Is tanking hard? Seriously... I'm not trolling.

[taybox]

I plan on playing a druid in cata as a main. I kind of want to get into tanking.

Is it hard though? Like end game pve tanking.

for example, how much harder is it to tank lich king or ruby sanctum than to dps or heal those kind of fights.

which is the hardest part of pve? tank, heal, or dps?

i know some will say none, but... im just asking. thanks

[Xpree]

on havy mecanics fights like lich tanking is hard as healing, but on a stand fight like ruby, it's not, you have to keep treat high enoch all times, but isen't hard, but in a fight like lich king is hard because you have move at all times, while dps don't stop damaging, mean while you still have to move and get some adds on it too, so it's dificult job to do it into perfection, but if you like it you can do it.

[Vasz]

The hardest part of bear tanking IMO is threat. Bears tend to lack burst, so the initial snap can be hard. Bears are 100% gear orientated ATM, even more than Warriros.

[Freytor]

As Vasz said, Initial threat can be difficult. I find that once you have some good aggro, it's not that bad. As for healers and tanks universally, movement in fights makes them more difficult.

[Wooticus]

As someone with near equal experience in melee DPS and tanking, I'd say tanking is by far easier. Yes, you do have to maintain threat, but you can do that easily with a sloppy rotation. Heck, with Tricks of the Trade and Misdirection, it makes that trivial.

Survival isn't really all that hard either. You get Soul Reaper, an incoming Frost Breath, you use a cooldown. On damage intensive fights like Festergut this can get a bit tricky, but doesn't take much practice.

The only 'hard' part about tanking is picking things up, and in raids normally you have a Hunter doing that for you anyway. So overall, in a raiding environment, I'd say tanking is the easiest of the four roles. Instances actually require more effort than raiding, simply due to the amount of trash to pick up.

[taybox]

on havy mecanics fights like lich tanking is hard as healing, but on a stand fight like ruby, it's not, you have to keep treat high enoch all times, but isen't hard, but in a fight like lich king is hard because you have move at all times, while dps don't stop damaging, mean while you still have to move and get some adds on it too, so it's dificult job to do it into perfection, but if you like it you can do it.

Thanks guys for the quick replies. I was just nervous about tanking in a raid. i think i will focus 10 man instead of 25. 10 man would be easier right? since its same lockout, that makes me happy

[Cortano]

Raid "main-tanking" these days is generally VERY easy once you get beyond very basic "stand in the correct spot" and "taunt when the add-on tells you to taunt" type of stuff. It varies a lot by fight.

Clearing trash takes more skill; you want to move fast enough so that things get cleared in decent order and your raiders don't get bored, but not so quick that you cause a danger to the raid. Lot of DPS uses trash to show off, and holding aggro on packs can be challenging.

Tanking heroics is generally the hardest job (at least until you over-gear it). Generally, the tank is the one marking targets and crowd control, and much like clearing trash on raids, needs to set a good tempo for clearing an instance. You need to know how to pull, which mobs to kill first, what type of control to use.

The only issue with tanking skill is that if you get it wrong, the raid/group usually wipes. With healers or DPS: one being AFK, stupid, or totally unskilled is something the rest of the group can compensate for.

As a raid tank you need to know what you are doing, but actually doing it is easy. Just make sure to read the guides, watch the movies, and have the appropriate add-ons. All the work is done BEFORE the fight, you need to walk in prepared.

[Hobson]

I plan on playing a druid in cata as a main. I kind of want to get into tanking.

