Tanking: More Than Just Having Things Hit You OR If You Don’t Know Shit, STOP TALKING

“Okay fine, I admit it, I don’t know anything about tanking.”
“Now you get it!”

Yesterday I was home from work. I wasn’t feeling very well, in part due to drama from the night before (where I got to play moderator again – not something I wanted to do, but I was the only one around at the time that could) but mostly because my body has decided to be a jerk lately (no, it’s not my time of month, thanks for asking). The topic of Death Knight Tanking came up, and guys, I totally learned something.

I’ve had it wrong all along!

Frost? Totally has defense-boosting talents that make it the tank spec and it is not in the party’s best interests for the tank to use their survival-related cooldowns. You’re wasting runes on Vampiric Blood, Rune Tap and other related skills!

Well, consider me schooled.

Gawsh, to think I had it wrong all this time. It’s amazing my party didn’t die with my thoughtless use of these health-boosting, survival-based talents. Why, the loss of threat generation must have nearly wiped us countless times!

Okay, serious business time. Let me put this in bold type for you:

Tanking is not just about pissing off monsters.

Tanking is not just about pissing off monsters.

Tanking is not just about pissing off monsters.

Is that clear?

Okay, good.

What is your job as a tank?

1. Out-threat your DPS and healer.
2. Keep yourself alive.
3. Keep your party alive.

What does this mean?

As a tank, you have to be the one and only thing the mobs concentrate on. They have to hate you. On top of that, you have several skills, several cooldowns, devoted to one of the following:

• Temporary total health boost
• Temporary damage reduction
• Instant % health recovery
• Temporary armor or avoidance boost

It is your job to use them, to love them and to love your healer by loving those skills. By doing everything in your power to help your healer keep you alive, you save your party from death.

But Matojo, it’s the healer’s job to keep me alive!

It’s also the healer’s job to keep him/herself and three other people from death.

Believe it or not, running instances and raiding are about teamwork. DPS prevent nasties from reaching healers or from hitting the boss and causing them to heal back to full, or they interrupt casts, or they aid in adding to your, the tank’s, threat – some provide buffs. Healers keep the party alive and provide buffs. Tanks sometimes provide buffs and distract mobs. The other part of the teamwork scene, for the tanks, is helping to make things easier for the healer which, in turn, helps make their mana pools last longer. No mana, no heals, and if you’re being wailed on like whoa and not doing anything about it, that mana isn’t going to last long.

Those cooldowns help make you last longer in battle, which helps your healer last longer, and helps keep your party alive.

But Matojo! I waste valuable runes/rage/mana on those cooldowns! I need those resources for threat!

As a Death Knight, by the time I’ve started my diseases, dropped Death and Decay and had some crits from Howling Blast/Icy Touch/Frost Strike, I’m generating well over 40k threat per second. On longer fights, it’s more. This is usually at least 38k or more threat per second above my DPSers.

The fact is, if you cannot spare a cooldown to save your ass for fear of losing threat, there is something wrong with what you are doing. It could be your rotation. It could be your gear. It could be your spec (shitty specs do equal shitty threat, but shitty specs are also the product of shitty players and therefore point to more problems). You could be in the wrong presence, stance or you forgot righteous fury again (Paladins? As long as RF is up, you sneeze and LO! there is threat).

The Teal Deer: One, tanking is not just about holding threat, it’s also about using all the tools that are available to you to succeed. Two, if you spec like this to tank* it’s obvious you have not done any research on tanking as your particular class/spec – so please, stop acting like you know what you’re on about.

* Before anyone brings up Gahiji’s current blood spec, yes, I know it’s not optimal for group tanking. It’s meant for soloing instances and level 60 raids, and it’s in the process of being tweaked. If it’s successful, you lot will be the second to know!

Troll is Tanking, HOW CAN THIS BE?

I recently picked up Gahiji as a tank again. After capping his hit and expertise and adjusting his spec, I started diving into heroics and found that… I could actually hold aggro against highly geared party-mates. Where I used to have issues, I suddenly didn’t unless the asshats were opening up their AoEs far too quickly.

