A few things that will make you a better tank. Part 3

Ok, when we last left off I was talking about playing the role of caster dps.  Some people think I'm completely off my rocker for saying that to be a better tank, you need to do everything BUT tank.  I have found that the best way to become a better tank is the ability to empathize with the other members of your group.  If you understand what they are having to deal with, it will always help you to be able to make a pull better, get a boss down faster and make the run go smoother.

On that note, Melee is next!

No, some tanks out there have done this.  Some have a melee spec and they go to town killing stuff.  HOWEVER.....they usually do it in their tanking gear and have no fear of pull off the tank.  This does nothing to make you a better player.  All this does is give you a bigger epeen and make you the group pain in the @ss.

So, as stated in the last couple of blogs, start up a new toon, I recommend a warrior as this class is perfect for this.  With a warrior,  you can't step back and cast a heal on yourself to pull your butt out of the proverbial fire (or real fire if you were standing in it, lol).  You will have to rely on paying attention and your healer to keep you alive.  Level to 10 and then jump on BGs.  This will give you the perfect place to learn to watch what is going on.  If you can develop eyes in the back of your head, you will have learned a skill that will make you a good dps and a great tank, extreme situational awareness.  This is a skill that you will find a great number of people are lacking.  Even dps should know what is going on at all times with stuff in the room.

Once you hit 15, jump in to dungeons with both feet and learn new fun features such as "The tank keeps him moving when he doesn't need to....I CAN'T HIT HIM!!!!"  or my favorite "Why does the tank keep turning him? I keep getting him by the mob since the tank faces him to me!  AHHHH!!!"  Watch closely at what your tank is doing and remember or even write down the things he/she does that drive you nuts.  Don't yell at them in chat, it won't do any good.  Just make a note of it and remember it.

So, now that you have played the roll of healer, caster and melee dps, you have a firm grasp on what the other members of your group go through on a daily basis.  You know what they have to deal with trying to keep you alive and how the strive to keep themselves alive.  Remember, you are the tank.  It if your job to not just grab mobs and make fast pulls to show off your epeen.  It is your job to keep the group alive.  It is the healers job to keep you alive so that you can do your job.  This means do not be afraid to CC something or to make a LoS pull or to kill that extra group of trash so that it does not get accidentally pulled.  It's your job to keep them alive by setting up the run.  You are the first one in there and it is your job to set up pulls so that no one gets killed (there are some exceptions such as people standing in fire.  Cause you just can't fix stupid, lol.).  You will find that once you try this technique of playing all the different rolls until about lvl20 or 30, you will have much better understanding of the real group dynamic and you will become a much better tank for it.

I hope this has helped out.  I have done this and I can say that it gave me a lot of insight and makes my runs much smoother and with less repair bills.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment below and I will respond quickly.  If you enjoy this blog,. please become a follower and spread the word about Neo's Challenging Roar!

A few things that will make you a better tank. Part 2

So, in my last blog, I covered that one thing that will make you a better thank is to put yourself in the healers shoes for about 20 levels.  Now, lets move on to dps.  Every tank should play two different dps classes.  One should be a melee and the other should be a mage since you get the ability to CC at a very low level.

Like before, level up to 10 and run BGs to get a better feel for shooting things that want to kill you more then spiders in Elwynn do. However, don't take off your heirloom.  In fact, you should have the highest and strongest possible enchants on that heirloom gear. As soon as you hit 15, queue for dungeons.  This is again where you will learn some good information and help you out as a tank.  You should have gotten Polymorph at lvl14 so every chance you get in a dungeon, CC something near the group that might be or was accidentally pulled.  Watch how the tank tends to ignore your CC and either hit it anyway or after the group is dead, walks past it like there is supposed to be a sheep walking around in Ragefire Chasm.

Now, you might be noticing that you are probably doing crazy dps with your heirloom gear on at this point and pulling mobs off the tank may be a bit on the easy side. You are now starting to understand that you might be under the tank on threat but it only takes 1 good crit to blow past him to make you run from the giant earth elemental screaming like a little girl as it pounds you in the face (ok, maybe that's just me that does that, lol).

