Nefarian Strategy Guide

I have posted my video, it was actually a few days ago and so i decided to stop putting it off.

the video can be seen HERE.

I was going to embed it but the way the blog is formatted cuts some of the video off

lastly, I was experimenting with masking and some other stuff and some of it has errors that I am aware of, I know how to fix it now, and will for future, but I'm not changing it on this one.

Let me know what you think, i will get responses here faster but feel free to leave feedback on the video too. I am looking to improve them so i wont take offence to criticism but try and be constructive.

Strat Videos

So last night i decided that i was going to actually sit down and start working on some strategy videos so i downloaded and tested the voice recording software and played around with some editing stuff on a test video in order to prep for making some. I think i may start one when i get home today and they usually take a couple days to make so potentially have one ready wed or thurs.

YAY!!!

I did have an idea for something extra i can do but im looking for some feedback.

The 10 minute videos are really good for learning the fight and getting an idea of what is going on so i am going to start with one of those; however, those 10 minute videos are not really practical for use during a raid because of their length, so here is my thought:

why not make the videos in three versions? There could be the one long version where you explain the full fight in complete detail at normal speed and dont leave anything out, being sure to include nuances in handling some fight mechanics and boss abilities. The second video will be a super condensed bare bones version for tanks/healers and the third would be the same as the second except for DPS. The later two videos would try to jam as much info into as short a time as possible and would use speeding up the video and constant dialogue.

The idea behind this is that if you want to see the whole fight and everything explained in detail before the raid you can go and watch the first video, but if the raid is already going you could say "tanks/healers go watch this video and DPS go watch this one" and it would take 3-5 min and you would all be back really quick.

I figure that most of the editing will probably be the same but there are things that could be left out because DPS/tanks/healers dont care about them.

So let me know what you think.

Tanking Movement Guide

I just realized that I promised you a guide and then posted it on the forums and forgot to post it here, so here it is now. It has only been complete for about 3 days now so this isn't too far behind. Also the guide is posted HERE on the forums so if you like it go sign in on that forums and up-vote the post. Also you could post a quick comment on the forums to bump it but now i am just getting greedy.

I wrote this guide partially for fun and, and of course to help. These are things that I have often taken for granted as common knowledge, but having paid more attention to people after I started writing it, I have a feeling that even some of you more advanced tanks may learn a thing or two. If you are reading through this and you find something unclear, wrong or would like to add something, then by all means drop a comment. I am not above admitting I am wrong (if I am) and care more about this being comprehensive and correct than buffing my ego.

As you start reading this you may feel that I started with an approach that is much too basic but I tried to move away from that quickly and use it as a quick step to the more complex movements, and if you keep reading you will find that it does get much more in depth. This guide will have a large focus on moving yourself but will have a large component of ways to move your enemies by moving yourself.  And Just before I get started, some of you may be reading through this and say to yourself, “Hey, I saw that on TankSpot,” and I will let you know that I did learn some of these things from a video put up by Ciderhelm, but I am hoping that I can elaborate more fully on some of those things to give the average a player a way to understand them, and not just the elite (not that I am elite, but just saying).

Moving yourself

The most basic way to move yourself is with either the arrow keys or with the WASD keys however this is rarely an efficient way to move and often leaves you either too slow or having to make less desirable moves in order to make up for your lack of speed. The problem with using only these keys is that you often cannot turn fast enough because the game dictates the speed of your turn. Even if you are absolutely perfect in your response time you will often find yourself too slow and may be given the title that everyone dreads, “keyboard turner.” But you aren’t handicapped so you knew all this already.

The easiest way to remedy this slow movement is to use your mouse to turn your camera. This allows you to basically move your camera as fast as humanly possible. If you can’t move any faster than you could get a new mouse and if you can’t move any faster after that then you probably just disconnected from moving so fast.

“But Jey, if I turn with my mouse I can’t click my abilities!!!” No, you can’t, and that is why you need to learn to keybind or at least use your binds. Pretty much everything from this point on will be hinged around being able to do things on the fly and that will require you to use your binds. You don’t need to have a bind for every ability, but having one for those abilities that you use often is a must. I personally have a bind that I am perfectly comfortable with for each of my four main tanking abilities and for my taunt and charge.

Strafing

The next evolution of movement is to learn how to strafe. Strafing is moving sideways or at an angle, instead of turning and then running forward. I have found that as I have become more comfortable with strafing it has slowly taken over as my dominant form of movement while tanking. In my opinion it allows you to keep much better tabs on all that is happening around you.

There are two dominant ways to strafe. The first, and easier way, is to use your strafe buttons on the keyboard. These are originally bound to your Q and E buttons and they move you sideways without turning you around. You can also use these buttons in conjunction with your forward key in order to move at a 45 degree angle in either direction.

The second method of strafing is to use your camera in conjunction with your arrow keys. I think that this method affords you a larger amount of control over movement, but you may feel that you prefer the other way or a mix of the two. I also find this is much more natural way to strafe when you are using your mouse to turn anyways. To do this you simply hold down your right mouse button and use your arrow keys to move sideways, or your forward and sideways arrow keys to move at an angle at an angle forward. Using your mouse this way eliminates your ability to keyboard turn and forces you to move more efficiently. It also grants you easy movement between strafing sideways and strafing at an angle.

Either way you use, don’t ever hit your backward arrow as that will just make you start backing up at an angle.

Reasoning

But why strafe? Strafing affords you better movement because you are never slowed from backing up. It allows you to always know where your enemy is because they are never behind your camera if you don’t want them to be. Strafing also has the distinct advantage of allowing you to move away from your enemy at full speed and still be able to dodge, parry and block your enemy where simply turning and running does not. It is worth noting that just because you are strafing the mob could still be “behind” you when you think that it is in front of you, in order to rectify this you should try to turn in a very large circle in the direction that your camera is facing. The direction that your camera is facing is the front side of your character and the direction opposite your camera angle is the back, so if you are moving in a circle to your backside you might as well just turn around and run away. The avoidance advantage alone makes it worth learning to strafe masterfully, but remember that strafing adds style points while you’re tanking so you look like more of a boss, and who doesn’t want to look like more of a boss?

So now you know how to move yourself but tanking isn’t something you do by yourself, if you are doing it right you always move with a partner.

Moving Your Enemy

Tanking is like a dance, and you have the man’s part. Everything that you do will cause a predictable response in the enemy you are tanking. Most of the things here will be mostly geared towards tanking bosses in raids and dungeons as it will be hard to properly execute some of these things with more than one target trying to branch out around you, but a better knowledge of movement will never be a hindrance.

Large Groups

When you are dealing with large groups of enemies you want to make sure that all of your targets are within your front 180 degrees so that you are able to be able to have your avoidance be effective. Large groups of enemies naturally try and spread out around you and get behind you, they are trying to accomplish the exact opposite of you. You need to develop a strategy to make sure that most, if not all, enemies are in front of your character.

The easiest way to counteract the problem is to back away and force them to move towards you. The farther that you move, the closer to the middle of your front cone that they get. So there you go, problem solved. But you get a problem sometimes when you can’t simply move backwards and you need to move in a more confined manner, not to mention that you may be ticking your dps and possibly your healer off. This may work sometimes but it won’t work always. You want a system that will work 95% of the time not one that works only 80%, and in a perfect world you want a system that is more predictable and causes the rest of your group to need to move as little as possible.

