World of Warcraft

[Arakasi]

Some of your points Kal just don't make much sense. Deal with threat? Really? Sure maybe it is an issue if I'm tanking an entire pack in Stonecore, but in any raid or boss encounter single target threat is completely and utterly meaningless. I could do abilities half the amount I currently do and would still hold agro over the DPS. Right now tanks have huge threat leads in any single target encounter. It's why DKs are annoyed at our prime tanking glyphs. They're utterly useless for tanking.

I completely disagree with you about control. When you don't have control it makes your job harder. What is it easier to do. Control things yourself or react to what other people do? Lets put this in sports terms for an example. In cold/icy conditions in football surprisingly it is defenders that have a harder time than the offense in passing situations. Because the offense knows where things are going. The defense can only react to what the offense does. To draw it back to WoW, when I have to drag one of the golems on Omnotron around because I just got poison protocol on me I can just move from the one mob. If there is a dps having to move to keep up with me, they need to be cognizant of what poison add is on them and make sure they keep distance from it while still keeping dps on the boss. Like I said before many abilities that bosses use can not target the tank, so in many ways the tanks have an easier job.

Also as the tank I can do some things that dps just can't get away with. I can willingly move a mob through an AOE situation because 1) I am always getting heals and 2) I have powerful defensive cooldowns I can blow for such a purpose. Most dps don't have that luxury.

And yes most boss fights are stand here and look pretty and manage your cooldowns. Threat is pretty much meaningless. I think you're overstating the difficulty of playing a tank right now, and I've played all 4 classes of it at various points in my WoW life.

[Arakasi]

Start tanking heroic raid encounters. Or keep tanking farther into the expansion when threat become more of an issue as DPS catches up to the it.

Tank threat gen is always crazy high at the start of an expac and gets tougher to maintain as it goes on. You're using anecdotal advice up against long time tanks and expecting anyone to recognize your short term experience as a strong argument.

Maybe this will change in some later patch, but right now for DKs single target threat is very much ahead of any dps. Due to DRW glyph there is really no chance a single player can pull agro off a DK right now. And both the DK communities I take part in (pwnwear and EJ) agree on that.

Yes I agree tanks have more responsibility. They do get blamed if things get fucked up. But pressure and responsibility does not equal difficulty. I think this is a deliberate design decision. They know that tanks have to do more of the leading and control more of the fight, so they deliberately make them easier to play then dps classes.

A friend of mine had a good post about a month back on the state of heroics.

99% of the time the DPS screws shit up. In my opinion, tanking is the easiest job of the expansion when it comes to 5-mans. The thing about tanking is it generally has group leading built into it, which is probably the hardest job of the expansion when you're dealing with PuGs.

As a tank now, you are required to keep aggro on one single mob. AoE threat isn't strong enough to keep aggro on a secondary target that's being single-targetted down. So the tank focuses on one mob at a time pretty much. If the group is AoEing, then it's relatively easy to keep aggro on the pack.

So you tank one mob, and DPS need to find out what mob you're tanking and hit it. This means responsibility is on the DPS to not fuck up and rip aggro off a secondary target.

Past that, there's not a lot to talk about. There's few technically challenging tank fights right now. At least no more challenging than melee dps.

In terms of DPS however, you need to avoid shit because you're not getting heals. (Even the tank has more leeway on taking a tick of fire because he's constantly getting healed). You also need to be able to do enough damage to not let the fight drag on too long and allow people to fuck up, or allow the healer to run out of mana. The DPS rotations are considerably more complicated than the tank rotations, and take a lot more attention.

You've also got the job of CCing shit, which is just another think to keep track of.

As a healer, you've got to do a lot of decision making based on mana conservation and generally not letting people die. When the DPS is performing well, this means the healer can focus on efficiently healing the tank and patching up unavoidable damage on non-tanks. When the DPS is standing in fire, the healer gets spread very thin and either lets people die, or runs OOM quickly.

So basically the scenario is this:

Tanking is easy, unless your DPS are retarded and make it hard.

