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!

Healing is part of your job too.

Now I know that people think, "You're the healer. it's your job to heal, not mine!",  or "I'm here to dps, not heal.". Well, for a feral tank, this is just not true. Healing yourself is part of your job and makes the healing easier for the healer and will keep you alive longer.  Now, this is not something you have to go out of your way to do. Part of it comes totally natural from talent points alone:



Leader of the Pack
While in Cat Form or Bear Form, the Leader of the Pack increases critical strike chance of all party and raid members within 100 yards by 5%.  In addition, your melee critical strikes in Cat Form and Bear Form cause you to heal for 4% of your total health and gain 8% of your maximum mana.  This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 sec.


This alone is a big heal in the long run.  Any healing you do to yourself here is mana not being used by the healer and mana that can be utilized in a "crunch time" situation.  I share this here as some people take a tank build that they see from a blog (I've posted mine here in an earlier post) or off the wow armory or from other places, which is fine.  Problem, some people don't take the time to read the talents and why they should be chosen.  This is one that should be.



Another thing you can do it use a glyph for your Frenzied Regeneration:



Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration
Major Glyph
Classes: Druid
Requires Level 52
Item Level 52
Use: Permanently teaches you this glyph.


While Frenzied Regeneration is active, healing effects on you are 30% more powerful but causes your Frenzied Regeneration to no longer convert rage into health.


Now this is a big step for some tanks as this makes you put full trust and faith in your healer and takes some of your self healing abilities away from your.  To me, this is a great glyph to have since it infact boosts the healing done to you by the healer AND by your Leader of the Pack talents. At the point you hit Frenzied Regeneration, you will want to do something very important. Keep your eye out for a Lightwell or any kind of AoE healing effect on the ground.  If you see these, get in them.  Some would argue that a Lightwell is really only for the dps so that the healer can focus more on the tank and not so much on dps.  This could not be farther from the truth.  Any and all healing you can do to yourself will help save the healer mana for use when it is truly needed to keep your bear butt up, lol.

Remember, tanking is part of the team effort.  If you want to succeed, you need to think like part of the team and not as just the tank. Any and all thing you can do to help the healer must be high priority. The healer and dps will thank you for this.  If the healer goes out of mana (oom) or dies, you will not be standing for very long after.

Keep up the good work tanks.  Remember we all want to get through a run alive, working together will make that happen.

Nice people make for a great run!

I decided to queue up for the new troll dungeons today.  I figured, it's late, I usually get pretty good groups this time of night.  As usual, as soon as I queued up, I get in to Zul Aman.  This is a fun dungeon, even back in the BC days, I loved this place.  Can give you a bit of a pain, but as long as you have a nice group, it's always fun.  It was myself (bear tank), a warlock, rogue, DK and shaman healer.  We go in and head for the first boss of the night, Akil'zon.  The gauntlet run went pretty smooth, no deaths, which is always good.  So we go up and we charge the boss, the dps down the birds that carry off party members, everyone did their job nicely.....until the storm came up.  As soon as we get the storm, we stacked up and the rogue and DK get insta-death.  No one had a clue what happened, but we killed the boss and moved on, slightly laughing it off. The warlock was kinda pushing us a bit for a timer run, which we rushed off trying to go for it.  


We start killing trash on our way to Nalorakk.  We get to the last set of trash and....I took one step too close.  Oh crap!  No time to CC so we try to burn them all with me holding everything, ouch......dead.  1 mass rez later and we are ready to try it again, timer gone, but no big deal.  We CC and kill that trash and pull the boss, fight goes off smoothly and he's one shotted.


Now we take off and head for Jan'alai and we go to do the first pull, to which the shaman forgets his CC mark and the DK spaces out....wipe.  But again, no one makes a big deal of it and we come back in and do it right.  We get to the last trash pull before the boss and we get 2, yes 2 flame casters in the group.  so we sap, hex and fear 3 mobs and kill 1, then we kill the fear.  I then target the sapped flame caster and charge in, the one I ran past, the hex, comes to and 1 shots the healer, well, we know what happens when the healer is down. lol.  We come back in and the shaman explains that he did not rehex because he saw me going for the flame caster.  The lock informs him that there were 2 and that sap is usually hit before hex because hex can be done in combat.  "Ohhh, crap, sorry. I noticed the name and didn't watch the mark.".  We all gave him a "eh, no big" and continued on one shotting the boss.


We move on to Halazzi and have zero issues and one shot him as well.  Hit Hex Lord  with a snake and demon out...HEX!  BANISH!  SMACK BOSS!  Dead boss, we win, loot!  Went off like perfection.  Meanwhile, we have been chitchatting the entire run.  Just talking about the instance, the gear that has been dropping.  We had a couple of agility BoE rings drop and I won one of them.  "Awesome, and to think I almost bought that 20 mins ago!" which lead to chuckles and talking about loot they had gotten in here in the same sort of conditions.


We get to the last boss and it started off great, adds dead, killing boss.  He changes in to the lynx form and starts beating on my hard, but we're ok.  He spawns 2 adds, I pick them up and start taking a bigger beating, but we are still ok.  I suddenly get 1 shotted, no idea why.  "SHIT! how?" had no sooner popped up in chat then I get a BRez from the lock!  YAY LOCK BATTLE REZ!!!  I pop back up, flip in to bear, pop everything I have to help bring back health while healer is healing,  I round back up the boss and adds, to which we kill the adds and he then switches to the dragonhawk form.  Ok, we got this going very well, killing him, no one standing in fire.....rogue lags for a sec, and that's all it took to kill him.  Boss drops, we cheer and rez while looting.  It was like we had just conquered a raid dungeon, it was not that hard, but we were having that much fun.  The healer then tells me that Not only am I the only tank that he ever ran with that picked up the cat adds, but that held aggro on them.  To which I replied "Thanks!  I do try my best.  after all, it is kinda my job. lol.". 