Many tanks get it in their mind that they are above the group, and that they are truly better. They feel that the world revolves around them and that their movements should be adapted to. The fact is that you are in a group of 5 or 10 or 25 and you are no better than any of them. It is up to you to limit your impact upon the group as much as you possibly can and then require the group to move for you. Blah, blah, blah, who cares? The less the group has to move the less chance there is of you dying because a healer lost range on you and the more damage your dps can do to your enemies. /Rant over. ( this is not to start a fight, simply to illustrate my reasoning)

So how should you move? Pick a direction, left or right, strafe that direction and then turn 90 degrees back to the direction you came from. If you move just past the enemy to that side, all the other enemies will be in front of you and the movement is very small. It also has the distinct advantage of never requiring that you move in the same direction twice, so that you can move in a very small area and continue moving forever in that space (but let’s hope you don’t need to). You may wish to make a small sidestep after you have moved through the enemies in order to make the positioning better but that will come with practice. Also, this is not so important on groups of 3-4 but when they start to get larger is when they really start to move around you.

The Hit-box

Just quickly on the hit-box because it is somewhat critical in tanking. The hit-box is the range from which you can melee attack the enemy. Some enemies have rather small hit-boxes but raid bosses tend to have rather large hit-boxes. The enemy is considered to be standing at the center of the hit-box and the edge of the hit-box is sort of like their personal space. You also have a hit-box, though it is generally much smaller and enemies really like to get into it and whack you in the face, that’s good.

Moving the Big Guys

This is where the fun stuff begins. This is where you make your mark and become that guy that always has the enemy exactly where he wants it. Others may not notice all the time but you will. If you have ever seen the enemy move with the tank instead of after the tank you will know how.

Strafing to Move Your Enemies

Did you think you were done with staffing? Nope. One final advantage to strafing, that I did not mention earlier, is that it forces the server to keep better track of your movements. Basically, when you strafe, the server registers your position more times per second than when you are simply running. This has the advantage of helping you move out of bad stuff on the ground better and is the reason that people sometimes say that the fastest way to get the game to realize that you are outside of a building is to strafe after across the threshold.

But that is not all that that means. Strafing has a unique way of interacting with enemies that are attacking you. When you are simply running forward the enemy you have following you will run towards the center of your hit-box. He will run towards you. When you are strafing however, the enemy will run to a point that is in front of you in the direction that you are traveling, not the direction you are facing, but the direction that you are traveling (thats important). Imagine that you are running and carrying a tennis ball on a short stick. You can face whichever direction that you want, but you must point the tennis ball in the direction that you are traveling. Now there is someone else trying to catch you but he isn’t running after you, he is always running straight at that tennis ball. This is what is going on when you strafe.

If you have ever seen the tank move an enemy, and they both seem to move at the same time, in the same direction and the tank didn’t really appear to have to change anything after they stop. This happened because the tank strafed and the enemy wasn’t trying to chase the tank, they were chasing that point ahead of the tank. This particular way of moving the enemy with you is actually rather difficult to do. I probably only get it to work about 15-20% of the time, but when it does work it is a really nice bonus to your movement. Usually what happens is the enemy doesn’t start moving till a split second after you so he ends up following you instead of moving with you.

Then there is a second way that you can exploit this enhanced server response to your advantage. Imagine you are still running around with that tennis ball on a stick (boy you are cool) and that guy is still following you but that you run into a fence. Yeah you aren’t the most skilled runner but you illustrate my point nicely. So you run into the fence, where is the tennis ball. In real life the tennis ball would have hit the fence and the stick would have jabbed you in the side, but this is a magic tennis ball and it just goes through the fence (I’m almost done with this, I swear). So know that guy following you is going to run up right next to that fence also, trying to get the tennis ball. You can actually do this while tanking.

So let’s say you want the enemy right up against the wall. That’s actually kind of hard to do when you are not strafing, but if you strafe it is actually rather easy. All you have to do is strafe towards the wall. Now when you get to the wall don’t stop cause then the enemy will stop, just keep running into the wall and the enemy will move right up next to the wall and you can rotate them and have them perfectly positioned. I used to do this in the twin valkyr encounter in ToC when using the door strategy. For those of you who don’t know what that means, you had to get the two bosses (yours, and the other tanks) into the doorway so that your raid didn’t get hit by exploding balls that hurt a lot. Well often I would strafe into the door and keep moving till the boss got to me, and then I would turn around and position him nicely, and then the hunter would get mad at me because the boss was too close to the door, but the other boss never was. Its minor but it helps a ton sometimes. It’s cool to note that it is actually possible to reset some encounters by moving the boss through a door using this technique but I have never done it (ciderhelm on tankspot shows how to do it with 4 horseman).

Turning Your Enemy Around

There is no collision detection in WoW when it comes to Units, which you no doubt know, which enables you to run straight through your enemies. This comes in handy when you want to turn your enemy to be facing the opposite direction very quickly. There are three common ways to do this, I prefer the second but I know a lot of people prefer the third so just get used to doing one and stick with it.

                                          

This is the most basic one. Simply run straight through your enemy and when you get to the edge of their hit-box just turn around. The problem with this is that while you are facing the other direction the boss will be guaranteed to hit you, it isn’t a very large amount of time so the probability of you dying is quite small, but there are better ways to turn the enemy that you should get used to.

The second way is to use strafing. I prefer this way because I don’t lose control over my movement ever but it is largely personal. The way to do this is to strafe just barely to the side of the middle of the hit-box on the side that allows you to keep your camera facing the boss, if you start strafing and your boss is between your character and your camera then you are on the wrong side. After you move past the midpoint on the hit-box you can turn to face the boss and just back up until you are a comfortable distance away from the boss.

The third way is like the first with a key difference. You are going to start off and just run straight at the boss, however, you want to make sure that you jump before you pass the middle of the hit-box. When you pass the middle of the hit-box you want to be in the air (thus carrying your forward momentum) and turn your character around to face the boss at his new position relative to you. When you land just back up until you are a comfortable distance away. I find that I use this way much less than the second way, but I find it useful to do this when I am less worried about positioning and more worried about getting through the boss to avoid something.

Backing Your Enemy Up

I have used this many times on the new Omnitron Defence System in BWD. When Toxitron is up he drops a cloud on the ground that increases damage taken by 50% for anything inside it. You will often find yourself tanking the boss who is just about inside the cloud but not really. You want to get the boss in the cloud because it is a nice buff for your raid damage but you don’t want to be inside it yourself. Now you could just properly turn the boss then strafe until you have the boss in the cloud and then properly move back through the boss again to get yourself out of the cloud :), But then you have been in the cloud for a good 5-10 seconds and you could possibly die from an ability from the other boss, such as a buffed arcane annihilator (this isn’t an interrupting guide), so that is not a very good option.

