At the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to make a post about tanking. Shocking, I know. But alot of tanking is repetition. No one can really know every detail of any particular instance their first time through, or even their first 10 times through, no matter how much they read. You have to get out there and do it. And once you figure out a way to handle a difficult pull or boss fight, you have to do it again, and again, to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. Then you have to remember all those little strategies. Put them all together and you have a smooth run that’ll make people say,”Hey, that was a smooth run!”

I’ve often been asked the question “Can you teach me how to tank?”. The short answer is: Nope. You simply can’t instill in a novice with an explanation, no matter how lengthy, what takes hundreds and hundreds of hours of experience across multiple venues and from multiple viewpoints to get. Hell, I’ve learned as much about tanking from playing non-tanks in other games as I have from playing the tanking classes in WoW. The slightly not as short answer is: Only you can teach you how to tank.

But, being the pretentious bastard I am, I try to teach them anyway.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, here’s some more “Tanking Tidbits” that have nothing to do with numbers or game mechanics, and everything to do with the player, where it all begins.

1) Get your fingers off those damned arrow keys.

I can’t tell you how painful it is to watch a tank slowly shuffle-shuffle-shuffle to the left or run in a semicircle, attempting to do a 180 to chase after the mob they just lost to healing aggro or a ranged dps that nuked the wrong target.

This is what we call a “key turner”, and whether they are using the arrow keys or WASD or anything else, their slow reactions have caused thousands of wipes and healer deaths. Seriously, no matter how quickly you react, if the keyboard is your only means of locomotion, you are too slow.

Use the mouse for turning. Do it. Play some FPS games to help you get used to it if you have to. If you cannot or will not use the mouse for movement, play a caster or something, you do your comrades a disservice if you insist on being a tank while crippling yourself.

2) Stop clicking. Just stop.

Make macros. You should have a macro for every single ability you use or even think you might use, including potions and trinkets and healthstones and everything else. Even if you have the fastest hand in the west and never have trouble locating your cursor in the middle of a chaotic fight with brightly colored spell effects firing off everywhere while watching your threat meters and maintaining your rotation and situational awareness, you’re still too slow.

Some will swear up and down with much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that being a clicker is ok and just as fast. It’s ok for some classes, at least in pve, but it’s not ok for tanks, ever. Even the uninitiated can see the difference in your performance, usually in their repair bill. They can continue to click if they wish, and I will strafe past them at full speed towards my group while spin jumping quarter circles to spend most of the trip facing the pull to maintain avoidance and avoid getting dazed while still building threat and managing to target and intercept that add bearing down on the healer from the other side of the group, all in less time than it takes to sing “I can do anything you can do betteeer!”

3) Take your Ritalin and pay attention.

You should not only be aware of the location of your team mates and the mobs you just pulled at all times, but you should also be aware of possible dangers that have yet to manifest. Since you’re not using your mouse to click your abilities, once you’ve positioned your pull comfortably, you are free to rotate the camera around and observe your surroundings. If that patrol you were waiting for comes earlier than you’d expected, you want to know about it. If one of your ranged dps is backing into the aggro range of a group you were trying to skip, you want to know about it. You can’t know about it if you didn’t see it, at least not fast enough for it to count.

If your group wipes to adds that you could’ve tanked had you seen them aggro sooner, it’s your fault. Even if someone else pulled them. It’d be nice if they’d been paying more attention and hadn’t pulled them in the first place, but it’s still your fault.

4) Learn to type.

How someone can spend any significant amount of time using a computer, much less playing a social game where text is the primary means of communication, without becoming a touch typist is beyond me. Still, there are people out there who are slowly hunt and pecking their way to victory.

If this is you and you want to tank, please, learn to type. There are a number of free games and tutor programs that will help you.

“But the game has built in voice chat, I don’t need to type to communicate anymore!”, he cried indignantly.

Irrelevant.

If you have to look at your keyboard to type, then you have to look at your keyboard to use macros with any accuracy. If you’re looking at your keyboard, then you’re not looking at your screen, and your attention is divided between keeping your group safe and trying to find the right keys.

There you have it, four things that would go a long way towards turning some of the worst meatshields I’ve ever seen into real tanks. Maybe you’re special, and you can make clicking and key turning work for you, but no matter how fast you are at it, no matter how you justify it, you will still be slower, less precise, and less focused than you would be if you didn’t. PvP isn’t the only facet of the game where every second counts. That one second you saved, getting that taunt off an instant earlier than you otherwise would have, can and often will save the group from a death or a wipe. And those you tank for will come to appreciate that.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 and is filed under Tanks, ~ Aensu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.