This might be too silly of a topic for the EJ forums but I figure if it is them mods can nuke it and no harm done.

I've been the main tank of my guild for the past two years now and I've tanked most every encounter in the game upto the first half of Naxx pre-tbc. I swear, I'm not an angry person in real life, nor was I during the first year or so playing. But I've found now that when I'm playing wow I'm just such a bastard when it comes to people making mistakes or poor encounter design ect and I'm just generally much quicker to anger than I was in the beginning.

So onto my question, have any of you other main tanks become angrier over the years like me or are you still cool and level-headed after tanking for the last couple years?

I don't really know if this is worthy of its own thread, but I've had similar experience with some of our warriors...MT burnout seems to be a pretty common phenomenon. It can be a lot of pressure put on a single person, sometimes people shine with that, sometimes people get fed up with it.

It is definitely common. Me personally, I also lead the raids and am the first one to get frustrated.

I very commonly find myself thinking "I've already got my part of the fight down pat, why can't everyone else adapt at the same rate? We'd have cleared this place already."

I'm not sure if this is a property of MT's or raid leaders. I think a lot of the times those are the same person but I would imagine a lot of it has to do with being a raid leader. I know on the raids that my guild runs I'm the second MT, which actually gives me a little more authority to tell people what they're doing wrong because unlike the MT who's usually preoccupied with making sure that he doesn't die I have time to watch the whole raid and direct people. Fights like Maulgar where our MT is on the complete opposite side of the room I can guide the rest of the raid and keep him updated on what's going on. It's worked out very well for us.

As far as being angry and all that, it might be the stress levels. It might be that we understand what every class should be doing whereas most people only know what their class has to do. But I personally think it's because I have such a passion to see us do well that I refuse to deal with incompetence.

But yeah I can definitely say that I have a tendency to become angry and it's something I struggle to try to keep under control so that I don't push people away, I just want them to straighten up and play right and asking politely only goes so far, sometimes you have to boot people out or find other ways of motivating them to pull their head out of their ass.

think its just the frustration that after 2 years of raiding/ running instances certain people still dont know the basics. like.. run TOWARDS the tank, not away. assist on the right target, if you are a caster dont stay in melee range etc.
i mean with all the mods out there that tell you what to do and when to do it its sometimes just amazing how badly people can fail at this game.

We didn't really have that issue. Yeah we have hotheads, but they aren't in the MT or raid leader slots. I think it's just a personality thing

For raid leading the opposite I found helpful. Soothe the emotions when morale takes a nose-dive and in general try to promote a blame-free environment.

This works well for the situation in my guild (as I described in my previous post) since the guild leader is the MT he can try to be the voice of reason and since I'm second MT / hothead I can call people out when they're playing like shit since I pay attention to everything going on in the raid while the MT has to stare at the ankles of whatever he's tanking.

So people do their best to not get yelled at by me, and if they do get yelled at the guild leader can step in and calm me down and make them feel a little better. But hopefully they'll work harder next time to keep their mob shackled / dispell debuffs faster / whatever it is that they can't seem to do. It's like the WoW version of good cop / bad cop.

It also means that if the raid leader does have to yell then you're really fucking up, because he's supposed to be the level-headed one.

(First post, be gentle. )
I’m the warrior lead for a large casual raiding guild, and I’ve recently gone on hiatus as their main tank because I was getting too angry. I was spending raids and even 5-man runs shouting at the screen, cursing my teammates with the mic muted, and generally working myself up over a game that should be a fun thing I do in the evening to relieve stress.

However, I’m not sure if it’s just “MT burnout”, or something to do with the evolution of the game in TBC. I don’t remember getting this angry tanking Scholo or Strat at the equivalent stage of WoW 1.x. There’s a fair bit of discussion about threat scaling, multi-target tanking, etc. in TBC, and these changes may have added up to a frustrating tank dynamic.