Or, in the case of warlocks, dropping that damned Seed of Corruption before I’ve had a chance to grab things. If you’re wondering why you’re dying, just use something that’s less fucking obnoxious.

For some reason I never fail to remember hit caps on my DPS toons, but the tanks? Every single fucking time. Unfortunately, Matojo is still not quite near his heroic hit cap yet, but he’s getting there thanks to Emblem upgrades and the occasional piece of heroic gear.

I love tanking. My Tauren tank on TB, Briske, hit 15 and I immediately hit randoms on him even though it was way past my bedtime. I occasionally hop on Tecila to tank a random and, honestly, I should do so more often – same with Bellonah – because Zul’jin’s battlegroup has been surprisingly good to me with the random groups (I haven’t had any supremely jerkfaced types yet). I’ve turned my TB Night Elf Druid, Ashkena, into a bear tank and… yeah. I’m a little obsessed.

So far, I’m up to three bears (22, 35, 73), one paladin (73), five warriors (10, 15, 24, 50, 80) and four or five Death Knights (60, 60, 60, 70, 80) that are specced and geared for tanking. In comparison, I have three priests (28, 64, 80), two shamans (66, 70) and one paladin (15) that are specced and geared for healing. What is that about girls preferring healing again? Sorry, can you say that while I bash your face in with my shield?

Yeah. Didn’t think so.

Unfortunately I’m lacking tanks on Moon Guard and will have to remedy this. DANIIL NEEDS TO LEVEL.

The Changing Face of the Death Knight Tank

Anybody that knows me knows that I am not one to QQ.

I tend to be the one that giggles at various QQing, but rarely am I the one to do it. In fact, I’ve ever only QQ’d once about proposed changes – back when the change to Unholy Blight was announced.

Well folks, here’s my second reason to QQ: Blood will be the only DK Tank spec when Cataclysm rolls in.

No more Frost tanks, (potentially) no more Dual Wield, no more Unholy Tanks.

I can kind of see why Blood, which has lots of self-healing capabilities, is the chosen tanking tree, but for me, the best part about the class was the ability to be a tank with whatever tree you wanted. Did you want to be able to heal yourself as you ripped shit up? Blood. Did you want to be a monster of AoE threat? Frost. Did you want to be a disease powerhouse? Unholy. That was one of the best parts of the class for me.

I can, for the most part, understand the change. The way things stand now, if one wants to be an effective tank in Heroics, the best bet is to grab a Frost spec for the AoE threat (because EVERYBODY AND THEIR FUCKING COUSIN wants to AoE and can’t find their fucking single-target skills anymore). Blood is, last I heard, the current king of single-target threat. Unholy is kinda the red-headed stepchild, to borrow a potentially offensive term – or maybe “the only Undead kid in the orphanage”. I think I’ve only seen one Unholy tank at 80.

So, my fellow DK tanks, join me in advanced mourning of the end of the Death Knight’s reign as the ultimate multipurpose tank.

/sob

Dealing With Depression and What Warriors Are Teaching Me About Life

You know you wanna hit this.

Last night was not a good night.

I’m not getting into the main reason, but another thing is that my Guild Leader will be unable to play for a while. The bright light in this is that I finally have his AIM info, so I can bug him whenever I want to. He’s a pretty cool dude, but honestly, all the Harbies are. They’re pretty much drama-free and awesome (mostly because the officers and I punt the drama out onto its ass) and why the hell do I try to take time away from TB when I have them? They seriously help my mood when I have low points.

I suffer from depression, I take medication for it and I will soon be seeking counseling. There’s my secret for the blogosphere, except not really, because I am pretty open about it. It’s not like I’m not doing anything.

And, honestly, the blogosphere and Twitterati and the Harbies are a pretty good support force – I’ve run into people that are familiar with what I’m dealing with, so it helps, and I slog on knowing that I’m not alone.

Being an emotional person doesn’t help, either – that is something I try to hide, ’cause I abhor any sign of weakness in myself.