Is it hard though? Like end game pve tanking.

for example, how much harder is it to tank lich king or ruby sanctum than to dps or heal those kind of fights.

which is the hardest part of pve? tank, heal, or dps?

i know some will say none, but... im just asking. thanks

Honestly, i wouldn't say tanking is much harder than dps (certain fights excluded) but the main difference is that if you fail, more often than not, the raid fails.
Back in vanilla tanking was much harder both from a threat standpoint but also due to boss mechanics, non tauntable etc. and you could be 99% sure that an endgame tank was one of the best players in the guild.
Tanking has gotten more accessible, like raiding in general but you still have that aspect of one mistake possibly wiping the entire raid. there are plenty of fights where this is true for dps or healers as well as plenty of fights where tanking really is nothing more than knowing your class/having enough gear.

it's peraps not the simple answer you're looking for but that, at least from my perspective, is why it's important to have really copetent players as tanks.

[beho]

I think the big change you have to go through when you go from DPS to tanking is the amount of situational awareness you need to have. Healing and DPS allows you to tunnel vision a bit more than tanking, you just have to keep an eye on more things as a tank on average.

[emni]

I think the big change you have to go through when you go from DPS to tanking is the amount of situational awareness you need to have. Healing and DPS allows you to tunnel vision a bit more than tanking, you just have to keep an eye on more things as a tank on average.

I was about to say exactly this. Tanking isn't hard, it just requires a different kind of focus and attention. You can't just stand there and nuke a boss in many cases. Positioning is also much more crucial than it is for others. And since this is a Druid thread, pulling a group of casters when you have nowhere to LoS can be a challenge.

[Deleted]

The hardest part of bear tanking IMO is threat. Bears tend to lack burst, so the initial snap can be hard. Bears are 100% gear orientated ATM, even more than Warriros.

^^This is very true.

...I'd say tanking is by far easier

You're mad!

What other PvE role do you

* Not only have to have perfect awareness of all the buffs, casts and procs available on you AND your target? But also,
* Have to have a strong understanding of key class pulling, threat and recovery spells in your arsenal, especially taunting between tanks?
* Have to be aware of not only every mechanic in every fight as well as the mechanics of specific kinds of monsters in order to determine whether to spell reflect, apply or not apply specific debuffs, or ask for the application of CC, what CC to use and when it needs to break?
* Have to have perfect awareness of not only new adds but also their relative distance and the timing of when and how to pick up the adds without causing a raid wipe?
* Have to have the self-awareness and confidence regarding your class to know when you already have far too much on your plate and dynamically assign tanking responsibilities to others? As MT, even if other tanks know what they are meant to be doing it, you still have to time transfers back and forth to perfection.
* Have to work your cooldowns in synergy with your healers to ensure that the damage you are taking is not creating a huge strain on their ability to keep you up but also whether its sapping other non-tank healers who feel forced to help and therefore risk causing others to die. Sometimes this is an acceptable loss, other times it is not - you have to decide dynamically?
* Have to know not only bog standard perfect-fight threat rotations but also how to intertwine survival cooldowns and threat when a boss becomes most dangerous (e.g. phase transitions and enrages when boss is almost gone)?
* Have to know how to kite, using LoS (line of sight) for pulls and raid damage avoidance, positioning (against cones, cleaves)?
* Have to have a high raid awareness knowing where all your healers are as the priority group to keep damage away from at almost all cost?
* Have to have a high raid awareness knowing where all your silly dps are, including ranged, to ensure that if someone unexpectedly pulls you're there ASAP to pick up?
* Have to have a great raid awareness (+confidence+control) to know that you are tactically in charge of the raid, not the other way around, and that if e.g. the raid gets too close to even one mob who can Fear or cause loss of control of the raid, and wipes, you will most likely be blamed?
* Have to understand many key interacting statistics in gearing your tanking spec and how they impact your gameplay, threat and survival: misses, dodge, parry, mitigation, block, armor, effective health, diminishing returns, what does strength give you, what does agility give you, crit etc?
* Have to understand nature, abilities, gearing and experience of the group for the current instance you are tanking for so you can decide whether to aoe or single target tank? Whether to give mana breaks or chain pull with no downtime?
* Have to be able to keep an eye on your threat numbers at all times to know if you are losing the threat lead to dps or other tanks and whether to dish out warnings all the while doing your normal tanking activities?

