Since late WotLK, Blizzard has designed most of their encounters for two tanks. They’ve used many methods to do so, some more popular or effective than others.
Tank Comparison: Cooldowns
This is the second in an MoP series on tank comparison. I’ve asked several tanks for improvements to this list, but it’s still possible that I’ve missed something. Please comment if I’ve forgotten or improperly evaluated something. Next I will cover passive bonuses and masteries.
My plans for this series are as follows:
- Active Mitigation
- Long Cooldowns
- Passive Bonuses and Masteries
- Strengths and Weaknesses in all of the above
In this post I compare defensive abilities for all tanks, which I define as situational skills with long cooldowns (greater than 30sec) that keep you alive through extreme damage. Raid utilities are included if they help keep the tank alive as well, though it should be noted that they cannot always be used this way. Also, passive cooldowns like Purgatory are included because they have internal cooldowns and can normally be depended on just like a traditional cooldown.
Tank Comparison: Active Mitigation
This is the first of an MoP series on tank comparison. I’ve asked several tanks for improvements to this list, but it’s still possible that I’ve missed something. Please comment if I’ve forgotten or improperly evaluated something. Next I will cover long cooldowns.
My plans for this series are as follows:
- Active Mitigation
- Long Cooldowns
- Passive Bonuses and Masteries
- Strengths and Weaknesses in all of the above
In this post I compare active mitigation for all tanks, which I define as rotational skills with short cooldowns (less than 30sec) that keep you alive through average damage (i.e. melee hits or spells that are used very often), or consume resources that would otherwise keep you alive. Some of these abilities are more situational than others, but my goal is to include everything that fits the above definition.
More on Active Mitigation
I wrote about interactive tanking a few months ago, but now that it’s becoming a reality, I feel like I should revisit some of those ideas.
First of all, what can we glean from Ghostcrawler’s recent blog posts about the changes? They haven’t said anything specific for bears, but they’ve dropped some hints.
We define [active mitigation] as hitting buttons regularly that have a meaningful impact on your future mitigation.
As an aside, the Feral druid’s mitigation is arguably the most passive right now, and we’d want to change things like Savage Defense to be active buttons under this model.
From these two comments, I expect they plan on making Savage Defense into Blood Shield. They don’t seem to be a huge fan of Death Strike’s heal, so they probably won’t include that in the feral model. My guess is that instead of proccing a small bubble on critical hits, we’ll proc a large bubble on a specific attack. We don’t know much more than that.
Orange paws of defense!
Threat Level Midnight
I want to point out that after a tiny bit of googling, I found that “Threat Level Midnight” is an episode of The Office (US version).
Blizzard, specifically Ghostcrawler, decided to talk about threat and tanking abilities. In a dramatic departure from previous Dev Watercoolers, they actually mentioned changes that will be coming instead of things they might think about later.
Tank Circle
I usually don’t engage in mass blogosphere questionaires because normally they’re boring and irrelevant, but this time it’s tank specific so that at least makes it relevant! There’s also an acute shortage of non-paladin answers.
Rawr!
How to Make Tanking More Interactive
The Problem with Passive Tanks
One of the questions I saw popping up a few times in the Ask a Dev: Tanking thread concerned the lack of active defenses for tanks. That is, tanks rely on passive stats like dodge, parry, block/Savage Defense, and base damage reduction to survive. Death Knights, with Death Strike, Blood Shield, and a handful of minor cooldowns actually have a healthy amount of active control over their defenses, so this question doesn’t apply to them as much as it does Druids, Warriors, and Paladins.
4.1 To-Do List and Tanking Changes
To-Do List for Feral Druids
Lots of good things are happening for ferals. I already wrote up an in-depth summary for changes to bears. All my guides and tank comparisons have been updated for 4.1 as well. Here’s a nice little list for all types of ferals (bear, kitty, pvp) so that you won’t forget to do some important things now that the patch has dropped.