Threat 101: Sustained Threat and Warriors/Druids

ST Issue #1: Heroic Strike/Maul/Cleave

I have on two separate occasions run into tanks in progression raiding guilds that had horrendous threat and consequently were not the MT’s at that time or even preferred OT’s of their guilds. With both of these tanks it was later learned that they did not know something about Heroic Strike (HS), which is that it is not on the GCD and it can be used while using other tank abilities.

If you do not know this don’t feel too bad about it, because as far as I am aware there are only 3 abilities in the game that work this way, HS, Maul, and Cleave. How it works for those who did not know is, if you have enough rage you can queue the ability and on your next white attack it will go off using rage, it then replaces the white attack giving you no rage from the attack.

Some tanks in high rage situations do not use HS or the equivalents simply because they do not understand they can while using everything else. In the case of those two tanks I knew, one got a bit better TPS, the other went from a horrendous off tank to the MT of his guild.

ST Issue #2: Rage Management

Most tanks start learning to tank in a high rage environment. The reason this is the case is because most tanks learn to tank either at max level, or while leveling in instances that are designed to be a challenge while they are leveling, and because of this their mitigation and avoidance are barely able to handle the instance, which interestingly enough causes almost unlimited rage.

In a high rage environment, it is easy to get in the habit of using abilities in a spam like manner, and those that know which abilities can cause the most threat, will do well in these situations. But what happens in a low rage situation? If the tank continues to spam all of his abilities will he be an effective tank? Most likely these types of tanks will begin to fail.

As a tank you can, as many tanks will do, just take off your pants, but frankly this is not the best way to deal with the situation. The usual reasons you are getting low rage is because of one or multiple of three reasons, to much avoidance, to much mitigation, or too little damage.

Avoidance:

Something to understand about avoidance is that it is a remarkable stat, in that it is quite useless for tanking. Shocked? Tanking is about mitigating damage and causing threat, avoidance mechanics do neither of these, in fact avoiding actually, because of rage loss, causes threat loss. Avoidance is a great survival stat in that it can prolong the likely hood you can survive if not healed, making it useful for healers. However, if the tank healer can heal without the avoidance, the tank is better off doing without.

Mitigation:

Not enough incoming damage could be because of too much avoidance but another possibility is that you are “over geared.” This term is heard often, but what it really means is that you are taking less damage and generating less rage than you need to use for the encounter. Again avoidance could be the problem but the other major factors are block value and armor. Reducing incoming damage by a steady amount is usually beneficial but because of rage mechanics there can come a point where you will need to take more damage.

Damage:

In most situations your damage has little to do with rage generation as a tank. The exceptions are, when you are in a low rage situation (low damage) that periodically changes into a high rage situation (high damage), and when you are off tanking. In both cases you may have to rely in part or in full on your white damage to increase your rage, and if you are not hitting often enough or hard enough your rage will suffer along with your threat.

Here are a few problems and their solutions to allow you the ability to maintain higher ST in low rage situations.

Gear:

The most proactive approach to low rage is to gear for the situation. If you are going into a situation where, because of your current gear, you will have less rage then you need to change your gear.

Replace avoidance with stamina, if this is not enough; replace tank pieces with DPS pieces that give high amounts of expertise/hit. As a warrior, block value to increase your shield slams is not a bad choice. As a druid, armor penetration is easily obtainable in large amounts and crit is a good stat as every crit is more rage. In either case if you are going to be white attacking for rage haste is a decent choice.

Debuffs:

If you’re not taking enough damage a very quick fix is to stop debuffing the targets you’re tanking. Often warriors note that druids have less rage problems while part of this is because of other factors a part of this is because druids are built to take 25% more damage because of no thunderclap. Although, because TC is a good deal of aoe threat, I would suggest dropping Demo Shout, before dropping TC.

Rage Conservation:

There are a few methods to save your rage as you tank.

In multi mob situations your greatest asset for this is taunt; it is quite possible to let mobs either agro onto other players for a short duration as long as the mob is not out of range of your taunt, and the other player can reasonably survive. The reason this is useful is that no matter how much aggro the DPS has built on the mob, you can burst a bit of threat after your taunt and now you have solid aggro on the mob, and you were able to spend your rage elsewhere.

