Recently I've started to wonder how to effectively compare to tanks. Player A vs Player B, instead of classes or specs, in other words. A practical test that could actually be used.

Many cases may be protection warrior vs protection warrior, in which case you could do most of the "testing" by just comparing their stats (I'm willing to assume player skill levels are roughly equal, but this is an assumption). Things would get quite a bit more tricky comparing warrior to paladin, warrior to druid, druid to paladin...

What methodology would be the most accurate/easiest to execute? Parsing combat logs? Looking at damage taken vs length of boss fight? Tank A took 300,000 damage over a 3.2 minute prince encounter, and Tank B took 260,000 over a 2.9 minute prince encounter, so tank B is the superior tank?

Is a 3 minute boss fight enough data to provide statistically accurate results anyways? The same tank could take an extra 40k the next week even if the fight is the same duration, based soley on luck. I am largely focused on mitigation since KTM is an accurate (though not perfect) metric for threat generation.

And finally, if this is one person's dream (mine) would I even have any chance of actually collecting data from other players who just don't care? (Ok, so you probably don't have to answer this last one...)

You can compare damage taken and threat generation and that'll give you a rough idea.

However, there are intangibles that come into this (like streakiness of damage and average time to live) ... is an avoidance warrior really the best tank if an unlucky streak drops him into the red routinely? Is a druid really the worst tank if they have 25k+ hp and take crushing blows left right and center but are never in danger of actually dying? also, threat generation ... is there such a thing as excessive threat? (if you can keep comfortably ahead of your shadow priests, locks and so forth, do you really need *more* threat?)

No. There isn't.

More threat on tank = more threat dps classes can generate = more dps

Unless you had a good warrior with thunderfury in 1.x, you always had to watch your threat. Pretty much the same in 2.x, except that TF has since been nerfed.

PS: I've even had to watch my threat on the odd occasion while healing, usually in those frequent agro-wipe or OT needs to be second in threat but generates little rage situations

I still don't get what this obsession with Thunderfury comes from really. It's probably because TF makes a mediocre tank look like a great tank and a crap tank look decent still.
We have never had one until we recruited a new warrior when we were at Patchwerk. There was never any aggro issue on anything except aggro dumpers. I once went afk on Garr at 90 % and it was all fine.
In BC it seems even easier since everyone has Salvation and Tranquil Air. DPS can go all out almost all the time and in fact HAVE to go all out in many encounters to actually beat them.

Having said that, you can't compare tanks by looking at build or gear. I don't think this is something that you can effectively test with a collection of data. With one tank you will one shot Prince every week, with another tank (even with equal gear) you will wipe 10 times in a row until you get lucky.

You can always download the Tankpoints mod to find out how gear affects your ability to take damage, but be warned that the method used to calculate it rewards evasion a lot more than it is beneficial in reality.

How do you figure?

I mean, it treats avoidance like pure mitigation in that it always acts on X% of incoming damage to reduce it (whereas its more of a 'it works or it doesn't' binary effect X% of the time) and could be seen as less valuable in that way but, over time, it works just the same.

Well by that reasoning what does TF do for a great tank? I've found people tend to play around what they can expect from their tanks, regardless of the reality people always believed I could generate more threat than other tanks and other tanks reasoned I would generate more threat than they would and honestly if we do the same thing with a TF I'd be doing more.

I'm inclined to agree with the previous poster, more threat is always better as if you really see your top DPS go to town they should be pumping out some impressive threat, while there might be some differences in gear earlier on where one has higher health pools or another has better avoidance eventually these differences will be ironed out as each tank obtains the same gear sooner or later but your play style (and I guess your awareness) is something you'll carry with you no matter how much your gear changes.

The reason is that TF made tanking a lot easier from what I have seen by grabbing area aggro that is much higher than just the standard demo shout, meaning that you could be assured of at least a few hits from secondary targets (meaning more rage, more damage shield returns generating even more threat on these mobs).This all amounts to easily having enough time to generate threat on the "other" mobs, or even not needing to at all.
It is similar to how Thunderclap now pretty much trivializes multi mob pulls in normal instances. If you spam it you don't need much else than that hold area healing aggro.
Personally I always prefer a faster weapon to unload faster/cheaper heroic strikes instead.

