relax while tanking?

[Insahnity]

Anything that relaxes you is good, provided it doesn't result in a warm, wet feeling in your pants, or noxious odours from aforementioned place.

[Raysere]

Think through what you're going to do before you do it. Don't rush yourself, and don't let your group rush you. Recognise when you start to get really anxious and take a step back, steady yourself and get back to it. When you make a mistake, try not to get flustered and panicky, assess the situation, realise the options you have to stabilise the situation and enact them. Most importantly, when you're done, try to reflect upon what you did well and what you did not so well. You're just need to build some confidence. You aren't alone in your nervousness. I used to feel exactly the same, in dungeons, then in raids and arenas. It will pass as you gain experience and are better able to cope with situations that arise as you tank.

[Drizzt]

thanks or all the advice =]
im fine in heroics and its all basically muscle memory for my druid now
i just cant seem to keep my cool in icc
and ill be looking into the addons a couple of you mentioned because im currently reworking my whole ui

[Bigbad]

You just have to be confident that you can do it, knowing the encounter and where damage spikes can happen always makes me more relax and knowing that there is a bunch of good healers behind you

[Mag]

I'm in the exact spot you are in ATM. I'm a fresh 80 prot warrior who went from 1-80 without doing a single dungeon.
I've been doing the lower ones like utgaurd keep and nexus just to get some XP under my belt. The first couple times i ran them i was a nervous wreck. I did manage to relax after the first few runs but it comes back when i hit some place new. Only time and personal xp will help
The bad pugs can be a new tanks undoing. I usually let the group know off the start that i'm fairly new and if there's anything special about a pull that they should speak up. Most of the time they are ok with mistakes but there's a few that you should boot right off the getgo like the squishies who think they are a duck dog and fetch the mobs for you, the loudmouth weekend warriors who spend more time talking shit than fighting, afk healers or dps. The loudmouths still get to me but i'm sure with time i'll enjoy pissing them off even more and watch them keyboard stutter.
I sort of disagree with not running with guild mates. Doing gear runs with alts or mains with similar gear scores is a great way to learn from each other, get raid xp, and slowly build up gear for the more serious raids. However, I don't reccomend running heroics with well geared guild mates as you'll hardly ever hold aggro on a mob.

I'm very thankful for this site and it has helped me alot so keep up the good work everyone.

[Winterburn]

Running with guildies might be a problem, especially if they get pissed and tend ro blame the tank for dps and heals problems. People should understand at some point that the tank never has too little threat, its always dps who have too much and those tend to die if they aren't able to cope with it. Neither tank has too little health unless he's one-hittable, it's always the healer who's picking his nose instead of doing a good job. However, blaming the tank is a universal practice, and if your guildies do that to you, it alienates you somewhat... I had that happen to me in my former guild.

As for running new instances, I always ask people to give me advice if I'm tanking the instance for the first time. If they don't, I can blame the wipes on them. Instances are all about cooperation, if people don't want to cooperate, it's their fault.

[Errvalunia]

Running with guildies might be a problem, especially if they get pissed and tend ro blame the tank for dps and heals problems. People should understand at some point that the tank never has too little threat, its always dps who have too much and those tend to die if they aren't able to cope with it. Neither tank has too little health unless he's one-hittable, it's always the healer who's picking his nose instead of doing a good job. However, blaming the tank is a universal practice, and if your guildies do that to you, it alienates you somewhat... I had that happen to me in my former guild.

As for running new instances, I always ask people to give me advice if I'm tanking the instance for the first time. If they don't, I can blame the wipes on them. Instances are all about cooperation, if people don't want to cooperate, it's their fault.

I think it's a little disingenuous to say "it's always the healers fault if the tank dies". So a tank has absolutely no control over their own survivability? Gosh, why did they bother to give you all those buttons then?

It is in large part about communicating with your healers--if you tank switch on Fester and are taking massive amounts of damage, pop your CDs and tell your healers that they're up and when they're about to run out. Sometimes cooldowns are necessary to let healers like our druid ramp-up, get all their hots rolling etc before you start taking damage that requires all three healers to just pour mana into you (like festergut's inhalex3)

[Winterburn]

I think it's a little disingenuous to say "it's always the healers fault if the tank dies". So a tank has absolutely no control over their own survivability? Gosh, why did they bother to give you all those buttons then?

It is in large part about communicating with your healers--if you tank switch on Fester and are taking massive amounts of damage, pop your CDs and tell your healers that they're up and when they're about to run out. Sometimes cooldowns are necessary to let healers like our druid ramp-up, get all their hots rolling etc before you start taking damage that requires all three healers to just pour mana into you (like festergut's inhalex3)

First, we aren't talking ICC raid bosses or any raid bosses for that matter. Second, I burn the appropriate CDs (and I believe it is only reasonable to do so) at all times. It includes those CDs that have recharge longer than 1 min and using them on trash and blah, blah, blah...