In your ability rotation dropping abilities that cause little or no threat such as demo shout or shield block, will gain you net rage. Also if you are very low on rage, abilities can be prioritized by the amount of threat per rage they generate. The first ability you should stop using is HS or Maul as these abilities are efficient but by not using them you gain not only the rage from not using them but the rage from the white hit. For a warrior, Revenge and Shield Slam are the most efficient Threat Per Rage (TPR). For a druid Mangle and Swipe (if 2 or more targets are being attacked) are the most efficient TPR.

Another thing to mention here is that in some cases you will come across boss encounters that are low rage by the nature of the encounter. If this is the case you will want to always have a reserve of rage for abilities you have to use for the encounter, otherwise if you get an avoidance streak your hosed.

ST Issue #3: Damage Dealt

While currently warrior and druid threat is not 100% scalable, a considerable amount of our threat comes from the damage we deal. Quite simply make sure you do not skimp on hit/expertise/block; stacking AP, because of the current game mechanics, is a poor choice but agility not only gives dodge but also gives crit, making it an excellent stat especially for druids. Finally, do not allow your raids to stack your group badly, the more damage you do from buffs, the more threat you produce.

More later on the intricacies of paladin ST.

Threat 101: Improving Sustained Threat For Every Tank

What are we talking about with sustained threat? Sustained threat(ST) is your threat over a sustained portion of the fight; this excludes abilities with a cool down longer than your standard ability rotation.

How do you improve your sustained threat? Let’s look at what can impact the sustained threat for all tanks.

ST Issue #1: High Latency

High amounts of latency, on any fight where the mobs are in movement, can cause issues with your placement vs. the mob and you may lose TPS while you and the mob dance around each other.

Solution: If you have a high latency the obvious though not easy to implement solution is to get better internet, I however suggest a cheaper solution which can reduce your latency by up to half, FasterPing

ST Issue #2: Button Mashing

It used to be you could mash your buttons and it would cause no problems. Sometimes it would even increase the likely hood you would use abilities faster. The reason that was the case is because before patch 2.3 the GCD was completely timed on the server, so mashing couldn’t activate the GCD until the server told your computer you were casting.

Now the current system doesn’t work like that because the GCD is controlled partially on the client side (they had to do this for spell queuing) this means sometimes you will actually increase the time you are in GCD but because this increase tends to be not much longer than what the increase was with the old system, most don’t notice it.

Solution: Besides lowering your latency which will help if you’re a button masher, actually not mashing buttons and timing when you press your buttons can increase your TPS.

ST Issue #3: Being Too Cocky

Tanks often suffer (well their guilds suffer actually) bouts of egotism, the easiest way to assure you WILL NOT be the best tank, is to assume you are. Why? Often when you think your exceptional you tend to stop learning because you feel comfortable. What’s worse, is sometimes “experts” stop hearing what others say because they assume they know it all.

Solution: The best way I found to not only keep me humble, but to get me looking for ways to improve myself, is to find another tank you can have friendly competition with.

ST Issue #4: Laziness

Hey, we all get to the point that we’ve done it a million times and we just don’t care as much. It still effects our tanking and is very easy to see in the case of ST as it is often the worst in older content, where DPS can pull out insane numbers.

Solution: Again, competition and a friend who tanks as an equal, goes a long way to solving this problem.

ST Issue #5: Lack of Confidence

If you don’t know what to do in a situation if that situation is new it’s expected. Now if you continue to be slow to react it could be because of lack of confidence in your own ability.

Solution: Do not allow yourself or others to belittle your abilities if you make a mistake or have a problem go and fix it.

ST Issue #6: Class Knowledge

In general the most likely reason for poor sustained threat is the tank just not knowing his classes tanking mechanics and standard rotations.

Solution: Each class has a ton of research done to find out their best rotations for threat. Here’s a good starting place: Elitistjerks.com

More later on specific problems common to the 3 classes.

Better Chain Pulling

A question most raiders wonder at some point is, what allows some guild to complete raids faster than we do. Well when I switched to a new raiding guild I saw a strategy that highlighted that question and gave me a tool I hadn’t had before for raid leading.

What was this wondrous revelation? Pretty simple, my new guild had a hunter mark the next pull long before we were there to tank it. Now its not perfect, sometimes the hunter that usually marked would not mark things as well as I would like, and occasionally it would be horrible when another hunter would replace our usual one, and that’s always real slow. In general though this Method does offer a few benefits with very few downsides if set up correctly.

