Where’s an Offtank to soak?
Whether you’re doing Gruul or Supremus knowing where to “soak” as an Offtank can give your Main Tank a compelling survivability advantage.
Isn’t it obvious?
I mean… we just hit the target in the back, right?
Wrong.
When you’re Offtanking one of these “soak” style encounters, it’s best to stand in the front with your Main Tank.
But, what about Parry?
Parries are actually why you should soak from the front. While soaking from the front will result in the occasional Parry from yourself, standing in the back actually has far worse implications.
By standing in the back, whenever you get targeted by a bolt you are soaking, it’s going to give all of the melee dps attacking the mob from the back an opportunity to Parry as well! This is because the boss will actually turn to target you with his bolt and the result will be significantly more Parries than if you stood in the front beside the Main Tank for the entire fight.
So, I should always Offtank beside the Main Tank?
Nope, just on soak style encounters like I listed at the start of the post. On your regular stay 2nd on threat style encounters, it’s still far better to hit the target in the back. It’ll improve your threat since your attacks won’t be Parried and it’ll increase the Main Tank’s survivability because of those same lack of Parries too.
June 29th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Hmm, well I always keep my off tanks behind these certain bosses because of parries but this does seem logical. I’ll have to try it next time I’m fighting one of these “soak” fights.
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June 29th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Good point.
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June 29th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Heck, the more expertise stacked by the offtank, the less you have to worry about his attacks being parried.
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June 29th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Excellent point. The “cave in” during Gruul while the MT is mobile is one more way as an OT to help your own survival - any MT would appreciate this!
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June 30th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Sometimes the boss turning is only a graphic and even if he looks like he is turning around to do a bolt/strike/etc. you can’t actually get parried by him because he still counts as facing the MT. I don’t know if this is the case for every boss but I know there is at least one boss who does it, I think it is gruul or something, I can’t remember.
Off to go make myself remember!
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Namthe reply on June 30, 2008 4:55 am:
Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is the case, for at least Gruul and Supremus. Perfectly willing to admit I’m wrong, though, if someone can find proof that the boss actually turns to deliver hurtful/hateful strikes and it’s not just a graphic.
In any case, positioning the melee dps at 4 o’clock on the boss, and the offtank between 8 and 9 (assuming the MT is at 12) will guarantee no melee parries on a turn to hit the OT.
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Naka reply on June 30, 2008 8:22 am:
Yeah, thats actually the best way to do it, imho. Having the OT stand 120° right from the MT, and melee 120° left (or the other way round ;). Or 12, 4 and 8 o’clock, as you call it.
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June 30th, 2008 at 7:06 am
It also stands to reason that if you have zero Melee in the group, that it doesn’t matter (post-Curator worms suck with no melee though). On Curator we generally have a Lock soak up the Bolts by putting DoTs on Curator for 2ndary threat. On Gruul we have the OT stand in Cave-ins on occasion to generate rage, so he is quite mobile during the fight as well as the MT.
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Vrathmat reply on June 30, 2008 7:53 am:
Same here. Never had an OT on curator. Usually a warlock soaks the bolts and any other tanks just try to hold the flares in place for DPS.
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admin reply on June 30, 2008 9:44 am:
Agreed, Curator was a silly example.
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Smaken reply on June 30, 2008 2:40 pm:
Curator is not a bad example, I’ve had everything including warriors (arms, fury & prot), S. Priests, ret paladins, warlocks and even a hunter soak bolts.
How you OT Curator depends more on what you have with you than anything else, but some groups do use 2 tanks on him.
June 30th, 2008 at 7:32 am
I’m not sure I’d have curator on the list. For the most part, when he is hitting up the offtank, melee DPS is running around on flares. When DPS is back on Curator, he is normally evocating, and won’t be turning around. I’d say soak Curator from the rear.
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vorp reply on June 30, 2008 2:10 pm:
If I can afford it, I try to never have my melee dps running around chasing sparks. It just makes it a huge chain link death fest. But there have been a few times when you just happen to have a melee dps heavy group and it has to be done this way. There used to be a particularly smug affliction warlock in our guild who assured me that he would be no help in dps’ing down the sparks. So after two wipes, I had him shadowbolt the sparks, and viola the curator falls down.
