I have been the MT for over a year in my old guild got frustrated a few times with the lack of dps we had on some encounters most Nef phase 1. Wiping over and over again because dpser couldnt do simple task as assisting or having low output got me furstrated.

That said I notice that alot of tanks get angry when they lose aggro. People should be smart enough to be able to control there aggro. There is no reason for it especially when you have have tools like KTM available. Yet, people still find a way to outaggro the tank.

it's not quite on topic, but it's easy to see how heavy prot spec could irritate someone - healing specced classes might have trouble farming, but they can at least contribute something valuable in PvP. there's nothing worse than a full prot warrior in a pvp situation

Our dead side vs. live side rivalry continues to this day.

The only encounter I remember getting really angry about was C'thun, because really dodging giant red beams isn't that hard. Also most likely Thaddius, that's one of the more frustration-inducing encounters because it's really simple yet people fuck it up over and over.

Thats why I never PVP with my prot warrior, I have a shadow priest alt when I want to PVP. I also almost never farm on my prot warrior unless forced to example for reputation. In TBC thats not even the case because you can farm your scryer rep on an alt and just send the rings to your protection war.

Well the good part is that there is really no interesting pvp reward for a tank. While if you are a dps class you might have to pvp in order to maximise your character.

Some classes also have a pretty easy time in WoW for farming, repairs, and consumables which leads to a less aggravation when wipes. Warlocks and hunters for example can many times control their own durability losses (feign, hellfire), and both classes are kings of farming - a warlock usually has to farm before every raid to get some starting shards even. Cloth classes also tend to have much lower repair bills, while my MT's repair in SSC yesterday was over 40g mine was under 10g.

God bless the people who play prot warriors and holy spec'd healers, I help them out in farming whenever I can but for the most part I have noticed they tend to be very goal-driven individuals who (want/need?) to coordinate people in accomplishing tasks. Most of my fellow hunters, warlocks and mages in our guild on the other hand are much more laid back, chatty, and less likely to start up a 5 man group and more likely just to join someone LFM.

There's something particularly frustrating about dying as a tank and watching the raid helplessly wipe. If the result of the death was some extremely bad luck with crits or crushes, fine- so be it. But when I die after taking 6 swings without a single heal, it's disappointing.

Most classes can screw up a little bit and not completely wipe the raid. A heal landing a millisecond too late can and does (often!). I don't always completely blame healing, but there's always a feeling of being let down when you die as the MT before anyone else. It's the same way I feel when I lose aggro and a Rogue gets splattered- I feel like I let that Rogue down.


Chocula: I resent your comment. I considered myself a decent Prot. PvPer! :P

Couldn't agree with that more. I remember being so frustrated with one of our Warriors on the Twin Emperors that I logged onto one of our Warriors, who was on holiday, myself and tanked on the right hand side. At this stage I had so little real experience with tanking it was laughable. Everything I knew (and essentially still know, because I've never read up on the perfect aggro generating rotation) I learned from watching our tanks and making logical assumptions on what to do - spam everything, especially shield block, but except Heroic Strike.

It wasn't much of a surprise that I hop in there and we 1-shot them, because I've always tanked on my Warlock on the left side so I knew precisely what to watch out for, but it was frustrating at the same time. Why should I, with next to nothing but observational knowledge of the Warrior class, be able to do the job flawlessly and guys that have been playing the class for the last 2 years screw up over and over again?

I love tanking, but that's probably because its so few and far between. If I had to do it every raid and put up with guys like me (who should suck at tanking since I don't do it often) telling me what to do I'd probably get frustrated a lot too.

That's just one of the things about the game though, I guess: You can spend years playing a class and still be unknowledgable about it. Knowledge is power, as they say.

Luckily I hardly pvp, and I agree - pvping as a full prot warrior is an exercise in futility. Although it is a little better post expansion with scaled shield slam damage and spell reflect. Prot warriors best serve as a distraction in my opinion, so I like to dress up in all my mean looking damage gear and then have them CC me into infinity. I really feel like I accomplish something when they take the time to kill me over someone else.

The only thing that ever made me angry was the utter frustration of having something like 12 Warriors in the guild and only having 3 of them(myself included in these 3) ever WANT to volunteer to tank anything in 40-man raid instances. Having to pull teeth to get somebody to get on a target on a nightly basis definately made me bitter toward having to do alot of the work.

Part of the reason I gave up Main Tanking for BC, I just can't take having to force people into doing what should come naturally. Prot Warriors give up alot of fun outside raiding to tank, and the DPS Warriors who run around in PvP killing stuff with ease or farming up 200 gold or matrerials in 1 hour get picky about tanking so they can lawl DPS and top damage meters.

Hey I tank Blindeye so I count as a tank right?

My biggest pet peeve is not admitting you screwed up. I plain fucked up on Kazzak on our last attempt the other night. Somehow I pulled aggro right at the enrage. I have NO idea how, I was doing moderate damage since I had to save mana for PoH during enrage, nowhere near the tanks on KTM, nobody had died, yet for some reason Kazzak decided to suddenly walk over and whack me, on a good attempt.

