Monday, November 2, 2009

Guide to being a better tank: Part 2

Part 2: Communication

First things first: get Ventrilo. Too many people I’ve run with recently don’t use it. (these are usually the same type of people who base everything solely on gearscore, which is dangerous.) Vent is a must for most raiding, in fact, I still use it on most ‘easy’ T7 raids.
The role of tank naturally tends toward leadership. In fact, this section could be titled ‘leadership’ instead of ‘communication’. Tanks are in a prime role to guide the raid through to victory. If you aren’t comfortable with stepping up and taking leadership, you probably won’t ever be considered a stellar tank. Tanks often are aware, or at least should be, of what is going on the raid at all times (see lesson #1, awareness), and are therefore in the best position to identify why a wipe happened, and communicate to the raid what needs to change to avoid that in future attempts. Learn to recognize these things and communicate them concisely with the team, offering solutions to whatever problems that may have arisen.
Communication with DPS is of course important (when to back off and give you time to get a better threat advantage, or when to push DPS as you have a large threat lead, etc.), but by far the bulk of your communication during the raid will be (or should be) with your healers. Healers need to know what you need to stay alive, and when. This largely comes down to healing assignments, making sure you have a wide enough variety of healers to deal with the situation (need more HoTs? Grab a druid, etc.)
It’s also imperative let your healers know when you’re going to use any of your defensive cooldowns, preferably before you use them. (I won’t be covering the basics of using your cooldowns, as that is information I’m assuming you know.) Announcing when you’re going to use your cooldowns due to excessive incoming damage allows your healers to be prepared to handle the situation accordingly, keeping you alive. Building, again, on our first lesson of awareness, when you see the raid start to take too much damage, you can pop a cooldown and advise one or more of your healers to focus on the raid. This is also applicable when one of your healers is low on mana and needs a bit of a regen break.
Communication during the fight is imperative, but the most important time to communicate is before the fight. Before the pull your team needs to know what to expect, and more than just positioning. The raid needs to know at what percent to pop heroism/offensive cooldowns, at what points in the fight you plan on using your defensive cooldowns, what spells need to be kicked and who needs to be doing the kicking, where to stand, where and when to move to, healing assignments, DPS priorities on fights with multiple targets, and any other information that may be special to that raid (dealing with the constructs on Ignis, for example).
It should go without saying, but all of the above is useless is you, as the tank, don’t know the fight. Use the resources at your disposal to make sure your knowledge of the fight is such that you can tell anyone in the raid what their job is. Especially in PUG situations, you may just end up having to explain bits of the fight to members of your raid.
A raid with a well-organized strategy is much more likely to succeed, especially in PUGs where the members aren’t used to each-other’s methods, but here’s the kicker: Your job isn’t just to communicate this information concisely, it needs to be done quickly as well. This is especially true when considering wipe-recovery. The more downtime pre-pull, the more likely it is that your raid will lose interest.
So there you have it, lesson number two of my guide to become a better tank. All information contained here is of course, my own opinion, and very likely incomplete, but hopefully it helps some of you out there.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really like what you have posted so far, hoping that you find time for more with everything you got going on right now. Loving the blogs tho keep it up :D


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