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tank (WoW)  

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This article will discuss tanking, as well as providing helpful (and class-specific) tips for tanks.

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What is a tank?

A tank is the character whose job it is to absorb the damage dealt by the mobs and keep aggro off the party's or raid's other members. Tanks need to be able to manage threat on one or more mob and survive doing so.

Who can be a tank?

Warriors of all types can tank, but those who specialize in doing so spec Protection. Paladins who spec Protection and Druids who spec Feral are also strong tanks. In a pinch, Hunter pets and a Warlock's Voidwalkers can tank easier mobs (such as overworld quest mobs), but they will not last long in instance's.

The Art of Tanking

Tanking is divided into two aspects; the first is generating enough threat so that the mob focuses on you, and the second is surviving the damage intake once the mob focuses on you.

Threat Generation

See threat

Generating threat as a tank does not depend upon your damage output; your DPS will be doing far, far more damage than you are, and yet you have to retain the mob's attention regardless. The solution is passive threat modifiers. A Rogue with Blessing of Salvation will generate one point of threat for every

Tanking is an essential part of group play in instances and raids, and is generally assigned to warriors, paladins and druids. The player who is tanking will attempt to take as much of the incoming damage as possible while holding the attention of the mob his/her teammates are killing. Most of, if not all the time, when the Tank dies to a mob the team wipes. The art of tanking is divided into threat generation and damage mitigation.

Threat generation

Tanks will attempt to build as much threat on the mob marked to be killed first. Depending on how the mobs are pulled in the first place, the tank may sometimes not have initial threat on the mobs. At max level, this can be avoided by using what is known as a Misdirect pull where a Hunter would cast Misdirect on the tank and pull the mobs. During boss fights, the tank will be competing with the rest of the group to maintain their position as the "most hated" target.

Damage Mitigation

If the Tank can generate lots of threat in a short space of time but is unable to mitigate damage dealt by the mob, all the threat generated will be pointless. As such, Tanking classes are given damage mitigation abilities and talents. Damage is avoided by either blocking with a shield, dodging, parrying or being missed. Armor also plays a part in reducing the damage taken. Adequate Defense rating will prevent the tank from being hit by critical hits and also contribute to the statistics required to become uncrushable. To become uncrushable in a raid setting (against level 73 mobs), the tank needs to have a combined avoidance of 102.4% with Shield Block active in the case of a warrior, and Holy Shield active in the case of a paladin. Avoidance is the sum of dodge chance, parry chance, block chance and chance to be missed. Note that a druid does not become uncrushable and instead deals with crushing blows with their extremely high health pools and armor relative to Warriors and Paladins.

Certain fights would require the tank to be spotting lots of resistance to a particular school of magic. Pre-Burning Crusade, the large amounts of fire based damage in Molten Core dictated that Tanks require a large amount of fire damage resistance to allow them to reduce the damage taken when hit. Post-Burning Crusade, the need for spell resistance is less prevelant but are still required in certain cases.

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This page last modified 2008-06-14 13:30:03.