I'm the hardest to heal?

[Andrey]

hello
first of all I just want you to excuse me for my english, since well its not my natural language. :P

I've been tanking with my warrior since level one really, leveld him in the protection tree while using defensive stance from 1 to 80, and i always loved tanking

i'm currently in a raiding guild that raids ulduar10/25 and toc10/25,
after been raiding for the past 2 weeks the healers decided that im the hardest of all 3 tanks to heal, and I was amazed since it simply came from no where.

an argument broke out between me and the other tank (im the MT warrior and they are the OT pally tanks) he was basically suggesting using my panic abilitys such as shield wall every time when it is not on CD, and use improved discipline in order to ease on the healers.

I explained that i'm not going to use the abilytis that i'm saving for the very last to use at the very start. it makes no sense to me.


so anyway,
The World of Warcraft Armory

I gem/enchant for stamina and dodge/parry only, I never tried block since it feels really weak and does not mitigate alot of damage, unlike dodge/parry which totally removes a complete attack..they are doing the exact opposite by stacking block.

the tanks that they compare me to (our OT's) are:
The World of Warcraft Armory
The World of Warcraft Armory

too bad that they are in their pvp/dps set at the moment..but i guess it will refresh soon.

my question is, how can I make my healers life easier? am i doing something terribly wrong that totally kills my tanking?

any help would be much appreciated.

[Kherberos]

personally, unless you need to gem otherwise for your meta ; I would never gem anything else than +30 stamina or dragonseye +stamina.

Looking over your gear you have no socketbonuses worth taking. Just mind your meta and gem exclusive +sta. This will increase your Time to live alot more.
Your healers will love you.


Besides that I have small tips like make sure
Thunderclap
Demoralizing shout

are always up 100%. (or similar effects like ice touch/demo roar)

Use agility food/flasks.
full buffs.

Make sure to use any ability/cooldown before a heavy hitting boss uses his special pewpew like impale on gormok or headbutt on icehowl.

Follow these simple guidelines and all is well.


(If all that makes your paladins seem easier to heal is the once every 2 minute "oh shit cheat death" shit then you can simply look to your healers, since they technically let the tank die .

Ardent Defender
Damage that takes you below 35% health is reduced by 7%. In addition, attacks which would otherwise kill you cause you to be healed by up to 10% of your maximum health (amount healed based on defense). This healing effect cannot occur more often than once every 2 min.)

[Andrey]

personally, unless you need to gem otherwise for your meta ; I would never gem anything else than +30 stamina or dragonseye +stamina.

Looking over your gear you have no socketbonuses worth taking. Just mind your meta and gem exclusive +sta. This will increase your Time to live alot more.
Your healers will love you.


Besides that I have small tips like make sure
Thunderclap
Demoralizing shout

are always up 100%. (or similar effects like ice touch/demo roar)

Use agility food/flasks.
full buffs.

Make sure to use any ability/cooldown before a heavy hitting boss uses his special pewpew like impale on gormok or headbutt on icehowl.

Follow these simple guidelines and all is well.


(If all that makes your paladins seem easier to heal is the once every 2 minute "oh shit cheat death" shit then you can simply look to your healers, since they technically let the tank die .

i dont really understand it, pure stamina gems would be better than pure dodge/parry gems?
it doesn't sound very logical to have 40k stamina with very little avoidance. :>

and yea, I always use flasks/foods before evey bos
all in all ive around 44k hp max buffed

TC is always up, so is demoralizing shout, im doing it all and still the healers rather heal the pally tanks instead of me

[uglybbtoo]

Hmm with your attitude not sure we can help apparently your doing it all right ^.^

Really need some WWS parses to see whats really going on but you might want to consider.

1. Go read up on gemming for parry (search tankspot as a start).
2. Your gear is hardly stellar for ULD/TOC 25 you are going to get belted yet you refuse advice out of hand without even trying it. How many times have you died with your CD abilities unused?
3. Are you keeping up thunder clap and shout debuff assigned to you.

Most of all talk to your healers and other tanks and work with them it's not an epeen contest.

If you really want to get to the bottom of it rather than seeking some sort of moral support to bitch to your guild about get some WWS parses and even rotate the tanks around.

[Encr]

This is the time of EH. All of those dodge/parry gems should be blue +30 stam gems. Your avoidance comes from your gear and that's it.

