Post by Domm on Sept 18, 2011 11:09:10 GMT -5
This thread more or less picks up where my previous thread (An Introduction to Warrior Tanking) left off, and is aimed at Warrior tanks at or near level 50 (or anyone that wants a preview of what to expect). Why level 50? That's when you can start to visit expert versions of dungeons.
I don't pretend to be an expert on this topic, and I'm always trying to learn. So I'd appreciate any comments you may have.
Gear
I reached level 50 wearing green gear, and I don't regret it. I wanted to save my coin for end game gear, so I didn't even buy a mount at level 40. As a result, when I reached level 50 I had about 300 plat (I'm a harvester...I don't craft, so can't comment on which is more lucrative). Between gear and a mount, I spent almost all of my savings within a few hours of reaching level 50.
Even though my gear was mostly green for 49 levels, I didn't feel like I was under geared because I did two inexpensive things to improve my stats:
(a) I participated in a lot of activities that provide planarite rewards (rifts, invasions, ...) and used that planarite to purchase the best sigil from the planarite vendor in Sanctum (Sigil of the Five, it allows you to equip 2 greater and 4 lesser essences...the world event vendor now sells one called Barnacle Encrusted Sigil of the Five that ups the ante by adding Water Resistance).
(b) I added basic item enchantments to my gear (purchased via the auction house).
Once I reached level 50, I visited the auction house and purchased purple gear where available and blue for the rest. There are some very nice crafted items available from crafters, so if you don't see anything on the auction house, try the Sanctum trade channel for a crafter (in particular, shop for plate leggings and a mace).
Those purchases raised my stats sufficiently that I was immediately eligible for tier 1 expert dungeons (use the Looking For Group window to determine if you are eligible). I bumped my stats up a bit more by completing the Order of Mathos reputation daily quests in Stillmoor every day for about a month (the quest givers are in Zareph's Return). My rewards were a purple breastplate (after about two weeks), and a belt enchantment (the only one I've encountered thus far in game). I then used my PvP points (from Warfronts...don't wait til level 50 to try Warfronts, you'll enjoy them a lot more if you do a level or two of Warfronts at the end of every 10 levels...so say levels 28 and 29, 38 and 39, etc.) to purchase a PvP belt which had decent stats.
Once you start visiting tier 1 instances, you start earning Plaques of Achievement as rewards. You upgrade your stats by spending these Plaques on better gear (the vendors are in the Lodge of the Planes in Sanctum), and eventually you qualify for tier 2 instances. The tier 2 dungeons reward even more Plaques, and you spend those on even better gear, and eventually you're ready to raid.
And I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the awesome crafted gear sets that were added in 1.4. The Warrior tank set consists of breastplate, shoulders, shield and ring, and you get stat bonuses for equipping multiple pieces of the set. Just be prepared to pay a high price for these items (100-300p per item).
Stats
If you study the Looking for Group window, you'll note that the game only considers three stats when deciding if you qualify for expert dungeons, namely Strength, Hit and Toughness. And surprisingly, two of those three stats aren't among those that I said were the most important in my previous thread. So that requires a bit of explanation.
Mobs have the ability to avoid your attacks. If an archer misses their target, the encounter may take longer to finish. But if you miss with one of your aggro management skills, you might lose aggro and a fellow adventurer may die! So it's important at this stage to ensure that you have a sufficiently high Hit stat, because this greatly increases the likelihood that your attacks will find their target.
In expert instances, the mobs score critical hits much more frequently. Think of a critical hit as an extra dice roll that determines whether their blow somehow bypasses your defenses and does much more damage than normal. Your Toughness stat is your defense against critical hits. It absorbs some of the extra damage, rather than reducing the likelihood of the critical hit. So although Toughness protects you, it doesn't also protect your fellow adventurers.
The interesting thing about these stats is that I've always seemed able to accumulate sufficent Hit without consciously shopping for it. But to get high Toughness you'll need to start spending your Plaques.
A Healer's Perspective
Once you start expert dungeons, there's a temptation to focus on the three stats that the game uses to gate your progress. However, don't lose sight of the fact that there's a lot more to tanking than satisfying the requirements of the game. One of the things you should keep in mind is that you should be easy to heal. If healers find you easy to keep alive, chances are better that they'll be happy to group with you.
