Very Heroics: A Raider's Perspective at Cross Realm Heroics and Poor Tanking

[noogie]

The idea is genius and the implementation is very strong. I love the Dungeon Finder system and now looking for a group to get my Frost Emblems (or Triumph Emblems) means I don't have to hit trade channel. I like that very much. However, with any good idea you have some bad side effects. Some people will say those bad side effects are... me. I say those bad side effects are slow tanks.

I have four toons I play with, two are tanks, two are pure dps classes. My main raids IC and my alts are pretty much to supply my main with Saronite for profit but also a bit of fun, they have whatever they can get from badge vendors.

When I tank, I chain pull. Let me explain the mentality. If I pull 4 mobs, they die in 15 seconds with pure AoE. If I pull 8 mobs, they die in 15 seconds. If I pull 12 mobs, they die in 15 seconds. So if I can handle 12, why not just tank the whole hallway? So I do. I also expect everyone to keep up at the pace I'm going because for the most part, geared tanks have no problem soloing a group of elite mobs in a heroic, dps simply speeds up the process. So if they get there 15 seconds after I've started on the next group, that just gave me time to build threat.

Why do I go so fast? It's because I raid. Currently, I raid Icecrown and (like most of us here) am waiting for the hard modes to hit. That's my interest, that's where my interest lies. I'm forced into Heroics because i have to get my Frost Emblems (on my main) or they are just too profitable to leave behind (on alts). What I mean to say is, heroics are like a shadow of the content that I (and many raiders like me) have gone through during this Expansion. It's hard for me to want to symbol each mob in a heroic and talk strat when I know last week I did Heroic Anub after months of repair bills. How can I possibly take the Heroic seriously? How? I cannot. So I go as fast as possible and push push push. My character can handle it and can generally pull a lot of undergeared characters along with him, so that's how I run it.

Tanks who run this way get a blend of compliments or curse words. "SLOW DOWN, MANA!"or "Wait for your healer!" but for everyone one of those you get, you get another player asking for you to run more heroics or that it was the fastest they had been through dungeon x. Depends on the player really.

I really don't mind tanking heroics cause i go at my pace and regardless of the pace of my group, I get to do it the way I want. Hooray for me. However, when I am on my DPS classes, I want to bang my head against the wall. Not at bad DPS, oh no. Hell, I think I'm a pretty solid player but I've been at 80, competent, with quest blue and putting up 1400 dps. That... doesn't bother me. It's the tanks. The tanks that spurt out "I have been tanking for x years, i know what I'm doing" whenever they are given the slightest bit of direction. I'm sorry but tanking experience doesn't mean you've been doing it the right way all along, clearly, there are some barriers in your understanding of tanking.

It's the tanks that decide that they need to give the healer a chance to get full mana when the healer is at 80% after every pull. It's the tanks that don't realize a lot of healers have their own way of regenerating mana. It's the tanks that don't realize that with Triumph badge gear, they are quite capable of soloing a group of mobs by themselves if someone doesn't catch up. It's the tanks that think that think that consecration, dnd, swipe or thunderclap will hold aggro and they do not cycle through each mob in the group doing a special, gaining aggro and then moving to tabbing next mob.

Why do tanks feel that someone pulling aggro is the end of the world? God, I welcome it! If someone is pulling aggro off me then he's doing SOMETHING. He's DPS'ing hard, or he's outlined a mistake in my tanking. Awesome, straight awesome. This may sound odd but as a tank my job is also to watch for such things and Taunt it back to me. wow! Do I care that he pulled aggro? No... did it change anything? No... that mob is now glued on me cause I have devoted more yellow attacks to it. When I finish a heroic, I honestly wouldn't even remember someone pulling aggro simply because its taunted back so fast it's not even worth mentioning that it happened.

