Mastering Masochism: Top Ten Tips for New Tanks
So you want to get hit in the face? Getting the stuffing knocked out of you repeatedly can win you fame, fortune and friends. However, the transition from waving your hands around to fill health bars or stabbing something until it stops moving can be a little awkward. My tips are designed to ease the potentially jarring transition:
10. Gear Check
The most obvious, but often forgotten. Not only do you need to make sure you have 540 Defense (535 for Heroic Dungeons) in your tanking set for non-bears, but you need to make sure you have your tanking set EQUIPPED. Sometimes you’ll forget to switch; it happens to everyone. I once tanked half of H:UK in my healing set before I realized that my shield graphic was wrong.
9. Check the Spec
Like the aforementioned gear check, you want to make sure your spec is correct. This is especially true for warriors and druids who may have very similar action bars in the wrong spec, with just a few buttons missing or different. That being said, a DPS spec in Tank gear is a great way to blast through low level dungeons for achieves or rare loot.
8. TPS over DPS
One of the biggest changes is the focus from doing the most damage to doing the most threat. Oftentimes these are two very different things. There are class specific posts on how to get the most threat from your tank. Do your research and make sure you’re generating as much as possible. You’ll need it to keep up with over-geared DPS classes in the Dungeon Finder.
7. Survive and Thrive
Though it’s fun to see big healing or damage numbers, it’s even more fun to take that big hit and laugh it off. Aside from generating threat, your other big priority is going to be making yourself unstoppable. Seeing +Dodge and +Armor should excite you as much as +Spell Power does for a caster. As long as you are holding agro, you should be stacking mitigation and avoidance stats as much as possible (Bears are allowed to have agility, but no one else!). I don’t want to see any tanks gemming strength or armor penetration. It’s not needed as long as your rotation is designed for maximum threat. Tanks are the only role that can be stepped on by a giant and not stick to the bottom of their boot: embrace that.
6. Movement and Positioning
Once you’ve mastered cheesing off monsters and letting them slam you in the chest, it’s time to focus on where you’re standing. I don’t just mean staying out of fires; you need try and keep packs of enemies clustered together and facing away from everyone else. That’s right! You finally get to see the front of the monster! Make sure everyone else is looking at the back. There are a few exceptions of course, but in general you want to face packs of angry beasts away from the squishies.
5. Know Your Enemy
It is not enough to simply know that “adherent” means he’s a caster. You also need to know if he’s a healer, has AoE damage, direct damage, something that needs to be dispelled, or any other tactically important bit of information about this thing you’re trying to kill. Find this out by: researching the dungeon/raid ahead of time, or pay attention and take notice for the future. Knowing your enemy will help you devise a kill order and help you to know when to use abilities like Spell Reflection. The more you know about the bosses and trash packs, the better you will be able to control, position, and survive them. Mark your kill targets, because dps will often start attacking the first thing they see.
4. Open With The Impressive
In today’s “go-go-go” Dungeon Finding crowd, it’s more important than ever to get a large amount of threat quickly. Impress those monsters with an amazingly aggravating combo of abilities right from the start so they don’t notice the Ret Pally who uses Divine Storm the second he’s in range. People don’t like to wait for initial agro from a tank, they just want to open up as soon as possible. There are two common ways to deal with this: ask them to wait a few seconds (good luck with that), or simply impress them with how quickly you can pick them up and never lose threat.
3. AoE vs. Single Target
There are very different strategies for engaging and maintaining threat on a single boss vs. a pack of his 10 closest friends. Know your class. Know your abilities. You need to choose the right ones for the right situation or you’re going to lose threat quickly and end up with a few dead warriors dps.
2. Practice, Dummy!
If you’re new to tanking, feel free to practice your rotations on a dummy in any of the major cities. This will help develop muscle memory so that you’re able to react quickly in a dungeon or raid. It can even help to have a friend use a flashy ability on one of the other dummies around so you can practice switching to them and using taunt or a high threat ability. Once you’re ready, get a group of guildies together for some dungeons so you can get used to tanking at a nice comfortable pace.
1. Better with Buffs
Check them before any major boss fight and at the start of dungeons. Make sure the short duration buffs are refreshed mid-fight. It’s really easy to miss something and cause a wipe. Don’t be that guy… I have. It’s not fun.
Paladin
Death Knight
Warriors
Druids
Now go and enjoy getting stabbed in the head!
