You cant tank!

Argh - I'm so sick of hearing this!

Everyone just looks at you like they've just wiped you off of their shoe.

How did you guys ever convince people to give you a shot?

Yesterday we dropped naxx early cos we did not have enough tanks to run a third tank on Gluth (for the zombies) and my suggestion of using the pet was pretty much sneered at.

Now - am i mising something, i would have throught this to be an idea pet tank moment:

The zombies dont require any threat held on them, wont really crit you that much - they just need to be tanked and held in a group. Ive got about 20k unbuffed and 22k armour. With the standard set of raid buffs would this be enough to take the damage?

Anything else? i know the debuff builds up and leads to heavy hitting, but that is the same for all tanks.


Edit: and yes, i know you can kite em. but we find we need 2 hunters to do this. On 1 hunter I find that i cant get them into a nice tight group for the decimate.

Oh this is the best part of pet tanking.
I must say that tanking the zombie adds Gluth is perfect for pet tanks (if a bit hairy at times).

The trick is to know that he will die at some point and be prepared for it. Tell the healers not to heal your pet under any circumstances (otherwise they will pick up the aggro when the pet bites it). I haven't managed to get the pet to drop the debuff though, although i suspect it is possible, you need to tank the adds yourself for 30secs after the 'eaty' phase while making sure your pet can grab aggro off you afterwards.

But in general terms the biggest problems are:

1) Pets can't tank! I once solo'd half an instance (this was HoS norm) with 2 dps. One ran into a pack mobs before thunderstomp went off and got himself killed pretty quickly (no healer) and then I suggested it might be safer to wait for the healer on the boss. At this point one guy hearthed to go pick up his tank gear because pets can't tank. I left the group.

2) No margin for error! If the Healer goes afk, pets have no survivability. I ran H VH with a group who insisted that you kill the two adds for the Sethekk boss (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=29315#comments) and then used the fact that we wiped to conclude that pets can't tank.

3) Yipikayai! Arms warrior sees pet tanking: Oh look tanking is easy: Maybe I can tank to: Oh dear looks like tanking is harder than I thought: See, I told you pets can't tank!

I haven't figured out how to solve these problem yet, but it does seem to be easier with people who know what they are doing.

My tips. Don't ever, _EVER_, tank in a PUG. It will give you bad rep when they screw up. Only do it with people you trust and slowly spread the amount of people you take with you. A new person here, another there.

People need to be trained to understand pet tanking. It doesn't happen over one instance.

Gluth tanking... I'm not sure about that one. Generally we have a tank run around with me picking them up. But most of the time they aren't hitting either of us because of the stacking debuff. With 20 zombies hitting you (or the pet) at the same time, the debuff goes up very fast. Can your pet take care of it? Probably. But I find it very risky and I would probably try to solo-kite it before having my pet tanking them all.

Hmm - without healing surely the pet wouldn't last 5 seconds??

So what your saying is that you set the pet on the spawn point and thunderstomp em as they come - then as your pet dies you res it, heal it and get it back in to the zombies?

So, (expanding on the idea in my head), when the pet goes down i would need to delay the mobs with a frost trap (pre laid in advance) Revive for 4 secs, cast mend pet then slap the detterence on while the pet gets its health up for a few secs - then thunderstomp to grab a bit of aggro so I can FD and start the cycle all over again?

Would it not be better to have someone healing the pet but you volleying the zombies so you are no2 when the pet does go down - but you wont have to do it so often??

In addition can the debuff be removed - would improved mend pet help here?

EDIT - in responce to Nord's post.

We normally have a tank just taking it witha a healer on him - makes them all nice and grouped for some AOEing.
When solo kiting this i guess i could MD to the pet and have him running around after me with passive and mend pent on... if they get to me i could easliy T-stomp the crowd and run them mob over a frost trap - would help alot


Think maybe this thread would be better placed in the tactics forum now...

The debuff can't be removed, it's counted as a physical debuff.

In ten my George the turtle can go two, three or even four rounds with only me healing. It might be a good idea to time when you stop healing so you can time his demise At the very least two I would say.

The debuff is on a timer so after Gluth eats (or doesn't eat hopefully) the zombies there is thirty seconds after which, if the pet does not get hit to reset it, the debuff disappears completely. This should work if manage to kill all the old zombies and get the pet to pick up aggro off you after.

In 10 man you're better off kiting, leaving your pet on the boss. There's zero need for tanking there.

In 25 man you have twice the number of zombies to take care of. If he lasts 4 rounds on 10 man, he's only going to last 2 on 25 man.

Most likely. What might work well here is to do one with the pet tanking, and then the next one you kiting. This way you can clear the debuff each time on both you and your pet. I don't think it is possible to do the kite entirely without getting hit is it?

