Druids tanks take more damage than others?

[Grishp]

I have been raiding on my druid and I'm keeping a good uptime on my savage defence but i am taking alot more damage that the warrior in my guild that has a similar item level is it just me or something other people are finding?

[sifuedition]

How are you comparing numbers? I would suggest using World of Logs to compare. Recount doesn't always break it down the best. For instance, in recount, my monk co-tank appears to take half the damage as my pally. In WoL, I take less damage. Has to do with stagger in that specific case.

[Airowird]

Are you looking at a Recount - Damage Taken meter?
If so are you taking into account self-healing? AKA looking at Healing Required rather than all healing taken?
Are you even comparing same tanking jobs/situation or did someone just post meters the entire raid and everyone saw it as absolute truth?

Don't just look at a generic meter, try and distill where the numbers come from and what they mean.

[Slyvar]

I think that tanks are pretty dang balanced overall (other than blood DK soloing abilities...). The game as a whole feels far more balanced than it has in the last few years, when comparing different class/spec DPS, tanking and healing abilities. The appearance of taking more damage could be that you are undergeared, improperly geared or reading the information given to you incorrectly. Can you link us to a World of Logs or something that we can look at?

[Tielyn]

The other thing to look at that WoL tells you better is _what_ is doing damage to you. The things that your Active Mitigation stops is anything you can dodge, which does not count DoTs or ground effects.

Another thing is how much time the bosses have on you versus the other tank -- more boss time on you equals more damage on you. If you do more DPS than the other tank while taking more damage, that's usually an indication that you had Vengance longer.

One of the things I do is add up the dodges + parries of the non-druid tank and multiply by the average damage done, versus all of my dodges multiplied by the average damage done, and that number is Damage Avoided. Add that number to the damage you and the OT actually took and you'll see who took more damage.

All in all, on specific fights (Stone Guard's bleeds are a prime example -- completely reliant on your RNG in a lot of ways), druids are squishier - but on other fights (Feng, where our passive 25% magic resist really shines), we're the least squishy. It balances itself out sooner or later, but we can't tell you what, if anything, you're doing wrong unless we see a log.

I play a druid, and so far, I've always taken less damage than anyone else I tank with.

-Tielyn

PS. Caveat: A druid played like you did back in Cata _will_ take more damage than you remember - and you will feel more squishy. On the other paw? All of the tank classes got some sort of 'do this or be squishy' mechanic added to them.

[Tahsou]

I have been raiding on my druid and I'm keeping a good uptime on my savage defence but i am taking alot more damage that the warrior in my guild that has a similar item level is it just me or something other people are finding?

My main is a guardian, and in raids Im takeing atp less damage than my fellow tanks warrior/dk, warrior is less geared than me, and dk is better geared.
The reson why u can feel u take more damage is how different the guardian prioritise their stat weights this days, I think, and ofc something important as what kind of boss u up against. Also it depends how often u have the boss compere to your tanking mate. From my perspective guardians is realy solid state right now when it comes to takeing damage the only thing I feel is that our dps is low compere to other tanks in simillar gear, I feel we gain vengance in a slower rate than other tanks something that make us a bit gimped in dps output specially in 10 mans u can notice this, u can compensate with stat wights that gives more rage but ofc at a cost that usually goes on mitigation/avoidence.
Paws up and Gl

[Tengenstein]

All tanks gain vengeance at the same rate.

[Tielyn]

Slightly longer version:

Vengance is a function of how hard you are getting hit by monsters (not players). Your Vengance buffs your attacks by adding to your Attack Power. Big meaty single hits will add more Vengance than lots of smaller, lighter hits, so you'll see a giant sized spike to your Vengance (and damage) for a little while after the big hit.

If you are using your AP-buffed Frenzied Regen to heal yourself, you will seem less squishy because you're helping your healers out, and they can't tell who's healing you, only that you aren't dropping as fast as the other tank is.

Since you will be hit by spell damage and melee strikes at the same rate, you teeeechnically don't gain Vengance slower than other tanks. However, I do recall seeing that if you dodge or parry an attack, there was a mechanic whereby you didn't gain any Vengance, but it reset your timer from falling off. Which would, I believe, reduce your Vengance over time (it averages out) so if you're being Really Good at dodging everything, you might see that as a lower Vengance than the tank that's not avoiding Anything (and being more squishy than you) and he'll have the higher Vengance.

The biggest problem with the no-cap Vengance system is that if the other tank maintains a really high Vengance lead on you after your initial taunt wears off, they'll pull back off of you. We've known this since before MoP hit, since the tentacles in Madness of Deathwing gave the Impale tank a stupid amount of Vengance and they'd take the tentacle back in two hits, since the non Impale damage was so much lower.

*sheepish grin* I'm not having problem with DPS output. I'm always above the other tanks in my raid (paladin, druid, warrior so far), and when I had two dogs for all of Stone Guard, I cleared 60K DPS, which was good for second.

I feel that they fixed the worst problems facing Guardian Druids since the beta days, and I'm enjoying myself immensely.

-Tielyn

[Tengenstein]

However, I do recall seeing that if you dodge or parry an attack, there was a mechanic whereby you didn't gain any Vengance, but it reset your timer from falling off. Which would, I believe, reduce your Vengance over time (it averages out) so if you're being Really Good at dodging everything, you might see that as a lower Vengance than the tank that's not avoiding Anything (and being more squishy than you) and he'll have the higher Vengance.