So, what makes a tank easy to keep alive? Basically, during an encounter a healer wants to see your health drop at a consistent pace. What healers don't like to see are huge spikes of damage. So don't have any glaring weaknesses. Don't be strong against melee and weak against magic. And keep your Toughness stat as high as possible. Your healer will appreciate it!
Souls
There are a lot of potential ways to build your tank. In this thread I'm going to limit the discussion to my first two builds (I have 5 tank builds in total). For 49 levels, the build that I used most often is what I think of as my survival build. It makes heavy use of the Paladin tree, with the rest spent in the Reaver tree. The third tree in that build is Void Knight, just to get the basic magic damage reduction that comes for free with that tree. I took all of the self heals in the Paladin tree, so that I can last a very long time without the help of a healer. And I took the multi-target DoTs (Damage over Time skills) in the Reaver tree so that I can manage aggro in groups. I still use this build when soloing, and sometimes in instances when survivability is essential (i.e. against a tough boss). The down side of this build is that others can take aggro from me if they work at it.
My second build is just a minor tweak of my survival build, and I use it 99% of the time now when I'm with a good healer. I eliminated all of the self heals and upped my damage output (particularly useful in those skills that include the threat multiplier). The result is that although I can't survive quite as long, I have much better control of aggro. And I can switch back and forth between these two builds with ease because my available skills change very little.
The details of both builds can be found in the two posts that follow.
Assisting Revisited
When I was new to tanking many moons ago, I was under the impression (based on lots of yelling in pickup groups) that "assisting" was the cornerstone of group play. In other words, all members of the group should at all times be targeting whichever mob the tank is currently targeting. But nothing could be further from the truth.
This myth stems from the fact that many times, particularly in pickup groups, the tank will pull mob "A" and a fellow adventurer will pull distant mob "C". This is typically followed by various comments of a less than complimentary nature. Clearly, no one should be pulling other than the tank. And if everyone is assisting the tank, then no one will pull anything. But assisting, although it eliminates this problem, is not the right solution.
Whenever facing a difficult encounter, the tank should mark the mobs and clearly state the order in which they are to be killed. The tank's fellow adventurers will kill the mobs in the order indicated, regardless of who the tank happens to be targeting at any given instant. If someone gets a little carried away and manages to steal aggro, they will naturally have the sense to pause in their attack until the tank regains control.
The reasoning here is pretty basic. Mobs don't do less damage as they approach death, they do exactly the same amount of damage regardless of their health. So even though the tank will be spreading threat among all the mobs in the encounter, the rest of the group should be focusing damage on a single mob until it's dead.
Allow me to illustrate with an example. Assume that your group is dealing with a group of 4 mobs. Further assume that each mob has 10,000 health and averages 250 damage per second. Also assume that your group does a total of 500 damage per second combined (excluding the tank, whose damage we'll ignore).
If the group keeps switching targets (assisting the tank), the group's damage will be (more or less) evenly spread across all 4 mobs. It will take 40,000 damage to kill all 4 mobs, and at 500 damage per second, the encounter will last for about 80 seconds (1 minute 20 seconds). Since all 4 mobs survive for about 80 seconds, they do a total of 80,000 damage to the tank.
Instead, assume that the group focuses initially on mob 1. That mob will be dead in 20 seconds, and the tank will take 20,000 damage. Then the group focuses on mob 2, killing it in another 20 seconds, with the tank takes 15,000 more damage. Then the group kills mob 3 in another 20 seconds, and the tank takes an additional 10,000 damage. And finally, the group finishes off mob 4, and the tank takes another 5,000 damage.
So, focusing all damage on one mob at a time reduced the amount of damage that the tank took from 80,000 to 50,000. That's a 37.5% reduction, meaning the tank needs considerably less healing and the healer consumes considerably less mana. And in a difficult excounter, it means that the danger only exists for the first 20 seconds rather than 80. In other words, the chance of disaster is 400% less.
Clearly, the preceeding example is a simplification. But it makes plain the fact that damage should be focused, not spread across multiple mobs. And if we all buy into the "assist at all costs" myth, then the tank will be reluctant to keep switching targets to manage aggro because it will extend the encounter.