Healing is easy, unless your DPS are retarded and make it hard.

DPS is reasonably complicated. But it has been traditionally easy, and players are lazy.

The other issue is that whenever the DPS fuck up, the blame gets shifted to the tank or healer. So as a tank, you're in a situation where when you queue up, you're going to be thrown into a group with 3 potentially retarded DPS that are going to make your life a nightmare, and then bitch about how terrible the tank is. However, the tank gets instant queues because nobody wants to be that guy, so they manage to finish with their gear pretty quickly. So once they've got their heroic gear, and their CP for the day, why would they queue again and deal with the retarded DPS.

Now that's not to say a tank that gets killed by coroborus shouldn't be made fun of, but a DPS gets one-shot too, and you blame the tank.

As a tank, I'm frequently dealing with players who deal like 4k DPS, stand in fire, then blame the healer when they run OOM. Or DPS who rip aggro off some random target, get raped, then blame the tank. I really do think that DPS has the hardest job right now. I also think that tanks have the worst job when playing with PuGs. Playing with friends I think tanks are just great, and DPS has low queue times.

But for playing with a PuG, I'd rather be DPS, because I often feel I can make a bigger difference in the outcome of a battle as a good DPS than a good tank. The only issue is the queue times suck dick because every mouthbreather is playing a DPS, and then fucking over the group by being retarded and causing the tanks to drop in frustration.

So, my next goal is to actually become good at DPS and not die in fire or stand under giant falling boulders.

[Kalbear]

Also, what you're basically saying is "DPS needs to improve first, for tanks to have any work to do at all". That sounds awfully like what I've been preaching in my last few posts.

You didn't read them correctly then, because that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that tanks have to improve first before DPS matters at all. I'm saying that if you don't have tanks and healers improving DPS doing amazingly just doesn't matter.

Some of your points Kal just don't make much sense. Deal with threat? Really? Sure maybe it is an issue if I'm tanking an entire pack in Stonecore, but in any raid or boss encounter single target threat is completely and utterly meaningless.

Okay, to clarify Arakasi: when I say 'heroics' I mean heroic mode raids.

Heroics are not the challenge I care about. Unless you're doing them wildly undergeared, they don't matter. I hope that helps some. I'll use 'hard mode' from now on, as it's probably more confusing otherwise. Sorry!

In some hard modes threat is decidedly not meaningless. In a few raid encounters it's not meaningless. Sustained threat is pretty trivial right now, I agree (though on the hardest of hard that's not exactly true) but burst threat is pretty important and is an issue. What's more of an issue is doing good damage; a tank's damage output is actually quite high and can be higher than many DPS, especially on multimob fights. Knowing how to do good damage as a tank is an important skill now.

I completely disagree with you about control. When you don't have control it makes your job harder.

Sure, it makes you job harder - but again, it only makes it harder because of a bad tank. A good tank either doesn't get into that situation or communicates in such a way that it's not an issue or proactively plans for those things. Offense/defense is an interesting analogy; I'll give another: who has a harder job in a car, the driver or the passenger?

Also as the tank I can do some things that dps just can't get away with. I can willingly move a mob through an AOE situation because 1) I am always getting heals and 2) I have powerful defensive cooldowns I can blow for such a purpose. Most dps don't have that luxury.

Okay, but you have the luxury of just not doing anything and it not mattering for a while. A tank doesn't have that luxury. A tank can't just go running to the corner of the room. What a tank does affects the raid.

And yes most boss fights are stand here and look pretty and manage your cooldowns. Threat is pretty much meaningless. I think you're overstating the difficulty of playing a tank right now, and I've played all 4 classes of it at various points in my WoW life.

Let's go through the encounters.

Omnotron: definitely not 'just stand there'.

Magmaw: mostly standing, a bit of running out of things, but the mob is rooted.

Chim: all stand there all the time. Yawn

Maloriak: lots of movement. even moreso if you're the add tank.

