Archive for April 6th, 2009:
Tank progress at 80
This morning, at 6:45 am, when I blearily walked towards my office building, a thought occurred to me. How do you measure progress as a tank once you’ve hit end-game?
Back in the day, in October 2008, I cried about the death of the threat mini-game, but of course it came back. It came back in the form of AoE insanity and all you can do is try to stem the tide of losing all your mobs to that warlock/moonkin/mage/insert any AoE class. Once you hit 80, first goal of the day is to hit the magic 540 to be raid-ready, or 535 to do heroics. Then you work on gear, and have to learn and live the skill to make it through instances like H Halls of Stone, H Utgarde Pinnacle and the H CoS timed run. It all requires quick reflexes, snap aggro (as much as you have that as prot warrior) and the will to best all your AoErs on threat. Pity the warriors and druids who don’t have it anywhere as easy as paladins and DKs. I like the ‘Bring the player, not the class’ theme, so it’s always been a personal challenge, to learn and improve. If everything works right, I can even one or two-shot the Brann event, though the frequent rage starvation and cooldowns makes it very obvious that we do not have any kind of snap aggro.
Once you get into your first raids, and I am merely talking Naxxramas-10 from my personal experience, trash groups shouldn’t really be a problem. Two tanks can hold against the AoE for the most part. Adds? kk, no problem. In a way, I miss trash pulls like the Ushers in Karazhan, which had such high requirements for tanks. Two tanks competing for threat, and a shackle to bind the second usher. If you had no shackle, you had to be creative with the tanking, but it was entirely possible. That part is missing. I haven’t found any Naxxramas trash that is quite that interesting. Gargoyles are annoying, and kiting oozes isn’t that amazing.
How do you really measure progress in your own technical skill as a tank from that point on? I try to thank healers when I can for great saves, but there aren’t really any times that someone tells me ‘Wow, Kadomi, your threat is amazing!’ I am vain enough to think that I am an excellent tank performing quite well. But I am never satisfied. I want to be better. My current measuring method is to look at WWS and personal DPS on bosses. Thanks to protection warrior changes, personal DPS really reflects on your TPS. Of importance to me is the benchmark boss, because he really isn’t anything else: Patchwerk. A benchmark for the tanks how much damage they can take; for healers how much healing they can do before going out of mana; for DPS how much damage they can do when there’s a boss that just stands there and doesn’t require any movement whatsoever.
I have tanked this fight twice now, which isn’t often at all (I healed once), but it’s got to do as a benchmark. My first time, I did around 1500 DPS, which I thought was great. Yesterday I did 1693 DPS, which was even better. 82 Heroic Strikes, 39 white swings. My best ratio yet. Of course, that’s nothing compared to Zhyk from the guild Showdown on EU-Vekni’lash who just ran Naxx-10 in 59 minutes. That’s 85 Heroic Strikes, 0 white swings. Is tanking progress really measured at how often I can hammer down on my HS key? I know a lot of tank bloggers actually have it on their mousewheel. I don’t. Instead I will wait for Blizzard to fix this really awful mechanic, because spamming one button inbetween using your regular priority rotation is really…silly. I would like a more clever way to dump excess rage. And yet, I shall continue to strive to push myself with Heroic Strikes. My Glyph of Cleaving is going the way of the dodo, because HS does do pretty impressive damage. I like being competitive DPS. Now, I do not like that I was only 30k damage below our lowest DPS, but I want to contribute with the highest DPS I can offer, while sustaining survivability.
How about you guys?
As a note, I don’t have any of my weekend stories this week. I had a very disappointing raid weekend, and so neither of my characters has gotten the full Naxxramas achievement yet. It was a raid weekend full of afks, waiting, standing around, and disconnect hell. But people got upgrades, people fought bosses they had never seen before, and next time we’ll get Thaddius, Sapphiron and KT again. Then hopefully I won’t grind my teeth while asleep. My jaw hurts. Peace.
