Do you call for externals in discord as a tank?

Is it an unreasonable thing when tanking to call out when the OT is about to take large portion of damage? I OT grong and am in charge of taking the throws… at 394 ilvl some of those throws hurt.

My raid lead has voiced his opinion that I am squishy because if i wasnt i wouldnt feel the need to ask for externals all the time. I was always under the impression that telling my healers when i am about to get beat up on was better than letting them panic when my hp starts dipping. On a fight like grong where you can easily negate a huge chunk of damage with a second or twos notice isnt it good to call out what defensive you want or that you are going to require some healing?

The raid lead voiced no other issues aside from me calling out everytime im going to take damage in discord… to the point of wanting to remove me off of the tank roster.

Am i doing it wrong? Should i just sit silently and risk getting the heals in time? I actually had to switch off of my warrior because the healers refused to put anything other than hots on me and told me raid healing took priority to tank healing… as a warrior i was told this. I am new to the guild and they are used to running DK/DK composition. Do you think taking a non-self healing tank into a raid where the healers have worked with double DK for a long time is an issue?

I felt pretty trapped between a rock and a hard place. I dont get heals and i die. I speak in discord to ask for heals… and i am announcing to the world how squishy i am.

Yes absolutely call for externals. That’s the only useful time in the fight in which to use them. They don’t cost a GCD so they’re essentially free minus targeting time and the like. If they’re needed to keep a squishy/undergeared tank alive, why wouldn’t you use them? You might want to consider getting an addon/Weak Aura that tracks healer externals so that instead of asking for a generic external and having all of them blow you off, you can ask a specific person for their external. Then you get a great blame target if they fail to follow through. Clear it with them in advance and give them a few seconds of advanced notice before the tank combo, if possible.

For Grong specifically, the throws are scheduled every 30s or so, but every other one is cancelled by using the item from the adds. So it’s only every minute that you should be getting thrown. I feel like you should have either Last Stand or Shield Wall up for almost every one, and Demo Shout for every one (RIP damage), right? Or are you using them for other times? Or is your guild not cancelling every other tank combo, causing them to come every 30s instead?

For the Warrior thing, that tank combo is primarily dot damage, which Warriors won’t deal with well because a ton of their mitigation comes from blocking, and these attacks aren’t blockable. DKs in comparison have some global DR, where Warriors have none, and they also have higher raw HP than Warriors. DK self healing is rather negligible while stunned and/or far away from their target, so that’s not relevant. It’s not the first time where one tank is much better or worse than another at handling one boss or one mechanic.

For the healer side of this thing, there needs to be a healer assigned to heal tanks in general, especially during the high damage tank combo. When I die and I feel like I shouldn’t have, I happily go through my death log and give some great knowledge to the raid. A real example is when I told them that the last time I was at 100% HP was some 36 seconds before I died on Conclave, and I went through looking for direct heals on me and found 2 in that time period, summing to something like 25k. Want to know why I died? There’s evidence of why.

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I don’t tank so can’t give you the tank perspective, so this will be more of a Healer’s PoV.

It’s generally pretty uncommon to have tanks call for externals until perhaps Mythic progression, but there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s a very good thing to do. If I was evaluating a tank’s performance I would be adding points for doing that, not subtracting.

Absolutely, those are the key points of the fight for you and should be using DR cooldowns, if yours are down or you don’t have enough CDs to deal with all the “difficult” moments then for sure call for externals it’s much better to use them pro-actively . Even if the healers are knowledgeable of the fight they don’t have as much information as you do to decide when you have something already planned to deal with it and when you’ll be needing an external.

As a side note, just be mindful that this depends on the fight a little bit, there are some fights where the tanks are never really in that much threat and their own CDs should be more than enough to handle everything, so externals should instead be used on other players that might need to deal with a dangerous mechanic.

(btw not sure if you know but you can spell reflect the throw, you still get thrown but you don’t take the ticking damage while he grabs you)

Well I mean, just don’t over do it, if you are using your own CDs then no need to say anything if not just call for the external (bonus point if you keep track of the CDs on externals and ask for a specific one).

Hmm actually no, Tank healing should take priority over raid healing, unless ofc the healer’s are just trying to pad the meters. In general, when big AOE damage is happening your healing team should have a Raid CD assigned to deal with it, so everyone else should put more focus on keeping priority targets alive rather than padding with AOE heals.

As the one that coordinates my healing team this is something I constantly need to re-iterate to my fellow healers over and over (they really like AOE healing), in fact this is the main reason why I swapped from Disc to Holy Paladin, so I can cover priority target healing better (could have done it as Holy Priest too but also wanted some of the pally’s utility).

