#304 - Oct. 8, 2010, 6:51 p.m.
Q u o t e:
As a warrior tank, what do you expect us to do differently between scenario A) and scenario C)?
fundamentally, the difference between 4 mobs and 20 is nil, thunderclap, blood and thunder, shockwave hit all of them, cleave and revenge hit some of them, we tab target the rest.
Tab targeting provides a minimal increase in threat distribution in scenarios such as C where you can expect cycling abilities like cleave and revenge to hit every mob in the span of 2-3 GCDs and you can reliably single target everyone with something in the span of say 2 thunderclap cooldowns.
What exactly do you expect us to do to raise our threat from barely adequate to hold 5 mobs off the healer to enough to tank for AoE damage against 20 mobs? The rotations for every tank are unchanged from 4 mobs to 100 mobs for the most part so either we can tank for AoE DPS and anything that doesn't hit hard enough to warrant CC can and will get AoE'd down, or we can't, and the only things that will ever be AoE'd will be those whose damage is trivial enough to be tanked by the DPS.
Unless you're doing something unusual, healer threat is generally pretty low, and tends to go lower if there are many targets. The biggest danger tends to be when adds spawn and a heal lands before you have done any threat against the new arrivals. If you are targeting Thunder Clap (I'm going to use Thunder Clap as my example, but this discussion is not limited to warriors) so that everything is in range and healers are still pulling, then something unusual is probably happening. Maybe you're taking so much damage that the healers are just spamming heals on you, which might suggest you need to somehow manage some of the adds that doesn't involve all of them beating on you so much.
You're probably at more risk overall of having dps pull off of you. Here are the scenarios again about how that could work:
One target -- if a dps pulls off of you, they are either blowing cooldowns before you have a chance to respond, or your threat generation is much too low for some reason.
Many targets -- in this case, the dps are probably AE'ing. Usually they will kill things pretty quickly, but they might get a few adds on them. These situations are always a little chaotic, but also don't last very long. We don't do many huge AE packs of mobs that hit brutally hard.
A few targets -- in this case, you might be CC'ing one or two, tanking a few others, but burning down the targets one at a time. If the dps are on the right target and pulling off of you, then we're back to situation one. If they are on the wrong target, then they are playing badly and should be corrected and / or mocked, depending on how you roll.
On the one target scenario, you may not need to Thunder Clap on cooldown. The cooldown is 6 sec and the debuff duration is 30, and the threat is not so massive that you should just always Thunder Clap any target. On the few targets scenario, it's at your discretion. Thunder Clap may help keep aggro on the targets not being dps'ed but you might also break CC. On many targets, you should Thunder Clap your heart out. You can tab target your other abilities around, and many tanks do, but you can't realistically tab target them all, so it's not going to make a massive difference. In the few case, you are going to want to spend most of your single-target abilities on the dps target, but perhaps start shifting over to the next target so that you have a headstart when that becomes the target.
That was a long explanation, and it's possible your question was just a thinly veiled jab at how your single target and AE rotations aren't that different, but I think the prioritization of how you use them is.