Atramedes: more movement, especially if you're on gong duty

Nefarian: there's kiting, multi-add pickup, mob switching, multiple phases...not 'just stand there'

Conclave: more kiting, more avoiding things, lots of movement. If you don't tank this well you basically remove melee DPS from the equation, as they can't attack due to all the stuff on the ground.

Al'akir - fairly easy as far as tanking goes, though there's lots of personal movement

Halfus: mostly stationary, though some add pickup

Theralion & Valiona: tons of kiting, picking up adds and moving things

Council: even more kiting, picking up adds and moving around and through things

Cho'Gall: if you're on the boss: boring as hell. If you're on the adds: scary as hell.

Now that's normal mode. Of those 4 are stationary for one tank.

And here's the thing - even if you're saying that it's harder for DPS to dps on stationary fights compared to a tank's job, it's still trivial. Ooh, you have to pay attention to which buttons to press! Which of 1-4 will I press now! Damn, that sounds exhausting; it's like the worst Simon Says game ever. I figured people were talking about fights when the difficulty is actually hard.

But for playing with a PuG, I'd rather be DPS, because I often feel I can make a bigger difference in the outcome of a battle as a good DPS than a good tank. The only issue is the queue times suck dick because every mouthbreather is playing a DPS, and then fucking over the group by being retarded and causing the tanks to drop in frustration

See, they'd really rather be a healer; healers get to be super heroic mode. A good DPS doesn't matter on most 5-mans as a difference maker. They can be shit hot but as long as their tank sucks or is meh and makes mistakes they will simply fail. There's just not that much you can do to affect the encounter unless the tank does their job well. THEN you can do something good and it might matter. But most of the time? Not that big a deal.

Finally:

Yes I agree tanks have more responsibility. They do get blamed if things get fucked up. But pressure and responsibility does not equal difficulty.

I just don't understand that at all. Pressure and responsibility don't equal it? People get paid a hell of a lot of money to be under pressure or be the responsible one. That's why (to go back to football) the coaches get the big money and the QB gets the big money. I guess you could say that if the decision is simple then the pressure and responsibility is not that difficult, but that's being pretty charitable. And more importantly, it's not that relevant since the decisions that tanks have to make are not trivial quite often.

[Arakasi]

Sure, it makes you job harder - but again, it only makes it harder because of a bad tank. A good tank either doesn't get into that situation or communicates in such a way that it's not an issue or proactively plans for those things. Offense/defense is an interesting analogy; I'll give another: who has a harder job in a car, the driver or the passenger?

Don't think that analogy holds. The passenger of a car has no active role in what the purpose of the car is (getting somewhere). My point is it is always easier to be the one acting than the one reacting. The tank has to react to the mobs, but the dps has to react to both the mobs and the tank. Not so much an issue I think for ranged dps, but for melee it is an issue.

And here's the thing - even if you're saying that it's harder for DPS to dps on stationary fights compared to a tank's job, it's still trivial. Ooh, you have to pay attention to which buttons to press! Which of 1-4 will I press now! Damn, that sounds exhausting; it's like the worst Simon Says game ever. I figured people were talking about fights when the difficulty is actually hard.

It takes away from situational awareness, and since dps have to already react to stuff it makes it harder, especially for classes with involved rotations where they're waiting on timers/etc.

See, they'd really rather be a healer; healers get to be super heroic mode. A good DPS doesn't matter on most 5-mans as a difference maker. They can be shit hot but as long as their tank sucks or is meh and makes mistakes they will simply fail. There's just not that much you can do to affect the encounter unless the tank does their job well. THEN you can do something good and it might matter. But most of the time? Not that big a deal.

That's because nearly all heroic bosses have no enrages or dps checks. Of course raids do, but the only boss where dps not doing enough output will mess you is last boss in GB. Every other 5 man fight in the game doesn't require that.

Finally:

I just don't understand that at all. Pressure and responsibility don't equal it? People get paid a hell of a lot of money to be under pressure or be the responsible one. That's why (to go back to football) the coaches get the big money and the QB gets the big money. I guess you could say that if the decision is simple then the pressure and responsibility is not that difficult, but that's being pretty charitable. And more importantly, it's not that relevant since the decisions that tanks have to make are not trivial quite often.

