Reply With QuotePaladin will be the most sure bet 6 months from now I bet :-P
Which is why you just pick whichever playstyle you like better.Originally Posted by Proletaria
Paladin will be the most sure bet 6 months from now I bet :-P
Different guilds do things differently. I was stating that our guild has always done it that way, and that I felt it was personally best. My opinion.
To clarify, while two of our three tanks are officers, in the past I was the only officer of the three, and none of us were labeled MT or OT. Our tanks all have a small part of authority, and that comes from playing the role that sets the pace of the raid. Sometimes one of us off tanks, sometimes we main tank. But then, we specifically only have tanks skilled, confident, and capable of both main and off tanking. We don't want someone to dps when we don't need him, and then sometimes OT when we need a third tank. We even rotate dps off specs when there's only a need for one of two tanks.
Other guilds still have designated main tanks, and I get that. I was just saying I feel like it's better this way. Tanking feels like teamwork with us, instead of petty rivalries or jealousy than can be harbored when you have the MT and OT mentality. We share gear (we don't use loot council for our gear; we know which upgrades are best for each of us and pass to one another), we keep our dps/tanking time fair, and -best of all!- nobody gets burnt out on tanking too much or too little. And if someone did get burnt out and had to quit or take a break, our guild's raids aren't put on halt because our other tanks are undergeared.
Again, solely my opinion. I think this is the best method, but hey, if you don't? It's your guild, do things how you want. :P
I would tend to agree with you, although I see a strong showing from warriors in icc right now which leads me to believe that in the long run they are a safe bet. Then again bears seem relatively strong too, and dks really have nowhere to go but up.
I agree with the playstyle that suites the player is best.
Main tank is really a term from a time in WoW where raids were designed very differently. Back then it made sense to gear up one tank before others. The main tank was the best geared tank, and was supposed to tank all encounters. This was always a warrior because it was the only viable tanking class.
Nowadays you need two appropriately geared tanks (at least) and encounters favor different classes.
Also, the add tank usually has the harder job and thus if there is a disparity in skill between the two tanks, the more skilled one should usually be tanking adds.
Don't worry about picking the "right" tanking class, worry about finding communicative tanks who can make quick decisions and who show up regularely and like what they are doing. If you are the tank, build and develop these qualities. They might be useful in real life also.
Last edited by Stengel; 01-08-2010 at 02:31 AM.
I have a warrior main tank and a dk alt tank. They are both capable of tanking anything that's available right now, including icc25. I tank way better on my warrior. The reason is i've been tanking full time with him for the last 4.5 years while the dk has only seen alt time for the last few months. Give me 4.5 years of tanking experience on the dk and i'll bet you wont notice any difference in "capability". Seriously, forget the class, tank with what you enjoy most. There'll be ups & downs to all classes, sometimes they'll shine, sometimes they'll hurt. You only carry on if you like it.
That said, if you're forming up for 25mans, you'll probably want at least 3 tanks. Then you'll need at least one backup incase somebody cant raid one day, that's 4. That's also enough tanks to cover 2 10man runs with no backups. With 4-5 tanks in your roster, you have the option to spread the love. I'm the tank captain of our guild and i make a special effort to keep the tank corps spread over classes - i also take into account offspecs & offspec gear. When all tanks are present and you dont have spots for all of them, you start rotating them, etc. Keeping your guild supplied with good tanks is a major human resources effort :P
@ Dreador & Ariedan:
I despise the word MT. I try my best to cultivate a "tank corps" mentality. However, there's no mistaking the fact that Dreador so nicely pointed out: Tanking is a position of leadership. If one of your tanks is taking up the leadership mantle and the others are automatically falling into line, you have yourself an MT. This is my problem atm. Despite the tank corps mentality, if i step out of the raid for any reason, the rest of my tanks suddenly start looking like headless chicken and cant sort out who tanks what. They want somebody pointing out the assignments. While in raids, i put the best person for the required job, myself taking side duty when it's best etc, but i still end up calling the shots and therefore get labeled MT despite my efforts to the contrary. Making my other tanks call the shots is my to-do these days
Except you will never be "capable" of using VB/UBA/BS without a rune, or apply an ap debuff on your dk. Food for thought.
Great post! I am in the "MT" position in our guild I was told after my OT and GM read this post. lol. Sauf for example. I pull him, let my pally buddy taunt off me when I get the buff, then just hang out behind him, taunting him at 0sec on the buff to have it reapplied to me. This is how we downed it. Taunting back and forth was just confusing the healers I believe. One of us wouldn't get inc heals until after they were behind the ball. Anywho, thanks to everyone for posting up here! This is exactly why I like tankspot over the others... "Those that will remain nameless" Have a stupid question here, ask and get razzed but get answered as well. Ask a stupid question there, get permabanned and your house burnt to the ground.