In most boss fights I need to keep up Demo shout and thunder clap myself, (Apparently there is something in the brain like: if dps = on, then brain = off.) and on non aggro dump fights with a reasonable boss or trash mob, there is no way dps can draw aggro, even without Salvation.

DPS has to do over 1000 dps to overaggro on a tank going all out (not including salvation or talents), and there is no raid situation where you go in without salvation, making the gap even wider.

I would say that threat is only an issue if your tank is suffering from rage deprivation, which likely happens only in content below your gear level where it should not be an issue.
In fact, if you think that threat is the cap for dps, then why is everyone constantly flasking and buffing to the max to kill mobs ?

About tankpoints: Often you will be looking for the maximum damage spike you can survive rather than total amount of damage avoided. Damage taken over time is less important than guaranteeing survival of the highest damage spike. This is encounter specific, making it even more unpractical to compare tanks.

TF was absolutely sick for agro generation when the debuffs produced extra threat. It was also the only way to get 20% melee attack speed reduction for a very long time. TF was VERY GOOD to say otherwise is ludicrous considering the benefit it provided.

There is the occassional tank in our guild that can generate enough threat to enable our dps to go all out, however there are many enocounters which have mechanics which make staying under agro thresholds non trivial. Shadow priests especially with aoe damage to their parties generate insane amounts of threat.

1000 dps is a 1000tps which most warriors I've seen can not do. Hell even feral druids pre nerf had a hard time getting to that much threat.

1000 dps at the moment is relatively easy to do with full buffs if a boss likes to stay in one place for an extended time.

There is a difference between generating 1000 tps and having to do 1000 dps to overaggro though. 800-900 tps should not be an issue for a tank on most bosses. Even spamming just sunder armor and heroic strike alone yields what 600 tps or so and those aren't exactly the most efficient moves. I guess it depends on your raid but for most of our raids, dps is capped by gear and not by aggro.

And obviously the original Thunderfury was way too sick for aggro generation, that's why it's been nerfed about 10 times.

Without Salvation yes (noone raids seriously without paladins anymore I'd hope). With Salvation it becomes 700tps needed to maintain aggro, which tanks in our not-so-hardcore guild can sustain fairly easily, at least when they're getting beaten the shit out of.

As long as a mob has sunders, I can regularly hold 1.1+k tps for extended periods of time (and i've hit 1.6k TPS for strings of 5+ seconds in full DPS gear, even though that's kinda cheating). The warriors in guild can also hit 900-1k TPS regularly and hold that for quite a while before a string of parries/whatever screws it over, but in general our warriors manage to get 850+ tps total over fights (one with TF, one with the mace from Lurker).

Nitpick:

DPS Warrior with Salv (-20%stance mod * -30%salv mod) @ 1000DPS = 560TPS

Actually I (slightly) disagree, because I think that this is sorta the point of the thread. I really 'feel' that there should be some absolute metric that will in fact allow us to run a mod and/or pore over combat logs and get a sense of 'what are they doing right/wrong', and I think that's would be a wonderful thing to have.

Subjecting the raid to a trial by fire could be...unfortunate.

Yeah, the first night I got a lot of 'lol pally tank get a warrior back in here' and nowadays the mages bitch if I DON"T do the pulls on trash mobs (since they can go nuts that much easier). I think a mod that measures mitigation (and possibly hooks KTM for a overall recorded fight TPS and 'string of parries or can't hit a GD button' info) might signficantly lower the journey from A to B, and help identify who's slacking/doing it wrong.

Parse a WWS log, a good warrior tank will have used shieldblock every cooldown and made liberal use of shield slam and revenge. The log will give you the fight duration, so you can just divide that by the number of times shieldblock was active (they should have it up every 5 seconds or so, if you divide the fight duration in seconds by 5, that's how often they should have used it). Good use of burst threat and avoiding crushing blows are probably what will make or break most encounters.

