You don’t strip down… by stripping down. Got it. Nice circular logic you got there.
But then, if I wear the good stuff and get my crit out of the toilet(which is largely the entire purpose of wearing ‘dps’ gear while stripping down your avoidance and armor), then am I not getting the best of both worlds?
And wouldn’t killing 5% to crit and 3% to dodge for hotdoggers that only care about their dps at the expense of the group, be the antithesis of that?
The funny part is that I have tried this with a shaman healer. We first tried WF and killed faster(had a fury warrior with OEB) but had to med every pull. With AGI totem we killed a touch slower, but could take 2-4 packs before medding. Its simply the mechanics of it. You get a touch more group damage, in expense of sustainability because you’re cutting group avoidance and not focusing the mobs on the tank better due to greater threat gen. That’s the tradeoff.
Tanks need aggro to get rage.
Tanks need rage to hold aggro.
If the DPS casts chain lightning/blizzard/volley the second you touch the mobs, you are going to lose aggro on all of the mobs except the one you are targeting.
If you tab target to slap a sunder or pop revenge on one of the other mobs, you’ll lose the one you are holding.
It’s not a tank problem.
It’s a DPS either not understanding or caring about aggro.
It’s DPS saying “Who cares, the game is easy?” and then complaining when they almost die from pulling aggro on 2 mobs because they burned blade flurry at the start of the pull.
Several reasons, really. Threat sensitive fights like Onyxia. Threat changes throughout vanilla. Itemization changes throughout vanilla. They were worse players.
Equipping different armor is not stripping down.
You don’t need the best of both worlds. You only need enough mitigation to not die when consistently holding aggro (also depends on your healer, of course), then you just get as much DPS as possible to hold aggro.
Only one person’s avoidance matters, and that’s the tank’s, because he’s the only one that should consistently be taking damage.
If Grace of Air Totem is doubling or even quadrupling how long the group can sustain itself, I think there is something seriously wrong with how you’re playing.
Exactly.
Blizzard is worse than Arcane Explosion.
Volley’s DPS is really low, and easily manageable with proper tanking.
Elemental Shaman’s DPS is terrible, so you shouldn’t be seeing a Chain Lightning, anyway.
To your actual point though, you can hold aggro fairly easily if you know how to play. Warrior has a harder time with it because their cleave/AoE abilities do less threat than a bear’s, but it is possible.
If your threat generation is that low, you’re playing your class poorly, especially if they’re AoEing. They’re dealing far less threat to each individual mob.
They shouldn’t be almost dying. The mobs are really weak and don’t hit very hard, even against non-tanks.
If they’re almost dying, it’s probably because of lazy healers using the fact the tank can’t hold aggro as an excuse for them to not heal.
How are you supposed to generate threat with no rage?
You should try playing a warrior tank in classic before you act high and mighty mr. faceroll 5man tank.
it goes like this:
Charge and then either TC/Demo Shout/Cleave, immediately lose aggro on all mobs but the one you’re doing white damage on.
Taunt one of the mobs back, immediately lose aggro on the one you were holding because you switched targets.
Sometimes the DPS isn’t idiotic and understands aggro, most of the time they aren’t and you have both taunt and mocking blow on CD every fight.
I try to tab target and use an ability on each mob as I have the rage to do so, but people blow their CDs as often as possible.
The problem is a combination of DPS not understanding/caring about aggro due to the incredibly nerfed content that we were given because the game is based off of 1.12.
This is only an issue in pugs because everybody is in a hurry all the time.
Why do you have no rage? You should be pooling some of your rage from the previous fight.
Hit some critters in between pulls (they’re littered throughout dungeons for that reason, though not every dungeon has them, to be fair).
Bloodrage when your rage starts to decay to keep it up.
Start pulling to the next pack as the one you’re currently fighting dies, only stopping if the healer absolutely needs mana.
Nah, you should probably not be Charging unless you’re Arms/Prot. As you’re leveling, that might be worthwhile, though, since you’ll have Tactical Mastery.
As Fury/Prot, you’re not going to have Tactical Mastery. You would probably have Tactical Mastery with Deep Prot, but that build really blows for threat to begin with.
Thunder Clap isn’t very good for threat (would be better if usable in Defensive Stance).
Demoralizing Shout is okay.
Battle Shout is better.
10 rage for 55x[Targets Buffed] threat. In a standard party, that’s 55x5. Add a pet, 55x6, and so on.
Understandably, you can lose aggro due to RNG, or even just slightly less threat generation than what is needed, but that’s what Taunt and Mocking Blow are for.
Taunt has a very short cooldown, so you should have no reservations about using it, turning their threat into yours.
Mocking Blow is obviously a longer cooldown, and due to being in Battle Stance, is less reliable, but is there for emergencies. Most of the time, just sitting in Defensive Stance and dealing damage will pull aggro back.
They should. It speeds up the dungeon tremendously.