Remember, dps are usually not totally fail or dumb.  They don't CC stuff to annoy you but rather to help out.  They don't mean to pull off you, sometimes a abnormally high crit happens.  Trust me, normal dpsers don't want to pull mobs off you and tank them.  They know that they can't take a hit like you can and don't want to try. You can always tell the good dps from the crazy epeen maniacs by whether they pull off you all the time or not.  You are always gonna run in to the epeen maniacs at some point or another, it can't be avoided.  That's what the pick feature is for.

Keep up the good work tanks, the world won't get anything done out there without you. Keep your eye out for the next part of this series on how to become a better tank.  Remember, no one is perfect and we all have room for improvement.

A few things that will make you a better tank. Part 1

After a few runs I have had in the recent past, I have decided to cover a few things that will make a tank a much better tank.  These are not your normal "get hit capped/more dodge/blah blah blah" stuff.  This will make you a better tank in that you will find that your runs will be smoother and nicer, which makes for a much better experience.  This will be a multi-part post that, by the end of the last post, you should have everything you need to make your life better in game.

The first this I recommend to EVERY tank out there is.......stop and roll a healer.  Yes, you heard me correctly.  Stop tanking and to roll a healer.  don't respec or dual spec and get a healing spec.  I mean start from square one and start healing.  Put all your points in healing as soon as you get them and then, at lvl10, Take off ALL your heirloom gear, replace the removed items with normal green/white items you can find and queue for BGs.  First, this will heal build healing skills.  Good healers learn that you can't just stand there and heal, there are times you have to heal and run as much as you can. This is easily learned in doing battleground.  A big orc warrior or little gnome rogue is not gonna let you just sit there and heal, you have to learn to heal and move to stay alive and keep people alive.  Stay with the group, the only way to learn good healing skills is to stay with the group and heal as much as you can.  Remember, don't get healer tunnel vision. This is where you are healing everyone so much, you forget to heal yourself.  This happens far more then you would think.

Now that you have leveled to 15 in battlegrounds, KEEP your heirloom gear off and queue in for random dungeons.  Now you learn some of the major tanking points in game.  You will now see how often a tank runs in for the next pull before you are ready and have mana back.  You will now see how often YOU are blamed for not keeping people alive, even though you were out of mana, siad you were out of mana but the tank went in anyway.  Here is where you will learn that healers are not supposed to loot ANYTHING, you are just supposed to keep up and heal.  You.....are a healbot.  You will also find some groups that the tank will listen to chat.  Will wait for you to get mana, will let you loot and will not go charging in if you have less them half mana.  Learning this all first hand, you will see what the healing classes go through in almost every run they get in to.

If you want to become a better tank, both for your sanity and for the good of the group (since running a dungeon/raid is a GROUP activity), you will do this until about lvl20 or lvl30.  It will only take you about 2 days to do this and you will learn just about everything you need to know.  Remember, you will not truly learn anything if you run to the AH and twink yourself out.  If you really want to do this, and I recommend you do, you will do it properly and do this in normal level appropriate gear.

My next blog will cover step 2 in becoming a better tank for you and your group.  When all is said and done, you will be a far better tank then you are now.  Trust me, I've done it.

Can you live in BC again?

I've been seeing people talk lately about "retro-toons" and was curious as to what this was exactly.  It seems that there are people that are creating new characters, leveling them up to lvl70 and then.....*gasp*, capping their experience.  At first I thought this was a bit of a crazy idea.  However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had so much fun back in BC that it might be worth a shot.  So I leveled up a mage that I already had sitting as lvl62 and capped off my XP at 70.  It was at that point that I had a huge rush of flashbacks from when I hit lvl70 on my druid back in Burning Crusade.

My first stop, Isle of Quel'Danas! Time to start knocking out my Isle dailys again. The more I started doing some rep grinding in dungeons and with turn ins, not to mention beginning to gather some better gear through quartermasters and dungeons, I began to have more fun than I thought I would.  I figured it would be fun for a few days and probably lose it's interest, at which point I'd simply turn back on my XP and move on.  But it's been well over a week and I haven't lost any interest yet.  Maybe it's the fact that I know I can always turn on my XP and move on if I get bored. Maybe it the fact that Blizzard has, in the past, made changes to the over all stats in the game and even with the actual BC gear, I'm doing more damage now then I did then.  Who knows, all I know is that it's become so much fun, I have 5 other guild member that have decided to do the same thing. Next thing we know, we'll have enough people at lvl70 to run Karazhan with all 70s, lol.

