This. If your healer’s are pink parsing your tanks are failing and your dps standing in fire.
Honestly though, you can see a lot in the logs about damage taken, absorbed, mitigated. As well as high and low threat abilities etc… It’s not just a leader board.
Assuming you’re trying to improve taking performance in a raid, you should actually be looking at the damage taken for all tanks in the group and comparing those numbers against other tank teams. Improving as a tank comes from better coordination and teamwork with other tanks. Learning the damage types of each boss and then finding the best timing with your tanking partner to do taunts and cooldowns can save your healers a lot of mana. Learn the general patterns of the bosses first and as you become more comfortable with their abilities and your cooldowns, you will eventually be able to start getting down to even timing taunts around the bosses melee attacks and which defensive cooldowns are active.
Tanks have very few spells that do damage in their rotation, don’t use dmg pots, don’t use engi bombs, gloves, dmg trinkets…
So no.
That’s thanks to gear, not your gameplay. If you’re say prot paladin, you got what, holy shield, and divine sac and divine prot, that’s extent of your mitigation. And any paladin can use his defensives, skill ceiling isn’t high there either.
Maybe you don’t but I do.
That’s also why I have much more contributable damage to a fight overall helping my group perform better, as a tank.
If you want to be a meat shield and that’s that, alright. You’re doing your job.
But you’re not doing it exceptionally nor as effectively as you can. Mediocrity isn’t what everyone considers acceptable play.
Keeping aggro, not dying, allowing your dps to dps without worry (not through threat generation). Thats the minimum.
Just because the tank moved and isnt in crud doesnt mean your DPS are in a good spot now. Gathering mobs is another thing.
Your DPS doing well, your healer being bored are good signs of a good tank.
I’ve also been a tank main since OG Cata, and picked it back up during TBC.
You sound like a vanilla boomer tank.
Tanks are a carry role in Speedruns. If you have a bad tank you’re gonna suck.
You obviously don’t tank… If that is your impression of tanking then you have decent tanks. There is more strategy than you would think involved. Positioning bosses, moving bosses, using cooldowns, calling for cooldowns, proper consumable usage, etc. On top of it tanks need the proper gear set for each boss and you can really improve your performance by doing so. Tanking is literally the “hardest” job in a raid. Before someone says it, I put hardest in quotes for a reason but it doesn’t change the fact that it is…
Sure you can… Did you use your cooldowns at the right time or were you late/early? Did you position the boss poorly resulting in dps having a harder time with mechanics? Did you get someone cleaved or breathed on? Did you move the boss too much that affected dps uptime or outranged your healers? Did you get hit in the back while moving or positioning the boss? You can tell a ton from logs that a sim will never help you with.
Tanking is cupcake mode. Are you getting 1 tapped? Good now just do mechanics like everyone else, use your CDs at the right time like everyone else, and just stand there and get beat. Your job is to put your dps in the best position to maximize their output and minimize avoidable damage to free up healers. Healers are the real MVPs. The good ones make all our ape mistakes go away.
Now to see how many make it this far down and realize the first line was a joke to trigger tanks.
None of what you said is quantifiable.
If you use dmg pots instead of armor pots, you take more dmg. Taking less dmg means you can have 1 less healer, 1 more dps, which will do way more than tank.
That’s what tank is in wrath raids. If you’re putting extra points into offense, you can’t afford having 1 less healer and +1 dps, and you’re a bad tank at that point, worse than if you were just a meat shield.
Haha… Sure.
Moving bosses is basics, every tank moves bosses if required, but where are you gonna move Sindragosa? Where are you going to move Gluth, Thaddius, or other 20 bosses that are stand and tank?
Using cooldowns is also something every tank does, it doesn’t make you special, it’s what cooldowns are for.
Calling for bloodlust is RL job, not tank’s job. Only cd you can call for is pain suppress, which any half-decent healer should know you need. Proper consumable usage? Armor pots. Literally pot before fight, pot after it expires. No rocket science.
I know a lot of fellow tanks like to sniff their own gasses, but it’s just pure ego. I’ve tanked for… what, 14 years now? Vanilla, TBC, Wrath in Classic, Wrath, Legion, BFA and Shadowlands on retail, tank was always the easy role. The only time you could shine is m+ or these new mythic raids with lot of movements, but dps and healers also have to move a lot, so… still not hardest role. But for Wrath, seriously, easiest role.
If it’s not quantifiable, why does it show numerically in logs?
2000 armor isn’t allowing teams to drop an entire healer…
Already can champ. Nothing hits hard. I tank Gluth with 10 stacks of his debuff in full threat gear.
If you’re healers are struggling to keep up tanks, get better healers.
Where are you going to tank Grobbulus? What about Heigen? Or the other 20 bosses that require tanks to have spatial awareness and positioning down?
Armor pots are like an 8% damage reduction. Physical damage reduction only. For a single tank. It’s very rare that a tank armor potting vs. DPS potting is the difference for a raid group being able to drop a healer.
Same argument as above. Usually optional talent points are very minor in terms of their defensive or offensive benefits. It’s very rare that talent points matter for deciding to drop a healer.
There’s a lot more nuance to moving bosses correctly than you allude to. It may not be something to worry about on every boss, but when it’s important it’s really important.
