seped

Ok, I started tanking with this expansion, and things have been going well but I have one problem. My threat gen versus druid tanks in the guild. I lose aggro on bosses I have initial aggro on and as soon as I no longer have the rage from tanking I never get it back. I'm comparable in hitpoints with the druids, and I think my gear is better overall. It's pretty annoying and I'd love any tips anyone might have. My basic threat rotation is shield slam, revenge, shield block, and heroic strike whenever my rage starts gaining faster then I'm spending. This is mainly a single mob problem.

 

alkis

5 sunders + spam devastate along with the cycle you already mention. What's your tps now? You should be able to sustain 800 tps without much trouble with that. Ofc your should use bloodrage whenever possible and aim mixing the most heroic strikes you can in the above (no gcd in hs). Shield block doesn't necessarily generate threat other than the threat from blocks but it is useful on mobs higher level than you. Otherwise it is a bit of a waste of rage imo.

 

seped

I like shield block to guarantee revenge every time I can. It seems like every time I try to stack up 5 sunders that's when I lose aggro. According to threat meter I run about 450tps on trash and about 550-650 on bosses.

 

Tzeni

I would definitely keep shield blocking, it keeps crushing blows at bay. You might want to consider getting the +threat enchant on your gloves, getting a better weapon, and pick up some parry (you'll get 40% faster main hand swings whenever you parry). Also consider that if you find you can't HS on every swing, you might want to pick up imp heroic strike and maybe give up another point for anger management. This stuff usually isn't necessary though, just saying if you're having that much trouble getting rage...

Edit: Sorry, I didn't read your entire response. Tell your dps to not dps until you get 5 sunders up then. If you're not making use of devistate that's probably where your missing threat is.

 

• Morsexy

Its all about getting that good rhythm down, and having a different rotation for low rage situations vs high rage. I would not be using heroic strike if you're in that lower rage situation, and from that lower TPS. I would use Sunder. I say lower meaning you cant spam everything easily including heroic 2 times with no penalty.

all that being said, without a much better weapon your TPS is going suffer a lot. Going from Gromtor --> King's Defender with Mongoose will be a substantial upgrade. I dont know if they intend for druids to have higher\better TPS forever, but like all aspects of warrior life, once you get 400 SB and an 83 dps 1h, the gap between will not be as large.

Another thing to try if youre having trouble is to get windfury in your party. All an estimate with KTM with WF in my group at the end of a long fight I tend to average somewhere in the 850-1000 TPS fairly easily.

 

seped

rage is fine until I lose aggro. I'm not really sure where there's a better weapon then Grom'tors Charge as far as mitigation goes.

*edit* King's charge is nice, but we are still trying to down shade of aran. *edit*

 

Twid

Take an hour at the end of your next night of Aran attempts, clear to the chess event (less than an hour if you've done the trash before), and have some fun It's a good stress relief, and a good way to end the night with a bit of reward.

That is of course, unless you're on the verge of killing Aran, then keep pushing.

 

seped

Ah, I missed the one night we did chess event, I assumed the chest was from something I hadn't seen. Score.

 

seped

Been paying more attention, my numbers where a little low, keeping about 600-700 on the last trash pull.

 

• Morsexy

I am a mitigation and avoidance first kind of guy, even though Im slowly coming around to the theory of Stars everywhere. Ive always felt that way except when it comes to our weapon given how our rage gen was tweaked. The higher the base dps the more rage you're going to generate. I think the other thing to realize is that on trash its hardly worth it to sunder much\Dev spam. If your druid has a good weapon, he will be ahead of you until you get the equivalent 100-110 ilvl epics in both slots.

I was very frustrated when I was at the same point in progression as you are since I believe I had +.027% chance to hit, and it seemed like over 50% of my skills were being avoided. Now that Im up to ~2% ( still sucks, wtb naxx type of balance on gear ) Its definately noticable that my TPS is steadier.

