Tank like a girl

-This weekend, my guild had its first ever Icecrown Citadel raid. We’ve never been at the cutting edge of progression and this is like the closest we’ve ever been timeline-wise to starting progression fights. It’s pretty cool. It’s one of the things that I love about WotLK. It truly has made raiding accessible to everyone. We have been able to visit all raid content in the game so far, this would have been inconceivable in previous incarnations of WoW. Kudos!

Now, this first ICC-10 raid was a really different raid for me. It was the first raid I wasn’t going in as progression raid leader and main tank. I recently stepped down as guild officer, after 3.5 years. There were many contributing factors. First, I have no tact. I don’t know if this is a German trait or just me, so I fail at anything that in any form requires tact. When I think someone sucks, I will not sugarcoat it. I won’t be insulting, but I won’t pat on the head either. I will offer advice, but I won’t coddle. As I have posted many times, my guild is all girls. We have little to no drama, but we have a repeating pattern. Girls who have been in the guild for months will leave with absolutely no warning to officers. I don’t know if this is common in other guilds, but it really just happened time and again. Bam, leaving, and mentioning in their apps to other guilds that they did not like something or another about us. The lack of constructive criticism towards the most approachable group of people I have ever met anywhere is baffling. I drew my own conclusion from this: people fear the bad cop, people dislike talking to the blunt, most vocal officer. One of my (many) character flaws is that when I feel pressured and pushed, I will push back and block. But you know what? I was one of 7-8 active officers we had at the time. Even with personal beef against me, there were other nicer, kinder, more gentle people available to talk to, even if it was to complain about me. Never happened. So I bowed out, because I love my guild, and I don’t want to be that officer.

Not being an officer felt like a weight is off my shoulders. I still schedule raids and lead them in off-weeks, but more for my personal pleasure and not with a look at the big picture anymore. On my personal raid to-do list I want to do a Sartharion zerg, because Kadomi of the Nightfall sounds sexy, and possibly Ulduar hardmodes, which should likely be ezmode, but I still want to do them. For fun. After all, WoW is for fun! I am also raid assist for our current raid leader, trying to help her out in any form. We’re a good team, so I think we’ll do fantastically well.

I also did not go in as MT, as I mentioned. In fact, our first night in, I was healing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know most of you come here to read about tanking. But in all honesty I currently do not feel good about the state of the protection warrior in WotLK. I have tried to avoid making whine posts, but I think most protection warrior bloggers like Tarsus, Linedan and even Veneretio will probably agree with me that currently, we get the shaft. Icecrown Citadel, or maybe progression content in its current form is not made for warrior tanking. Our utility and toolkit is supposed to be the buffer for our traditionally low DPS output compared to all other tanks, but that’s not enough for me anymore. Speaking of the toolkit, how awesome will Warbringer be for us when it no longer breaks snares? Thanks, PvP, I love that nerf. Same with Shield Slam damage. Now, there is a sustained damage buff in the air, and it’s likely going to be Devastate getting another buff. This means we go back to Devastate spamming. Big toolkit. Yay.

Yesterday, I was offtank on our second day in Icecrown Citadel. Never have I felt more useless as a tank than in the Plagueworks. Our current MT is a Death Knight. She’s excellent, I adore her, and she does a great job. She could have solo-tanked most of the trash, I suppose. All those AoE pulls where I hopeless spammed Thunderclap and Cleave til I was out of rage and basically only my current target was on me, everything else on the DK. Or on Precious, with all her zombies, where the same situation occurred that she was doing all the AoE tanking and all I could do was taunt Precious off at the right time. And let’s not speak of Festergut. Dead, dead, dead. Here I was, feeling helpless in battle stance, keeping sunders up, keeping Rend up, keeping debuffs up, pretending I was able to make any DPS contribution. I am not able to say that warriors do not have issues. We do. Please fix us, Blizzard. I’ll be on my ‘main alt’ in the meantime, my shaman.

Enough with the whining. Let’s hear some good stuff!

First off, our raid group is awesome. I can’t say that often enough. They bring it. On Saturday, our first ever visit, we went in and one-shot Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper and Gunship Battle. I had a blast healing, and got rewarded for my efforts, with the very sweet Midnight Sun.

Deathbringer Saurfang turned out to be our stumbling block for the night, after an 8% wipe. As we 2-healed this, I felt this was our first real healing challenge, holy crap. Healing a clothie with a Mark is really intense. Our two Blood Beast kiters got some good practice in, and we went back yesterday afternoon. That time I was tanking, not healing, and it was a very amazing one-shot. It was a beauty to behold. Our kiters did a fabulous job, Blood Beasts went down smoothly, our tank transitions were very well timed, and we got our first Mark at about 30%, much later than the day before. I love learning encounters and then kicking their ass.

