Thanks!

Warrzone

Warrzone

Member
I tried my hand at tanking for the first time tonight, and several of you were kind (read: patient) enough to come along and help me get my feet wet. You can rest assured that I have no intention to tank raids....ever... but doing more insta-queue heroics will be nice. Just wanted to say thanks!
 
haha, have fun with tanking! It's tough at first.. especially when you've been DPSing for a long time. But once you learn what to watch out for it becomes a lot easier! :)
 
Hey man its not a problem. If I'm ever on you can tank for me, i get sick of it sometimes so I'd love a break!!! =P lol
 
tanking's fun once you get the hang of it :) you were actually pretty good if that was your first time! you paid attention to who all had aggro and got the mob on you if they weren't. Just have to learn the fights and you'll be set!
 
I wouldn't give up on it so easily Warr. When I first started tanking, we were all back in BC. I delayed tanking heroics for WEEKS because I was so worried about not being a bad tank. I spent a lot longer on normal instances than I really should have, and would only run my first heroics with the guild, that's how nervous I was :P

I researched all the numbers I needed to have, and made sure I surpassed them all before I would even get near a heroic. But once I finally ran in to my first pack of heroic mobs, I remember thinking "hey, that wasn't so bad!" With each new heroic, I gained confidence until I had a list of random people from the server asking for me to join their heroic groups when I logged on. It was great.

Unfortunately, I never did get to a raid tanking level before Wrath came out. This time around, I wasn't afraid of heroics, but I did go through the same thing in raids, even worse this time. I felt like I had 9 or 24 other people depending on me. I ran numbers even harder, got my stats about 10% above where they needed to be, and finally stepped in to my first raid.

I was terrible.

I ruined the whole run (luckily it wasn't a guild run).

But after running a few of the lower level raids with the guild, learning fights, and improving my gear, I became a lot more confident.

If you really enjoy tanking, just stick with it, and I'm sure you'll be a very capable raid tank someday!
 
lol wow flame I didn't know you went through so much...stress!! Haha I didn't care what people thought in the heroics because from a healers standpoint I knew what they could handle so i was in there running heroics with like 25k hp and was fine :P Guess that's what you get for rolling dps first ;)
 
Warrzone said:
I tried my hand at tanking for the first time tonight, and several of you were kind (read: patient) enough to come along and help me get my feet wet. You can rest assured that I have no intention to tank raids....ever... but doing more insta-queue heroics will be nice. Just wanted to say thanks!
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pfft, we made him do it....

and he did great! keep getting gear, you may occasionally be called upon in a raid, never know!
 
Haha flame. I love the fact that everyone depends on me. Lol a ton of "power" is the click of my keyboard. Haha

I do got to agree with you on that one flame. I was nervous tanking raid bosses. Especially when it's ICC 10 and your on Sind and have never faught her. I think I did fine my I was so nervous that I was going to skrew up. Lol but we downed her and now on LK tonight. Talk about my nerves going now. Haha.
 
Sheckle said:
lol wow flame I didn't know you went through so much...stress!! Haha I didn't care what people thought in the heroics because from a healers standpoint I knew what they could handle so i was in there running heroics with like 25k hp and was fine :P Guess that's what you get for rolling dps first ;)
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lol - I don't go through all that anymore. Once I learned my class pretty well, I felt like I could take on any fight - although it may take a fight or two to learn new bosses.
 
War, it was good for me to go because it allowed me to work on my pally healing....which was stressful for me...thx for your patience w/ me and i thought you did great!
 
It really was fun to run with guildies the first time, and I'm glad it ended up working out OK for everyone--including your healing! I tried a few more heroics after that, one with Kirastraza healing, one with pug heals, and so far no outright catastrophies.

Guess I'll get to spend some more time on Tankspot watching video...
 
Another good source of raid info is wowwiki.com . I've gotten alot of information there and when I need it on the fly it's good to have open in the web browser. Tank spot is great to watch but some stuff I remember better by reading. This site will have all the strategies written for bosses, abilities, who needs to do what and what ability does what. Very helpful as well as the tank spot videos.
 
Sheeesh... If I could only get my memory of reading such to work.

Stickying this post would be a good idea until expansion.
 
There is lots of information on DK tank specs out there, and I borrowed one considered to be "the best." It was suggested that I needed to change it badly, because although it is arguably the best DK tank spec for main tanking raids, it is not ideal for 5-man heroics (I assume that's what he meant).

So, since humility comes easily to a noob tank, I promptly went looking for information on DK specs to match the content I intend to tank. It is essentially nonexistent. The most consistent opinion out there is that it really doesn't matter in 5-mans. I thought that sounded just great, because I hated to give up my pvp spec to tank heroics. Thus, an unholy abomination of a pseudo pvp-tankish build was born. Hehe, spec matters. It was squishy. Drawing Pit of Saron in the random heroic queue may not be the best measure of squishy, but it happens, and it was ugly.

Frost builds seem like they would be able to mitigate the most damage, thus helping out the healers, and it looks like they would have the best insta-aggro on multi-target mobs, but I've never played frost. Learn to play frost? Blood was great for one mob, but I had difficulty keeping all the mobs on me without actually having to tank. Learn to tank--that's an option. Unholy was slow to generate threat, and I wasn't very survivable. Although I can pvp pretty well with that build, it didn't feel very tank-like.

If I'm starting to sound confused, that about sums it up. Opinions?


*As a side note, there was a pug (rogue?) in our group eventually that had aggro most of the night (I was dps-ing). Auggy was tanking by then, mostly because I begged him to lol, but I kept having to steal aggro from the rogue, trying to keep him alive, since we didn't have a dedicated tank. In hindsight, next time that happens I'm letting the aggro-stealing uber-squishy dps die so we don't have to chase mobs all over tarnation (wherever that is).
 
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Blood tanks are my favorite to heal. Were you getting told a blood MT build wasn't the best for AOE threat in five mans maybe?

As far as the rogue, remind him he has tricks of the trade... If I had a dime for all the DPS that don't know how to focus the tank's target and think they can just blindly AOE (looking at half our raid DPS by the way) I would be rich.
 
old very general saying:

General rule of tanking.

If the tank dies it is the healers fault.
If the healer dies it is the tanks fault.
If a dps dies, it's their own fault.


some exceptions, like if a tank simply fails to pick up extra mobs that are running aroud one shoting dps.
 
Plankeye said:
Were you getting told a blood MT build wasn't the best for AOE threat in five mans maybe?
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I'm pretty sure that's what he meant. It went something like, "LOL I checked out your spec! You need to change it BAD! MT."

Hehe, I'm borrowing Bigsword's blood spec now.
 
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