daily on week nights.  The longest instance in Wrath was Old Kingdom which even at the beginning would take about an hour on heroic.  Even that long instance would allow you to have time to do your jewelcrafting daily, some other dailies, some mining, etc.  It allowed you to do other things in the game than just instancing and raiding.

Let’s compare this with Halls of Origination or as I like to call it now, HoO Crap.  Even on normal, it will take an hour easy.  Now the instance is beautiful, the fights are different and challenging.  But why does it have to be so damn long?

I like that trash matters again and I don’t think that there’s too much or too little of it.  The problem is when each trash pack can take 2-3 minutes compared to the 30 seconds of Wrath, it lengthens the instance quite a bit.

I’m guessing that by giving even the weakest of trash so many hit points, they’re future proofing the instances which won’t become a zerg fest even when the DPS reach 20k on average.  But now?

I try to play about two hours at most on non raid nights.  At this point, I’m having a hard time fitting in a heroic run without risking running late and not sleeping enough.  The challenge is great.  The time sink is not.

Well that’s a kick in the codpiece!

I was working on a new post about professions for tanks but it will have to wait.

The release notes for patch 4.03 are out and they’re none too tender with warriors.  Now, I know that I keep saying how great we are but to be honest, I thought we were simply in a good spot, pretty much on par with Pallies and DKs.  Then this dropped on our head:

Warrior

• Cleave damage has been reduced by approximately 17%.
• Execute damage has been reduced by approximately 17%.
• Heroic Strike damage has been reduced by approximately 17%.
• Overpower now does 125% weapon damage, down from 150%.
• Rend base damage has been reduced by approximately 17% and percent of weapon damage per tick lowered to 25%, from 30%.
• Shield Block now only increases block chance by 25%, but excess block that pushes avoidance plus block to over 100% is now converted to critical block chance.
• Slam now costs 15 rage, down from 20, and now does 125% weapon damage, down from 150%.
• Victory Rush damage has been reduced by approximately 17%.
• Whirlwind now does 65% weapon damage, down from 75%.

Arms

• Mortal Strike now does 150% weapon damage, down from 185%.
• Second Wind now heals for 2/5% of total health, down from 5/10%.
• Strikes of Opportunity now does 100% weapon damage, down from 115%.

Fury

• Blood Craze now heals for 1/2/3% of total health, down from 2.5/5/7.5%.
• Bloodthirst damage has been reduced by approximately 17%.
• Raging Blow now does 110% weapon damage, down from 150%.
• Unshackled Fury now gains approximately 50% more benefit per point of Mastery.

Protection

• Critical Block now grants an equal amount of block chance and critical block chance (1.5% each per point of Mastery).
• Devastate no longer provides bonus threat.
• Shield Slam: Contribution of attack power reduced to 60%, down from 75%, and base damage brought up so that a level 85 warrior in Heroic dungeon gear deals the same damage with no Vengeance, but Vengeance has less impact. In addition, Shield Slam no longer generates 30% bonus threat from its damage.
• Vigilance no longer provides 3% damage reduction, but still refreshes Taunt and provides Vengeance.

I’m sorry, but are you kidding me?

I’ll focus on the Protection Warrior part as this is the topic of this blog.  I just finished doing Heroic Lich King twice and Business Time had decided that we were done with ICC and were now just raiding to hang out or get one more Warhorse out of TotGC.  I’m glad that we’re done now as it would have been quite difficult to do it after this patch.

In phase 1 of our H LK fights, I was tanking the Horrors and Ghouls.  Since the number of enemies to tank was quite large, I was using Cleave continuously to supplement Thunderclap and Shockwave.  I still lost a lot of Ghouls to healer aggro that had to be taunted back.  This is a nerf to our AoE threat.  Warriors were never the AoE kings so that hurts.  Also, those who used the Blood and Thunder Talent are also having their Rend effect nerfed.

For single targets, I am quite happy that Shield Slam will no longer be so dependant on Vengeance but again, I thought we were in a good place single target threat wise.  I am also not a fan of baked in threat bonus so I’m happy it’s going away but I am concerned about keeping that threat up if there is no compensation on the damage side for the lost threat.

I usually try to be positive about changes but you must admit that this one is a hard one to be positive about.  If we had been dominating (Like Fury Warriors), I would agree that a nerf was needed but this doesn’t feel warranted except if they were seeing huge discrepancies on the Beta at 85.

This is my gut feel reaction so I could be wrong and I’ll be doing some more research to be sure.  Right now, it sure feels like taking a mace blow in the codpiece.

But why on Azeroth would I play a warrior tank?

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 favorite.

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.  At the time, we had the following stuns or interrupts:

• Concussion Blow
• Shield Bash
• Heroic Throw (talented to silence)
• Shockwave
• Charge
• Intercept
• Revenge (Since then it has been changed to no longer stun the target)
• Pummel (if you actually decided to change stance in all of this)
• Intimidating Shout

Again, keeping track of them all was not the easiest, but in the hands of someone who knew the class well, that gave you one less target to worry about.  The warrior even came with his own fear breaking ability.  Who could ask for more?

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.

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…  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.  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.