I would suggest if your not using a method like this you switch over to it asap, even on our worst nights the speed of our runs was noticeably good even in comparison to when I would chain pull assigning targets in my previous guild. And believe me, I can push a raid hard if I want to.

Another way to do this is to have your first target kill tank go off, and start marking after his target is dead. The reason a hunter is a better choice usually for marking, is with mouse over macros, a hunter can start marking while dps’ing. Also, if the hunter is marking, there is a good chance he knows whats getting MD’ed.

Threat 101: Healing

Healing at first might seem like it causes reactive threat because it effects all mobs, and some forms of healing, like earth shield, are very firmly in the camp of reactive healing as they requires a mob to trigger the proc.

Another confusing factor with healing aggro is that in general it seems that for healing threat to happen a person has to be hurt to be healed, this taken at face value makes it seem that it is reactive. In reality healing aggro does not require mob damage to heal, the best example is a warlocks lifetap. In fact most healing aggro is active because it is the choice of the healer when to heal.

The reason this distinction is important, is that healing aggro is often seen as necessary and uncontrollable from the healers end. This is in fact, far from the case. There are things that a healer can do to make healing aggro more manageable for your tank, also there are things a tank can do to increase a healers ability to help with healing aggro.

First, lets look at healing aggro to see what is happening. Healing aggro is, at base, half the value healed in aggro, but not to each target, it is divided equally to all targets that the healer has aggro on. An interesting side effect is the more targets the easier in theory it is to mitigate healer aggro, the problem is that most tanks that we see have problems with healing aggro have mostly active threat abilities which tend to limit the amount of targets they can effect.

One important thing to note is that while healing is not reactive to mobs damaging a party member, there is a relationship. This means a tank directly reduces the healing aggro possible by tanking less damage, also through stopping damage from occurring to other party members.

What does this all mean from a healers perspective? If you heal before a tank is able to effect all targets to be tanked then you will get aggro, therefor the longer you can put off healing at the beginning of a pull the less chance you have of getting aggro. While it may seem chancy to wait to do a big heal at the beginning of a pull it actually is much more effective aggro wise to time a big heal later in a pull than to keep the tank topped off.

Earth Shield, prayer of mending, lifebloom blooms also help because the healing threat is attributed to their target. Precast hots as long as they are on the tank before the pull also produce no aggro.

From the tanks perspective, abilities like thunderclap and demo shout/roar are a huge boon. This is because they not only cause some threat, though with demo it is very minor, they reduce the amount of damage incoming, which prolongs the time before a healer must heal you.

Another thing you can do to help your healer is to up your effective health, the easiest way of doing this is to gear for stamina when possible. what his does is give them more time before they have to heal you on a pull, giving you more time to hit every mob.

Reactive threat abilities use, such as shield spikes and thorns are also a help. When in situations with a large amount of adds these actually cause a huge amount of threat in comparison to healing aggro.

Mostly I have addressed warriors and druids. Paladins because because they use reactive threat mechanics often have little problem with healing aggro. But another factor not even most paladins are aware of is, that with paladins getting healed actually increases their threat.

The reason for this is from the mana gain from healing, if you gain mana or rage in a non normal way (normal being through doing/taking damage for rage and mana regen for mana) you gain a certain amount of threat.

With a paladin, for every 1000 healing a paladin gains 100 mana, this causes 50 threat divided among all adds. This not only negates at minimum 10% of the  healing aggro, but it also causes normal aggro increasing a paladins TPS in general.

In summary, to make your life easier in the case of healing agro; either be a paladin, or reduce healing needed as much as possible, while using reactive threat, and back loading healing on the pull.

My Pet Project: The early levels

Alright, so since pre-bc i have done silly things, like you know be feral (back when our primary threat ability was a 5 rage faerie fire).  My latest wonderful idea is with the hunter changes it may finally be possible to be viable to tank with pets, at least in heroics, maybe even further in wrath.

Now being my min-max self I want as much threat as I can get, unfortunately my current hunter is a Tauren (warstomp is PvP gold), so i decided to level an Orc hunter.

