TankingTips.com

One of the great things about the standard Blizzard UI is the portraits given to your toon. Back in TBC, what I liked to do was show my helm for one gear set, my cloak for another and neither for a third. It made it easy to tell what set of gear I was in and as a result, I never found myself accidentally running into an encounter unprepared.

These days though, I never show my helm.

During our Blood Queen progress on Sunday, I noticed an interesting phenomenon between myself and my offtank. Whenever Blood Queen flew into the air, I’d position myself exactly where I was tanking Blood Queen and my offtank would run behind me about 10 yards and up the stairs. (You have to spread out during this portion of the encounter) It didn’t matter whether a slow reaction to fear left us in a less than ideal setup to accomplish this, we still did it.

Why this struck me as odd is that we never talked about this.

We just did it.

For those of you that having been living under a virtual rock for the better part of this expansion, GearScore is a wildly popular add-on that does exactly what it says. It gives you a score based on your gear. The better you gear is, the higher your score is.

It’s also probably the most hated add-on on the market right now too.

Which kinda confuses me…

Rewind back to the beginning of this expansion before GearScore was widely use, how did you get into a pug? You needed an achievement. Not just any achievement, but the very achievement that the run itself would have given you. So, if you hadn’t done the run before, you couldn’t do the run. Kind of ridiculous.

Looking back on our Putricide10 man kill, I’m reminded of a number of mistakes that I made while we went through the learning process. This fight really is an excellent example of a fight where small subtle choices you make can have huge implications.

1. Erratic Boss Movement
There’s no avoiding it… you’re going to have to move bosses sometimes. However, how you do it can make a big difference. If you can develop a rhythm from one attempt to the next then DPSers will pick up on the manner in which you do it and adjust accordingly. Make no mistake a tank with an inconsistent rhythm reduces raid DPS a shockingly high amount. If you’ve ever wondered why PuGs seem to fail even with competent players or your raid fails with a different tank, this is one of the reasons.

Changes in this patch for us:

• Concussion Blow: The damage done by this ability has been reduced by 50%, but its threat generation will remain approximately the same.
• Devastate: This ability now deals 120% of weapon damage, up from 100% of weapon damage.
• Shield Slam: The damage scaling from block value for this ability now diminishes faster and diminishes starting at a lower block value. The difference should be negligible for players in high-end tanking armor. In addition, the threat caused by Shield Slam has been increased by 30%.