So to go beyond mere commiseration, how have people successfully dealt with “tank rage”? Have you found any attitudes or tricks for keeping your cool? I know raid healers often suffer from burnout, but do they experience the same kind of anger issues?

Well not sure. There is way to give feedback without naming people and putting them on the spot. Nothing wrong with iterating that everybody ought to do, ask people to pay attention and stuff.

Most fun emo game was C'Thun though because you have 8 groups of 5 each monitoring each other and starting to blame each other for screwing up. Trying to get people to cool I always found best, because otherwise they have their heads on the other people or on being embarassed or angry, rather than focusing on execution.

And if you seriously have people who for very long don't get it, well then no yelling at them will change it either... I think there are probably better fixed for that situation.

Note that "blame-free" doesn't mean not saying what didn't work what happened last try and needs improving. You definitely do need to do that. But "Crushing? WTF!" is certainly only achieving that Crushing get -50dkp and feels bad and on top of it gets everybody aggitated and angry with Crushing rather than the "lets improve and do this right next time".

But whatever works for each group I guess. I always found it helpful to lead the emotions of folks to wanting to down the boss and not wanting to gank a raid buddy.

Heated discussion in chat channels certainly never have downed bosses for us.

I often find myself in this situation. A lot of it deals with the encounter. Aran, for example, has driven me nuts in the past. Flamewreaths more specifically. Its like the concept of not moving while it is up is difficult to understand. Stupid things like that are what drive me insane.

It might sound cliche, but take a deep breath. That's pretty much what I have to do every time we wipe. Now if it's the middle of a fight and someone needs to be told what to do I don't expect to be calm about telling them for the 5th time. But if it's after a wipe and there's no more urgency involved taking a deep breath and letting your blood simmer down and trying to be calm when discussing what happened can help a lot in preventing other people from becoming burntout. Because nobody wants to listen to people get yelled at over and over every time something goes wrong.

My feeling has been that MTs who double as raid leads (which I think is many of us, if not most) or at least officers have a lot of pressures on them. When you consider the stress of leading and motivating a guild/raid group, plus all the additional stress of broken consumables (everyone assumes that tanks are buffed in every encounter, all the time, and we take it on ourselves to be that well prepared) and annoying resist gear grinds (see the resist thread), it gets to the point that most MTs even in semi-casual guilds (my group is in KZ and waiting for the Gruul retune atm) can be incredibly stressed and have a lot of balls in the air at once.

I personally have suffered serious MT burnout three times - Huhuran, C'Thun, and Loatheb. In all three cases it just got to be too much for me that I was ALWAYS prepared, that I had my resist gear, I had my buffs, and I showed up for raids and put forth a huge effort, plus all the behind the scenes organizing... and then we had a bunch of people who couldn't be bothered to log on consistently or generally give a shit about what we were trying to do as a group. Part of that was an issue with the group (we needed fresh blood, or better motivation from me, or both), but part of it was just raid fatigue that everyone experiences and I just experienced from more angles than most.

I think the combo of MT and raid lead can be great, and I enjoy it most when I'm doing both - but it can also be really, really stressful, particularly if you value things in RL and have stress there as well. For warrriors and/or druids, I'd say caveat emptor, and everyone else might want to hug your MT and/or raid lead today.

Edit - the things for me that made life better:

1. I went more casual, at least for a while. Less farming, less stress, less need to freak out on people who didn't farm/etc
2. Take a break, at least for a week or two. Two weeks off was enough to get me interested in coming back pretty much every time I took off.
3. Honestly, I think many people who want to MT could stand to lower their blood pressure in many areas of their life. I personally started emphasizing certain things in RL (eating better, exercising, spending time with my wife) that generally lowered my stress. Taking the time to be sane makes you feel a lot less frustrated in game, or at least it has for me. Your mileage may vary.

I think in ~2 years of raid leading with rebirth I yelled in vent twice.

Once on c'thun when we took a 10 minute afk in the dragon room to let people get up and grab a drink, which then turned into a 20-30 minute afk because apparently some of my members had narcoleptic fits. The other time when I really, really, wasn't willing to let an argument continue about "who fucked up last time".