I dunno about this. You talk about Mike McCarthy and how badly he makes on field decisions. You seem to believe those decisions aren't that hard to make. I think you said you'd volunteer to do it on the cheap. Just because he's responsible doesn't make the task hard. Was using the shield block ability to stop shear on Illidan hard? Not really, but if the tank didn't do it it was a wipe. Tanks do get big things like that to deal with. Use your big cooldown here or die and so on. But the tradeoff they get is rotations and abilities that are simpler to do.

[Inigima]

This argument is dumb as hell. Every role has a job to do, more so now than at any time since I started playing two years ago (as opposed to Wrath 5mans where you could basically carry a group yourself).

I don't think Kalbear is suggesting that DPS don't matter -- he's objecting to the idea that tanks and healers don't have a lot on their plate, and he is absolutely right. If you think your tanks and healers aren't working hard in Cataclysm, you are a blithering retard too stupid to deserve oxygen.

[Kalbear]

I don't think Kalbear is suggesting that DPS don't matter -- he's objecting to the idea that tanks and healers don't have a lot on their plate, and he is absolutely right. If you think your tanks and healers aren't working hard in Cataclysm, you are a blithering retard too stupid to deserve oxygen.

+1

Don't think that analogy holds. The passenger of a car has no active role in what the purpose of the car is (getting somewhere). My point is it is always easier to be the one acting than the one reacting. The tank has to react to the mobs, but the dps has to react to both the mobs and the tank. Not so much an issue I think for ranged dps, but for melee it is an issue.

And my point is that there is some difficulty in being the decision maker. Yes, the passenger may have to do some pretty heroic things if their driver drives off the cliff - like every single player in Halo, for instance. And that's some skill right there. But that's not the norm, and that's a case where the tank was dumb. Yes, if the tank is dumb the DPS have a hard time. In raids, if the tank is dumb the DPS don't have a time.

It takes away from situational awareness, and since dps have to already react to stuff it makes it harder, especially for classes with involved rotations where they're waiting on timers/etc.

Everything a DPS has to react to a tank does too. And they have to react not just by moving, but moving in such a way that it doesn't LoS them from healing, doesn't range them from DPS and doesn't position melee in a bad spot.

DPS have to...not stand in fire.

Yes, the ease of not having to react to others is nice. It's pretty hugely counteracted by having to think about all of these things proactively instead.

I dunno about this. You talk about Mike McCarthy and how badly he makes on field decisions. You seem to believe those decisions aren't that hard to make. I think you said you'd volunteer to do it on the cheap. Just because he's responsible doesn't make the task hard. Was using the shield block ability to stop shear on Illidan hard? Not really, but if the tank didn't do it it was a wipe. Tanks do get big things like that to deal with. Use your big cooldown here or die and so on. But the tradeoff they get is rotations and abilities that are simpler to do.

I said I'd volunteer to decide whether to challenge replays based on their success rate. That isn't hard at all. That analogy is akin to a DPS volunteering to press the shield wall button when it's needed. Pressing one button when a timer goes on is one small aspect of tanking. It's not the hardest one, and it's not particularly hard. WotLk sucked, tanking wise, because all CDs were mandated by external events on a specific timer. It used to be that a good tank was decided largely by how well they could deal with personal survival and could either proactively plan on it or choose to react depending. Cata is getting back to that model, somewhat, but in the end that's not what makes tanking hard.

What makes tanking hard to do well is that your primary controls are WASD and you're steering a giant freight train with them - a freight train that has latency. And you have to do it backwards while making sure the rest of the raid has good time on target, good LoS to you, good escape routes for the next event, good phase change situations, good ability to AoE mobs, etc. That's what makes it hard - that you've got this annoyingly difficult thing to do with almost no useful tools to accomplish it. NeedToKnow doesn't tell you where to put yourself and how to move so that the boss nicely goes from point a to point b. Doing that while maintaining a good damage rotation, keeping an eye on your CDs, making sure healer mana is reasonable, making sure you're not getting RNGed, and often leading the fight or coordinating with other tanks? Is hard.