However, from my personal experience if I die in a battle with healers alive, I die either through a CD or when I have none left to use. At this point I don't really care if the healer got CCed or he is undergeared or he is just plain incompetent. It's his fault that I died, period. I won't blame my death on the healer if I jump from the ledge in Occulus, but I don't think it's really worth mentioning. On the other hand, if I get CCed or I pick my nose on a pull and healer dies as a consequence, it is my fault. Another period. There's no blaming a druid healer that he hadn't shapeshifter into a bear and tanked himself if the tank died, is there?

To take the argument further, it really saddens me that I'm likely to die on the first pull in PoS after Ick, because the healer doesn't have a heal ready for massive spell damage. So I have to pop AMS to get through and even that doesn't help at times. I mean, they've probably run this instance a dosen times, what were they expecting all caster going melee on me? So popping AMS in this case does me credit, but it does not mean that if I don't pop it up and die it's my fault.

[Errvalunia]

I was just arguing that you can't say this is ALWAYS the healer's fault or that's ALWAYS the DPS's fault or ALWAYS the tank's fault. It depends on the situation. Did you die because the balance druid star-falled and pulled waaaay too many mobs? (has happened to me on that damn PoS hill. 2 packs? HOORAY) Did you die because you let something wail on the healer and they couldn't keep you both up? Did you die because the healer was not paying enough attention? Was a mage standing in fire and taking the healer's attention? Were people (including you!) paying proper attention to fight mechanics--when to run away, when to spread out, when to clump together? Did you charge back up to Tyrannus when he's enraged, or forget to move the mage-lord off of the ice? There's a lot more to "blame" than "I died, which means obviously I wasn't getting healed enough so it's the healer's fault".

Yes, in 5-man PuGs there are tons of bad healers, bad tanks, and terribad DPS

I find the biggest problem many healers have with the hill in PoS is getting distracted trying to heal melee DPS (who can take ridiculous amounts of damage from the fire dudes, and of course even the retadins and enh shammies usually won't heal themselves). I've long accepted that I may just have to let the melee die, and focus on the tank.

[Drizzt]

>.< less discussion and more helpful tips pweese? lol
though i do learn a lot reading these < more or less > arguments

[Errvalunia]

Tips... hmmm...

1. Accept what you can and can't do. What you CAN do is keep things off the healer (as the healer that's usually my #1 factor of how much I like/hate you), use your cooldowns appropriately, learn fight mechanics, and try to at least be the first to die if a pull goes horribly, horribly wrong. Sometimes you can't hold stuff off DPS going hogwild, but you just have to accept it and move on. If they die, they'll learn.

2. Be willing to ask for assistance with stuff you can't do. If you don't have an interrupt, ask the DPS to interrupt whatever super bad ability (shadow blast... phantom blast... etc) or interrupt just to pull stuff closer. Ask for CC-ing, ask a shaman DPS for cleansing totem(the totems it replaces aren't very useful for DPS anyways) or tremor totem. Ask for misdirect/ToT if you're having trouble grabbing aggro the first few seconds. Just talk to people. In 5-man pugs it may not always work out well because they want to RofLstomp everything and just spam their one AoE spell, but it can't hurt to try.

And if you find a group who will cooperate with you, ask them to do more runs!

[JollyWarrior]

I've been tanking since release and it's now second nature but when I started to DPS in TBC I found lots of PVP helped. Wrath has given tanks the freedom to pvp as prot so pick up a prot pvp spec to help yourself out as well.

[clubberlaing]

Ive been tanking for years. I look at it as practice when things go wrong and you are forced to make some quick decisions. I think its fun trying to pick up a bunch of new adds while tanking the existing ones. It may seem daunting at first but the first time you actually manage to pick up all the adds and save the group you will feel good and usually the group will be like wow you ARE a good tank. Those kind of compliments will make you want to keep tanking. Look at it like its your time to shine and get in there and try and hit as many mobs as you can.

keybind your taunts and snap agro abilities.
If you see a mob heading towards a caster or healer or whatever taunt it back or charge over and hit it a few times to lock it to you ... if the dps pulls it again well then its not your fault (usually)

[Stonesheild]

Easy way to relax, DI the healer... simple as that wipe those damn annoying DPS that keep pulling for no damn reason trying to wipe you

others are make random macros that say the weirdest things and hit them at random

and get vent to chat up some buddies so that you can distrake yourself (exept in raids)

Buy a healer (I recomend ones that dont care about wiping) - if tank and heals are on the same realm and seem to be friendly no DPS wil kick you and if you get pissed with anyone 80% odds the will be kicked if you or healer start the vote

[Fetzie]

basically just run as many instances in random groups as possible. you need to learn when you have a situation that you can save with some cooldowns or pulling off a really cool move (using some terrain to LoS a caster group, buying your healer 3-5 seconds to stabilize the group, as a warrior learn when you can intimidating shout safely etc). BigWigs bossmod has a plugin for 5 mans, can be helpful.

