Why I Tank (And it’s not to see Bear Butts)
As I wrote this, I realized this would be a lengthy post. For the attention challenged members of the community, I am providing a TLDR version for you: Cleared instance-happy druid, wipes-sad druid
My first character was a Hunter. Leveled to 60, joined a guild, did some raiding. I found raid dps as a hunter was dull process. Stand in one spot (41 yards away) and click aimed shot every time I could. That’s a bit of a simplification, true, but before steady shot hunter dps was a very repetitive task. Then I rolled a priest to heal, went shadow at 29 and never looked back, except for brief period of time where I was leveling other characters and went disc/holy to help out the raid. I never had a tank; I never thought to roll a tank: I never thought it would be fun. You had to stand there and get hit!? Why in the world….
But then Lushere hit Outland and started getting dungeon quests. I was unguilded at the time, pretty much starting fresh in WoW, and to run instances at all I had to run them in pick-up groups. And what’s worse, they didn’t need kitty-dps, they needed tanks . Bootstrap time, there’s the button for bear form, time to work.
Though it had been quite a while since I had run the Hellfire Citadel instances, I’ve run them a fair bit, so I knew how the instance worked, I knew how the bosses worked, I knew how growl worked. “At least I’ll be getting the quests done,” I thought as I stepped through the instance portal. “Do you want lead so you can mark?” “Sure… trap square, sheep diamond, kill skull.”
Hmmm… this isn’t so bad. It’s kinda fun to be standing over the corpse of your foes. Second pull- oh no! we got the second group- demo roar and swipe, mark on the fly. When I’m on my priest, clicking shadowform and hearing that sound effect sends a chill down my spine, I love it; tanking four mobs on a bad pull and not losing a party member on my second pull ever tanking, it was a close second. The rest of the instance went petty smoothly, then into Blood Furnace, Slave Pens at 60, and on from there. Whoa, tanking is fun! Why do all these warriors complain and go arms? (My warrior is only level 10, though I helped S level her warrior to 62 before Real Life(tm) happened. So I’ve never tanked end-game as a warrior, but leveling as arms is fun /digression)
Ultimately, I think I’m a control freak, and tanking allows me to pretend to be in control. Usually, as tank I’m setting targets, setting the pace, deciding strategies. I find it to be a more challenging role than DPS or Healing. To excel at it, I feel it is pretty necessary to have a good grasp of the abilities of every class and spec, as well as the players behind them if you know them, and to know the instance as well as possible. With the ease of finding information on sites like WoWHead, there isn’t much excuse not to. I also feel a much more personal stake in the group when I’m tanking. Whether or not it’s realistic, it’s my responsibility to control the mobs and not let people die even if they do stupid things like pull a second group along with the first pull. Wipes are my fault: clearly there had to be things I should have done differently to hold aggro on all the mobs, or I should have used a different strategy, or, whatever.
It’s a roller coaster ride as a tank. With a great group (sometimes even a pick-up group can be great) when everyone just seems to click into place like Voltron, instances are maniacal fun. With good people, even wiping over and over again can be an enjoyable time. There come runs where you just can’t do it, and those suck. You know, sitting there in your fur (and I imagine it would be the same for the plate wearers) that just that bit more health you don’t have, just that extra armor you don’t have, just that AP you don’t have, would make the difference. Never, on any other character, DPSing or Healing, have I ever felt that I was incapable of filling my role. When I’ve healed and there was a wipe, no big deal, I healed what I could. As DPS (or as DPS/CC), do your job, try not to get aggro, stay on the right targets, and if it goes bad, do what you can. While I have seen (and done) those crazy, heroic, group-saving tricks, they aren’t expected, but they are applauded. However, as the tank to do those heroics, and when I can’t, it weighs heavy.