The fact that they even said something like this leads me to believe they don’t really know wha they are talking about, what level do they raid at? (I’m guessing no higher than Heroic)

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I appreciate the feedback and a bit of validation. No this is a “mythic” group we were talking about. I most certainly pointed it out to the raid that i spent the entire combo and throw qithout getting a single targeted heal. Spell reflect is silly broken on thay fight but once we reached jadefire i was legit banned from using it and then they were upset that i was ticking away so fast (no joke) so i swapped off of the warrior for last week. I went to my comfort pick which is DH because i felt i have a lot more control over my own health and it worked great. Significantly less deaths now that i could pretty well heal and shield myself through most things… thats when i heard that the leadership had an issue for me asking for externals (and i ask for them specific and ahead of time) but they felt i shouldnt have to use them as a tank and someone in that leadership viewed it as weakness to call out that the damage was swapping focus to me…

Ultimately tanking for that guild is more trouble than its worth. Tank and heal is about all I enjoy doing. So since my pointing out that there was no tank heals drove a couple healers away and now my calling for externals lost me my spot cause “a good tank shouldnt need that” im just going to go seperate ways. There is literally no winning with thay group unless you tank on a blood DK and can laugh as you pull more hps than half of the healers. I dont particularly enjoy blood. But healing a warrior that took 40% less over all damage than the other tanks was too much to ask of that healing team.

For sure you should call for externals. Healers are paying attention to the whole raid and might not notice you have two stacks of bleed and might die from the throw or something. Or maybe you wanna pull big in m+

Calling out for, preferably a specific, external is reasonable and good practice imo.

Glad to help, one extra advise I’ll give, based on your last input:

Just be a bit cautious when calling out stuff like that, some people tend to take it personal, if you don’t know them well enough maybe it will be better to communicate it to the Raid leader first.

Also make sure you evaluate the situation properly… I’m saying this because in my guild we had an issue where a tank was calling out the healers for not getting a single target heal for 12s and then he died… But the problem was that he was only looking at the death log, which doesn’t tell the full story, upon taking a more detailed look at the logs I noticed that while he truly didn’t get a single target heal for 12s, he spent the majority of those 12s at above 80% health (so he didn’t needed single target healing) then he went from 80% to 0 in less than 2s. So the real problem is that he didn’t had any mitigation up when taking a big damage combo (in your case if you are calling for externals and are aware of the damage then this shouldn’t be the case, but it’s still a good practice to try to get the full story before calling people out).


Yeah that’s dumb, externals are there to be used and it’s much better for the tank to call for them than you trying to guess as a healer when they might need one (and using them reactively is much less effective).

If your raid leader thinks you can survive all encounters without needing externals then you need a new raid.

We can all stand to play better, sure. But if he thinks mythic tanks aren’t getting externals as they ask for them then he is really ignorant.

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Skol was a heroic/mythic progression guild that died (R.I.P.) in 2018.

The raid leader, Aima, was also the MT. I was the OT. He would always call out for externals whenever he needed them and would communicate very clearly to the healers when it would be needed (I.E. “Coming up on KJs fel swipes, gonna need big heals in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…”). So not only was he raid leading, but also communicating with the healers regarding his needs as a tank. I learned from him as I never before had to communicate the need for externals.

I too experienced a similar situation in which I barely received any healers in mythic BoD. The dps were making so many mistakes and taking so much damage, that they just assumed I could heal back all my damage.

Not sure if this is normal, but they had me tank all of the Champions mobs (besides the boss of course) and utilize all my interrupt abilities. They then asked me to call out once I ran out of interrupts. Once the crusader became “empowered” I started taking damage in chunks, ultimately dying right when the boss was at 1 million hp. The raid focused the boss, even with adds on them and killed him. I felt as though I had been used as bait…

No, there’s good raid leading and theres bad raid leading and it sounds like this is a steaming pile of bad. A congealment of misinformation and poor priorities would be accurate.

No direct healing on the tanks during the 3 hit combo is mind boggling, and healers telling him to stop using spell reflect and that raid healing is priority are almost unbelievable. There is no valid reason to have things be so off.

Can he be taking it overboard or panicking a lot instead of asking in a calm way at correct times? Yes. But if that’s going on, its far from the only bad thing in this raid.

This is called zerging and is the only way most pugs can deal with the boss. Ideally your interrupts would be used for when you need to move the pack and ranged should be interrupting all other times.

That interrupt part makes a lot more sense to me than “Use all your interrupts, then ask for ranged to interrupt while you are on CD.” No wonder it felt hectic! Thanks.