World of Warcraft: Tanking Overview

If you have a character of a class capable of tanking, you may want to give it a shot. Maybe you have already tried it out but feel like you are getting lost in the details or overwhelmed by the complexity. Many people who have never tried to play a tank make the mistake of thinking that it’s easy. Regardless of the actual technical details of playing each of the tanking classes, there are certain aspects of actually playing the role that make it more difficult than any other to perform well. Death Knights, Paladins, Warriors and Druids are all able to become a ‘tank’ dependant on what gear they are wearing and the talent build they choose. All these classes have different strengths and weaknesses when playing the role of a tank that affect how you approach things. There are also some things that all the tanking classes have in common that should be kept in mind.

Tank Responsibilities

A tank’s first responsibility in a group or a raid is to protect the other members from being attacked. Given far superior armor and a range of defensive abilities to protect them from much of the damage monsters dish out, tanks are designed to get hit – a lot. In order for this to happen, the tank will have to output much more threat than any other party or raid member to ensure that the monster always focuses on them. They will have to ensure that the monster is positioned in a way beneficial to the damage dealers and healers in the group both for accessibility and for protection. For example, many monsters have frontal Area of Effect (AoE) abilities that will damage anyone stood in front of them, and these will need to be faced away from the group. Another example is where a tank pulls and the melee monsters run over to the tank but a caster stays behind, in this scenario the caster will not have sufficient threat built up from the tank and will quickly move on to the healers in the group and quickly kill them. This kind of scenario also limits the speed at which the group of monsters can be killed as no AoE abilities from the group will be able to hit all of the monsters at once. A tank must also have enough damage mitigation and avoidance to ease the load on the healers trying to keep them alive.

A tank must fulfill the following:

Movement/Positioning – A tank must be able to position monsters in a way that is beneficial to the group. They must also be adept at moving around in combat.
Threat – A tank must be able to generate more threat than any of the healers or damage dealers in the group to maintain monster aggro.
Mitigation/Avoidance – A tank must have enough mitigation and avoidance to enable the healers to keep them alive when taking massive amounts of hits.
Alertness – Although not mentioned above, a good tank needs to have the reflexes of a cat. There will be many times when something goes wrong either on a pull or even during a fight like another group getting accidentally pulled. The tank must be able to react fast enough to keep the group alive.
Leadership – Again not mentioned above, and not often actually written about as part of the role but vital nonetheless. A good tank will need to be good with people and strong enough to lead. They will be responsible for the speed at which the group moves through content, for denoting the kill order of monsters when necessary, and for making strategic decisions about how to defeat difficult content. Not all raid leaders are tanks, and not all tanks are raid leaders, but the two usually go well together.

Becoming a good tank

There is really no shortcut here. The first thing you will need to do is research everything you can about your particular brand of tank. Reading up on class-specific websites and forums can turn up a wealth of information for you to start from and may provide you with a talent build for your initial attempts at tanking. You will then need to optimize your gear to make the best of it and limit the amount of damage you take whilst optimizing your threat output. Once you have your talents and gear sorted out and you are loaded with theory, all that is left is practice. More so than any other role, to become a truly great tank you will need experience, experience and more experience. Keep trying things out, stay abreast of current information and get stuck into those monsters. With time, everything will fall into place.

A good leveling guide and gold making guide can come in really handy if you are wanting to be a tank. Zygor's Guide will help you get to your max level quickly and become very powerful, while Dugi's Gold Making and Professions Guide will help you dominate the professions and have plenty of gold to help in your tanking.