Both times I warned everyone with headsets to "take them off, you'll be fine without hearing this" in a very calm, pleasant voice before hand.

The benefit from having those be my only "angry RL" moments? Whenever I told someone calmly - that was your fault, you did this wrong, you should have done this instead, fix it for next time. (A rare occurence for me to be that definitive with someone) they fixed it. Either because they were terrified of being #3, or because they understood that I wouldn't blow up or get angry, and I was making that conclusion level-headed.

There's something to be said for having your raid believe that you don't make decisions while you're emotional about them, because they tend to take your decisions/observations much more seriously.

That said - I've found myself incredibly dissapointed with people I honestly like quite a bit in wow. Wiped on anub'rekan because noone pulled the crypt add? That was frustrating.

I think the _anger_ is mostly "We can do better than this" frustration, and it's always a good idea to take a deep breath, admit that even in mario bowser sometimes wins, and go back to it.

I will say that some of the most amusing moments in wow are the result of "that angry child" going crazy - but I'm not laughing with the angry child, I'm laughing at him. So I try very hard, as a raid leader or tank, not to be that angry child that people laugh at. You get more done if everyone respects your opinion than if they laugh at you. Or at least I always have.

Yeah, the fact that getting angry over stuff and snapping is unhealthy is not in question. I was just curious to see if my compatriots have had similar experiences over the years.

I suffered from that kind of burnout myself when I was part of the raidlead of my old raid (and I didn't pull that kind of double duty, being a rogue is comparatively free of responsibility). Granted, I didn't take a hiatus....but I left everything I had built up for a reroll. Raiding especially can lead to a lot of pressure that occurs every time you log on. Imho the only way to avoid it is indeed to take breaks, to rotate duties that can be delegated etc and to kick those ones who are permanently trying to push you over the edge.
All problems that raid groups suffer from (motivation, lack of progress, individual mistakes) tend to hit folks in leading positions much more than raider no.37.

Looking back on my time as a healer (fro the person asking if healers get the same way), my experience was that it took a LOT of idiocy and abuse to push healers over the edge to screaming angry- but once you pushed them that far- might as well call the raid.

I can only recall 4 incidents off the top of my head where healers started screaming back- 2 of which were me. o.o I have a *nasty* temper, but 2 times in a year and a half could be worse.

1) MT constantly harping on using power word shield for shadowflame. Harping. Constantly. Every other comment for half the raid harping incessantly on WHY the MT wasn't getting bubbles before shadowflames. Attempts to explain that Hey! you haven't died... let us do our job, we're doing fine, meant nothing. Harping. Incessantly. WHY AREN'T I SHIELDED PRIESTS? YOU ALL SUCK? After about half an hour of it (all this crap was on farm... it's not like we were wiping) one by one the priests started snapping. It wasn't pretty.

2) Twin Emps. See 1 and replace shadowflame with "unbalancing strike". Again, not pretty.

And my two were both on Razuvious... weeks apart. I still twitch a little when I think of Razuvious. The amount of heckling, back seat tanking.... until I finally logged and told them if they were so damn sure that they could do it better than me- to do it themselves. Oooooh was I ANGRY. I think I was the only one who went batshit postal over Razuvious though. =/ It was such a stressful fight.

I think it's not so much that tanks are getting mad easier, as people can't sleepwalk through things any more. With 40 man raids, there's significantly less accountability than in anything post-BC. No 5 man, or other small group content in pre-BC WoW pushed individual accountability beyond keeping the tank alive and killing the boss, so these people didn't get weeded out pre-raiding. Almost everyone here can probably point to the one or two or even more people who would die almost every time on Heigan, C'thun, or anything that was big on positioning.