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Sage reply on July 1, 2008 3:04 pm:
The chances of the lightning chaining anyways is high. With enough healing, you can concentrate the casters, then have the melee run in one direction. Besides, the spell they cast is basically chain lightning, so it wont chain infinitely.
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June 30th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Ah, good point. I never tanked beyond Curator, but I was wondering about the boss turning around on these fights.
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June 30th, 2008 at 9:27 am
We never had an OT on curator, we usually have everybody else picking up flares. Do you have a special way of killing him? If I’m the OT of the group, i get in DPS gear and spam devastate on the flares…If i’m the first one out to pick the flares up, i usually get aggro on them.
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June 30th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Ignoring for the moment the suggestion to simply angle the 3 groups (MT, OT, DPS) at 120 degree angles from each other, is there any evidence suggesting that multiple parries is worse than a single parry? To my knowledge, the boss’s next attack is merely hastened; it will not land immediately after the parry. While parries are bad, I don’t see how 5 simultaneous parries are any worse than a single parry — won’t the net result be the same?
If there was an encounter where angling wasn’t possible, I’d much rather have the OT sitting directly behind the boss with the DPS. I would assume this would lead to less negative parry “effects” overall (but more total parries). I think it should also be noted that the OT isn’t simply a soak here…he needs to stay 2nd on threat to soak, and for someone who is such a strong advocate of more threat to help the DPS, it seems a bit contradictory to intentionally nerf your OT’s threat by submitting him to parries.
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admin reply on June 30, 2008 3:03 pm:
Due to the frequency of bolt strikes on soak encounters, it’s true there will be a number of parries that’ll come simultaneously, but there will also be far more instances of negative parries as you call them as well. This is especially the case when you consider that as a tank, you will have some level of Expertise at your disposal as well.
As to your 2nd point on Supremus unlike on Gruul threat actually isn’t important, but we’ll pretend it is for the sake of this argument. While certainly it will nerf your offtank’s threat, it’ll also improve your melee DPS’ damage since they won’t experience parries. Your offtank should still be able to gear himself in such a way to maintain high threat as well as soak adequately.
You perhaps misconstrue what I advocate. I’m not an advocate for doing ridiculous amounts of threat just for the sake of doing threat nor do I advocate doing things a particular way to make it easiest on yourself always. I simply state that your threat is not fine. If anything your example proves this point. To people that say their threat is fine, well then start offtanking on Gruul in your soak gear and stay far enough ahead of melee dps so they don’t have to hold back at all. If you can’t do that, your threat is not fine, but make no mistake that does not mean that you get to hurt the survivability of the Main Tank in order to make it easier on yourself nor does that let you justify hindering your melee’s dps either. Gear yourself accordingly, tighten up your threat rotation and try your best to make your threat as fine as it can be. That’s what I advocate.
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Galf reply on June 30, 2008 6:46 pm:
Not to be dismissive, but isn’t this all too theoretical to go against the conventional wisdom that an offtank should stand behind the boss? We both agree that you should not be jeopardizing your main tank’s survivability — but the only way you are doing that is by letting a hastened attack eat through his shield block.
Let’s take 2 scenarios:
1) the act of soaking takes a decent amount of time, let’s say 1 second. With 2 melee groups, we are very likely to get a parry here. However, as parry can only speed up an attack by a maximum of 50%, and raid bosses typically have 2.0 swing timers (I’m not sure how parry affects imp TC), this should be a wash.
2) the actual act of throwing out soak damage is virtually instantaneous, let’s say .2 seconds. With Gruul using hatefuls every ~20 seconds, that would mean, at worst, 1 semi-predictable crushing every 20 seconds (through means other than the MT). Effective Health theory is based on worst-case scenarios, and by having both tanks standing in front of the boss, you are opening the doors to some truly horrible, unpredictable worst case scenarios — even with reasonable amounts of expertise.
All of the above is simply my concern with reducing the MT’s survivability — we’re ignoring that most tanks do at least 4% less threat from the front, just because of parries. If you have threat-capped DPS, this seems like a lose-lose scenario, but perhaps my math/understanding is horribly wrong.
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Namthe reply on July 1, 2008 12:09 am:
“is there any evidence suggesting that multiple parries is worse than a single parry?”
Yes.
