Loading ...How’s my Threat? [Calculator]
http://rehfeld.us/wow/wws-tps/
This Threat Calculator has been making rounds for some time and is definitely worth highlighting for curiosity sake more than anything else. It requires you to copy -> paste in your Wow Web Stats (WWS) report directly into it then just click Submit Query. The following is an example of one such report that can be used in the threat calculator, you’ll notice that in order for the threat calculator to work you’ll need to pick a specific boss as well as the specific tank you wish to see the threat of.
http://wowwebstats.com/f2wwhli62jddm?s=12970-18548&a=xc5cc2c
July 26th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
This site is cute, but what functionality does it have? As long as your TPS is 1 higher than that of anyone in the raid, your threat is “fine.” Like, there’s nothing to compare your TPS numbers to. You could maybe compare them to what other tanks are doing on the same bosses, but what good do you get out of that? As long as you aren’t losing aggro and your dps’ers don’t require bathroom breaks during a boss to let you get enough threat, your TPS is high enough.
I think threat mods like Omen offer much more feedback as to what your threat is like. Or, I dunno, maybe asking your DPS’ers how your threat is!??!
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Veneretio reply on July 26, 2008 7:10 pm:
This is like saying, “What good are DPS meters? All that matters is whether or not the boss dies.”
In the same way that DPS meters are useful so to are TPS meters. They allow you to track your own TPS progression especially when comparing how you’ve done on the same fight multiple times. This offers you valuable insight into what gear combinations offer the highest threat since as we all know this is often far from intuitive.
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July 26th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
How about just analyzing yourself from fight to fight? Also, I really doubt that all your DPS are going full throttle every fight. Your argument is not good from my point of view, any DPSers can stay bellow any tanks, even the bad tanks.
Personally, I use it to evaluate myself compared to other tanks and most of all, to evaluate new recruits. I don’t trust Omen, because I know it is not a good picture of sustained threat. I will try the website author add on for sustained threat next raid.
Its just a tool, not necessary, but as any tools, it has it use if you know how to handle it.
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Machus reply on July 26, 2008 8:56 pm:
The DPS *should* be going full throttle after your third threat move or so. As a mage in a raid I do the maximum DPS I can do for for the entire fight except when I have to move, sheep, etc. A similarly geared and well-played tank should have no difficulty staying ahead during a boss fight. When things are not so, and either the tank or the DPS don’t give their maximum output, the boss may die but the whole event will be much less satisfying.
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July 26th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I just use a good ole fashion yard stick to measure my e-peen.
In all seriousness, I guess this could be a nice thing to have, but if you are doin the rotation, shield blocking, and remembering to do heroic strike too (and have some hit and expertise) and your threat isn’t up to the DPS’ standards, tell em to cool off and remember to turn off the damage meter before they start a raid.
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July 26th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
What is this tool, and others like it, good for? A ton really. They allow raid leaders and class leaders to easily show tank tps output. They can use these reports to show improvement or to compare their tanks to figure out who might be better suited for a particular encounter. There is far more then just e-peen at work here fellas.
As for Omen, it’s a fantastic tool that helps raids pull these encounters off, but it is far from 100% accurate. I love hearing how Kara tanks are sustaining 1500 TPS because that’s when they happened to look at Omen for a half second. You know, right after that massive Shield Slam crit. On the other hand, these tools show you a tanks true sustained TPS.
A raiding guild doesn’t technically need WWS either, but using it gives you a competitive edge and really allows you to go beyond just the lame in-game meters that can’t possibly give you the complete picture of what’s happening/happened in the raid. WWS also allows you to heavily analyze what happened post-raid and figure out what changes you can make.
It may not be your thing, but it is more then “cute.”
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bosephus reply on July 26, 2008 4:32 pm:
I definitely agree with herid. Just as with WWS, it’s another diagnostic tool to allow raiders to learn to get better. It’s great for educating non-tanking raiders in threat generation mechanics. And it also provides good benchmarks for fights where there are multiple tanks in a guild that take on the same fight.
