Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Where’re the Tanks?

I think the lack of tanks in my guild it affecting my brain. I clicked on a protection warrior in the armory and said to myself "That's hot".

I think if he was a gnome I would have actually yelled.

I am not a happy lock unless I can trust the tanks holding the HUMONGO FACE EATING BOSS.

You don’t want me to scrutinize you as a tank. Not that I have to tell you this… but I can be blunt. The intention is not to hurt feelings … I am told it does happen. I state an obvious issue that many are to nice to say. Feelings don’t have anything to do with a tank not using their cooldowns, moving out of things, or pointing the boss away from raid when needed.

As a raider, I leveled a warrior until she had the fundamentals of tanking. I did this years ago to understand how to be a better dps. I also have a bear. I read up on “How to Tank guides.” I need to understand the basic fundamentals of tanking so that I COULD be critical. Plus it has helped out my tanks.

If I can look this stuff up as a Lock and understand it on an Alt, I expect someone who says “I can tank” to actually tank. But can you actually tank? I can throttle my dps, but can you actually tank?

I can go on longer, but I forgot if there was a point. *grin*

3 comments:

  1. There are a couple answers as to where are the tanks, Hydra. The short one is that tanking is harder than dpsing or healing, so not everyone can do it well. You actually see a lot of 'wannabe tanks' out there, but you know how their tanking is: crap. It's easy to notice who is an offspec tank and just tanks to get a faster queue.

    The long answer is that as of the current state of the game, tanking can get very frustrating, especially (but not limited to) for newly-80 tanks. It's incredibly rare to find dps that isn't trigger happy in heroics; everyone starts AoEing packs of mobs when the tank is still pulling and placing them; all they worry is about Recount, instead of Omen. This is already difficult for a geared tank; it gets stupid when the dps is ICC25 geared and the tank is in heroic or Naxx gear. I speak this from personal experience: I have not tanked heroics for a month now. Learning tanks then? They get the least compassion. Everyone is always rushing and blaming them if they don't get their heroic done in 10-15 minutes, when instead they should work WITH the tanks to help them learn and improve. People don't realize that, the more rude they are to tanks, the less people wanting to tank will appear. That translates into longer queue times. Yay for dumb dps.

    Raid-wise, tanking is incredibly easier (at least for me), but some people are scared by the thought of tanking for people doing 10, 12, 15k dps. It's not a comforting thought, and again, can be really hard for new tanks. I think that, overall, the lack of patience and guidance is what makes tanks so rare in the game.

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  2. "everyone starts AoEing packs of mobs when the tank is still pulling and placing them; all they worry is about Recount, instead of Omen."

    Absolutely true, but you seldom see raid leaders or officers say :

    "Wow, your threat is low, we're gonna have to remove you from the raid...."

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  3. I know for me, i find it hard to tank heroics on my DK, even though I'm decently geared. For heroics i have a hard time generating AoE Threat really quick, i can generally do around 40k of threat opening up but then for 6-8 sec im sitting dead in the water... But Single target tanking for raids and such... lol i generally have around 14-20k TPS, so for a new tank startin off to not be the best is somewhat understandable... i dont remember where i was goin with this post but... ill post more when i remember.

    ~Jibb~

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