Your job as a tank is controlling chaos. You are micromanaging 4+ mobs in heroics, generating threat on all of them and... your job as a tank is... WORKING WITH THE DYNAMIC OF YOUR GROUP. If they pull aggro, you taunt it back, if they pull faster then you do, then you are too slow, if they are losing too much mana per trash back healing you, you blow cooldowns more regularly. That's YOUR job and let me be the first to say, as a tank, that's what you signed up for it and additionally, you are quite capable of doing it.

I'm sorry but if you complain about anything as a tank other then the group not going fast enough, it's your own fault. You control the group, you not only chose the 'Tank' role but you passively chose the 'Group Leader' role. You are in a heroic, act like it.

There's just so many gripes. It's so frustrating to hear tanks who cry about a rogue Tricks of the Trading to them and they refer to it as 'the Rogue wants to tank'. Christ, know the skillsets of your fellow party members! If I had a rogue that is willing to LOSE DPS by getting by not attacking the current group and ToTing the next group, that is one manly rogue right there and I'll love him (or preferably her) all night long.

Blood DK Tanks.. that Hysteria you have.. ITS NOT FOR YOU! It's for the best physical DPS in your party! Don't you dare waste 30s enrage buff on the TANK. Give it to your best physical DPS if you have one. You think that's wrong? Well man up and don't rely on an enrage buff to control your aggro.

Warrior tanks... you are the special bag of tricks tank. You have these cool skills called Spell Reflect, Disarm, Vigilance, Intervene, Heroic Throw (it can silence!), Cleave. Let's see you use them every time it's applicable. Heroic throw is not to PULL, it's to silence a caster who has ran away and you want them back into melee range. Spell Reflect is what you use on the focused mob to do 2 things a) increase your threat b) reduce your required healing. Disarm, works on bosses sometimes! It'll help you when you've got that nasty huge Skeleton (IC comes to mind) bearing down on you and you want to take next to no damage. Vigilance, it does three things: Reduces damage taken by 3%, allows you to instantly refresh your taunt when said player gets hit (awesome) and transfers threat from said player to you. A warrior tank can do just about anything in the realm of heroics, so why do I see soooo many bad ones?!?

Feral Druid Tanks... you are every bit as awesome as the other tanks, there's no reason to complain about your situation and christ, use your barkskin more often, it helps on large trash pulls. Fearie Fire is not a method of pulling, you don't really "PULL" mobs to you at this point, you charge the hell in and go nuts. You realize you can also innervate your casters as you run on to the next trash pulls so they don't have to stop to get mana right? Just saying...

Prot Paladins... YOUR CONSECRATE IS NOT ENOUGH!!! 2 out of the 5 of your abilities in your aggro "rotation" does AoE damage. You have passive life saver mechanics like Ardent Defender which means even if you are incompetent, you can't fuck that up. All of this doesn't mean you get to pick a target and stick with him. For the love of god, tab target and generate aggro on each mob that is on you rather then just attacking one. Christ! I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

Tanks, get over your own ego and I'll get over mine! If someone came in and said 'you are tanking wrong, this skill is a waste and that skill isn't' I wouldn't immediately dispute their opinion because they disputed my knowledge base. You'd have to be an utter moron to think that you know everything to know about your class. I mean seriously, you come to me and say 'Cleave is stupid in a heroic' and I'll think your wrong initially but I promise I'll quickly explore the possibility of WHY you are an idiot by applying your idea to the environment at hand. Perhaps you were right! OMG! Perhaps i wasn't the greatest tank in the world! Shit... I can tell you I still learn things about heroics every day. Did you know in Draktheron Keep if you get initial aggron the Novos fight and then pull all the raptors in King Dreads pen into the Novos room it will reset? Probably not! So now you know you can just pull the bat rider and his bats in to aoe down while you wait for that slow ass event to finish. See? WE'RE LEARNING HERE! If I can do it now, and I've been in Wotlk tanking heroics since day 2 as the first Warrior on my realm to hit 80, then you can do it seeing as though you (hopefully) are clearly fresh to level 80, ya know, with those 35k hp that you guys get passively.

Yes... opinionated. yes... I'm annoyed. Yes... my rant has turned into a mini guide about tanking. Yes... I'm now going to go find a 5 man and yell at my tank.

