It’s time for more random tips from your friendly neighborhood tank who is stalling for time while he tries to write a real article! I bet you’re excited, I know I am.

Take the Lead

If you PUG 5-mans, every now and then you’ll find yourself in a group with a non-tank that wants to do the marking, pulling, leading, and maybe even “off tanking”. There are any number of reasons why they act like this, none of them good or reasonable.

In any case, unless the tank is entirely unfamiliar with the instance, or just doesn’t know how to assign CC and pull properly (in which case they’re not a very good tank anyway), there’s no logical reason for anyone other than the tank to be leading. Any decent player should know this, which is why mister I’m-a-DPS-class-but-want-to-be-leader will typically fail in every role they’ve assigned themselves in the first 20 minutes.

So what to do about this person? The easiest solution is to just not PUG, or form your own group. But if you’re really determined to make it happen, you’re going to have to work with this person, especially if they’re getting the group wiped right out of the gate.

Sometimes simply asking “Hey, mind letting me do the pulling?” will do the trick. Sometimes you may have to browbeat the person into submission. Calmly whispering suggestions so that they can maintain the illusion of leadership while doing exactly what you tell them to is seldom a bad idea.

The absolute worst thing you can do though, is nothing, while hoping they figure out what the hell they’re doing before your gear turns red. Tanking and timidity don’t go well together. If you wont do it to save yourself, then do it to save the rest of the group, that’s what we’re there for.

Walk Softly…

Mobs in WoW are squirrely, I’m sure you’ve noticed this. The AI makes them want to compensate for your every twitch. Latency can cause them to overcompensate so severely that they end up behind you on a regular basis from a slight sidestep. And we all know that tanking a mob with your back to it is bad, unless you’re specifically trying to accomplish that, then it’s good, but naturally they’ll end up on the side you don’t want them on.

Large groups present a different problem in that, once you’ve stopped moving and they’ve settled, they like to fan out so that they’re not standing directly on top of one another. If the pull is large enough, some of them are going to end up outside of your frontal 180 arc, which is effectively the same as being directly behind you when it comes to mitigation.

The easy solution to most positioning problems? Turn on walk. It’s just that easy. While walking, the mobs will cease their wild movements and walk with you. You can easily fine tune the position of a medium sized or even single pull, and keep a large pull herded into a tight group by walking.

Just don’t forget to turn it off when you need to move quickly ;D

…and Carry a Big Stick

This one’s for the warriors. It’s common knowledge that a fast weapon is preferable for tanking, and it’s no coincidence that nearly every high level one hander with tanking stats has a speed of less than 2.0. Due to the mechanics of heroic strike, it’s a mathematical fact that a fast weapon can generate more threat per second than a slow weapon.

So why would you want to use anything else for tanking?

Consider the situations where you don’t have enough rage to use heroic strike constantly; off tanking, shadow tanking, or tanking content that you’re overgeared for. Without the benefits of HS with a fast weapon, it can be difficult to put out the numbers. While a fast weapon can generate more threat per second, a slow weapon is far more rage efficient, and greatly increases the potency of devastate. You’d be surprised at the threat you can generate with a simple shield slam/devastate rotation with a slow weapon, even while not getting hit to generate rage. More than once I’ve ended up with a full rage bar while shadow tanking with this setup simply from having to hold back to keep from pulling aggro off the MT.

And the best part? You probably already have one for soloing. And if you don’t have one or want to upgrade it, you don’t even have to compete with your dps for drops, just go on welfare get a pvp weapon.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 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.