So just make the boss move backwards. How you ask? Well I will tell you. This is a very simple move that is extremely useful in many positioning oriented encounters. All that you want to do is move towards the boss and into the hit-box, you are going to want to do this kinda slowly until you get used to it because it is really easy to overshoot the point that you want to get to. There is a point in your movement when the center of your hit-box will get very close to the center of their hit-box and they will turn ever so slightly in one direction. STOP. That is the point you want. If you go too far past this point the boss is going to spin around and start to melee you in the back, which is bad.

This point will be the point when the middle of your hit-box is starting to get close enough to the middle of theirs that small forward movements are causing the boss to rotate. They are going to move just the slightest amount and then you need to stop. It should be about a 10 degree turn in the direction they are facing or less the better you get. Now what is gonna happen is that the boss isn’t going to like you being all up in their face and they are going to get intimidated, so they are going to back off. This may take a second but if you do it right it will happen. The boss should turn around walk about 3-7 yards away depending on how big their hit-box is and turn around to face you. Tada.

One thing to note about this move is that the boss is never going to actually turn around. It will look as though they are walking away from you and then turning back around, but as far as the game is concerned, bosses don’t have a back-up animation so the game makes them turn around. For all intents and purposes the boss is actually backing up, evident by the fact that they actually move slower than normal. This is nice on a boss with a cleave or shockwave as you can back them up a bit without needing your raid to reposition. People may freak a little when the boss turns towards the raid and then back to you but just ignore the people and know that there is almost no risk to doing this. So try it out.

Moving Into/Out of Things

This was brought up in the comments and it seems like a lot of people don’t know about it. When you are moving out of things don’t jump. Jumping has the opposite effect of strafing in that it causes the game to only register your movement once you land. So if you are standing in fire/ooze/lava/void zones and you need to get out don’t jump out of them. Perhaps you may have some experience of this with the big worm boss in Stonecore who burrows and then jumps out and one shots anyone standing above him in the dust cloud. If you jump out of the dust and don’t land before he jumps then you are going to die. So just remember that if you are trying to move out of things, even though you feel like jumping means you are technically no longer standing in lava, you are.

On the flip side of this, if you do have to move through something for some reason, such as needing to be on the other side of a line of fire. Jump before you enter the fire and you will have a little bit of carry before you land and you will take less damage or be slowed less by a frost path (sort of like jumping before entering stealth or going into the water).

Conclusion

You were probably worried that I was a moron when I started talking about moving with your keyboard at the beginning but I wanted this guide to have some useful info for every level of player ( I may have over-done it a tad). I hope that some of you read this and take one or two of the things and try them out. You will find that as you learn to move more efficiently, and as it becomes more natural, that you will be able to focus more on tanking and awareness and less on getting yourself positioned nicely because it will just happen. If any of you have any feedback just leave a comment and I will get back to you.

Joust

So i wont know how many of you are already past this point in your leveling but in Hyjal there are 3 flame gates that you have to go through in order to complete the zone (i think). Well in the second gate there is a series of quests that force you to do a mini game type activity that is based off of the game Joust which was super popular in the 80's.

I have been talking with people in my guild who absolutely hate this little series of quests, but i have to say that i loved every moment of it. If they made it into a daily i would definitely go do it. I think that the problem lies in understanding how to control your character. Most of the people that i talked to said that they didn't like it because you have no control over your character. I found that this was easier to control then some of the vehicles that we have that don't seem to turn properly. But there may be some of you that gave up or some of you that have yet to do it or even some that have vowed to never do it on another character again but i hope to change your mind and tell you how to do it.

These ostriches do not function anything like flying mounts. They don't fly the direction your character is facing, they always fly in a straight line, they are always falling unless you intervene, and you can only control speed and direction with one button. But it isn't that hard. You simply need to change your idea of how the mount should work and do what you need to to actually make it work.

When you are flying on a flying mount, the mount will follow the exact direction that you are facing, you can spin your camera around but the instant that you change your characters view direction, whether with the mouse or the keyboard, you will immediately change to be going that direction. Forget this completely. When you want to move forward you simply hold down both mouse buttons or use your keyboard and you immediately move forward. Forget this too.

The only way to make these ostriches move once they are in the air is with the use of your one button. This button will be in the number 4 position and will be called flap. What it does is cause you to move forward in THE DIRECTION THAT YOU ARE FACING and also move upwards a little bit. That is all it does. Lets do an example.

say you are standing on a platform and you want to move north, simply face your character north hit the button a couple times and you are moving north. Now after you stop hitting the button you will start falling and in order to stop from hitting the ground you have to keep hitting it. This is the easy part. Ok, so now you are moving north and you want to move east. Face your CHARACTER the direction you want to be moving and then hit the flap button. You want to face your character there because if you only face your camera and then flap you will just hit the wall on the far side of the room. Also, there is a small amount of momentum taking you in the direction that you are going that needs to be overcome, so when you are trying to go east one flap might not do it and you may have to flap two or three times to get going that direction. For this reason, if you are trying to joust the other guys off you will probably want to lead them a little bit because the change in direction is not exact.

Think of this as riding a bike, the first thing my mother ever told me when i was learning to ride a bike was to look the direction that i wanted to go, this is no different. Simply face the direction you want to go and then flap. The flapping is important because if you don't flap you will never change directions and this may be one of the issues that people are having. I found it was easiest to get the people knocked down by aiming ahead of them and then letting myself fall down on top of them.

also don't hit fireballs or your mount might die, but i think that there is a person with some mounts at the bottom of the cave if you do happen to lose your mount. Oh and the last part where you have to kill the eggs, don't try and fly to them, just land on a platform and walk around the platform killing them.

I really loved doing this, i thought it was fun and unique and i enjoyed it for the 5 min that it took me to complete. And for anyone who still doesn't get how to do it "You can be Goalie" (I just wanted to link this because it is awesome, you should watch it).

Lowbie Bears

Just a quick post before I go to class.

Most of you probably came here from BBB in which case you probably already know about Reesi's blog, but this is for everyone anyway.

There is a post there, at www.theincbear.com about lowbie tanking for bears that you should go check out. I still plan on doing my own when i get more time but you can go check that out if you want the info now.

Patch 4.0.3a

So mmo-champion is saying that the new patch will be dropping tomorrow and i felt like there were a couple things to go over before that happens.

First off, obviously this will completely change the old world so you will have some alt leveling to do if you want. I know that I will be leveling my shaman who is just about 50, to 60 if i can find the time. This means that for any of you who don't have a druid...get on that.

You will be getting access to the new race/class combinations for the expansion so you will be able to roll your tauren paladin or blood elf warrior if you want. That being said, anyone who rolls a troll druid, you are a bad person. I don't know why but i just have a serious issue with trolls, they just don't look right.

There are going to be some class changes going in with this expansion that you have to look forward to. Your health will drop, your swipe damage will drop, your LotP heal will be reduced and your brutal impact debuff will be less potent. Aren't things looking up? On the plus side, if you are ever in cat form you will not have to target something before you can swipe.

None of these nerfs seem too bad tbh though. We will make it.

If you you are a Druid, Paladin, Priest or Shaman your talents will be reset. this leaves us with a free respec going into cata that we can use to get ready. I dont know how many of you used the last reset as your "lets get ready with a cata spec" reset but this patch is close enough that i would advise you to just spec for cata this time around. The last reset i went for the (I think) optimal build so that i could do better in my raid. This time, no chance.