Last edited by Banterloft; 01-08-2010 at 09:31 AM. Reason: I put sarth in instead of sauf
The traditional Main Tank role has expanded to Main Tanks, as in more than one. A good guild will have several tanks of equal quality and skill, regardless of class.
In our guild we run x2 warriors and 1 paladin with a capable druid if needed.
The issue is and always has been Blizzards non conformed tank requirements. Requiring a guild to carry 3-4 main tanks and having fights where only 1-2 are needed and having that requirement vary from boss to boss in the same instance.
Ideally they will fix this in Cata to have a standardized amount of tanks needed. Im personally hoping for 3, possibly 4. The more tanks the more fun an encounter is in my opinion.
There is something so appealing about backhanding someone across the face with a shield.
I certainly hope they beef up the amount of tank loot we see if 4 tanks becomes par for 25man content. Between myself, a prot pally, and prot warrior there was hardly a tier of content between naxx and icc that at least one of us missed out on quite a bit of gear. I guess the dkp system is somewhat to blame since it doesn't allows us to spoon feed one or two primary tanks, but if the end goal is to have 3 or 4 relatively equal quality tanks there would need to be a bit higher drop rate on some of the univeral tank loot at the very least.
That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Consider how many DPS you bring to a raid, do they increase the drop rate for their items just because you have more?
Tanks have probably the best ratio to be geared considering a raid will always have more Healers and by far more DPS.
There is something so appealing about backhanding someone across the face with a shield.
I agree with Boda here. I have had no problem getting gear. The tank team that I am building know that we will distribute gear equally.
On a side note, everyone should be using Boda's UI. Amazing man. Just amazing.
I'm going to stand by what I said. We've got 3 tanks now, one of which is still carrying around some ilvl232 stuff. That's fine for us, but if you mean to say a 25man raid with 4 tanks in every encounter, well, 1 or 2 of those tanking positions had better be a lot more lax on expected gear.
TLDR & Simplified: Gearing four tanks will take longer (perhaps even longer than content is meant to be farmed) than gearing what is usually 2 or 3 at present. Considering a tank-check encounter that would test all 4 tanks could exist, you would either have it deliberately under-tuned for a long time, or it would be a choke-point until your guild got more tank loot.
Gearing 1 more tank is not going to take significantly longer. A bit longer but not by a huge margin. Again consider how many DPS you have in a raid and the fact that there item drop rates are not increased.
There are plenty of 3 tank encounters on the books and a few 4 tank ones that were not "deliberately under-tuned for a long time". The strongest tank takes the strongest assignment and so on down the line, its not that hard to picture.
The reason there are few tanks around in the game is due to us having the smallest amount of raid slots allocated to us. Adding 1-2 more in there is not a huge stretch.
However forget the "how many" for a moment. My big beef is the number not being consistent. A guild should be able to field "x" amount of tanks for an entire instance and they should all be able to tank without forcing 1 (or more) to flip to off spec or even worse be sat from the raid.
Just so I'm clear , I am not bringing this up because I don't get to tank, I in fact tank all the time. I however understand tanking passion and I don't feel the set up is fair right now.
There is something so appealing about backhanding someone across the face with a shield.
I agree the inconsistant 1-3 raid tank fluctuation is a bigger issue. I tank with a paladin and somtimes a warrior. Any encounter that can be one-tanked is defaulted to the pally. Usually when we come to a new encounter that requires 3 tanks the warrior has to brush the cob-webs off his tanking gear because it's been months since he last had to do it. I see what you're saying.
As far as what I was getting at:
Gearing up more tanks would take, necessarily, and logically, more time. Right now I think the pace at which a tank can expect to get gear is ok. It's a few months to get the majority of the tank loot you and your second tank need, and by the time a new content patch hits, you're collecting a little off-spec loot. The same paradigm with four tanks would probably see every tank competing for needed drops until the day of a new content patch. While I don't think that is a foreign concept (i remeber farming MC just for rag for months on end due to bad rng on t2 helms), it wasn't much fun back then either.
I always support having encounters consistantly require more tanking, but if you double the necessary number of tanks, you have to consider all the rammifications.
Last edited by Proletaria; 01-10-2010 at 03:23 PM.
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks