8 Posts on Tanking that I’ll probably never write
The following 8 topics I really felt warranted their own individual posts, but the reality is that I’ll probably never get around to properly researching and writing them so instead I’m just going to outline some points, maybe rant a little, and mostly just use my gut instinct to discuss each topic.
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How do I increase my threat?
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How do you determine which mobs get CCd and kill order?
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Gift of Arthas: A Hidden Gem
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The Perfect Taunt Macro you thought you’d never need.
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3 Great Ways to use Focus Macros
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Set bonuses?
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Who should Pull?
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Strafe Tanking + that horrible 2nd Boss in Heroic Mech.
Expertise > Hit > Block Value. You’ll do the most threat with 5 sunders up. Shield Slam as much as possible. If you aren’t waiting for the global cooldown then you aren’t using your abilities fast enough. Heroic Strike is a rage dump, don’t over use it.
Most pulls worth talking about seem to be 4 mobs. These pulls can often contain a mobs that heal, fear, seduce, mind control, mana burn and any number of other bad abilities that you don’t want going off even once. A given pull usually won’t have more than 2 mobs that can do anything especially bad. So kill one of them first and CC the other. The rest of the pull is best left for 2nd on the kill priority b/c they’ll be lackies that at worst have a cleave but generally aren’t going to disrupt the control of your character or the positioning of your group. If you trust the player CCing, it’s always best to CC mobs that fear. If you don’t or your CC is less reliable like sap, trap or seduce then it’s always best to kill the mob that can fear first.
Some additional notes by me regarding a Caster, Melee, Healer 3 pull situation @ Tankspot.com
I’ve read a lot of talk about how much this elixir improves dps. The reality is that it seems to get resisted a lot. On any fight where it’s a dps race and your survival really isn’t going to be an issue then it’s probably worth it. If it’s a hard hitting bosses though I’d rather stick to flasks and elixirs that keep me alive.
/cast [button: 1] taunt
/stopattack [button: 2]
/cast [buttom: 2] taunt
Basically the macro was for clickers so that if you left clicked on taunt it taunted a mob normally. If you right clicked the macro then it taunted, but turned off your auto-attack. The idea behind this is that if crowd control breaks you should be able to taunt it onto you until it can be CCed again without worrying about auto-attacking and breaking the CC that could come at the exact same time. In practice, the situations where this was useful didn’t arise enough for me to develop the habit of using it and ultimately I found that I could just as easily do it the way I was used to with pre-emptively turning off auto-attack then pressing taunt.
I’ve always wanted to try to utilize focus macros to make multi-target tanking easier, but I never found a way of implementing it that I liked. There are some good ones out there that cycle between two mobs, but it still felt a little limiting for my taste. The other part was going to be a really fancy intervene macro that you could left click to intervene as usual or right click to intervene the early you’d set up as your focus, but I found that it was just as easy to type in the name of the healer into my intervene macro for the instance not to mention this idea of right clicking buttons just never has sat well with him. (I’m kind of a hybrid player that’ll sometimes click and sometimes use the keyboard to use an ability)
The Bold set’s set bonuses aren’t good enough to warrant not using epics. Tier 4’s 2 piece is hardly anything to go home and tell mom about and it’s pointless to even speculate about the 4 piece because 4 piece of Tier 4 is simply not a strong way to gear yourself. The 2 piece set bonus of Tier 5 seems nice, but it’s really starting to conflict with new Badge of Justice and Zul’Aman loot. Ultimately, don’t worry about set bonuses. Determine the value of your tanking gear based on an individual item basis and treat the set bonuses (this is going to be truly revolutionary…) as a bonus. (okay it wasn’t)
Just do the pulling yourself unless you have to worry about line of sighting something a very, very long way or that the particular group of mobs might run up and 1 shot before CC is applied. In those cases, a hunter misdirecting is worth it. (hopefully you have one on hand you can trust)
Just do laps around the outside of the little bowl. The key to this strat is strafing while you tank the boss rather than backing up (which is very slow) or running forwards (which makes generating any significant amount of threat nearly impossible). Strafing while you tank something can be a little disorienting at first, but it’ll allow you to move at full run speed and attack the mob. (which means you can Shield Slam, Devastate, Revenge the mob too) Basically, it’s a technique that every tank needs to be able to do.
Anyway that’s the mess of them. Feel free to add your two cents too and let me know if you’d like to see this kind of post again in the future.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
How bout a post about not taunting off your up and coming off-tank because you have an inferiority complex?
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November 29th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
What is “strafe”?
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November 29th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Strafing is moving sideways to the left or right. The default keyboard setup of wasd uses q and e for your strafe keys.
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November 29th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Although I think a lot of people re-map strafe to A and D because keyboard turning sucks :-). Plus it frees up Q and E to remap to other abilities if you want, personally my action bar hotkeys go 1 2 3 4 5 E Z X Q 0.
Speidel, agree completely. I’m an up and coming tank in my guild, but honestly, I’ve tanked Curator, so it’s a little insulting when the MT taunts trash off me, I feel like I’m a child being patted on the head.
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November 30th, 2007 at 6:48 am
Hey Talisman,
I was kinda of just making a joke at Vene cuz he does it to me, and it really isn’t a problem to me (But Vene actually does a really good job IMO of spreading out tanking assignments). But I can understand why you feel that way. Like, I’m kind of at the point now as an OT where I’m relatively close to Vene in gear. So now that I run Kara as the MT and bring an OT with me, I try not to taunt trash off of him.
But, that being said, there’s a few reasons to do it. 1. The MT can usually build threat faster. 2. The MT requires less healing.
If it’s a really hard hitting mob or something, and it looks like the OT is having a little trouble, then I’ll taunt. I don’t do it trying to make a statement of “You’re not a good enough tank for this.” It’s more to just put less strain on everyone.
What I’ve been doing lately is this: I try to let my OT do as much as possible. I keep my eyes on his health a lot. And if he start to get low, I’ll intervene him, and that’s it. I’ll almost always put myself on the first kill target so that he has plenty of time to generate threat. I try to do most of the work on the untauntable trash mobs, because you can’t generate much threat if you don’t have aggro, and if that mob breaks free, either by OT death or just people passing in threat, then it can be devastating to the raid.
I dunno, I understand that you want to show that you’re capable of tanking things like trash mobs, but I wouldn’t get offended by being taunted off of. It just makes things go smoother. And in an environment where you’re spending a few hours doing something, you want there to be as little difficulty as possible. But if it’s really a problem too you, just talk to your MT. Let him know you want to try tanking the trash mobs, because frankly, you only learn how to tank by actually doing it.
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November 30th, 2007 at 8:21 am
My OT is often my pally bf…he can handle himself…there is really no sense is pissing each other off over tanking. XD But even so…if you’re MTing a lot people probably think you’re aleady BAMF, no reason to flex your muscles and upset someone who is trying to learn and do their job.
Good post, Vene. As far as focus macros go…I think as long as you keep your eyes open for strays and your DPS focus fires it never seems to be an issue.
I think multi-mob tanking as a warrior is something that takes a lot of practice and doing it the old fashioned way is good practice. /nod
I just use:
/a
/cast Intervene
Me and my GM argue about pulls a lot… I think for me, any fight before some of the ones in TK and SSC the tanks should always pull. We argued for the longest time about the Mag trash…the mobs that just never want to be tanked and DC and fear if you don’t have like 10x more threat than everyone else. XD He kept trying to misdirect to the tanks and I told him it would work a lot better if he let at least the tank for the first kill target to pull them up the ramp…he finally started doing that the other day and it works soooo much better.
The healers create too much threat from healing just one volley that its really not worth trying to misdirect. Blah, I’m ranting, my point is, let the tank pull…it makes everything so much easier and the tank should be learning to work quickly on his/her own anyway.
My advice to all tanks: use Intercept, Concussion Blow and War Stomp (if you have it) liberally. Not only is it incredibly effective if you’re good at it, but it makes you look stylish too.
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December 4th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Stunning a mob is almost never a good idea. I get extremely angry when a rogue cheap shots a mob that I just pulled and starts attacking it as well. Congratulations, in those 3 seconds the mob is stunned, I don’t take a single hit, and I can’t get any threat generating ability off because I have no rage. Now either you pull or the priest healer who cast renew on me just pulled.
My advice to all tanks: don’t use intercept, concussion blow or war stomp liberally unless a mob is casting some ability that you can’t shield bash due to it being on cooldown.
Sometimes I other classes would understand how difficult our job can be.
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December 4th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Yea, it’s pretty annoying when rogues stun mobs right off the bat, but I like to look at it as a challenge. It’s how quick can you generate threat? It’s no different than pulling a mob and having like your first 3 attacks dodged or parried. This is where using all of your tools comes into play.