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Speidel reply on July 26, 2008 4:53 pm:
Omen will tell me pretty much everything I need to know about a tank’s threat. The things I look for usually is how fast he can get to around 25k, then how far ahead he is halfway through the fight. If these are good, then that’s the end of the story.
If not, pull open WWS and take a look there. Shield Slam crit/hit damage and how much is parry/dodge/missing is going on, etc.
The only thing this site shows of “interest” is TPS for the entire fight. Which is insignificant. I know that when I’m tanking, once I get a sizeable lead on threat, I stop caring about TPS and put much more focus on staying alive.
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July 26th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Rend? He did 3% damage with rend?
The main thing I want to know as a tank is not really if I’m doing enough threat (I can sort of see that by watching the lead in Omen) but if I could do less. For future fights on the same boss I want to know if I can replace, say, my threat weapon with my avoidance weapon without frustrating the DPS.
Unless there are resets, adds, etc. threat is very stable. That means a 10% lead in threat at the end of the fight is wasted tank points that could be spent on avoidance, health, or anything else that would reduce the probability of a wipe even further, for that particular fight on that day. Unless of course the best place to put those points is your DPS, which it might well be.
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Pellaeon reply on July 26, 2008 11:29 pm:
I’ve used Rend from time to time, heh.
In the past I’ve switched threat/avoidance weapons in particular fights before. I’ll use Prince in Karazhan as an example. Depending on the group make-up (i.e. heavy DPS/gear-savy) I often favor Executioner-enchanted threat weapon versus Mongoose-enchanted avoidance/mitigation weapon simply to help the DPS group end each phase sooner.
On the flip-side, I’ve quickly switched in an avoidance weapon if heals are lacking, or some bong-toking ranged just ate it to an infernal…
It comes back to various articles Vene’s addressed here in which you gear/spec for different situations.
I think it would be unfair to say “wasted points.” I can understand “wasted Rage” or even “crappy threat rotation” (particularly during new encounters or mobile tanking). In a classic “tank and spank” fight, you generally want to maximize your threat - more raw DPS that can be landed, the sooner the fight ends with a kill.
I dunno, unless a particular fight requires the maximum avoidance you can achieve (to improve the odds that the raid survives the fight), I wouldn’t sweat trying to replace threat for avoidance. Heck, consider it your duty to set the bar high and force your DPSers to consider their own threat output… “Gee, can I pew pew more and end this bastard of a fight?”
Your best bet though would be to consult your guild’s DPS leaders and healing leaders - is your threat/mitigation/avoidance high enough to their needs or not?
Now where’s my damn Misdirect?
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Machus reply on July 27, 2008 8:34 am:
Well, the Prince is a good example. With my standard EH+threat gear and a decent T4-geared PuG I know that I’ll finish the fight with 30%-40% lead in threat. Also I expect the Prince to go down smoothly most of the time. But what could go wrong?
Probability of someone pulling aggro, or having to gimp their DPS after the first 10 seconds? Practically zero. Threat is accumulated over the whole fight, so after about 20k lead is established no random event is going to change this.
Probability of something going wrong and me dying? Small but significant. Infernals may land in a bad place. DPS may die from AoE. I may take too much damage from flurry or infernals. There may be no heals while we move.
So the thing to do to optimize my performance as a tank is not to maintain such a high lead in threat but to change the balance of gear towards survivability. Extra threat does nothing to reduce the chance of failure. Extra avoidance, health, or DPS does.
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Kavtor reply on July 29, 2008 12:39 pm:
In those situations, it’s easy to start with battleshout and a threat weapon, and lay off the shield block (if you’re not worried about getting gibbed) to get a decent threat lead, then swap over to commanding, a survivability weapon, and spamming shield block.
July 27th, 2008 at 3:20 am
Maybe I’m one of the few that’s playing with people in raid having extremely high DPS, but I tend to focus a lot of my gearing into threat because I know that my DPS know how to ride my threat line, and I enjoy pushing my threat as high as possible for fights. I like hearing ‘Come on DPS, pick it up. Nin is kicking your ass tonight’ from the raid lead, and watching their threat jump into the red line after this prod. For me, these kinds of tools are far from just being ‘cute’. They’re absolutely essential.
Rather than trying to use Omen to determine my threat, which is a horribly inaccurate tool when it comes to actual numbers, I can and do use TPS calculators just like this to gauge what my gearing choices this particular week has done for my threat numbers. I get to see the numbers themselves, not just what I assume they are based on the threat of Hunter A and Warlock B, who may or may not be concentrating as much as they could be.
This may or may not be your style. Whether these kinds of mods are essential to you or not also depend somewhat upon how your raid plays. We pushed a Teron kill in just over 3 minutes recently, and without this kinda mod to optimize my threat output it would have been a lot more difficult for me to achieve those numbers.
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July 27th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I have a lot of asshats in my raid that consider pulling aggro an achievement and laugh about it. Some people even go so far as to click off salv in order to try and wipe the raid. I end up dropping a lot of health and avoidance for threat for most encounters.
Here is last night’s Gorefiend. I had a Ret paladin click off salv and ride my ass the whole fight with 1800 TPS for the last 2 minutes.
http://rehfeld.us/wow/wws-tps/report-28878
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admin reply on July 28, 2008 7:42 am:
Well as much as your raid is a bunch of jerks, they’ve definitely helped (forced) you to become a great tank. Nice TPS!
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Muulan reply on July 28, 2008 7:35 pm:
See thats the problem with all this focus on threat. Half of tanking is about surviving, and half is about threat. All I see nowadays is a bunch of epeen about how high a tank’s threat is. The problem is they gear ridiculously close to DPS warriors… and where does that leave the healers? People have been farming BT for far too long to remember what it was like back in kara in blues trying to squeeze in every last bit of stam so you can survive prince phase 2. Back then threat wasn’t the focus because you actually didn’t overgear the fights. I’m sure teron is not tuned to full BT-geared tanks (and more importantly, full-BT DPS). In that regard I just can’t take seriously any DPS that wants to tell tanks they can’t threat when I have to use half DPS gear to even keep up on a boss that we shouldn’t even be going back to (and getting judged on). I don’t have any respect for flashy tanks trying to prove themselves by overgearing encounters. Tank brut in BT-gear trying to squeeze every bit of avoidance in and then show off.
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admin reply on July 28, 2008 11:04 pm:
I think you see more epeen about threat (and more discussion) because you have control over it and it’s actually measurable. A player’s survivability is so much more random and so much harder to measure how effective one player is at it than another.
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Muulan reply on July 29, 2008 12:52 pm:
No, tanks have alot of control over survivability. If they took 1/2 the time spent posting those WWS parses and looking for “best threat” gear on proper research of sunwell bosses and farming for consumables (something that is truly productive and actually beneficial to the guild) instead of languishing in BT-farm mode and lamenting their plight of skill gone to waste then we wouldn’t have this type of junk all over the place with dps expecting to not use threat dumps cause their tank needs to L2threat.
A properly timed last stand, healthstone, or even preemptive shield wall (cause you have boss timers, raid info on healer mana, status effects/and LOS) on a progression boss is worth a hundred of those 3min teron gorefiend kills. REAL TANKS have what it takes to make the best of their gear when the odds are against them. These things may not be noticed, and probably isn’t very flashy, but if you want to go on epeen parades after every fight roll a DPS. Threat-crazy tanks are the number 1 reason healers quit because when they undergear too much and die on farm runs. The healers get blamed, and stressed, and eventually quitting the game from burnout.
What happened to the days of “you pull it you tank it”? You’d think guilds in BT and sunwell would have people that know how to control threat on trash. Meters on trash don’t matter, the only time threat really matters is on boss fights. And even then I don’t care if you can go all out and do 2x DPS, there are game mechanics in this game designed to limit dps cause the tank’s threat is limited by balancing survivability and threat. Any tank that says they can always stay ahead of any DPS is bullshitting or in DPS gear while their healers are having heart attacks.
