Do open world content until you figure out what all your buttons do.
Do queueable content (heroics, LFR) until you’re comfortable running in a group.
Gradually work your way up through low mythics, normal raid and into higher and heroic raid.
If you’re worried people will flame you, that’s just something you’ll have to get over. It might happen in your first LFR, it might not happen until you’re running 25+ keys. But it will happen. Don’t listen to the bad tanks who are all like “oh tanking is SO HARD”. It’s not. You’re a DPS who pushes a couple buttons for survival as well. And you get to ignore most mechanics that will kill DPS.
Tanking, and the other roles even have a few different things you could mean by learning. If you are talking about learning how to play insert tank class here, you can manage that open world in a number of areas. There are places where you can stress test a tank on your own like soloing elites in the open world, the tank target, and lfg groups, and even the mage tower. There is a limit to what you can get out of this but its not a bad way to get the muscle memory and basics down, but not much else.
If you are talking about tanking in actual raid or m+ the only place to learn is to do so, and for organized groups its best to just bite the bullet and check third party, you aren’t going to learn a fight effectively from the dungeon journal. And one thing to keep in mind is that tanking is a role built upon game knowledge, a layman might tell you the role of the tank is to eat melee hits but the real role of a tank is to make sure the enemies are in the right place at the right time while handling specific tank mechanics. Most fights have a consistent strat that isn’t too hard to execute in lower difficulties that tanks are generally expected to know.
Oftentimes these fights have more advanced strategies that aren’t as expected, but are still worth knowing and you will never find these in the dungeon journal. For example on sark this tier my heroic guild adopted a strat where in second intermission everyone but our dwarf tank goes into the shadow realm instead of dealing with upstairs mechanics and the dwarf tank cleanses the debuff and if done well its nice and clean, but I would never suggest the strat in a pug because it requires all players in the group to be on the same page. Despite that its a thing you can do and its nice to know you can do so.
Another one is I run with a prot warrior for my m+ group and it has been made known to me that there is out there somewhere a spreadsheet of everything that can be spell reflected in m+. If I was playing prot warrior I would rather use that spreadsheet then trial and error to figure those things out.
It might seem like a lot of research, and it really is, but it all depends on the content you want to do. Do you want to pug normal? That’s a video to see common strats, and you can get most of it from lfr as well. Do you want to pug heroic, same deal but more likely to have a bad time due to people not being super forgiving of mistakes. Pushing keys can be watching a video on routing or a m+ guild specific to your spec and figuring out routing. If you want to have fun tanking lfg there isn’t really an investment needed beyond having tank gear and spec, its when you step into organized groups where you want to seriously consider doing some homework.
I have yet had one problem understanding quest in either Shadowlands or Dragonflight as to what to do to accomplish it, even way back in beta when some of them was buggy as hell.
I think it’s easy to be in the “just look it up” line of thinking but I do think it’s sad to to play a game and be expected to read everything about it first.
I think that defeats the purpose of playing a game personally.
I always think the people complaining about tanks being new or too slow or not knowing mechanics are funny. Why aren’t YOU tanking then??
These threads always confuse me and 100% of the time bait. I have never played a single game ever that has gone beyond “here is how you move and these are abilities”.
League doesn’t teach you when to rotate dragon, where to ward or when to push towers.
Elden ring doesn’t tell you what stats are best with what weapon for what boss. Where to go or how to dodge boss mechanics.
Street fighter doesn’t tell you the frame data and moves counter what.
If you want to get above “pressing random abilities” you learn by playing or google/guides. The wow community is hilariously bad and hilariously entitled pretty much all the time.
Lol. Maybe they were for god gamers like you, but I would bet that getting gold was not faceroll for everyone–like the new players OP is talking about.
Well seeing as how the only choke was silver and the amount of players who couldn’t out dps the tank/healer got through to dungeons is kinda proving my point.
The game (like every other game) shows you the bare minimum. If you want to go above that you need to learn.
What is it you exactly trying to learn? If you are trying to learn how to survive, I would suggest going into the mega dungeon alone at 410 ilvl and seeing how long you can last. Each tank can handle that without issue and proper play.
If routing in keys is what you are trying to learn then that is juat trial and error. A lot of tanks will do run as dps in keys to get other ideas on what route to go and how to pull
I will put this here but if hold threat is an issue then your just need to use your damage cool downs better. Each tank has damage CD for that reason.
You form your own group and tell everyone you’re new. I’ve done this several times. It will take some time but it will fill eventually.
Heroics and even mythic zero aren’t good learning spaces because the dps can probably delete most mobs even without a tank.
As for raids, I find the best thing to do is first try as dps and watch what the tanks do.
I mainly learned to tank via the dungeon guide and watching other tanks when I play dps. The guide literally tells you what certain spells do. So you read them and make the appropriate choice of response. If the guide says " this skill must hit at least one player or everyone dies" you should be able to figure out that one person should be the tank.
First and only time to learn was the first dungeon group that was ever run back in vanilla. It’s absolutely too late to learn now.
But no really just watch the fights and pay attention to positioning that competent tanks you played with were at and what they did. And then copy. And then do better than them. Also get your eyes up and pay attention the gaggle of cats you have to herd via the enemies and allies.
Exactly my friends thought process, she thinks “if they pull it, they tank it” the other day she asked me “if dps are so pull happy why don’t they just roll a tank?” To which I answered something along the lines of “there just inpatient children who don’t want the responsibility of tanking”
You don’t need a guide to do anything in this game. Understanding stats and ratings is RPG gameplay 101 so that’s a very basic thing to learn early on.
The game is really just being observant. Swirls on the ground are damaging, swirls that go up are stacking animations, enemies usually have uninterruptle cast bars 1.5S for frontals. When you’re tanking, the boss always yells something when they’re about to perform the tank buster–you use defensives there.
The last time I looked at a guide was in Wrath because my older brother was pressuring me to do it and I was a child.
I haven’t looked at a guide since then. I’m a 2700 tank.