Belghast

Hey Folks! This morning I am going to try and write something that I have largely avoided writing for a very long time in part because I was always afraid I would fail to do it justice. I am mostly known as an MMO Tank, and in fact this blog began as a very specific Warrior Tanking blog dedicated to World of Warcraft. Over the years I have tanked in pretty much all of the MMOs that come out because I gravitate towards that style of game play at the core of my being. When I was leveling all of the classes recently in World of Warcraft, I saved a tank as my victory lap because I figured it would be the most enjoyable thing for me to level… and was absolutely correct to do so. That said when my friend asked me last night if I had any primers on my blog to MMO Tanking… I had to honestly say no. As far as I know it is a topic I have talked around the edges of quite a bit but never really focused on as a proper discussion. I could of course explain how a player tanks in this game or that game, but in reality tanking is more of an ethos and a particular state of mind. Once you have the concept of tanking down, it can pretty much be applied to any game just swapping in various abilities to meet the goals of a tank. To keep it simple I have broken down the role of a tank into five core concepts.

• Aggro – This one is pretty straight forward. You want to make all of the mobs in a specific pull angry at your character and as a result focused on attacking you while the rest of the party kills them.
• Place – When you pull an encounter you want to place it in such a way as to keep your party out of harm and also allow your DPS to kill the target with as little downtime as possible. Generally speaking this is turning the pack of mobs away from the party and giving easy access to the backside of each enemy for extra damage potential.
• Avoid – You want to avoid any damage that you don’t have to take, which means you need to understand the attacks and which ones you can move out of safely without causing damage to the party. It is a juggling act of trying to maintain DPS uptime while also trying to avoid making your healer mend damage that you didn’t need to take in the first place.
• Mitigate – One of your key responsibilities as the Tank is to be sturdy and this means not only gearing in a way so that you have a hefty health pool, but also using any active abilities at your disposal to normalize the incoming damage as well as strategically using your “Oh Shit” buttons to avoid fatal damage.
• Pace – The tank controls the pace of the party and bad tanks drag their party through the dungeon kicking and screaming. Essentially you need to use the tools that you have at your disposal to figure out how fast you can move through the dungeon and the best path to reach the end objective safely.

I wish that it spelled something clever, but alas at 6 am in the morning I am doing good to have boiled them down to simple concepts. You have to understand that for most MMO Tanks, this is all committed to muscle memory and nothing that we really think about. You can always tell a seasoned tank because it is their instinct to turn the mobs to face away from the party. You can always tell a sloppy tank by them haphazardly trying to fight things in place as the chips fall. What I am hoping I guess with this discussion is to help you develop that instinct of how to navigate a dungeon in such a way as to get to the rewards at the end safety and effectively. After all the entire name of this blog “Aggronaut” was me trying to be clever and coming up with a word for one who navigates aggro.

Aggro

This mechanic may work differently in your target game, but all of them have some sort of concept of a “threat list”. Essentially imagine a spreadsheet with a bunch of names on it, and each encounter is going to focus their attacks on whatever name is at the top of that list. Your goal is to use the abilities given to you to keep your name with as many “threat points” beside it so that monster keeps focused on you. Different games work in different ways, the aggro make swap between targets if a single point of threat is higher than its previous target, and in other games you might need to gain a certain percentage more threat in order to shift targets. Whatever the case your goal is to do as much as humanly possible to keep your name at the top of the list of ALL of the mobs that you are engaged with. In a game like Final Fantasy XIV or modern World of Warcraft, this is pretty straight forward and you are given tools that cause all of your actions to generate way more threat than any other player on the list. If you have your tank stance buff up in FFXIV and you touch a mob, chances are it is going to be glued to you for a period of time. Other games are more tricky like in World of Warcraft Classic, you have to keep swapping between targets and trying to build threat equally on them all to make sure that your aggro does not “decay”. Many games have a concept of aggro falling off over time, and even if they don’t things like healing the party generates threat equally for your healer on all of the encounters meaning that you need to keep touching the mobs in order to ensure that they are glued to you. Hard Taunting Many games have the concept of an ability known generically as a “Taunt”. How this functions depends greatly upon the game, but generally speaking this will raise your threat level to 1 point higher than the highest on the list. Often times there is a debuff applied to the target that will make it focus you for a period of time, and if you have not regained a stable footing by the time this buff fades the mob will revert to the highest threat target. Generally speaking you do not want to rely on taunts because over time a lot of encounters become “taunt immune”, so your goal is to generate threat naturally and save what we often refer to as a “hard taunt” as your ace in the hole for when things are going really south. Initial Threat Another concept that is worth exploring a bit is that of initial threat. In some games there is a stickiness applied to the person who generates threat first. Generally speaking you want to always be that person, but often times you are going to have overeager dps hitting the mobs before they can get to you. In older games like Classic WoW, this could mean a death sentence because threat is harder to generate and harder to hold. After all this is the reason why we used to have the “Three Sunder Rule” before the DPS opened up on a boss fight. Even if the game is not that extreme, the fight will go more smoothly if you can be the one pulling the encounters because the entire pack will default to attacking you rather than running around like mad for awhile until you get things under control.

