Tank specific addons for Legion

[Jingbaby]

Hi all,

I will be switching from Range DD to Tank come Legion and I want to be sure to be prepared (pun intended ) regarding addons as well. So I just want to ask which specific addons may be useful in order to fulfil the role.

My list of basic addons so fare which I will continue to use as they are really useful:

- Weakauras
- BigWigs
- Tidyplates Threadplates
- Skada (show Deaths, view logs, etc)

Which additional addons would you recommend?

[Supakaiser]

Hi all,

I will be switching from Range DD to Tank come Legion and I want to be sure to be prepared (pun intended ) regarding addons as well. So I just want to ask which specific addons may be useful in order to fulfil the role.

My list of basic addons so fare which I will continue to use as they are really useful:

- Weakauras
- BigWigs
- Tidyplates Threadplates
- Skada (show Deaths, view logs, etc)

Which additional addons would you recommend?

I think that about covers it, especially with Weakauras. If you want to mix things up a bit you could switch from Tidyplates to KUI Nameplates which are a bit nicer imo and have a threat option but it's all personal preference.

[Deleted]

That's a decent foundation but you missed a few in my opinion. If you want to be the best tank you can be this will be going beyond your role and also watching what the raid is doing. Especially since tanking has now been so dumbed down in my opinion, you have a lot more mental RAM to work with.

Here is my Blood DK's UI from just before the legion prepatch: http://rps-guild.eu/uploads/default/...bfe131e928.jpg

There were actually some issues with the UI I hadnt managed to fix yet for this picture due to a harddrive reset messing up somethings (nameplates in the picture are not configured mainly). Also I heavily make use of the addon TellMeWhen, I find weakauras is way overrated for majority of UI tracking. It's only superior to TMW for graphical/heavy custom lua coded strings in my experience. In case anyone is curious, my action bars are fully hidden and all icons/procs/debuffs are replaced with a combination of weakauras and tellmewhen instead.

1) A solid addition would also be a raid frame addon I currently use Grid2 (Grid2 and Grid are totally seperate addons!) where you can track all the debuffs/buffs from the raid encounters which are applied to your teammates. If you want to go above and beyond, I found it extremely useful to also track defensive cooldowns and externals directly on the unit frames. This is very helpful for checking if your teammates are being lazy and not popping defensives when they are low. I'm not sure how seriously you wish to raid, but there have been many occasions in mythic raiding where I have saved a player by being aware he had no more defensive cooldowns to use, and called for a healer to place an external on him. This is usually especially true for monitoring your co-tank since his survivability will often directly impact your own.


2) You also strongly benefit by tracking the various major cd's for the raid, though the extent of which you track will depend on how much you want to try and carry, these cd's include; single target mitigation (pain suppression/hand of sacrifice/iron bark etc); hybrid cd's like smoke bomb/rallying cry/vampiric embrace (not sure how many remain since prepatch); healer throughput cd's such as tranquility/healing tide totem/ascendance etc; and utility cd's such as stampeding roar/life grip/gorefiend grasp/wind rush totem (new in legion for shaman). There are many more you can track such as interrupts/stuns/defensives/offensives.

Tracking everything might sound like you'd be left with no screen real estate for your own UI, which is why how you organise it is so important. If you check my UI link, you will see I track the majority of things I just listed towards the right of my screen. Raid cooldown tracking is done by the addon Exorsus Raid Tools, which is a fantastic addon and offers much more than just this feature. Highly recommended addon for raiding

3) You didnt mention any unit frame addons, I am using Shadowed Unit Frames for my UI. You can see my frames are to the left of the picture, my player frame is stacked on top of my target frame, and the target of target frame is at the bottom. The Boss unit frames are directly to the left of my player/target frames, the the targets of each boss are shown also to the left of that.

It is important to centralize your unitframes/ui in general due to it being more directly where you are focusing your vision majority of the time (your character generally). It is also important to have good boss unit frame configuration so that you can track who they are targeting when you have a million adds up and you have assignments concerning them, as well as being able to see their buffs/debuffs and casts.

4) It's common practice in high end raiding for leaders to write assignments on your screen using addons like Exorsus Raid Tools or Angry Assignments. Having both addons is redundant in terms of function, but depending between pugs having both will make sure you are fully prepared :P.

That more or less covers the addons I would additionally recommend at a basic level. Ill try and answer any questions if you do have any.