I must admit, it's has been really fun.  Running some Cataclysm raids on my level 85 toons and then switching over and running dungeons and other stuff on my level 70 has been a blast so far.  I hope that it doesn't get old or boring any time soon. One thing we, the people in my guild that are going to have toons stay at lvl70, have decided is no twinking.  By this, we mean that you have to get gear from dungeons, heroics, raids, quests or quartermasters. Running battlegrounds to power through and grab all the super-high level PvP gear you can takes away form the fun of it and is somewhat frowned on.  1 or 2 pieces of PvP are ok, but full BG epics is a bit much.

If you have a level70 toon and are interested in having some fun on the Anvilmar server (Alliance side), cap that XP off and give me a pst.  Just whisper Taeo (my lvl70) or Neotaeo, if I'm not on then just whisper anyone in <DunderMifflin> and if they can't invite you, they will let someone know that can that you want an invite.  Come and have some fun, that is what retro-toons are all about!

A little about the blogger...

After handing out all this information about tanking and everything else I have covered in my blog, I though I should take a moment to give you a look in to where this wealth of knowledge (pffft) comes from. A little background on me, the blogger so you can maybe understand a little bit more about why I have the opinions I do and why I have taken it so seriously to gather up all the information I have obtained over the years and feel the need to share it with everyone out there that is looking for some help or maybe just a confirmation of what they were thinking.

I stated playing World of Warcraft back in early/mid 2006.  My first toon was......a mage.  I know, but I soon learned the ways of the tank side, lol.  After a lot of thinking about it, I grabbed myself a free trial of WoW.  I always loved the Warcraft games and thought, why not.  Man, I was not prepared for what I saw.  I started out as a human not having a clue as to what was going on.  didn't know what quests were, didn't know anything.  I wondered around in awe of the landscape of the game.  To me, the Elywnn Forest was amazing looking.  I Stumbled on Stormwind and didn't have a clue a I got lost (didn't know about hitting "M" for a map yet, lol). I found what I thought was a underground train that would take me around the city....WRONG!  I get off the tram and wonder around some more.  I finally find what looks like an entrance and.....I find myself in a high mountain peak, surrounded by snow.   I was shocked and in awe....and had to have this game!  I told my wife that she had to try this game out.  After all, she is the one that got me in to the warcraft games in the first place.  After she roamed around a bit, it was settled, we got a WoW account.

After about 6 months, I got a second account. Since I knew nothing about character transfers, I started a new toon..my druid Neotaeo.  My original reason for this was I liked the description of being able to cast spells AND heal myself.  Little did I know that in my leveling, I would learn how to change forms.  This was a big thing for me, I loved it.  The survivability of the bear form really kept my attention. Of course, I still had no idea what a tank was.  I wouldn't learn what a tank was until I got to about level 50ish.  By this time, My wife and I had seen the demon attacks on cities and discovered the upcoming Burning Crusade expansion. So with the coming of BC, I became a full on tank...kind of.  It was a steep learning curve and bears were looked down on even harder then ever in times after.

By the time I hit lvl70, I was the GM of my guild, tanking anything I could get in to and building up a guild group for dungeons.  I began to tank everything in sight, it didn't matter what it was or how hard it was, I tanked it ( or at least tried to).  I began to read up about feral tanking.  Back then, we still needed defense, although, we didn't not need as much as other classes.  This is when I found myself becoming all too familiar with 2 major things in BC.  1, everyone would rather take a pally in a group then a bear, and if there was no pally, they just would not go some times.  2, bears were stacking stamina (NOOOOOO!!!!!!).  It was at that point that I decided 2 things.  I was going to make a name for myself as one of the very few bear tanks on the server people would have no trouble running with.  And 2, I was going to do bear tanking against what most people were doing.  Almost everyone was stam-stacking and that did not make sense to me.  If you can get your dodge rating up high, you will take less damage and therefore need less heals.  By the end of BC, I was getting requests from some of the bigger raiding guilds on my server to tank raids like SSC, and Gruuls ( I made a lot of friends tanking heroic dungeons with people) and I was proving that stam-stacking was NOT the way to go, even if people didn't listen.

