Hiya guys. Need some help from the gurus of warcraft here. I have always played clothies, mage/priest/warlock..but now i'm stumped.

I have a friend in the guild, dwarf warrior, that refuses to act as a tanker.

We have all reached level 70. We are all running lev 70 instances now and gearing up for 10man and perhaps 20+ man raids in the future but for some strange reason he refuses to respec.

His reasons:

1. I have all this elite gear and can churn out high dps. you actually think i'm crazy enough to sacrifice all that to become a punching bag?
2. I can tank well enough... I've been accumulating protection gear so all i need to do is wear em and switch to defensive stance (is this correct? i'm not sure)

Also as a warrior attempting to tank in arms specialisation, i find that he is unable to hold aggro. He claims in every instance run that its the fault of the mages (me included) for dpsing to early. So we let him get 5 sunders in, we release frostbolts & combination of arcane spells for threat reduction and guess what after two shots..mobs start running to us???

My priest OOMs in every run. He says the warrior is taking so much damage that his heals cant keep up and worse he is holy specced. This warrior also has a habit of not following Marks that have been assigned by the leader e.g. feels that he is uber enough to solo a single mob by himself when the rest of the team is resting..that kinda thing.

and whats even worse...he can't progress further than sethekk halls cos he still believes that he can tank??!!

He basically says we clothies have no idea what it takes to be a tanker.

So Main Tankers out there...please oh please tell me how one respecs and gears to be a good tanker cos I really am in the dark in advising my real life friend.

Help much appreciated.

simple, dont group with him.

Unless you pay his subscription, you really have no right asking him to respec. Than again, you don't have to get him as a tank in your groups.

Warriors being one of the most gear dependant classes, can swap their roles with a simple gear change. It is also possible to tank without protection talents especially since you're not really working on heroics. An option for speccing if he wants to retain his pvp spec, is to just get enough points of get defiance in the prot tree.

I have no idea of his playing style but it appears that he may be inexperienced in tanking. There are some very good stickies on the US and EU warrior forums on Learning To Play.

He's an anchor to ur group. Cut the rope and sail away. He's obviously lacks a brain on tanking. And elite gear w/o doin any 10-25mans? lol. Just laugh at him! =p

Well there's hardly any warrior dps gear in kara

edit: or more specifically, plate.

This post has been edited by Kidicarus: May 10 2007, 10:32 AM

Unfortunately for our guild he is one of two warriors amongst a sea of paladins. For some strange reason everybody loves playing pally here. And after a gear inspect, (shock horrors) his idea of epic gear is blue quest rewards...EEEeeek!

While you say a warrior can tank just by changing the gear and such without respeccing, i have seen him drop like a rock in front of Talon King Ikiss...i kid you not. (even with a priest healing him and only him overtime till OOM). I've seen the protection gear he bought with his cash (he is kinda proud that he has over 3k, which kinda seems ridiculous now that i think about it when the rest of us have been spending cash like water to respec and regear and he refuses to spend even 100g for an enchant or weapons...sigh) and they seem quite good with all that +def and all that. SO i dunno i think a respec is necessary too.

The other warrior has respecced to prot and reshuffled his gear accordingly.

Since the warrior i mentioned doesnt look like he is gonna change ever...do you have any tips on how i can groom/train/practise run with this other protection warrior...you know just to get him comfortable with tanking.

This post has been edited by stefanong: May 10 2007, 10:38 AM

i think that was his question....

my advice would be... get a new friend

like seriously

you know in all honesty...i am seriously considering it.

or get a pally to tank instead if u run out of warrior.

Blue tank rewards are fine, especially the ones you get from SV and completing instances.

Protection paladins are also viable in 5 mans and Karazhan. So are druid tanks. Encourage off specs in your guild and you'll be surprised at the results.

As for grooming your warrior to become a good tank, It's not easy to become a good tank overnight. I still stand by what i said earlier about not needing to go full prot to be a good tank. However it's important to understand how the theory works. The following links will work.

Edit: They are a good read for non warriors as well if you want to understand how threat works and how much hard work it takes to be a good warrior/tank.

tanking guide:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...=75381044&sid=1
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...=94319875&sid=1

Gear guide:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...194559515&sid=1

Once you know how it's supposed to work, put it into practice. Apart from that the only other tips i can give is, learn the pulls, be aware of your surroundings and always look after your healer.