[noogie]

wall of text certainly crits for over 9,000

[Nabdyret]

I scrolled and gave up..

[UnemMun]

In this thread, a man believes he can cure stupid.

[Ninjabear]

cool story bro?

[MushroomBomb]

I think you might be overestimating many tanks. Don't get me wrong, my Druid is decently-ish geared and I probably could go faster or pull more mobs than I usually do. But there's a reason I don't.

I know that I'm not good enough to hold aggro on so many mobs at the same time without half of them running wild, yet. I know that my gear isn't really good enough to solo 5 mobs, yet. And last but not least, I don't feel even remotely comfortable enough to do it, yet.

So you see, it's not just because we don't think about it. Sometimes, we just don't want to do it, or just don't feel like it's something we can do. And frankly speaking, you'll just have to deal with that.

[Cearat]

wall of text certainly crits for over 9,000

Damn, i was too slow..

[Annaconda]

The idea is genius and the implementation is very strong. I love the Dungeon Finder system and now looking for a group to get my Frost Emblems (or Triumph Emblems) means I don't have to hit trade channel. I like that very much.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZ

I tried googling a summary of this and failed :@

[Ikkatsu]

I approve of this thread.

And to everyone complaining about the length...

Learn to fucking read a book once in a while, christ.

[ItachiZaku]

wall of text certainly crits for over 9,000

I was with a guildie healer and the tank was very go go go in CoS (with all those zombies, sometimes hard to rez eh) and the tank thought he was johnny mc hotsauce and went storming down the last hallway pulling way too many, missed 2 elites so healer was dazed walking soooo tank dies. I shift to bear and tank the 2 elites on the healer and then the big mass that was coming. Due to the nature of the instance, and my not being BR talented (so i told him for being a prick the whole time, like going straight to the village without helping with crates or anything and then complained about it being slow), we told him to run back. Was entertaining cuz he waited for a long time to release and we booted him before engaging Mal'Ganis.

I love guidlies.

[underdogba]

Why do tanks feel that someone pulling aggro is the end of the world? God, I welcome it! If someone is pulling aggro off me then he's doing SOMETHING. He's DPS'ing hard, or he's outlined a mistake in my tanking. Awesome, straight awesome. This may sound odd but as a tank my job is also to watch for such things and Taunt it back to me. wow! Do I care that he pulled aggro? No... did it change anything? No... that mob is now glued on me cause I have devoted more yellow attacks to it. When I finish a heroic, I honestly wouldn't even remember someone pulling aggro simply because its taunted back so fast it's not even worth mentioning that it happened.

I think the attitude you suggest about dealing with this situation is healthy, but your analysis of why people pull aggro is off the mark. The usual aggro-pulling problems I see involve dps disrupting the first few seconds of the pull. I'd imagine these are the same players who dig into Anub's adds before they're on ice. Another issue I see if players arbitarily picking a random mob in a pack for direct nuking.

The first scenario I bring up there is more or less a nightmare for DK tanks, especially if your tank spec is blood (which is common among raiding DK's running heroics). Achieving your max aoe tps requires using a number of abilities in the correct order, and having that interrupted beacuse you have to deal with re-collecting the mobs just slows down the group, because you may end up blowing bloodboils without diseases just to grab things back, or blowing runes on moves against individual targets that should have just received diseases in the first place using pestilence.

[uga-buga]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7w64fbqYQY

seriusly, im not even joking here....

[Azyoulike]

It's the tanks that decide that they need to give the healer a chance to get full mana when the healer is at 80% after every pull. It's the tanks that don't realize a lot of healers have their own way of regenerating mana.

Sure, I'm always having to tell tanks to ignore my priest's mana-bar, because most heroic bosses I'm quite happy to engage at 2k mana and rely on fiend+HoH to put me at max within a few seconds. However I find the 'MUST RUN FASTER' mentality can be taken too far.

