Is tanking difficult?

[Xuno 0]

I was thinking of rolling a Warrior tank. I've never tanked in my wow career though. Will I manage? 

[Undertanker 88]

It can be difficult at times, it can be a lot of fun as well.  

Think of tanking as a proactive/reactive role you play.  Healers heal HP bars that go down in the group.  You build threat on HP bars that are going down on mobs.

Pressing buttons is not hard.  The warrior forums has loads of information of threat ability prioritization and the works.

5 man tanking and raid tanking are completely different.  20 man tanking vs 40 man tanking is completely different as well, with 20 man tanking closer resembling 5 man tanking with the tediousness that comes along with 40 man tanking so I will not have a specific 20 man section.  

I'll explain in detail below:

5 Man Tanking:

The difficulties:

- Managing others: 

Spoiler

The responsibility of managing proper buffs, kill priority, marks, stopping others from ass pulling, instructing on what mobs things need to be CC, Stunned, Interrupted, ensuring people have proper mana/health for the upcoming pull. Dps classes WILL hit the wrong targets, it is your job to correct these failed actions through professional communication.

- Memorizing Trash:

Spoiler

 

5 mans typically have patrols throughout the instances, it is critical that you learn the patrol points to avoid additional stress on your party in the form of ass-pulling that can result in a wipe.  

Specific instances have triggered events, such as Strat - Live.  Certain rooms if you step into them will spawn adds behind you.  Learn these 2 rooms to avoid your healer/ranged dps hanging in the back from being 1 shotted as they will spawn on them.  

Certain mobs have kill priority and you need to know which ones.   An example would be the spectral ghost in Scholomance, that split.  If you are not instructing your raid to kill these first, you are doing it wrong.

 

- AoE Pulls:

Spoiler

The achilles heel of warriors.  Many post and discussions are in the Warrior class thread on this for good reason.  Feel free to check those out.  I will say, that it also ties into "managing others", as no matter how good your AoE is, if somebody opens with Flame Strike, spams hell fire or other forms of AoE as soon as you pull, the upcoming mess of a pull you are sure to experience is the fault of the trigger happy dps, not you.   

- Knowing Boss Mechanics:

Spoiler

 

It is critical that you known specific boss mechanics and how to counter them to ensure the success of your group.  Just to list a few here:

Strat UD - Keeping Baron max range of non-melee / UBRS Beast - Anctipating when a fear will happen and already being in bezerk stance to break it   Drak - keeping boss turned away to avoid raid breaths and using cooldowns pre-emptively if you are eating the conflags  /  Scholo - Using the stairs as a line of sight tool to limit the amount of spells the boss cast on you /  Strat Live - Using the doorway as a tanking point with healer Line of Sight of boss to ensure the healer doesn't not get mind controlled.

The above is all manageable with proper communication throughout an instance with your group, and experience doing the instances.  You will mess up.  Learn from mistakes and each time you run the instance you will become better at pats/mechanics/trash prioritization.  Tanking 5 mans is direct training for tanking trash in 20 mans.  All of the above applies + what I'll cover for 40 man tanking.

 

40 Man Tanking:

The difficulties:

- Positioning: 

Spoiler

This is by far the most undervalued aspect of 40 man tanking and is not something you will see often discusses.   Standing slightly too far to the left/right could result in the raid eating a shadowbreath and you just wiped the raid on a drake.  Standing too close to the hitbox of Val, and you could trigger a chain cleave on the melee dps and wipe the raid.  Waiting for a banished mob to break, if you don't put yourself between the mob and raid, when it breaks it will most likely quickly move out of your hit/taunt range and kill people and or stun the entire raid.   Knowing where to tank Chromag to ensure the raid is able to LoS the breaths.  Standing in the wrong spot on Rag, you could take a lot of fall damage or be punted into lava.  This is all learned by trial and error, so listen to people that are giving you tips on this.  A wise man learns from his mistakes, a wiser man learns from others.

 

- Buff/Debuff Monitoring: 

Spoiler

Being aware of what buffs/debuffs you have on your character is very important to specific encounters.  This goes well beyond your typical check list of, is the pally/shaman using the approriate aura/totem for the encounter? Is it or are they in range of buffing you?  Is the warlock parking his imp where you benefit from it? Is fire shield/thorns/ret up? Do you have all HP buffs?  Did you use your appropraite consumables (agil/fort/wellfed/rum/ect)  For specific encounters; while not as prevalent in Molten Core, this begins to matter in BWL.  Using a free action potion during the start of phase 2 on Razorgore to ensure you can built a decent threat ceiling, using your sands on Chromag the second you see Bronze Affliction to prevent moments of not mitigating/avoiding damage and not building threat, verifying you have a fear ward/a shaman ready to drop totem of each fear on Onyxia/Nef/Mag (being ready to stance dance if it is missing), noticing when you have curses from Nef/Shazz or Mortal Strike from Broodlorde.   This is all expected that you are 100% aware 100% of the time.  An oversight of any of these things could and most often will result in raid deaths up to a wipe.