At this point, you may be wondering about the order in which mobs should be killed. Lets say that a boss has two helpers. Should the boss be killed first, or the helpers? I'd say that depends on how much combined damage the 3 mobs are doing. If you can survive their combined damage, then I'd suggest killing the boss first, because multi-target attacks may kill the helpers even before the boss dies. But if you can't survive the combined damage, then you have no choice but to kill as many helpers as necessary first. Not to worry, they won't have as much health as the boss.
Crowd Control
In some encounters, the group of mobs does more damage to the tank than the healer can offset. In other encounters, although the tank survives, they take so much damage that if even the slightest thing went wrong, the tank would have died. In cases like this, crowd control makes life so much easier. Ask your fellow adventurers if any of them have crowd control skills (e.g. Sap, which stuns a mob, or the skill that temporarily turns a mob into a squirrel). The idea is, prior to the tank engaging the mobs, your fellow adventurer incapacitates one of the mobs. The tank then deals with the rest. Once those mobs are dead, the tank moves on to the incapacitated mob.
The trick to successful crowd control is to not touch the incapacitated mob until all of the other mobs are dead. Sadly, that's harder than it sounds, because everyone (including the tank) likes to use AoEs during multi-mob encounters. If an AoE causes damage to the stunned/sleeping/morphed mob, it will wake up and join the fight. Likewise, if a DoT has already been used on the mob, any attempt to control the mob will fail, because the DoT will tick and break control.
Communicating with your fellow adventurers is key to making crowd control work. Mark the mob to be incapacitated and remind everyone that the mob isn't to be touched. You'll find that this works better when adventuring with your friends than in a pickup group.
The animations caused by crowd control are worthy of brief mention. Sap does cause an animation to indicate that the mob is stunned, but this skill is often used from a distance, and as a result can be a bit hard to see. And when a mob gets morphed into a squirrel, well, squirrels are small. I'm embarrased to admit that once while dungeoning with a pickup group, I had no idea that a mob had been morphed into a squirrel during the fight. I didn't notice the cute little squirrel hopping around near the back of our group and so I went ahead and pulled the next group of mobs. All was well in the end, but I felt rather careless...
Positioning Mobs
At this point, you've no doubt mastered all of the positioning strategies that I mentioned in my previous thread. It's time to add two more to your repertoire.
When dealing with ranged mobs, there are two good reasons to draw them in to your location:
(a) When they are close to you, you can use your multi-target skills to manage their aggro and burn them down faster.
(b) When they are distant, any roamer that gets close to them may get drawn into your encounter.
If you don't have the "rubber band" pull that I mentioned in my previous thread, the only way to pull them to you is to get out of their sight. If they can't see you, they will come closer, and won't stop until they can see you again. So if you duck behind a rock or a wall, they'll soon join you. You'll hear this referred to as "line of sight" positioning.
The second positioning strategy is referred to as "kiting". Kiting means backing up and having the boss follow you, much as you would fly a kite. You kite a boss if it isn't safe to engage them in a single location, perhaps because they are dropping something that is eventually going to explode, or they are causing the ground in front of them to burst into flame. In theory, kiting couldn't be simpler. You back up and the boss will follow you as long as you have aggro (assuming they aren't ranged, in which case they can't be kited). So mix your ranged attacks with melee strikes every time they close the gap between you. However, keep in mind that you don't want to back out of your healer's range or move the boss out of the range of your fellow adventurers. So typically I'll kite a boss in a small circle, with my fellow adventurers positioned in the center of the circle. This approach has three added bonuses:
(a) If the boss spawns any adds that attack your fellow adventurers, the adds will be within your range and can easily be controlled.
(b) If the boss teleports to one of your fellow adventurers, it will be within range for you to regain control.
(c) Kiting in a circle greatly reduces the chance that I'll back up over a cliff...
Looking Ahead
Lest you think that we've exhausted every aspect of Warrior tanking, please be assured that there's plenty more to come. Such as special purpose builds that make challenging bosses easy. And when you start raiding, you'll need to deal with the very different roles of main tank and off tank. Your gear will also change to reflect the fact that your raid members will buff you so much that you'll start bumping up against the hard cap in some of your stats.
