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Tanking Workshop Brainstorm


KeyboardNinja

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My guild is probably going to do a "tanking clinic" at some point in the near future. We're basically in a situation where we have a couple of very good tanks, and a whole bunch of tanks who are…weak in various ways. The trick is to figure out the most efficient way to get everyone up to speed and at least in possession of the appropriate information.

 

So, I'm curious as to what the community's thoughts on this are. What topics are important to hit? How would you present/practice them in a controlled and repeatable group setting?

 

My current thoughts are to use Lucky as a training dummy, since he's an absolutely inane tank-n-spank fight that hits back at a high enough rate to keep energy management decent and also has enough hitpoints that we're not going to kill him by accident. Bring a bunch of tanks, a healer with a lot of patience and a couple high-burst DPS out and go to town. Everyone would have to be willing to /stuck to avoid getting the boss on respawn lockout. A couple practical things we can practice:

 

  • Openers - Get a geared Combat Sentinel and a Sharpshooter Gunslinger and don't guard either of them. Precast Orbital and pop Inspiration on leap. Get the tanks to hold agro. Openers are really important, and most tanks screw them up royally. All tanks *can* hold agro under these circumstances, but it does require some precision.
  • Rotation - Have each tank hold the boss and tank for a minute or two. Watch their abilities and critique rotation and priority queue. Sustained damage is part of every tank's job. Live parsing will probably help.
  • Active Mitigation - More important for some tanks than others. Just by watching a buff bar, it's pretty easy to tell if a shadow is screwing things up. Guardians are harder to mess up (keep it all on CD), but it's worth checking. Vanguards have a bit of variance with Energy Blast. The main thing they have to worry about is Shoulder Cannon, which is hard to time without bugging the GCD.
  • Kiting - The Lucky arena is fairly large, and he has some physics effects. We could practice kiting him around at a pace that is acceptable for melee.
  • Cooldown Usage - This one is harder, because Lucky hits like a wet noodle. Maybe have the healer pause healing at certain intervals to simulate distraction/death/burst damage?
  • Tank Swapping - The number of tanks who screw this up is depressing. Swapping smoothly without extra cleaves or refacing/repositioning the boss is a simple skill that's worth practicing.

 

We could also head out to Makeb or the Czerka daily areas. There are some trash packs that are fairly large, and some which have interrupt or facing mechanics. We could use this to practice cotanking trash, which is an art form unto itself. The DPS could simulate focus targeting, or just complete spread-fail targeting. It's not as good as it could be, since all the packs have very low health, but it works. Maybe the pre-bridge pull in the Section X heroic would be better?

 

My favorite trash pull in the entire game for learning how to tank difficult trash is the double-carver trash pack right before Titan VI. Unfortunately, that requires an op instance, and thus is harder to orchestrate.

 

Thoughts? Suggestions? Insults?

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One contest/test my guild use to do was "threat wars". You already mentioned one way to do it with DPS. Another way to do this is to have only tanks compete with each other. All tanks taking part will remove all taunts from their tool bars. Then , after letting someone else (non-tank) get initial argo, all tanks jump in and bound their rotation out, trying to remain on top of threat WITHOUT using taunts and keeping the boss agroed to them.

 

Found it was a good fun competition that encouraged tanks to learn their 'rotation'.

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I think this is a really good idea. Good feedback is important to tanking. I honestly don't know if im a good tank or not i hold threat finish instances but other then that i dont ever hear any feed back about what im doing wrong what i need to do better. So i think this would help alot of tanks are cause chances are if they are a bad/ok tank they don't know it. Unfortunely i am on harbringer
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I am thinking you could do a KP Nim run (possibly undermanning a 16 man to make it more challenging.)

 

On trash pulls you assign two tanks to grab whatever. The rest act as DPS. Since this is presumably a mostly tank group, you can simulate overeager DPS by taunting off them and seeing how long it takes them to react.

 

Bone Gnasher is your awareness/reaction test. Everyone stands in a cluster except for the current target. The goal is to not cleave the group, and not pull him out of the cluster's melee range. No voice callouts for who has agro.

 

Jarg and Sorno are used for tank swapping. You can add in additional requirements, for instance: Must be kept as far from eachother as possible. Jarg has a cleave/knockback, you must stand with your back against a wall. Swap in tank groups at will.

 

Foreman Crusher is the annoyingly easy test of proactive cooldowns.

