Well I see that you have set it up already; but I will throw in my 3 1/4 cents anyways (that's right I'm loaded with cents).

 

Teaching someone to tank is about teaching them a different philosophical approach to the game.

 

(snip)

I will take all your cents, because it made sense. I loved this write-up and posted it (with credit) to my Guild forum. Awesome stuff, thanks for sharing it.

(Wish I was on a server where I could participate in such a workshop! I'll just have to continue to glean what I can from the many knowledgeable forum posts.)

In my guild (or better, I do this with people that ask for help) I have done several different training situations, I'll mention the ones that I like the most and were most successful:

1-) Go to a dummy, any dummy, and start a duel with the guy being evaluated, use your skills and companion to simulate mechanics (this one is generic and works for tanks and dps, even healers if they consider their companion a tank that they should be healing): Sending your companion would represent an add attacking, so if a dps and a tank are supposed to drop whatever they are doing and go for the add, using explosive dart simulated a mechanic in which the dps/tank needs to move away from the group so he can take the dmg alone and not inflict any aoe on the raid, using any area-marked aoe would test their ability to move away from circles, droping also a healing circle or something like that would test the guy's ability to stop what he's doing and go for an objective/mechanic that requires him going somewhere instead of avoiding it. This is basic general mechanics training and is very good for beginners in the game.

2-) 4 or 5-man (depending on your gear) TFB storymode, just go in and clear the trash, you can kill first and second bosses if your group is good but the point is not killing the bosses but actually putting people to the test, the trash is really interesting since you have many nice mechanics (malfunctioning that needs to be stunlocked, self destroying droid that you either kill fast or run away from explosion, little adds that need to be separated from small adds, cleanseable debuffs on trash, big guy that needs to turn away for purple vortex, carvers that knockback, adds that drop aggro all the time.... that trash is a pure tank workshop), the 2 bosses are really good for practicing too, first boss is great for tank swaps, keeping your back to the wall for jealous male knockbacks, predicting boss movement so you keep yourself always at melee range etc., second boss is probably the best tank swap test in current content, the fact that you will have only one healer will make it feel like you are in hardmode and force you to swap as quick as possible, it is possible for your tank to get doom or mark for death, the reduced people will make the place totally full of green puddle that they need to avoid all the time, ciphas is a very nice kite test, there is a good chance you will enrage the boss at the end of the fight which would make everyone work really hard at the end. As you can see this is probably my favorite since you can train in a lot of stuff, it doesn't really matter if you can kill the bosses or not but how well you perform while trying. On a sidenote you make really good money from this.

3-) Classic ops, in special EC HM, or even SM since most of it is easily 3-manable and possibly 2-manable, EC is one of the most mechanic heavy ops in the game for bosses (not so much on trash) and undermanning content makes you have to deal with mechanics in some unusual ways sometimes, which many times take a lot of advantage from particular class skills that may not be very conventional and requires quick adapting to situation - very good communication training.

4-) Champions and world bosses -> I don't love this one, I come from a pvp server and player interference is always possible, not to mention *******es who can interfere without pvping (taunting bosses, attacking without being called for etc.)

Now, as for how to try and make the tanks better, here are some thing I ask them to do:

1-) Try tanking as much as possible without a taunt, if you do a run with people you trust in a hm fp try to ask him to completely take taunt off his bar, this will teach him not to rely much on his taunt and also learn to direct people for focus targeting (since this is his only hope for keeping aggro in large groups), it also makes him see the importance of the opener and also how to throw some attacks on the other enemies so you keep aggro on them.

2-) No guard, I actually got so used to this that I go through entire runs without noticing that I didn't guard. Lets face it - guard can only protect you from 1 crazy-burst dps, if your guild is good you will have 4 dps who can do crazy high numbers and even more if you do 16-man, even if you have 2 guarded if you suck the other ones will rip aggro from you.

3-) You can make them run with more-geared dps to teach them how to use taunt rotation to make sure you keep the boss, even when no matter how good you are in your rotation it wont be enough to keep aggro from that OP dps (which is a situation that should never happen in a real raid)

4-) Always pretend you're in a tier above - If you are doing storymode try to pretend that the hm mechanics are there, if you do hm pretend NiM mechanics are there.

Those are the main thing I can think of, I've tried some other training methods that were not very successful and some others that were but not really worth mentioning for being either too specif to a class or boss fight or for being to specific for a problem that one guy had instead of general tanking issue.

I am btw the "training specialist" in my guild, which means I'm responsible for providing training to my fellow members and as such I am very interested in this kind of subject KN, if you have any nice ideas or things you've done in the past in your guild, be it related to tanking or not, I'd greatly appreciate if you share it with me

I do realize that the idea of a workshop is different from a small training and most of my suggestions are instance-based and thus wouldn't work well for a workshop, but my experience in trying to provide training showed me that big things like that are not really effective, I'd prefer to find the people interested in becoming better players and working personally with them.

do videos with vocal explanations.

teaching by example would probably help with some high quality information.

do videos with vocal explanations.

teaching by example would probably help with some high quality information.

I'd be willing to make some videos. What topics would you expect to see in a tanking 101?

I'd be willing to make some videos. What topics would you expect to see in a tanking 101?

One thing I'd like to see is info on pulling, especially for the Guardian/Juggernaut. I know about the LoS pull, but apparently there are other ways to pull, and I have no idea how those work. And with the Guardian/Juggernaut, your ranged options are very limited, so I'm not sure if some of those other options can even be made to work for them.

Other than that, I think the best sort of video would be to run several fights where you just do the fight so people can see how the fight works, then go back and do slower motion, explaining what you do and why at a rate that people can see what's going on. For example, you've got three enemies grouped together, and a fourth out of easy reach. Your video shows you Force Charging in, popping Smash, then running over and Force Choking the loner. When you go back, your commentary goes something like this:

"I start off by using Force Charge, which gets me into range to use most of my abilities quickly. I choose to Charge to the group, as that will put me close to multiple enemies, making it easier to get threat on the majority of the group. Once I'm in, I use Smash. When Talented, Smash does a lot of stuff. However, for the moment, what we're primarily concerned with is the fact that it deals damage, and therefore builds threat, on all enemies it hits. This gets the group focused on me. Finally, because there's a lone enemy who wasn't in range of my Smash, I move into range and use Force Choke. This takes him out of the fight for a moment, gives me some Rage to use other abilities, and most importantly, generates Threat on the lone enemy, keeping his attention on me. I've now generated threat on 4 enemies in a matter of seconds, so now all I have to do is keep that Threat."

Of course, you don't have to go back and show it again if you can keep commentary going while you're fighting, but between the fact that that splits your attention, and the fact that fights can be rather fast-paced, I figure it would be easier to go back and run the video more slowly so that you can do the commenting after the fact.

I took my shot at some basics for a Guardian tank.

Posted it here

any feed back would be wonderful. Perhaps we can get all the tanks to make videos for each AC and compile them to one thread here on the tanking forum.