With the coming of Wrath of the Lich King, bears had changed.  We got rid of defense and got some nice AoE attacks.  This was like music to my ears, if we don't have to have defense, we can add more agility to our gear where we can.  Wrath however, caused problems that we would not understand until Cataclysm would hit. Tanks, bears included became lazy and impatient.  We would run in to a group, round them up and begin to hold everything, and it was not hard for us.  Even I fell in to the trap that was Wrath.  When Cataclysm hit us, we were in a world of hurt.  Tanks that were so use to running in and grabbing everything were dying very quick because Blizzard had brought back the need for crowd control (CC).  I know I found myself in a fix.  They had done major changes to bear that left us all but broken, but they also changed the rules of the game back to BC style mob pulls. I'll be honest, I hung up my bear suit for awhile after trying very hard to relearn how to bear tank.  But this gave me a good opportunity as I rolled a Death Knight for the sole reason of tanking.  I could learn form scratch how to tank in Cataclysm. Although I was now a DK tank, I still kept up on druid tanking and gave Blizzard my two cents worth of information and feeling on how they could change bears and make them more playable again. After all, it was at that point that bear tanks all but disappeared ingame.  We all felt the same way, and I'm glad that Blizzard listened.  With the big changes they did to bear tanks again, they brought us back out and in the main stream of tanking again.

So, I have seen and been through so many different incarnations of feral tanking and have done so much person trial and error for what works with bears that I feel that I need to share it with those that are either just starting out in feral tanking or might be thinking about it.  I share this with those that might be looking for some piece of information that confirms what they think. I even happily share my info with those that would argue against my points as I know that I don't know everything and there might be a different way of doing things that are better or easier at the time. For over 4 years now I have been the GM and main tank of <DunderMifflin> and I intend on continuing tanking until they shutdown the servers.

I don't believe in stam stacking. There, I said it, now lets move on.....

Ok, so let me be a bit more clear about the title, lol.  I've been a bear tank for a very long time.  I've seen bears go through major trends, on more then off, of stacking stamina over any other stat.  Many tanks will argue that by "stam stacking" it gives them a lot more survivability in raids and dungeons.  That having more health makes it easier on healers to keep them alive.  I feel that they could not be more wrong, and let me explain why I think this (please remember, this is what I have found, this is not hard facts, just what I think works better).

First, by stacking stamina, yes, you have far more health and it does in fact give the healers a lot more time to get off a heal before your health pool is empty.  However, healers, no matter what Blizzard or any forums posts say, have a need to keep your health bar as full as possible at all times in a fight.  By having a huge health pool, you are still taking large chunks of damage and thus, more mana is used to keep you up. This can be a very bad thing as healers can tell you.  Here's a little secret, *looks around to see if anyone is listening*, if healers run out of mana, you get no heals.  lol.

Ok, now, on the opposite end of this, if you stack other stats totally over stamina, you will have a much smaller health pool and thus make it hard for the healers to keep you up.  The trick it to find a nice balance of stats to make the healers life easier.  Remember, the best thing for a tank is to take your epeen and throw it away.  Epeens only end up causing problems, espeically for tanks and healers.  Now, the tricky part is to remember, you need to have some stats over any other stat regardless of how you feel.  Here is my breakdown of stats and the order I feel that should be dealt with.

Hit Rating - 961 or 8% hit  is needed for raid boss or 721 hit for heroic 5-man boss. That is the long and the short of it.  Now, I have found that there is leeway here. If you go in to a raid with 5%, you will notice a huge problem in threat, you won't produce enough.  If you go in with 7.5%, you will usually be just fine. But the closer to 8% you are, the more threat you will be able to generate and the happier your group will be.

Expertise - The soft cap is 26 expertise or 781 rating. This soft cap is a MUST!  I can't express this enough as I see so many tanks below the soft cap and pay the price.  What is the price you ask? Hit rating is great to hit the boss, but think of expertise and "The Force".  It allows you to predict when a mob/boss is about to dodge or parry your attack and allows you to counter act it and still hit him. Now granted that this is all just numbers in the system and there is no thought involved in the counter action.  However, as you can see, being able to not be dodged or parried will also help you to gain maximum threat generation.