-Tielyn

How squishy you are has about as much to do with vengeance as it has to do with hamburgers. Vengeance from avoided attacks is less subject to RNG than vengeance from non-avoided attacks , which will actually make your vengeance gain smoother. however keep in mind that this is going to have a minimal effect on vengeance as vengeance is pretty damn smooth anyway, the only RNG on it is is the variability of boss attacks and bosses tend to have predictable sized hits in any matter.

[Tielyn]

How squishy you are has about as much to do with vengeance as it has to do with hamburgers. Vengeance from avoided attacks is less subject to RNG than vengeance from non-avoided attacks , which will actually make your vengeance gain smoother. however keep in mind that this is going to have a minimal effect on vengeance as vengeance is pretty damn smooth anyway, the only RNG on it is is the variability of boss attacks and bosses tend to have predictable sized hits in any matter.

Agreed. It doesn't directly affect your Vengance. After the first several seconds or so, you _should_ have more Vengance than the other Tank because you are being hit and they aren't (and their Vengance will fall off comparatively). What I meant by 'being more squishy than you' was that the tank that isn't avoiding attacks (being bad at Active and passive Mitigation) is getting more Vengance input, and what I've been seeing is that my average Vengance doesn't go up when I dodge attacks because I took 0 damage via dodging, and the other tank who wasn't using any Active Mitigation at all (we're still working on fixing this) would occasionally outhreat me at the taunt transfer because I didn't have enough Vengance yet.

-Tielyn

[Tengenstein]

That no vengeance from avoidance if you currently have no vengeance issue got fixed over a month ago. If you avoid a boss attack you get the vengeance amount equal to the average unmitigated damage of that attack multiplied by the vengeance constant which is 1.8% for attacks affected by armour and 5%(?) of armour ignoring attacks.

[Tielyn]

Just checked -- you're right, to a point, and I stand corrected. The you-get-Vengance-even-when-you dodge fix affects autoattacks (melee swings) only, and not specials -- and from personal experience, week before last on Feng, I taunted off of the MT when she had two stacks of Lightning Lash, sidestepped the first Lightning Fists he tried to cast, she got hit, and her next Shield of the Righteous yanked him back from me, because she had the Vengance from LF on top of her pre-existing Vengance.

This past week, too, we had two bear tanks (myself and Telamir) on Stone Guard, and we were doing a double swap, and Tela had a high-tick Lacerate on her dog (she had two dogs, I had one), and while doing a max range taunt, the one I taunted turned around and went back to her even though she hadn't touched it after the taunt (it was just out of melee range from me, but I couldn't go to it because of the Cobalt mines in the way).

Seems that the following is the case:
- For mobs with high autoattack melee damage, low special damage, you should have smooth Vengance scaling.
- For mobs with low autoattack melee damage, high special damage, if you don't get hit by an equal-sized special, it's still a potential issue in a Vengance differential department.

-Tielyn

[Sharku]

Our Guardian is taking considerably more damage than I do as a Paladin at the moment, not to mention the ridiculous levels of self healing I do that the Druid cant/doesn't do. I follow Theck's advice and stack haste/mastery and am hit capped and expertise hard capped. Are druids meant to be doing the same re. expertise? Maximising SD uptime by never missing or being parried sounds sensible to me, but then I'm not playing a druid. Should Guardians be aiming for 15% expertise now and stacking dodge on physical bosses and crit on magic bosses?

[Tengenstein]

Seems like sloppy tanking; people not controlling their threat, standing in shit they shouldn't be standing in, not swapping out of non-tank presences when they don't need to tank. As for the ping-ponging dog, there's some shenanigans there, either she hit it hard after you taunted, or some sort of tricks/MD fun is happening. for her to pull it with residual lacerate ticks, they'd have to generate >30% of the total threat she had on the dog at the time of the taunt in the 3 seconds after you taunted it.

Vengeance is predicatable, there's no RNG avoidance screwing it up anymore, no more X tank class takes more damage so has more vengenace. Differetial's between tanks vengeance levels are only a problem if one of the tanks let's it be. The tanks should not be fighting each other for threat, that just plain being a dick to one another. if you're tanking and the other guy taunts off you at the appropriate time, yyou should know not to lay into the mob that hard for the next little while, hell maybe you should even consider swapping stances, likewise if you're taunting, you should be prepared to hit the target like badger on acid, if like on feng you've just been aggro less you should have the respources built up to open with SD up and maybe an extra Maul.

[Tjomek]

Our Guardian is taking considerably more damage than I do as a Paladin at the moment, not to mention the ridiculous levels of self healing I do that the Druid cant/doesn't do. I follow Theck's advice and stack haste/mastery and am hit capped and expertise hard capped. Are druids meant to be doing the same re. expertise? Maximising SD uptime by never missing or being parried sounds sensible to me, but then I'm not playing a druid. Should Guardians be aiming for 15% expertise now and stacking dodge on physical bosses and crit on magic bosses?

I myself recently changed from a mitigation build (stam > agi > dodge = mastery > crit) to a rage build (stam > agi > hit 7.5% = exp 15% > crit > mastery) and i find that both my tps and SD uptime are a lot easyer to controle. With the added benefit from crit in bear form i am sitting at about 50% crit so i can really rely on those 15 rage procs to keep my rage bar red.

About the opening post "druids beeing more "squishy" than other tanks" I tank together with a pala and on most fights we are never more than 1% dmg taken away from eachother, if we both tank equal time that is. So no, i dont feel this is an issue.

Anyway, that was just my $0.02.
Tj.