Good hunting!
I don't pretend to be an expert on this topic, and I'm always trying to learn. So I'd appreciate any comments you may have.
Gear
I reached level 50 wearing green gear, and I don't regret it. I wanted to save my coin for end game gear, so I didn't even buy a mount at level 40. As a result, when I reached level 50 I had about 300 plat (I'm a harvester...I don't craft, so can't comment on which is more lucrative). Between gear and a mount, I spent almost all of my savings within a few hours of reaching level 50.
Even though my gear was mostly green for 49 levels, I didn't feel like I was under geared because I did two inexpensive things to improve my stats:
(a) I participated in a lot of activities that provide planarite rewards (rifts, invasions, ...) and used that planarite to purchase the best sigil from the planarite vendor in Sanctum (Sigil of the Five, it allows you to equip 2 greater and 4 lesser essences...the world event vendor now sells one called Barnacle Encrusted Sigil of the Five that ups the ante by adding Water Resistance).
(b) I added basic item enchantments to my gear (purchased via the auction house).
Once I reached level 50, I visited the auction house and purchased purple gear where available and blue for the rest. There are some very nice crafted items available from crafters, so if you don't see anything on the auction house, try the Sanctum trade channel for a crafter (in particular, shop for plate leggings and a mace).
Those purchases raised my stats sufficiently that I was immediately eligible for tier 1 expert dungeons (use the Looking For Group window to determine if you are eligible). I bumped my stats up a bit more by completing the Order of Mathos reputation daily quests in Stillmoor every day for about a month (the quest givers are in Zareph's Return). My rewards were a purple breastplate (after about two weeks), and a belt enchantment (the only one I've encountered thus far in game). I then used my PvP points (from Warfronts...don't wait til level 50 to try Warfronts, you'll enjoy them a lot more if you do a level or two of Warfronts at the end of every 10 levels...so say levels 28 and 29, 38 and 39, etc.) to purchase a PvP belt which had decent stats.
Once you start visiting tier 1 instances, you start earning Plaques of Achievement as rewards. You upgrade your stats by spending these Plaques on better gear (the vendors are in the Lodge of the Planes in Sanctum), and eventually you qualify for tier 2 instances. The tier 2 dungeons reward even more Plaques, and you spend those on even better gear, and eventually you're ready to raid.
And I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the awesome crafted gear sets that were added in 1.4. The Warrior tank set consists of breastplate, shoulders, shield and ring, and you get stat bonuses for equipping multiple pieces of the set. Just be prepared to pay a high price for these items (100-300p per item).
Stats
If you study the Looking for Group window, you'll note that the game only considers three stats when deciding if you qualify for expert dungeons, namely Strength, Hit and Toughness. And surprisingly, two of those three stats aren't among those that I said were the most important in my previous thread. So that requires a bit of explanation.
Mobs have the ability to avoid your attacks. If an archer misses their target, the encounter may take longer to finish. But if you miss with one of your aggro management skills, you might lose aggro and a fellow adventurer may die! So it's important at this stage to ensure that you have a sufficiently high Hit stat, because this greatly increases the likelihood that your attacks will find their target.
In expert instances, the mobs score critical hits much more frequently. Think of a critical hit as an extra dice roll that determines whether their blow somehow bypasses your defenses and does much more damage than normal. Your Toughness stat is your defense against critical hits. It absorbs some of the extra damage, rather than reducing the likelihood of the critical hit. So although Toughness protects you, it doesn't also protect your fellow adventurers.
The interesting thing about these stats is that I've always seemed able to accumulate sufficent Hit without consciously shopping for it. But to get high Toughness you'll need to start spending your Plaques.
A Healer's Perspective
Once you start expert dungeons, there's a temptation to focus on the three stats that the game uses to gate your progress. However, don't lose sight of the fact that there's a lot more to tanking than satisfying the requirements of the game. One of the things you should keep in mind is that you should be easy to heal. If healers find you easy to keep alive, chances are better that they'll be happy to group with you.
