2010 August | Tank Hard!

Tanking Vacation: Arms PvP

August 30, 2010 By LordSnow 1 Comment

Back from your fury vacation already? It sure was fun seeing all those numbers pop up all over the place every time you hit Cleave or Whirlwind wasn’t it?

But maybe you’re not ready to tank again quite yet.

Maybe you’re still craving more, I’m sure you’re itching to introduce yourself to other living, breathing digital people who’ll soon be left on the ground in little pieces in your aftermath.

So let’s take a look at the life of an Arms PvP warrior and take an extended break. Don’t worry, your raid will be there when you return.

While there are some variations in the spec based on preference, THIS is the basic spec that you’ll use. A few of the variations comes from whether or not you prefer to have Improved Hamstring in arms or Blood Craze in fury but other than that, they all play basically the same.

To compete without getting completely blown up in arenas, you’re going to want to gather together enough PvP gear to hit the 1k resilience mark while keeping your other stats as high as possible. Remember, just like with Fury, it’s not about stacking one stat or the other but about keeping a balanced mix. You’ll want that armor pen and the strength to be as high as possible with the crit rating taking a backseat.

There’s a shift in mentality to take into consideration too. With fury, the goal was to have as high sustained DPS as possible. In a PvP setting, burst is the way to go. Now what I mean by burst isn’t necessarily crit. In PvP, as your victims try hilariously to run away from you, you don’t have constant uptime to smash in their face. So you have to capitalize the brief moments you DO have to do as much of the face smashing as possible.

There are a couple of ways to achieve this goal.

The main one is something that you control in which you try to line up as many attacks as possible. You can try to keep Rend applied on your targets before you try to burn them down as this will save you a precious GCD while their in range. You can wait half a second for your Overpower to light up again before hitting them with Overpower and Mortal Strike in quick succession for a nice two hit combo. You can even line up a big one the next time you see your Improved Hamstring (if you took it) proc on an enemy by hitting them with an Overpower/Mortal Strike and following that up with a Bladestorm while they’re still stationary. By the time the storm ends, your Overpower will most likely be ready again with Mortal Strike following shortly after. That makes for a pretty hefty amount of damage that most classes won’t live through without some immediate assistance.

Keep in mind too that in an arena, the name of the game is team play. Learn to rely on your partner and be someone that your partner can rely on. Don’t go chasing an enemy halfway across the map while they nuke your partner to glass and don’t be afraid to call for assistance catching an enemy or CCing a healer before you unleash your combo.

The more you and your partner or partners work together and trust each other, the more of a leg up that you’ll have on your unorganized opposition.

Now go take another week off from tanking and see how the face smashing side of life lives.

Filed Under: PVP, Tanking, Warriors Tagged With: PVP

Tanking Vacation: Fury

August 22, 2010 By LordSnow 1 Comment

Psst.

Hey you.

Yeah you, the one sitting there all bored with your weapon on the ground and your shield on your back.

You don’t look like you’re having a good time at all. Yeah, yeah, I know that you’re fine tanking and you’re perfectly willing to help out your guildies and tank runs for them and all but you’re bored.

No, don’t try to deny it. You’re speaking to a fellow tank here remember? Here in the tanking brotherhood we don’t lie to each other. We share each others burdens and try to make life bearable again so here I am, your ever faithful servant with a little series of articles to try keep you amused.

Here in this first article, we’ll deal with the most likely path you’ll take when you need a vacation from tanking those bosses and that is, of course, fury.

There’s something you want to consider first. If you’re just switching to fury for fun in bgs and dungeons for a bit, then it doesn’t really matter as you can just do whatever you want and still be pretty successful.

If you’re trying this in a raid setting though, you’re really going to want to build up a half decent set of gear first before you give it a try to keep from making a bad showing for yourself.

In order of importance, you’re going to want to climb up to about 164 hit rating and 214 expertise rating. What these will do is ensure that you don’t miss the boss when you try to hit them. Now it’s important to realize that I said about that much hit and expertise. While hitting these hit and expertise caps are very important to your damage, as a protection warrior on a fury vacation, it’s not worth stressing over min maxing your damage to that degree so that you land on the caps exactly.

Just get to roughly that hit rating and that expertise and you’ll be alright.

The second thing you want to do in terms of stats is a bit tricky. You’ll want to get an even mix of strength, crit and armor penetration. The problem with stacking one of these to the exclusion of all else is that without a balance, you do some pretty horrible damage.

Sure, you can get up to 100% armor penetration first before you add on any crit or strength but you’ll still hit like a wet noodle. Ditto the other way around.

A balanced mix is what you want.

So build up that strength and crit and place a slightly higher emphasis on building up the armor penetration and you’ll be fine.

The cookie cutter spec can be found right here and there’s typically very little room for variation: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LG0GzfhZhxe0V0u0eRVkAo:MGooMz .

And as for the battle itself, here’s all you really need to know.

Priority 1) Stand behind the boss while attacking and make sure that you do your best to avoid any and all aoe damage.

Priority 2) Keep Heroic Strike queued up as much as possible (rage providing)

Priority 3) Bloodthirst > Whirlwind > Slam > Execute.