Fact 1: When you screw up, admit it.
Fact 2: Don't bore the raid with explanations. Save it for the raid leader, or your friends, or people who ask. So I admitted I pulled aggro, didn't go into a full explanation.

Truth be told I think most people don't care how you screwed up, they just want to know that YOU know you screwed up, and more importantly that you know what you need to do not to do it again.

The #1 thing that will piss me off is when we wipe to some stupid crap, the raid leader says "Okay what happened there, why did this happen, who screwed up" and everyone is silent and won't say a word. Nobody's perfect, and I can find humor in a lot of things if people are just honest about it. One of our best priests ran RIGHT AT ME on one of our Gruul attempts -- I laughed because of course I had about 3k more health than he did, so he ended up just killing himself on the shatter. First thing he told me as the shatter was happening "Holy shit I even saw you there and I kept running." "We can snuggle after the raid, you know."

Fessing up is the biggest, IMHO.

Bringing up Razuvious again, this happened to us a couple times in my old guild. Other's having never played a priest before, were able to log on another players priest and flawlessly MC, position and execute the tank transitions. Something that our normal priests could never do.

Positioning mobs and tanking are not commonly called on skill sets for Priests =P For that matter, MC in a raiding environment was pretty much untouched by priests pre-naxx as well.

Our best priests at doing the MC were the one who'd actually tanked up to BWL... and the one who already did a lot of MCing in pvp and found the mechanic interesting before Naxx. Unfortunetly the first one left the guild and the second one had spotty raid attendance.

Me? I spent 3 days trying to teach myself basic mob positioning in gnomregan in my off hours. The mobs simply refused to go where I put them no matter how hard I tried- and I was trying VERY hard. I also missed out on the whole "click to start auto attack" thing by never having played melee past level 20... also spent way too much time fishing around trying to click on my target and disoriented by the change in view position from MC.

Those simply aren't things that a die hard caster simply picks up along the way like a melee class does.... and a small number of people (who normally only slightly get on my nerves) expected it to be flawless on the first try every time- no matter how many times we changed the positioning or the priests themselves.

Yep, someone else might have been able to do it better than us, but damnit- they were stuck with us and mocking, yelling, and harassing us wasn't making us learn it any faster.

This is the only thing that really gets me angry, usually it isn't even something stupid during the fight but while we are buffing and rezzing. Someone will attempt to stealth or run to us through some respawns and won't admit they did it. If you screw something up and wipe us all I want is an admission that you know you did it and you are sorry. The only encounters where this stupidity comes into play is something like Kel'Thuzad where someone can pull a whole cubby and won't say anything. Other then that I don't really get angry as a raid leader.

Our current MT can frequently get angry but I think he is kind of an angry person to begin with. Typically I think it is healer related but that is pretty much expected since healing is of course out of his control.

The Sebudai thing is awesome. The best one is the one 'Listen, I dont care how you did it in your guild...'.

Raid leading and MTing both cause high blood pressure and bouts of heavy drinking.

Speaking of not having any control over a situation. Heigan really, really, really fucking killed me. We had like 20 people who could pretty much live forever in terms of the dance phase, 10 or so that could pretty much never live past a wave or two. And 10 or so complete question marks, you never know what is going to kill them. Every time we won it was pretty much a 25 man fight.

Razuvious tanking doesn't really have anything to do with playing a Priest. I did a pretty terrible job of it, but it's the only time I've ever had to position a mob. The one time I've played a tank in an instance was DM West on a friend's warrior with three ranged dps. I'd certainly hope that a warrior would be able to hop onto my account and have absolutly no difficulty with Razuvious beyond finding the mind control button.

We only took down Razuvious once pre-TBC, and our MT made the comment that on the one successful encounter, the priests doing the tanking were the ones with 60 warrior alts (and had tanked a bit with them). Other priests, who were rotated in and didn't have experience tanking on any character, seemed to do poorly at positioning the add correctly to avoid the shouts or something else would go wrong. Speaking of frustration, I remember nearly blowing it on a wipe night after we had taken Razuvious down that one time, because I couldn't understand why the other priest doing the rotation couldn't seem to get the positioning right at the transitions, after I had already done the pull and Razuvious was in place. It was incredibly frustrating to know that I wasn't screwing up but there was nothing I could do until the other priest "got it".

I guess it is a natural tendency to concentrate responsibility, but from a pure raid perspective, the MT has got to be the worst person to lead a raid due to limited overview. Especially when fighting some giant thing where the feet fill up the whole screen. Healers are almost as bad as we tend to stare at health bars. That can cause frustration, especially when the used-to-giving-orders MT+raid leader+GM does not fully understand all the other classes and the system they have worked out, especially for healing.

In the prior incarnation of my guild, the GM was very mellow and universally liked, while some of the officers did the yelling (there never really was much if it though). However, that ultimately held us back quite a bit as the GM was unwilling to discipline/remove the slackers. The current incarnation of my guild has a more strict GM (who is also the MT) and several officers who tell it like it is. Time will tell if it works out better.