So, what makes a tank easy to keep alive? Basically, during an encounter a healer wants to see your health drop at a consistent pace. What healers don't like to see are huge spikes of damage. So don't have any glaring weaknesses. Don't be strong against melee and weak against magic. And keep your Toughness stat as high as possible. Your healer will appreciate it!
Souls
There are a lot of potential ways to build your tank. In this thread I'm going to limit the discussion to my first two builds (I have 5 tank builds in total). For 49 levels, the build that I used most often is what I think of as my survival build. It makes heavy use of the Paladin tree, with the rest spent in the Reaver tree. The third tree in that build is Void Knight, just to get the basic magic damage reduction that comes for free with that tree. I took all of the self heals in the Paladin tree, so that I can last a very long time without the help of a healer. And I took the multi-target DoTs (Damage over Time skills) in the Reaver tree so that I can manage aggro in groups. I still use this build when soloing, and sometimes in instances when survivability is essential (i.e. against a tough boss). The down side of this build is that others can take aggro from me if they work at it.
My second build is just a minor tweak of my survival build, and I use it 99% of the time now when I'm with a good healer. I eliminated all of the self heals and upped my damage output (particularly useful in those skills that include the threat multiplier). The result is that although I can't survive quite as long, I have much better control of aggro. And I can switch back and forth between these two builds with ease because my available skills change very little.
The details of both builds can be found in the two posts that follow.
Assisting Revisited
When I was new to tanking many moons ago, I was under the impression (based on lots of yelling in pickup groups) that "assisting" was the cornerstone of group play. In other words, all members of the group should at all times be targeting whichever mob the tank is currently targeting. But nothing could be further from the truth.
This myth stems from the fact that many times, particularly in pickup groups, the tank will pull mob "A" and a fellow adventurer will pull distant mob "C". This is typically followed by various comments of a less than complimentary nature. Clearly, no one should be pulling other than the tank. And if everyone is assisting the tank, then no one will pull anything. But assisting, although it eliminates this problem, is not the right solution.
Whenever facing a difficult encounter, the tank should mark the mobs and clearly state the order in which they are to be killed. The tank's fellow adventurers will kill the mobs in the order indicated, regardless of who the tank happens to be targeting at any given instant. If someone gets a little carried away and manages to steal aggro, they will naturally have the sense to pause in their attack until the tank regains control.
The reasoning here is pretty basic. Mobs don't do less damage as they approach death, they do exactly the same amount of damage regardless of their health. So even though the tank will be spreading threat among all the mobs in the encounter, the rest of the group should be focusing damage on a single mob until it's dead.
Allow me to illustrate with an example. Assume that your group is dealing with a group of 4 mobs. Further assume that each mob has 10,000 health and averages 250 damage per second. Also assume that your group does a total of 500 damage per second combined (excluding the tank, whose damage we'll ignore).
If the group keeps switching targets (assisting the tank), the group's damage will be (more or less) evenly spread across all 4 mobs. It will take 40,000 damage to kill all 4 mobs, and at 500 damage per second, the encounter will last for about 80 seconds (1 minute 20 seconds). Since all 4 mobs survive for about 80 seconds, they do a total of 80,000 damage to the tank.
Instead, assume that the group focuses initially on mob 1. That mob will be dead in 20 seconds, and the tank will take 20,000 damage. Then the group focuses on mob 2, killing it in another 20 seconds, with the tank takes 15,000 more damage. Then the group kills mob 3 in another 20 seconds, and the tank takes an additional 10,000 damage. And finally, the group finishes off mob 4, and the tank takes another 5,000 damage.
So, focusing all damage on one mob at a time reduced the amount of damage that the tank took from 80,000 to 50,000. That's a 37.5% reduction, meaning the tank needs considerably less healing and the healer consumes considerably less mana. And in a difficult excounter, it means that the danger only exists for the first 20 seconds rather than 80. In other words, the chance of disaster is 400% less.
Clearly, the preceeding example is a simplification. But it makes plain the fact that damage should be focused, not spread across multiple mobs. And if we all buy into the "assist at all costs" myth, then the tank will be reluctant to keep switching targets to manage aggro because it will extend the encounter.