Don’t be impressed by the epeen parade, those guys are either bored to death having everything in SWP on farm (and outgear you by 1000 item levels) or can’t muster the courage to do progression content again so they try to gloat about how much they own overgearing instances. Seriously some of these people have better gear than full time raiding DPS warriors.
admin reply on July 29, 2008 2:41 pm:
I think we’re splitting hairs here, but I’ll try to explain regardless.
Threat is controlled almost completely by your own skill and your gear selection whereas survivability is more a skill based on opportunity. As a result, we can put hard numbers beside a tank’s ability to generate threat and more to the point a tool such as the one I’ve link to can be used to aid in tracking the progression of one’s own threat. It can act as a tool to compare not just gear selection, but also the impact of having to keep up Thunderclap and Demo Shout.
It’s fantastic for diagnosing as a tank whether you should be using Shield Slam > Revenge > Devastate > Devastate or SS > Rev > Dev based on latency. It’ll give you real hard numbers to answer your threat questions.
So to swing back to Survivability, as I said, it’s more a skill based on opportunity. Many tanks due to badge gear end up outgearing content. As a result, they get very few opportunities to truly test their Survivability. More to the point, the more you know about gear selection, the less you’ll be required to be good at re-actively surviving.
This is the opposite of threat. You can gear for threat and maximize your threat with that gear. Survivability is like a paradox. The more you gear for it, the less skill you’ll require. So here’s where the really funny part is…
Those tanks putting up those huge threat numbers, not using shield block… they are actually learning to survive better than anyone that’s too afraid to push their limits. The reason is simple. The more aggressive you gear for threat, the worse your gear will be catered towards survivability in many cases. What ends up happening is that your reaction time will have to be that much faster in order to not die. Your gear will be far less forgiving if you don’t use your cooldowns fast enough.
So those guys putting up those insane threat numbers while wearing half-dps gear, not shield blocking… make no mistake, they are very, very good players and while they may be doing it more for epeen than anything else, they are actually unknowingly training themselves and their healers for the really challenging Survival fights.
Kavtor reply on July 29, 2008 4:57 pm:
There are things you can look at though, from WWS in terms of survivability. They’re just harder to see. Shield block, demo shout, thunderclap, ironshield uptime. Where, and why you got crushed, You can look for heavy burst damage that you should have done something to avoid taking (don’t stand in the fire) etc.
Khrushchev reply on July 29, 2008 5:44 pm:
One thing of interest about this whole conversation is that in the upcoming expansion, tank gear really isn’t that far removed from dps/threat gear. No one is entirely sure of the exact tanking mechanics yet (as the warrior class still hasn’t been “polished” according to blue posts), but it sure looks like Strength is going to be a primary tanking stat. Both in terms of threat and survivability, as most threat moves will now scale with AP and SBV is now 1 per 2 STR. Plus talents for critical blocking, etc. Not to mention Shield Block becoming rather less of a core ability (current tooltip is for 100% increased chance to block, double normal amount, for 5 seconds. Only 1 charge, 30 second cooldown/20 second talented).
Vrathmat reply on July 29, 2008 11:51 am:
People love to compete, and as for avoidance, it’s pretty much binary - either you had enough avoidance to survive with your healing, or you died. There’s not a whole lot of room for trash talking about skills there. With threat on the other hand, we have Omen and WWS to give some sort of benchmark.
I think you’re right about one thing - incredibly skilled+geared healers are very often overlooked as the most important thing which enables a tank to use threat gear to achieve the ridiculous threat numbers that are out there.
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Zelgius reply on July 31, 2008 5:07 am:
Yikes. I think I should clarify that I did not post this to brag as some posted above seem to think. There are people in my guild that do the same DPS some people that never even come close to pulling aggro do. These people think it’s worth bragging about when they pull aggro. These are the people I am forced to gear around. I don’t take pleasure in having to put in a lot of effort for BT when I don’t need anymore gear from it. So before you take offense to my high threat, try to remember I’m practically wearing DPS gear. And my DPS gear is pretty shitty.