I think that concussion blow is one of the best tools at my disposal. It has so many different uses and a liveable cooldown. Hydrix, you seem to think that concussion blow is used mostly for interrupting spells and whatnot, whereas I feel that’s what I least use it for. It is a life saver for multi mob pulls. CC breaks and heads for a healer, or one of the extra mobs your tanking gets free. I like to conc. blow the loose mob, throw a little more threat onto the main target, then go back and taunt it for full time tanking. Either that, or allow it to be re-CC’d.
Another great use for it is to simply lighten the healing load. On those pulls in heroic SP where there’s those 2 un-CC’able that hit hard, I like to stun the off target about 2 seconds into the pull. This is when I throw down thunderclap and demo shout, so when he comes out of stun it’s easier to heal through.
Intercept is very hard to use effectively in regular tanking duties. Loss of rage, and increased damage taken is never a good thing. But if you’re not using it on the 4th boss of Mech, I feel sorry for your dead DPSers. We also use it on Gruul to get back into melee range during ground slam. It’s very situational, but like Tara said, when used, it awards HUGE style points.
I did a heroic with a semi-pug who was using vent. And i stunned the last mob of the pull and ran ahead and pulled the next group and threw up targets as they ran at me. One guy says “Wow, this tank is bad ass…” Made my day
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December 4th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Concussion Blow is definitely an amazing tanking ability, but I have to agree that Intervene has largely replaced Intercept’s uselessness for tanking.
Another thing I really like to do though is Intercept over to a mob that fears since I’m going to have to preemptively use Berserker Rage already.. I might as well get there faster and look cool doing it. (example: Champions in SP)
I don’t agree with Speidel about taking the Rogue’s opening with stuns as a challenge. If I’m on a pug, my challenge is to get them to learn how to play their class. If I’m on a guild run or with a rogue I know won’t change, I’m simply never going to run with them again. There are challenges and then there are unnecessary challenges.
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December 4th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I have fun with those cheap shotting rogues. If they manage to pull off me after the stun wears off, I /t not to heal him, let him die and explain why that happened. Generally they don’t do it again, at least from what I see when i tank heroics with them. Or if it’s a guildie that does it I yell furiously at them to fix them, since being an Officer in a guild it kinda falls as a responsibility to help people L2P
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December 5th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Spedil I think you missed my point. I know there are situations when stunning a mob IS a good idea, but generally, I won’t use it unless it’s certain situations that call for it.
In heroic SL, the mobs in the room with the first boss will continuously dispell each others sheep, so if I have 3 of them CC’ed I’ll stun the one I’m tanking so that it reduces the number of times they will actually dispell.
I also use intercept liberally when I need to get back to a mob as soon as possible.
“But if you
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December 6th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I’d like to see that Gift of Arthas thread… I’ve tried it and it works on every boss in Kara.. it worked on the first 3 bosses in ZA as well. Akil’zon, 2nd bird boss was inflicted with it within the first few seconds of the fight.
I tried looking at the combat logs to see if there was a consistent +8 in damage, but I ran out of time. I am going to try this on Gruul next week. I think with 23 people hitting him +8 could be significant over time.
fubs
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December 6th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Well, like Vene said, the Gift of Arthas is best used for farm bosses. I’d never use it over tanking elixirs and flasks for progression level encounters.
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December 7th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Heh @ #7.
If you’re a hunter and you’re reading this, misdirection is nice, but make sure I’m not afk when you pull with it on me.
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December 19th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
in addition to strafing the heroic mech boss, is it possible as well to keep jumping backwards while sundering or doing mocking blow or something? I ask this since I use this a in regular SL a lot and was wondering if it works at the heroic level.
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December 23rd, 2007 at 11:44 am
Jumping backwards is the same speed as walking backwards, both are slower than strafing.
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January 8th, 2008 at 9:25 am
You know, I’ve never thought about intervening another tank to take a possible killing blow off his hands. I usually do taunt a (trash) mob off the tank if he’s below 40% just in case the next attacks kill him, but people may not appreciate that.
Intervene will have a new use next time I run kara =)
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January 8th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Whenever I’m MS I’ll actually use Intervene a lot to help an undergeared tank on the more challenging pulls in Heroics. It works out really well cause you can often dumb the rage you get from this hit on a quick Thunderclap before going back to Battle or Berserker Stance.
I use Intervene a lot if I have to offtank Gruul too although you really have to be cautious on this one since in the later stages you run the risk of this + a bolt killing you.
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