Comments on: [Cataclysm] A few thoughts on tanking and instances

By: nikodhemus

nikodhemus — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:07:45 +0000

I haven’t done any tanking in Cata dungeons yet, but I’ve recently done Blood Furnace (TBC) on my Warrior tank, and things are definately tougher tho I don’t think its necessarily for the worst either. AOE Threat is tougher, I can barely manage 3 mobs anymore, and 4 or 5 I am constantly running after strays. Rage generation is much better, i really have to try to get below about 50%. Damage mitigation is easier, as I have quicker cool downs and i have a heal button now which helps! Much of this can likely be attributed to me primarily playing with PUGS, and them not understanding focus fire or CC. I take it as a chance to relearn to play a game that I already enjoy!

By: spinks

spinks — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:55:09 +0000

I’d agree with Celendus in that the main difference I have found so far is needing to work with crowd control (like, I forgot that glyphed revenge has a cleave effect and broke CC by mistake on one pull) and being way more careful with the trash pulls.

It’s because I find marking up 4 mobs per pull to be such a headache that I started encouraging CC to mark their own.

Tanking itself hasn’t really changed in any major way that I can see. But it was always very dependent on the encounters and that’s still the case. There’s a good variety of types of encounter in the instances I have seen.

Gearing is also changing. You can’t really gear for stacking stamina since all gear has it anyway so you effectively do have more choices but it’ll still boil down between gearing for threat vs gearing for mitigation.

My suspicion is that tanks now will all be able to use their mastery to get more mitigation vs physical attacks so that Blizzard can use spell attacks as their “omg you can’t just tank though this and hope the healer can handle it!!!”

By: ZombiePirate

ZombiePirate — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:04:10 +0000

In my experience marking a kill target doesn’t make a difference, half the DPS will still AOE or go for a target other than the skull so their DPS on recount doesn’t suffer….

By: Celendus

Celendus — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:55:46 +0000

@Jeffo:

As a Paladin tank, I’ve noticed the following:

- We have more cooldowns than ever, and many of them are small (~20%). They’re also now on short cooldowns. There’s no reason not to use cooldowns on trash.

- Threat doesn’t seem hard unless I get chain stunned or something. AoE tanking is limited mostly by healer mana, but this may change as DPS gets more gear.

- Working around CC is of course different than hulk-smash-aoe-tanking, but it’s coming back to me. It does require finesse.

By: jeffo

jeffo — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:15:52 +0000

Spinks, I have a question for you as a tank (after the lengthy preambe).

In my experience so far, healers are extremely busy, and we have our hands full with managing damage and mana.

DPS seem to be more engaged in dungeons, now that they have responsibilities (i.e., CC) besides NUKE, watch Omen, NUKE MORE.

The game has changed quite a bit for healers, and it seems to have changed a bit for dps. What about tanks? Are you finding that the game has changed at all, and if so, is it for the better?

By: Arbitrary

Arbitrary — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:46:18 +0000

My first PuG instance run in Cataclysm had a hybrid in and they offered to help with healing on at least one boss. Was happy to take the help, even if they didn’t switch to full healing to do it.

By: spinks

spinks — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:22:13 +0000

Good point. And I shouldn’t have skipped that because I’ve been dps in PUGs where I had to ask the tank to mark a kill order.

Usually the best way to do this is let the CC mark their targets first and then mark up whatever is left, I find. But once we know the instances better, it’ll be easier to know which mobs to CC and which to kill fast. (I suspect Blizzard have designed it so that you have some options though, depending on which CC is in your group.)

By: Masith

Masith — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:13:50 +0000

Good general points but id add one that a large number of tanks don’t do and in my opinion is actually the very important.

Mark a kill target.

The amount of times I’m in a pug the tank carefully marks two cc targets and the other 3 mobs all seem to die at the same time. I know dps should use the tanks target but this can’t be relied upon and it really is the work of seconds to put up a skull to kill.