Vrathmat reply on July 31, 2008 2:02 pm:
I’d tank in cloth if my healers could keep up with it and it let my DPS down stuff faster. If you can survive, it really doesn’t matter.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I’m never satisfied with my threat lead in Omen. Sure, at some point I may get concerned about staying alive and I’m hitting Last Stand, Shield Wall, etc. but I still try to keep maximizing my threat. Like Ninano above, when the raid leader tells the DPS to kick it in high gear, pop trinkets, etc. I want as large a lead as possible because they will start catching up.
I haven’t used WWS before so I’ll be checking that out!
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July 28th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
There is a much better version of this:
http://www.coolyo.org/?area=threat
there have been many complaints that it is broken but it lives on and is more useful in the analysis of one’s tanking than Rehfeld.
the reason why people say it is broken is that they are using the 2.4 renderer. down the bottom on the left of the WWS, click “Do not use 2.4 renderer” and then copy-paste the URL and there you have it!
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Grim reply on July 28, 2008 10:34 pm:
What makes coolyo more useful?
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admin reply on July 28, 2008 10:57 pm:
I had thought of mentioning that one too, but I don’t really find it to be better. (and I’m guilty of thinking it broke with 2.4 as well) It really just spits out exactly what your WWS already says.
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Sanelora reply on July 29, 2008 9:18 pm:
i just find it much more useful to do indepth analysis - it simplifies “hits” and “crits”, gives you the amount of threat per damage and per skill use.
on the whole, it just feels, to me to be more useful. that said i think the one you linked does work for paladins and Druids
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Grim reply on July 30, 2008 7:18 am:
the only thing i see coolyo showing that rehfeld doesn’t is the hits and crits. all the other stuff and more is shown, its just some things you need to hover you mouse over the numbers to see the extra info.
Sanelora reply on July 31, 2008 4:49 am:
I hate to be a bastard and say that that is all i really use threat parsers for is for hits, crits and optimizing my rotation (that and generally checking my threat)
what i use it for is more than likely different to what everyone else uses it for (except Xav!)
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/tankspot-library/35313-generating-threat.html
In that “Analysis” section is basically what i use it for
July 29th, 2008 at 9:01 am
When we tanks look at threat it is always important to understand the mechanics of each fight; example: is there a stun? are you rage starved? are you have to focus on surviving (Archimonde). A true test of your threat generation is after a boss fight asking your decked out destro warlock how often he/she was having to cool it… i find that is better than any website. I also keep track of my threat generation from boss to boss and write down small pointers about what happen or what gear I was wearing.
I HATE RAGEWINTERCHILL FOR THREAT GENERATION…
/getsoffsoapbox
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admin reply on July 29, 2008 9:18 am:
I’ve started just standing in Death and Decay the whole time whenever it’s on me for insane threat
p.s. Warn your healers.
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Kavtor reply on July 29, 2008 12:37 pm:
Or not. They’re probably bored too! And the tree’s won’t want to loose their lifebloom stacks anyway. (no misses / parrys on RWC this week!)
Also for RWC - don’t bother with shield block, unless he’s actually hurting you. He crushes for less than Azgarlor hit’s for.
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July 29th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Omen is great for on-the-fly TPS statistics, not just for tanks but for the DPS’ers also. there are encounters in the game (hi brutallus!) where the DPS classes need to be above 100% on the threat meter as they cannot afford to lose that extra 10-20% DPS.
a tank’s threat output can now make or break an encounter (remember those 2% wipes? if your threat had been 5% higher and the DPS pushed 3% more it would have been a kill!), alongside their survivability. you can pretty much gear for the latter of these two and gain it passively (alongside your usual TC, DS, SB, etc) but your threat output really needs you to work on your shot rotation and swapping in / out the appropriate items.
the problem then is how to measure these changes in order to yeild the best results. Omen isn’t best for this as it is real-time, snapshot data. which brings my rant quite neatly back round to… WWS (or insert your preferred historic combat-logging / TPS parser) ofc!
it’s another tool to up our game as tanks. we should use this.