 

Lodekim

If people are dpsing/building threat as soon as you're starting, don't bother spamming sunder to get the 5 stack, you'll lose aggro, it's not enough threat. My rotation prioritizes revenge/shield slam, then sunder til 5 stacks, then devastate, using heroic strike when I can burn rage. I don't pay attention to threat on trash, but I'd say between 700 and 950 dps is about where I sit, while using The Hungering Cold still.

 

Andrise

You want to Shield Slam whenever you can, and Revenge whenever it's up. These are your two highest threat moves. If you're talking about trash mobs, don't bother spamming shield block, especially not inthe first few seconds of combat. Your normal avoidance should be enough to light up revenge just fine. In between Shield Slam and Revenge cooldowns, start stacking Sunders, until 5, then replace the downtime between SS and Revenge with Devastate, obviously. Any time your threat generation really matters, stacking 5 sunders right off is a mistake.

 

Whiteknight

To directly address your question: druids put out fantastic hate even when they don't have aggro. This is *very* different from a tank-spec warrior who puts out incredibly low hate (comparatively) when not actually being hit. Any competent feral can pull a low or even medium damage mob off a prot warrior.

The solution is simple - tell your druid not to pull aggro. As was discussed on a separate thread, being an offtank is a skillful job - pulling aggro means your offtank failed. Just like if dps pulled aggro. Make him use KTM and pay attention to it.

If you meant you were losing aggro to dps classes, well, yeah the same applies - have them install KTM too. It's fairly easy to lose a mob to dps when it doesn't put out tons of damage. Your TPS goes down, their DPS stays constant.



As to actual threat rotation, if you're in a low rage scenario, your goal is rage management. As such, white damage hits are an important source of rage, Revenge is a really good tool, Shield Slam and then sunder or devastate. In that order usually. Skip SB/demo/TC in many cases to improve your rage.

When you're getting hit hard, your goal is GCD management. Your strongest hate tool is actually heroic strike - not because the TPS is high, but because it's essentially 'free hate' due to it not taking the GCD. In such a scenario you should be getting virtually zero white hits. You fill in the GCDs with Shield Slam, Revenge and then Devastate if you have enough time. I.e. if you didn't have to refresh TC/Demo or something else with the GCD.

In real tanking situations you often shift modes due to temporary rage drought or surplus. Knowing your encounter allows you to understand which you have to sacrifice TPS in order to gain mitigation, etc. For example - if you have 15 rage, do you devastate, or shield block? Well, vs Attumen probably you devastate. Vs Gruul at 15 grows, you sure as heck shield block. I guess my point is the rotation is dynamic, but based on the encounter certain abilities become higher or lower priority.
Against Gruul at high grow values, I sometimes find myself using SB, SB, SB, SB because I hit a dodge string and didn't have enough rage to do anything else. I just trust my DPS to not pull and when he finally hits me I turn on the hate abilities again. This kind of thing is uncommon, but it serves to illustrate how different the priorities might be - missing a SB in this scenario is an almost guaranteed wipe.

 

Dynalisia

Good stuff. In rage-starved situations, I also tend to swap to berserker stance to use berserker rage. Berserker rage does not require you to be in berserker stance to be in effect and it does not drop once you swap out. The only risk you take is the 20% damage increase from defensive stance, but since rage starved situations are usually either on mobs that hit hard, but really slow or on mobs that don't hit hard at all, it is usually not a problem to deal with it. Ofcourse, you can only do this in fights where you don't need berserker rage for its other utility.

 

Dralmoo

Does anyone have the math on fast vs slow weapons for tanking with Devastate spam with current weapons? I assume it's different from the 60 math. In high rage situations (gruul) I assume that the extra Heroic strikes with a fast weapon are still more TPS than devastate spam with a slower one, but numbers are always nice.

 

Whiteknight

Devastate 'spam' isn't an effective tanking technique regardless of which weapon you're using. The itemization doesn't yet allow devastate to be more hate than revenge/shield slam, so you're better off using your GCDs for Shield Slam and Revenge.