We all grats each other on a nice ran and after a bout 2 mins of more chitchat about the run, we begin to go our separate ways, actually saying good bye to each other.  It just goes to show you, you can have a run with some "oops" and a few " awww crap, my fault" times, but if you keep in mind that it is just a game and try to just have fun with it, every run can be a great one. Everyone makes mistakes and getting mad and blowing up at people only makes it worse.  I simple, "no prob, we now know NOT to walk up and say "Hi" to the flame casters."  can bring on a couple of laughs and make the run go far more smoothly and make the game over all more fun.

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!

Can we go?

So I queued up for a nice heroic run today after having several successful and fun runs (I know, can you believe it.) and I got in to Lost City.  I like this place, I like the pulls, I like the bosses and even the layout.  It's one of my favorite dungeons in Cataclysm.  However, there always ends up being 1 thing that makes a nice set of runs stumble a bit.  Today it was a frost DK that queued in a dps.  Now mind you, there is nothing wrong with them at all.  I like DKs, but this guy started off the run with a bang.  After he "accidentally auto ran" in to the first pull while the healer was still buffing up, the healer asked for a moment to turn off some addons due to bad lag.  No problem, I perfect the healer to be healing me when I need it, not 3 seconds after I needed it, lol.  So the healer goes offline to turn off stuff and about 5 seconds later we get, "This should not be taking this long." from the DK.  I though, wow really?  This from the person that pulled the first group with his/her face is now complaining?  After a couple more complaints about "how long this is taking"  which was only about 2 mins by this time, I kindly said "Feel free to bail if it's taking too long.".

OMG, you'd think that I just killed his family.  Starts talking in chat about how rude that was and whispering me about how rude I am and that that was totally uncalled for.  I responded that I was only being honest and if we were taking too long, then maybe he would be happier in a different group.  The hunter in my group then chimed in with "Well, impatience is rude as well.".  I love that guy, he's a good friend and guildie and doesn't usually say anything unless it is really deserved.  by this time, the healer has come back online, apologized again having to turn stuff off and was obviously a bit shocked what he came in to. I had to pst him to let him know that it was really not his fault, the DK was just out of line and no one else minded. Finally, we started back up and were on our way.

After 1 boss fight, the DK makes fun of the hunter and laughs at him because he lost a roll on a polearm to me.  My bud and I laughed about it abit in pst and just moved on.  But after the 2nd boss kill, the DK began to talk to us as if we had known him his entire life and were interested in everything he had to say.  He began talking about the nachos he was eating and other odd bits about his life and what was going on.  This totally through us off as a bunch of "????" started flying though whispers.  We get to the last boss and the DK dies almost right away from standing in the green swirls that usually mean "don't stand here or you die", you know, standard Blizzard meanings.  We down the boss and rez the DK while we loot.  No sooner is he up then he drops group.  not a "thanks",  "bye", "get bent", "you guys suck"....nothing.  At the very least, this gave me a great subject to put here in my blog.  I just don't understand people like this.  Starts off a total PITA and by the end acts like nothing ever happened and everything it happiness and light.  Talk about deserving of the "insane" title.

If you don't know, just ask.

So I'm sure you have all had this situation happen, probably in the same place too.  I get in to a group for H Blackrock Caverns, not my favorite place but not too bad (just glad it wasn't Grim Batol).  Kill the first trash, down the first boss pretty easy.  All is going nice and smooth.  We kill the next trash, still smooth.  Now we are at the next boss.  I have the rogue block the middle beam, feral druid block the right and mage the left while I tank the boss between the rogue and druid cat.  I always make sure to ask "Everyone know what to do with their target?" to which the healer replied "Ummm, heal him?" ( I love a touch of comedy in a run, lol). I got a yes across the board so  I made the pull and everyone jumped in to position quickly.  Interrupting the fear and doing good so far......until the druid turns in to a giant freakin mob bent on killing us, followed by the rogue.  Ok, we all come back in, rebuff and remark the mobs.  I charge in, position the boss........giant freakin mobs, again.  Come back in, rebuff, remark, charge in......HUGE BEAR KILLING MOBS.....AGAIN!!!!!!   After every wipe, there are a ton of excuses from "I don't know what happened, I was right there." to "I was feared" (which could account for 1 mob, not 2).  So we come back in and I, as nicely as I can being as how the cat was a guildie of mine and having the GM going off on you is usually a bad thing, I like to keep it down as much as I can, say, "ok, just so we are all on the same page, block beam until you get 70-80 stacks of debuff, get out of beam, wait for debuff to tick off, get back in beam, rinse & repeat.".  Everyone says "ok", so we rebuff and I remark.  I make sure everyone is ready and then I charge in as I have done for several tries.....and what do you know, we down her with no effort at all.

Look people, if you don't know the detail of a fight, just ask. If you are afraid you will look dumb because you don't know, you will look even worse after you have killed you party members. People don't mind filling you in about the details of a fight, not everyone has done them all.  But people get a bit mad having to spend gold on repairs that could have been prevented had you just said something, not to mention wasted gold on any food, pots or elixirs that were used and wasted on a fight that ended in death due to lack of knowledge. So please, for the love of all that is good and right in this world.....

If you don't know, just ask.

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.