With that said…

Slight meltdown lead me back to TB, where I hopped onto Matojo, ate up the adoration of my guildies (the amount of love there is staggering) and jumped into a random to beat the shit out of things.

It’s empowering. It really is. I’m in a position that most don’t associate with a woman – even less so because I’m playing a man – and I am kicking ass. It’s chaotic,  but it’s invigorating. My brain is working so fast, everything is just awesome.

And suddenly I’m seeing my warrior in a new light. That level 78 warrior, that character that I’ve roleplayed for three years, he is awesome on a toon mechanics level, as well as personality-wise. He is eating this up and is ecstatic about kicking ass. It’s what he was born to do. It’s what he lives for.

Matojo Furiey, giant blue Saronite-clad harbinger of death and tequila, Soldier of the Harbingers of War and a big part of my therapy.

Now I know, for sure, why I love tanking – and warriors in particular. When I’m down, a tank is a nigh-unstoppable destructive force that puts me in a position of power and control that I honestly don’t have in my life. When I have my moments of weakness, he reminds me of just what I can do.

And he’s working on making me carry that over into real-life. It’s slow-going, but it’s happening.

I Am Not Hardcore. :(

It took me ’til the last major content patch – you know, when ICC was added – to hit 2k Spellpower in any form on Grindal.

But I had nearly 30% Holy crit.

I have a crit addiction, I admit it. I get excited when I see crit on my healers’ gear and I might even drool a little. My heart goes pitter-patter (or maybe that’s from being a fat chick, I don’t know) when a new piece of gear gives me an additional point or two of that delicious, delicious crit or I see that I’m being healed by a Disc Priest or Shaman (Holy pallies don’t exist).

Grindal had been looking for Int and Crit pieces, gemming for Spellpower and generally being a little “meh” about Haste – sure, Haste is nice and I know I need to hit the soft cap, but it’s not exciting. If my healing has ever wiped a group, it’s been because of slow reaction time, not low Haste (or uh, the cat, or not targeting the right person). He has a higher mana pool than the other Disc priest I used to regularly run with, though I haven’t played him in forever, and, well, I keep getting told I’m good at what I do.

Now that my Crit is close to 30% I’ll be piling on the Spellpower. In fact, that’s a stat that I can’t imagine any healing class not wanting, and when I see commenters on WoW.com crowing about Haste over Spellpower for Shamans I am confused. Okay, you cast faster and your global cooldowns are better, but um, what about raw healing power? Delicious crits? Is it a matter of supplementing what’s not on the gear? Maybe my little non-raiding brain can’t handle the logic behind this idea, I don’t know.

Or maybe these people are bitter about not being the Resto columnist and are venting their rage on a series of 101 Articles. For fuck’s sake.

I think, when it comes to styles of healing or tanking there’s a little more wiggle room when it comes to stat preferences. If your heals need to come fast and furious, you’ll concentrate on Haste. If you need your heals to hit harder when they come, Spellpower. If you like crits, you get the idea. Even with this said, if you’re a Paladin or Shaman stacking Spirit, you are bad and I do not like you.

I won’t pretend to know whether or not this works from a raiding perspective because my raiding experience is limited to easy shit, I mean, Sarth with no Drakes up. That isn’t exactly rocket science. That’s “stay out of the fire and pray lag doesn’t eat you” and “don’t hop into the lava you idiotfuck”.

As a tank, I’m trying two things: On one DK, I’m going for avoidance, I’m looking for gems, enchants and gear that will make things hit me less often while on other DKs and my warriors, I’m going for health pool. I love Avoidance tanks. Does this make me a failure? I dunno. I’ll let you know when my squishy ass wipes a group due to being squishy.

Oh. Wait…

As an aside, for the love of Djehuty stop sucking EJ cock, seriously. They’re one fucking resource not the be-all, end-all of everything.

Matojo: On Leading the Charge

[ If anybody makes it through this and understands what he's said? You get a cookie. ]

De name’s Matojo Furiey. Ah’m a soldiah, Ah’m gonna be a daddeh fo’ de Loas-know-how-maneh-time again wit’ de love a’ mah life, an’ Ah’m a grumpeh ol’ bastahd.

