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Posts with tag mitigation

Maximum stamina

If you want to live through any boss fight as a tank, the one thing that you need above all else is health. Stamina, which gives ten health for every one point of stamina, is by far the most important stat that a tank needs in order to do their job well. No matter if you have reached the armor and defense cap, or if you're producing more threat than your DPS can keep up with, you won't live for a lick if you don't have enough health.

Defining minimum health is an important concept in end game raiding and groups. For most instances, a minimum of 10,000 to 11,000 unbuffed is needed. This will at least let you take a few blows from a boss before dying, hopefully enough blows that the healer will be able to get off a few heals on you. For more entry level raiding environments, it's necessary to have unbuffed health between 11,000 and 12,000. If you've got 11,500 hit points going into Kara, you'll probably be able to reach 13,000 health fully raid buffed. This will let you survive a good portion of Kara, which means you can get more gear, which begets more health in the long run.

Continue reading Maximum stamina

Shifting Perspectives: Bear Tanking Strategies Part 2

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, sometimes known as the Big Bear Butt Blogger, continues his discussion of the finer points of bear tanking.

Previously, I talked about exactly how threat mechanics work in groups. Now, you might think I was going to use that knowledge to inform our decisions on being a bear tank.

Instead, I'm going to talk about gearing up.

I'd like to start by saying, up front, that this article is unlikely to contain stunning new information that will change your bear tanking world. For those players that are firmly bear tanking their way through Gruul's Lair and beyond, you are most likely to read this, chuckle, and move on. You are already living the dream, kicking butt and taking purples. Hopefully, you will share some of your insight with the rest of us.

But for the player just starting out, eager to prepare themselves to be the best bear tank they can be, I hope that this article will be of some help.

So you want to be a bear tank. Great! Bear tanks are lots of fun, and speccing feral gives you the wonderful ability to not only be able to tank at the drop of a /invite, but also let's you solo effectively with a simple change of gear.

To be a bear tank, you need to realize that your role requires you to focus on two main responsibilities;

  • Threat generation
  • Staying alive

Threat generation is exactly that; you must put out enough threat to keep your enemies focused on you, while the rest of your party kills them.

Staying alive blends into two different philosophies;

Survivability is your ability to still be alive after taking a big old whack from the boss, or suffering spiky irregular damage the healer was unprepared for.

Mitigation is your ability to avoid or reduce taking that damage altogether.

Today, we are going to focus on the second of those two responsibilities, staying alive, and how to plan your gear choices effectively.

More after the break!

Continue reading Shifting Perspectives: Bear Tanking Strategies Part 2

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Saying hi to the new boss



The Care and Feeding of Warriors comes to you this week to discuss preparing to tank a new boss for the first time. Matthew Rossi has ended up dead under the feet of some jerk with a fancy name enough times to know that you need to be sure you're ready before you step into the instance. Learn from his boneheadedness.

One of the drawbacks of playing a tanking warrior (or any tank, really, but I'm not writing the druid or paladin columns, after all) is needing to have a certain threshold of gear in order to do the job. You might well know how to hold aggro exceedingly well, but if you don't have the armor, defense, mitigation stats and health to stand up to the pounding then you'll die and dead warriors are insanely bad at hold aggro.

No, not undead, just plain dead. Undead warriors are no worse at holding aggro than anyone else. (Sorry for the mix-up, Vish, you know I know you're awesome.) Being that holding aggro is thereby a function of not only generating threat but surviving as you do so, there are thresholds below which you won't survive tanking a boss encounter. If a boss can possibly unleash 12k damage (I'm looking right at you, phase 2 Prince) then you'd need, at a minimum, something like 16k health to tank him, buffed. I'd prefer more. (The MT on our Prince kills has about 17k buffed.) This level of health is necessary to provide room for your healers to get those heals off after a huge damage spike.

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Saying hi to the new boss

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Making life easier for your healer



The Care and Feeding of Warriors is all about your favorite meatshields. Matthew Rossi used to tank for people who called him that all the time, and honestly, he didn't like it all that much. He preferred 'Dislike Management Engineer', but folks are still gonna call you meatshield so you might as well get used to it.

After a burst of frenzied PvP activity to get the Gladiator's set, I've found myself in a cooling off period towards it. My wife and I are exploring the arenas on the Alliance side, but as for the Horde, I have to admit I haven't been PvPing much at all lately. So the other day I went ahead and respecced prot to get back to my roots as a tanking warrior. As arrogant as I am, I was still a little worried that I'd be rusty, but a quick trip into Heroic Sethekk convinced me that yes, Virginia, I still know how to tank. As i gear up to start tanking in ZA and maybe SSC (crossing my fingers) I wanted to talk about the other half of the equation of tanking. The first half is making sure you generate threat. After all, you're there to keep the mobs focused on you instead of the rest of the party.

The other half is in being hard to kill. You need to be as hard to kill as possible, because your healer has limits, and anything you can do to reduce incoming damage to a steady, manageable level is something you should do. In addition, anything you can do to make it so the healer has more health to work with is also something you should do. You must maintain threat, of course, or even the best healer can't prevent a wipe. But even if you're a genius at generating hate, if you only live for a few seconds once you have focus fire on you, then your healer is again unable to prevent a wipe.

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Making life easier for your healer


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