Being in vt/ts with guildies who are not in the group can be good, everyone like hearing someone flame people in their group, just make sure that if you are in a raid that your guild voip has a different PTT button to the raid voip :P

and disable the party chat 30 seconds into the run if the people are annoying you.

[Swam]

I learned a different way. when i started tanking i was bad. so i got 2 people i knew a healer and a tank who had a dps toon (pre dual spec) and ran with them... a lot. They were friends of mine and they found that when they constantly told me i sucked I would get pissed off and preform perfectly. They still use that when there is a tough fight, they build me up even when I am doing a great job. If my timing is a second off i get an earful, I loose 1 mob when there was no way in hell i could have gotten it, they inform me that I should have become god and pulled it back. This works with the three of us because we are all very skilled players and push each other hared than we push ourselves. If people expect perfection, thay wont get it but you will try harder to obtain it (and you wont reach it)


Everyone makes mistakes. And after a while of getting criticism for crap that was not your fault and you learn to recognize when it isnt your fault, you can just laugh at people who blame you when they pull 2 groups of adds and die because you were on the other side of the instance, or you save the healer over a dps. As a tank you have to make those choices. and all in all its a game.

if you wanna relax while tanking play funny music or tell jokes while pulling ( I have a few good ones macroed) if you get your group laughing they wont really care when you mess up

[Mäcintosh]

I'd have to say I disagree with not running with guildies. For the most part, won't they be the ones with the most patience? Or shouldn't they? They can go hard on you, outgear and out threat you all night and you can just strive to get better just as or more effectively, cause you won't have people bailing on you for one.

Practice, time and experience will give you the confidence. I'm always nervous going into a new situation, only on raids now, with people who are counting on me to hold aggro and stay alive and whom I don't know. Why? Mainly, I just want to do the pro job that I normally do. I take pride in that. I know my rotation, the fight(hopefully), and know how to handle situations when things don't go quite right.

Knowing your rotation is one of the most important parts. You need to build threat fast and maintain it. This will hold aggro the best. As you get better gear, it will become bigger naturally, but knowing what buttons to push when, is huge. When you do it right, there isn't much that can overtake you and I've tanked plenty of instances where dps way outgeared me. Not to say they never pulled it or don't come close. I still have plenty of scares from real high dps, but for the most part, in heroics, if they do pull aggro, it's because they are about to die anyway.

Knowledge of fights, not just your rotation, is important too. Take my first Gen Vezax. I was OT. Never got to void walker in time and caused wipe. Spawned too far away from where I was, knew I was going to tank him, but wasn't central to boss to pick him up. That's inexperience. I knew he was coming but not from where, now that I knew. Second time doing it we got the hard mode acheivement. (I think it's HM ach)
Anyway, you can get all the knowledge from these forums/videos to go into a battle with that knowledge and that can help you relax too.

Once you have the rotation down and you have some experience with your setup and UI and you know the fight (cause knowing is half the battle) you should be able to relax enough to perform your job competently enough for the group to be succesful.

Other than that, f@&$ em if they can't take a joke!

[nserafini]

Confidence is key. Not knowing the dungeons in PUGS, i ran them as DPS for a while, watched other tanks and got a good feel for pulls, mechanics and the like. After a few times you just have to saddle up and ride. While there is a wealth of info on here, you'll never learn unless you do it. Over and over and over and over.

The first thing to come is the button hits, so your rotation becomes second nature. Then, just like driving a car, you'll press the brake when needed without really thinking about it. Oh, one guy in the mob peeled off, highlight and taunt should just happen almost without thought.

If' you go FUBAR and you get kicked, another random queue is right around the corner

[Loganisis]

PUGing H HoR is a comedy rather than a horror.

A Greek Comedy by chance?

[Loganisis]

Warrior tank - I've run into 3 fights that have really made me want to just wow quit. Gormock, Morrowgar, and Rotface. The first time on each, we had 5-8 wipes with me as the OT. Our pally MT was sailing through, but I couldn't survive the sudden drops in healing caused by the moltov cocktails, bonespikes, and running healers (seriously, top 2 healers are the first to get hit 3 times in a row?).

In all three cases I was pretty frustrated. With Gormock and Morrowgar we swapped OTs (we had pallys with off-spec tanks at the time) and were able to go through with double pallys. Rotface we got the next day.

In all three cases, I was able to successfully OT in all three cases the next time through. The difference ended up being very little on my end. It was better reaction by DPS in downing snobalds/bonespikes, and better cleansing with Rotface.

The storal of my morey (for you Capital Steps fans) is if you think you're doing everything you can, you may well be. Its hella frustrating not being able to successfully tank something (or even feel like you're getting better at tanking the fight), but the fact is, unfortunately, we're just as dependent on the raid at times as the raid is on us all the time.

Still frustates the hell out of me when it happens, but is easier to handle when it does now.