Otherwise you could split the time in half with the first thirty seconds after the decimate having you pick up all the zombies and once the debuff clears on the pet going over to him tanking.

Of course something to consider is that the debuff will stack much quicker in Heroic than in Normal because of the greater number of zombies (I presume). Even so the 75 seconds should be easily survivable by the pet and when the next decimate pops they will be all nicely stacked together.

Even if all else fails and the Pet cannot survive you can always go back to kiting normally. Even in ten man though I can definitely say that tanking is much much much easier than kiting all the time, at least it is for me.

To convince my guild i wrote a post that outlined my new abilities, posted the sapphiron video from durante as proof positive, and simply asked that I be considered.

As far as pugs go, ive never been able to convince a full group at 80 to let me tank. Usually half the group is open to it, and the other half is VEHEMENTLY opposed to it. It almost seems that I have offended them in some way, unearthing suppressed trauma.

The only pugs I have convinced to let me tank were when everyone was leveling. It seems people are more open to trying new things while leveling. I guess its because the instances are viewed as easier or at least more flexible. Once people hit the level cap its all about super efficiency.

Some of my favorite pet tanking times have been conquering brand new content for the first time as a pet tanker.

".... carry on."

The way I've managed to get taken seriously was, essentially, to be persistent about it. Also, you have to be serious about it. Not 'serious' as in 'unable to laugh at yourself', but 'serious' as in 'Yes, even while I'm laughing, I fully intend to be able to tank'. I started asking about 'offspec' gear in the raids, backing off the moment anyone else was interested in something. If anyone asks, tell them why you want it as an 'offspec'.
"Why on earth would you be considering rolling on that leather instead of sharding it?"
"High agility and high stamina, as well as good attack. I think that it might make for a good tanking piece."
I won't guarantee that it'll get you taken seriously just from that alone, but it makes them realize that you are genuinely thinking of what you're doing. And be polite: don't roll 'need' on something for your offspec. You probably don't even want to roll 'greed' if some Ele Shammy is *also* rolling offspec on something. *

Definitely start with a guild group, or at the very least a group of trusted friends. This is not only because PUGs may not take you seriously or will be idiots with threat, but because when they see this, they will spread the word to important people.

Start small, or 'small' as the case may be, to get a feel for things. My first real, genuine tank (other than the duo and an overleveled Nexus tank) was the Obsidian Sanctum adds in the portals. Maybe in Naxx, offer to take on some boss adds, especially if you are doing a 10-man. Suggestions for this are rife in Naxx: Faerlina, Anub'rekhan, Noth, Razuvious in 25-man (I haven't tried this one yet; try at own risk), Gothik. Make sure you have a sympathetic healer, or one who will habitually heal 'target of target' on a boss so when it happens, you're prepared to really show your stuff.

Now for the actual 'I want to tank' moments: when you have convinced people (however you want to) that you are serious about this, offer to tank something full-on. UK or Nexus are the best instances for this. Make sure that your group of friends is understanding that this may be a first for a full-instance tank. The *best* group to pick for this are easygoing people, preferably a little overgeared (but not too much; that will really try your threat-holding; trust me!). This way if you fail the 'gear check', as well you might (and don't feel bad if you do; all tanks have those issues) you won't completely ruin your chances. Just go back to practicing a bit on elites or something, gear up a bit more, and come at it again.

Remember: for a hunter tank, that 'first shot' is more important than for a lot of tanks. While failing is understandable, if you fail *mightily*, they are going to start dismissing you out of hand. Make sure, through whatever practice you need to, that you have the basics down pat. Read BRR and the tactics put here by various hunters. Practice your threat-holding on an elite quest or two.

Whew. More detail than I expected to add, but there you have it: pretty much exactly how I convinced my guild that I was serious about this. Though until the moment of 'Carry on', I never felt *solidly* that I had convinced anyone for anything major. To that end, don't give up if small setbacks happen, or you feel like things are going slow.


* Unless it's Hyalene Helm Of The Sniper. Then IMO making huge sad eyes at said Shaman is understandable; I know I wouldn't fault you for it.

In terms of getting people to let you tank, definitely work with your guild first. I found the most success with this in talking theorycraft with them about pet tanking and tanking as a whole and talking about research I had done about talents, bosses, and building my tanking set. The more you sound like you know what you're doing, the more willing they'll be to let you try things.

Once you convince them to let you tank something (and just about anything will do here, don't shy away from non-heroic 5mans if need be) and you succeed at it, post some screenshots on the guild site or talk about it in guild chat, make sure people know.

Once you get some normal instances or heroics under your belt, it gets a lot easier to convince your guild to let you try bigger and better, especially on content being farmed. Of course it also helps if your guild is a crazy lot like mine.

Its also worth noting that while you're still trying to convince people what you're capable of, make sure you pick fights that you can reasonably expect to succeed your first time trying.

