Just nothing to post here, really.
Got unexpectedly pulled in to tank in ICC-10 when a spot opened up and I was on standby. I probably should’ve passed to the other person who could’ve tanked and was also on standby, because holy shit I am not ready for that place yet. Especially Deathbringer Saurfang. After several valiant attempts, including two glorious screwups by me (one of which involved Heimdall tanking Saurfang solo for about 3 minutes straight while I chewed on the pile of bones that was accumulating at our feet), we wandered over to ToC-10 instead so that I could work on gear and Malak – the aforementioned other tank – could work on tanking experience (along with me apologizing copiously for not being ready yet).
Apparently ToC-10 is more my speed! Definitely felt less like I was flailing like a roper at my keyboard. Gormok is a decent way to learn at least the tank portion of the fight – obviously it doesn’t compare on the DPS end, but the coordination of switching off at X time is pretty similar, but less of an emergency. Malak and I seem to be able to out-threat each other when we have to when switching, as well, which is nice. Made it to Faction Champions before a variety of non-fight-related issues (sleepiness, weird lag issues, etc.) knocked us out for the night.
So yeah. It was a learning experience! This weekend, since SNOWPOCALYPSE 2010 is supposedly on its way, I’ll be taking the opportunity to do things I want to do that don’t include raiding, including grinding mass numbers of badges, trying to pug a VoA or something of that nature, possibly transferring and leveling my shaman or warrior, or … other things. I dunno.
Oh! Before I forget: does anyone know how to get Skada to show threat? I switched from Recount to Skada since Recount seems to be all over the boards sometimes, and while I was able to get it to show DPS, Skada has never once shown me anything except a blank window when I’m looking at threat. I suspect I may have a setting switched on that is causing it to get ignored or somesuch, so if anyone has a good intro to using Skada, I’d appreciate it.
WoW.com has an article on Skada and goes into the threat meter. I am going to dig a bit deeper into this addon myself as well.
http://www.wow.com/2010/02/04/addon-spotlight-ska...
What may help you on the tank switches:
- Adjust the display of debuffs so that they look bigger. You can use a UI addon like Xperl or Pitbull for that.
- Have the display of the target of your target switched on, so you can stay on the boss while the other tank has agro and monitor him for the debuff.
- If you are a Warrior and threat is not a problem, you can set Vigilance on the other tank to have your Taunt cd refreshed with every hit that that tank takes. It makes a resisted taunt on the boss less of a problem.
- When the boss is about to get taunted off of you, stop all but your auto-attack for a moment. After a few seconds you can pick up your rotation again, but leave out heavy threat abilities if you are less than 10% away from the threat bar of the active tank. Since the damage that you do as a tank is not much and there is the risk of easily stealing agro, I usually stick with abilities supporting the tank; debuffs, interrupts, various shouts, etc. (be aware of not agroing Saurfang's ads with your AoE abilities).
Most of this you probably already know, but I wanted to leave it here for relevance.
All very good advice. I think part of what was happening was this: in ICC, I was finding it VERY easy to overrun our other tank, thus ending up with a few stupid situations of my own causing. Example: getting the Rune twice in a row because I happened to slip ahead in threat right as the Rune of Blood came out. See? Glorious(ly stupid) mistakes on my part.
However! The other problem then was that I wasn't generation ENOUGH threat, so that when it came time for me to take him, I wasn't ramping threat up quick enough. I'm chalking this up to inexperience – I can count on one hand the number of tank-switch fights I've tanked prior to last night. I got some good practice in on this in ToC, though – hovering just enough behind Malak that when he needed me to grab Gormok, I could. (I've also found that Death Grip is nice for this because it gives me a 3 second breathing window to lay the hammer down.)
I also had a taunt resisted. Twice. I can, again, count on one hand the number of times I've had a taunt resisted. Two. However, your advice is sound, so I'll leave it, even though I'm not a warrior. Believe me, I wish I had vigilance. It's a fantastic little ability!
Skada will only show threat if you actually have a target and are in combat. Outside of combat, the threat window will always be empty.
You can set Skada up to show you threat in combat, and once you leave combat it will switch to your mode of choice, e.g. damage