This post has been edited by Kidicarus: May 10 2007, 10:48 AM

Thanks guys. I will do some reading from the link's you posted and thanks for the reminder kurei. It looks like he will remain casual for a very long time now. As it is, he can't even find a pug willing to take him to complete sethekk halls...let's not even talk about Steam Vaults, or even COT/tempest keep. I guess its just me trying to help a warrior who doesnt want to be helped lol.

thanks again guys

This post has been edited by stefanong: May 10 2007, 10:59 AM

Being a healer, one tends to remember good tanks and mediocre tanks. So, least healing required is Prot Tank < Fury < Arms. When I'm in a group with Arms Warrior, I tend to heal a lot more. Believe me, it's a lot more.

Whoever is tanking, they must be given a few seconds to gain enough aggro to hold the mobs. If non-tankers pull aggro, it's ok. Let them take a few hits. Because a good tank is able to pull them back to him. Look at Shattered Halls. The tank has to tank multiple mobs. The team will have to take a few hits, no choice, even if it means that your HP is going to drop by 50%. Deal with it - mentally of course.

Not following marks? Then the tank doesn't deserve to live. Let him die. Running instances or raiding is a group effort for survival. Whether he's tanking or DPSing, should be following instructions. If your team members can handle it good. If not, he shouldn't contribute to unnecessary stress.

I have a friend who is an Arms warrior who tanks. He's pretty good but even he says he has problems in BM when it comes to the 2nd and 3rd boss. Even with Prot gear. But he's ok tanking TK, CF, HP. This friend is also very interesting. He absolutely refuses to install addons or threatmeter but as he got to the higher level instances, he got threatmeter in the end, just so that he doesn't pull aggro off the tanks or that he knows what his own aggro is while tanking.

I have another friend, who is one of the best Fury/Prot warrior I've ever seen tanking. All DPS classes can continually cast spells (of course not the high-threat one but they do not need to wait a few seconds before casting). But he decided to respec to Prot/Fury for heroics as it was easier to get through those instances that way as he did not have the gear.

Your friend sounds like he's literally gone into defensive mode. Being a good WoW player doesn't mean that you've already reach your match. A good player would try different specs/builds, different strategies, etc. It's expensive yes, but doable.

As for your healer going OOM, healing gets a lot easier at +1K heals. Below that figure, it can get hard. But if your healer is getting OOM by that tank in Sethekk Halls, because of him not following marks, eep. Downranking healing helps too. And I absolutely love Prayer of Mending.

This post has been edited by myremi: May 10 2007, 12:02 PM

eh?

in plain tanking terms fury warriors take the same amount of damage as an arms warrior. Stop making things up!

Sigh.. i miss the days when i could Dual Wield tank in 5 man content, ZG and MC.

Well,

First off i'd like to say please throw away that mindset that Warriors are ONLY for tanking. Players have their own preference, some people prefer to be a DPS thats not so squishy. Not directed at the poster, just the general WoW community.

I didnt bother to read everything, but i gather that your guild is runnin 5 mans and needs a tank but he doesnt want to eh?

He doesnt really need to respec, i have tanked with, Heavy arms/Fury, Heavy Fury/Arms and my favourite Offtank build 34/10/17 all without problems with people that know how to manage their DPS/Agro and knows how to play. He might just need to start collecting more Tanking gear.

As for him losing agro. It's normal, Even a prot spec tank will lose agro if the group spams their skills like crazy getting crit after crit after crit. Let him get initial agro, Nobody pulls other than the tank or a Misdirect hunter as the initial aggro from pulling will help him hold aggro longer. If another class decides to pull, The tank will have to build agro to surpass that of the puller, And usualy for people, once they see the mob beating on the tank they will start spamming their skills including the guy that decided to pull making it very crazy for the tank to maintain agro.

Prolly the group needs to DPS a little bit slower, pace your casts...., Not only will this allow DPS casters to be more mana efficient it also lets the tank hold the mob better. It's Cool to see frostbolt crits 5 times in a row and your name on top of the DPS meter but just dont QQ if the mob comes a runnin after you. Identify who pulls too much aggro in your group. Perhaps the tank is taunting too much from a rogue lets say, Ask the rogue to tone it down so that he can save the taunts to save the first person on the taunt list: The Healer.