That being said...you may be wondering what the spec you should be going for is. well have no fear because I am here. This will be the bear spec only because there are more knowledgeable people out there that can give you a cat one. If you really want me to take a stab at it i will but i am far less comfortable making decisions about cat than bear.

So here we have the bear spec that you should be pushing for at 85 that will be your general raiding spec for tanking:

This will cover all your needs for tanking. The one point in stampede can really be put wherever you want but that will be where i am leaving it. This is the spec you should be working towards as you level from 80 to 85.

At 80, if you are planning on working  towards this you will probably want to take this spec:

Natural shapeshifter is not the best choice but it will allow you to move into the third tier as soon as you hit level 81. You can start off with points in perseverance and then move to master shapeshifter or go the other way. I would suggest going with perseverance first because i think damage will be quite high when tanking dungeons. If you are having issues with threat though, you may want to grab master shapeshifter on your next level as it is basically a 4% threat increase (not exactly but roughly). The last point you have left over after that can be put wherever you want, i chose stampede but if you have somewhere else that you would want to put it then go for it.

So there is your specs for 85 and 80. You could choose to go with the better spec for right now and put two points into stampede instead of natural shapeshifter but the difference is negligible so i would just go with the one i posted with it being so close.

All that being said, have fun in your newly shattered Azeroth!!!

YouTube'in

Before I started this blog I thought it would be cool to help people out by doing some YouTube videos about some of the raids (tankspot style). I kinda stopped doing that after ToC when I had to reformat my hard drive and I lost Fraps and my video editing software. But I have been working to get set-up for Cataclysm so that I can push out some videos when the expansion drops. The first ones may or may not have voice-overs because I am getting jaw surgery on Dec 15 and am getting my jaw wired shut and my face will be swollen and I may not be able to talk but that is irrelevant.

I plan on releasing videos showing the instances, including strategies for the instance bosses as well as all the mechanics changes from regular to heroic. When I get to raiding I will start working on bigger videos for those with similar information. But I would also like to hear from you. What would you like some videos on (strategy, guides or otherwise)?

4.0.1 Tanking First Impressions

So patch 4.0.1 went live yesterday and I took some time to play around on my druid and run some heroics so I am going to share my observations with you. Keep in mind that I haven’t done any raiding yet so I don’t have any real idea of how much damage I am taking relative to before but today I should be raiding so I will do a second post to follow up.

First just a little about my character so you know the perspective I have. I have just over a 6k GS. Unbuffed I have about 40% crit chance and 50% dodge with about 5000 attack power. As of yesterday I am hit capped and am about 2.2% off of the expertise hard cap (parry cap).

Rotation:

Fiddling around on the target dummy I had enough rage to do a full rotation so this is pretty accurate. The rotation has moved more towards a priority like the cat system.

You want to try and keep lacerate up (even one stack) so that you can benefit from berserk procs for more mangles. You want to mangle as soon as it comes off CD. You want to use pulverize on a 3 stack of lacerate to maintain the buff but get up lacerate up very soon after so that you can still get the berserk proc. Pulverize is not worth hitting just because. Try and maul when you proc OOC. Use FF when you are low on rage (which should not be very often) and maul when you are high on rage. Hitting maul at the wrong time now actually sucks. Lacerate is now your main filler ability however swipe is a little better so use it if you remember. And one note about lacerate is that the bleed sucks, most of the threat is front end loaded and the bleed is just there to proc berserk. Not looking good for the current manifestation of the T11 set bonuses but that will probably change.

I am noticing that my threat seems to have increased in live.

AoE tanking really sucks right now because they put the CD on swipe w/o giving us thrash and the threat that is on swipe is reported to be half of the threat of live on the beta. I have a feeling that we might see the swipe threat stay the same until cata when we will be able to get thrash to supplement our aoe threat. That being said however, if you just warm up that tab button and throw out 3 lacerates/mangles on your targets in between each swipe it is not that bad, just remember to spread them around. You may choose to let the other tank do the plague wing trash but we are doing fine.

Gear:

Stam is more important that armor now whereas there used to be a decent trade-off before. In T10 before you had a lot of arm pen which was rather weak as a stat. Now that arm pen is haste which is also weak as a stat. I have been reading some ideas on what to reforge that haste into and it seems like a lot of people are saying crit or mastery are the good choices. I think a little different though. Right now my dodge and the SD bubble are quite high with my dodge being much higher in ICC due to the dodge reduction being removed.

I think that if you are going to be reforging haste you should try and get to the hit cap and then start getting expertise. These two stats are going to give you a lot more rage than crit and are going to cause a lot more threat to keep up with the dps that have recently received a dps buff that is reported to be as large as 30% more in some cases. If I am wrong however I will eat my words and rereforge my haste to be mastery.

That is really all I have to say for now and I will update this as I experiment more and do a little bit of raiding and see what my threat and damage taken are like. My assessment so far...we are in a good spot.

DPS Basics

So my blog has not died, i just have not posted in a while because of some outside circumstances. I had this post ready for a bought a week cause i was having issues bringing it over from a word document to here but i figured it out now and then about a week after I finished I went on vacation for a week and a half so here i am with a day off and im going to at least post this and update my telents post so that it is correct and current again.

This one is not as directional as the tanking one was because my thoughts on tanking are fully developed and my thoughts on dps are developed from tanking. Some of this post (parts of the agro portion) sound like a rant from a tank and I thought about removing it and rewriting it but I think that it shows some of the frustration that I have with dps sometimes. That being said I think most of it is neutral and probably a good thing to read. Here we go.

1) Know Your Abilities
This is what I believe to be the most important thing that ANY new player should do. It is especially important for those with more responsibility in fights such as tanks and healers and dps with special roles. When I say know your abilities, I don’t simply mean the ones that are used regularly by your spec but all of the abilities you might ever use if you played every role you are able to. You should never say to yourself, “I know all my bear form abilities so I am set to tank”. Tanking is about being prepared and one of the best ways to do that is to know your class extremely well. An Example: did you know that if you want to root 2 mobs it is possible to do it, pull with entangling roots and then cast natures grasp on yourself. You can refresh roots without the NG one breaking and you can redo NG by having that mob hit you again. Now a lot of people may be saying to themselves what useless information that is and I will admit that it is almost completely useless for PvE. I have never used it and probably never will but I know that I can.

2) Know your Talents
With the overhaul coming to talent trees in Cata this may not be as important but I will still list it here anyway because for the time being I believe that it is very important. Different from the abilities, you should know the talents trees of the specs you play inside and out. I will probably never play resto so I only really know the top three tiers that I use for feral but in my feral tree I know tons of details. When I finished levelling to 80 and was creating my raiding spec for WotLK I spent almost an hour and a half combing through the talent tree individually looking at each talent and researching it. I came up with the cookie cutter build for druid tanking at the time all by myself and I know the pros and cons of every talent. Now that may have been extreme but knowing all my talents like that I have had to adapt to changing talents only very slightly and I knew what they all did and was able to make a very educated decision about my spec. It is not good enough to simply go to elitist jerks and copy their spec for the patch, sure your spec may end up looking the same anyway or you may want to use that as a very strict guideline but do something yourself so that you know what your talents can do for you. You may not need an hour but do 20 mins and have a better knowledge of what you are putting points in. You decided that you want to tank, now you have to do some work to get ready.