There is a lot involved in how much a situation will anger a raid leader...
Crappy content angers raid leaders to some extent.
Burnout angers raid leaders to some extent.
People making absolutely stupid decisions and not thinking things through angers raid leaders to some extent.
People openly fighting or going through the wrong channels for off the wall ideas can really anger raid leaders if done at the wrong time, to some extent.
Edit: This one really pisses me off: People who left some crappy guild to join ours, telling us how they did it in their fucking guild, just because we wiped on something once, pisses me off so badly. I don't give a shit how you did the encounter in your old guild... especially since that old guild was like half a year or so behind us - I think we know what we're doing. ARARGHGHH
The longer a raid leader has been leading, the more likely they are to get upset over simple things.
And to some extent, the better the guild, the less patience and tolerance a raid leader might have.
Personal stress can increase the raid leader's anger.
Don't taunt happy fun raid leader.

I know in everquest, my raid leader would literally flip out, lose it, yell at us, then quit the game for the night. This happened DAILY... it happened in almost every guild. In WoW its far less common, but i've emo rage quit at least twice now in the last half of a year, and haven't done it ever prior to that. I found myself losing patience much more quickly during the crappy periods of the game (post KT, and pre hydross). But with SSC finally being progressed into I feel more relaxed and content with things. Its only the really bone headed things that piss me off, and I tend to never, ever yell at my guys anyway, but they know when I'm pretty upset with things... and our guild is full of such good players throughout now that they are themselves aware of the mistakes and weak points. All we can do is progress.

Gruul for instance gets me angry when people make bad decisions; but most of the time this comes from new players trying to do their best. It is extremely hard for me to get angry at someone making a mistake the first time they've seen an encounter - frustrating yes, but there's nothing I can do about it other than explain where they made the mistake, and offer ideas to a solution. If it happens 20 times however... I'm more inclined to bump that person now adays than simply get mad.

From a tanking standpoint, with all the things I'm doing on Prince, all the anger management, all the shield blocking, demo, tc'ing, sundering, stance dancing, intercepting, shouting, calling commands, calling where the infernals are dropping, repositioning, popping pots... I find it fucking amazing that a mage/whatever sitting at max range pressing 1 button, who is doing literally jack shit during this fight can die because he didn't notice the Prince was being moved 40 yards and/or on top of him. Or that an infernal lands in his face, he steps out of it, then forgets about it, and steps into it on the next enfeeble. Dying to enfeeble is pretty much admitting you're an idiot... barring horrible positioning.

Thats my take at least.
-Not angry.

Speaking as a non-tank. The most frustrating thing I think I've yet to encounter in the game was when I was trying to 'tank' on Maulgar and watching a mob (mine) one shot a healer which lead to a wipe, because I was a little slow or I got a resist on the pull. Not once, but at least twice. Granted it was our first Maulgar kill, and my first attempt at tanking so it should be fine now. Talk about a wakeup call, I can't imagine doing that everyday.

And I agree, if you screwed up and KNOW it was you, come out and say it.

What you describe is what happens to tanks the majority of the time they lose aggro at the start of a fight. Comments about "lrn2tank" or such when there is nothing you can do after Autoattack gets parried, SS gets parried and the follow up sunder armor misses then the healers drop their 4k heals and get obliterated or the mage nukes for 8k, etc. Happens more than you think.

Welcome to tanking and one of the most aggrivating things about it.

Coming from the perspective of having led raids in WoW for over a year (100 days played with each character) as a shaman, and a year as a warrior, it is significantly easier to lead raids as the shaman. Your view of the playing field is far greater, your crisis to use abilities is far lower, and you can essentially communicate everything that much better. I actually have a shaman officer who does a lot of this on-the-fly updating for me now, since I simply cannot see, or react to encounters the same way now. Maulgar for instance as the MT/RL is so counter productive it is sickening.
I'm not saying that healers are all idiots or something, obviously all your healers have to be very good to progress well, and a good player as a healer contributes as much to the raid as a good player as a main tank. My point is it takes more concentration to tank, but smart decisions and a good player are still going to overwhelm a players contribution. I would imagine a frost-mage raid leader would be pretty ideal I'm sure it comes off as slightly insulting to say it takes more concentration to MT than heal, but its the truth for me, and I'd imagine in general. Missing that shield block because you're asking someone why they just laid the wrong totem down is a wipe sometimes.

Healing is the exact same. Only DPS has it better as their most common screwup is pulling aggro which can be avoided by slacking. Which is why I think as much responsibility should be put on the classes that have less to start with. Piling on more stuff on the players that already have the most to do (ie the MT) is just asking for burnout.

Last night I was in some PUG and after the second pull (which everyone survived with full health) the mage asked me if I was healing (I was the only healer). He asked because I was not in tree form. I made some sarcastic comment followed by the observation that tree form isnt that great for 5 mans, but stuff like that can get to you.

I always found that getting smartass advice from people who don't know my class is the most annoying.