I'm still getting back on track with my next post (originally it was just going to be a strategy post for ToC5 but it's so late on now I doubt there's a great deal of point, even for new tanks) so here's a handy filler post!
Tagged by Askevar of You Yank it, You Tank it.
What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?
Aelystriel, warrior, survival prot.
What is your primary tanking environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
As my guild disbanded in my absence, I'm sticking to 5 mans and VoA PuGs at the moment. Used to be 10man.
What is your favourite tanking spell for your class and why?
CHARGE. Alright, alright, it's not specifically a tanking move, but there's still nothing like yelling "Rawr!" and zooming into a group of mobs. As for tanking skills, it's a tie between Shockwave and Shield Slam. Shockwave is a brilliant move: masses of threat and a good long pause in which to position yourself without the mobs hopping on your back. Shield Slam, on the other hand, gets my love because it means part of my rotation is also a dispel. Tanking Jeraxxus' adds is especially fun when I dart over and smack Nether Protection back to whence it came before turning back to my target.
What tanking spell do you use least for your class and why?
Challenging Shout. I feel I could make much better use of it than I do; at the moment it's just an "oh shit!" button for me, whereas I feel it would be quite useful used more frequently. The only fight where I'm sure to use it is Onyxia (but frankly, the whelps count as an "oh shit!" moment for me as my dodgy connection is big on buggering up as soon as they spawn).
As for why I don't use Challenging Shout that much, I think it's partly because of the keybinding. I have it bound to dash above my num pad, and I jab it with my mouse hand when I need to use it. Were it elsewhere it wouldn't be such a stretch to use. Other than that, I still have the backward mentality that taunting is bad. This, of course, is foolish. Using taunt isn't a sign of a bad tank; taunt is a perfectly acceptable tool and its AoE counterpart is no different.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of your tanking class and why?
Mobility and flexibility. Your prot warrior can deal with fear better than any other class thanks to Berserker Rage (and Will of the Forsaken for me, too); we have a reliable interrupt; we can dispel; we channel another player's threat away from them; we have three effective taunts (Taunt, Challenging Shout and Mocking Blow); we can apply three debuffs that reduce mobs' damage (Thunderclap, Demo Shout and Disarm); we bring buffs to improve our team's damage (Devastate and Battle Shout); we can take a hit that should have struck another tank without risking making a mob taunt-immune (Intervene); we can cross a field faster than any other class with Charge, Intercept and Intervene; we have a ranged silence; we can stunlock mobs that aren't immune for almost as long as a rogue... the list goes on. I do not feel we are the strongest main tank figure any more, even though our cooldowns are solid and our mitigation is not to be scoffed at. We are, however, brilliant at dealing with those little oddities of boss fights and, in my opinion, a pleasure to watch when we're Doing It Right.
What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your tanking class and why?
Sometimes we get resource starved. Not half as frequently as the "down with rage!" ranting crew you can find on the forums try to make out, but when it happens you just look bad. Bloodrage, Challenging Shout, Heroic Throw and Charge are on cooldown. You have no rage. Someone body-pulls. You Taunt one of the mobs and run out to meet it, but you block the first strike it makes against you and gain no rage worth speaking of so you can't snag the others with anything other than your melee swing. Your silly body-pulling ally? Quite possibly on the floor. I've only had this happen twice in my entire tanking life, but it still burns the portion of my memory in which those two occasions reside.
In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best tanking assignment for you?
The only 25man raids I run are OS and VoA. In OS, I find I'm very good on the drakes and lava spawns, though I can still tank Satharion himself with ease. In VoA, I prefer to main tank Koralon: Vigilance on the off tank reduces the damage dealt to him and gives me such an abundance of threat that the DPS can just pewpew to their heart's content. On Archavon it really doesn't matter. I like tanking the adds for Emalon, as Heroic Throw is great for picking them up, but I'm probably best suited to main tank there as I can zoom in and out of Lightning Nova range with Intervene and Charge.
What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with most and why?
I have a druid, a paladin, a death knight and a warrior, and the warrior is my favourite. Of course, the warrior is the only one at 80 - the others range from 40 to 73. I enjoy bear most of the other three; Swipe is fun, Mangle the closest to gory this game gets and, let's be honest here, who doesn't like tanking with their face? I always feel slow as a bear though, perhaps because of my big bear butt. Feral Charge is fun, but just doesn't compare to the real deal.
Paladin just feels too passive. Things hit me, I get threat. And yes, I know that's an oversimplification, but that's just how it feels. I stick down Consecration and mobs just run into a carpet of threat; people heal me and my resource pool replenishes; I have an instant full-heal for those ohshit moments. I do quite enjoy the guise of invincibility provided and watching really good paladins, like the leader of my old guild, is quite something. I just don't love it like I do warrior.
Death Knight frustrates me, in part because I prefer DK DPS but never get to do it. I'm good at keeping up diseases and boiling them and using Howling Blast whenever it comes off cooldown, and I'm starting to react well to the odd unintentional pull that previously had me groping stupidly for Heroic Throw. I just feel kinda... passive, though. I stand and my skills zoom out to mobs.
Which leads to why I like warrior. Mobs move, and I zoom to them. Yes, that's right. I love warrior because I can zoom. It really is as simple as that.
What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with least and why?
Death Knight. I think this may change if I try a different spec - perhaps blood - because frost just bores me, but I dunno fo'sho. It's mostly down to the feeling of being stationary I mentioned above.
What is your worst habit as a tank?
I brood. If I make a mistake, I make more mistakes for a little while afterwards because I'm still focusing on the first one and being bitter about it. As I'm always a leader figure when tanking, this makes for snark in chat if I really manage to stress myself out, or just plain forgetting to mention something if I need to review tactics. This doesn't seem to happen to me when playing healer or DPS: when healing, if I screw up and my charge dies I apologise and then make sure I don't make the same error again; when DPSing I just pull out all the stops to make up for lost ground.
