Tanking revised – the little gifts the Lich King brings

We love our tanking, don’t we? Of course we do. For good reasons, that is. However, the new expansion soon to come will change many a thing about our daily deeds and the overall feel of tanking seems to change significantly. It’s a lot of minor and bigger changes, adding up to what I believe will be a whole new tanking experience. Interested? Read on.

First of all a personal note. I feel like tanking as is does have some very basic problems, wrong assumptions and weird ideas. We are plate mail juggernauts. We weild a fast weapon and an as-big-as-possible shield. Our armor outweighs ourselves. And yet, most of the damage we reduce with dodge & parry. Come on? How’s that supposed to look like? In my full plate mail outfit, where I should be barely able to move at all, I elegantly swing my hip left & right, leaving your attacks to hit nothing but air. If I can’t seem to move out your way I’m just raising my sword and parry your attack.

This. Is. So. Wrong.

In my opinion warrior tanks shouldn’t be avoiding much damage at all. Our specialty should be to mitigate as much damage as possible. We should be the one tanking class that almost never has to deal with unsuspected spike damage. Forget dodge. Reduce parry. Increase armor, heavily. Increase block damage mitigation, heavily. Have us reduce all incoming damage as far as every fight becomes a predictable, constant damage-income. That’s how I think a warrior tank should work. Less avoidance. More mitigation. But back to topic, to something substantial, the upcoming expansion.

A lot of stuff is about to happen

I won’t pull out any numbers in this post, because I only am going to take things as granted about a month or two after the expansion went live, but basic directions are pretty much obvious. Within the next paragraphs I’ll try to cover all the changes that will come, from a very shallow, practical point of view.

Fear me, monster ferret

We’ll generate a serious amount of threat through damage. Our damage output will increase significantly, through better scaling and way more strength. This is great. Not only will it make us more useful in practically every situation, but it will – and that’s the greatest part of that – make our spec way more fun. I’m a bit worried that we might loose some of our threat-generation abilities though, obviously for balancing, but after all I think more versatility and fun for prot warriors is a good change. And who could not love the whole crit-talents we get? Incite gets us 15% more crits on Thunder Clap, Heroic Strike and Cleave. Critical Block gives a good chance to add 15% crit to shield slam, Sword & Board stacks 15% crit on devastate, so with Cruelty we have a 20% crit chance on pretty much every tanking ability – not a single buff or item bonus applied.

Take them all

You’ve probably already heard it by now – thunderclap will get it’s target cap removed. We’ll be able to AoE tank somewhat, and multi-mob-tanking will get significantly easier. Adding to that is the new damage shield, the shockwave-thingy and appropriately scaling abilities with gear and talents (armed to the teeth, anyone?), so watch out bomb-groups, for here we come.

There’s more to it than taunt

Mocking blow in defensive stance. Charge in all stances, plus a serious upgrade, for only one point in Warbringer. This means an additional intervene (i prefer the stun over the damage-reduction, by far) and an additional taunt (probably without the rage equalization, but still you’ll get that mob off of whomever it’s running at). With all cooldowns and such, a prot warrior will most likely be able to get back a running mob at any time, in every situation.

Easy, is it not?

Vigilance seems to finally be sure to have the threat-transfer. This is hilarious, because it will make our job so much easier. On trash groups vigilance will be on the healer, that makes our job 20% easier (-10% of his threat generated, +10% of ours – how cool’s that?). On Bossfights your preferred nuker will be able to totally let go and also help you do your job. That’s absolutely great. Spell Reflection now will, for only 2 points, also reflect spells on team members, thus becoming a must-keep-that-up during all magical 5-man encounters. It will not only avoid damage to the group, but also increase damage on the mobs.

More goodies

Heroic Throw means no more running out of ammo, no more keeping that throwing weapon in your bag and also means significant inital threat. Enraged Regeneration not only will ease the task of your healers in close call situations, it will also make soloing way more enjoyable, so now the Improved Def. Stance really is worth the 2 points and a must-have. With Berserker Rage becoming available in all stances and a significant boost in Improved Bloodrage there will be neither threat- nor fear issues anymore, two things that have been more bugging and frustrating than challenging.

Conclusion

After all I’m really looking forward to the new tanking. I’m not happy with dodge still being an important thing for a tank (especially the Anticipation-change seems awkward, I’d rather have it reduce all incoming damage for 1% per point, which results in the very same damage reduction, but more predictable and stable), but we’ll just get so much more options and fun-things. So the only real concern I have is: Where to put all those buttons?

It’s about time for a macro-condition checking for cooldowns:

/cast AbilityA [hascd] AbilityB [hascd] AbilityC.

What do you think about the changes?

Recommended Reading

• The final countdown @ tanklikeagirl.com

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