The power of the handy dandy addon....

If you have ever taken a moment to look over the addons on curse.com or wowinterface.com, you have probably been a touch overwhelmed by all the addons that are out there that are supposed to make playing easier in one way or another. With all the addons out there, what are some of the better addons for tanking and all around playing? How do I pick an addon?  How will I know if it's any good?  These are all valid questions, questions that I hear from guildies all the time. I have taken a my current tanking UI and will break it down as to what I use and why.  Maybe this will inform you of an addon that you have been looking for.  Maybe you don't run addons and wanna know how they work.  This should make things a bit clearer. Here is a screenshot of my current tanking UI:

click image to see a bigger view

Ok, now lets break this down in to its parts.  Below is a key.

click image to see a bigger view

1) BasicChatMod: This is a nice little addon to clear up your chat window.  It's also nice if you are lazy like I am and hate having to constantly type /o to talk in officer chat.  Once you enter a chat channel, you stay there until you enter a new one.

2) Bartender4:  This is a very nice way to organize your buttons and make things smoother and easier to organize.  Place any number of action bars anywhere on your screen.  Also allows you to move around your bags, menu bar and everything else.

3) Skada:  This is a nice alternative to Recount.  It will show you any information about the fight from dps to threat to CC broken and so on. Can be set for current fight or over all.  Since 4.1 dropped, I had nothing but trouble with recount, since I switched to Skada, I've never been happier with a meter since I used DiamondThreatMeter back in BC.

4) SexyMap: This is a nice addon that allows you to move your minimap to anywhere you wish.  It also allows you to give it a nice custom look, far nicer then the standard minimap.

5) Raven: This is a buff/debuff display addon.  You can create and move bars that show buffs, debuffs, timers and lots of other things.  Very handy in helping to keep your UI clean.

6) TitanPanel:  This is a nice little bar that sits at the top of your screen, it allows you to display brokers (addons that show things like gold, durability, latency, ect.) and make things far more organized and easier to see at a seconds notice. On TitanPanel, I currently run:

• Currency - This will let you list right on the panel all your currencies, from gold to tokens to points.  Also lets you see what you have on other toons by just hovering over it.
• CPU - Let you see what addons are running and how much memory each one is using. This is a great tool, if you are having lag issues suddenly, you can hover over this and see what is going on. See if an addon pulling more then it should.
• DurabilityInfo - The name says it all, lets you know your current gear durability.
• Volumizer - This allows you to adjust the volume for everything ingame.  No more having to go in to the sound menu and changing stuff for you.

7) TomTom: This is a simple coordinate addon.  It does have nice features such as you can place a "pin" on the map anywhere and you will get an onscreen arrow that will point you the way and how far you are away.  Arrow also works for quests that you are tracking as well as trying to find your way back to your corpse. 

8) DeadlyBossMod (DBM, not pictured): This is a must have to anyone running anything.  It gives you a nice heads up when bosses or mobs are about to do something you should really avoid/interrupt.  Also gives you timers for such things as boss enrage timers, time to next cast from boss, even battleground timers.

9) Altoholic (not shown): This addon lets you see what is on your other toons.  Now not just what they are wearing, but in their bags, bank, AH and you can also use it to look at your alts professions and even link them in chat without even logging out of your current toon. This is a very handy addon to have.

10) Addon Control Panel: This I HIGHLY recommend. This allows you to look at a list of ALL your addons, on or off.  You can turn some on and turn others off, click "reload ui" and POW! no more logging out to turn on or off addons.

11) CBH Viewer: This is what gives me the black gap at the bottom of my screen where all my stuff is.  This doe snot just give you a black area, it actually zooms the screen out, giving it a true widescreen feel to it.  this also allows you to see more and makes tanking a bit easier.

As you can see, I find that a clean UI is a huge benefit for tanking.  The more that you can see, the more control you have on a situation.  You will be less likely to be surprised by a stay mob walking around or miss that fire pillar until it hits you.

I hope these help out a bit and do you as much good as they have done for me. Remember, keep up the good work bears! We gotta show them how it's done!

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!

It's called a "minimap".

So, I took a break from tanking for a night and played my arcane mage.  I love this toon and love all the buffs that they have given us in this latest patch (thank you Blizzard).  But I have noticed a pattern with some tanks that, as a person who normally plays a tank, I just don't understand.  Let me paint a picture for you so you can see exactly what I'm talking about....

The group engages a boss and, due to most people not ever having been on that fight, the group wipes.  No big deal, everyone releases and starts to come back in and meet up at the boss.

Tank: ready?

Hunter: r

Mage: r

Death Knight: r

Tank charges in and......wipe.

Tank: WTF?

Hunter: What happened dude, you got one shotted.

Tank: Healers fail

Healer: I wasn't even in the room. Did you see a "r" from me? No, you didn't.

Tank: WTF NOOB!

*Tank leaves party*

Ok, now lets point out a couple of problems with this entire situation.  First off, the healer was partially at fault as he/she could have said they weren't ready.  HOWEVER, the tank did notice the "r" from everyone else and I'm assuming that he/she can count that there were only 3 "r" responses.  Which would be that 1 person was not ready, so why pull.  If you are not sure if they are or not, you can just ask, it won't hurt or burn to be nice and ask, lol.  Next, there is a simple thing in game, even addons to make it far more customizable, that makes this entire situation really a tank fault problem.  It's called a "minimap" and it sits on everyones screen displaying where all people in your group are at any given time.  If you ask "ready?" and you see that one of the dots on your minimap are not where you are, then someone is not ready.  It really is as simple as that. I have been seeing this kind of thing alot with tanks when I play dps and I just don't get it.  

Come on tanks, you are giving the rest of us a bad name. A tank is supposed to have full situational awareness of what is going on around them in order to do their job, but if you fail to watch your minimap to see if everyone is there for a pull, it is not much different then going in to a pull with a healer out of mana.  It causes undue stress and strain on the group and usually leads to wipes and people leaving the group.  And since everyone wants to have a nice smooth run, just please, join the rest of us and pay attention to eveything around you.....even your minimap.

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.