3) Know How to Pick Gear and Weight Stats
This is easy and only takes about 15 min to find out. All you want to know is maybe your 4 or 5 most important stats and their weightings relative to each other. There are lots of guides out there that will tell you what gear you should use over another and I use them quite frequently but when I am out in a raid or an instance I know my stat weights good enough that almost every time I will pick the better piece anyway. This is definitely worth your time.

4) Know the Other Classes
This knowledge will be very general. Know the other classes buffs, major debuffs, big cooldowns, and the basic abilities used at max level for each spec. You don’t have to be able to have a thought provoking conversation about the ins and outs of arcane blast and arcane missiles and how they relate but at least know that they are used by arcane mages. The exception to this is the four tanking classes. When it comes to the tanks you want a better knowledge of their abilities so that you can react better because messing up in regards to another dps may cause you to lose a little damage but messing up when it comes to timing in regards to a tank will most likely leave you face down on the ground not moving a whole lot. Just saying.

5) Aggro
So you all knew that this was coming but here is the problem that I have. There are just too many parts of this topic that I want to share and not all of them are negative so grouping them all together wasn’t really an option. At the same time they all seem very important and I want them near the beginning, so you can see my dilemma. I did come up with a solution however...SUBHEADINGS!!!!!!!
5a)Don’t Pull Aggro
Yeah we will just get this out of the way early; you all saw it coming anyway. There is never a good time to pull aggro off the tank. Often you are only focusing on what you are attacking and how much damage you can do (don’t lie to me I dps too) and you don’t pay any attention to much else because you believe that the tank will magically always have aggro. Its people like you that cause problems. At any one time a tank is keeping track of any number of things such as the number of mobs, their positioning around him, any adds coming, paths of pats, healer location, location of himself relative to dps, mob abilities, boss abilities, fire on the ground, and probably more things I can’t remember. Ok now tanking is not the hardest thing in the world and keeping track of lots of those things overlap with one another however you should try and shoulder more responsibility and make the tanks job a little easier by not riding their tail on threat. There are exceptions to this such as high burst situations but most of the time it’s not a big deal and it isn’t even really that hard to do. Most times all that is required is a small bit of patience and then you can go nuts. Tank threat is generally not a problem after they have aggro but when the target is bouncing between them and a dps it makes it very hard.

5b) If You Die, It Probably Is Your Fault
When you stand in fire do you blame the healer for your death? When you jump from too high and die do you blame virtual gravity? When you auto-run into the boss and die do you blame ready checks? I would think unless you aren’t all that intelligent you probably answered no to all those but there is one last question that begs asking. When you pull aggro and die do you blame the tank? “but Jey that question is not even the same at all”. Well I believe it is, and this is coming from me as both a tank and a dps. It is your responsibility to stay alive. It is the responsibility of the tank to keep aggro off of everyone, not you. If you are dumb enough to simply pull off the tank then you deserve to die. If the tank loses aggro and multiple people die that is their fault. More often the former and not the later is the case. Man up and take responsibility

5c) If You Pull It Prepare To Tank It
Many tanks have the mantra that if you want aggro you can have it but many times it is out of the tanks control. I often am guilty of this in heroics as I simply do too much dig too fast due to dps scaling a lot better in heroics. Every time I pull however I expect that I will have aggro of whatever I am attacking until it dies that way I am not surprised to have it for the remainder of the fight but always pleased when the tank pulls it off. If I really do not want to pull off I can wait a few moments and then attack or can wait till I get high aggro and then lay off but it is always within my power to stay below the tank more so than the other way around.

5d) Use Threat Dumps Proactively
Ok so when I say threat dumps I mean stuff like tricks and misdirection but also things like feign death and soul shatter. If you have any abilities that allow you to get rid of threat or to make it go on to someone else you should use them early rather then when you have already pulled off of the tank. Some people like to say that the mob will run to you then be out of tank range and when you threat dump it will go to another dps or the healer and potentially cause a wipe. While I highly doubt a healer will have high enough threat to cause the mob to go to them it is very possible to go to another dps. These things should be used before you pull aggro but when you are very high on threat allowing you to get the most use out of them. Using these dumps or threat wipes around 100% threat is a good place because you are getting very close to pulling but everything is still on the tank. Hunters and rogues...use tricks and MD often. As a tank nothing makes me warm up to a dps more then getting their threat so I don’t have to worry as much. I currently am levelling a hunter that is level 77 and I can’t use misdirection enough, I just love the ability and it has made a couple really bad instances successful.

5e) Know Tank Aoe’s
This could very definitely go out of date with Cata but for the time being it will still hold true. Each tank has some abilities that they use when they are tanking multiple mobs at the same time. Knowing these and being able to look for them before opening up on the group. I was thinking hey I can make a video about that but I had already read a post about that on the wayward initiative that was about this exact topic so here it is.

6) Don’t Tunnel
This is probably the number one thing that gets dps killed on fights in raids and instances. Just by the nature of the role, dps do not need as much awareness as tanks and healers. Dps only watch two health bars and most often that just becomes one health bar. While doing damage to the boss is important it is not the only thing you have to watch for and this singular need to do dmg to the boss is what leads to tunnelling. You should always know what is going on in the fight so that you can react pre-emptively to some things or just be able to react in a timely manner to everything else. Most often the people who get hit by bad stuff or die in fires are dps. Yes I realize the ratio of dps to tanks and healers is very skewed but dps are usually the ones that stand in things. Just work on knowing what is going on around you and you will be much better off.

7) The Best Player Is Not Always Highest On the Meters
How many times have you seen a dps link a dmg meter parse in order to show that his e-peen is the biggest? Probably countless. That is probably not a player that you want with you in a raid. The way most dps choose to show their skill is by linking dps meters and this is rarely an indication of a good player. If you want recognition don’t link meters. Generally if you link meters people ignore it and don’t really care but if you do good during the fight and have the highest dps then people around you will make comments. The best dps are usually the ones that are consistently near the top of the meters, switch targets when they need to and keep quiet. If someone is overbearing and bragging they probably don’t realize that no one wants them there. The most successful dps I ever played with was always highest on the meters by a wide margin, followed all the fight mechanics almost flawlessly and didn’t say much at all over vent or raid chat and I found myself wanting to raid with him again.

8) Switch to Adds
When your raid leader tells you that you need switch to adds you need to do it. I cannot even count the amount of times that I have been in a raid and we have wiped repeatedly to getting overrun by adds during a boss fight. For something so simple to wipe the raid is just dumb. I realize it sucks to switch at almost any time during the fight. I play a feral druid, trust that I know but I would way rather kill the boss then wipe repeatedly just because I don’t want my dmg to drop.

9) Special Jobs Make You More Valuable
If you get tasked to do a special job during a boss encounter never complain. Yes you may lose damage but it will make you far more valuable to the guild. Most special jobs during boss fights require you to pay attention to more than just the boss and they help you to develop your awareness. Also if you become good enough you may soon find that you become irreplaceable. I’m sure you have noticed that good tanks and healers seem to be guaranteed a spot in raids and in most cases they probably are. You could have a spot like that if you are the guilds go to guy for dps tasks that they don’t feel comfortable giving to everyone and that may be all you need to be guaranteed a raid spot.

