Tanking from a Healer’s Perspective

Good afternoon all…

Today I’d like to talk a little about the perceptions that tanks have towards their healers, and vice-versa. I began my paladin as Holy, and it has been Holy the whole way (not including my little foray into Ret, that wasn’t permenant). I have spent my WoW career healing (no matter how ineffectively in the beginning), and have began to learn the intricacies of the Tank/Healer relationship. As of recently, I have been both Holy / Protection dual spec; and thanks to the LFD tool, apparently I am needed as Protection more. With this in mind, it has taught me how a tank can make a healer’s life easier.

When I first began raiding any bit regularly, I felt that it was more the boss fight that determined how hard a tank was to heal; however, I have since learned that in all reality, nearly all fights can be made “easier” if the tank and healer work together. I have healed every tank that there is, and have learned which tanks seem to be more spiky/squishy than others. From this knowledge I have also learned how to tank effectively, while still making life a bit easier for the healer.

1.) Not all bosses are stationary:
I have learned this the hard way. When in a raid, and even in some heroics, the tank cannot always stand in one place, and let the rest of the raid do the moving. Bosses, and even some trash, can have AoE that only affect those within melee range. If not AoEs, then something that you should NOT stand in. Now, this doesn’t only mean you the tank, but also the other melee who should either be behind or beside the boss (think dragons and their lovely hit box safe areas). The more you as a tank move out of the fire/ice/slime/puke the less chance the healers have to hit “oh shnizzle” buttons and save melee. In addition to assisting the healers, this also helps those melee dps, as they won’t have to reposition as much and can continue stabbing the bad guys quicker.

2.) Manage the cooldowns:
This is a given, every tank knows that there are going to be “oh shnizzle” moments. And we have tools that help with those moments. However, they also depend on different cooldowns. I have come to learn that some oh shnizzle buttons can be used more often then that one moment. An example being Divine Protection. (Now this blog is a bit biased towards Paladin tanks and Paladin healers, so you’ll have to bear with me.) As a tank, I can use Divine Protection to provide myself with a shield that reduces damage taken by 50% for 12 sec. This does activate Forbearance which will knock you out of using it again for 3 minutes; however, if used early enough it can be usable again (These cases are usually only Raid bosses, Heroic bosses fall within a minute now-a-days). What I’m getting at here, is that taking advantage of cooldowns early enough can allow the healers to reserve mana for the more expensive moments later on in a fight. But don’t forget your trinkets (I have, and it’s not funny… ok it is, in a sad kind of way).

This also goes for healers; as cooldowns or trinkets used early on can definately help in the long run, but should be managed with those of the tank; as a cooldown wasted is not a good cooldown. An example of this would be Divine Illumination. At first I was paranoid of not having enough mana by the end of a fight, and would always start a fight with Divine Illumination running. Now, if the fight was long enough, sure I could use it again later; however, if the tank used any cooldowns early on, then that 50% reduction in mana cost was really wasted, as I’m not going to be healing as much.

Coordination and Communication are key. This leads to my next point.

3.) Coordination and Communication:
Now-a-days, just about everybody is able to use Vent or some variant. I personally am able to listen to vent but not speak, since my gaming PC is right next to my son’s room, so to be polite, I try not to make too much noise. I do regulate the volume and listen to the other people in Vent, though. The very act of listening to the other raiders in vent can increase survivability of the raid. Especially if the Raid Lead is calling out events that are happening; especially those that you may not be able to see directly on your GUI. This point also pertains to coordination between tank and healer cooldown coordination. If a Paladin healer calls out that they have just used Lay on Hands on the tank, then the tank should know that the heal bomb that they just got isn’t going to come again for at least another 3 minutes. In the beginning this was a point of contention, as Paladin tanks who were healed with Lay on Hands from a Paladin Healer used to get Forbearance (I can’t remember if this was only on the PTR or not), because of this, the Paladin tank could not use any of his oh shnizzle buttons until that Forbearance wore off. This external cooldown heavily limited the survivability of the Paladin tank. So, to prevent this, the tank and healer would need to communicate as things happened, or even strategize prior to beginning the fight.

4.) Pay attention:
I really felt this is important, not only in how I tank things, but also from a story I read from the Big Bear Butt Blogger. It was a story about an oblivious DK tank who didn’t look beyond his tunnel vision to see what anybody else was doing behind them… whether it be dieing or finishing off the mobs that the DK had not gotten aggro on. I have healed several tanks who are like this. No care or attention for the healer or even the DPS, but instead steamroll ahead and finish everything off as fast as possible. Thank God for Divine Plea, Divine Illumination, and if I’m lucky, Replenishment. But I have never been that kind of tank.

When I tank, in heroic instances specifically, I often start off the run by saying “Please let me know if I need to slow down, I’ll be watching mana levels, but just in case holler if I’m going to fast.” Polite and to the point. I’m basically saying, I’m going to try and fly through this for you guys, but don’t want to stretch you thin. I’m open to responses, and even the scathing “SLOW DOWN!”. I don’t however, try to make an instance easysauce, and slow down to a crawl. In a way, I guess I try to teach other healers a bit of skill, in that I will push them a bit but not so hard that they /ragequit. I’m no hardcore healer or tank, but I do feel that I can help others if not in a roundabout way.

This last point seems to circle back to the first, in that paying attention will lessen your chance of standing in the bad stuff. You’ll still need to move out of the bad stuff, and move far enough to keep your melee dps group effective.

This concludes my first “guide” to synergizing Tanks and Healers. I hope to do more of these in the future; let me know what you think. Also please let me know of any other topics that you’d like for me to do a post on, I’m very open to suggestions.

The Casual Tank

Good afternoon everyone.  Welcome to the armored side of Illumination.

