yes, you are quite right, tanking is not quantum physics or playing metal. You do not need a doctorate to play nor do you need years of practice.

It's a game, it's meant to be easy. Yet, you have people like the OP that think it's too hard, and people like the one above think it's too easy, the trick here is finding the right balance.

The poster above me mention DPS rotation and tank switch, but the role the tank go farther than that. There is no doubt in my mind that the above poster is a good player, but maybe not a good teacher. DPS rotaion for a tank must be automatic, a tank must go through his rotation without thinking. It is ok if he makes mistake in the rotation, if he use telekinetic throw with only 2 stacks of harnessed shadow, use project without proc, his job is not to maximize dps output, though it's good if he does.

While dps role is just that, go through their rotation while avoiding stuff on the ground, the tank role is far more important.

A tank (good one that is) must be aware of his surrounding, his position and those of is teammate. He must anticipate and react. When positioning a boss, he minds that there will be dps behind the boss. is there are mezzed mob, you can use slow time but not force breach, don't forget kick, stun. He does look at the combat zone, aware of the position of every raid member, aware of the strat, he also watch closely his own life because of his role, he is meant to take a punishement and may very much die, not from hiw own mistake, not from an aoe he miss to avoid, but simply because the boss deal more damage than he receives heal. he must be ready to use defensive cooldown.

And yes, knowk back are part of his awareness and anticipation.

PS: and by the way WoW warrior tank rotation is

Shield slam // Revenge // Devastate while maintening long cooldown debuff (thunderclap and demo shout), that 5 key that will be the only one you need to clear all the raid content in highest difficulty mode.

Some tank throw in shockwave with 3 stack of thunderclap, but it isn't necessary really. How simple is that?

I don't even begin to talk about paladin or druid rotation.

PS2: you forget dark ward in your rotation.

As much as it's entertaining that the loud minority in this thread think tanking is fine, I'd much rather they make tanking extremely faceroll so that there are actually tanks than to leave it the way it is where there are no tanks. If tanking were so fun and better than in other games, then why is there so few tanks? The answer: it's not. Or at least, not to the vast majority of people who play this game, which are indeed casual. I'm actually a former casual player myself and hardcore now, but even still, my guild which is doing Explosive Conflict right now can barely manage one, maybe two tanks at best. Our main tank is a tank alt and actually would rather DPS, but has to tank because there are none. The other tanks aren't on very much or are main spec DPS. Other than that, we have to get tanks from other guilds to tank for us because there are no tanks.

 

Bottom line, I don't care how rewarding tanking is in this game if there aren't even enough people who want to do it. I tanked a bit myself until I realized how bad everyone is. Every time a DPS would attack the wrong target it would make me rage and want to quit the group. Same with when a healer would ask for Guard, etc. Most people just don't know how to play and don't understand game mechanics. The game needs to be designed around that instead of ignoring it if it wants to survive any longer than it already will, which isn't that long judging by how many subs it's losing every quarter.

I COMPLETELY disagree with this assessment. Lack of tanks has NOTHING to do with tanking mechanics it has to do with:

1) DPS shows bigger numbers - seeing that "popcorn" is a big deal to a lot ppl and tanks just don't do as much damage

2) soloing is easier as a DPS class. again because you do more damage you kill stuff faster.

3) there is FAR less responsibility in groups when you play a DPS class. I agree with the person who posted "DPS is science, healing is art, tanking is strategy". I have done all three roles in many games. Tanking involves thought; you are presented with a situation and YOU decide how to handle it. And too many players do not want to think when playing this or any other MMORPG - they just wanna kill s***!

So when a player goes to choose which AC to level as, the overwhelming majority of the time, they are going to chose a DPS spec. This has been going on since DAY ONE of computer-based RPGs and will probably never change. It takes certain personalities to WANT to play a tank or a healer.

My problems as vanguard tank - keeping aoe aggro. If I use aoe attakcs, ill burn my ammo in 5 seconds and then I'm useless. And even if dps is attacking 1 target, rest of mobs will go for healers. I have feeling that guardians can keep mobs easyer, don't know if I'm right., don't they haver better way of gaining focus, every time they are hit?

To answer your basic question guardians do not have it any easier. AOE agro is hard to hold in this game. What I have learned as a guardian tank is that the tank is not meant to have 100% agro on EVERY mob 100% of the time. Tanks go after the (non-CCed) toughest mob in the bunch, then the DPS are supposed to go around the room from weakest to strongest. The AOE taunt tanks have is intended to be temporary. Hopefully in the six seconds you have "universal" agro one or more of the weaker mobs dies.

yes, you are quite right, tanking is not quantum physics or playing metal. You do not need a doctorate to play nor do you need years of practice.

 

It's a game, it's meant to be easy. Yet, you have people like the OP that think it's too hard, and people like the one above think it's too easy, the trick here is finding the right balance.

 

 

The poster above me mention DPS rotation and tank switch, but the role the tank go farther than that. There is no doubt in my mind that the above poster is a good player, but maybe not a good teacher. DPS rotaion for a tank must be automatic, a tank must go through his rotation without thinking. It is ok if he makes mistake in the rotation, if he use telekinetic throw with only 2 stacks of harnessed shadow, use project without proc, his job is not to maximize dps output, though it's good if he does.

 

While dps role is just that, go through their rotation while avoiding stuff on the ground, the tank role is far more important.