The spell priority does have some minor variations depending on how your cooldowns are running and whatnot but for a brief vacation from tanking, that’s all you really need to know.

So get out there and smash in some faces!

I’ll be back next week with a look at the pvp side of life.

Filed Under: Warriors

“Oh shit!” Buttons

August 16, 2010 By LordSnow 3 Comments

Do you know what’s a problem that I’ve seen so many tanks have?

Something unexpected will happen in a raid and they’ll drop dead. Immediately afterward, someone will always ask the question.

“Are your cooldowns still up?” And of course, the tank replies in the affirmative which means that the death and the subsequent wipe could have been avoided.

Do you know why this happens the way it does? It’s primarily because a lot of tanks out there don’t LIKE to use their cooldowns.

Yeah I said it. I’ll say it twice if it’ll get through to you guys. Most tanks, do NOT use their cooldowns properly.

See the thing is, a lot of tanks develop a certain mentality in the course of their lives. They have this packrat mentality when it comes to cooldowns where they always try to save it for a “rainy” day. They always think that even if their health drops down to under 10%, there’ll always be a situation right around the corner where they’ll NEED their cooldowns and THAT’S what they’ve been saving it for.

It’s important to understand that without using the cooldown that first time, that second situation will never come up. Your cooldowns should be used the instant you first get the feeling that you’ll need them. Whenever you see your health drop low, whenever you think your healer might not be paying attention, whenever you think that there’s even a chance that you’re about to eat dirt, pop that cooldown and revel in the fact that while you may not have needed it, you can be certain that you just prevented a potential death.

The problem’s deeper than just a single situation which is something that can be overlooked. The problem that most tanks don’t understand is that without constant and systematic usage of these cooldowns, you won’t have the proper instinct and muscle memory to hit them the second you do really need them.

If you’re one of those tanks that try to save all of your cooldowns for the ”real” emergency, do everyone a favor and start using them now. Put those cooldowns on an easy to see, easy to reach keybinding and hit it anytime you think you might be in trouble.

Do this for about a week and then see how much of a difference that all of that practice and muscle memory makes in the course of an actual raid. You’ll notice a very real difference in your reaction time and more importantly, in the sheer frequency of your usage.

You’ll find yourself using it more in the first moments of a fight where the healers might be caught napping and might not be quite ready to heal you. You’ll find yourself finally hitting that cooldown on time during a boss fight instead of fruitlessly smashing the key after you’re already dead. Heck, you’ll even find yourself using it more often on trash pulls and that’s perfectly okay.

Once you get into the habit of using those cooldowns the instant you need them instead of saving them for a rainy day, you will find many situations where the use of the cooldown saved your life where you would have otherwise died and you’ll be a better tank for it.

Filed Under: Tanking, UI & Macros

An Ode to Off-Tanks

August 8, 2010 By LordSnow 4 Comments

Off-tanks are a lot like the unsung heroes in our raids aren’t they?

The main tank is the hero, for sure, hanging onto the biggest, scariest mob while the rest of the raid does their thing and where’s the off-tank in this whole thing?

He’s up there if you actually take the time to look for him. He’s up there standing right next to the main tank, not really taking much of the hits, largely feeling pretty useless unless the main tank happens to bite the bullet and then he’s got his five minutes in the sun to shine.

That’s the way that it used to be.

The role that the off-tank used to have in our raids were largely very small ones. The off-tank is the one that grabbed a lesser add or two when the fight started and then their job was done inside thirty seconds, leaving nothing for them to do until the boss died.

This mentality, while it was no longer true, has been held as truth by popular perception.

Try thinking back to Naxxramas, Ulduar and ToC. How many fights can you remember had the off-tank play a minor role in the fight and then do absolutely nothing for the majority of the fight? There were a lot of them and it completely cemented the concept that the off-tank was exactly that, the OFF-tank. As in, the tank that you turn to when your Main Tank (notice the capitals?) is out of commission or busy.

It also becomes apparent once you really stop to consider the matter that this lamentable situation that I’ve outlined for you as to the inferiority of the off-tank simply doesn’t apply anymore. A lot of the fights in ICC require the two tanks to taunt off of each other or even fulfill roles that are as important or more than simply hanging onto the boss.

A fight like Rotface comes to mind where the main tank just has to stand in one spot pretty much and hold threat while the “off-tank” has to kite around a big, dangerous, potentially raid wiping mob and where one slip up on his part will kill the attempt.

To be sure, there are a decent number of fights where the role of the off-tank is as small as it used to be. Something like Marrowgar or Lady Deathwhisper where the only job that the off-tank has it to stand next to the main tank for the duration of the fight.

It’s all really just a matter of perspective. While there are occasions where the off-tank fills a smaller role than the main tank, it’s balanced well with occasions in ICC where the they share roles, where they share the same hits from the boss, where they both hold potential raid wipes in the reach of their keyboards and share the responsibility of not dropping the ball.

We’ve come a long way from the days where the off-tank was the worse of the two so if you’re stuck in the off-tank’s role now, bear the title with pride and know that you’re just as important as the main…even if nobody in your raid chooses to acknowledge that salient fact.

Filed Under: Tanking