(This post is a part of several posts I am taking off old content to share on my new blog, so the content might be outdated. This was written in LK expansion.)
My name is bear and I am a paladin tank. I would like to tell you what it is like to be me, but you really have to play as a raiding paladin tank to know what it is like. However, I keep hearing people with inexperienced paladin tanks asking for advice so I figured I would write a bit about what being a tankadin is. So this advice is mainly for new tanks, not how to tank raids, but how to learn the basic attitude of tanking.
Firstly, you do not know how amazing it feels to be able to solo old 40-man raid bosses unless you have been a class that can do it. I don’t do this often because I drag my hunter friend with me (or she drags me, I haven’t figured that out yet) to most boss kills just to speed up the process, but I CAN do it. As a paladin tank I am pretty much invincible, but my damage output can be slow. Standing in front of bosses in MC, knowing you won’t get hurt by them is an awesome feeling. Want to solo Kara? Go ahead, you are a paladin-good luck figuring out chess, and Netherspite’s mechanics make it near impossible for a paladin to solo, but I am sure someone has and someone will, just not me. I can solo level 70 world raid bosses and parts of ZA and this is stuff I haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out. But I’m a pally, it’s what we do. DKs may solo things better but it’s in a tank paladin’s nature to see how much shit we can have on us at once without taking any damage. Be careful of casters though.
As a new tankadin one of the first things you have to learn is how you are basically invincible. If you can get this mindset going tanking will be a LOT easier for you. It’s not that you are invincible if you are bad and don’t know what to do other than throw your avenger’s shield around and consecrate on cooldown, but that you are invincible because you know ALL of your tricks. Paladins come with a huge bag of tricks. Seals, blessings, shields, hands, all of these things help make you the amazing tank that every team wants tanking for them. It’s not that we are highest on threat-we aren’t unless you are talking AoE trash packs. It’s not that we have the best survival-we don’t, even with AD our damage can be spikey and unforgiving. We have a threat rotation to maintain but even that sometimes goes to the wayside if survival is as stake. But as paladins, we are the only class that can do all the amazing tricks we can do WHILE we are still tanking.
Gearing is not all that hard for new paladins. Hit defense minimums for heroics, try to get 30k health buffed to make heroics easy. Focus on stamina and armor as your main stats, avoidance is good but it’s not the best min-maxing for any level of content like stamina and armor are. Avoidance doesn’t really help with magic damage much like effective health from stamina does. You might avoid 50% of the hits and take 50% head on with 90% damage and it may kill you whereas a tank that stacks stamina and armor gets hit by every single hit but only takes 50% of the damage of each hit, so it’s very predictable.
Part of being invincible is in trusting your healers. It is good to keep an eye on your health and the health of your group. It is good to know when you are taking that big incoming damage and need to pop cooldowns but part of tanking is trusting that your healers will keep you up. Often if the tank goes down it’s a wipe, so the healers are NOT going to fail you unless something is out of their power or they miss a CD or are out of mana. They know their jobs and they trust you to do yours so please trust them to heal you. Don’t worry too much about your health, survival, yes-damage reduction cooldowns, trinket procs, stuns, minimizing damage yes-but that is a tank’s job at any given moment. Your healers WILL heal you, so relax about that and move right along in being invincible.
Once you are invincible because you trust your healers, be invincible by sharing your invincibility with your group. You bring buffs that are amazing because they are set-it-and-forget-it. Range isn’t really an issue with your buffs like say shaman totems, so make sure you use them, they are only going to help your raid. Is poison going crazy around the raid and you have a priest healer? Cleanse yourself and the priest at least and work on the dps if you have the CDs. Magic silencing your druid healer? You can dispel that. Rogue getting hit by a whirlwind? If you are fast enough you can bubble them to keep them from dying-though they SHOULD be fast enough to move out…sometimes people get hyper focused on their next big pewpew cooldown and forget they have to be alive to hit though. I am guilty of this and I think every dpser has been before. If someone has a special debuff on them increasing their damage that cannot be dispelled then you can throw Hand of Sacrifice on them-if you can take the damage-and it will allow some of that damage they are taking to come onto you and give your healers some breathing room. You can throw sacred shield on them for some absorption as well. If they are frozen in bad stuff, you can Hand of Freedom them (or yourself). So bring your amazing survival abilities to your group. Stare at your buttons for a while. Read what each of your hands and other buffs/cleanse do. Think about what situations you would use them in-and think OUTSIDE the box. Your 969 threat rotation is often not as important as all these tricks you can use while you are tanking to help out the group as a whole.