We moved on to Plagueworks and banged our heads against Festergut for the rest of the day. All in all, I think our raid DPS just isn’t there yet. We need every DPSer to break 4k or it just won’t happen, not in such a tightly tuned encounter. But we did not have everyone break 4k, and those who did weren’t so far above that they compensated for the rest. We cannot carry. I hope that will be in every raider’s head for next time. We cannot carry any DPS. It’s A-game or we will only bring home a huge repair bill. I keep hearing the argument that tank DPS doesn’t decide an encounter, but 100, 200, 500 DPS, it still might mean you beat that enrage timer. I think next time we might have more success with a more execution based encounter as Rotface while we try to solve our DPS problems.

I really did enjoy what I have seen so far, despite my personal disappointment with my own tanking capabilities there. Trash mobs! Traps on the ground to watch for! Rep for killing mobs! You have no idea how excited people were when they got to buy their rings, just like in the good ol’ days of Karazhan raids. Unfortunately I am sitting at 50% rep towards friendly on both my characters now. Next time! The encounters in Lower Spire were all good fun, and especially Gunship Battle made people happy. The Plagueworks immediately set the bar with a lot higher difficulty, starting with the Vrykul trash pulls. It will feel amazing to clear it.

As an aside, I should note that my 24″ monitor I got for Christmas still makes me so freaking happy, and I am in love with my raid UI. Witness my screenshot of the Saurfang kill. Now only try to ignore the stupid quest tracker on the right. Really need to find a way to disable it in raids. I need to write another addon spotlight, to sing the praises for DXE. Deus Vox Encounters is fantastic, I love it, I fully endorse it. Must post about it soon.

There aren’t really a multitude of addons out there that are specifically written to assist tanks. Today’s reviewed addons however are most helpful if you are a tank. I have been using them extensively for a month or two, and I fully endorse them. Originally I had wanted to make a companion video, but that’ll have to wait for another time.

Step 1: to use this, you need to run with name plates turned on. Press ‘V’ and enjoy seeing nameplates over the head of all neutral and hostile mobs.

Step 2: Install Tidy Plates, which is basically an addon to skin the default nameplates Blizzard gives us. TP’s default skin is extreme fug though, if you ask me.

Step 3: Install Tidy Plates: Threat as theme for Tidy Plates. You need to have both TP and the threat module enabled. Runs out of the box, but can be adjusted. You can turn off display of nameplates for neutral mobs, e.g., or adjust size, opacity for the various threat levels.

What does the skin do overall? It makes the nameplates respond based on the amount of threat you have on the mob. If you set the addon in tank mode, nameplates of mobs you currently do not have aggro on, are large and red. Mobs that are aggro’d on you but another player is just about to snag them off you will be framed in yellow. Mobs you hold safely have green frames. The less threat you have, the bigger the nameplate. Especially in AoE situations, this makes actually locating stray mobs very easy, and you can just click on the large nameplate for targetting. You can freely define the threat threshholds that will have the color and behavior of the nameplates change.

In my example screenshot, I have full control over the pull, all mobs are on me. I managed to frontload a lot of threat, the closest party member is only sitting at 4% threat. All green, all safe. But the less threat you have, the bigger the nameplate would be.

 
If you’re strugging in larger pulls, this is a fabulous visual aid, and I wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. On top of that, it has a low memory footprint and won’t tax your resources. Give it a spin or discuss it on Tankspot, as the author is specifically looking for feedback from us.

P.S.: if you are not of the tanking kind, the nameplates have a DPS mode, which means they would be all green for you, if your threat level was safe, and go yellow as soon as you gain threat on the tank to your personal warn level. Big and red when you have pulled aggro. Could be useful, right?

I got a 24″ widescreen monitor for Christmas, and it’s been since TBC since I discussed my whole UI, so expect a dissecting the UI post very soon.

P.S.S.: Another player who tanks like a girl made a demo video. Enjoy, and thanks for the link, Gabbu. Another review can be found over at Pwnwear.

I know that not all of my readers are predominantly tanks. Maybe some of you DPS will read this, or even healers (because it applies to some of you too).

• Read ‘Do not spank the tank‘ over in the WoW European forums. Credit for discovering this gem goes to Heartbourne over at Project Lore.
• When you start running an instance, set your tank as /focus.
• If you are melee DPS, create a macro to assist the tank. It will start auto-attacking the current target of your focus, which should be the tank:
  
#showtooltip Attack
/target [target=focustarget, harm, nodead]
/startattack
• If you are caster DPS, change the macro to:
  
/target [target=focustarget, harm, nodead]


Why the macro, you might ask? Just to provide some kind of assistance to the tank. I play DPS as well, and I always try to assist the tank and not pull aggro inevitably. Based on my personal experience, many people don’t care about marked targets, kill order or /assisting, and this macro would be such an easy fix for a lot of people. Try it, you damage dealers. It won’t hurt anyone, and will not kill your DPS.

As personal appeal: Please do not pull for the tank.

I have seen healers, mages, death knights, everyone and their brother pull. If the pace is too slow, say so, without using the gogogo variation.

Alternatively, I think tanks need to be more resolute, stop taunting off people who pull or kick them. I know I will, because it gets tiresome.