Tank Performance Tracking

Are you drag racing to beat others or are you drag racing to beat your time. Parsing meta is just creating a leaderboard out of the parsed data. You can get addons that track all the metrics and parse it yourself to try and improve. Eg. Look at interrupts, where/how you take damage, self heals/parries, etc.

A good tank will anticipate changes or mitigate things getting out of control with the use of cooldowns, positioning and proactively communicating.

Holding threat, utilitising defensives and utility, announcing and taunting when required and gearing appropriately are the bare minimum expectations for a raid tank.

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I think youā€™re saying that those are two different things. I use other peopleā€™s standings to show me that I have room for improvement and logs can help point me to where I want to improve. I donā€™t care much for being the best, I just want to do my part and if there is room for me to improve my personal performance then I want to do just that.

Not so much a drag race as a snail race I suppose.

Probably because this is retail now lol. Pservers dead and wrath classic is thriving. Welcome to the modern mmo.

Ignore the toxic blue collar boomers. Warcraft logs gives you all the info you need to analyze your tankplay.

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They are different, one is competitive and one is progressive. Yes competition can drive progression but you dont need to compete to progress. If your looking to gauge progress then leaderboards are a waste of time. Only your personal numbers improving matter. Dps is stacking dmg and proper rotations, tanking is way more convoluted and performance metrics are alot harder to nail down. Soak tanking vs mitigation. Rage vs aoe. If the raid group is an engine, then the dps is the horsepower, tanks are the torque and healers are the cooling and lubrication. Tanks just have to pull the weight and not break under load, dps is just how fast you burn down the load, healers keep it cool and running smooth.

I suspect you smell like motor oil

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Donā€™t go off parsing lolā€¦ Parsing only looks at the damage you do, it is literally the most toxic thing in the game to have a tank trying to parse at the expense of the run. Most top parses are people in an OT role and if they arenā€™t ripping threat off the MT preventing them from playing optimally then they would be doing more damage in a dps offspec which helps everyone perform better. For instanceā€¦ Paladin OT popping haste pots in half ret gear while a DK is tanking a bossā€¦ DK now has to use every single frost rune to IT to stay ahead of him because he doesnā€™t turn RF off cause then he wouldnā€™t get that ā€œtankā€ parseā€¦ DK canā€™t death strike to heal which puts more strain on the healers. If the DK has bad RNG on resists said paladin can rip threat and get the raid cleaved, breathed on, or something else catastrophic. DK puts out MUCH less damage overall because they canā€™t use higher damage abilities even though they are 10 miles ahead of the dps on threat. Paladin gets a 99 parse and thinks heā€™s a god, meanwhile we are all laughing at his level of cringe.

Use warcraft logs to check your positioning, consumable use, rotation, damage taken, damage you could of avoided, etc. Compare this to other tanks, actively tanking bosses and succeeding. You will pick up little tips and tricks the more you do this.

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Warcraft logs, but if you only look at your damage parse as a tank youā€™ll go blind.

Look at your damage taken / mitigation. Look at your important buffs/debuffas and their uptime. Look the resources tab and see if your health/mana got dangerously low and if there was something you could have done about it. Maybe watch the replay to see if you could have reacted quicker or tanked something in a better spot.

If you didnā€™t die to a mechanic & used proper CDs, didnā€™t lose threat and performed everything correctly - youā€™re golden my friend!

Probably the best answer to how do I stack up to other tanks in a single metric would be your raidā€™s execution parse. That still isnā€™t perfect, as it gets dragged down by long kill times and idiots standing in bad.

If thatā€™s all you took from my whole comment, then you really admit you were wrong.

Because I plainly said when you compare Wrath tanking to say m20 or mythic raid, itā€™s nothing. Stand and keep aggro. Thereā€™s very low skill ceiling for tanking compared to dps and heal.

Want to prove me wrong? Go ahead, name those ā€œhundreds of ways good tank can bring benefitā€.
Outside of keeping aggro and doing basic mechanics, there is nothing more to do. Pop armor pot, thatā€™s about it.

If you wanna improve your parse as a tank itā€™s simple you need to do more dps. So if your guild doesnā€™t care and your confident you can swap gear a bit/use bombs/change strategies to ā€œcheeseā€ mechanics.

However this will only inflate your parse # doesnā€™t necessarily do much to improve your tanking. End of day if you hold aggro and dps can pump. You donā€™t die or take as little dmg as possible = winning?

Reality is tho if you want a better tank parse chances are you may be making the encounter more difficult just to parse so your guild might not like thatā€¦.

So with this logic as long as a dps does damage and the boss died they did their job, right?

There are metrics to measure performance.

Dps can do low dps, high dps. Dps can contribute in ways tank canā€™t.

Tank is too limited, tank holds aggro and gets healed by healers. There just isnā€™t much you can do in raids. If you did Naxx youā€™d notice itā€™s mostly standing and hitting, and Ulduar isnā€™t much different. Offtank gets to move a bit to pick up adds, but thereā€™s no mastery there, you aggro mobs and dps down them, while healers heal you.

But really, if you think tanks have high ceiling liek the other person claims, tell me in which ways. How can great tank be seperated from average? What difference is there in standing and keeping aggro between those?

You can record your raid and rewatch them to see what you did right or wrong.

Thatā€™s what people do with arenas to improve.

You canā€™t really quantify something like tanking outside of simming for effective health because it is based on mechanics more than just numbers.

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Tanks can do low dps or high dps.

There are ways to perform better.

If healers arenā€™t having difficulty healing you then it is more beneficial to the raid for you to gear to do more damage. Since faster kill timers = better time for everyone if nothing else is being sacrificed.

But all performance metrics are subjective in some regard.

Dungeons. The best way to determine your skill as a tank is dungeons. The skill ceiling for raiding is pretty damn low. Get threat, survive. Thatā€™s basically it.

Dungeons on the other hand? Especially when pugging? Tanks make the most difference, and their effect is the most noticeable. Can you chainpull? Is is smooth? How much are you pulling? How much are you controlling? (Silences, interrupts, stacking mobs, LOS etc.) And when pugging, thereā€™s the knowledge side of things. Are the DPS Iā€™m grouped with stronger at AoE, cleave, single target? Whatā€™s the best path through the dungeon (Why a lot of tanks quit retailā€™s mythic+) which mobs are dangerous

Then thereā€™s little things that are mostly noticeable as a healer, like ā€œstaggeringā€ hits (get hit, move slightly, delay the next hit), positioning of mobs (not putting frontal cleaves into the group, for example), timings (when you pull things, when you get hit)

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Do parsed dps leaderboards take gear into account or is it just a comparable of class? The game is gearcentric so metrics like dps are absolutely not a reflection of skill only power output.

Logs can be broken down into ilevel ranges, class, spec. You can even check the individuals gear, if youā€™re so inclined, to determine things like ā€œOh sure these people both have ~205 ilevel, but this ones using almost entirely pvp gear so that explains the massive difference in outputā€

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