A Question about Tanking

[Jorhax 0]

I have been a long time lurker of Icy-Viens. Find the discussions, guides etc to be very use full. I have mostly play a DPS but have thought lately about playing a tank. My question is would it be better to roll one from scratch and lvl them all the way. Or use my 90 Warrior make him some gear and start rolling through the dungeon s.

Thanks,

Jorhax

[Tidalwavex 3]

My opinion, either is the same. Leveling through the lower levels is so fast / easy you really don't learn much any more. That being said at lvl 90 you are going to be hitting the heroics and expectations will be higher that you can maintain threat and survive (which requires some practice). Nice thing is that all of the guides are for lvl 90 tanking (some key CDs will be missing at lower levels). Practice with some dummies and always let the group know you are inexperienced and you should have no major problems (healers may grumble under their breath but a quick refresh on queue times will usually quiet them). Also, just on another random note, a lot of DPSers lately have a ton of high end raid gear which makes their DPS through the roof. If you don't have decent gear with your tank, not matter how good you are you will always lose threat (you generate 3x more threat, but they do 5x the damage=DPS getting face pounded). Just to reiterate, best way to go for me is just to let the group know I'm not perfect and generally they don't have an issue.

[NightShade 14]

Having a group of people you know to learn is a lot better than doing randoms. If you go into a random and just plain can't tank or know what you are doing it is a MAJOR pain. As for leveling up that is up to you though I agree you won't learn a whole lot as tanking at max level is different without the same cooldwons and abilites.

If you are going to give tanking a go then get some valor gear and do a few LFR's and change your toons spec to tank spec after the fight and give a second roll for a tank piece till 5.3 when you can just select the spec you would like to get gear for. Don't just find some random greens and call yourself a tank. An addon or two geared towards tanking will help as well. Tidy plates with threatplates is nice so you can see that you have agro on the mobs and Tauntmaster can be helpful for taunting something off of the rest of the group.

And until you have figured tanking out let people know. . . don't just go in and start fighting and then loose agro and let a mage tank something. Repair bills add up and they will either leave or you will get kicked, even if you just have to make a macro to tell the group you are new to tanking and learning will help. If I know someone is having a rough time or going to I lay off the DPS a bit so they can get agro easier, otherwise I charge in when the tank does and coun't till three till I pop sweeping strikes and bladestorm. . . after that good luck on getting agro if you aern't ready for it.

[Jorhax 0]

Thanks for the advice, I have some VP gear, and i have 4 LFR tokens (all except the hands) that I can spend for tanking gear. My thought was gearing him up, then running the regular 90 dungeons to get some experience. Would still let people know I was new, but thought it would be easier starting off in the regular dungeons than heroics, as i have at least 463 tanking gear. May try to round up a group, or see if there is any interest in the guild, but the server i am on is dead and low pop so randoms would be my best hope. I will go through the guides, gear him up and see how it goes. Thanks for the input.

Edited March 26, 2013 by Jorhax

[NightShade 14]

The only problem you will find is that you can run regular randoms at 90 only heroics. You can try and setup something with people and do cross realm dungeons but it really is a pain to do.

[Vlad 419]

I don't think much can be gained from leveling a new character up from scratch as a tank anymore. As others have pointed out, the leveling experience is pretty lax, and you won't be learning much along the way.

Assuming you have a pretty solid understanding of your class from a DPS perspective, then switching to tanking shouldn't be all that hard. As a Warrior especially, there are really only a handful of new abilities to use as a tank from what you normally use as DPS.

The best advice I can give you is to take your time to learn things. I know it's easy to get carried away and think "I'll just jump into a dungeon and see how it goes", but tanking is quite unlike the other roles in the stress department, so I advise you to check and double check that you're up to date on what you need to be doing.

I suggest you read my tanking guide if you haven't already, it goes into a lot of depth on a lot of issues. You can drop many of the subtleties that you might find in the Protection Warrior guide when starting out. Just focus on the essentials. Make sure you've got your taunt keybound accessibly. Make sure you don't have your back turned to any mobs that are hitting you. Make sure you have nameplates on and configured in such a way as to easily see who's got aggro of what. Start with that and then build proper cooldown usage and such later on. Chances are you won't need much of that extra stuff to survive in a dungeon.

Good luck!