Place

Generally speaking as I stated in the breakdown of these concepts, this is making sure that you are fighting the encounters in a way that keeps the party safe and lets your dps have as much uptime on the boss as humanly possible. Unless there are specific reasons in a given fight, you want to run in and generate aggro while spinning the encounter 180 degrees away from the party. If possible you want to also park your back against a wall or some sort of object that blocks movement. If there is a knock-back, this will mean you are knocked back against something and can rapidly return to the same position you were tanking in previously. Your goal is to hold that encounter still as much as possible which allows the DPS to place themselves in the most optimal way to deal the maximum amount of damage. Positionals Often times your DPS may get a bonus to attack when attacking from a certain arc surrounding the encounter. I first saw these in Dark Age of Camelot, but modern games like Final Fantasy XIV heavily rely on attacks that deal bonus damage or produce a combo of attacks when done from a specific axis. It helps greatly if you understand the types of attacks that your party can do, and as a result how best to place the targets so that you can enable the DPS output to be as optimal as possible in the situation. Line of Sight Place is not just a concept of turning the mobs but being aware of the specific needs of that encounter. For example if you have a pack of mobs that includes a number of casters or physical ranged, they are not going to clump up neatly giving you easy access to generating threat on all of them. At moments like this you might need to utilize Line of Sight mechanics to generate aggro and then duck around a corner forcing the pack that you just generated threat on to chase you. Breaking Line of Sight will force the encounter to seek you out, and if you utilize this correctly you and your party can set up an ambush spot creating a tight “murder ball”. Environmental Damage Another concept of place is being aware of your surroundings. As you move through a dungeon there are often times traps that are set for the players that consist of some sort of avoidable damage or open ledges that the party can be knocked off. When deciding where to fight the encounter, you need to take all of these parameters into account and do your best to find a spot where it is safe for the party to engage the mobs. Again your role as the tank is to limit the damage being dealt to the party, and a big part of this is trying to keep them from having to fight in bad situations. This might mean needing to move the encounter from time to time to get out of acid puddles or something similar. As such while fighting you are often times keep your head on a swivel looking for changes in the field of battle.

Avoid

As I said in the last point, part of your role as a tank is to limit the damage dealt to the party. This also means that you yourself need to take as little damage as possible. This is pretty straight forward in a game like Final Fantasy XIV where clear visualizations are placed on the ground with hard edges allowing you to very easily tell if you are going to take damage or not. This is less easy in games without that predictable level of advisement. Some of this is honestly just learning the encounter, because at the end of the day every boss that you are fighting is following some sort of script. It often helps to think of it in terms as a flow chart and the boss will perform a certain attack under a certain set of circumstances. It may be as simple as learning a dance or it may be as difficult as looking for a specific tell that a boss performs before making an attack. Whatever the case you are seeking out any ways that you can avoid taking damage that you don’t need to take. Animations Like I said, life is pretty simple if you are given clear visualizations as to what the attacks do. However even in the scenarios that you won’t be given a clear marker, there are almost always some sort of tell in the animations being performed by a mob. I have to say that learning to play Monster Hunter Online greatly improved my ability as a whole to spot these tells, because that game was entirely about predicting the movement of these gigantic monsters that you were fighting. As you dive further into the tanking mindset, you are going to find yourself drawing inspiration from unlikely sources and another great one is Dark Souls.

