Healing a sensational Tank from LFG

Went online last night just for one run on my disc priest. I wasn't feeling to well but I wanted to level to 82 already. So, queued up and after 17 minutes, finally got a group for Throne of Tides.

5 minutes into trash, I was wondering if Blizzard made a hot fix for priests same as they did with holy paladins. I was going through mana like I was wearing greens. I know I'm level 81 Lk raid gear doesn't mean much now, but it totally helps having them as opposed to wearing greens or blues straight from levelling to 80.

Anyway, pally tank died on the second boss, and the next boss, the dps dk ended up tanking and having more mitigation than the pally ever had. Was it my stupid isp? ( I was healing at like 1200 latency)

On one boss, pally tank asks if he can have plate helm, I looked at the item and it was dps! Dk dps of course went berserk. Pally needed and of course he got it. This should've clued me on what gear he has and why I was healing so bad.( only tank died, all of us stayed alive on all bosses and trash)

Last boss, he died again! As usual dk tanked! I finally looked at his gear. No suprise, he's in all dps gear! Moral of the story? Always check your tank's gear before running the instance, sometimes it can better prep you for what you'll be dealing with. And sometimes, you can just run like hell away from him!

Girls Don't Cry

Ghostcrawler put up a blue post to all the crybabies out there.

A tank’s job is to protect the group. A big part of that is controlling the enemy. A big part of controlling the enemy is staying alive. Tanks have a lot of tools to stay alive, and mastering those is a major component of learning to play a tank. On the other hand, some of these tools are on long cooldowns, and on some encounters they are intended for use at specific moments in the fight. Furthermore, staying alive isn’t the sole responsibility of the tank, because there will always be one or more healers present whose job it is to keep the tank alive. As such, staying alive can’t be the only thing tanks have to focus on.

So, let’s back up a moment to controlling the enemy. “Control” includes things like positioning the boss, or doing specific things at specific times, such as swapping with an off tank. It also includes making sure the boss doesn’t attack anyone else. That’s where threat generation comes into play.

If threat generation is too easy then the entire risk of the encounter drops. Newsflash: we don’t actually want encounters to be easy. We want encounters to be fun, and for most players, that includes both rewards and risks.

We want tanks to care about the buttons they hit instead of just relying on auto-attacking to control their target. We don’t necessarily want very complicated tank DPS rotations, because as I mentioned above, tanks do have other things to keep track of. But we want their combat abilities to be engaging. Good tanks should be those who control, survive, and generate sufficient threat.

On the other hand, when threat is too hard to maintain, it can be exasperating. Tanks get understandably frustrated when the game is asking them to do something but not giving them the tools to do it. The non-tanks in the group also become frustrated, because they feel throttled. It’s one thing when overcoming the boss is challenging. It feels worse when you know that another player is standing in your way, keeping you from achieving your top performance.

We don’t usually want DPS classes to have to stop attacking in order to keep from generating too much threat. We do want players to pay attention. We don’t think it’s too much to ask for DPS and healers to wait a couple of GCDs for the tank to get the enemy under control — we’re not asking for five stacks of Sunder Armor these days. What we really mean by proper threat management is knowing things like when it’s time to go all out, when it’s appropriate to use a threat-reducing cooldown, and most importantly, which is the right target to be attacking. I’m not trying to bash pugs here, but I am amazed at how often a nuker will pick a random target instead of the one being tanked, then blame the tank for not holding aggro (and then blame the healer when they die). In short, if threat is too easy, the game is boring. If threat is too difficult, the game is frustrating.

How then do you guys (and the developers!) know when threat is a problem? Here are some handy guidelines.

– If a tank is trying to generate threat on a single target, and it runs off to kill a DPS class, that’s a problem.

– If a tank is trying to generate area threat on a group, and the tanked things are running off to kill healers, that’s a problem.

– If Vengeance falling off causes the tank to lose threat, that’s a problem.

These problems can have a couple of causes. It could be a problem we caused, meaning that even an expertly-played tank has low threat generation because our numbers are undertuned. Or it could be that only an expertly-played tank can generate threat because you’re asked to manage too many abilities. Or it could be that Vengeance is the only thing allowing you to generate enough threat because the size of the buff is masking low threat generation from your abilities. It could also be a problem you need to fix on your end: if someone is nuking or cleaving a random target on a group pull instead of assisting the tank, that’s not the tank’s fault.