If the group does all that Any spec warrior can hold aggro by just spamming sunders, revenge, MS, heroic strike and sheild bash. Ask the tank *if he doesnt do this* to also to spam Sheild Block whenever it is up it will light up Revenge and also helps mitigate damage.

Marks, hmm ....just explain what all the marks are example:
Skull is first kill, X is second kill, Square is trap etc. Explain how the pull will go. If something is marked as kill first ask him to keep building agro while ocasionaly switching to another mob that he is tanking to sunder or perhaps taunt if it runs of to the healer. Letting him know what he will need to do step by step may help avoid confusion and wipes. In this situation all other marks Except those CC-ed and marked as Kill must not be touched. This is so that the tank doesnt have to worry about anything else other than the kill target and second kill target in a big pull. I've had pugs that keeps bangin on X while skull is clearly marked as first kill....what i do in this situation? let him tank it if he wants it so bad. And taunt it off the healer once he is dead.

Healer OOM. Maybe healer is OOM-ing too fast coz he is healing everybody and not just the tank. Again, Aggro management, following marks not only does these ease the job of the tank it also eases the job of the healer and damage mitigation helps too.

Other than that it's all back to basics, Put stam enchants on your tanking gear, buy stam gems etc. A defense rating of 490+ should be good enough for most 70 instances.

Lastly, ask him nicely Say that you guyz Really need a tank to progress. Ask him to read up about tanking and bear with it even he doesnt like it for awhile, at least until you guyz find a dedicated tank and he can be the DPS/Offtank. If he still doesnt want to, dont force him it's his preference and choice. Just go find another guy that is willing to tank for your group.

Never force, it's a game...and if people are FORCED to do sumthin they dont like...the game wont be fun anymore and your RL friend might decide to quit.

Phew thats my advice/rant ;p

Edit:@kidicarus, yes fundementaly they do BUT there are fury tree talents give the warrior some healing if he is critted or using a skill like bloodthirst.

This post has been edited by Grimwrath: May 10 2007, 01:01 PM

He's not tanking if he's using bloodthirst. And if he's getting critted in the first place, that's not exactly making him easier to heal is it?

And yeah, that brings me back to the first post i made - no one should be forced into a spec. But that also means that if your spec is not as useful to the group/raid/guild don't expect to see that much action.

Well, initialy i was about to say what you said to myremi but then i remembered about BloodCraze.

Getting critted with 12k armor in defensive stance is not nearly as bad and as getting critted as a clothie and is easily healed through.

Regenerating 3% of your total health where usualy tanks have more than 10k helps. It might not seem like alot but maybe thats what myremi means.

Which is less than 1 renew/rejuve tick in the long run that's really nothing. Not to mention blood craze ticks over 6 secs? 300hp over 6 secs on say a 6k crit will not help much. It's a filler talent and really more appropriate for a grinding spec.

Point is, apart from speccing prot, it's the gear that makes the difference... not the talents. If you're in gear with 490def you're not going to get critted.

edit: blood craze has a role in pvp for anti rogue and when they fix the bug of it not stacking with 2nd wind. For pve dps it's useless, and for tanking a waste of the 3 points unless you're planning on getting critted all the time.

This post has been edited by Kidicarus: May 10 2007, 01:42 PM

If u plan to get anywhere in pve, specced it. If u arent specced for it and dun do well dun whine its only ur fault. Is just like when i respec for arms i will nvr ever run a dungeon with this spec just bcos its aint that much fun tanking with it and its a burden to the rest of the group constantly holding back. But of cos i spec arms to do 3k crits in bg/arena. haha.

very eh. put it this way, the other factor is the players' playstyle. Again, only from what I see. No, not making things up as this was only observations. Reasoning behind the observations, I'm open to what u guys are saying mah. Besides, all conclusions are up for discussion.

Tsk tsk Kidi, chill. Want ice-cream? I know it's a hot day but... Screaming at people?

Yah, those days of being Dual Wield Tanking were awesome to say the least, pre-BC. Although I did have an Arms Warrior saying to send in a Caster Pet in for tanking while she dual wield for DPS in a PUG. Was thinking that "Wah! Now that's a lot of expectations from everyone in the group. " It was a PUG through botanica with all complete strangers.

This post has been edited by myremi: May 10 2007, 02:52 PM