So now you are a team player tankadin. You are getting compliments left and right from your healers about how easy runs are with you heading it up. But maybe you are having some threat problems. Maybe you are having dps pull off you right away in 5-mans. This is a bit tricky because everyone’s gear is different but I do have some tips there as well. If you are new, undergeared compared to your dps, or just inexperienced on threat management, let the group know. Any ICC dpser that wants to survive in an easy daily dungeon is going to hold back a bit if the tank has heroics gear and 25k health and tells them at the front of the run that they are kind new and would appreciate the help of dpsers on not pulling off. You will always get your douchebags who want to throw all their crit burst damage right off the bat and if they do? You let them. Let them kill themselves, let them bitch. I guarantee if you are nice and doing an ok job and someone pulls off now and again or one person pulls off and dies constantly, if push comes to shove a group would rather kick a bad, rude dps than a tank-though there may be times you do get kicked if you are really having trouble and that’s ok because you can get a queue immediately. Now, some ICC geared people might pull off you anyway, but the skilled ones know how to manage their agro. FD, Iceblocks, Soul Shatter, Vanish-things to survive when things are going to hit them. Not only do most know how to take care of themselves, most will be understanding if they do pull agro off an undergeared tank because they will know that their gear is a LOT better and it’s a lot easier to pull agro.
Communication between tank and group is vital. If you are struggling, let the group know. If you want them to stop body pulling, lay down the law and tell them if they keep doing it, they will tank it. My rule is that if a dps can pull off me, they might get one taunt. If they KEEP pulling off me-especially if they are focusing on a mob I am not-which is nearly the only way to pull off me, if they can pull it off, they can kill it before it hits them or they can use an agro wiping skill to save themselves. It is not my job to compensate constantly for bad dpsers.
Learn how to pull. You do not always have to throw your shield at a mob to get agro on it. You have a taunt that also does damage to get a mob’s attention. Sometimes you don’t want a target dazed or you just want to target one of them. I rarely pull with my shield anymore in groups because I run in and smack them with my Hammer and then I throw my shield to get more of their attention. Consecrate is NOT your best agro move. It’s good for some constant AoE threat but if you are fighting for threat against well-geared dpsers, consecrate is not going to be your best bet right off the bat. Consecrate can also eat a boat-load of mana when you are over-geared for content and not getting hit enough to regen mana. So I just don’t use it that often unless it's a few GCDs into a pull and I know I will have the mana. My HoR and other spells are enough to keep agro on small packs mobs (5 or less). Raiding is quite different because there-unless I am dispelling or throwing another global cooldown spell, I am keeping my 929 rotation as close as I can to keep my threat high. Since damage is pretty much assured on raid bosses, it’s easy to keep up a high mana cost rotation. If you are not overgearing content and can keep mana up enough, 969 is your best bet, but it is not the ONLY way to tank.
LoS is your friend. In heroics and raids nowdays the seemingly best way to enter combat is to run in and bash something, worry about placement later. BUT! There is an art to pulling things the right way and this includes using LoS, silences, etc to your advantage. Especially in the newer heroics like FoS and PoS there are some mob packs that are made crazy easy with the right pulling techniques instead of just running in and 'hittin stuff'.
If it looks like it is going to agro 'maybe', it will-especially onto your healers. Be ready for the unexpected. Constantly turn your camera and know where every mob and every mob path is. Keep your keybinds ready for taunts and any other emergency buttons you may need to use. Constant vigilance is also a trait of a good tank. You will be alive at the end of your pulls, and with you doing your best job, so will everyone else!
Good luck!
So that’s my simple ‘what it’s like to be a tankadin’ talk. Other things will come, like constant whispers to tank raids/pugs, constantly having to give up things you want to do on alts because it’s easier for you to tank things. But if you are lucky you’ll have a great group of people to back you up when you throw a fit and want to heal on your druid instead of tanking on your pally.
MINDSET IS A MAJOR PORTION OF WHAT MAKES A GOOD TANK! No one wants a fluffy chicken tanking for them, an armored bear is so much more apropo.
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