Ah’m an impo’tant paht a’ mah unit.

Ah lead de chahge inta dangah.

Dat’s mah job, joo know? Ah’m de fella wit’ de goggles an’ de big fuck-off shield. Joo don’ get ‘tween me an’ dem, joo good. Ah stay standin’ an’ dat’s how joo know t’ings is gonna be okeh. Joo gimme time ta piss dem off, evereht’in’ be fine.

It’s scareh as shit, knowin’ dat if Ah screw up, t’ings gonna go crazeh, so Ah do mah best ta stay good an’ pissed off. De moment joo let joo feah take ovah, joo’s fucked an’ den joo fucked joor team. ‘s alsah scareh relyin’ on folks dat’joo don’ know – de fella keepin’ joo standin’. Joo dunno if he gonna fuck up, neit’ah – he could get joo killed.

Dat’s de knowledge joo go inta battle wit’ evereh day when joo leadin’ de chahge. It’s dis big-ass gahdamn suhge a’ ‘drenalin dat get joo goin’ an’ keep joo goin’ t’rough de whole t’ing.

Dat’s why Ah keep doin’ it. De rush. De rush, an’ knowin’ dat, dis time, Ah can do shit. Ah ain’ some sisseh huntah dat stand back no moah. Ah’m in de t’ick a’ t’ings now.

An’ if anehbodeh mess wit’me, Ah fuck dem up.

What Ah do? It ain’ nice – but Ah’m damn good at it.

[ Matojo is a level 78 Warrior on Thorium Brotherhood and has been tanking since he started at level 62. I run randoms on him on occasion, and I've never received so many compliments on a single character - apparently, he really is good. ICly, he's a heavily-scarred, heavy-drinking, womanizing bastard that is currently deeply involved with a Darkspear girl and is expecting a baby. He's toned down a bit over the years, but his mischievous nature continues to ring true no matter what he's doing or where he is.

I love this character. ]

Matojo Admits She Has a Tank Addiction

I have been pretty much tanking non-stop on various toons – two warriors, a druid and two death knights – over the past several weeks. With my mood being jumpy it’s been a great way to distract myself while continuing my hermit habits, though it also means I’m really behind on Roleplay and a lot of people are getting twitchy with me.

I digress.

After I dropped Gahiji’s tank gear and turned it into DPS gear, I switched back to tank gear (regemming and reenchanting the entire kit) and turned over to The Frost Side. Gahiji is now sporting a two-hander-centric Frost Tanking spec (admittedly copied from what was pointed out to me by Lodur after I bemoaned my favourite spec’s shitty AoE threat). Since I can’t get dual disease to flow worth shit with Frost, I’m going single disease and having a ball – my threat problems are few, I crit like crazy and my confidence in my Death Knight tanking has started to come back. With Dariahn’s lists and guides combined with the Tankspot DK Tanking Guide, I am pretty much set to work on gearing him up. For what? No idea. He has the DPS sigil, the one with the 200 STR proc, but I’m not replacing that until I get rid of some blues (I think of it as a little extra threat, y’know?). I also, unfortunately, dropped my dodge trinket (from Brewfest) in favour of the +170 STAM trinket from Brewfest, so I have two +170 STAM things on me. This puts me around 30k health and average avoidance with dodge gems, though I will probably replace the pure dodge gems (which are probably A Bad Idea and will get me laughed at) with Stam/Dodge.

First thing’s first – new pants.

I’m also enjoying my warriors. Matojo, who hit 77 this week, is a rage machine – he generates rage like whoa and puts out very high threat, which makes me happy and means I’m getting a lot of compliments about my tanking. One thing I have to say regarding the Vengeance battle group:  my shitty experiences have been few and far between. Thank you, Vengeance. He’s not getting very many upgrades, but this is okay! These things happen.

Tecila on Zul’jin is level 20 and making me realize how stupid the low-level dungeon groups really are, though even Vengeance had a break from the stupid. There was one awesome druid on Ruin somewhere that made me want to hug her, can’t recall her name anymore. Overall though, I know my tanking is solid and I can’t fault myself for the idiocy of others – it’ll get better as I get higher.