This means in a given cycle (between shield slam cooldowns), you're going to be using devastate once, or maybe not at all.

Compare this to a 1.6 speed weapon which will hit almost 4 times with heroic strike in the same timeframe.

HS/fast weapon is still the way to go, unless you actually have to do dps as a prot warrior (Aran for example).

 

Rand

I haven't seen anyone mention block value yet. One of the more fun things to do on trash and 5-mans (heroic even) is to stack a bunch of block value in as many slots as possible (maybe save some badges for the Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker). 600+ passive block value (w/ Shield Mastery) isn't too difficult to attain with various blues and some raid gear. Maybe throw in some dps plate to boost your crit/ap/hit and watch the trinketed 2000+ shield slam crits fly. It still provides decent mitigation, especially against fast attacking mobs (or multiple mobs) and there's nothing like opening up with a big shield slam crit at the beginning of a pull, allowing dps to dive right in. Relying mainly on Shield Slam can sometimes be problematic because of dodge/parry, so disarming first (where possible) can be beneficial, if it does indeed eliminate parry (correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any parries yet after disarming a "disarmable" mob).

If you need to be in full survival gear for a boss or hard hitting raid trash, and still have plenty of rage, I've found it helpful to link Heroic Strike to other abilities with the use of macros, for those situations when I almost can't spend rage fast enough. I currently have HS linked to Shield Slam, Shield Block, Devastate, and Revenge. It will only activate HS if the skill it's linked to is on cooldown (ie. when you're spamming instants). Otherwise, in rage starved situations, you can just hit the ability once when its cooldown is up, and it won't activate HS. I had to train myself not to spam buttons in those situations, but it was well worth it.

Example:

..is all you need. Then just do the same for Devastate, Revenge etc. if you feel so inclined. Since Heroic Strike doesn't activate the GCD, you can still get away with using two /casts in the same macro.

 

Zamaar

I tried making a macro with /cast shield block /stopcasting /cast revenge /stopcasting, /cast shield slam /stopcasting, /cast sunder armor (and one with devastate for when 5 sunders are up) /stopcasting /cast heroic strike.
what I wanted it to do was try to cast the first one, if it's on cd then cast the second one and so on and it will always cast heroic strike, but it didn't work, it only casted the first one on the list and if it was on cd it just did bla bla not ready + heroic strike, any idea how to make a macro to check for cooldowns? because such a macro would make my fingers hurt much less on long boss fights

 

• Chicken

That functionality was specifically broken with the 2.0 patch; you'll have to get your fingers used to the Aggro Tango.

You could try it with /castrandom, but I'd recommend not doing so.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

7Sam

Over my last curator kill on kara I was with 9 "strangers" as I was a singed, for that week, with my guild's second raid group.

This setup use OT that sit on tank gear use 1h\shild and make sure he is second on threat (according to KTM).

Yet, my setup use me (DPS warrior, DW deep Fury spced (17\44\1)) to just dps my way and stay second on threat.

However the raid leader\mt (witch happand to lead our 25man as well) refused to even try with G2 (nick name for other groups name) tactick, and told me to go tank gear, and so I did yet with twist:

I used my dps rings\trinkets\feet\neck, with access to rampage and imp battle shout (no leader of pack however) I made it to 22% crit chance and 2,000AP.

My rotation involved the usual "tank stuff" with BT\OP when possible and more heroics then unseal, (sitting on battle stance half the fight).


Bottom line: it was insane, I don't have the additional 10% threat of def stance as the MT do, yet I was able to not only keep up with him, but leave him at my dust, althow his rage gen is (due to dmg taken) higher then my.

So basically what I done that fight was get really close to MT (meaning leaving rest of raid far bhind, as I must stay #2 for w\e reason) then quit attacking all together let 3rd person on threat get to 5k threte gap from me (meaning around 50k gap from me to MT) and then rush the 50k window and see how fast I can do this (its more then 50 as the mt still keep gathering while i do my 50) and well, done it twice on that twice on my fight... and damn it was easy.

