Writing away with Blog.com

I’ve been tracking my website hits and most viewed stuff and it looks like every time I bring up the word “tank”, it gets the most views.  So, I figured I would take some time to talk just a little bit about that.

I’m going to be 100% honest with you.  I don’t know crap about being a DK tank or a Pally tank.  I’ve always been lost with Pally’s.  I started reading the spells that Pally’s have and it completely loses me.  I feel like their descriptions are “The Paladin is filled with Holy Light causing 2% damage to reflect back to the casters target’s target and reducing all damage taken from party members by 12% as long as they are all wearing pants”.  Ok, in WHAT situation would I possibly use that?  I’m sure people reading this are saying “Dude, Pally tanking is one of the easiest classes to tank with”.  I’m sure for you, but not for me.  DK’s are supposed to be THE tank.  The mastery all revolves around self healing and return healing.  It just helps out the healers a ton which is nice.  I have a 56 Warrior who is prot spec’d only and I have really enjoyed tanking him up through the dungeons.  But at 56, I have no basis to really tell you how to be an effective tank.

My forte’ is on the Bear.  You don’t see many of us around anymore.  The patch before Cataclysm really hit us hard and kind of made it no fun to be a bear.  Swipe was put on a 6 second cooldown which took any sort of AOE tanking away from us all together.  So….we had to tab target and try to keep aggro on each individual mob.  Keep in mind, this was during the wrath days so marking targets was non-existent.  AOE’s pulled mobs off the bears, we were all called “fail” and it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.  Also Blizzard wanted to make all the tanks fall in place and be more streamline.  That meant a health nerf to us.  Bears have always been the ones with the crazy high health pools.  Now, we’re equal across the board.  I’m sure all of this information makes you want to go right out and start up a bear tank doesn’t it?  Well fear not.  Things have gotten better.

Level 1 – 18:

Here’s my recommendations.  Get comfy with your kitty spec and quest up to level 18.  At level 10 dump your first point into the bear tree so you can pick up mangle right away.  I chose 18 as the cap because at 18 you get swipe.  That’s going to be your best friend for a while so get ready!

First things first.  What are we going to stack?  Well, any leather piece that has stamina and agility.  Basically in the lower levels, if a rogue would use it, you want to use it too!  Agility gives you a number of things.  It gives you attack power as well as dodge and crit.  What’s the benefits of those three things you ask?  Attack power makes all of your abilities hit harder.  Dodge means that if an enemy or boss goes to strike you, you have a chance to dodge out of the way and either take partial or no damage.  That means you’re not dying and the healer isn’t worried about keeping you alive…..for a split second.  Critical Strike Rating is a good thing!  If you have a critical strike against an enemy, it will increase your threat and decrease the chances that some stupid dps is going to pull the boss off of you.  Things that you would want to avoid is anything with haste, parry or block.  Mostly those will be on plate items, however you might see them on the occasional ring or necklace.  They will do you virtually no good.

THE PULL!

Ok, here we are, we’re level 18 (maybe higher) and everyone is standing behind me waiting for me to go.  Usually you’re going to have a group of 3 or 4 that you’ll want to get a hold of.  This is where swipe comes in handy.  Stay on one main target and between mangle and swipe you should have enough to keep hold of all of them.  Tab every once and again and hit other mobs with a mangle.  ALWAYS hit swipe every time it’s available.  That’s just buying you insurance at that point.  At level 15 you will learn an ability called “Maul”.  This is NOT on the global cooldown and if you glyph into it, it will hit additional targets when you use it.  Yet another great ability to do damage to multiple targets and keep all the mobs ON YOU.  Another good thing to throw into your rotation is Demoralizing Roar.  This will reduce the damage from enemies by 10% and lasts for 30 seconds.  It’s not an offensive ability, it’s a defensive ability.  It’s you helping to keep yourself alive.

NOTE:  At 15 you’ve also learned an ability called growl.  Did one of those pesky dps pull a target off of you?  Growl at the target and hit him with a mangle to show him where he belongs!

So you’ve become comfy with all these things and you’ve just dinged level 24!  Congrats!  Now you’ve learned a spell called Faerie Fire.  This is something you can either throw into your rotation, or possibly pull a group with.  It decreases the targets armor by 4% (12% if you spec into it) which will make the enemies take more damage.  That’s a debuff that helps everyone in the group you are in.  Burning bosses faster=finishing instances faster=phat loots.

So you’ve ravaged your way through SM and ZF and various other dungeons and have now reached the golden level of 52!  Go head to the trainer and pick up the spell “Frenzied Regeneration”.  You’ll hear all the time in raid chats and other tanking threads “Blow your cooldowns!”  Well, this is your first cooldown you’ll get to blow in an “oh crap I’m almost dead” situation.  What this spell does is it boosts your overall health by 30% and starts converting rage into health.  It’ll buy you enough time hopefully for that healer to get his big heal off that will put you back up to full again.  If you glyph into it, you lose the ability to convert rage into health, however healing effects on your are increased.  So it’s definitely a worthwhile glyph to get especially at the end game raiding level.  You’re little bit of rage isn’t going to be enough to heal you through a big hit from a boss.  However the fact that heals are hitting you harder is going to help out a ton.

