Tank Hard!

With patch 2.3 came Weapon Expertise to add yet another confusing stat to the mix for tanks. Don’t get me wrong, I like a chance at deeper gameplay in any fashion and am very happy with the addition.

So let’s first take a look at exactly what Weapon Expertise is.

One point of Expertise decreases the chance that melee attacks made by the player will be dodged or parried by 0.25%.

Items do not add Expertise directly, but add to Expertise Rating. At level 70, every 3.9 points of expertise rating grants one point of expertise.

For a tank, the importance of Weapon Expertise is two fold. One, it will directly increase your threat through more melee attacks that land, and two, it will directly increase your survivability due to Parry Mechanics.

Parry Mechanics

When a boss parries your attack, it reduces the default swing timer of the bosses next main hand attack. Based on the time during the bosses swing timer that the parry occurs, it can cause a boss to appear to attack in rapid succession, dealing burst damage to the tank, and is often the cause of those ‘OMG WHAT HAPPENED?’ type of insta gibs.

So how much Weapon Expertise is needed? It is commonly accepted that a bosses dodge rate against attacks is 5.6%. Parry rates are not precisely known, but believed to be around 11% (perhaps 5.6 x 2). In order to lower a bosses dodge and parry by the initial 5.6%, you will need 22.4 Weapon Expertise. However, since ratings are rounded down, you actually need 23 Weapon Expertise, or 91 Weapon Expertise Rating to prevent all dodges. In order to prevent all parries, you will need in the neighborhood of 44 weapon expertise, or 172 expertise rating.

So where is one to get all of the Weapon Expertise? Unfortunately there is not a ton of Weapon Expertise rating gear floating around.

Items

[Shapeshifter's Signet] (20) - Exalted with Lower City
[Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx] (22) - 35 x [Badge of Justice]
[Brooch of Deftness] (21) - 35 x [Badge of Justice]
[Gauntlets of Enforcement] (21) - Teron Gorefiend - Black Temple

Weapons

[Mallet of the Tides] (14) - The Lurker Below - Serpentshrine Cavern
[Fang of Vashj] (21) - Lady Vashj - Serpentshrine Cavern
[The Brutalizer] (21) - Supremus - Black Temple

There are several other items, particularly leather and other weapons that have Weapon Expertise Rating, so take a look at this filtered list from WoWHead.

In addition, Orcs and Humans also gain Weapon Expertise Rating racial bonuses, axes for Orcs and swords and maces for Humans, which adds 5 Weapon Expertise Rating in each case.

Quick list of pretty basic stuff that DPS never seems to notice but probably should. If you can get your guys to keep an eye out for this stuff, your life will get a lot easier.

- Knockback/knockup: If at any point the tank goes flying through the air, you need to slow your dps. Knock backs very often come with a threat reduction. Knock ups usually don’t but usually isn’t always. At the very least, the tank isn’t generating any threat while running back to a mob.

- Roots/snares: Usually if a mob is able to root the tank, it will do so and then run away and hit the tank from range. While the tank is rooted, he is generating zero threat. If you are able to dispel the root, don’t hesitate, just do it. If a mob has a snare or slow on the tank, realize that if you pull aggro or if the tank gets knocked away or is in some other way far from the mob, the tank is going to take a long time to get there and start generating threat again.

- Stuns: These are the tank killers. When a tank is stunned he loses all of his avoidance and can find himself dead rather quickly in some situations. If you can cleanse the stun, do it. If you are a healer, step up the heals. If you are a dps, you need to be aware that a stunned tank generates no threat. This is particularly dangerous when a tank gets stunned at the very beginning of a pull. There are a lot of mobs in TK that get stun happy

- Debuffs: If a mob puts a debuff like a damage reduction or attack speed slowing, dps has to realize it and know that threat is going to be lower (Tidewalker or the leviathons in BT come to mind).

- Casters: If a mob has a lot of Random Secondary Targetting spells, then all that time spent casting is time spent not hitting the tank so the tank will probably be short on rage. There are some robots in TK that are particularly bad about this and iirc they also have a knockback.

- Charge: Sometimes mobs with a charge will drop aggro when they charge so stopping dps is a good idea (think Doomwalker or the ogres in Gruul’s Lair). Even if they don’t drop aggro, realize that the tank is generating zero threat while the mob is running back to him.

- Mind Control: Mind controlling mobs usually do not target the person who has the most threat. Keep in mind that most threat is not necessarily the same as the person with aggro so dps needs to stay below tank’s threat, not just below aggro gain. If the tank gets MCed, dps should stop so that the tank can easily regain the mobs. MC is usually not a threat wipe so if DPS stops, the tank can do a shout as soon as the MC ends and the mobs should goback to him. I always advocate killing MCed players, but that is probably a bad idea when it’s the tank. Also, if the tank wants to get in on the fun (I usually do) of killing the MCed player, he isn’t going to be generating any threat on the mob so you might as well hold off on dps and help kill the guy who got MCed.