- DW
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July 29th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I’m using WWS and the rehfeld tps calculator more and more, to benchmark myself and find out where I can improve. It also gives an indication of how much higher your dpsers could still push it before running into threat problems… if they’re not already holding back anyway…
But the main I wanted to comment on, Vene with all due respect, you’ve chosen a bad example of a WWS link for us to try out the tps calculator. On Nalorakk each tank spends roughly half their active time as an offtank, with lower rage thus building less threat, and putting this fight through the tps calc doesn’t give a meaningful result, it’s the average of their real tps (while having aggro), and their standby tps while offtanking.
So my point is, and I’m sure to most of you this is already obvious, there aren’t a lot of fights where this tool provides meaningful results, it has to be a 100% tank&spank fight for the MT, and as such Teron Gorefiend is what I mostly use here, he has no stuns, no tidal shields, no cast bar, no kite phase, no adds, no deaden, etc.
So use this tool with reason, showing only 560 tps on Nalorakk doesn’t do the guy from the linked WWS report any justice because he may well have had 900-1000 tps during his actual tanking period, then resorting to blocking/debuffing/shouting (ok and maybe rend lol) during his offtanking phase.
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Vrathmat reply on July 29, 2008 11:43 am:
Yeah I wish there was a way to differentiate between TPS while actually tanking (having aggro) and TPS while being the raid’s dead weight.
Even so, it’s all relative. As long as you’re comparing tank output for the same fight, it’s still useful data. If you do 560 tps on Nalorakk one week and then 625 tps on Nalorakk a month later, you have a clear indicator of improvement.
Yes, it would be nice to have a cool static number for our TPS that we could compare across boss fights like a DPS class can, but it just doesn’t exist.
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Alkahn reply on July 29, 2008 3:08 pm:
I’ve actually been using Coolyo (and I do like this new site better) to test my threat on our bear runs in my guild, and we actually were able to get more meaningful data out of this.
For 1, I stopped using shield block since he doesn’t crush and I pop a stoneshield potion if the healers have to work hard (I tank the troll phase).
For another, I realized how low my threat was and noticed during the fight that there’s times nobody’s tanking, as he charges and runs back. So we moved the whole raid closer (not into melee range) and I noticed TPS numbers go up.
The sites allowed me to measure the effectiveness of these tactics and now our shadow priest is able to go more or less all out even in the absense of salv, so the payoff was huge and gave us more flexibility in our group composition going forward (we’ve gotten bears w/ no palis in the raid, for instance).
I’ve actually cracked 900 TPS on the fight on a best attempt:
http://rehfeld.us/wow/wws-tps/report-29261
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July 29th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I don’t think a lot of this tool to be honest. Without gear comparisons it is a meaningless number. Just looking at a few of the entries on the leaderboard or whatever it is and most of the highest threat warriors generate pretty much no rage from shield block.
I don’t care if you are putting out 1300 TPS, if you aren’t blocking any attacks you are a crappy tank. In fact, I would state doubly so if you have excess TPS and no blocks you are an incredibly crappy tank (or you totally outgear the encounter).
The problem is, many people who would look at those numbers to see which is the better tank won’t have a clue what they are seeing. They will just see TankA did 1000 TPS while TankB did 900 TPS.
With that in mind I see this only as a tool for self evaluation. If you need a website to tell you if your MT then either he doesn’t suck enough for it to be obvious or you don’t know how to gauge it.
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Eamo reply on July 29, 2008 12:41 pm:
The last sentence should read:
If you need a website to tell you if your MT sucks then either he doesn’t suck enough for it to be obvious or you don’t know how to gauge it.
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ROchelle reply on August 2, 2008 4:02 pm:
I havent used shield block for any boss in BT prior to Mother Shahraz in about 4 months. I just plain take it off my action bars for ZA. I am incredibly crappy.