Ding! 58!  Congrats!  Speaking of cooldowns, here comes your next one.  Barkskin reduces your damage taken by 20%.  Again, it’s not an offensive ability, it’s a defensive ability that you can use to help keep yourself alive.  Add that to your hot bar next to Frenzied Regeneration.  Chances are, if you need to blow one cooldown, you’ll probably need to blow both at this point.

At level 66 you’ll learn your bread and butter ability for bear tanking.  Lacerate!  Now is when you’ll start doing the lacerate/mangle dance.  Ideally (depending on the situation) you’re going to want to stack lacerate 3 times and then mangle.  Mangle is going to hit harder and cause your bleed effects to hit harder as well.  So lacerate generates threat by putting a bleed on the target.  The more stacks you have (up to 3) the higher the damage is going to be.  If you mangle the target, with 3 stacks of lacerate up, it’s going to increase the damage even more.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  We’re not trying to out dps anyone here.  The more damage you put out, the higher your threat is going to be.  You ARE the tank and you have to have all targets on you always.

Right now you’re rotation should look something like this on a single target:

Faerie Fire (to pull) – lacerate – mangle – maul – lacerate – lacerate -mangle – maul

It doesn’t have to be that EXACTLY but I’ll explain why that will work for the time being.  Faerie Fire will automatically put the debuff on the target and pull him to you.  Lacerate puts the first dot.  Mangle increases the damage of that dot. Maul isn’t on the global cooldown so that’s another easy hit to throw in there and generate additional threat without having to go through a global cooldown.  Lacerate x 2 will increase the severity and frequency of the dots.  Mangle will also intensify the bleed/dot damage and your last Maul is used, again, because it’s off the global cooldown.  When in doubt…..lacerate and mangle.  If you don’t know what else to do, make sure you have 3 stacks of lacerate up all the time and you’re hitting mangle every time you can.

So you’ve beat down everyone from Northrend and it’s time to get into some cataclysm content.  A few things have changed.  Upon reaching level 80, you’ve now opened yourself up to reforging your gear.  Here’s my rules to live by.  Not gospel, but it’s never done me wrong:

Always reforge to Dodge.  Get rid of haste every time you can and switch it to dodge.  If you’re stuck with crit and mastery, keep the mastery and sacrifice the crit.  Some people may disagree with that decision, but if you understand what the bear mastery does, it will make sense.  I’ll cover that later.

Here’s some ideas I have regarding the 80-81 journey.  Don’t tank.  Get back into your kitty cat form and go questing.  Those shiny greens you get as quest rewards will far outweigh anything you get from Northrend.  It doesn’t matter where you quest really.  You’ll get similar gear from both 80-81 zones.  If you do try to go into any of the higher end 81-85 dungeons in your shiny purples from Northrend, you’re going to get your face stomped in.

At 81 you’ll learn a bear ability called thrash.  This was the AOE gift we had been waiting for from Blizzard.  Thrash puts a dot on everything around you and it ticks pretty hard so combined with swipe, you’ll have a good hold on everything around you.  That is really the last tanking ability you’re going to learn all the way up to 85.  By now you should be able to see the effects of how everything works.  Swipe and Thrash keep mobs on you while lacerate and mangle keeps the mob that everyone else is burning down, attracted to you.  Glyphed maul is strictly insurance in your back pocket.

Ok, so you’ve seen all of the abilities and how I recommend how to use them.  I understand, different strokes for different folks however and my style may not work for you.  That’s perfectly alright.  I know that I don’t have aggro issues for the most part.

So lets talk about one of the hardest things to understand and successfully pull off…….THE TAUNT!

There you are in a raid and you’ve got another tank that is just PUMPING out the threat.  Now you have to taunt that target and KEEP him on you even though the other tank is just going balls out.  Here’s my rotation:

Just before I have to taunt I make sure I have 3 stacks of lacerate ticking away.  Then taunt – Mangle – Pulverize (it’s in your talent tree and you MUST spec into it) – thrash – lacerate x 3 – mangle.  Be sure to throw a Maul in there if you have the time.  Basically what you’ve done is you’ve set yourself up to be able to put out a bunch of burst damage.  After that rotation, you should be able to look at the threat meter and see a good lead on the other tank.  Some new tanks think that as soon as they taunt the boss, the boss is just going to start attacking him.  WRONG.  The boss attacks he who has more threat.  So make sure you are….he. 

Here is a link to my build and you can view my glyphs and equipment.  You’ll also be able to get a good feel on how I have gem’d enchanted, and reforged my gear.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/emerald-dream/twizzl%C3%A9/talent/primary

There is a TON of threads about bear tanking out there.  This is just what has worked for me and the raiding guild that I’m in.

Twizz out.

Questions?  TwizzleTank@gmail.com or you can follow me on Twitter @TwizzleTank