My usual TPS is around 420 with spikabilty (can u even say that) of reaching 720 on rare cases but not sustaining that, with 22%crit 2kAP I was able to sustain over 1150 for around 15secends (didn't try more as I would have stolen the aggro).


So... you guys might also want to try this some time... sure is fun.




Edit: oh yeah speaking of threat, well, back when I was pvp scped (35\23\3) on trash pulls of lets say 8humnionds before morass or small snakes (mana things) before shade, I used to pop trinkt+death wish+sweep strike, and then just ww+cleav(not improved) (ofc use BT when cleav queued WW on cd and rage left) and well hold aggro on 6+targets outputing 1620tps while not enraged...when enraged well ... more :P, the only two problems with that are:
1) 8k hp 5k armor :P.
2) mobs die so fast (its trash after all) that u don't got much time to check KTM and such.
we did MC 40man (speed run 4fun) the other day, with mt+ot cuple of dps warriors and so on, well on some molten destroyer I found great way to bost dps: pop moking block after tank's taunt fade xD (takes cuple of asinged healers to make it workflawlessly).

Second edit: some thing didnt click for me regarding stats, I loged the game now and tryed recreate this, so first off I also had 20str food buff, a side of that the gear setup is:
def legs\bracer\chest\shoulder\1h\shild rest = dps (ranged\trinkt\ring\feet\belt\glove\head\neck\back).

 

◊ Kaubel

http://www.google.com/support/firefo...tures.html&v=3

 

7Sam

My bad, my replay to Kaubel saying is off topic, please delete my saying. (This post, not above one).

 

• Daboran

As already said, Druids can find it very easy to pull aggro off Warriors in some situations (remember also it is Blizzards intention for aggro control to become one of the skills every class needs to learn).

I'm having similar issue with our guild MT at present, even to the extent of downgrading my gear on certain fights. I need to speak to him actually. I tend to think theres a combination of things going on. Not only am I slightly better geared in terms of DPS, but I think the my MT is playing it a bit safe with gear choices in order to alleviate demands on the healers.

It's a pretty fine balancing act. The limiting factor on dps for many classes in a lot of fights is now how much threat your MT can put out rather than mana/rage/energy. I tend to think it's preferable that Druids can if necessary put out that degree of threat on an OT situation. Certainly on Gruul it makes it a lot easier to make sure I'm the HS tank ahead of any over-enthusiastic Rogue/Fury Warr.

Best solution imho is just find the best skill rotation and if necessary tell your Druid to cool it on those fights where you can't swap in DPS gear to up your threat.

 

7Sam

I just posted the above to suggest that in none-survivability issue fights (unlike prince lets say) to tossing in some dps rings\trinkets and possible even more items, while keeping some minimal level of tank gear, just to result higher threat gen, could be good idea.

If the MT of the target in question have high threat gen, then not only that its "safer" for other raid members (or group) it also make it so that they can dps "harder" result in shorter fights, and on trash lets say, if you do every fight faster the total time you save from first pull to last kill could be much.

And none survivability fights are usually what OT gets, and higher threat gen for OT means easer life for him to match up with MT's high threat gen that is direct result of dmg taken translates to rage and of course.

 

moodle

When tanking trash:
Use shield block to proc revenge
Don't worry about sunders
Don't use devestate
Focus on Shield Slam, Revenge, and HS(Spec for imp HS)
With this strat puts me at 650-750 TPS

When Tanking Bosses:
Always keep shield block up
Wait for at least 10k threat before applying sunders (I wait till 10k-20k to start applying.)
If you are a serious PVE main tank and rage is an issue spec imp sunder because it is more rage efficient for threat value then devestate is.
Dump excess rage into HS every chance you get.
This usually puts me at 750-1000TPS depending on the encounter.

If you really are having threat issues and your dps is a bunch of idiots make sure the shaman in your party is dropping wind furry especially with the 2.1 nerfs coming up they might as well get use to it because it will be your best buff for threat generation.