Comments on: Where’s an Offtank to soak?

By: Balrok

Balrok — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:07:52 +0000

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.

By: Sage

Sage — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:04:08 +0000

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.

By: Sage

Sage — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:01:25 +0000

Arg, didn’t read the comments, someone already mentioned this. :/

By: Sage

Sage — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:59:52 +0000

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.

By: Hao

Hao — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:52:37 +0000

In the gruuls pugs i’ve been in, we’ve been intervening during the silence.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:29:00 +0000

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.

By: Tankette

Tankette — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:43:41 +0000

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?

By: Warmwoods

Warmwoods — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:02:44 +0000

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.

By: Reydien

Reydien — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:07:31 +0000

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.

By: Namthe

Namthe — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:09:56 +0000

“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.