I also occasionally forget to watch a healer's mana. Not frequently, but every once in a while. This is bad because I get really frustrated when a healer insists on calling out every mana break even though I've obviously stopped already. *facepalm*
What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?
DPS pulling or deliberately overnuking. I don't care if you're a mate and you think it's fun to push me; I set a good, quick pace through heroics but that doesn't mean I ever pull mindlessly like some of these dweebs do. If you notice that I pull a group, spend a little time attacking it, then pull another, think about why that might be, mister "ololol, Aelys, run here! :D" paladin. Maybe it's because I'm waiting for a patrol to pass. Maybe it's 'cause I want an AoE ability off cooldown first. Maybe because I as the tank want to keep everything under control...!
I should terminate that rant before it goes too far.
Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other tanks?
The fact that I adore my class makes this hard to tell. I do feel that paladins are pulling ahead of everyone at the moment but I don't mind that much. I'm not being excluded because of my class, after all, although I have had a PuG group rise up against one member who demanded I was kicked so they could bring in their friend "who's a proper tank class." Instead of taking that as a bad experience, I was mostly just touched that the people I'd grouped with before were impressed enough by my previous performance to tell that guy where to stuff it.
What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?
I keep loose track of how many spells I reflect, how much of the time I keep Thunderclap and Demo Shout active, how frequently I make use of cooldowns and how often I just don't notice a mob to evaluate myself, as well as checking up on Recount to track my interrupts, skill usage and dispels. I also ask healers how easy I am to heal and watch Omen to see how my TPS is doing. Occasionally I'll even play without Vigilance if I feel I've been slacking a bit but generally I feel that, while it may force me to work hard, not making use of such a strong ability is a bad thing to do.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?
That we were left behind with TBC. Yeah, we were the only tanks worth speaking of in Vanilla WoW. Yeah, everyone else finally (and deservedly) came into their own in TBC. Yeah, some people are foolishly calling death knights "warrior mk. II". Our AoE threat is a lot stronger than you realise, our cooldowns a lot more effective, our versatility a lot more worth considering. Just because our rivals are now on equal footing does not mean Blizzard hates the warrior class, nor that it should be left in the dust by the player base.
What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new tanks of your class to learn?
Spatial awareness. This includes intelligent positioning of mob group and of yourself within the mob group, as well as how you aim your camera and whether you look to make sure everything is in LoS of your party. I notice a lot of new warriors will charge into a group and let one or two of the mobs hide around a corner, so that the warrior is hitting them but the ranged have to move before they can do the same.
Having sat behind someone who was learning the warrior class and watched him run Maraudon, I also noticed how static his camera usage was - while fighting he would stop moving the camera altogether and just stare at his own butt. You need to be constantly vigilant for patrols and for party screwups, remembering that a good tank will see the mage accidentally hit blink instead of pyro and body pull a dragon in time to save his squishy arse, while a bad or mediocre tank will only notice the mistake when suddenly a party member is dead.
Effective Health or Avoidance and why?
I believe that a good health pool is much more important when you're first gearing up. This is because a tank that starts stacking avoidance immediately will get Spiky Health Syndrome (SHS, fo'sho). They'll dodge and dodge and take a hit of a third of their health and block a bit of the next hit and parry and take another hit; because their avoidance is at the "getting there" stage and their health will barely be in the 20k range they will be taking regular hits and those hits will be disproportionately large to the healer, because a 5k smack is actually a fourth of the tank's healthpool. You do not get the near-invincible level of mitigation until much high gear levels so you need the big health pool to soak the inevitable hits.
Additionally, people will judge you on your health. A new tank needs to build up their confidence as much as their gear, so the fewer people sneering at them for having low HP the better. Later on, I feel you need to achieve a balance. Personally, I do still favour health a bit: blue sockets get stamina gems, red sockets get expertise/stamina gems, yellow sockets get defence/stamina or dodge/stamina gems. This is because, while healing, I have had to deal with tanks that favoured mitigation... and I know I would much rather they'd beefed up their stamina a bit first.
What tanking class do you feel you understand least?
Druid. I've never read about their end-game tanking 'cause I don't know any druid tanks at the moment. I think they look wicked cool though! (See earlier paragraph re: FACE TANKING.)
What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in tanking?
I have a macro that takes me into Battle Stance, uses Retaliation and then hops back into Defensive Stance when I hit it three times. I usually hit it twice and then smack my Defensive Stance keybind instead, though: too many moments where I haven't spammed as much as I thought I did or have spammed too much and ended up tanking in Battle Stance for a few seconds. o.o;
Other than that, I have no macros. I tried one to use Heroic Strike with Devastate, but that rather removed Heroic Strike's functionality as a threat/rage "throttle" and irritated me so it didn't even last one instance run. My mods are Omen, Pitbull, ForteXorcist, Recount, Quartz, Satrina's Buff Frames, CaelNamePlates, DeadlyBossMods and TicTac.
Do you strive primarily for balance between your tanking stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
I love me some stamina, so once I'm defence capped stamina becomes my best mate. Other than that, I prioritise expertise over hit (although you wouldn't know it by looking at me - somehow I have enough hit from my gear, without enchants or gems, to put me well over the hit cap) and dodge over block over parry. I mostly aim to keep myself balanced, although I intend on creating a threat set, a mitigation set and a health set when I get the gear to customise it thusly.
So yeah, that's it. I tag any tank that sees this and still hasn't done it themselves. Go! Spread the word. The circle cannot be broken.
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