[Kherberos]

point about stamina andrey is this. Imagine following scenario :

amazing avoidance. medium hp. > 44k buffed.

avoidance fails. 26k mainswing. > 1 sec interval( 1 hot tick for 2k) > 26k mainswing. = dead. >big heal lands after death

medium avoidance. amazing hp > 53 k buffed

avoidance fails. 26k mainswing > 1 sec interval ( 1 hot tick for 2k)> 26k mainswing= 3k hp left. > big heal lands for 16k > 1 hot tick for 2k > //////at this point it only takes about a flash heal to enable you to survive 1 more mainswing of 26k. ( and rly, healers are spamming you so you are probably 100% all the time at this point anyway. + mana = endless)


point of these scenario's is this. Yes , you take more damage. But , healers get more *time* to react to this damage. Look at it like so , you get continuous damage coming in , healers are healing along , knowing what to expect.

instead of

avoidance holds out for 7 seconds. Barely needed to be healed. BOOM avoidance fails for 4-5 seconds. you get 52k damage in the span of 4 global cooldowns. Healers are sleeping since you needed no heals. Hots are not enough to keep you up (at this point healers start complaining since they need to predict damage coming in which is impossible)


Conclusion :

Will you trust people like me or other tanks that have chewed over gemming/gearing for ages, MTing heroic mode of colliseum and working on anub atm. Or b) will you come here for help , get advice , and not accept it.

My healers dont complain, and I have 1 druid MT and 1 paladin MT in the tanking team that happily swap MT duty around with me. (and on progress we basically take the role that is suited best atm. I tank anub adds for example. Although I can tank anub just fine)

I admit some fights need to have some gear adjustments to be able to do it good but you can easily MT everything there is atm as a warrior.

My advice : Regem + get helm/ring/throwing weapon from emblems and tell your healers to adapt since it sounds like they are getting lazy since the damage intake difference between druids/warriors/paladins/DK's atm is fairly similar. And the biggest difference between paladins/warriors is rly they basically have like a guardian spirit 100% uptime just in case. So healers get away with being sloppy

[Tengenstein]

Thats pretty much exactly what happened to me last night, was in my EH gearset ran 10 man voa, ony, 1 wipe, and the siege of ulduar. decide to go do the daily HC, switch to my Block set, since they won't hit hard enough to not rage starve me, and headed to ToC.

BAM!

Memory of Herod fears them and then smacks me down like a red headed step child. My druid healer was like "WTF?! how did that happen?!". The EH set got through 8 raid bosses with the only wipe being cuased by a healer not moving out of a deep breath, the block/avoidance set fails after 2.

there are times when you healers can't heal you, either becuase they're feared or stunned or sheeped running to keep up with you after you've charged or have been flung half way across the room, or locked out by a boss mechanic, or the co tanks have just bit the dust and are covering the raid healing while a brez is being cast, during those times you can rely on EH to get you through those healing dry patchs alot better than avoidance

[Andrey]

Hmm with your attitude not sure we can help apparently your doing it all right ^.^

Really need some WWS parses to see whats really going on but you might want to consider.

1. Go read up on gemming for parry (search tankspot as a start).
2. Your gear is hardly stellar for ULD/TOC 25 you are going to get belted yet you refuse advice out of hand without even trying it. How many times have you died with your CD abilities unused?
3. Are you keeping up thunder clap and shout debuff assigned to you.

Most of all talk to your healers and other tanks and work with them it's not an epeen contest.

If you really want to get to the bottom of it rather than seeking some sort of moral support to bitch to your guild about get some WWS parses and even rotate the tanks around.

thanks for ur respond
what WWS stands for?

1. will do
2. uh i didnt really understand what you meant there
did you mean its a bad or good gear?
3. yes

its not about moral support, no bitching, i want to be better at what i do and thats why i came here.

Kherberos: i think i got it now..
so you guys are basically saying to stack as much as stamina possible and let the avoidance come from the gear itself?
should I use pure 30 stamina gems or some other gems like rating+15 stamina?

[Beshara]

WWS: WowWebStats (Wow Web Stats)

Use (rating)+sta bicolor gems to keep your meta activated, other than that stamina stacking is the preferred way to go. (Specific rating used depends on which meta you use.) My preference is to enchant for defense rating where available and gem pure stam except for two dodge/stam gems in convenient red sockets to keep my meta active, but you might get more bang for your buck sticking with pure health stacking.

[uglybbtoo]

thanks for ur respond
what WWS stands for?

As per Beshara link

2. uh i didnt really understand what you meant there
did you mean its a bad or good gear?

You have some i200 pieces like your shield from heroic COS mixed with i246 gear the balance is all over the place. It will get the job done but it's not like it's brilliant.

its not about moral support, no bitching, i want to be better at what i do and thats why i came here.