Gluth’s movement really only matters at the start of the fight. Don’t run so quickly to the door that you outrun your melee. If you happen to outrun your melee, that’s 15 seconds of the slower ones not being able to DPS. That’s pretty important, although it’s a simple task.
Thaddius movement really matters on the Polarity Shifts. A tank who moves carelessly has a much higher chance of having the boss decide to stutter-step somewhere. Having the boss stutter-step somewhere is the biggest risk to crossing the charges when the people in the direction to which Thaddius moved don’t move back in time before the opposite side melee move in. If you have a tank who positions perfectly, you don’t even know about the dangers of this mechanic.
Tanking is sometimes about managing CDs. Generally you want exactly one for pain points. You may not want an external one at point X because you’re using your own and vice-versa when at point Y. Maybe the tank knows that a cooldown at point X isn’t necessary and so he’s saving his for point Y, which means that the healer can save his for point Z. The main way the tank and the other people get on the same page is through…communication. Expecting everyone else to know when you want or need externals through ESP alone is ridiculous.
and sacrifice, and raid sac…
What is harder than tanking? Healing is brain dead, dps is a joke… No, its not actually hard but it is harder than either of the other 2 roles. Yes, every tank positions and moves bosses but not every tank does it well. You won’t always use armor pots. There will be threat sensitive fights where you will use dps pots. The majority of tanks are engineers, knowing when you use bombs/sappers come into effect. MT should call for lust not the raid leader. The tank knows when they have a firm handle on the boss. Sure, some bosses are tank and spank but they aren’t all and things happen…
Cooldown usage is absolutely crucial. It’s obvious you haven’t done 3D if you don’t know that. DPS gets lust, they pop cooldowns, GG… Tanks are vastly different, they need to know everything that boss is going to do and plan their cooldowns accordingly. For a DK that also involves thinking multiple runes ahead.
That healer is tracking your personal cooldowns? Doubt it…
sure you have…
Give me a number on boss positioning then. You can’t, because it’s not a quantifiable measurement, which is what I stated in my original post:
The only real quantifiable number for tanking is effective health. You could argue damage and threat but those doesn’t exactly determine how good a tank is because no one cares about those numbers so long as you can keep agro.
I never stated that you can’t use logs to figure out mistakes that were made, it’s just not quantifiable by definition and rewatching a recording is a thousand times easier than sifting through logs to find mistakes.
I’d rather have the better players be DPS and healer than being the tank, because all a bad tank need to do well is a good raid leader to tell them where to stand and when to taunt with very few exceptions.
The only way to win at wow is to unsub
It’s 3500 armor.
It’s almost like we’re in Naxx, raid where everyone complained it was too easy and it resulted in Ulduar getting overbuffed. Go with same mentality into Ulduar and see how your RL and healers react to that.
8% for just pot is a fair bit. I haven’t done the math myself, but tank that passes on 3500 armor is just silly.
Yes, it’s situational.
This is true if you are trying to min-max raid to race for world first times. Which 99% of playerbase doesn’t. Hotshots coming here saying there’s difference between tanking in anything other than some 1 hour speedruns, just clown feista.
As prot pala, got that covered, not really needed in Naxx yet.
Good dps will do big dps, bad dps will do low dps, there’s skill ceiling.
Go try healing a bad raid, see how that goes for you.
For tanks you either do the job right, or you don’t. There’s no % difference in tanks that are gamechanging for raid groups. If you can’t perform as tank, you are bad tank, if you can, you are what you are expected to be. I’ve seen tanks autoattack bosses, literally stand and autoattack, I wouldn’t even put them into comparison into tank difference, because that’s just plain not even playing. If you mash your face into your rotation, you got aggro, and not much movement in Wrath Classic.
You know I used to be like you. I played a bit of Wrath on this server that just went overboard with buffs, to point where Wrath raids were challenging, enrage timer was tight, bosses and raid damage was hard, and I felt like I was the king, the big guy, tank, holding all the aggro, being the chief, while everyone else contributes.
But then hpala can’t show up for a raid, and you see how much of a difference there is between a great healer and average one. And if dps is lower, and healers started running out of mana, and enrage was tight, oof.
Fortunately we’re in Wrath Classic, where everything is unbuffed, bosses don’t hit hard, enrage is non issue, healer mana isn’t a problem, but at the end of the day, people will still make mistakes that healers need to make up for on average, not in guild that does everything right, but in pugs, in some progressions in ulduar hardmode coming soon. And you’ll see difference between your dk pulling 7k dps and one pulling 4.5k.
With tanks… You’re a sponge, you putting talents into offense and using dmg pot to increase your dmg by 500 won’t make much of a difference. You can pat yourself on the back, keep the ego going, but if you played WoW for years and did all roles, you’d know that tanking is just easiest. That’s why I generally play it. Keep aggro, follow fight mechanics, people pat you on the back even though you didn’t really do anything special, not because they think you did great, but because they just want to make sure you don’t leave, because not many want to tank, people find it boring. People rather push big dps. It’s always been like that, tanking wasn’t in shortage because it was hard, but because it’s more boring to people, low skill ceiling, no visible progression, your dps isn’t going up, you aren’t being able to soloheal a fight, you’re just… tanking.