Mitigate

One of your jobs as a tank is to be well… Tanky. This means stacking gear that makes you harder to kill and often times just increases your sheer health pool. The more health you have, the more damage you can take before putting yourself into a situation where you are burning out your healer. Tanks need to be cautious of how they are gearing and instead of favoring dealing extra dps, you want to favor reducing the incoming flow of damage. How you do this depends greatly upon a specific game, but often times there are stats to reduce specific kinds of damage, or mechanics like block, dodge and, parry that either decrease incoming damage or cause you to avoid it entirely. The negative is gearing out as tank means you are going to chew through content solo extremely slowly, but it is the price you pay for your chosen vocation. Active Mitigation So please note I am using “mitigation” here in the most generic form because technically a block is mitigation, but a dodge is technically avoidance. However generally speaking your character as tank will be given abilities on a cool-down that allow you to reduce your incoming damage. Again this depends greatly upon the game but often times you have weaker abilities on shorter cooldowns and very powerful abilities on long cool-downs. As a tank you want to figure out the best time to use your shorter cool-downs while strategically saving your big ones… aka the “Oh Shit” buttons for times that can save a fight because you are going to take fatal damage or needing to hold on while your party recovers from a particularly damaging sequence. Tank Busters Often times there is one specific attack that is designed to kill any character that is not specifically a tank. Tanks even often times need to specifically time a short cool-down ability either directly before or directly after the attack in order to survive. One of your jobs as a tank is to get to know these and learn how to navigate them correctly, and more specifically make sure that the encounter is facing away from the party when they are firing off… because often times tank busters “cleave”. Cleaving is a term for an attack dealing damage to more than one target in the vicinity of the focus of that attack. Final Fantasy XIV made our jobs easier because generally speaking the first big attack that takes place after a pull is going to be your tank buster, so you can memorize that name and then be looking for it to fire at pretty regular intervals throughout the fight.

Pace

The tank is part battle tactician and part cruise director when it comes to leading the party through the encounters that make up a dungeon or raid. Right or wrong the tank sets the pace for the party, but one of the key parts of learning how to be a “good” tank is understanding that this is a symbiotic relationship. A bad tank will run off without paying attention to the party and expect to force their way through a dungeon as fast as possible, often times pulling way more than the party can handle at a given moment. A good tank will pay attention to how well the DPS is performing, how taxed the healer is and the current state of their mana, and then set a pace that is brisk but manageable. The goal is to get to the end of the dungeon in a swift but safe fashion, so that everyone gets good loots and has a low repair bill. Multi-Pack Pulls Over the years it has become out of vogue to carefully move your way through a dungeon and to just go haywire pulling everything in sight. One of the responsibilities of the tank is to know when a group can support this sort of play style, and resist doing it when you know that they can not. Generally speaking when tanking pick up groups or “PUGs” I will test the water with a single pack, and pay attention to how quickly it is being dealt with. If it goes well I will start pulling two packs at a time, and if that goes equally well move up to three and so on. Essentially it is better to ramp up than to slam into a brick wall less than five minutes into the dungeon because you got careless. While you might have demands to “Pull Big”, you need to be the adult in the situation and realize when the party just can’t tackle that much at once. Respect your Healer There is a lot of focus placed on the tank, because they are the one setting the pace of the group and navigating it through the obstacles of the dungeon. However you have to realize that the healer is actually what enables us to do all of this. Tanks are mostly useless on their own without a good healer backing them up, and as a result you need to pay attention to what your healer is actively saying… and also attention to what they are not saying. If they are pulling their punches and not keeping you topped off, it might be that they are struggling to keep up with the pace you are moving at and should maybe pay a little closer attention to that blue bar if they are struggling. Additionally if they are spending all of their time DPSing, then maybe you should speed up a bit because clearly they are not being fully utilized. The entire party is an ecosystem, but none of the relationships are as symbiotic as that of the tank and the healer as they are effectively two sides of the same coin.

