Tanks have two jobs. Build threat on
mobs, and don't die. Feral druids have precious little control over the
not-dying part, so really the measure of a good bear tank is how they
build threat. The hard part is building threat on the right things, particularly when tanking multiple mobs. So let's focus on something easier, tanking a single boss.
The
main goal of tanking a single boss is to generate as much threat per
second (TPS) as possible. Just like your DPS classes are optimizing
your DPS meters, you should be optimizing your TPS meter. Only there's
one catch; there's no good TPS meter.
Most tanks rely on
Omen to report their threat. It's a great tool, and it even includes a
handy TPS number. But that number is too volatile; it's showing you an
instant TPS number over the last 15 combat actions. Most tanks you ask
say %26quot;I generate 900 TPS!%26quot;, but what they're really saying is Omen is
reporting 900 TPS as their top burst threat. Nice, but not sustained.
Omen
can also report a second number, E-TPS, for Encounter TPS. That's the
average threat for the entire encounter. On a long boss fight that's
the number you want to optimize. You can enable the display in Omen
under the skin settings. Unfortunately the resulting value is very confusing and inconsistent; I think it does not work for multi-target fights.
But if you keep an eye on it in a boss fight maybe you'll learn something.
An even better way to track your TPS is the amazing Recount addon.
Recount is a damage meter on steroids. One useful feature is it will
track your threat during a fight. A second useful feature is you can
get it to draw a graph of your threat over the course of a
fight. Toggle the Recount display to threat, Alt-click on your name and
a graph pops up. Click %26quot;integrate%26quot; and fiddle with the history and you
get a graph like this:
That's a graph of the total threat of various people in my old guild
as we were killing Void Reaver. The orange line up top is me, the bear
tank. The brown line below is Bouks, a warrior tank. The other lines
are for various DPSers, mostly warlocks. Note that the tank threat
actually drops down a few
times during the fight; that's because Void Reaver has an odd aggro
reduction with his Knockback ability. It makes VR a particularly hard
fight to tank.
The important thing on this graph is that
the DPSers line stays below the tanks at all times. If they go above
the tank's threat (or more specifically, 130% of the tank's threat)
they'd pull aggro and bad things would happen. Even more important, the
slope of the line matters;
that's the rate we're generating threat, our TPS. Ignoring the
knockbacks for a moment you'll see my slope is steeper than most of the
DPS, which means my TPS is keeping up with them. You can even calculate
TPS off the graph; in that last run where I never got knocked back I
was doing 650 TPS. And I was rage-starved then.
So that's
a couple of ideas about how to measure your TPS. Use E-TPS in Omen, or
fiddle with graphs in Recount. You can learn a lot by looking at it.
It's too bad the amazing raid analysis tool WWS doesn't calculate threat; unfortunately it's difficult for them to measure it because threat isn't in the combat logs.