10) Happy Tank Happy Life
There should be no reason that should be causing a tank to be unhappy with his group. Most tanks dread tanking heroics and for good reason. Lots of dps are colossal losers and just make you infuriated. Now obviously this is not always that case and there are people that renew your hope in dps but the fact remains that a lot of them don’t. No matter how annoyed you are you should hold your comments to yourself. Go into guild chat and make fun of him, talk with other dps in the group behind his back, w/e you have to do but don’t voice that directly to your tank because if you keep him happy you will have a far better run. I have had tanks that suck, they make the run long and annoying but in almost every case I have kept those comments to myself and I think that it helps. I know that it is extremely hard to not say anything sometimes but unless they tank starts blaming others for something that is blatantly their fault but only if you are positive that it wasn’t your own.

11) Give Some Compliments
This will not make you a better player or improve your game experience directly but from a tanking point of view this can help you more than you think. If your tank or healer is doing a good job it is very usual that you simply note that and carry on with your life and never think about it again. If they are doing a good job let them know. It is always nice to hear that you are doing well from your guild but hearing it from a complete stranger is usually a lot better. And if every dps did this for all the good tanks that they came across then there would probably be more tanks out there that were doing a good job and more tanks in general thus making your queue times for randoms shorter.

That’s all I got right now but same with the tanking basics post I will update it if I think of anything else and if you give me ideas that I like I will throw in your name beside the title.

Feral Talents Runthrough

So my initial thought on the Cata talent trees was to leave them alone as a blog topic until they were closer to the release trees but I have thought of nothing better to write on so I am doing this.

Overall I think if they were to polish up the tree and release it right now I wouldn’t be too put off but a couple things seem slightly wrong to me but ill talk about them as they come up. I am going to try to show equal respect to bear and cat but I am a tank at heart so no promises. This is current as of build 12857 and I will try to keep it updated.

Feral Tree
Tier 1
Feral Swiftness
For Bears this is pretty much a no brainer same as in live right now, more dodge is good. For cats it is move speed, if you want more move speed over something else go for it.
Furor
This is the same as live at full now and scales at 33/66/100% but otherwise unchanged
Predatory strikes
This is absolutely useless for bears so leave it alone. For cats this is mostly just a choice if you want to move faster from feral swiftness or if you want to have an occasional instant spell such as a Brez when dpsing, I would probably take the move speed
Tier 2
Infected Wounds
This is the same as live for both specs so all the same arguments apply
Fury Swipes
I think this is a very cool talent for both specs and will probably take it in both. For cat it is an obvious dps increase but for bears there has been some skepticism around its actual benefits. I think with the normalization of rage however this will become an increasingly valuable talent but that is just my initial thoughts at the moment.
Primal Fury
This is the same as live and is just as good, you should be taking this.
Feral Aggression
Having faerie fire stack up to three instantly from one use and i think that the rage cost of faerie fire has been removed meaning that the feral version of faerie fire will be the same as live except that it will be 12% armor reduction instead of 5%.
Tier 3
King of the Jungle
Same as live? For cats it should be taken but for bears it is kinda still useless unless you have 4piece T10 and those 3 points are better spent elsewhere imo
Feral Charge
Same as live. Take it for both.
Improved Feral charge
I am iffy on this for both specs. For cats it seems useful as ravage does more dmg than shred and it would be a good way to open a fight or use after running away. For bear im just not so sure about this. For some fights it will probably turn out to be fantastic as you are charging all over the place but for other fights where you don’t charge at all this is totally useless. It seems like the kind of talent where you would almost have to make a point of taking advantage of it. Im not sure.
Thick Hide
Same as live and the same outcome for the talent. Take it for bear leave it for cat. This now also includes the crit reduction that was previously baked into survival of the fitest for tanking.
Tier 4
Leader of the Pack
I would say just take it, other classes may have the same thing but 5% crit is 5% crit. In the last build this was changed to also have the effects of improved leader of the pack but only for the druid that has the talent, if i read that correctly. This means that the buff will never become obsolete by another class having it.
Brutal Impact
With the new skull bash ability this gives cats and bears their reliable interrupt on a short CD. Definitely worth taking.
Nurturing Instincts
I am biased against this talent because of the current raiding environment but in Cata when mana is more of an issue you might see a niche for this talent. Obviously cat only.
Tier 5
Primal Madness
If you are like me and didn’t take king of the jungle for bear then this doesn’t matter anyway, other wise I think it is rather sub-par for the exact same reasons. For cats it was improved so that not only does it increase your max energy but also grants you extra energy.
Survival instincts
This ws redesigned int eh latest beta build to be the same as shield wall and have a 5 min CD instead of 3 min. It now, for those not staying up to date, it reduces all dmg taken by 60% for 12 seconds. hopefully this doesn't mean that they are taking away barkskin from ferals. The current effect of survival instincts is now tied into frenzied regeneration so that not only does it regen loads of health but also increases your max health by 30% for the duration. This should not be a big deal because i suspect that most people use survival instincts and frenzied regeneration together anyway to get the most bang for their buck and this just puts those two abilities in the same button.
Endless Carnage
This is obviously good for cats to ease the rotation and improve dps and it is looking like we will be balanced around having the buff from pulvarize using up lacerate stacks and so having the increased duration could mean the difference between it falling off or having full uptime.
Natural reaction
Bear only talent and all bears should have it
Tier 6
Nom Nom Nom
Aside from having the best name of any talent ever this looks very nice for cats in situations where the enemy is low and you don’t necessarily want to use 5 combo points that you happen to have on another rip that isn’t going to last. Not useful at all for bears.
Rend and Tear
We will have to see how much maul gets used in Cata but I see this being good for both specs, this could very likely get changed to be more than just maul or a different ability entirely.
Pulverize
This will very likely be a core bear talent but I want to see it in action personally. Not useful for cats.
Tier 7
Berserk
Ahh berserk, how I love you and how I hate you. I love this ability in cat form, it is a great dmg increase and burst cooldown for use on longer fights and has a fear break to boot. I really have an issue with this for bear tanking. It kinda sucks. Having looked at the new tree i think that i will still take it given the amount of points that we are to need.

Resto
Tier 1
Blessing of the grove
Looks good for cats and cats only
Natural Shapeshifter
Has not changed and probably would only get taken if you want master shapeshifter
Heart of the Wild
For both specs this should be taken. More health for bears and AP for cats. In the newest beta patch the it increases your max man instead of your intellect making it markedly more useful for ferals that have to shift alot.
Tier 2
Perseverance
This is a tank ability or a cat ability if you suck at getting out of fires really bad. But seriously only take it if you are a bear.
Master shapeshifter
I don’t know where to stand on this. For bears it will probably get picked up because you are getting pretty much forced to take at least two points in natural shapeshifter but cats have more options and I can see this losing for furor but that is just me. However right now this talent is all just passives so maybe it will change. This was changed from 2% to 4% lately.


I have mostly determined the path my spec will take in live however i have to do a little napkin math based on a raid and i don't think i have a recount parse saved so i may have to wait a little bit for some more information, that being said i will post my spec options here with the info that right now I am trying to decide between master shapeshifter and improved feral charge as far as dmg goes.