And thats fine but also don't dismiss the advice of your co-tanks out of hand they have the same healers etc as you and when I ran the stats have over 4 times the raid runs.

This is your raid history as at Tuesday when i ran it and the reason for my comment.

10 man raids
ratio runs progress
Naxxramas 9.52% 2 80% (12/15)
Malygos 4.76% 1 100% (1/1)
Ulduar 19.05% 4 57% (8/14)
Coliseum 9.52% 2 100% (5/5)

25 man raids
ratio runs progress
Naxxramas 12.5% 1 7% (1/15)
Ulduar 25% 2 57% (8/14)
Coliseum 25% 2 20% (1/5)

[Andrey]

As per Beshara link



You have some i200 pieces like your shield from heroic COS mixed with i246 gear the balance is all over the place. It will get the job done but it's not like it's brilliant.




And thats fine but also don't dismiss the advice of your co-tanks out of hand they have the same healers etc as you and when I ran the stats have over 4 times the raid runs.

This is your raid history as at Tuesday when i ran it and the reason for my comment.

10 man raids
ratio runs progress
Naxxramas 9.52% 2 80% (12/15)
Malygos 4.76% 1 100% (1/1)
Ulduar 19.05% 4 57% (8/14)
Coliseum 9.52% 2 100% (5/5)

25 man raids
ratio runs progress
Naxxramas 12.5% 1 7% (1/15)
Ulduar 25% 2 57% (8/14)
Coliseum 25% 2 20% (1/5)

alright, i guess youre right there

and I simply cant get rid of my i200, i think i did ulduar10 around 3 times up to the point of auriya and I didnt the shield nor the pants that i really need, nor hodir's 25 shield..im having a really bad luck :/

[uglybbtoo]

NP's we all know what drops are like :=)

What it leads to is like whats happened to you to compensate you load up one or two stats in your case you were just stacking avoidance and worse lifting your parry really high. You parry a boss the hit comes back faster on the next time (you need to read up) so you avoid the damage for that hit but due to roll of dice you are going to get hit eventually.

I am guessing you geared up thru heroics and they are all a breeze and figure your gear is well balanced. The problem is heroic fights are very very very short you dont often get a chance to see a full set of what can go wrong and even when you get a bad set of rolls the healer has his big spell ready to save your butt.

So what you created was a spikey tank you were easy to heal while your avoidance held up but the moment you got a bad set of rolls you were dam hard.

There are several ways to tackle the issue but the other tanks were correct one way was to use your CD's agressively the better way is for you to adjust gear and prob go farm a better shield, ring etc and I see you started adjusting stuff.

With your old EH and setup saving your CD's was never going to save you anyhow so the other tanks were right but it's not the permanent and best answer.

[Athenodorus]

Using Shield Wall "whenever it's up" is... well it's like some sort of metaphorical bad thing that I'm too sleepy to think of right now. Blind use of your major cooldowns is silly. But if you're having survivability troubles, do consider getting Improved Disciplines 2/2 and taking the Shield Wall glyph. A 2 minute cooldown makes it easier to burn without worrying about it being up later.

Your glyphs are kinda weighted toward running Heroics instead of raiding.

In fact, if your biggest problem is survivability (in other words, you have a surplus of threat) consider taking a more survival oriented build (something like this 5/15/51 with glyphs). You'll lose threat from Deep Wounds, but gain a good bit from the Dev glyph's phantom threat.

In other words: Play around with your build. Read the mechanics and gearing threads here. Consider the differences between tanking heroics and raid bosses and adjust accordingly. Use World of Logs or WWS to parse your raids and examine your performance, healing needed (and received) etc. Above all do not be discouraged!

[Andrey]

Thank you for your help
I made some changes with my set as you can see

my tps suck as it is, I really dont feel like screwing it up a bit more..I can push around 6k, and maybe 7k on a good day..for now its enough, but since I didnt get any drops and some casters/hunters did, it feels like a shitstorm is coming my way

ive a question about the glyph of block, if i dont really stack shield block and value, why would i want that glyph?

and about glyph of devestate.. why would I need it if i can stack it up to 5 times in a bos fight?

to be honest I didnt think ive any survivability problems until the point of the healer saying that im the hardest to heal
i mean we done toc10 (normal of course :P) and we wiped around 3 times, we didnt wipe because of tanks/healers actually, it was due to the lack of tactics at the twyn part.

so yea, i didnt know i had this problem before

[Beshara]

Shield block value is almost a straight increase in effective health, as I recall. Glyph of Blocking accentuates what's already on your gear. (I <3 SBV)

Glyph of Devastate means you don't have to hit it 5 times at the start of the fight - only three, freeing up two GCDs for you to get into your threat generation that much faster.