- Aggro wipes: This is almost always a boss thing, I can’t think of any trash mobs that just plain wipe their threat list (except for a few that do it when they charge). This is one where it is the tanks responsibility to pick up the mob just as much as it is the DPSers responsibility to lay of for a few seconds. Hydross, Leotheras, Doomwalker, and Illidan are the ones I can think of who have mid-fight aggro wipes. A good tank won’t have trouble picking the boss up as long as dps restrains themselves. These are usually pretty easy to deal with since it is generally a major mechanic of the fight so its not going to catch anyone by surprise.

- Fear/Reflect/Interrupt: There are some cases where the tank needs to keep his global cooldown clear so that he can interrupt a heal or some other important spell or so that he can break a fear. During that time the tank is doing nothing for threat but heroic strike. Likewise, if there is a something that the tank must reflect, he will just be sitting there waiting for it to be 100% sure he has enough rage to get the reflect off. (Spell Reflect should be effected by Focused Rage IMO but that is a whole other discussion). Like aggro wipes, this is mostly a boss only type of thing and is generally a major mechanic so people tend to be conscious of it.

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Feel free to add a comment with anything I missed. The idea is that this is pretty basic stuff that DPSers can and should be aware of instead of mindlessly smashing their fireball button.

Someone in the forum section asked for help with threat and I started writing this response and then I went into story-telling mode and it just ballooned in size. But I think its is funny enough for me to stick on the front page instead of the forum.

Last night in our raid my threat was really low and i just couldn’t figure out why. I was doing the same things I normally do, but my threat just sucked. I am normally a button masher and I figured that my sloppy technique had finally caught up with me so I tried to slow things way down. I waited for the GCD to end before doing my next move and I would make sure the swing timer quold go off before queuing up the next HS. And it really helped a lot. I went from doing 600 or so tps in the beginning of the night back up to 800-850 that I usually do through trash.

I normally use an add on called TankBuddy. It?s a great little tool that will announce to the raid when you use challenging shout and are about to get pummeled by everything in sight or it will announce when a taunt gets resisted or if you use last stand or shield wall. In addition to those announcements, it will also remove buffs you don’t want. If I am in defensive stance it will automatically remove prayer of spirit, arcane brilliance and other buffs that don’t benefit me at all but take up space on my already crowded buff bar.

Now our paladins are pretty good, but, for whatever reason, like to put their Blessing of Protection right next to other important buttons. We have had a few wipes because a pally accidentally BoPed the tank instead of doing whatever else he was supposed to do. So to make sure that wouldn’t happen, I added Blessing of Protection to the list of buffs that would be automatically removed.

Over the weekend I was doing some arena and at one point I was getting hit pretty hard to I threw on a shield and switched to defensive stance to try survive, at the same time my pally partner tried to BoP me. But TankBuddy saw that I was in def stance and automatically clicked off BoP and then I died and we lost. I turned off TankBuddy so that wouldn’t happen again. One thing that I didn’t mention before is that TankBuddy will also automatically remove Blessing of Salvation and since I almost always have TankBuddy on, I never even think about having to click it off manually. You see where this is going don’t you? I never turned TankBuddy back on after those arena matches and in last night’s raid, I didn’t remember that it was off until about halfway through the raid. I was tanking for about 2 hours with Blessing of Salvation… /facepalm

An interesting corollary is the story about why I had to add Blessing of Protection to the list of automatically removed buffs in the first place. It was one of the nights when we were learning Archimonde and we were getting pretty close to a kill and then around 30% I see the Forebearance debuff pop on my screen and Archimonde runs off and starts killing people. One of the pallies confessed to being an idiot and we all laughed at him and moved on.

I thought I would be clever and add BoP to the TankBuddy list. We even tested it out before the next pull by having a pally BoP me and making sure it got automatically removed. What I didn’t notice was that I had made a typo when I put BoP on the list and I accidentally left a comma in there at the end of the line. That comma made TankBuddy think that there was one more buff on the list that it had to remove but it was a blank field. So after I am sure that BoP will get removed and after the pally moved the BoP button far far away from everything else, we start the next attempt.

About 20 seconds into the fight I noticed my HP was a lot lower than usual but just figured I my warlock was out of range for blood pact and I hadn’t put up commanding shout yet. About 30 seconds into the fight someone said, “Does anyone else see Rochelle as not having any buffs or is my UI messed up?” I glanced up in the corner of my screen? Oh. My. God. “I don’t have any buffs, wtf?”. The raid leader called out to get me buffed and the buffs came flying in. But a few seconds laters, “Oh shit, they fell off again”. TankBuddy had freaked out because of that blank field and it removed every single buff I had. Pally blessings, priest buffs and shields, flasks, food buffs, EVERYTHING. It was even removing hots like renew and lifebloom. We of course ended up wiping that attempt but we got the boss down to 60% with a completely unbuffed, direct heal only tank. And the really funny part is that we didn’t even wipe because I died. A mage, of all people, let himself die to fall damage and then the deaths chained - as they tend to do in that fight - and we wiped. Then I confessed to being an idiot and everyone laughed at me.

ooo, and that reminds me of another of my finest moments in tanking. This one was really awesome and I wish someone had gotten a screenshot.