I mean I could go on, but I think you get my point...If you think none of the above applies, then either you do not know the first thing about tanking or you're a great tank and do it ALL intuitively. By the way, Cata will make all of this even more relevant.

As far as anything in WoW is "not hard", in relative terms tanking is definitely the hardest due to the amount of control, adaptability and involvement required to be good at your job. This is one of the reasons even healers eventually try their hand at tanking because both dps and healing eventually lack a meaningful challenge most of the time. Of course, whether they become good at it is another matter entirely since as shown above it requires both a large amount of awareness, confidence and ultimately experience.

Separately, I believe tanking is the most fulfilling of all the roles (and by the way my main is a healer - I only tank for fun ). That is, you could do it for years and never even consider not doing it. Whereas in WoW, the other roles often create serious boredom.

Also, if you measure difficulty by "rotation" then the only hard spec in the game is the feral cat and possibly enhancement shaman. I hope this is not what you meant and was just a throw-away comment.

[Mammoth]

Tanking is different from DPS because you have to watch the situation rather than your own rotation. Don't think its easy just because you don't have to stick a hard rotation to keep threat. The difference between a good tank and a great tank will be one that can react in the right way when things go wrong.

The hardest bit of being a tank is not failing. If you fail at another job, people can pick up your slack. As a tank when you fail, the raid dies and everyone knows it was you. (You also can't go AFK on trash, because you need to tank it).

[taybox]

^^This is very true.



You're mad!

What other PvE role do you

* Not only have to have perfect awareness of all the buffs, casts and procs available on you AND your target? But also,
* Have to have a strong understanding of key class pulling, threat and recovery spells in your arsenal, especially taunting between tanks?
* Have to be aware of not only every mechanic in every fight as well as the mechanics of specific kinds of monsters in order to determine whether to spell reflect, apply or not apply specific debuffs, or ask for the application of CC, what CC to use and when it needs to break?
* Have to have perfect awareness of not only new adds but also their relative distance and the timing of when and how to pick up the adds without causing a raid wipe?
* Have to have the self-awareness and confidence regarding your class to know when you already have far too much on your plate and dynamically assign tanking responsibilities to others? As MT, even if other tanks know what they are meant to be doing it, you still have to time transfers back and forth to perfection.
* Have to work your cooldowns in synergy with your healers to ensure that the damage you are taking is not creating a huge strain on their ability to keep you up but also whether its sapping other non-tank healers who feel forced to help and therefore risk causing others to die. Sometimes this is an acceptable loss, other times it is not - you have to decide dynamically?
* Have to know not only bog standard perfect-fight threat rotations but also how to intertwine survival cooldowns and threat when a boss becomes most dangerous (e.g. phase transitions and enrages when boss is almost gone)?
* Have to know how to kite, using LoS (line of sight) for pulls and raid damage avoidance, positioning (against cones, cleaves)?
* Have to have a high raid awareness knowing where all your healers are as the priority group to keep damage away from at almost all cost?
* Have to have a high raid awareness knowing where all your silly dps are, including ranged, to ensure that if someone unexpectedly pulls you're there ASAP to pick up?
* Have to have a great raid awareness (+confidence+control) to know that you are tactically in charge of the raid, not the other way around, and that if e.g. the raid gets too close to even one mob who can Fear or cause loss of control of the raid, and wipes, you will most likely be blamed?
* Have to understand many key interacting statistics in gearing your tanking spec and how they impact your gameplay, threat and survival: misses, dodge, parry, mitigation, block, armor, effective health, diminishing returns, what does strength give you, what does agility give you, crit etc?
* Have to understand nature, abilities, gearing and experience of the group for the current instance you are tanking for so you can decide whether to aoe or single target tank? Whether to give mana breaks or chain pull with no downtime?
* Be able to keep an eye on your threat numbers at all times to know if you are losing the threat lead to dps or other tanks and whether to dish out warnings all the while doing your normal tanking activities?

I mean I could go on, but I think you get my point...If you think none of the above applies, then either you do not know the first thing about tanking or you're a great tank and do it ALL intuitively. By the way, Cata will make all of this even more relevant.

As far as anything in WoW is "not hard", in relative terms tanking is definitely the hardest due to the amount of control, adaptability and involvement required to be good at your job. This is one of the reasons even healers eventually try their hand at tanking because both dps and healing eventually lack a meaningful challenge most of the time. Of course, whether they becomes good at it is another matter entirely since as shown above it requires both a large amount of awareness, confidence and ultimately experience.

Also, if you measure difficulty by "rotation" then the only hard spec in the game is the feral cat and possibly shadow priest played well. I hope this is not what you meant and was just a throw-away comment.

can you list me a few of the "HARDER" fights to tank in ICC?

[killzwitch]

As a Tank you do your Job if the Boss/mob attacks you & you minimise incoming damage.
As a Healer you do your Job if everyone is alive at the end of the fight.
As a DPS, well it's not as binary as the other two, of course you move from the graphics on the floor and add in as much effort as you are willing.

All in all I find tanking to be quite stressful, not only do DPS struggle to justify themselves by nuking the crap out of the boss 0.5seconds before you pull but also they often don't help to minimise their own incoming damage, forcing the healer to take his eyes off you.

[Tuvok]

I don't find it difficult at all as a protection warrior, probably because I've been doing it for almost a year now. Come to think of it it was only hard when I was learning, just as with everything, once you learn the ropes it's easy. I don't see how playing any class could be considered hard, that's not where the challenge of the game comes from, the challenge comes from fresh encounters, and the well-oiled performance of 10-25 people, where individual mistakes are commonplace and cause wipes since there are so many people playing that encounter in the raid.

The difference in rotations and prio systems for dps/tanking are negligable in terms of difficulty, anyone who says otherwise to try and make it seem like they play a hard class and are for some reason better than those who don't, are being idiots or actually so bad at the game they still find their main class hard.

[Megatwan]

no, its easy like everything else in this game.

although... if youre a mouf breather, clicker, or think something in this game is actually hard, then yes it can be tricky ...i guess ...you corky bastard

id say healing the raid with a class subpar for it (pally), maxamizing a dps rotation, being top 3 on churts or making up for a bad player (ie a prot pally spamming dispells cause healers are poop or making up for a fail tank with a slick taunt bubble/cancel macro to wipe stacks) are the hardest things to do. everything is cake. but ya if you talking tanking with a bear, no its easy cause your either keeping your head above water or failing.

[Tuvok]

Pushing a class to it's limits however, squeezing the extra few % of dps your class/gear set is capable of is down to dedication, practice and research - since any monkey can learn a simple unchanging series of buttons to press, and given time can easily do it well. People are bad because they just don't care as much as others, they don't put in the research, don't care if they are dead for 75% of the fight as long as they still get to roll on loot, and don't care what their dps is.

[Warod]

The hardest part of tanking - threat - is supposedly making a come back in Cataclysm. In Wrath i could tank with one hand and do.... stuff with the other. Hopefully that'll change.

[MushroomBomb]

I'll be honest - when I first got into tanking with my Druid I wasn't very impressed. I'd always heard it was so hard compared to DPSing (which was primarily what I had done before), but whether it was just great skill or coming from having seen the fights before from a DPS perspective I still thought it was about the same difficulty as DPSing.

[NPEC]

Tanking is not harder or easier than the other roles. that being said, i do consider that learning to tank is way harder than learn to dps and a bit harder than learning to heal. I have been tanking with a prot warrior and healing with a dpriest since vanilla and also played some dps, afther you learn how to play the roll they are all easy to do. the only thing that makes any roll more dificult than the other is the specific situation.
In conclusion exept on learning you roll, were tanking is the harder to learn, playing is by deadfull easy in any roll.

ps: i apolajice for bad gramar