From 5 to 10/25: The Raiding Transition

Posted by admin on 03 17th, 2009

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I recently did an article on Clustering focused on the transition from being relatively new to tanking to doing your first 5 mans. This post you could say is the next step in the chain. We’re going to look at how the rules change when we move from doing 5 mans to doing 10 and 25 mans and why it’s important you are aware of the transition you’ll be going through sooner than later. Vene’s Raiding Rule of Thumb The only thing that matters is Bosses. Everything else is pointless. This should indicate to you immediately a massive difference between 5 mans and 10/25 mans. Whereas 5 mans are about being able to generate a ton of threat and moving throughout the instance in a quick yet, controlled way… the emphasis for raiding is NOT that at all. It becomes that eventually once the bosses are just as trivial as they are on 5-mans, but it does not start that way at all. Bosses are the road blocks in raids. It’s not about how fast you get to them, but instead of how few attempts you can kill them in. It doesn’t do you any good killing the trash before the boss faster if you end up wiping on the boss multiple times. Raiding is about maximizing your chance of killing a boss. How do we Maximize ourselves? Do not Gem and Enchant your “best” tanking pieces for threat. Why? Gems and Enchants are permanent. You can always “gear down”, but you can never “gear up”. In other words, you can always swap out an item for something more dps-oriented in order to get more threat/dps, but you can never swap your best tanking piece for something with higher survivability. But, my gear is Good enough It can never be. There’s a lot of encounters where you’re simply not going to have the luxury of completely focused healing and even more to the point, the less healers that are necessary to be dedicated to you… the better. This is a major difference between 5 mans and Raids. In 5 mans for the most part unless DPS is really stupid, they usually won’t be taking a whole lot of damage, but Raid encounters are designed around everyone taking damage. The less healers have to worry about you, the more they can worry about someone else. Or even better, the more they can worry about themselves. A dead healer doesn’t heal. That one is pretty universal with 5 mans too though. The Solution: Multiple Sets of Gear Tanking is not like DPSing. We don’t get 540 Defense then get 30,000 Health then get 8% Hit and 14.5% Expertise and call it a day. It’s not about reaching minimums or hitting caps. It’s about maximizing your gear to fit an encounter . That’s why it’s so important to use multiple sets of gear. Which is to say, have a threat cloak, neck, ring, trinket and have a survival cloak, neck, ring, trinket at the very least. (It’s also why a mod like ItemRack is one of the few mods that every good tank has) The Evolution of your Sets Depending on the type of person you are, you’ll start with a Threat or a Survival style set. Eventually you’ll make the opposite set of the one you started with, (Threat if you had Survival, Survival if you had Threat) but where do you go from there? The Boss Threat set This set is still a survival oriented set, but focuses on building up your Expertise primarily. If it makes sense, you can also improve your Hit Rating. Block Value is NOT something you go out of your way to get for this set. The Trash Threat set This set focuses first on hitting the Trash Expertise and Hit caps and then tries to get as much Strength and Block Value as possible without neglecting your Health too much. You’ll need at least 535 Defense, but it’s good practice to stay at 540 just in case you accidentally pull a boss in this set The Boss Stamina set This set is made to maximize your Stamina in order to handle as much magic damage as possible. This is not the same as your Effective Health set. This is also not a set you’ll find yourself using too often as most fights have both a Magical and Physical element. (read: Dragons) I use this kind of set to soak the damage at the back of the 4 Horseman fight. The Boss Effective Health set This set focuses on Armor and Stamina in order to take the least amount of damage from heavy Physical attacks as well as having a nice Health buffer against both Magical and Physical damage. This is your Dragon tanking set you could say. The Boss Avoidance set This set focuses on both Defense and Dodge in order to Avoid as much physical damage as possible. It’s ideal for handling steady, heavy physical damage that your healers may not be able to keep up with (soaking bolts on Patchwerk) or for offtanking adds when your healers may not always be able to give you their dedicated attention. (adds on Kel’Thuzad) The Block set This set focuses on getting as much Block Rating as possible in order to improve your chance of Blocking as much as possible. As most pieces naturally have both Block Rating and Block Value, you’ll end up with a healthy amount of Block Value too, but that isn’t this set’s focus. This set is ideal for tanking a lot of little adds and taking as little damage as possible in the process. (adds on Sartharion) What about the Block VALUE set!? A set that focuses on maximizing your Block Value. It really isn’t worth making . It creates big Shield Slams and allows you to block huge hits, but it’s priorities are simply misplaced. A situation where you’re using this set, you should probably be using your Trash Threat set or your Block set instead. Specs and Glyphs This is where I find the biggest divide between 5 man and Raid tanks happens. Specing for Improved Cleave or Glyphing for Glyph of Cleave are two big tells that a tank in a raid just doesn’t get “it”. Your spec and your glyph selection should be catered to whatever boss you’re going after. It’s for this reason that talents such as Anger Management, Puncture, Improved Bloodrage and Improved Disciplines just aren’t worth it. Rage isn’t an issue and you won’t be using Shield Wall twice during a boss fight even if it’s at 4 minutes. What about Shield Specialization and Deep Wounds!? This is where I’ll get called a Hypocrite. How can I justify specing into 3/3 Deep Wounds instead of maximizing my survival by getting 5/5 Shield Specialization? It’s because 3% extra chance to Block simply doesn’t have the same impact on a boss as 3/3 Deep Wounds does. Yes, I understand that this is Threat vs Survival and that by my own rules, I should be maximizing my Survival first, but there comes a point when you gain so much Threat and give up so little Survival from a choice that you have to do it. This is just one of those situations. What about X from Patch 3.1 3.1 isn’t here, yet. When it is many of the rules will change because the game changes. We could be specing into Improved Disciplines. We could be avoiding Deep Wounds. We could be doing a lot of things, but the sets you need to make will be the same. The fact that you don’t want to gem and enchant your best survival pieces for Threat will remain the same too. And above all else, the mindset that Boss Encounters are all that matters when it comes to Raiding will definitely not change either.

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