 

Use the droid thingy to make them pay attention to their cotank's debuffs. They must use focus target, and call out when the other tanks must taunt off them as quickly as possible.

 

Karraga is your slow kiting test.

 

Or you could just run EC Nim, and if they pass that they can probably handle any tank swapping at least. :p

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Some of the things we do with our tanks....

 

Solo world bosses / Champions *way* above your level (trying to, anyway): This one we use mostly for tanks that are leveling. spend 15 minutes with your heal companion just to get the bastard to 5% then you die....then you gotta go back.... try again. You learn to balance CD's and some INTERESTING ways to lessen damage.

 

Down-grading gear (ie: half-naked runs)

 

NiM KP: Solo tanking Jarg & Sorno, but split the DPS so it's REEEAALY fun for he tank:p

 

HM Mando Raiders: Tell the tank he is not allowed to AoE taunt with no straight line pulls. Basically he/she can single target taunt, but must LoS all pulls. Gets them in the habit of controlling packs and therefor controlling incoming damage (plus works on aggro building)

 

Karraga is your slow kiting test. :p

 

That only counts if you can kill him on the elevator so his corpse goes up and down :D

Edited by Grumpftard
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HM Mando Raiders: Tell the tank he is not allowed to AoE taunt with no straight line pulls. Basically he/she can single target taunt, but must LoS all pulls. Gets them in the habit of controlling packs and therefor controlling incoming damage (plus works on aggro building)

 

I already do that but with saber throw. ;)

 

When ever looking at tanking prospects I've always found it best to simply take them on a few hardmode flashpoints and rock the boat a little. It might make you look like a total scrub and make the recruit question how good your guild really is. But their reaction and how they deal with the issues will be a great indicator to the quality of tank you're looking at.

 

It's also a good idea to bring a mix of heavily and lightly geared dps and be a little short on the heals. Keep an eye on things like interrupts, threat distribution, movement and ability usage (CC and threat generation).

 

If you're looking to improve the performance of your current tanks, it's a good idea to first identify the areas they're weak at. Solo challenges and extreme dps conditions might not be too effective if the tank is playing a clunky class like say the guardian. Each tanking class has a strong point and a week point and thus can't be held to the same standard.

 

But in general I'd apply the hard mode flash point test to identify the weak spots of the tank, unless they are otherwise known. From there I'd make suggestions on ways the tank can improve their game play. I'd also consider rotating the tanks around different jobs in raids.

 

My old WoW guild never had a main tank, instead they had a group of tanks that would take turns at tanking different bosses. Only during certain fights where a specific class had a clear advantage or we were really short on time would we consider going with X tank over Y tank.

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I've gotten told off for mentioning this before but my favorite test of tanking skills is HM TC adds. Assign your highest DPS to the adds and simply blow them up from the start. No matter the class its a challenge to control two adds and interrupt at the same time and it forces you to react as opposed to following a set rotation. My opinion at least.
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For CD usage, you might actually be best served by Outlaw's Den or some other dueling site for starters.

 

There are plenty of classes with attacks or attack patterns that do a ton of damage left to their own devices. Can probably identify either set attacks or set attack strings that can be used to train reactive CD use.

 

The advantage of using PVP is that you can pre-define the attacks and the timing, and work up from easier reactions (popping Saber Reflect mid-Ambush) to significantly harder (popping Saber Reflect right after a SS GS pops into cover to catch an insta-snipe, or something).

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I've gotten told off for mentioning this before but my favorite test of tanking skills is HM TC adds. Assign your highest DPS to the adds and simply blow them up from the start. No matter the class its a challenge to control two adds and interrupt at the same time and it forces you to react as opposed to following a set rotation. My opinion at least.

 

Absolutely. IMO the HM TC adds are the hardest threat challenge in the game right now, unless there's something in NiM TFB/S&V I don't know about.

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Absolutely. IMO the HM TC adds are the hardest threat challenge in the game right now, unless there's something in NiM TFB/S&V I don't know about.

 

I'm going to agree with this, and I've done the Nightmare content. Kephess is pretty annoying to tank because of the circle thing, but it's just a question of positioning. Nothing else is of particular interest. The HM TC adds are legitimately hard and require a significant amount of attention. Saber Reflect makes it almost trivial though, so raid groups who roll double-Guardians can just swap off and easy-mode it, but everyone else has to work.