I had a massively overconfident tank pull all 3 groups before Eadric in Heroic ToC when I was healing on my druid the day I hit 80. It was horrible, and ofc much slower than taking each group singly because of the healing and the unmanaged MCs.

I also had a similar experience to ItachiZaku, with tanks failing to spot when I have aggro on gauntlets in CoS and PoS. I get dazed, they get out of range, die, and then blame me.

Thus I'd prefer tanks didn't get bullied into running too quick, because many simply aren't skilled enough to know the difference between the packs they can and should chain pull, and the packs they shouldn't. Or to be able to hold aggro on the groups that they can.

[shishka]

I like this post, gives hope that not everyone is a complete moron.

As for setting your own pace, as long as you wont wipe the group and yell at healer (OMG NO HEALZ!) its totally fine with me.

[markinthedark]

....WORKING WITH THE DYNAMIC OF YOUR GROUP.

While I agree with most of this rant, I felt the need to point out that this also means going slower if the group needs you to.

[Blackhide]

Great post.

Highlights many frustrations I have myself when tanking randoms. Also the main reason I dont bother unless I can bring one or two guildies along. Hardly ever bother with my DPS alts, unless somone from guild goes tank.

[Unholyground]

I approve of this thread.

And to everyone complaining about the length...

Learn to fucking read a book once in a while, christ.

I am writing 3 books you better read every damn of of them lol.

[Seragan]

See, one of the point of the dungeon systems that you seem to have missed is that - heroics are for gearing up. While yes, the daily frost emblem is a plus - you have to realise this isn't the reason heroics exist. Most Heroic groups are made up of either a geared tank and a geared healer or dps. Usually 2-3 people in your group will be undergeared and most of the time the undergeared person is the tank. So, deal with it. If you don't like it, no one is forcing you to step out of Icecrown. Just don't whinge that something that is made specifically to gear up may be slow. If you don't want it to be slow - run the daily with people from your own guild - you still get the badges, just not the damage/health/healing buff.

[noogie]

See, one of the point of the dungeon systems that you seem to have missed is that - heroics are for gearing up. While yes, the daily frost emblem is a plus - you have to realise this isn't the reason heroics exist. Most Heroic groups are made up of either a geared tank and a geared healer or dps. Usually 2-3 people in your group will be undergeared and most of the time the undergeared person is the tank

I never had any gripes about anyone being under geared. I also never implied that under geared tanks couldn't chain pull effectively. Undergeared does not make a player incompetent. What I'm complaining about is incompetent people. Most tanks in heroic have over 34k unbuffed (most that I've seen) which is far more then they NEED to have to be tanking a heroic. That means they went from undergeared 25k tanking to 34k tanking, or perhaps a little less of a margin. In that amount of time they still have not yet learned taunting and their role.

If heroics are for gearing up, that remains true for raiders. We are there for Frost Emblems just like under geared players are there for Triumph Emblems. The heroics exist similarly for both types of players. So neither one is in the "right" on this particular issue. Hell, i'm merely venting. =)

[Seragan]

Sorry, my point was a little out of the way after reading your response. When I was gearing up I was learning how to tank. Pulls were slow, etc.

The thing these days though is, gear is sooooooooo easy to get. I reckon after running maybe 20 heroics you would be at a pretty good gear level to get ~34k UB Health. Back in the day when I first started tanking, after 20 heroics I'd be lucky to move my 22k to 24k.

See, just because people have the gear does not mean the have developed the skills. I didn't consider myself an above average tank until about ~5 months ago and I have been tanking since the release of wrath. This is after many heroics, many raids, etc. In context, what I am trying to say is - you can give an apprentice his tools, but he won't be comfortable using them for a while - same deal.

Also, on the venting - I know where your coming from though :P. I just like to defend newbies, cause I remember back in the day when I was that dumb player that was making the group fall behind, I had people help me out and let me be carried through heroics so I could learn my class and my role. On saying this though, if someone is making the group lag behind AND they are making out like they are god's gift - bugger em, they can go jump off a cliff.