For example, when I picked Sapphiron to tank, it was based upon the fact that Sapphiron is a fight that lends very well to pet tanking. There's no enrage timer, no taunting required, no maneuvering, my pet would have much more frost resistance than a normal tank would, and crits were large but not capable of 1-shotting. If I instead had picked a fight like Thaddius as the boss they let me try, it more than likely would have ended in a lot of frustration and they'd have been a lot more hesitant about pet tanks in the future.

Durante did you stack any extra frost for this?

The reason that i ask is that for the tank all i see is melee damage and frost aura, which would hit for practically nothing. Does frost resist help the tank on this one?

Would be cool to have a write up from you on this fight, your build your gear, tactics, but i know you are working on some other stuff so no pressure!

Yeah - my own guild are happy to heroicrun - and with a few good successes. My prob is that we raid with 2 other guilds who are less keen on the idea.

've always 'trained' on non raid nights by going after elite mobs and playing around with the pet tanking. Its not the progress im making thats annoying - its the ' =you are a hunter - you do not tank' attitude im getting.

I'll just plug away at the HCS for the time being. I guess

It can be very discouraging to hear that on a regular basis.

I spent a good hour or two farting around on my character and checking out some of the heroics and regular dungeons for groups that needed tanks, and it was the same stuff every time.

"you want to tank? youre a hunter lol"

The funny thing is, i usually ask whats needed first, and people will say stuff like that even before i say anything about hunter tanking. Its as if no one understands that I might have another class that i could jump on. When you see that kind of resistance, you know its gonna be tough.

Even when they ask how its possible and i tell them what kind of stats my pet has, and what ive already tanked raid wise, they still don't budge. Your guildies and friends are just going to have to take you more seriously, out of respect they have to give you at least a shot at it.

Because let's face it, in the face of someone telling me something is possible, unless I have first hand experience that its not possible, its unreasonable to dismiss it out of hand. And if any of them had tried pet tanking themselves, they would see that its possible.

That's why i feel we have to get creative somehow. We need to solve the problem, not hope that people will just wise up. One idea I had to break up a pug is to get a healer on board with it, who knows whats up, and then bring on 3 dps as a pug. Pick something easy, maybe invite them onto your guild's vent server, and maybe make a few converts.

We will eventually need some official way of confirming that pets can indeed tank. This has always been my concern with the OT philosophy, either you can tank or you can't, no use mucking around trying maintain pet tanking at a sub-par level.

Now we all know that pet tanking works well in most situations and might even be preferable in some while be non-viable in others but without acknowledgement of our role it will be very difficult to sell it even in limited settings.

The biggest single problem we face as tanks is the old BC and pre-BC joke about hunter pets tanking, it was one of the staples of of huntard mythology at that time. And anybody who sent a pet up against even a normal elite quickly found out that hunter pets =/= tanks in any way shape or form. Now that the design philosophy behind pets has changed people still think that pet tanks are cheating somehow (like evasion tanking) and use any sign of weakness to support that belief.

This is why I would rank the three things we need as pet tanks as such (in order of importance):
1) Official acknowledgement of the role through the LFG system or some other means.
2) Additional threat generation through scaling on growl and spell power even though I have gotten better TPS on single targets than some DK's I've seen around.
3) Crit immunity (I think that pet tanks are designed around the possibility of damage spikes, as long as we can avoid double crits).

Even if it is just a case of being confirmed as 'weak' tanks like Pallies and (Druid)Bears used to be it would be a significant step in the right direction. The biggest single stumbling block to this is the Hybrid/Pure methodology, which is rubbish anyway imo. How to you convince hunters to accept Hybrid status with the resulting loss of dps?

I think with the changes made in Wotlk, then the talents added in 3.1, Blizz are moving along the route we want - just at their own pace.

Tbh - this is probably for the better. Blizz work on the theory that building up step at a time rather than OPing then having to nerf bat like mad is safer. They need to build up hunter tanks to a level where they are feasible - but still different from other tanks. The massive heal bonuses are a sign of this - but it is a new and untested mechanic and means that Blizz need to know they can balance it without breaking it.

Giving almost teaser upgrades each patch is a good way of doing this. We are guinea pigs to show what can be done with the current setup.

PS - in 3.2 i want a armour plated pet with 50k health and 4k dps. Laser eyes are a optional talent....

Lazaers are OP, except if we can get shark pets and put them on their heads somehow
I agree with you bear, but I still feel that the community as a whole needs to be given some sort of signal that this is what is in fact occurring. I realise that this is one of those step step step things where before you know it pets are fully fledged tanks without people getting heart attacks from the shock of it.

Doug wrote:
The biggest single problem we face as tanks is the old BC and pre-BC joke about hunter pets tanking, it was one of the staples of of huntard mythology at that time. And anybody who sent a pet up against even a normal elite quickly found out that hunter pets =/= tanks in any way shape or form.