 

Regarding the other suggestions, I want to avoid things that require an instance, just because I want a) the time commitment to be reasonable, and b) the setup to be fairly low. I don't want it to require tedious clearing in order to get to the object lessons. Though, solo tanking NiM Jarg and Sorno is an awesome suggestion. :-) I did this once a few months ago with four DPS who were (at the time) parsing over 2.9, one of which who was a Focus sentinel that got a 3.3 on the fight. It was one of the hardest bits of tanking I've ever done, strictly on a planning and threat tabulation metric. Really fun. But also requires an instance, so…

 

All of these tanks are familiar with how to tank KP, so I'm not sure that any of the bosses in there would make for a good object lesson without doing something cheesy, like taking off gear or AFKing the healers.

 

I do somewhat like the HM FP suggestion, though it would have to be one of the newer ones since the 2.0 HM FPs are absolutely terrible for tanks of all shapes and sizes. The tanking mechanics on those bosses are so stupid (not challenging, just stupid), so it's hard to glean information. The other thing that's tricky about HMs is a) people have run them a bazillion times, and b) it's not entirely like what you see in a raid, where you have a second tank to coordinate with. Not sure how to resolve that issue, or if there is even a way, but I thought I'd put it out there.

Edited by KeyboardNinja
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Another one you can do is no-stack / low-stack Dreadtooth (or any world boss, really) He always around now and it's not really instanced.

Put DPS in the middle and have tanks on opposite sides.

 

Tank »»»»»»»» DPS ««««««««««« Tank

 

Tanks are not allowed to touch the boss and can't let boss touch them. They are only allowed to taunt and kite, while DPS does its thing. Lesson in taunt swapping, dual tank coordination, and kiting. See if you can keep your deeps from getting crushed.

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Tanks are not allowed to touch the boss and can't let boss touch them. They are only allowed to taunt and kite, while DPS does its thing. Lesson in taunt swapping, dual tank coordination, and kiting. See if you can keep your deeps from getting crushed.

 

It's a really good idea. Unfortunately, Dreadtooth moves very fast while simultaneously applying a slow to his tank, so I'm not sure what you suggest is possible with this boss. Maybe with a different world boss, like Primal Destroyer.

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For any Hardmode flashpoint, it's best if you view the tanks as ranged player. Melee just don't get to see as much as a healer or ranged dps.

 

That being said.

 

Mandalorian Raiders - Trash with no taunting or CC:

 

Tests movement, threat distribution / aoe tanking, cooldown usage.

 

Mandalorian Raiders - Bonus Boss hit fewer than 2 times on his aoe sweep attack:

 

Tests movement and ability reaction speeds, kiting and single target tanking.

 

Athiss - Beast of Vodal Kressh. Tank the boss next to the doorway into the tomb:

 

Tests situational awareness, positioning, aoe tanking, single target tanking.

 

Athiss - Prophet of Vodal: Drop the void zones evenly along the steps on one side, reposition the boss with minimal movement, kite the flams with out getting burnt while tanking the boss.

 

Tests situational awareness, single target threat while kiting, void zone deployment.

 

Cadimemu - Bonus boss: Move out of the aoe using Q,E or W but no S key.

 

Tests movement, situational awareness and reaction time.

 

Cadimemu - Final boss: Have the tank break the majority of the shackles while tanking the boss.

 

Tests movement, situational awareness, reaction time, single target threat, group awareness.

 

For tank swapping I'd suggest you just go with the ops encounters that require tank swapping. Voice chat goes a long way towards making a tank swap clean. However if you're looking to have you tanks learn how to swap targets with out voice chat I'd look at having the other tank as my focus. Unless there isn't a debuff mechanic that is applied to the other tank.

 

But the main thing is, use voice chat. It helps sooooo much.

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I have always liked going into say EC HM or even SM and do non-stop trash pulls by getting one or two of your dps to pull the next group before your finished with the one you have. I have broken many a tanks doing this and be broken myself but i find its a good way to teach threat management and when to taunt or what to taunt.
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I will definitely express my interest. I've always been willing to take hits, so I decided to run a Tank to make that work for the group. Unfortunately, I have no metric for how good or bad I am at the actual Tanking. Something like this would be amazing if it was run every so often to help new Tanks learn the ropes. Unfortunately, there are two drawbacks: first, I don't have a single Level 55 character yet (was trying to find a class I like). Second, my only Tank on the Ebon Hawk server is a Level 27 Juggernaut. You don't mention what side your guild is on, but the fact that you have more Republic characters than Imperial characters makes me think it's a Republic guild, so I'm pretty much SooL there.

