Raid Tanking 101

The purpose for this thread is to help out new tanks to the fun and the challenges associated with tanking raids. I am aiming this specifically at those that want to tank in ToC and ICC as I am assuming at least basic knowledge of your class from tanking 5 mans.

Topics

• Attitude
• Mods
• Interface Setup
• Communication
• Positioning
• Situational Awareness
• Reaction
• Knowledge of Encounters

I look forward to your comments and corrections.

Attitude
Attitude is my first topic and for a very important reason, it makes or breaks a tank. A tank has to be a go getter that is confident in their abilities. A tank wants their shot at the boss or wants to see how many adds they can control and live. A tank doesn't hesitate to act at a moments notice but is not foolhardy. A tank can take it on the chin both from the boss and from the raid leader. A tank looks at large repair bills as a badge of honor and not a burden. A tank is a team player.

Mods
Mods have become an integral requirement for raiding. There are several must have mods for raiding in general but I will also cover a few alternative uses for mods.

• Deadly Boss Mods/Big Wigs - Relate key events within an encounter including count down timers and warnings
• Grid/Grid Mana Bars - Although usually reserved for healers, it gives tanks three important pieces of information when setup. Who has agro, who is at low health and what is your healers dps/mana levels at
• Omen - The defacto threat meter
• Recount - There is no tanking stat to watch out for but there is a wealth of information available in this mod. Besides being able to see top DPS and heals, the death log is a great resource for seeing what happened the last couple of seconds before your death.
• Tankpoints/RatingBuster - Useful for weighting gear upgrades.
• TrinketMenu - Useful as it displays your current trinkets as clickable buttons and allows for easy switching between different trinket sets
• Buff Mod - I like CT Buff Mod for consolidating buffs/debuffs and cleaning up my interface. Also useful for raid leaders as it allows you to hover over a buff and see who is missing it
• Player/Target/Target of Target/Focus/Party/Raid Frames - There are several mods that manage these important frames. Xperl and Pitbull are popular ones. They allow you to greatly enhance these frames by adding information not available and by giving settings that are not available within the default Blizzard UI
• Class Specific addons - PallyPower is a must for a tankadin as it lets you know if you have the wrong aura setup, if righteous fury is not enabled or if you are missing your assigned blessings. Mods that help you manage cooldowns are great too

Interface Setup
The default interface provided by Blizzard is not optimal for raid tanking. A tanking interface should accomplish the following.

• Provide Player, Target, Target of Target, Focus and Focus Target in a central location:
  
  
• Debuff setup which is even more important with all the tank switching that happens in ICC and ToC:
  
  
• Consolidate information:
  
  

Communication
If you haven't already, /join redtanks

Vent with a microphone. To date we have only had one tank that could pull off not using voice communication for raiding and that was because he was deaf. He excelled in every other key tanking ability along with being able to type like he had the paragraphs macro'd already.

Do communicate with the tanking team. Who is MT, OT and what taunt rotation are things to communicate in redtanks. Use vent or custom macros to let others know when you have used a cooldown.

Positioning
One of the main duties of a tank is to position the boss/mobs while they are tanking. The typical setup is face the target away from the raid. The reasoning behind this is you are the first one to engage the target which means you typically are ahead of the DPS in reaching the target. So do them a favor and rotate the target so as to quickly position the rear of the boss to the raid so DPS has less movement.

Tanks must know how to strafe tank to position a target. This is the art of moving sideways while still facing the target so as to not give the target free hits to your backside but still allowing you to build threat with frontal attacks.

Tanks must assist the raid in reducing AOE damage. This is usually done by moving the target out of the area of the goo/rune/bomb/cloud/void/yada yada yada.

Tanks must be aware of cleaves/breaths/cone attacks when moving a mob. These abilities are only used on the targets facing the boss, so make sure to keep the boss facing away from the raid at all times.

Situational Awareness
The art of knowing what to do. It comes with experience. For instance, knowing that a DPS/healer is to far outside of the group and is going to pull patrolling adds. It is knowing to jump on the boss when their shield is down to 6% yet the next wave of adds will not spawn for another 20 seconds. Its popping trinkets/cooldowns when a boss is about to hit hard.

Reaction
The ability to adjust quickly to a changing environment. Having a fast stable connection and powerful PC favors faster reaction times. If your game play is choppy, you are reducing your ability to react quickly.

Knowledge of Encounters
Read up on boss strategies by checking out resource sites like bosskillers or Tankspot. The strategies and videos will give a good starting point for building experience off of. Specifically stop by Tankspot as project Marmot does an excellent job of detailing each boss encounter in each of the 10 and 25 man formats along with giving alternative strategies from time to time. Most of the time the videos are from the tanks perspective.

I'll sign this! I think there's a little more room for flavor and preference when it comes to UI's and some of the addons you have listed there, though. As long as people are able to effectively get the job done, they should be ok.

Oh... that looks like a sticky to me . Thanks , Plankeye.