The other DK, Nyarah, is Dual Wield and built according to the TankSpot guide. I really, really like DW tanking and haven’t had any difficulty with that – stylistically speaking, it’s pretty similar in rotation to 2-H. Of course, she isn’t 80, so it’s difficult to really gauge the similarities.

I think my favourite is turning out to be my Druid, Varkev, because Druid tanking is so simple but so damn effective. I’m hard to kill and I’m a fucking bear. This is a character that I really want to get to 80, and considering he’s in the Harbingers I can see this happening sooner rather than later.

So that’s what I’ve been doing – tanking. I like to think it’s something I’m good at, I seem to have the instinct for it, even if I’m not the most theorycrafting-minded person out there.

Ode to the Sword and Board

It took me a very, very long time to warm up to warriors. I rolled several that never made it to level 30, then Kezeyah came along and she made it to level 62 before I grew tired of the character concept and had to retire her – that toon was recustomized and became Matojo, who originally was a Hunter. I also had Ojore, who was paired with another character but, due to scheduling conflicts, the partnership was dropped and Ojo has languished for quite a while, inactive, ’til I recently changed him to a Protection warrior.

… And now I have several warriors scattered over three servers.

I don’t know what it is, I never used to like the class, but mechanics changes over the past three years have made leveling them fun. The warrior is my favourite tanking class, followed by Death Knight, Druid, then Paladin and it’s one of the classes that I can level, and level, and level without growing tired of it.

On Thorium Brotherhood I have Matojo (76), Ojore (49) and Briske (10). On Moon Guard, it’s Daniil (10). Then there’s Zul’jin’s Tecila who, at the time of typing this article, is level 12 and steadily climbing.

I love the variety of tools that I have that I can use to grab and hold aggro. Sure, I lack the sheer number of AoE effects of the Death Knight, but once something sticks to me it’s still extremely difficult to peel it off. Matojo, as he is currently geared, hardly takes any damage – hell, he was able to finish off the last 30% or so of that Lich boss in Gundrak without a healer and with careful timing of his cooldowns – and his priorities and rotations just seem to come naturally to me.

Really, it’s like Warrior was the class that I was meant to play, but it took me my entire playtime to figure it out.

So, Warriors, I salute you! You are awesome and you should feel awesome.

The Return of Varkev Hammerhoof

Varkev was one of my first alts on Thorium Brotherhood.

He was also my very first RP character in WoW, predating Mama Lana by several months. The character was rolled on Eredar as a Tauren Warrior before I abandoned that server and moved to Thorium Brotherhood, where he was rolled as a Tauren Hunter. The patient, slow-speaking young Tauren developed through his entry into the Harbingers of War, the insanity and death of his half-sister and an attempt at Druidry before I finally deleted him and sent the character off, off-screen,  into Northrend. My new druid was his sister, Ipolani, and gradually I found that I really didn’t know her as well as I had thought, that she was a lot harder for me to play than Varkev had ever been.

All I had to do was understand something very, very important about Varkev:

He’s not an idiot.

I think this was a fact that was difficult to translate for those that played with him, too, because of the way he interacted with people and his habit of mixing up robes with dresses (they were the same thing, as far as he was concerned). His speech, in Orcish, was almost child-like, he was long-winded – often taking several statements to get to his point – and his patience was interpreted as him being slow.

Varkev Hammerhoof is a patient, gracious man who is very comfortable with himself; he is quite happy to wander around a city in a pink dress if he feels like it, and he is just as able to sport the heavy leather armour of the Bear Brother that he is. He’s willing to stand back and heal, or rush forward and take a few fists to the face.

He’s also eccentric.

His trip into Northrend drastically changed him and made him understand things that he had never understood before, but just what, even I’m not certain of yet. Perhaps it forced him to grow up.