 

Wait...I do have a Guardian on the Ebon Hawk server. However, she's geared for DPS, so it would take quite a while to swap her mods over to Tanking versions. Especially since Cybertech (her crafting skill) can't even start making Tanking mods until at least Level 33. Still, if you're willing to work with lower level characters (probably not, since you'd have to find areas I could survive in to teach me), I could do some work on that character to get it swapped over to Tanking.

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I will definitely express my interest. I've always been willing to take hits, so I decided to run a Tank to make that work for the group. Unfortunately, I have no metric for how good or bad I am at the actual Tanking. Something like this would be amazing if it was run every so often to help new Tanks learn the ropes. Unfortunately, there are two drawbacks: first, I don't have a single Level 55 character yet (was trying to find a class I like). Second, my only Tank on the Ebon Hawk server is a Level 27 Juggernaut. You don't mention what side your guild is on, but the fact that you have more Republic characters than Imperial characters makes me think it's a Republic guild, so I'm pretty much SooL there.

 

Wait...I do have a Guardian on the Ebon Hawk server. However, she's geared for DPS, so it would take quite a while to swap her mods over to Tanking versions. Especially since Cybertech (her crafting skill) can't even start making Tanking mods until at least Level 33. Still, if you're willing to work with lower level characters (probably not, since you'd have to find areas I could survive in to teach me), I could do some work on that character to get it swapped over to Tanking.

 

We've picked a time for the tanking workshop. I'll post it on the official Ebon Hawk sub-forum, and anyone who is interested on Rep side is welcome to come. For the record, I'm in <Aisthesis>, which is a Rep side progression guild.

 

I think that getting tanking workshops on the other servers as well (especially Pot5 and Harbinger) would be really fantastic. I'll see what I can do about saving my notes from this one.

Edited by KeyboardNinja
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We've picked a time for the tanking workshop. I'll post it on the official Ebon Hawk sub-forum, and anyone who is interested on Rep side is welcome to come. For the record, I'm in <Aisthesis>, which is a Rep side progression guild.

 

I think that getting tanking workshops on the other servers as well (especially Pot5 and Harbinger) would be really fantastic. I'll see what I can do about saving my notes from this one.

 

Would a lower-level character (i.e. not level 50 or 55) be welcome? I understand if not; you'd have to figure out multiple areas where mobs would provide a challenge to players of the appropriate levels, and bosses with the right mechanics to teach the ropes. Frankly, that's a massive amount of work. I can understand wanting to keep things simple.

 

Also, you may want to look into having regular sessions with this. Maybe have a guild of teachers who hold a class once every week or two. The way I figure it, there will always be new players (or players who have played other roles and are trying Tanking) who could use a primer on proper Tanking practices. It needn't even be a guild, either; I just figure a guild would allow easier communication between the people running it, and allow easy induction of new teachers so that you don't have to do everything yourself. Just something to mull over.

 

I'll probably wait about a day for the thread to post in the Ebon Hawk server forum, since I expect that will have the time. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to learn since I'm not specced for Tanking (I'd have to gain 3 levels, make all my Tanking mods, then reverse engineer them to get at least Blue quality to match what's available from the Vendors, I'm thinking), but I'll at least show up and try to learn what I can. It would be great to get an idea of how good or bad of a Tank I am, and this would give me a much better metric than 'Some guy I haven't attacked yet is attacking my Comp. Is that okay because I haven't attacked him yet, or bad because I don't have automatic threat on him?' questions.

 

EDIT: Oh, crap. I just realized: my DPS Guardian is actually on Harbinger. I don't have a Tank on Ebon Hawk. Well, I'll still keep an eye on things. If you do get this going on Harbinger, I'll be sure to show up with my Guardian Tank. As it is, don't be surprised if you get a Sentinel hanging around trying to pick up a few things even though they're the wrong role.

Edited by Deathstalker_
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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.

 

Philosophical tenet:

1) Your number one priority for an encounter is to provide control.

You are the anchor of each encounter. How good you are at this translates into DPS/Healer up-time. So how does one provide control to a fight.