Realistically there's other things that matter too, and you won't necessarily get those from a WWS parse. Positioning, smart consumable use, keeping debuffs on the mob, and gear selection all play a factor in whether or not your tank is a zero or a hero. You can't model that in a spreadsheet and post-fight statistics won't necessarily point that out to you.

I don't agree at all. Sure if I'm tanking a non-heroic 5 man I'm not putting out more than 5-600 tps, but does that really matter? No one is going to die if they get aggro and most of the mobs are tauntable or stunnable.

It's all a function of how much damage a warrior takes and the raid buffs the warrior has. Paladins are not limited the same way, however they can run into sustainability issues if the incoming dps is low (post 2.1). If it's an encounter that matters (i.e. the Prince, Nightbane, Gruul, Maulgar), a warrior is probably getting 30-50 rage every time they get hit, which means he is also probably getting rage faster than he can dump it without using Heroic Strike. Unless you get an unlucky string of dodge/miss/parry on the mob or you have a long string of avoidance, there's no reason you can't keep a HS + 4 GCD abilities going.

I can easily generate 1k + TPS on a lot of the serious Kara encounters, Gruul, and Maulgar. The only time I get into trouble is on the Curator because I'm not getting hit that hard and the shadow priests are aoe healing + restoring mana + doing a lot of damage. Excluding heroic strike, you should be able to sustain 7-800 tps. Excluding salvation, most dps classes have an inherent threat reduction ability (rogues/druids get 29%, warriors get 20%, even enhancement shaman get 15% to melee damage). This is in addition to the buffer all classes get for being at range (30%) or in melee (10%). You'd be surprised how high dps has to be in order to actually pull aggro with those types of modifiers when the tank is putting out at least 800 tps. 1000 dps isn't the speed limit for anyone but a shaman.

Also, tranquil air is suboptimal. If you really want to increase the raid's threat threshold, give your warriors windfury and your druids GoA. It allows them to generate a lot more damage, a lot more rage, and is effectively a raid-wide threat buff.

I agree. Thunderfury is way overrated if anyone thinks it makes that much of a difference anymore. 88+ dps weapons do quite a bit more white dps (generating more rage), can have faster speeds, and are much easier to get. You should do just fine with a blazeguard or the mace from SSC. Even before the threat nerf to the proc, these weapons were going to come close to rivaling TF's threat generation.

IMO the only real value to Thunderfury is the resistances and the debuff for mitigation (it saves you a tclap from your rotation). If they keep the offhand attack on devastate it might be nice as an offhand for a dps set, but that's about it.

I can't seem to break 750ish TPS. Certainly I've never been able to sustain anywhere close to 900 TPS. I'm still using Gromtor's, though, how much of a boost can I expect getting king's defender (it won't drop) or maybe eater of the suns?

This thread has seemed to jump around about different tanking metrics... but I believe there are two of them that both should be taken into account.

1. Generating Threat

A tank that generates more threat allows more dps on the target. Whether or not the tank is doing a "good job" here is often raid/fight dependent in addition to tank dependent. The core question to ask is "was the dps limited by threat?". Then you have have to find out why.. This could have nothing to do with the tank... example the OT on Gruul needs to stay above the melee to take the hurtful strikes.. but gets no rage.

2. Staying alive

This is much more dependent on the tank in my opinion (former tank). Things like having shield block up, potting when you need to, LS/SW to fill heal gaps or spike dmg. This is really a question for the logs... unless you want to tell you healers to stop healing for 20-30 seconds or so


Btw... this all relates to raid content. Five man content tanking I found to be much different as you need to hold agro on multiple mobs, that are stunnable and tauntable. Completely different style.

I have told several people to draw the line @ 400 TPS. If a tank can't keep his threat @ 400 TPS consistently then you will have issues. KLH THreatmeter can show you this and you can see the comparison pretty easily. A tank with high spikes and very low periods needs some help and coaching. This is for level 70+ encounters obviously if you go down level in instance then you generate more TPS.