Now, Varkev is a level 71 Tauren Druid with a Bear and Tree spec available to him. As a Bear, his health sits around the 12k mark, with some rather impressive (to me, at least) avoidance stats and what appears to be decent damage numbers. He is prepared to take on the threats of Northrend with some macros, spec and rotation advice offered in some of BBB’s Bear-Tanking Intro posts.

And I am feeling more comfortable with this character than I ever had before. It’s almost like, shoving him into the back of my head and forcing myself not to try to get into him, effectively “killing” him for a while, made us come to some understandings with each other. His sister standing in for him seemed to make it easier to step into him.

Add onto the fact that I’m far, far more comfortable playing men (most of the time) than women, and I wonder why it took us so long to figure things out.

This is Varkev Hammerhoof, and he’s back and ready to start eating some faces.

Glory to the Horde!

… One day I will get myself a decent, non-GIMP, image-editing program for work. ONE DAY. And yes I was totally lazy with the image BUT AT LEAST THIS TIME I HAVE A PICTURE.

Ranting on a FailKnight

Good morning, audience!

This weekend, I had the pleasure of schooling a fellow Death Knight in the art of not sucking. Sort of. It was more a matter of me foaming at the mouth and him saying “I’ll change, I’ll change”. Whether or not he’ll listen to me is a topic for another post.

In a conversation on how well Death Knights manage the damage they take, I pointed out that I am not too difficult to heal – in fact, I’m apparently so easy that my friend Wyat, on his slightly lowly geared but nonetheless awesome shaman, was letting me take damage because he was bored. This Knight, who I shall name Mo, told the channel that a healer once told him that he was harder to heal than her Death Knight friend.

“Then you have a gear issue,” I said as I pulled up Armory.

I found:

• A distinct lack of enchants.
• Two pure parry gems.
• This spec.
• Dual wielding – without DW talents!

“No, nevermind,” I added. “You have more issues than just gear.”

If one intends to tank, please, for the love of kittens (and to save yourself from being brutally torn asunder by serious or semi-serious DK tanks like myself) – take the first-tier tanking talents. They are: Blade Barrier, Toughness and Anticipation. In the course of making use of your skill priority, Blade Barrier will activate (whenever your Blood Runes are on cooldown), which gives your healer some time to recover. Toughness adds to the reduction in squishy by adding more armour to what you already have. Anticipation gives you more dodge – everybody likes dodge!

Parry gems are problematic because parry suffers more from diminishing returns than dodge does (the curve for DR on Dodge is 88%, 47% for Parry). I would suggest Regal Twilight Opal/Regal Dreadstone for the stamina (Enduring Forest Emerald/Enduring Eye of Zul if one needs to hit the defense cap but doesn’t need enough to warrant a pure Defense gem, I’m using Stalwart gems in my red slots until I figure out how to re-arrange my gemming now that I’m at the Defense cap). Those who raid will be gemming for stamina regardless of socket bonuses – remember, raids are not my focus.

Regarding dual wielding: Unless you have the proper fucking talents, don’t do it. A lot of people go on about how dual wield tanking is so not something that should be done and omg! Dual wield tanks suck – those people are about a patch behind. Dual wield tanking is viable with the proper set of talents and stats, end of story. There, I said it. Don’t believe me? Read Chill of the Grave. You also might want to check out TankSpot’s Death Knight Tank Guide.

Next – enchant your gear. ILevel 200 blues? Enchant them. Greens? Get thee to the Auction House, and if you don’t have any money, what the hell? Check the categories. I’m not going over making money in this article. Buy yourself some entry-level crafted tanking gear (Tempered Saronite, Tempred Titansteel, Titanium Rings and Necklaces), then enchant.

TL;DR – ATTENTION FAILKNIGHTS: Get yourself a proper tank spec. Look! Two examples and three templates. Enchant your gear. Hit Defense cap, then start upping your Stamina while getting the Hit and Expertise soft caps with some Strength, Dodge and Parry on the side. Don’t dual wield if you’re not using the proper Frost talents.

Remember: If you find that you’re squishier than you’d like – check your spec, then your stats, gear, gems and enchants and finally, your rotation/priority system. There is always a way to fix it, and it is not the class. We are spiky, not squishy.