Too Much Tank?

So, your Warrior has been accepted as a MT/OT in your guild’s raids. You have great gear, an abundance of health, plenty of armor, and a hefty chunk of avoidance. Your healers stopped complaining a while ago about how hard it is to keep you alive, you Scoff at Gormok’s Impales and Anub’Arak’s Freezing Slash, and you are even starting to think Festergut’s hits are starting to tickle. All is right in your tanking world except…. your guild is wiping on Blood Queen Lanathel, and Putricide is a dicey proposition as well. What is a tank to do? Bring more damage of course!

Tanking, at its heart, is a threshold business. You either have the gear (and healers) to reliably live through an encounter, or you don’t. Once you do, it is common practice to keep making yourself harder to kill. This is usually a good idea as it gives you and your healing team more room for error, as well as a buffer against random bad luck. Sometimes, however, you’re better off rolling the dice and going for damage.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Why should I take the risk of bringing more damage? If DPS is a problem, then our DPS’ers need to step up their game.” Excellent question. I am going to assume that you are in a guild which has capable players. Your DPS have studied their classes, and are gemming and enchanting their gear correctly. They are using proper specs, and have worked out their rotations. In short, they are doing many things correctly (clearly some incorrect things here and there as well), but you are still short on damage. In this case, for the most part they will not increase their damage by regemming, or swapping out a piece of gear. As a tank though, you do have the option to make a change and increase overall raid DPS. Furthermore, even once you are killing bosses, extra damage is never going to go to waste. It is the one thing in raiding that you can never have too much of, really. More damage equals faster kills, which mean less time for something to go wrong and a more progressive raid night as a whole.

The hardest part about doing this is figuring out if it is the right decision to make. If you are hitting enrage timers, or if you are consistently one of the last people standing during a wipe, chances are pretty good that your current survivability is fine. It’s a good idea to talk to your healers to both see what they think about you losing a bit of health and mitigation, as well as letting them know in advance to inform you if they start having any problems keeping you alive. The last thing you want is for your healing squad to be confused as to why they suddenly can’t keep a tank up or to be going OOM keeping you alive while your dps gets picked from raid-wide damage that could have been healed up if everyone wasn’t too focused on you.

Before we even get started on making gear changes, take a look at yourself and your rotation. Make absolutely sure that you are doing everything you can with the buttons you push to do the most damage possible. There are a variety of tank swap fights in ICC. Are you switching to a DPS stance when you are off tanking? If not, you are throwing out damage. If you are a warrior tank, and you don’t even know where your Shattering Throw button is, you are wasting a HUGE amount of raid damage. Even on single tank fights, almost every boss takes their focus off of you for long enough to do a quick stance dance and shatter. If you need to practice your rotation, target dummies are somewhat useless for tanks, fortunately Blizzard put tank dummies a short flight from Dalaran. Pustulent Horrors patrol the top of Ironwall Damn. They live long enough to give you some time to practice on, and generally respawn fairly quickly.

Once you have decided to push your DPS, take a look at your gems first. You probably have +30 stam gems in every slot, with one purple gem to activate your meta. That is giving you alot of health, and you should keep 30 stamina in all of your blue sockets, but feel free to replace the gems in your yellow and red sockets with Hit/Stamina and Expertise/Stamina gems. Your health is going to take a hit for this, but not as much as you think, as you are now also going to be getting all of the socket bonuses that you were missing before.

The next step is likely going to be your weapon. DPS 1 handed weapons are fabulous for tanks. For one thing, they aren’t all that popular with DPS classes, as there are a limited number of builds that actually use the same weapons you are interested in as a tank. If you are running both 10 and 25 raids, you should have no problem picking up a nice weapon that would go unused otherwise. Another great thing about them is that they tend to come with agility on them. The nice thing about this is that while you give up some stamina and avoidance to use one, you gain a bit of dodge back from the agility, as well as some bonus armor. Unless you already have a weapon with bonus armor on it, this is actually a pretty nice trade to make.

After you have swapped your gems and weapon, it is time to look at trinkets. First of all, there are some excellent DPS trinkets from both the badge vendors and Heroics. This is a good thing, because your DPS is going to want the DPS trinkets from raids, and it is silly to give them to a tank when a DPS needs them. Swapping your trinkets is a great way to boost your damage, but it is also the place that will cost you the most survivability, other than using outright DPS gear in a handful of slots.

Lastly, never vendor a piece of gear that you think you have upgraded from and/or effectively replaced with a new piece of loot. You never know when it might come in handy for something. You may get an upgrade that allows you to swap around gear for your DPS tanking set because suddenly you have too much hit for example. Always re-evaluate what you have on hand, and see if there is a way you can squeeze more Damage AND survivability out of the set.

In the end, if you’re wiping on bosses due to low dps, then this can help. If you’re killing bosses now, this can still help. A tank’s job doesn’t have to end with having enough HP to live through big damage spikes.