I switch my trinkets around a lot depending on what I am doing. I often use a pretty simple macro - /use 13 /use 14 - that triggers both of my trinkets at the same time. I will click on the trinkets individually if I want to use them individually, but most of the combinations I run with are meant to be used together.

So there we are, about to start the Illidan encounter and I have my trinkets on and I am running my simple double trigger macro. Illidan has an ability called Shear that reduces the MT’s health by 60% for 6 seconds. Since he hits really hard, it can be instant death for the tank to get Shear. The only way to stop shear is by blocking it. Illidan dual wields and it is possible for him to eat up both your shield block charges very quickly and then cast shear before your shield block cooldown is over. It is rare, but it happens. To prevent getting killed when that happens I pop my dodge trinket and cross my fingers and hope he doesn’t hit me and almost every time Shear goes away and I am just fine.

When we were going for our third kill, the first two attempts were a little sloppy but the third attempt was looking good. We had him in phase 5 which is easymode. At about 20% he managed to slip a Shear through. A shear on the MT is a pretty paniced situation since my health drops to 8 or 9k and Illidan hits 6-7k with his main hand and 3-4k with his offhand so I freak out a little bit. I did what I usually do and popped my trinket macro. Now, for some reason, I decided to wear a stamina trinket as my second trinket next to the pocket watch instead of Shadowmoon Insignia like I usually do. I am too poor to afford the darkmoon faire cards so the trinkets I use for stamina are the SSC trash drop and a Goblin Rocket Launcher. The rocket launcher has a little more stamina than the one from SSC so I went with the rocket launcher.

So, 20% on Illidan who was definitely not on farm yet and I get sheared. I freak out a little and punch my trinket macro. I see the animation for the dodge trinket then? Raid leader screams, “What the hell are you doing?” And I die almost immediately and the raid wipes shortly thereafter.

When I hit my trinket macro, it tried to fire the rocket launcher… So there I am, at the Temple Summit, the final boss of the expansion is going down, and I am trying to shoot him with a rocket launcher… I don’t think I will ever live that one down.

I am a skills competition more than a dunk contest kind of guy. I like teams playing small ball more than home run hitters. I like footballs teams with a strong defense or a solid ground game more than long passes and touchdown celebrations. I like long winded sports metaphors more than… uh hippies…*

*A complete listing of things I like less than hippies: Spiders, welfare, the City of Detroit

One of the things I have noticed in raids lately is that a clean kill feels really good. Pulling off a last second win with only 3 people stand (I am looking at you Reliquary of Souls from 2 weeks ago) is exciting, but not nearly as satisfying as a clean kill. The raid leader always says something like “Well, at least he is dead, please don’t play that poorly next next week because that was sloppy as hell”.

But those sloppy kills bring me to my topic - when do you use shield wall. Here is the scenario - a fight that generally last 8-10 minutes is at 3% hp. Your healers are dead/dying with little to no mana. Your dps are dead/dying with little to no mana. The common instinct is to pop shield wall and cross your fingers. I think that instinct is wrong.

Lets say that average boss X takes 7 and a half minutes for your guild to kill under full raid dps. That would mean that you can knock off 1% every 4.5 seconds. But in the scenario where you are trying to pull off the heroics, you aren’t going to have full raid dps, you will probably be at half capacity at best. And don’t forget that when it says the boss is at 5%, he could actually be at 5.999999% and the last percent is literally the longest percent since it goes from 1.99% to 0%. So if half your dps is down then your dps can do maybe 1% hp every 9 seconds but that is also assuming there is no raid damage like arcane orbs, whirlwind, earthquake, murlocs, spore bats, etc. slowly killing your dps off too. If you shield wall, you will stay up for another 10 or 15 seconds during which time your raid can MAYBE take off 1-3%. Then you will die and then the boss will start one-shotting people. Your dps might be alive long enough while the boss kills them one at a time to take another 0.5-1% out of the boss. So, in the very best case you can maybe take another 4-5% out of the boss while you are dying. But chances are much better that you will wipe at 1% and be screaming that the 1% took forever.

You might get lucky and kill the boss but it will be sloppy as hell and the raid leader will implore the raid not to suck as badly next week. But chances are that you will wipe and have to try again. Now check this it, next attempt the boss is at 70% but your healers are silenced or cut off by doomfire or out of line of sight or you just took a damage spike and now you are about to die, what do you do? You die because you used your shield wall the last attempt to try and be a hero.