 

1a) Every fight as a tank is a mechanics fight. You need to understand what is going to happen to everyone and the best way to balance long term positioning with the short term RNG. For example Stryak. Last night for my group he spawned by the entrance and not in the middle of the room on those stones like he normally does for us. Normally we aim him to the throne, but that wasn't possible. I had to look where my group was and choose the best place to position him so thundering blast didn't hit the group. A bad tank will try and force him by the throne because that was the plan ahead of time.

 

1b) Communicate. You need to be in communication with your fellow tank, you need to be in communication with healers for CD usage. You need to be able to tell the DPS hey I'm tanking stryak by the door and not the throne so put your orbitals there.

 

1c) Be wrong acting/reacting. When something happens off schedule or someone screws up - do something don't just wait for the group to wipe and say, "I did what you asked me to do." If you know the fight and the needs of all 4 roles (mdps,rdps,heals,tanks) you can react to RNG in an intelligent manor. Your choice may be the wrong one; but you made a split second call to save the situation and that's better than watching it fall apart. Every time you make those mistakes think about why it didn't work. You will then make better decisions in the future.

 

2) Threat.

Yes I know this is part of 1, but I think its important to separate it from 1 and think about it separately. This is the mechanic that allows 1 to happen.

2a) Guard - 90% of the time on a melee. Their pulling threshold is lower than ranged I believe.

2b) Opener - Each rotation for the classes is different and everyone has their own opinion, but in general its something like this. Heavy threat ability(s) 1 to 3 followed by a taunt (for guaranteeing boss attention for a few seconds while some abilities come off CD or a DPS gets a bunch of lucky crits in their opening rotation). AGain this is highly debatable - but the jist of this is pretty solid.

2c) Adds. Be prepared to have an AOE taunt and or regular taunt for them. If you use your AOE taunt say so in case you pull the boss from the other tank. He can save his single target taunt for your AOE in case that happens.

 

3) Gearing/numbers

Our numbers game happens before the op begins. Its a stat shuffle and keyboardninja obviously knows it. So listen to him and no as a beginner you don't know more than him, but ask anyway so you can learn why.

 

4) Don't be easily rattled.

Constructive criticism and brainstorming by other roles is very useful. They have a different perspective to the encounter and will notice things you didn't with that giant boss covering your whole screen.

 

Best of luck Keyboard Ninja. Please update the community on how it went.

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Taking this idea a step further, what about class specific workshops?

 

Shadow Tanks have always been my main, but I've got a Guardian Tank I wouldn't mind learning more about too. For Shadow Tanks I can think of two issues I struggle with at times, Phase Walk placement (where and when to place, when to "recall" early instead of letting it fall off) and Optimal Self-Healing.

 

Don't have any ideas for the Phase Walk, but for self healing maybe ask the healer to limit themselves to only one type of heal for the tank? I don't know what fights or situations to test it with though.

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Taking this idea a step further, what about class specific workshops?

 

My guild has actually done a Sentinel workshop in the past. It didn't go particularly well. Things got a bit derailed and we were overwhelmed by a horde of Watchman specs who took Overload Saber off their bar. If things go well with the tanking clinic though, we might look at other areas.

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Well, the Level 55 requirement has killed my participation. Not that I expected otherwise; it makes perfect sense. I hope it goes well; if it does, then there's a chance that I'll be able to participate in one of these workshops in the future, when I actually have a Level 55 Tank. Best of luck, and let us all (and especially me :p) know how it goes.
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My guild has actually done a Sentinel workshop in the past. It didn't go particularly well. Things got a bit derailed and we were overwhelmed by a horde of Watchman specs who took Overload Saber off their bar. If things go well with the tanking clinic though, we might look at other areas.

 

The best workshop I did for Sentinels was having 3 Sentinel , and myself on my sent alt, all on my ship hitting the dummy. Though clearly not ideal to learn moving while DPS, it shows a clear picture of who is doing their rotation correctly and who is not.

 

This is the main reason why I would love guild ships. Having a true operation dummy that a guild could practice on as an ops group while in the privacy of their ship

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Did this ever take place?

 

@Kitru I think it would be worth doing one on the POT5, I know I would be happy to host it on our teamspeak.

 

It did take place. It was reasonably successful, and I know several people got a lot out of it. We ended up focusing exclusively on openers for the first installation, simply because we knew we wouldn't have enough time to look at anything else. Active mitigation and rotations are probably next.

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