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.

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'd just like to point out that the offtank really doesn't get "no rage" unless you're ridiculously "unlucky" with dodges/parries on the hurtful. If its a warrior you should always be able to zerk rage between hurtfuls (always = on cooldown) as it has about 6-8 seconds cooldown, which helps a lot with getting rage off the hurtful. If you really are starved for rage, zerk rage + turning your back on it for a second will work (means you can't dodge/parry it). Feral druids should never have problems with threat - even post nerf patch I've tanked it when it was bugged out (i.e. no ground slam, no hurtful) and still stayed above melee with lacerate/mangle and no mauls.


On the general subject, I'm not sure there's any fight which you could really test 2 tanks and just see who takes more damage. There's too many extra factors like avoidance strings on abilities or avoidance of them hitting you meaning no rage so no threat, or whatever.

Generating threat I'm pretty sure can be improved in general - some of our tanks just weren't doing the same threat as one of them, so he gave them a few tips on what he was doing and now they all do a lot more. I also think a lot of people underrate shield block value for generating threat as a warrior, and it gives you extra survivability on top.

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.

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.

What about GoA + stones? I've heard complaints that WF is too streaky.



Also:

Is there a way after a fight is over to see the average TPS? I know KTM shows the rolling TPS, but it's a short timeframe and it wipes it out when the fight is over. No matter how many times I try to get a last-second screenshot I always miss it.

Something changed in the last week with our tank's threat, or with my dps (I haven't gotten new gear, although I did make some changes in my casting to better keep on top of the global cooldown) -- it's sort of hard to pin down what the change is, despite us talking a while. (I'm the highest dps in the guild on gruul by a pretty big margin.) I got caught flatfooted on Gruul this week by the tps difference, screwed up and reflexively shattered early, and ended up just soulstoning and hellfiring down to drop threat -- it was all in all a rather unpleasant experience.

But if there were a way to easily see, post-fact, the average tps of a tank, it'd be easier to discuss such things and figure out what the variation is.

Some bosses really require the maximum stm and mitigation you have available while others don't. I'd be surprised to find a main tank that doesn't have a few different sets setup in itemrack (or equivalent mod) for different bosses/trash/etc.

There are too many critical variables that depend on the encounter to make any accurate mod for this. Key variables would be for example base damage, swing speed, instant attacks, abilities that reduce mitigation like sunder, stuns...
A tank with loads of evasion for example will be less vulnerable to a fast attacking mob with a sunder ability (like Prince phase 2), whereas a tank who stacks armor and hitpoints will do much better against a mob that periodically stuns (like say Chromaggus).

In addition, there is a difference in survivability between taking secondary attacks like Hurtful Strike and taking regular hits. Since every encounter is different you cannot categorize all eventualities unless you make a survivability mod per encounter, and even then it would be practically useless.

Even if you use a mod with loads of option like Tankpoints, choosing and comparing gear is not as easy as: more points means it's better.

Does using a stone with GoA offset the threat loss though, perhaps resulting in a higher total threat? The idea was GoA + stone, not just GoA.

This is just talking with our tank and ideas there, sorry if these are dumb questions, I R not a tank, just a high-dps lock.


Nope.