Tank Hard!

Karthis is a feral druid who writes about druid tanking in his blog, Of Teeth and Claws. He has written an article factoring in rage as it pertains to threat.

He quotes from WoWBlues:

Gaining Power (Mana / Energy / Rage) also causes threat in most cases, for example taking a healing potion, or gaining rage from Bloodrage, or Energy from Thistle Tea.

[…]

For normal abilities, each point of Mana is 0.5 threat, Rage is 5 threat, and Energy is unknown, probably 5.

[…]

These forms of buffs all have infinite range; they will cause threat to all mobs on whose threat list you are on. Furthermore, the threat caused is split equally among all the affected mobs.

[…]

Note that threat caused from Power Gain is not affected by threat modifiers. Gaining 1 point of Rage will give 5 threat whether you are in Battle Stance or Defensive Stance.

For me, this is particularly interesting as my typical pre-pull setup is to Berserker Stance -> Berserker Rage -> Defensive Stance -> Bloodrage -> Pull

What this means is that I could actually generate more rage by doing the Pull BEFORE I hit Bloodrage. Doing so would help generate a bit more threat on the initial pull.

A few days ago we discussed the importance of using Shield Block and mentioned the Combat Table. Today we are going to go over the Combat Table, what it is, and why it is important to understand how it works.

Basically the Combat Table determines when an attack will hit or miss and what kind of hit the result will be. The Combat Table factors in the chance that an attack will flat out Miss, be Dodged, be Parried, be Blocked (partially or fully), be Critically Hit, be Crushed by Crushing Blows, or be Hit regularly. The order here is important, as the higher your chances of defending an attack can push the other types of attacks off the Combat Table. The order is as mentioned:

• Miss
• Dodge
• Parry
• Block
• Critical Hit
• Crushing Blow
• Hit

There is actually an additional option called Glancing Blows, but that is for player attacks vs MOBS and here we are mainly interested in tanking mobs, not dealing damage.

All of these options are combined into a single table that results in 100% of attacks. A single random number is generated to determine the result of an attack. Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say you are fighting a MOB of equal level and that you have the following combat table when the mob tries to hit you:

A random number between 0 and 99.9 is generated. Let’s say the random number is 43.2. If you look up the value in the table, you see that a Critical Hit will be scored.

Now, let’s take the same numbers above, but let’s assume you had activated Shield Block like in our discussion a couple of days ago. Shield Block adds 75% to Block. When that 75% is added to Block, other attacks will be pushed off the end of the table.

As you can see, when you increase your Block by 75%, it effectively pushes off all attacks off of the table, guaranteeing that you will at least Block the attack.

I hope this has shed a little more light on how NPC attacks are resolved and further solidifies the reasoning behind Shield Block, as well as give you more insight in general why you want to have higher avoidance values (Dodge, Parry, Block).

Next time we will discuss the Combat Table a little more but from the perspective of players attacking NPCs!