For the 2 specs above and the one below note that the position of Heart of the Wild and Furor have been switched but it makes no difference in the way you distribute your points. I am not going to redo the pictures for bear because they are more of a pain than cat and nothing has changed. These will be the main choices for almost all feral druid tanks out there. The spec on the left contains improved feral charge for the increased haste after a feral charge and the spec on the right contains master shapeshifter instead for the passive 2% dmg increase. For the small percentage of bears there is one more option however:

This spec is for those lucky druids that have the benefit of having someone to put up the attack speed reduction almost 100% of the time. If you have someone that is very reliable doing that for you, you have the option of dropping infected wounds and picking up both improved feral charge and master shapeshifter. And now a spec for cats.

So this is what i think will be the cat spec so far come cata. Keep in mind that there are 2 points missing to put wherever you want. Being a feral tank who has to take infected wounds that is where i think you should put it but i think most everyone disagrees with that so probably nurturing instincts would be good to turn down the strain on healers. I am inclined to say that you should not get predatory strikes as ravages with 50% more crit which will probably be joined with imp. feral charge and that just sounds like a good way to die at the beginning of the fight.

That is all I have to say for now. I will try to keep up with the changes but this is a very solid point unless the tree gets a major overhaul. So have fun on live or in the beta if you got lucky and have a good day.

Tanking Basics

Alright, well this was my first idea for a nice long post to get me into this blogging thing. I am going to do a general tanking guide for beginners. My hope for this guide is for it to be general enough as to not become outdated by Cata releasing but specific enough that it isn’t just mindless reading material; you will have to let me know if I hit that mark. Alright here we go…

I am going to split this into sections that I feel make sense and then elaborate on them. I will try and order them from what I believe is the most basic to the most complicated, or in other words most to least important. I hope that every tank does everything in the post to some degree but the later things will be not as important to do your job.

1) Know Your Abilities
This is what I believe to be the most important thing that ANY new player should do. It is especially important for those with more responsibility in fights such as tanks and healers and dps with special roles. When I say know your abilities, I don’t simply mean the ones that are used regularly by your spec but all of the abilities you might ever use if you played every role you are able to. You should never say to yourself, “ I know all my bear form abilities so I am set to tank”. Tanking is about being prepared and one of the best ways to do that is to know your class extremely well. An Example: did you know that if you want to root 2 mobs it is possible to do it, pull with entangling roots and then cast natures grasp on yourself. You can refresh roots without the NG one breaking and you can redo NG by having that mob hit you again. Now a lot of people may be saying to themselves what useless information that is and I will admit that it is almost completely useless for PvE. I have never used it and probably never will but I know that I can.

2) Know your Talents
With the overhaul coming to talent trees in Cata this may not be as important but I will still list it here anyway because for the time being I believe that it is very important. Different from the abilities, you should know the talents trees of the specs you play inside and out. I will probably never play resto so I only really know the top three tiers that I use for feral but in my feral tree I know tons of details. When I finished leveling to 80 and was creating my raiding spec for WotLK I spent almost an hour and a half combing through the talent tree individually looking at each talent and researching it. I came up with the cookie cutter build for druid tanking at the time all by myself and I know the pros and cons of every talent. Now that may have been extreme but knowing all my talents like that I have had to adapt to changing talents only very slightly and I knew what they all did and was able to make a very educated decision about my spec. It is not good enough to simply go to elitist jerks and copy their spec for the patch, sure your spec may end up looking the same anyway or you may want to use that as a very strict guideline but do something yourself so that you know what your talents can do for you. You may not need an hour but do 20 mins and have a better knowledge of what you are putting points in. You decided that you want to tank, now you have to do some work to get ready.

3) Know How to Pick Gear and Weight Stats
This is easy and only takes about 15 min to find out. All you want to know is maybe your 4 or 5 most important stats and their weightings relative to each other. There are lots of guides out there that will tell you what gear you should use over another and I use them quite frequently but when I am out in a raid or and instance I know my stat weights good enough that almost ever time I will pick the better piece anyway. This is definitely worth your time.

4) Know the Other Classes
This knowledge will be very general. Know the other classes buffs, major debuffs, big cooldowns, and the basic abilities used at max level for each spec. You don’t have to be able to have a thought provoking conversation about the ins and outs of arcane blast and arcane missiles and how they relate but at least know that they are used by arcane mages. The exception to this is the other tanking classes. You need to know them a step better. They are there with you doing your same job and you aught to show them a little more respect. For the other three tank classes you want a general knowledge of how they tank and pull as well as the usual patterns that they follow. Its probably a good idea to know what their defensive cooldowns are (except pallys cause they all sound the same :P).

5) Relax
So often you hear new tanks or perspective tanks worried about dealing with pugs and how they will react to them. In the end it really doesn’t matter what they think. No one is expecting you be the best in the world even though some people might seem like they do. All anyone in those groups wants is for you to be competent and you cant do that if your all nervous and freaking out and tense. Talk with guildies over vent, eat while you raid (healthy food though :P), or my personal favourite is to make funny noises IRL when no one is around. However bad you feel the run is going, or you are doing, just take a step back and relax.

6) Practice
The only way you are going to get better is to practice. If you need to learn your rotation, your abilities better, how to pick things up better or anything else, you need to practice. You can’t learn to tank by going out and doing dailies, you learn to tank by tanking. If you are so worried that you are going to be a bad tank and that people are going to make fun of you that you never queue in the dungeon finder, im sorry to say it but you are going to be a bad tank. You have to queue to get experience tanking; you don’t need experience tanking to queue as a tank. Just let your group know you’re new and get on your way. If they kick you shake it off and queue again. You wait 3 seconds for a group they wait 5 min for a tank. If you really do not want to do a random dungeon group, go with friends. They will know what’s going on and even though they might poke fun at you while you are learning they probably wont be hostile. That being said there are two really good ways to learn to tank that I have found, the calm gentle way and the one that forces you to get better. The calm way first, queue for a group in a dungeon that is under your level by say 2 or 3. This way you probably will not have to worry about dying or wiping but a really good player might give you some threat issues to deal with and it will help you learn to pick up mobs. This way is really good for learning how to pull and position and lets you get a rhythm for your tanking. The second way is to go into a dungeon of your level where everyone else in the dungeon over gears you. This forces you to improve you reflexes, gives you better vision for mobs that are running and given enough time will help you relax. This method is stressful at first but I find it a lot more fun once you get a hang of it.

7) Bind Taunt
In a perfect world you could stick taunt off on some obscure action bar where you would casually mouse over to it and gently click it in order to properly tank switch on a fight that requires a tank switch. This is not a perfect world. You bind taunt in the most natural, most easy to hit place that you can hit in the least amount of time possible, because in this non perfect world you are going to use taunt, and you are going to use it a lot. I don’t care if you are a clicker and you key bind nothing, if you are only binding one thing to one button on your keyboard or mouse it better be taunt.

