Thursday 26 March 2009

In the name of the Light!

I hate tanking with paladins!

I have raided a few times with a protection paladin as my tanking partner. Their passive and fire-and-forget AoE abilities generate such a huge amount of threat that it is virtually impossible to keep aggro from them. Most recently, my fellow tank had materially lower EH and avoidance than me and so it would have made sense for me to tank most of the mobs on trash pulls. The way that rage works compared with mana allows paladins to front-load their threat - since effectively they start with a full resource bar and can go all out, whereas I rely on being hit to generate my resource which I then use to generate threat.

The usual way that a pull worked was him using shield throw (or whatever) to build early threat on 3 mobs. These mobs run to him and start hitting him (not gaining me any rage). My heroic throw was generally (it seemed) doing less threat than his shield thingy, so was useless for gaining aggro and I was literally reduced to taunting mobs off him one at a time to get any rage and to spread the incoming damage between us.

The general strategy that I have developed for tanking with a pally is now to find the biggest, ugliest looking mob in the group and to ensure that I'm tanking at least that one by taunting it, while spamming thunderclap whenever it's off cd. This means that I am putting out decent AoE threat, and hopefully reducing the incoming damage on the pally. If the pally dies I should then be ahead of any AoE dpsers on the threat table.

No comments:

Post a Comment