DPS who refuse to use their cooldowns except on boss fights are just lazy. The majority of any dungeon is the trash. Bosses are easy. If anything, cooldowns should be used on the trash, unless the boss is particularly challenging if it lasts too long, e.g. Baron Rivendare.
If it’s incredibly nerfed, then you can just relax about losing aggro. They aren’t going to get one shotted. Just do better to hold aggro, but don’t freak out about it.
I have the opposite problem. All of my PUGs seem to be afraid of the content, wanting to go slow and CC everything. My guild groups go really fast by comparison because we don’t bother with that crap, and we know all of the trash skips.
The biggest difference between PUGs and guild groups that I’ve seen is that PUGs are less willing to wait for mobs to be gathered during an LoS pack, and will stand out in the open as a caster attacks them.
Actually that’s just not true. In AoE pulls a tank could be doing everything right and you could still pull threat. Same with Onyxia. You not knowing this while insulting someone’s skill is obnoxious. Threat wouldn’t be a mechanic if a tank couldn’t lose it. What you’re saying makes no sense in classic.
I do that when possible, but it’s not always possible to do so.
Bloodrage is my “Oh crap, I need more rage right now” ability if someone body pulls ads and I need to control them.
Generally I charge, swap to zerker mid-charge and burn zerker rage as it’s only a 30 sec CD vs Bloodrage’s 1 min CD and then jump into def stance.
The only person’s mana that I care about is the healer, the DPS can drink after they drop combat as the last mob dies and I’m going for the next mob.
I’m currently arms/fury because of tactical mastery and improved cleave due to the AoE/Cleave meta, I figured since I was spamming Cleave(with sunders and revenge as rage allows) constantly I may as well grab cleave.
TC is pretty awful, it was just an example.
Battle shout is one of the first abilties that I use, but blizz nerfed the threat from both Demo shout and Battle shout early on, now it only gives threat on the initial cast and not the refresh.
Taunt putting you at the top of the meter is temporary, much like fade only temporarily reduces threat for priests.
You’d think that’s how it works, but it doesn’t.
I’ve legit had enhance shamans using Earthshock as part of their DPS rotation and not understanding that it creates more threat when I ask them to use flame shock instead.
I mean that they burn sweeping strikes/blade flurry at the start of the pull, not 2 secs into the pull. Considering most packs end up being 45 secs to a minute it’s not unreasonable for me to expect people to hold back for more than 2 seconds while you establish the baseline aggro.
The bosses are definitely the easy part due to warriors have tremendous single target DPS, I rarely if ever lose aggro on a boss.
It’s nerfed and the characters themselves are more powerful due to itemization/talent changes that weren’t in Vanilla until the very tail end of the game.
See I think the biggest difference between your experience and mine is that I’m still in the leveling instances.
I’m hoping that things get better at cap, but I am not holding my breath at all.
That happens a lot too.
Trying to LoS stuff and people immediately start DPSing as soon as you pull it.
I all but gave up on trying to pull things with my bow for precisely this reason.
This is actually pretty solid advice.
I’ve tried being nice and saying “Hey, so give me like 5 secs to get some stuff going because of dodge/misses” to no avail, maybe saying “If you wait for a couple secs, you’ll be able to do more damage” will appeal to their E-Peens.
I will admit that I did overstate the issue a bit, but the really really bad runs make the good ones seem rare.
It honestly flabberghasts me when you mark something with a skull and people are attacking anything BUT the skull. It’s like, do you not have eyes?
This thread has devolved into Ohshiftson either trolling, or pushing their views on everyone else and replying because they are either stubborn or bored (I, myself, am bored or I wouldn’t even be here).
I vote we stop replying and let it die. Ohshiftson has flat-out said they rarely PuG and they apparently have more issues with their L33t guild pulling threat then PuGs, which seems very backward to me. Not worth your time, guys.
When I play my Hunter I never know when to jump in.
Too early and I pull aggro, too late and I don’t do hardly any damage with makes me look bad because everyone is watching their details addon.
I feel others are feeling that pressure too, just my guess.
I’ll read this all later but I’m just going to say this,
Dps pulling aggro is absolutely not indicative of a bad tank. First off, threat isn’t just based off damage. Spriests…shammys…many classes have skills that generate a high amount of threat. If you pull, it doesn’t necessarily mean no one can handle your pro dps. More often than not, dps do things like charge mobs the instant they’re range pulled. Blizzard the instant the tank even gets in their range, etc. It’s simply a byproduct of people not knowing how classic works. Does retail have talents that lower your threat? No? I wonder why…
Now look, I’m not saying bad tanks can’t exist; but don’t go thinking it’s never the dps’s fault. Remember, to a tank, we have to build rage (which takes time) to use skills. You need mana for skills but you always start the fight with it. If I start the pull with full rage, I challenge you to try and pull aggro. Fact is though, we just don’t usually.
The dps has always the option to leave if they are not happy
Iv’e seen so many wipes because of impatient dps who just wanted to go faster and faster but at the end we lost so much time running back to dungeon multiple times…
