Over Taunting isn’t just Bad Manners anymore

Posted by kissulyanka on 08 5th, 2009

Categories: Tanking & Cooldown Rotation Tips | no responses

If you’re somewhat aged in the craft of Warrior tanking, you’ll remember that Taunt isn’t what it once was. Once you had to stand beside a mob and then suddenly, unexpectedly, you didn’t. Which, of course, led to abuse and is why now we’re forced to deal with this lovely term known as Diminishing Returns.

Diminishing Returns is unfortunately the logical solution to anything abusive in the Warcraft world. What’s confusing is how it diminishes things seems to differ from one ability to the next.

What does Diminishing Returns on Taunt mean?

It means that if you Taunt a mob too many times in a particular period of time that it’ll become immune to Taunt. To be exact, if you Taunt a mob 3 times in 18 seconds, it’ll become immune to all following Taunts until 18 seconds have passed from the last Taunt.

Which is impossible to do on your own, but far less than impossible with a friend or two around.

From Bad Manners to just Bad

Taunting off a fellow tank used to be something forgivable and among tanks not used to each other it was often frequent, but now that frequency very well could be fatal to your raid. Clearly, making a mob immune to Taunt is a bad thing especially if it’s a boss that you need to be Taunting back and forth.

The Importance of Defining #2

I’ve come to realize though that the mistake is not in the tanks themselves, but more so in the raid leader for not stating who’s 2nd in line specifically. (Of course, now that you know this it’s your responsibility to ask :p )

By defining who is #2, we know that if the Main Tank dies exactly who is expected to Taunt. Last week, I made this mistake as an unorthodox raid flooded with tanks walked into Ulduar. I died, chaos ensued and many a dpser died to a Taunt immune mob. I knew who I wanted to Taunt the mob, but the other tanks didn’t. As the leader, the mistake was mine.

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The 4 Quick and Ugly Steps

If you’re not the one assigned to Taunt, don’t. You may think you’re helping, but you’re not. This scenario turns ugly in 4 quick steps:

A bunch of Tanks taunt.
The wrong person gets the mob.
The healers don’t know they should heal them and they die.
No tank can Taunt anymore and DPSers start dieing from aggro.

It all comes down to trust. You have to trust that the people who’ve been assigned to do a task are going to do it. You have to be willing to accept that if they don’t do their job, you will wipe. If you can’t accept that, you’re going to wipe your raid more times than you’re going to save it.

Read the rest here: Over Taunting isn’t just Bad Manners anymore