I know it sounds biased, but really, as a DPS class (and yes I have played one high end, I think I had more Naxx first kills recorded on my rogue than my warrior o.O), you have so much more slack on your attention level over the MT, as a requirement. You *can* push yourself to be at the level of the MT's attention, in which case you're probably on top of the DPS charts by a significant margin over anyone who isn't. Healers to some degree can do this too, and it can save you cash on potions, just by making an effort to have 100% attention on doing things like cancelling your heals, checking for renew/regrowth/rejuv before spamming another heal onto a DPSer, etc.

The point is, if everyone plays at the attention level of the MT and puts in the effort, you usually end up with a dead boss in BC. When that doesn't happen, you either wipe, or that person needs a rez at the end. If a tank plays like that, it's a wipe, almost guaranteed, and it can get frustrating. The most important thing is to remember that at the end, it's just a game, and when we turn off the computer, it doesn't matter any more. Personally, rediscovering that has pushed me to basically take a long hiatus from raiding, but YMMV.

It's all a question of frustration, and it's situational.

Wiping because of something that is entirely outside of your control will tend to cause irritation.

When you wipe to Gluth for the 20th time in a row because your kiter doesn't know how to kite, you want to put your head through your monitor. When you wipe to Razuvious because the same priest keeps running his adds out of MC range and breaking it, same deal. When you're on Gothik and your side is handling the spawns flawlessly and the other side wipes a dozen times in a row, same deal. When you're a tank and your healers simply don't heal you... well, yeah. That last one probably comes up more often than the others. Hence this phenomenon.

...

You get paladins now - so hopefully it's less painful in the future!

(I may or may not know what you're talking about, and I've always had paladins.)

Yeah, whoever's idea it was to give all the healers in our guild their own channel needs to get slapped. They wield too much power if they decide someone needs to die :-P

It's definitely not a tanking problem only, I used to suffer a lot from getting angry over things before the expansion's release; nowadays I'm a lot more mellow (I used to play Priest before my current Paladin).

I think it's more likely to happen to people who either have responsibility, or feel they have responsibility; that is, you'll see it happen to raid leaders, main tanks, main tank healers, but also to people who are good at getting the best out of their class. After enough time of people causing some kind of thing that annoys you, you snap. In some cases, you snap badly.

I used to respond particularly badly to people who thought they knew better than myself what I should be doing, and I also had the (bad) tendency to see any comments on bad healing as a personal insult. Basically, overstating my own self-importance, and for that matter, skill. That probably wasn't helped by the fact that I usually played the key roles that you could use a Priest for (Zombie kiting at Gluth (On that subject, wiping on Gluth when you do completely smooth kite work is pretty frustrating too); MCing at Faerlina; Shielding before Shadow Flames, you get the idea).

I have actually seen it have some good effects on me as well; instead of taking it out on other people like I'd usually do, I'd sometimes just go quiet (While definitely being pissed off) and do the smoothest jobs I'd ever noticed myself doing. Specifically I can remember that happening after the group I'd got assigned to at C'Thun was wiped out by someone being slow on running in, and than that getting blamed on shoddy healing. Next attempt I did the smoothest, fastest heal work on my group and the other nearby groups I'd done in ages.

Now I'm more level headed, at least, in my opinion. I know now that getting angry doesn't usually help much, and it's better to stay calm and be patient. People tend to respond better to that, while you might be telling the same thing, if you ask politely, they'll probably do it, if you're obviously angry, they'll do the opposite just to spite you.

To me its the beauty of this game.

Gather 25 people from all over.
Coordinate a strategy.
Fail repeatedly due to above mentioned phenomena.

Finally achieve your goal of conquering some pixels and having everyone on the same page and working together makes it worth it.


I get angry when I think everyone should be on the same page after countless tells and conversations.

But when Gruul finally falls and you hear the cheer over vent...definitely worth it. When the thrill of the kill isn't worth the frustration, I take a few days off or screw around on an alt.

I don't think the "insta-pissed" experience is MT/RL only. I think its all the people that are trying their best only to be hosed by 1 guy not paying attention. To the OP you are not alone!