 

A tank (good one that is) must be aware of his surrounding, his position and those of is teammate. He must anticipate and react. When positioning a boss, he minds that there will be dps behind the boss. is there are mezzed mob, you can use slow time but not force breach, don't forget kick, stun. He does look at the combat zone, aware of the position of every raid member, aware of the strat, he also watch closely his own life because of his role, he is meant to take a punishement and may very much die, not from hiw own mistake, not from an aoe he miss to avoid, but simply because the boss deal more damage than he receives heal. he must be ready to use defensive cooldown.

And yes, knowk back are part of his awareness and anticipation.

 

 

 

PS: and by the way WoW warrior tank rotation is

Shield slam // Revenge // Devastate while maintening long cooldown debuff (thunderclap and demo shout), that 5 key that will be the only one you need to clear all the raid content in highest difficulty mode.

Some tank throw in shockwave with 3 stack of thunderclap, but it isn't necessary really. How simple is that?

I don't even begin to talk about paladin or druid rotation.

 

PS2: you forget dark ward in your rotation.

Whilst I agree with everything you posted, the general implication of this thread is that holding aggro in this game as a tank is difficult and this is exacerbated by knockbacks and stuns from NPCs. I was simply disagreeing with that general sentiment as I believe that the basic task of holding aggro in this game is mindnumbingly simple.

An example.

Sentinel does 1600DPS generating 1600 Threat per second.

Tank puts guard on sentinel, transfering 25% threat: Tank now has 400 threat per second, Sentinel has 1200 threat per second.

This means that as a tank, I only need to generate 800 TPS to stay top of the table. Due to tank stances giving me 200% threat per point of damage, I actually only need to do 400 DPS per second as a tank to stay top of the table against a sentinel doing 1600 DPS!!!

Should I fail to be doing 400DPS during a fight, I can always use one of two taunts which not only snaps aggro on to me, but places me 30% above the person at the top of the table, giving me a 30% buffer. the later I am in the fight, the larger that buffer is going to be.

Thats what I mean about it being faceroll easy. Ofc, I also agree with you that to be a good tank requires much more, especially regarding good judgement of who you want to drain threat from, placement of mobs, when to AoE taunt and when not to, when to use defensive cooldowns etc. However, in comparison to other MMOs that I've played, the core mechanics of tanking i.e. holding aggro and mitigating damage is excessively easy.

To answer your basic question guardians do not have it any easier. AOE agro is hard to hold in this game. What I have learned as a guardian tank is that the tank is not meant to have 100% agro on EVERY mob 100% of the time. Tanks go after the (non-CCed) toughest mob in the bunch, then the DPS are supposed to go around the room from weakest to strongest. The AOE taunt tanks have is intended to be temporary. Hopefully in the six seconds you have "universal" agro one or more of the weaker mobs dies.

Same is true for shadows. We have our AoE taunt on 45s cooldown, and then we have slow time and force breach.

Slow time does ~1300 damage and generates 250% threat, so it does 3250 threat every 7.5seconds. Force Breach hits for ~800 and generates ~1600 threat every 20 seconds.

So, over a 1 minute period, a shadow tank is going to generate 30800 threat on each target. Add in some addition threat from self-healing and we maybe generate 40,000 threat on AoE targets every minute.

In order for a DPS character to steal aggro, they need to be doing ~733dps (40k *1.1 / 60) which is easily achieveable by anyone in tionese and above. For a healer to steal aggro, they need to be doing 1466 heals per second (healing generates half threat) which is actually quite high, so luckily shadow tanks can usually keep threat off the healers as long as we use slow time and force breach on cooldown and hit every single mob with both skills.

But, as you point out, tanks simply arent meant to hold aggro of every single mob 100% of the time. We just need to tank the most lethal mobs and we can let the DPS deal with the rest.

Tank puts guard on sentinel, transfering 25% threat: Tank now has 400 threat per second, Sentinel has 1200 threat per second.

Guard reduces the target's threat generation; it doesn't transfer threat whatsoever. Even without it, threat in this game is a joke thanks to the 1.3 tank threat gen multipliers: you only need to do half as much damage as a DPS to keep threat off of them (less actually, thanks to the fact that the game requires 130% threat in most situations to peel threat off of a target). I don't even bother putting guard on anyone I run with anymore, pugs *or* guild.

Stopped reading the rest, no wonder tanking is easy for you <3

Precisely! Its those Ultra-Faceroll tanks I´ve been talking about earlier. haha They think they are ******, they just dont realize they are totally OP and theres other tank classes out there that actually require S.K.I.L.L.!!!!!! lol

Precisely! Its those Ultra-Faceroll tanks I´ve been talking about earlier. haha They think they are ******, they just dont realize they are totally OP and theres other tank classes out there that actually require S.K.I.L.L.!!!!!! lol

Whilst I agree that shadow tanks are very easy, as I don't have any other tanks I'm unaware as to how other tanks have it harder.

All tanks get the same threat modifier meaning that holding threat on a single target is exceptionally easy. All tanks get single target taunt plus AoE taunt on same cooldowns to make tank swopping exceptionally easy. All tanks get guard......

Only thing I was aware of that shadows had easier was our AoE aggro via the skill "slow time", but 1.3 aimed to fix that. Still, every single boss in this game is single target aggro so shadows have no advantage there.