Agreed that there are lots of ways to setup a UI. My mod list is a basic must have list with a visual on how to accomplish centralizing and consolidating information. What bugs me is tanks that have no idea how to setup a focus frame or have to wait for a debuff to be called out on vent if they are even on it. That in my mind is epic tank failure. My hope is to bring some awareness and help transition 5 man tanks to effective raid tanking.

I like the clean in the top pic. However, the others get to be a lot of info to process. I have to be careful about how much info I get out there to process. There are really not too many things that I think you need to have "live" in front of you.

Recount has only a post encounter usage for me. Watching those numbers is distracting while live.

All I can handle in omen is myself and whoever is pulling aggro close to me or if I am losing it. After that it is not such good live help for me, but is good to look at after the fight.

I love X-Perl! Helps me understand what is going on with me and with those I am responsible for - especially the target. The target frame can be used to show how much aggro % you are pulling and will let you know when it starts slacking.

Choice of a pc for me is a matter of economics - the challenge of being on a disability income. I may go back to my desk top, but I like to have those available for my grandsons to use. Plus choice of video card is far below my preference. If this game is for those who can only have the best pc systems available, I am out. But I enjoy my gaming even with slow frame rates.

Other things that are valuable to me are the combat text and communication via vent and the text boxes - which I do not see while I am focused on a fight.

I have yet to figure out a good purpose for the focus frame. As the tank, my focus is my target. I think it is Perl or BossMods that pops up a small status of boss health via a bar so I do not (gasp) use the focus.

Also, because of typing skills or lack there of, means my mouse is very active. But therein lies one of my challenges: to overcome is the lose of the ulnar nerve to my left hand. Look it up - I ain't going into details. So I rely heavily on my bar mod - Macaroon - which was written by an old guildie from The Forgiven on Teranus. I assign important tasks to keys as well as use my mouse.

The one mod that is DK specific is FaceSmasher which evaluates the available runes and tells you what to use to get the most affect for the specific task - DPS, pull aggro, or survive. It does not push the buttons for you.

I agree with knowing your raid ahead of time as well as studying how to make your toon more effective. However, it is hard to plan which one to study if I do not know what raid I might be going on. I have enough problem with memory retention without throwing 2 or 3 into the mix. Sometimes I cannot remember what I did yesterday much less earlier in the day if a lot of in game stress comes my way. Oh the joy of having a challenge... Not only that, but I enjoy doing most of my WoW in game.

Thanks for the post. It is good info - just need to know who is the DK geru of gerus? A lot know a little, but which one knows a lot? Until I now, i will just keep tossing my questions out to the guild in general.

Oh and why I play the game: it helps focus my attention off the tremendous pain I frequently suffer. I hate narcotics and their side effects though I must use them. I have to take a bunch of meds to help with that and its side affects. I love hanging with you guys and do not intend to get any more serious with the game than I am now. If I wanted to raid a lot, I would.

Plankeye said:

Agreed that there are lots of ways to setup a UI. My mod list is a basic must have list with a visual on how to accomplish centralizing and consolidating information. What bugs me is tanks that have no idea how to setup a focus frame or have to wait for a debuff to be called out on vent if they are even on it. That in my mind is epic tank failure. My hope is to bring some awareness and help transition 5 man tanks to effective raid tanking.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's pretty much right on!

I have mine set up totally differently, but it does the job. The only time I miss taunts is when I'm distracted trying to taunt Saurfang adds to help the dps

I don't have all the addons you suggest, but I'm pretty confident that my current setup is optimal for me and for our raids.

This is absolutely a good guide for people that need to create a good setup though.

Can you give a brief rundown of how to set up a focus frame, how it should look, and what information to look for when using it?

i am unsticking this thread, you will now find it it listed under the one stop sticky class guides thread.

I would recommend having some type of unit frame mod like xperl or pitbull. There are a number of others but as long as they let you setup focus and target of target frames along with showing debuffs then they are good to go.

There are two ways to focus and that really depends on your preference on how many target windows you want to have. One way is to focus a raider and the second is to focus the boss. If you have a focus target window then it doesn't really matter which method you use. Focus on the other tank works great for 10 mans as you don't have to switch it the entire time you are in the instance. For 25 mans you may have to switch your focus from time to time.

The command is really simple, just highlight whomever and either right mouse button on their unit frame selecting focus or use the following command:


The main thing with WotLK fights is using the focus window to monitor debuffs on the other tanks. From Naxx on (Gluth), there have been fights that require tanks to switch agro on a boss once a certain number of debuffs have been reached. Although Deadly Boss Mod and other boss mods can alert you to switching, it can sometimes be missed in the heat of battle so having the focus window up and monitoring debuffs gives you an advantage.

Woot. love this as one of the new tanks that is still learning and hoping to become better. thx sand man!

As I look at your screen, where are your combat text and chat windows?

Also, do you use cast bars? I rather depend on them as well as key locks for spells & macros.

Where on screen do you place consolidated info? Like who else has aggro besides oneself?

The enlarged debuffs is awesome!