 

- Cooldown/Trinket Management

Spoiler

Being knowledgeable about the raid trash and boss encounters will ensure you set yourself up to have cooldowns available when needed.  It can be trial by fire learning when you should have used what-when.  Even if you clear a boss, think of what you could have done at a specific time to take stress off a healer or counter what I call "spike damage" (moments that you may eat an auto attack + whatever ability the boss does within a 2 second window).  Using Force of Will trinket when assigned to AoE tank whelps paired with Blessing of Sanctuary makes life easy for healers in the Suppression Room.   Certain fights such as Luci and Major Domo have a lot damage at the start of the fight and progressively get easier.   Using a shield wall at the start could take major stress off of your healers and ensure an easy kill.  Knowing that Magmadar doesn't have much spike damage and shield wall isn't needed, same with Gehnnis, it is a safe time to use it early in a raid and start the 30 min CD to be available again on Domo.   Magmadar being a tank and spank, you may want to swap a trinket or other gear out for more threat per second.   Golemag, ensuring you have last stand for 10% phase (+life giving gem if you have it) can make the encounter much less stressful on healers at the end.  These is no pride in clearing the instance without using CDs and proper trinkets, you are just putting more stress on healers, when 50% of your job is to reduce damage taken (the other 50% is threat).

 

- Knowing Trash/Boss Mechanics

Spoiler

Do your homework on each trash mob and boss for the instances you are tanking.  What are their abilities, which ones fear/stun, which ones need to be spread apart/kited and the works.  There are many detailed guides, especially for every single mob in Molten Core.  Don't be afraid to ask questions, just don't keep asking the same questions.  Learn, learn, learn.  It can be overwhelming at first if you are having to learn 3+ raids worth of mobs at once, but it becomes second nature.  I have this the lowest on difficulty list since it does become much easier and quickly no barrier at all with some out of raid time investments of what mobs do.

 

I know this is a lot of "difficulties" listed, but do not let this deter you from playing a tank.  It is a completely different feel for the game and may spark new life into your interest and approach to Vanilla.  You are not measured by a DPS/Heal meter, but my leadership and pulling your team through those moments that people thought would have been a wipe if 99% of other tanks were at the helm.  I would be lying to you if I told you the margin for error is extremely small at times compared to other classes.  1 minor mistake on your end can wipe a raid.  This usually isn't the case for healers when there are 8-12 of them that support each other, or DPS with the very few instances that kicks/CC > damage, even then they have more support from their peers to make up for their mishaps.  I've wiped many of raids during my growth as a main tank and I've saved a lot of wipes as well.

My best advice overall is accept when you messed up and own it.  If you do not, you will not grow from that situation.  Even if the fault was not directly your own, still apply the group failure to yourself and what YOU could have done to prevent the mistakes of others.  You do this on a daily basis, then the learning curve will be much easier to overcome.

[smokeit 26]

Also, if you die, you can always blame the healer or dps.

[Pwnana 1]

17 minutes ago, smokeit said:

Also, if you die, you can always blame the healer or dps.

Actually if you want to have a nice experience with the game I would refrain from blaming people for deaths/wipes, unless it's like hunter pulling with his pet constantly or something. I remember being in a group in Deadmines with a lot of new players and we wiped like 5 times after bad pulls / ship glitches but everyone kept their heads up, we finished the dungeon, and it turned out to be a pleasant dungeoning experience after all. In some other groups there has been intense blame game in the group after minor mistakes and eventually most of those groups have fallen apart due to the intense flaming and these times have almost always been exceptionally negative experiences for me.

The tank tends to die most often in groups especially at lower levels btw. Sometimes the hunter pet / druid / pala or whatever can still tank the remaining mobs and the group survives and rezzes you.

[smokeit 26]

Just now, Pwnana said:

Actually if you want to have a nice experience with the game I would refrain from blaming people for deaths/wipes, unless it's like hunter pulling with his pet constantly or something. I remember being in a group in Deadmines with a lot of new players and we wiped like 5 times after bad pulls / ship glitches but everyone kept their heads up, we finished the dungeon, and it turned out to be a pleasant dungeoning experience after all. In some other groups there has been intense blame game in the group after minor mistakes and eventually most of those groups have fallen apart due to the intense flaming and these times have almost always been exceptionally negative experiences for me.

The tank tends to die most often in groups especially at lower levels btw. Sometimes the hunter pet / druid / pala or whatever can still tank the remaining mobs and the group survives and rezzes you.

Oh I totally agree :). Just wanted to add a lame joke :p

[csant 3]

Our tank back in vanilla use to go afk against tank and spank bosses. LOL

 

Tanking can be hella fun, but you will be required to know what is going on all the time. Nothing worst then a tank that has no idea what is going on. =)

I have always healed and have been thinking of making a Tank alt. 

[Storfan 24]

Diffucult? - Nah. Challenging? - Yeah, more than other roles.

[Justme 9]

Hotkey sunder armor to mouse scroll and it only becomes a challenge when on a laptop

[Garun 9]

It might take you some time to get the hang of it, but it can be loads of fun when you do learn it. It will be much easier to learn if you do it with some friends or guildies first as pugs will often not give two shits about aggro which makes it quite harder.
 

[Ragingducks 9]

Tanking is great when you're doing it with people you know.

With strangers, most of the time is quite painful as most DPSers just care about their damage meters.