We had a teron gorefiend wipe last week where three blows, two of them crushing, landed on me in the space of a second. The cause? Melee (and treants) positioning themselves incorrectly and getting a seriously unlucky parry streak.
The first parry reduces the swing timer, the second reduces it again… you can see where I’m going here.
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July 1st, 2008 at 1:07 am
parry haste has a limit, though, at least assuming mob parry haste works like player parry haste. based on http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t15257-melee_combat_riddle_me_-_parry_mechanics/ parry haste seems to be 40% reduction in swing time, with the limit that it cannot lower your swing time below 20% of the normal swing time.
As for the overall topic (front vs back), I’m going to agree with Galf: the lack of any substantial evidence as far as how soaking works (specifically, how long the boss stays turned towards the OT) makes the blanket statement of “best to stand in the front” anecdotal at best.
I find the notion of soaking on Gruul from the front particularly silly: he hurtful strikes on average every 20 seconds. You’re seriously suggesting that giving the melee dps 2 chances (assuming DW) to be parried every 20 seconds is worse than giving the OT the chance to be parried for the full 20 seconds? Assuming the OT is spamming instant attacks (with autoattack and the hurtful strike, he should have the rage), he’s getting off about 26 attacks per 20 seconds. To make keeping him in front better, you’d need something like 10-13 melee dps OTHER than the OT.
Also, if we’re getting to this level of optimization, I feel it’s safe to assume your DPS is packing at least the shard of contempt (it’s that good), and rogues will have an extra 10 expertise, so the difference between OT parry levels and melee DPS parry levels is not as much as you might think.
I dunno, this just kinda seems kinda out there, like the whole “parry rating is bad” thing you hear about occasionally (short version: more parries = more parry haste = more attacks = more boss parries = higher chance of being parry-gibbed). I’ll remain skeptical until some solid numbers are presented.
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July 1st, 2008 at 6:02 am
Vene, you talk a lot about off-tanks, but you never mention the burn-out of actually BEING an offtank. Wondering what your thoughts are on off-tank burnout.
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July 1st, 2008 at 11:43 am
We often end up with 4 tanks in Gruuls. Typically 3 warrior tanks and 1 druid. One of the warriors is MT and the druid is the soaker. The other 2 warriors use intervene whenever its not on CD. In addition to absorbing a blow that the MT would have taken, it gives these warriors some rage to work with. My question is if this practice also gives Gruul a greater chance to parry even if the warrior hustles to the back of Gruul after the intervene?
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admin reply on July 1, 2008 12:29 pm:
Assuming the Warriors don’t have their auto-attack on, it won’t increase Parry chance at all. A boss can only parry an attack based on being attack, proximity of a player won’t affect his parry chance if they aren’t attacking him. If they do Intervene and continue swinging as they run through him to get to the back, then it will definitely result in a chance for parries as they run back.
All in all though, having extra warriors Intervene at appropriate intervals is definitely a good tactic.
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Hao reply on July 1, 2008 12:52 pm:
In the gruuls pugs i’ve been in, we’ve been intervening during the silence.
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July 1st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
The boss’s actual position is a circle. Consider this circle. The tank is one point of the circle, the melee group another, and the Off-tank a third. Consider, that if you space out each group on the edge of the circle evenly, two groups will always be flanking. It just requires a ton of coordination. And the DPS group all standing on each other.
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Sage reply on July 1, 2008 3:01 pm:
Arg, didn’t read the comments, someone already mentioned this. :/
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July 17th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
With respect to standing in front of a boss and the risk of getting parry-gibbed (or rather, causing the MT to be parry-gibbed):
Just finished the first four bosses in ZA. Both the Bear and Lynx Bosses require the tanks to stack up to split cleave damage, and so the two tanks have to be in front.
Being my first time doing a “paired” tanking event, I blithely went about attacking the Bear while he was in Bear form (I was tanking Troll form). Three “parry” results in a row and bam, MT down. The next time up I targeted a player in the raid first, then tab-targeted the boss (no auto attack) so I could see if my thunderclap/demo shout was sticking. This resulted in a successful downing.
Having learned my lesson at the Bear Boss, I proceeded to do exactly the same thing for the Lynx. Despite not being successful (we had eventually to resort to Savory Deviate Delight to get our body-sizes the same; mine being Orc and hers Blood Elf), I did not contribute to ANY parry-hastened swings.
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