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admin reply on July 29, 2008 2:14 pm:
Saying if you aren’t blocking attacks makes you a crappy tank is simply incorrect. Knowing when to use Shield Block and when not to is just as important as knowing when to use any other skill.
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July 29th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
An addon that I have come to love is “sustained TPS” it is hard to find but it does pretty much a WWS parse of your threat for each encounter and dumps the result right into your chat window.
The numbers are an exact match to WWS parsing so I consider it reliable. On hard hitting trash I am sitting at 1k - 1.1k tps but lower on raid bosses since I don’t go in with full threat gear.
The only time I’ve ever seen a TPS benchmark for raids it was 600=T4 700=T5 800=T6 but this was before sunwell and the uber badge loot.
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July 29th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
There’s a difference here between measuring your TPS to optimize your gear or your technique in the long run, and achieving those 3% kills. To do the latter you have to understand what to do to allow your DPS to pump out more:
- Can you do more TPS at the start, and do it more reliably, so that the DPS can switch on faster?
- Some DPS classes and specs have a fixed optimal rotation, and if these lead damage meters extra TPS on your part is wasted.
- Other classes and specs can do “extra” DPS for short periods. Do you have those, is this suitable for the encounter, and if so is threat an issue.
- Some classes have fading abilities that drop their threat. These waste time from DPSing. Are your top DPSers using those? What if they didn’t?
- Is there movement during the encounter? Are you keeping it to a minimum so the DPS can get in range? Can ranged DPS safely pass the 110% threat mark?
- If you took less damage, would more healing be available for the DPS? That could make a huge difference in output, by taking a mana pot instead of a health pot for example.
- How much DPS are you contributing? Are you using the right shield and weapon? Can you reflect anything? Do you know if it’s safe to use execute?
These are the most obvious, there are probably lots of other things a tank can do to maximise the output of the DPS in the raid. My point is that measuring sustained TPS isn’t nearly as useful tactically for a raid as sustained DPS.
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July 29th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I see a lot of replies here of people stating: we don’t need it.
Well it was like that with dps meters also, dps scared of having them posted. Probably because they’re scared others see they underperform.
In the end, if survivability is not the issue anymore, TPS IS the thing that can set tanks apart.
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July 30th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Its about the threat you can put out in survival gear. What PieterB said, just because your TPS is low, don’t hate.
You’re lucky to have good healers to keep you up =\
Your survival can only be measured with gear and your healers.
TPS on the other hand is a measure of skill, intellect. Knowing when to use what and why? Rotation, hello? With HIGH TPS, you allow your DPS to kill the boss faster thus allowing shorter battle time. When this happens: you = proTank
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July 31st, 2008 at 5:47 am
Up until last monday I never had threat probles in raids with once overtaking the MT on gruul midfight as icing on the cake: then we hit Gorefiend. Obviously I really need to get myself a Shard of Contempt and a new shield (S2 shield atm, giev Heart) but other then that I think I have got more to solve.
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July 31st, 2008 at 9:44 am
IMO, gorefiend is the best measure of TPS. You have to know how to balance survival gear yet keep one some threat pieces on to keep your TPS up there.
The longer the fight goes, the more people die. If your threat surges up there, your DPS will be able to finish him faster thus having less people die to construct duty. TPS also comes into play when you have to decide when to use Bloodlust/Heroism/Drums. Once people use these and your TPS cannot keep up, those abilities will go to waste.
You want to maximize DPS time. WWS and the website mentioned above is the best way to gauge your threat output on certain encounters. Thus allowing you to do better next time.
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August 8th, 2008 at 8:30 am
I agree- WWS is an excellent tool, but all data is best used in comparison within a large data pool.
Keeping reports of WWS over many months and keeping track of gear changes and raid makeup will really help you dig deeper to where the changes in your performance lie, and will help you keep a better view on the big picture. Tracking changes over time using the data will best help you understand what improvements were most valuable and least effective, helping you sort out what areas you need practice or improvement in the most. Even two weeks of Gorefiend attempts/kills can show a lot more than just a single report.
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