8) Always Be Prepared
To a lot of people this most likely seems like second nature; they go to a raid with flasks and a well fed and they are ready to go. But are you really prepared with just a flask and a well fed? As a dps player all you have to know for the fight is there anything you shouldn’t stand in or that you have to move for and are there target switches. Tanks need to know everything. Being prepared to go to a raid isn’t just limited to having a flask and a well fed, you need to understand the fight and almost all the spells and abilities and adds that come during the fight. Any little ability in the fight has the potential to change what you are doing drastically as a tank. When you go into a fight you need to have a solid knowledge of what is going to happen to everyone. Now ill lay off the preachy part for a second. Being prepared does not mean that you have read all the abilities and memorized them, while also having watched three different strat videos showing you every thing that you should look for in the encounter. For each individual person this will be different. 95% of the time your raid leader will give a rundown of the fight and positioning that they want…take that into account. You will most likely have a wipe or two while everyone is learning the fight…take that into account. When I was doing naxx I watched every strat video that tankspot put out, I was new to raid tanking and wanted to be absolutely prepared. Now I often just read the boss abilities and listen the raid leaders description and then jump into the fight. Your goal for the boss should be that after a wipe you understand the majority of the mechanics and then after that you simply work to improve your reactions to them. One more thing…don’t take heroics lightly, it used to actually require a little knowledge to kill those bosses when they were fresh and I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a tank just eat Ingvar’s smash in UK when it is really easy to avoid and can almost one shot you at appropriate gear levels, Just saying.

9) Know What Is and Is Not Your Fault
Too many times I have seen tanks take blame for things that are not their fault and are totally out of their control. Even worse though is when tanks do not take the blame for things that absolutely are their fault, and this happens even more. When you understand a fight this will be much more clear to you and having this simple knowledge will help you to relax. Do not use this as a means to attack people who mess up but instead just know for yourself so you can tune them out or accept it and move on. As a start follow this simple (and entirely incomplete) tanking mantra:
If the tank dies it’s the healers fault,
If the healer dies it’s the tanks fault,
If the dps die it’s their own friggin fault.
While not always true it’s a good point to start from.

10) Find Your Own Rhythm
As you become more comfortable with tanking this will naturally happen but it is a good thing to note. Some tanks are extremely spastic and move all over the place when they don’t need to. In guild chat I once referred to tanking as a dance where you are leading and the mobs are dancers that are following. That was a brilliant metaphor imo. It’s exactly how tanking should be. There should be a way you move that is always the same and appears to be graceful. There will be times when you will fall out of step and lose that, but always return to that natural tanking rhythm you set for yourself. Now I may be overdoing this now but so ill stop but having that rhythm helps everyone. Healers will know how to expect you to move, tanking will become so much more natural for you and dps will thank you because they know how the mobs are going to move all the time. This rhythm is going to be slightly different for most people but it helps immensely. The people it helps the most of anyone in the raid however are your other tanks. After tanking with someone for a while you pick up their rhythm and you learn to adapt to it and you work so much better together than if the other person was erratic. It goes along with practice but its something to keep in mind while you are learning.

11) Get a Threat Meter
This is one of the most important things that you can have as a tank as far as addons go. I will not tell you what to use or how to use it but get one. Currently I use Omen3 for single targets and the underrated and imo extremely powerful built in blizzard threat meter for all my off targets. I know that there are probably better ways to show this. Grid I believe can be set up to do this, John “Big Bear Butt” Patricelli over at thebigbearbutt.com likes to use the threat plates skin for tidyplates (which I am slowely becoming a fan of) and I am sure there are more I am missing. “Sorry I didn’t know I didn’t have agro” is not an excuse, its just because you were being to lazy. Not being able to react in time is fine but simply not knowing an add is running around is not acceptable.

12) Never Tunnel
DPS are known to do what is called tunneling. Tunneling is when you focus only on your dps and your rotation and don’t notice what is going on around you. When a dps tunnels they die, when a tank or a healer tunnels other people die. You chose to be a tank and so you chose what goes along with being a tank. The simple greatest skill you need is awareness. A whole lot of awareness can make up for a lot of crappy play. Some things that you need to keep track of are not easy such as specific debuffs on specific players that affect you as a tank. I can’t really give you many pointers as to how to get this skill but move your camera…a lot.

13) Install a Boss Mod
More experienced tanks will wean themselves off of relying on boss mods but when you are learning they are extremely helpful for knowing what is going to happen and when. As you get better you will find that you look at it less and less. You may find it kind of annoying but most of these addons are very small on your UI and you get used to them being there. If you feel that you are beyond using boss mods I am not going to say you are an idiot for having them but even though I rarely look at mine, I would far rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. The three I know of are Deadly Boss Mod, DXE, and BigWigs.

14) Don’t Seek Acceptance, Expect Rejection
When you are tanking you will rarely, if ever, get any sort of gratifying compliment outside of your guild members, and even within your guild it is not a given. A good tank is not often recognized until they screw up, once. You wont often hear that you did a good job for picking up that group that just came without casualties, but you will know in about 3 seconds if there is a level 1 spider attacking the healer. You are the unsung hero of the instance or raid group and you better get used to it. If a group thinks you are a good tank they will invite you back or take you off of guild trial status. If a group thinks you are a bad tank…you will know.

15) Make Your Healers Life Easy
Of all the bars of all the people in your dungeon group you watch your healers bars the closest. If there health is low see if something is attacking it, If there mana is low toss them an innervate or stop so they can drink. In raids this becomes a little different, there is too much going on during some fights to be constantly watching your healers bars but If a healer tells you that you are out of range or turned in a bad direction you better be moving, don’t be dumb but always make sure that you are trying your best to make their life easier. And remember that being a healer is like being a tank in that often there is little said when you are doing good, so if a healer is doing good just let them know, takes 5 seconds and it lets them know they are on the right track.

16) Learn How Strafe Works
I will briefly explain this and you can do some looking of your own. Strafing is moving side ways instead of turning around for lack of a better definition. You can strafe one of two ways: The first is the strafe keys, which are Q and E if you have not rebound them. The second is to hold down your right mouse button and hit A or D or the turn left/right buttons. In essence you are just turning around and running however when you strafe the game responds entirely different to the actions you make. When you strafe you move at full movement speed as opposed to backing up which severely cuts your move speed. A second advantage is that you can see more of what is going on easier than if you turn around and run. Probably the greatest advantage to strafing however is that you are considered to be facing the target and because of that you are able to dodge, block and parry as usual instead of just getting wailed on without having any avoidance like what happens when you are fully turned around. Another thing that happens is that strafing forces the server to track your position more often and what ends up happening is that any mob that is following you runs to a point in front of you in the direction you are running instead of directly at you. Imagine running with a long stick in your hand and pointing it in the direction you are facing and having someone chase you but instead of running at you they run at the end of the stick when trying to catch you. While not entirely useful knowledge all the time there are certain times when it helps to position an add. A better look at this can be seen in this tankspot video around the 7 min mark however for a new tank this is a very informative video to watch.

That’s about all I can think of for the moment but after 3300 words I think it is good for the moment. If I randomly think of anymore I will add them in before this little blurb. If you leave a comment with another idea and I like it I will write on it and/or copy it and add it in with your name beside it so that everyone knows. I would like to also follow this with some things that I feel are more of tanking conveniences but I think ill just wait and see If I can think of enough to just make a new post.