This week [note: this post was written some time before it was posted. I’ve run Magisters’ Terrace twice: once on Patch Day and once on Friday. On Tuesday, I got home from work, updated, logged in, hopped in LFG. About two minutes later, I’m summoned out to the Isle of Quel’Danas and we’re into the instance. No one in the group knew it, and I was looking forward to experiencing new content. I hadn’t read much about 2.4 because I wanted to keep it new, surprising. From the get-go it was tough. We had two hunters for trapping, neither survival spec, so CC was hit and miss. With so many caster mobs to deal with, CC was almost an afterthought anyway. After a few pulls I started to get a grasp of what mobs did what, started assigning targets a little differently, and without too much trouble we get the first two bosses down. Then downstairs and we’re looking at the Very Large Pulls of Insanity. The first half of the instance took around an hour. I spent four more hours in there. Wiped on almost every pull, just hoping to kill one or two so they could be cleared the second time. Skipped as many groups as possible. Got to the third boss. I’d say this was almost two hours. Eventually, we got it done, but it was messy. One pull, then Kael. One pull. One pull that I Could. Not. Make. Work. I could not hold aggro on the five mobs who were AoEing and CCing all their own. I failed.
Spent a couple of days on other characters doing some leveling, watched other people run MrT, enjoyed the Zen of Hunter Shot Rotations. Friday I logged in on Lushere expecting to see a Karazhan run, didn’t, ended up starting a MrT run with an Elemental Shaman of Pwnage and a Rogue of… well he’s awesome too. Picked up a druid for healing and a survival hunter for trapping and we go. I consider the amount of magical damage I’ll be taking, and swap out half my tanking set for dps gear-the armor value won’t matter and while my health takes a big hit, more damage from me means more threat means things die faster and do less damage overall. This is the theory anyway. I don’t know if my performance was overall any better (tanked one pull in cat form, hit the wrong button and I could not see my character to tell. The action bars are totally different but did I notice? No.), but the group was better able to work together. The hunter was a chain trapping master and I didn’t die often, so the healing was probably really good. Wiped once before the second boss as my pull of the mana worms brought, someone said, five groups at once. Wiped once on the 6-pull before Kael. The third boss was rough, but we did it. The Kael encounter is really fun.
Probably an hour and a half to do the whole run which was a full clear. I’m far, far, from a master tank, but it was personally redemptive to go in and finish that instance. It’s not that it makes up for the failure, but it did remind me that we succeeded because of the work done by the team, not by me alone.
It would be nice if there were a tool that could evaluate performance as a tank. DPS can track their DPS and see if it has places for improvement. Recount and WoWWebStats can be used to determine which elements are the most effective to provide DPS. Omen2 (if it starts working for everyone) sets the limit, DPS just has to maximize their usage of what threat the tank provides. But how do you quantify tanking effectiveness? Mitigation, survival, TPS, group coordination, tactics… not all of these things can even be broken into numerical values for analysis. That, I think, is the problem. The only way I can judge my effectiveness is by overall success, which I am not the sole arbiter of. Something of a dilemma there, I guess. I’d be curious (for anyone that reads this and is a tank), how do you determine your quality as a tank? Am I crazy for thinking I should be responsible? If not, how do you deal with the failures? There’s no way I’m giving tanking up, it too exhilarating when it’s going well, but when it’s not…. I guess that’s one of the reasons I have so many characters, to switch to easier roles from time to time.
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4 Responses to “Why I Tank (And it’s not to see Bear Butts)”
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Recount actually tracks TPS, damage taken, healing received, and a lot of other useful stats tanks find useful in addition to DPS and damage.
Drotara’s last blog post..Word on the street is . . . .
Thanks for the comment, Drotara! Woot! I have a comment!
To respond: yes, Recount can track a lot of the things that tanking involves, however, I’m not so sure that, on the whole, any collection of statistics would be an effective tool for measuring. In terms of TPS, a tank only needs to generate enough threat that the DPS classes can. Granted, more TPS allows for more DPS, but, particularly in multi-mob tanking, that is going to be diluted by switching targets and what-not. Damage taken, is another thing that loses some meaning once comparison is made; ultimately, my goal in gearing as a tank is to take enough damage to have sufficient rage generation to spam maul every swing and mangle/lacerate/swipe every global cooldown. Any damage I take beyond that is extra work for the healers, but how do you compare that. I, as a bear tank, cannot look at damage taken compared to a warrior and say I am a better tank or a worse tank, because it’s so much more nebulous than that.
Recount is awesome in comparing personal progress, but overall ability, I think, escapes that sort of mechanical description.
Regarding damage taken, I look at it not in terms of raw damage taken, but the percentages. The lower the percentages of damage taken by the dps and healers, the better I did my job as a tank.
That’s not a bad way to look at it Kelarian. Though, the longer I tank, the way I look at it changes. I may need to write an update to this.