Now, there are things we don’t like about threat as a mechanic. It’s fairly gamey as game mechanics go and we think there are probably better ways to communicate it to players. There are some mods that do a very credible job given the limited information we provide, but overall we’d like to present threat better since we’re asking you to take it seriously in the PvE game.

-Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft and the skipper of a very nice ship where they serve cute sandwiches with the crust removed. And gin.

/clap

Thank you! Hopefully we'll be seeing less tank and spank strategy. This development will clearly separate the pre-Lich King players from the endless AoE monotonous gameplayers.

Honestly, I missed using Crowd control, single target dps of a 5 pull mob, days when AoE meant lowering your dps. I missed wiping on trash like in Steamvaults back in BC where if you pull wrong, Fear will get you. Bringing back lock-tanking, off-tanking, and off-healing! Yum!

Truthfully, I had to get my Banish and Seduce macros from my spellbook. Dusty as it is, it certainly brought back a lot of memories.

I'm glad that WoW devs have noticed that the game has seriously been compromised in terms of strategy and difficulty. BC and Vanilla- like content is what brought the game to where it is now. I just hope that they continue to give challenging content at the same time make it available for non-hardcore gamers.

Emalon and his friends

We decided to try Emalon in VoA 10man last night. We got the group ready and everything. 2 tanks 2 healers and the rest are dps. We were buffing and getting ready right outside his hall, when our mage decided to play tank and pulled an add while eating his Conjured Biscuit! I taunted and damn, that guy hits hard!

I'm not sure if I'm geared right yet, tanking is just my 2nd spec and I only get trash epics that our warriors don't need anymore. I saw my life go down quick and it was good thing that our healers were ready.

So down we went to the boss. Rebuffed again and then someone asked,

"Does anyone know the fight?"

It was the raid leader.

Uh oh! Then someone explained, ok maybe this won't turn into a ___ raid afterall.

5 wipes later, I look at my recount and saw a DK doing 600 dps! 600!!! Also, people kept getting aggro, I haven't done anything on the back adds but the healers were going down coz they were trying to heal me. I don't know if it's my hit rating or because they're too far back for me to hit with Avenger's Shield.

Also I had to manually mark the enraged add for the dps. I couldn't see which add it was coz they were all bunched up together in front of me, I had to tab them and it takes time to see which one has full health. Hm., now that I think about it maybe I should've turned on the health bars over their heads. Eesh!

Of course, dps just couldn't follow that priority was burst dps'ing the add for 10secs or we wipe. After 10 tries, I wanted to cry. I think I spent 100g on that boss alone that I felt wasn't that hard especially on 10man.

I'll try again one of these days, hopefully it'll be as heals and not as a tank. I think I'll stick to healing on progression raids for now.

Newbie's Tanking Perspective

I've been trying out tanking for a few weeks and finally got a chance to off-tank in 10man Naxx! It was fun! It's a lot less stressful than tanking heroics. Weird right? Then again I was just the OT.

The raid i.d. we had cleared most of the easy bosses so we went to Gluth and Thaddius then to military quarter Sapph and KT! Tank throw was the best for me! It was pretty cool going from one side to another! ;) 4 Horseman was cool too, though we got 6stacks of debuffs!Thank god heals were OP! Razuvious was cool too, 10man Mind control! I got to single tank KT with 2 adds when the MT dc'd and died! It was definitely an interesting raid for me overall! I don't know if the healers had a hard time healing me yet. I should've done wws just to see the damage I was getting.

I'm glad I chose the right spec to build. I get to see much more of the game as tank and healer than a dps ever could. I have a warlock too and most of the time it's just spam dots spam, spam spam... move out of fire, spam spam spam! I fall asleep most of the time!!

Definitely looking forward to dual-spec and 3.1! Maybe I can tank and heal in Ulduar! haha! Oh and i got the Red Sword of Courage just before we did Naxx! Woot! Say goodbye to UP and Hello AN for the trinket !!