And most of the time that's harder than what any DpS has to do. More than that, most of the time it's more pressure than anything a DPS has to do.

Really, the mechanical abilities are the least difficult part of the game. If that's your only definition of difficulty, WoW is by definition hugely easy. You have seconds to press one button or another. You have mods that tell you 'push this button now'. You have built-in power auras that state 'hey, you can do this awesome thing!' It's not quite the castrandom macro that enh shamans had or the castseequence macro that hunters had in TBC, but it's still very, very easy to do. It's harder for DPS to do shithot DPS than it is for a tank to do shithot DPS.

Both are still really simple.

[TerraPrime]

In a 5 man group, the tank has to react to the actions of 4 other people. I need to watch threat spikes from DPS, and I need to keep my healer protected from adds that spawn.

In a 5 man group, the healer has to react to 4 other people. I watch tank health and my own health first, but I also need to triage dmg to DPS and decide whom and how to heal.

In a 5 man group, the DPS has to react to 2 other people -the tank and the healer. As DPS, I watch my threat so I don't yank the mob off the tank. I also keep an eye out for the healer, especially in fights where lot of tiny adds spawn at once (like last boss in Stonecore), so I can be sure to save the healer first before damaging the boss.

Of course, everyone then also reacts to the game content.

Of the 3 roles, I find healing the most challenging and variable.

[Mack Kilimaro]

Stepping outside of this current role pissing contest...

First raid night of the week. We'd gotten Valiona and Theralion back on Sunday, so tonight we killed all the five bosses we'd done before (Magmaw, Omnitron, Maloriak, then Halfus and V&T) and had about an hour left, so we poked in on Twilight Ascendants. Nobody really thought we'd get it, but it turned out we were pretty keyed in. Had a couple of deaths in the earth/air phase due to lightning rod problems, but almost nobody got killed by the Quake/Shock stuff. So, we were consistently making it to the last phase, had a couple of wipes because we didn't do the greatest killing the pairs together, and downed the encounter on the last attempt of the night. Fun fight. Neat new mechanics in there and it felt like we did a great job adapting to the challenge to down them.

So, half the encounters down, just on normal, of course, but that's pretty nice for us. Sunday we have the whole night on Cho'gall. It'll be awesome if we can get him down, but, I remember end bosses and you don't usually get them the first week you see them. Still, you never know!

[jurble]

I like Ascendant Council, I just spend p2 running around in circles grabbing buffs. I mean, theoretically, as a rogue, I can feint and cloak, and survive the mass AoE without taking any damage, but usually, if I try dpsing during p2, my guy (Terrastra) ends up at like 25% way too far ahead of the other dude, so I just circlejerk for like a minute and a half. I don't even know why, in p1, they both die at even rates. I think some of our ranged are still retarded and attack Terrastra instead of Aerion.

Doesn't matter, we haven't wiped on that boss in a month. I did 20k dps in Baradin Hold yesterday, a good 2.5k about the next highest guy. Went to WoL to see where that puts me for 25 man. I proceeded to weep. wtb heroic gear.

[Inigima]

We've tried Ascendants' Council a few times but our tanks keep biting it. Not sure what the problem is. We think one of our healers may be doing what he feels like doing instead of concentrating on his healing assignment.

[Mack Kilimaro]

Which tank is croaking? If you're talking P1, you may be having the Feludius tank not getting far enough away from Glaciate (or not moving at all). If the Ignacious tank is dying, then yeah, that's probably healer fail.

Tank damage didn't feel intense at all in the earth/air part, to me. Just had to watch out for the chain lightning stuff and make sure you had the right buff to resist the quake/shock.