Dodge Rating - This to me is far more important then stamina.  This is a major part of your avoidance/not taking damage.  The less damage you take, the happier the healers will be with you. Now, as I stated earlier, you should not focus solely on this stat as a way to be "WINNING!!!".  You will need to balance this stat with stamina.  I have however found through trial and error that this stat is a very good one to improve over stamina at first. I usually shoot for a dodge rating of atleast 30%, in bear form, before I start tossing in a few stam gems in my gear.  Now, your best way of getting dodge is to grab as much agility as you can.  Dodge just gives you dodge rating, but agility gives you 2 AP while in form, 1% Crit per 324.85, 1% Dodge (pre-DR) per 243.58.  So you can see that agility is a far more helpful stat then straight dodge.

Stamina - Stamina, this is what I consider to be a tricky stat.  Every tank out there will tell you that having a large health pool feels good, that it helps you to feel like you can do about anything.  This is totally not the case.  If you have a huge health pool and little avoidance/damage mitigation, you will likely drop like a sack of potatoes very quickly, no matter how good the healer is. Once I got my dodge rating up to 30%, I worked on getting my stamina up so that I had a health pool of about 138k health in bear form.  Now I know that this does not seem like a lot, but remember, the more you avoid taking damage, the less health you need to stay alive.

Mastery - This is a very good stat to work on next.  This is your damage mitigation stat.  This stats works with your Savage Defenses.

Savage Defense: Each time you deal a non-periodic critical strike while in Bear Form, you have a 50% chance to gain Savage Defense, absorbing damage equal to 35% of your attack power for 10 sec.).  

Your mastery for bears reads "Increases the damage absorbed by your savage defense ability by 32%. Each point of Mastery increases the absorb by an additional 4%.".  So as you can see, this brings a very nice amount of damage mitigation to the table.

Critical Strike - Crit, well, this is purely a threat stat.  The harder you hit them, the more threat you generate.  It's much like when dps have huge crits and you can see them climbing the threat meters quickly.  It works the same for you.  Although this is a nice stat for threat, it is the second to last you wanna work on.

Haste - This is a stat you DO NOT want. Any and all haste should be reforged in to dodge rating. For a tank, it's not how fast you can hit them, it's all about generating threat through avoiding damage and other attacks in your arsenal to generate the threat.

Now, through my personal experiences, I have found that if you follow this guideline, you will find that feral tanking will go far smoother then most would lead you to believe. Remember, avoidance is a huge part of staying alive, not just your health pool.  The more damage you can avoid/mitigate, the less damage you will take, the happier your healer will be and the more confident you will be since you will tend to find healers saying how easy you are to heal.

Next post I'll talk about the current tanking build and glyphs as well as enchants for tanking.

Keep up the good work bears and remember, we gotta show those other tank classes how tanking is really done!

Do they really think "gogogogo" works?

Ok, we've all seen it, we've all know people that do it to some degree, so here is my question.  Do people really think that chanting "gogogogo" at the tank is gonna make us move any faster?  I can tell you right here and now.....No, it won't.  If anything, it'll make us slow down.


Here are a few key things that dps NEED to realize about tanks.

1: Tanks don't wanna die.
2: Tank want to keep healers happy.  Happy healers = better heals (generally speaking)
3: We all know that mobs do different things. Part of a tanks job is to set up a pull so that it is easy to round up mobs or set up for any needed CC to keep the healer from burning through mana and keep people from dying.
4: If we were just in a large group fight, chances are we popped a cooldown.  If we are just sitting there, we might be waiting on it to cooldown or maybe to let a taunt come off cooldown.  If this is the case, we aren't moving until it does.
5: And this is a big one, WE WATCH HEALER MANA!!  If the healers mana is low, I can guarantee you that we will not move until the healer has mana again.  Why?  See item #1.


Also, if a dps uses the "gogogogo" method to get a tank to go, and he/she doesn't move, pulling for the tank...well.....lets just say more times then not you will find yourself back in queue for a tank.  Which these days, if you are looking for a tank for your run, you'll be waiting awhile.


If you just wait and let the tank go at his/her own pace, you will find that you will have a much nicer, smoother and more productive run.  After all, which takes more time, a tank that goes a bit slow and you one shot everything?  Or a tank that is rushed, makes a couple bad pulls (or the dps does) and you wipe a couple times, wasting time running back in and to where you left off?  Hmmmmmm?  (Pssst, here's a hint.  The second one will take longer.)


Keep this in mind next time you run a dungeon and spread this information around and who knows, maybe you will see more tanks coming back out to play more often.