Your shield wall is a panic button, not a hero button. 9 times out of 10 when you try for last second heroics you end up wiping anyway. But when you can use your shield wall as a panic button, you will live through the dire straits every time. Those 10 seconds are more than enough time for your healers to get back in position or unsilenced or whatever.

The only time I recommend using a shield wall at the end of the fight is to bring it home. On some bosses they just feel a little out of control no matter how many times you do it and you feel like you are always on the brink of a wipe. Archimonde is the worst when it comes to this kind of thing. Vashj is a little like this and so is Tidewalker. For fights like that, when tank death is just a parry-gib away, if I have my trinkets and panic buttons up going into the last part of the fight, I will turtle up and become unkillable for the end. I will pop a nightmare seed, then my dodge trinket from moroes (best tanking trinket in the game IMO), then last stand, then shield wall. Depending on the boss fight I will time it so that my cooldowns will last to the very end of the fight. During this time my healers can lay off me a little and make sure the raid stays up.

In conclusion, shield wall is a panic button and should be used as such and should be preserved for true panic situations. Last second, low % boss attempts are NOT panic situations, they are cross your fingers situations and you shouldn’t be burning a 30 minutes cooldown if the boss is at anything more than 1%. The only other time it is ok to use shield wall is at the end of an otherwise clean kill to make sure that it stays clean.

Keep this post in mind when you read my next post where I tell you that improved shield wall sucks.

It was June 2006. I wanted my computer to function properly but my computer disagreed. I tried everything, troubleshooting from my computer at work, calling tech support, opening up the box and staring at the insides, shouting racial slurs, quietly weeping in a corner? you know, the usual. I wasn’t going to get the old girl up and running without a major overhaul so I figured I might as well just buy a new computer. I found one that I thought would suit my needs and started to haggle. I got a price I liked and the salesman said I could pick up two pieces of software for free to seal the deal. I grabbed Civilization 3 because I had played the original way back when and I grabbed WoW since I had heard good things and I played Warcraft 2 back in the day and had a lot of fun with it. I installed WoW first and to this day Civ III remains unopened.

I tried to find a picture to represent tanking

It was my first foray into an MMO and I didn’t know anything about anything. The description of warrior sounded good and I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult play if I just had to hit stuff with a sword. I remember getting in a group for SM and one of the other guys asked if I was protection and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I put talent points in stuff like improved demoralizing shout (used to be in the arms tree) and improved thunderclap which seemed like protection talents to me so I told him I was a mix. I had no idea that there were multiple talent trees. I remember getting the quest for berserker stance and reading the quest text and thinking it sounded like pvp. I didn’t like pvp so I didn’t do the quest till level 45 or so. I was the noobiest noob ever to noob. But I slowly picked up knowledge and I made some friends in a casual raiding guild that I eventually joined. It took until about halfway through Molten Core for me to really start figuring out how to tank.

Aerie Peak was launched just before Naxx was opened. That meant that nobody on our server got to do end-game in Vanilla WoW. The most progressed guild killed one boss in Naxx. My guild was working on Firemaw when TBC launched and we were one of the top 5 progression guilds on the server. When TBC launched, the gear reset helped our server catch up on progression. Naxx guilds were able to go straight to Karazhan with their tier3 and our server had to farm level 70 dungeons and heroics before going so we weren’t totally caught up, but we were a lot closer. I was in a guild that was a little slower than some other moving through Karazhan but we got the server second kill on Maulgar and a server first on Gruul the week after he got nerfed - almost had him pre-nerf which was quite an accomplishment =/.

Then progression on the server stalled in late April and there was some upheaval and I was a part of forming a brand new guild with the intention of becoming THE raiding guild on Aerie Peak. And it worked too, with the exception of HKM, Gruul and Mag (already killed before we formed) and Lady Vashj (long story?), we got a server first kill on everything and we finished tier6 about 2 weeks ago. We are by no means an elite guild, there are probably 400-500 guilds worldwide that killed Illidan before us, but we do pretty well. MT duty is split between me and the best damn feral druid I have ever seen and we have another tanking warrior on our roster who is one of the few people I trust to tank when I am not there.

I have tanked everything from Lucifron to Illidan (Naxx at level 70 is crazy fun) and I have played with just about every spec you can imagine (17/5/39 + block value + critical strike = super happy fun times tanking). I went from knowing nothing at all about playing a warrior to reading every last bit of info I could find. In the end I am quite pleased I picked a warrior to play. I can’t imagine trying to raid as anything but a tank.

P.S. If you feel the need to check my armory, the character name is Rochelle on Aerie Peak (US).

P.P.S. Despite the name and the female character model, I do, in fact, have a penis (at time of posting).