I have two accounts and decided leveling a healer with the hunter would be almost as fast as soloing so using my 3 new favorite programs/mods(all perfectly Blizzard legal by the way ;p ) Octopus, Autohotkey, and Twobox Toolkit. I started leveling my new hunter and a shaman at the same time and at a rather good rate using questhelper and being able to tank/dps/heal at once is really useful.

I started this just before Blizzard decides to unveil their recruit a friend 300% experience boost but since I have no money right now it wouldn’t have helped though it is annoying to know I could be doing this 3 times as fast.

I am not leveling them at very fast pace only because I figure I need to to have them at 70 when beta is over, which is awhile. So I’m building up rested, and doing a few hours every now, and then. So far they’re level 37, but I am enjoying a new style of tanking as I Level and I can not wait to push the boundaries again at 80.

Threat 101: Types of threat

This is the first in hopefully a long line of articles about threat. I thought I would write these entries to show some of the underlying complexity of threat and maybe give non tanks and some tanks a place to start on the long road of understanding.

I was talking to a in-game friend of mine about the problems he was having with the prot pallies they bring to their ZA runs. Now this guy is far from stupid, but he like most of the wow community doesn’t understand as much about tanking as he does about DPS or about healing.

This isn’t surprising however, DPS is rather simple to understand in concept if you hit harder or faster the health bar goes down faster. Healing is harder to play correctly requiring more reaction, but the concept is still simple, someone takes damage you heal it. Now tanking seems maybe on the surface just as simple, you do damage and cause threat right? Unfortunately damage for a tank rarely equals threat, in fact currently there is no way without mods to just look at a mob and get an idea of your threat other than you do or do not have agro.

Currently there are three completely different styles of threat management when it comes to tanking. Each type has benefits but each type also has limitations. These types of threat management are active, reactive, and proactive. Keep in mind this article does not address other issues such as rage or mana starvation.

More

Tank Attitude

Reading many different forums I find I come across post often relating to how tanks have a bad attitude, or how tanks need to get off their high horse. The immediate thought in my head is “they think that guys a dick? they should group with me,” and generally while I’m thinking this I end up with a smile.

I wasn’t always a dick and I’m not always one now. How did it get this way and why? Well some of you reading this are good tanks and I bet to some extent you understand and some of you think you know what good tanking is and don’t.

For those of you who do not understand what tanking is, tanking has multiple aspects, I would list them all, but frankly every single one of them is easy except for one. That aspect of tanking is the other players. I can set up a pull perfectly so that I would barely have to think to tank something and my healer could decide to heal the life tapping warlock as the pull is incoming, that pull went from easy to interesting with a button push. The problem is its not my choice to press that button.

When I started tanking it was in Sunken Temple about 3 months after WoW was released, I learned allot about tanking multiple mobs, and having weird group comps etc… But what I learned first and foremost, was that if the rest of the group does what I tell them too, we have few wipes on new content to me, and almost never do we wipe on old content as long as I don’t get lazy.

So I learned to be a control freak because it worked, I learned that if your a dick from the start and make sure the whole party understands that they do what you say when you say it, that as long as you run fast, wipe free runs they respect and even come to like you. Whats more once you establish you can be a dick, you end up not having to be one 90% of the time. Yes, some couldn’t handle this attitude but for me it was very rare to be honest I would say about 1 in 10 couldn’t handle grouping with me.

I know some tanks that are able to do fine not being a dick but it seems to work for me. and to those who do not understand why your tank is being a dick, you might think about what your doing to make yourself his opponent instead of his ally.

What’s this blog about?

This blog is a forum to allow me to chronicle my tanking, also a place that will allow me to express my opinionated rants.

As I start this blog, I am a WoW player in Optimus Prime, a Kel’Thuzad guild working on Kil’jaden in SWP. I currently have two Sunwell/BT geared tanks, Aablaine my feral druid, and Seryph my prot pally. I also, in the past, tanked on a warrior into tier 5 content and even tanked hakkar with my hunter pre bc.

And for the last bit about me before I start actually filling this blog up, recently I have gone through the worst experience a tank can go through in his WoW life. What is this horrific experience? Well I couldn’t  tank obviously. My Left shoulder for the past month has been unusable so being able to strafe and tank at full capacity has been beyond me. There is one benefit to this however, I got bored enouugh to start this blog.