This is from a threat generation standpoint so as long as they generate that threat most other things can be resolved with gear improvements. Armor, defense and so on can be improved but if the threat generation they have is bad and they can't be taught to get it higher then I submit it's re-roll time.

The only time currently I've noticed rage issues with the new encounters is OT on curator. It's very inconsistent but as the mana flares spawn they hit the OT and help to create enough rage for consistent OTing and keep yourself 2nd on aggro. For some reason, some times the flares don't arc or hit the OT regularly and it's hard to keep rage up.

Why do people use OTs on Curator?

You don't need an OT on Curator there is no 2nd on aggro mecanic at play. The Hateful bolts hit the highest on HP person that isn't the MT, Usually a warlock with AR performs a very good job at that, just keep him toped.

Surely 400 TPS is less than just spamming sunder and heroic as a DPS warrior? As a defensive specced warrior, you should be able to push out 600 as a minimum, as long as you obey the rule that Revenge > Shield Slam > Devastate(sunders@5) > Sunder.

600 TPS means a DPSer should be able to do about 800 with salv without ripping and with no abilities, which is an acceptable amount, although a bit low imo. Decently geared tanks should be able to do 700+, and exceptionally geared 800+ as long as you have a debuffer (i.e. tank isn't having to demo shout or TC).

While it's fine if people want to mesh out metrics for more areas of the game, what I was most interested in is mitigation/survivability on tanking raid bosses. Threat is very critical to a tank, but it's easily measured with KTM, and my threat's groovy, etc etc.

The situation that made me wonder about this was last week's Karazhan raid. We were fighting the prince, who we had not killed yet. I'm a feral druid, and we had a protection warrior in the raid. Usually the prot warrior is MT, but my guild decided to play with things a bit and I was the MT for the night. The prince was the only real test, as we had cleared the first bosses already and only killed shade of Aran/prince that night.

On the first attempt, I tanked, and other than a mage blinking in while I was positioning the prince (I hadn't yet hit him) things were fine. The mage was one shotted, I picked him back up, the 9 of us went on. When phase two came around, I started taking heavier damage, and after 10-15 seconds it seemed like my life was steadily decreasing. I turned on moroes' lucky pocket watch, and the prince missed/I dodged every attack for the next 10 seconds. About 2-3 seconds in I was topped off at full health, and then the healers stopped healing me. When the 10 seconds was up, I started taking damage again, and still wasn't healed much (I'm not sure if I got a few heals or none at all) and went down. Now this isn't at all suggesting I can't tank the prince, but I never communicated I was using the trinket, and I paid the price for that.

Raid leader asked if I'd mind switching with the prot tank, I said go ahead, and the with the warrior tanking, we killed the prince on our next attempt.

There's an obvious reason (the dodge trinket) for my failure, but afterwards another feral druid who was filling a sometimes-healing role for the fight said he felt the warrior took less damage than I did, and I am wondering how accurate this was. He wasn't healing very much, he said he was still in his DPS gear, so I am wary. Nevertheless, the raid saw druid = dead, warrior = live, and on our guild's first prince kill no less.

Comparing logs of shield block activation to my combat log is worthless since I'm a druid. Tank points may be the best I can realistically do, and I have not tried it in the past few weeks, but in my experience it has not always been very accurate for druids. Is there an accurate tank points mod that can handle warrior/druid/paladin stats? How will a mod take into account trinkets, last stand, demoralizing roar/shout, etc? Obviously, it won't, but even a decent baseline to which we could add our own values for various effects would probably be useful.

The other use for logs that I could see isn't for checking for effects, but to use a parsing program to see # of hits taken/avoided, average damage per hit, total damage per fight, etc.

In my experience, gearedness and threat output have an inverse relationship, except in the case of a tank stacking block value. Even the weapon tends to have a relatively minor effect on threat generation, except in the determination of which attack may be better in devastate vs heroic strike in TPS/TPR.

Thoughts?