If anybody has ever seen my WoW Armory profile, they’ll notice that I’ve got the best chance at never having a wait time in the LFD tool.  This is because I have dual-spec’d both into Holy and Protection on my Paladin. 

I began my little paladin life as Holy, and Holy all the way.  In fact I leveled, oh so slowly, as holy, even when it was not at all popular and endlessly frustrating.

As I reached the max levels (I hit 60 about a week before BC), I began to run into other paladins who were excited about the new possibilities of paladin tanking becoming much more viable.  I took it with a grain of salt, as I was still a dedicated buffbot and FoL spammer.  Deep into my experience with WoW: BC, I ran into a great bunch of folks in (at the time) a guild known as the Merry Marauders.  I had become one of their healers for their late night Karazhan runs.  It was here that I met a fellow by the name of Crownvic.  He and my fellow pally healer Dragonsspear were the ultimate tank/healer team, and it was awesome to see them work together.  By watching this chemistry, I began to learn the little things that worked so well between the tank and the healer, and what one’s weaknesses were covered by the other’s strengths.  In short, this inspired me to begin to pick up some tanking gear, simply to begin experimenting.

At the time I had no plans to tank full time, and instead used the gear simply to “Holy Tank” instances with some friends of mine.  It was truly fun to hit things in the face (though still getting pounded in the face at the same time), rather than filling up health bars for once.  Upon the release of WotLK, I had acquired a decent tanking set, definitely not high end BiS, but something that met the Uncrushable mark, and nearly the Unhittable mark. 

With the arrival of patch 3.0.8, the new talent trees were released, and I became very excited about the changes to the Retribution Tree, and in turn began to collect some offset gear and actually respec Ret to level into WotLK.

This in turn put a lot of gear into my bank, left there to rust away next to all my other nicknacks (BTW, I’m an item hoarder… my bank is full of stuff that I just can’t get rid of, nor move to a bank alt, haha).  This at least sped up my leveling, and brought my Paladin to lvl 80 much quicker that it would have otherwise.  Once reaching that point, I began doing some late night raids again with my good ‘ol Holy/Prot tag team buddies again, and again had to don my healing set again.  I didn’t mind the transition, in fact it was a bit of a nice change of pace, short of the normal healer stress and blame.

In the back of my mind, though, I continued to think about that tank set that I had worked on, and how fun it was to tank, but did not want to spend the gold to spec back and forth.  Instead I just began to collect the pieces of tank gear that I could, and began replacing those that began to grow cobwebs in my bank.

Then came Patch 3.1…

Oh the beauty that is Dual Spec.  I was outwardly excited, though saddened at my miniscule income.  Thanks to the Argent Tournament, it took little time to reach my goal of 1000g, to get my dual spec on, and finally truly try a tanking position.  Sadly, though I had now become one of the most needed class combos that I could think of, my friends had moved on, and changed servers.  I was again, a lonely paladin, roaming Northrend gathering what tank gear I could, with no direction from my tanking buddy.

Well, I won’t drag this on, so we’ll fast forward to the present.  With Emblems of Triumph flowing like rain, and purples glistening like candy at every turn, it didn’t take me long to build up a decent tanking set.  Defense capped, decent mitigation and avoidance, acceptable HP, all the good stuff.  Not much more thanks to the newly implemented LFD tool, and the chance to practice a bit of tanking with less concequence.

Now, this isn’t a post about how easy WoW has gotten, because believe me, if you are as casual as I am, you do not often get blessed with the most incredible players, or overpowered killing machines in the game.  I was fortunate enough to have run a pick up Ulduar run with, what I now feel is the awesome guild of “Unending Nemesis.”  Sure, they’re not the bleeding edge guild on the server, but they are a fun bunch of folks who have skill to back up the gear they have.  As we began trying the new content, including the Trial of the Crusader, and eventually Icecrown, a gap began to form.  That form was that of a missing tank.

Now, I don’t raid regularly, in fact I don’t hardly ever sign up for a raid, simply because my family comes first, and I’d rather 1) be sure there’s nothing else going on, or 2) straight up spend time with them [family].  Anyway, after a few more runs of ToC, we took a step into ICC.  Here is where it got interesting.  They did not need a healer, but instead needed a tank… I thought long and hard, fearing that I was not adequate for the task, or that I didn’t have the skill to make the cut.  But I took the plunge “/g I’ll tank if ya need somebody”.  There it was, my leap of faith, my step into that unfamiliar realm of raid tanking.  Suddenly I got the reply, “Alright, we’ll see how far we can get, summon incoming.”  I quickly activated my prot spec and thew on my tank gear, double checking that I hadn’t forgotten anything.  Fortunately I was sitting in IF, so I grabbed a couple elixers and some Dragonfin, and thew them in my bag, and off I went.

Upon entering the opressive facade of Icecrown Citadel, I got a good look at my fellow tank… another Paladin!  His gear was slightly better than mine, more HP, more avoidance, but obviously more skill as he had tanked for a long time.  I had not read strategies on ICC from the tank’s point of view, but began to learn from his movements, and his cooldown use.  And we started our way through the dark hallways.

Now this group was the secondary raiding group, and wasn’t the creme of the crop, but we were good.  I believe that our group suprised many in the guild as we pushed our way through ICC, oneshotting Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, and the lootship battle.  We did not make it through Surafang, as several of the member either had to leave, or a PuG’d member had simply gone offline.  However, the feeling was exhilerating.  My confidence shot through the roof.

The moral of this post is:

Do not fear the unknown.  Make that leap of faith, don’t expect to be shot down, but do your best, or don’t do at all.

P.S. As a side note, we have gone back and cleared the first wing with no problem, and I have since tanked Onyxia 25, nearly solo tanked Onyxia 10, and Sartharion 10… confidence is a wonderous thing.