[Kalbear]

I like Ascendant Council, I just spend p2 running around in circles grabbing buffs. I mean, theoretically, as a rogue, I can feint and cloak, and survive the mass AoE without taking any damage, but usually, if I try dpsing during p2, my guy (Terrastra) ends up at like 25% way too far ahead of the other dude, so I just circlejerk for like a minute and a half. I

In P2 the whole raid is supposed to target swap. Swap to terrastra when the other teleports away, swap back to break the shield. Repeat.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

I have to agree with TP and Kalbear, and I am presently DPS. In Vanilla through WotLK, I primarily played tanks and healers. With my druid in Cata, I wanted to try something new, so I leveled as balance. In 5-man and heroics, DPS is much easier than tank or healing. As Kalbear said, your job is to not stand in the fire. A job that's also shared by tanks and healers too. It's quite clear from my own experience as well as watching from a bird's eye view as DPS, that healers and tanks often have the best grasp of fights, including positioning and the boss mechanics.

That said, I have found being a balance druid quite rewarding, as in many (if not all) 5-man dungeons and heroics I've done so far, I have provided party-saving back-up healing. This usually means healing either the tank or healer, though also it includes battle-rezzing the dps (who stood in the fire). I am also resto dual-specced, but I have not done too much main healing in Catalcysm yet. However, I miss tanking. I was a paladin tank before, and I'm not sure how druid tanks fare in Cataclysm. (I have not yet seen a druid tank in upper level dungeons and heroics.) Also there is the matter of gathering a new item set.

[Kalbear]

As of right this second druid tanks are kinda scary weird. They suck hard on multi-mob fights compared to the other tanks, mostly because of how savage defense (their block) doesn't work well with multiple mobs. They take about as much magic damage as the rest. Their threat is very poor unless they're being beaten on hard, especially when dealing witth multiple mobs. Their bleeds are actually reduced by armor (yay bugs!) and they just got another threat nerf.

However, they have a stupid amount of armor now. Just silly. And they have a higher amount of avoidance than other tanks. Combine the two and you have the best tank against physical damage that exists currently, and it's not even close. Yes, other tanks will take smoother damage due to block, but a druid will consistently take less overall damage - both on an unblocked hit and over the course of a fight. Add to this that they have probably the best overall cooldown set of the tanks and they're very, very good.

[jurble]

In P2 the whole raid is supposed to target swap. Swap to terrastra when the other teleports away, swap back to break the shield. Repeat.

There's a shield? wat.

Honestly, I have no idea what goes in p2.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

Thanks, Kal. As I said, I've greatly enjoyed my balance druid. It was probably some of the most fun I've ever had leveling a class. I like the gear synergy between balance and resto. But I still miss the rush and the thrill of tanking. I may just need to level another druid. Decisions, decisions. <_<

[Kalbear]

It's the ability harden skin - which increases the damage he does by 100% and reduces damage taken by 50% - but as soon as the shield breaks you do all that damaage back. The normal thing to do is to dps terrastra down while the shield is up so that your tank doesn't take stupid damage, then swap to the air one while they're in range. When the air guy teleports away, go back to terrastra. That should keep dps mostly balanced.

Another thing to do is have melee on terrastra and ranged on the air guy; the problem is that it's hard to spread correctly and you'll get in a lot of people's way, plus this can cause some imbalances.

[Daeric]

So, half the encounters down, just on normal, of course, but that's pretty nice for us. Sunday we have the whole night on Cho'gall. It'll be awesome if we can get him down, but, I remember end bosses and you don't usually get them the first week you see them. Still, you never know!

Tbh cho is fairly easy, you just need to avoid mistakes via adds that will destroy your corruption in phase 1, we had problems with the small adds for awhile as it turned out that the mages we had on them were not spell hit capped and where missing the nova's now and then. Phase 2 really is just a burn phase while dealing with eye stalks.

[Inigima]

It's our Ignacious tank dying, so yeah, we'll see what happens without that guy this week.

[Minaku]

We've tried Ascendants' Council a few times but our tanks keep biting it. Not sure what the problem is. We think one of our healers may be doing what he feels like doing instead of concentrating on his healing assignment.

It's likely our healers, as the one time we hit P2 was the attempt right after I told him to quit dicking around. He still raid healed, though.