[Petninja]

NP's we all know what drops are like :=)
You parry a boss the hit comes back faster on the next time (you need to read up) so you avoid the damage for that hit but due to roll of dice you are going to get hit eventually.

Wrong. Parry hasting works exactly opposite of this. If you parry a boss you get a haste buff to your next attack, and if a boss parries you he gets one (except most of the hard hitting bosses these days have it disabled, probably to help out with DW frost). Parry is only a bad stat because the DR on it is so low. Gemming for parry will get you parry capped pretty quick, while dodge you can go quite a ways with. Obviously, Stam is still the stat you're going to be gemming for unless you outgear the content or are on a boss fight where avoidance would shine.

[uglybbtoo]

Sigh sometimes on here we cant keep things simple and let people go off and read as suggested.

Yes petninja it's the other way and yes some bosses have it disabled but really it was suggested he go off and read up. As to DR being the only bad for parry yes if we talking about a boss with parry haste disabled but this is all really off topic.

And Athenodorus noone suggested using Shield Wall "whenever it's up" the sigesstion was "to use shields aggressively" which because of the anals on the forum lets define

"to use shields aggressively" = To use shield whenever you reasonably expect to take alot of damage

[Athenodorus]

And Athenodorus noone suggested using Shield Wall "whenever it's up" the sigesstion was "to use shields aggressively"

@uglybbtoo: He said this of his guild's veteran tank: "he was basically suggesting using my panic abilitys such as shield wall every time when it is not on CD" which I interpreted as facerolling cooldowns. Maybe I misunderstood, but if it *was* what the vet meant it's about the worst survivability advice ever given to a new tank. Not trying to argue, just trying to cover an important base.

@Andrey: Glyph of devastate does more than just double the application of Sunder: It makes Devastate grant additional threat. It's a substantial, substantial amount. (See the mechanics forum, there's a thread on it.)

Glyph of Blocking is both a survivability and threat boost, since shield slam (one of our primary threat moves) scales with shield block value.

Parry haste has nothing to do with why people say gemming for parry sucks. There is no risk of hasting the boss by parries: It happens when the boss itself parries, as Petninja said.

The EU armory won't load your character ATM, so I can't check out your changes, but I will!

[Reev]

You shouldn't use Shield Wall every time it's up, but you should use it very very often. The more you learn to identify higher damage phases and use your cooldowns to help healers, the better off you are. Paladins don't usually have to use a cooldown because it's built in. Warriors have to be a bit more proactive. So when a worm soft enrages on Beasts, pop your shield wall. When Icehowl is coming out of stun and you know he's going to headbutt stun you and hit you again, use your shield wall or last stand. When you're tanking Burrowers on Anub'Arak, and you have 2 of them at the same time, pop shield wall. If you have it talented and glyphed, it comes up often enough you can use it very very often, and should.

The worst thing you can do with shield wall is to save it as some sort of panic button. It's there as a proactive mitigation tool and should be used that way.

[Andrey]

You shouldn't use Shield Wall every time it's up, but you should use it very very often. The more you learn to identify higher damage phases and use your cooldowns to help healers, the better off you are. Paladins don't usually have to use a cooldown because it's built in. Warriors have to be a bit more proactive. So when a worm soft enrages on Beasts, pop your shield wall. When Icehowl is coming out of stun and you know he's going to headbutt stun you and hit you again, use your shield wall or last stand. When you're tanking Burrowers on Anub'Arak, and you have 2 of them at the same time, pop shield wall. If you have it talented and glyphed, it comes up often enough you can use it very very often, and should.

The worst thing you can do with shield wall is to save it as some sort of panic button. It's there as a proactive mitigation tool and should be used that way.

thats where im using it, in situations that I know something bad is about to happend.

I would love to use improved discipline but i really dont want it to affect my TPS, is there a way to do it?
also, from doing general vezax today it seems that the glyph of shield wall would actually rock there, should I use that glyph?

I totally re-gem'd most of my items, I dont think i can get any higher stamina than that. I dont know my healers opinion yet, but ill ask them later


Also please note about the other tanks they were comparing me to; The World of Warcraft Armory
he basically had the same HP at the time so to me it doesnt look like effective healing problem, is there a reason why healers would prefer to heal a pally instead?

Anyway thank you for your time and great help guys. I think its coming along, but im not sure until we start raiding ulduar again.

oh and a question: I had really bad time today to keep aggro on vezax, due to casters having 10k dps..is there a way for me to increas the tps slighty with my current gear?