Final Thoughts

There it is folks, my general thoughts on tanking. While certain aspects may not apply to all games… it represents the general mindset that I think is required for a successful tank. For most tanks I know, a lot of these things are just so ingrained in our personality that it has become a sort of instinct or muscle memory at this point. The truth is however that the only real way to learn to tank… is to get out there and force yourself into the tank role. I think keeping all of these things in mind is important, but it is a learning experience and once you fall into that role it will be with you from that point moving forward. I am sure there are some finer points that I have missed, but I was shooting for the most generic take on MMO tanking that is applicable to pretty much any game you might pick up from this point forward. If you have specific comments however I would love to hear them. The post Ethos of Tanking appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Every so often there is a post that I end up not making, largely because I was not really certain how to approach it. Essentially for me this has been a year without Blizzard games. This is due in part to some intentional and some unintentional avoiding of anything that comes from the Battle.net launcher. Recently I had thought about beginning to lay down my sword and accept that change was happening, because from the outside it seemed like things were beginning to move in the right direction. Then a few things happened, firstly the resignation of Jen O’Neal and the Wall Street Journal article expanding on that action and the fact that Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard has been complicit in everything up to this point. As part of everything coming out we find out that Kotick actually wrote the awful Fran Townsend letter, which brings into question if Jen O’Neal had anything to do with the public resignation letter in the first place. This has been a journey that began with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing lawsuit in July, and has been a ride of various bits of information coming out from that process. As a reaction to all of this a group of Activision, Blizzard, and King employees have banded together to create the ABetterABK movement, and held a number of walkouts. They have some pretty straight forward demands:

• An end to mandatory arbitration clauses in all employee contracts, current and future. Arbitration clauses protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution.
• The adoption of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion policies designed to improve representation among employees at all levels, agreed upon by employees in a company-wide Diversity, Equity & Inclusion organization. Current practices have led to women, in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups that are vulnerable to gender discrimination not being hired fairly for new roles when compared to men.
• Publication of data on relative compensation (including equity grants and profit sharing), promotion rates, and salary ranges for employees of all genders and ethnicities at the company. Current practices have led to aforementioned groups not being paid or promoted fairly.
• Empower a company-wide Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion task force to hire a third party to audit ABK’s reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff. It is imperative to identify how current systems have failed to prevent employee harassment, and to propose new solutions to address these issues.

Activision Blizzard has taken some half measures namely ending binding arbitration in regards to sexual harassment cases only… which gives them a loophole to claim anything is not specifically sexual in nature. They have also implemented a “Zero Tolerance Policy” towards Sexual Harrassment, which leads ABetterABK to their final demand… that Activision Blizzard act upon this policy and remove Bobby Kotick as CEO. Thing is, it has gone far further than just the Activision Blizzard Employees… we have calls from Shareholders, Sony Entertainment, Microsoft, and Nintendo to leave the company. This seems like a pretty resounding vote of no confidence but in spite of all of this the Board Members continue to back him. So I have been thinking for awhile, what action it would take in order for me to return to the fold. In truth it is a lot of actions, not all of which are even related to this current situation we find ourselves in. I bounced off Shadowlands for example long before knowing about any of this, and all of the problems I had with that game still exist today. However when it comes to avoiding games that I do love like Diablo 3… I was trying to figure out what pound of flesh would be enough to make me feel like change actually was possible. The single action that I have landed on is the removal of Bobby Kotick from the company entirely. I don’t just want him to step down as CEO, I want him completely gone from the decision making structure entirely. This happened under his reign and there is no question he was not only aware but supported the cover up. He needs to leave in order for the healing to begin in earnest. The other things I would like to happen is to completely remove the board of directors, but that is a much bigger ask and one that I sincerely doubt is ever going to happen. What I do think is within the realm of possibility however is for the Activision Blizzard King to formally unionize. They have made a lot of strides with the ABetterABK Movement, and I would love to see it formalize into a proper union with all of the rights and protects that it has. Ultimately that is part of why I have been less vocal is because I have a lot of friends who work for Blizzard right now and are trying to make things better behind the scenes. I am constantly torn on how my own personal boycott ultimately impacts them. I’ve also never made broad sweeping demands for folks to stop playing Blizzard games. Everyone has to arrive at this on their own terms, and for many Blizzard games are their coping mechanism for other things that they are going through at the same time. Many of us use games as a refuge from the troubles of our own life and the last few years have been absolutely brutal. I feel the constant pang of loss of Diablo 3, because that was one of my comfort games that I knew every three months I could return to with friends and get a dose of dopamine from it. That said the single action that would tell me that things are going to start moving in the right direction is going to be the act of removing the man who’s name is synonymous with Activision. It is time for Bobby Kotick to leave. The post Fire Bobby Kotick appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.