<off topic>
*cough*

Pets were viable as raid tanks in vanilla as well
</off topic>

Anyhow, I don't think Blizzard will ever let pets be known as tanks officially. That job is up to us.

Haha, this I did not know. I only picked up the game halfway through BC. That's epic btw!

Well, we have already exceeded blizzard's stated 'top end' of the envelope. It was on the expansion test realm forums, and GC said pet tanks were envisioned to cap out at heroics. Thats always been in the back of my mind as I've seen pretty much constant buffs along the way, and I've been wondering if perhaps they have changed their minds on this point, wishing to increase the envelope.

When the taunt nerf came, that sent a clear signal to me that they felt that we were where they wanted us, or higher than they had planned. I realize that they were really just trying to eliminate ping pong taunting, but that really hurt us in terms of official recognition.

It may be that blizzard would like to elevate us to official tank status. The problem with that comes in when they actually do it. IF they make pet tanking 'official' that means they have to support it, it has to be realatively doable by most players, they have to listen to us telling them we are underpowered compared to 'x', and all the other trappings that come with that stuff.

Best case scenario is, imo, that blizzard wants us to be viable, but not easy/official, and will allow us to stay underground, slowly giving us more and more abilities, letting the wow public get used to the idea.

Personally I see a good deal of similarities between current hunter pet tanking and enhancement shaman tanking in Vanilla WoW. They could use shields, rockbiter provided extra threat, and had talents for increased armor defense, and block%, and were able to tank 5-mans but were not supported as full blown end game tanks. Despite that a shaman dedicated, knowledgeable and cleaver enough could still tank successfully in some end game content. We can really only guess at this point, but I suspect that's what Blizzard has in mind for pet tanks.

In the meantime though, methinks it may be time for me to find a new guild

I don't think that we should be content with the situation as it is now. I honestly believe that the hybrid/pure philosophy is the single biggest design flaw in this game. People tend to think of pet tanking as cheating, almost like evasion tanking or caster tanking. Traditional tank classes would trust an undergeared tank long before they would consider allowing pet to tank in most scenarios.

While I like the idea of gradually building a support for pet tanking I do not think that there is very far that one can go with that kind of mindset unfortunately. Here is what I think we know now:

1) Pets are perfectly capable of tanking most material in their present state (with the biggest single problem being the lack of experience most of us, barring certain individuals, have).
2) Rather than being buffed, the design goal seems to be to give pets everything they need and then take away just enough to make life hard for us (double crits and all).
3) People have a visceral and irrarional dislike of the very idea of pets tanking.

Adding those things together we can reach the following conclusions:

1) Some material will never be viable for pet tanking because of exploit concerns.
2) There is no fundamental reason why pets cannot be full tanks.
3) This is key: If pets are designed as OT they will never be generally accepted because of the fundamental disbelief of players, and any weakness will support that disbelief

Number three can only be overcome by either a) having a consistent, clear and definable advantage of pet tanks over normal tanks in some limited area, or b) endorsement of the concept by either the top guilds in progression material (the noobs will never believe you anyway) or Blizzard themselves.

This business of implicit recognition is not going anywhere. Frankly, considering the severe problems that hunter's generally are having with pets at the moment (leading to very low dps numbers in Ulduar and complete uselessness in PvP) suggests that BM must eventually become a tanking tree and MM/SV lose it's reliance on pets almost entirely.

/end rant lol

Just wanted to add my 2 cents. I have yet to tank a heroic in northend. Everytime I try to to offer to tank, I always get 1 of 2 responses. Either no response....or the typical "pets can't tank." Even from my own guild no less. Even when they are hard up for a tank and are waiting around, no one wants to give me a try. It is so frustrating.

What I have been doing these days is tanking non heroics or when I run with my guild with some of the more easier going folks, I will off tank the paladin. I help to keep some of the damage off of him and I also grab adds that go after the healer/squishes. As I work on this more, I think I will be able to win over some people. But there are always those hardcore guys who will never be convinced. *sigh*

I have been steadily building up my tanking gear and my turtle now has over 27k hp with buffs. Not too shabby. Actually my turtle has more HP than our paladin tank I often run with. I am careful not to step on his toes and point that out, so I just let him do his thing and I off tank and people are cool with that.

One day I hope try a heroic in northend...

Thanks for this blog. You guys continue to inspire me. =)

- Hung aka Meganchan

Im glad youve found it inspirational! Alot has been said here about building up reputation with folks so that they will let you run stuff. It can be tough and disheartening especially if time drags by between opportunities.

All I can say is that its lonely out on the edge, and thats exactly where you are trying to use the game mechanics in fun ways and thinking outside the box.