At this point, you may be wondering about the order in which mobs should be killed. Lets say that a boss has two helpers. Should the boss be killed first, or the helpers? I'd say that depends on how much combined damage the 3 mobs are doing. If you can survive their combined damage, then I'd suggest killing the boss first, because multi-target attacks may kill the helpers even before the boss dies. But if you can't survive the combined damage, then you have no choice but to kill as many helpers as necessary first. Not to worry, they won't have as much health as the boss.
Crowd Control
In some encounters, the group of mobs does more damage to the tank than the healer can offset. In other encounters, although the tank survives, they take so much damage that if even the slightest thing went wrong, the tank would have died. In cases like this, crowd control makes life so much easier. Ask your fellow adventurers if any of them have crowd control skills (e.g. Sap, which stuns a mob, or the skill that temporarily turns a mob into a squirrel). The idea is, prior to the tank engaging the mobs, your fellow adventurer incapacitates one of the mobs. The tank then deals with the rest. Once those mobs are dead, the tank moves on to the incapacitated mob.
The trick to successful crowd control is to not touch the incapacitated mob until all of the other mobs are dead. Sadly, that's harder than it sounds, because everyone (including the tank) likes to use AoEs during multi-mob encounters. If an AoE causes damage to the stunned/sleeping/morphed mob, it will wake up and join the fight. Likewise, if a DoT has already been used on the mob, any attempt to control the mob will fail, because the DoT will tick and break control.
Communicating with your fellow adventurers is key to making crowd control work. Mark the mob to be incapacitated and remind everyone that the mob isn't to be touched. You'll find that this works better when adventuring with your friends than in a pickup group.
The animations caused by crowd control are worthy of brief mention. Sap does cause an animation to indicate that the mob is stunned, but this skill is often used from a distance, and as a result can be a bit hard to see. And when a mob gets morphed into a squirrel, well, squirrels are small. I'm embarrased to admit that once while dungeoning with a pickup group, I had no idea that a mob had been morphed into a squirrel during the fight. I didn't notice the cute little squirrel hopping around near the back of our group and so I went ahead and pulled the next group of mobs. All was well in the end, but I felt rather careless...
Positioning Mobs
At this point, you've no doubt mastered all of the positioning strategies that I mentioned in my previous thread. It's time to add two more to your repertoire.
When dealing with ranged mobs, there are two good reasons to draw them in to your location:
(a) When they are close to you, you can use your multi-target skills to manage their aggro and burn them down faster.
(b) When they are distant, any roamer that gets close to them may get drawn into your encounter.
If you don't have the "rubber band" pull that I mentioned in my previous thread, the only way to pull them to you is to get out of their sight. If they can't see you, they will come closer, and won't stop until they can see you again. So if you duck behind a rock or a wall, they'll soon join you. You'll hear this referred to as "line of sight" positioning.
The second positioning strategy is referred to as "kiting". Kiting means backing up and having the boss follow you, much as you would fly a kite. You kite a boss if it isn't safe to engage them in a single location, perhaps because they are dropping something that is eventually going to explode, or they are causing the ground in front of them to burst into flame. In theory, kiting couldn't be simpler. You back up and the boss will follow you as long as you have aggro (assuming they aren't ranged, in which case they can't be kited). So mix your ranged attacks with melee strikes every time they close the gap between you. However, keep in mind that you don't want to back out of your healer's range or move the boss out of the range of your fellow adventurers. So typically I'll kite a boss in a small circle, with my fellow adventurers positioned in the center of the circle. This approach has three added bonuses:
(a) If the boss spawns any adds that attack your fellow adventurers, the adds will be within your range and can easily be controlled.
(b) If the boss teleports to one of your fellow adventurers, it will be within range for you to regain control.
(c) Kiting in a circle greatly reduces the chance that I'll back up over a cliff...
Looking Ahead
Lest you think that we've exhausted every aspect of Warrior tanking, please be assured that there's plenty more to come. Such as special purpose builds that make challenging bosses easy. And when you start raiding, you'll need to deal with the very different roles of main tank and off tank. Your gear will also change to reflect the fact that your raid members will buff you so much that you'll start bumping up against the hard cap in some of your stats.
Good hunting!
