How to Tank - Threat vs. Survivability

How many times have you heard someone yell at a tank that they are not holding threat? If you play in PUGs (pick up groups), my guess is pretty often. Is holding threat a real issue for most tanks? How complicated is it? How do you go about building threat? How do you become more survivable? Don’t worry all will be explained.

Anyone that has played as a tank will quickly tell you that it isn’t always that easy to balance threat vs. survivability. If you are in a pre-set raid group it can be relatively simple to balance as you get a chance to learn what is required based on your healers and DPS partners. With strong healers you can give up a little survivability for extra threat generation, with weak DPS players you can ramp up survivability to help conserve healer mana for long fights. The balancing act is learned over time and easy to see because it is based on the same players being there.

If you tend to run a lot of five man content then it can be extremely difficult especially with the huge number of trigger happy DPS players out there that rarely even wait for a tank to hit the target before they blast away with their biggest attack right off the bat. This is made worse by the fact that if you gear and play for additional threat you trade of your defensive stats, meaning your survivability drops. You will then start to become the problem in groups because you will be taking so much more damage than the average healer will expect or be able to cope with.


How to Tank - What is Tank Threat?

You can't just stand there and expect them to stay mad at you.

Threat is the amount of hate that you generate from an enemy in-game. Almost all damage caused or healing done in range of an enemy generates threat towards the player causing it. The more damage you cause or healing you do, the more threat you generate.

Since DPS players do much more damage than tanks, tanks have abilities that cause additional threat either from certain abilities or when they have an ability active. This allows a tank to hold threat even when doing less damage than a nearby DPS player.

Each tanking class has a lasting aura type ability that helps cause additional threat, for example Paladins have the Righteous Fury ability that increases all threat caused by 200%. The other tanking classes have similar abilities: Druids have Bear Form, Warriors have defensive stance, and Death Knights have Blood Presence.


How to Tank – How do I Increase WoW Threat Generation?

As you can see from above, quite obviously you can see that to generate threat you need to cause damage. To do this you can do several things, the first and easiest is to ensure that you have an optimal tanking build and are using your extra threat abilities and using a solid attack rotation. All of these depend completely on your tanks class so can not really be discussed here at length.

Secondly you can focus more of your stats that allow you to hit the enemy. This can be done by reforging gear, gemming for threat, or enchanting for threat. No matter which method you use to try to improve your threat generation stats what you are aiming for is 8% hit rating and 26 expertise.

Being hit capped at 8% hit means that you will never miss when you attack a raid level boss. This means additional threat due to all your attacks landing on the enemy. Getting to 26 expertise means that you are at the dodge soft-cap for expertise and a raid boss will not be able to dodge your attacks and therefore you will be causing more damage.

Lastly you can improve the amount of damage you cause when you do strike the enemy by increasing your damage output stats. This is your strength (or agility for druids), attack power, and critical strike chance. All of these will help your threat, but not nearly as much as threat auras, hit cap, and expertise cap.


How to Tank - What is Survivability?

Survivability is a nice way of saying how long you will live when under attack. As a tank you have many different stats that combine to effect your overall survivability.

The stats that affect your survivability are: stamina, armor, dodge, parry, block, and mastery. Obviously not all of these stats apply to each type of tank, as neither Druids nor Death Knights use shields and therefore can not block. Also mastery affects each tank differently. However, overall, those stats all add to your survivability as a tank.


How to Tank – Mitigation Stats and Avoidance Stats

Armor Value is an easy to understand mitigation stat, the more armor you have the more damage you block.

The stats listed as survivability stats are then further sub-divided into what are known as health, mitigation, and avoidance stats. Your health stat is obviously stamina.

Mastery is a bit more complicated as it varies from class to class. This is an example of Paladin Mastery

Mitigation stats are those stats that mitigate or reduce incoming damage. This essentially refers to your armor and block stats as they reduce the damage that lands by a percentage. Each hit that lands that is affected by your armor or block value has its base damage reduce by a percentage before the damage is taken off of your health.

Avoidance stats are those stats that allow you to avoid damage entirely. This is your dodge and parry abilities. When they activate you avoid the incoming hit and therefore the damage it would cause entirely.


How to Tank - What is Tank Effective Health in WoW?

Another term often used to describe your survivability is “Effective Health”. While knowing your real health is simple, just look at your health bar, your effective health is a little more complicated.

Your effective health as a tank is a measure of how much damage can be aimed at you before you take enough to die. Notice the aimed at you part, not landed on you. Here is a good example of an effective health calculation:

Effective Health

Obviously the more health you can have as a tank the better, and this is what too many players focus on.  What a smart tank or player will focus on is your effective health. Your effective health is how much damage you can take over time which is far more important that looking at simply how big of a simple hit you can take, well it's more important once you can take the biggest hit you need to be able to take.

Let's look at two simplified examples, the first a tank with 300,000 health but no avoidance and a second tank with 150,000 health and 20% dodge and parry and 30% block. We will then have them fight a boss that hits for 50,000 damage every 3 seconds after armor reduction, or 20 times in a minute.

The first tank will take 1,000,000 damage over that 1 minute fight because he will get hit by every attack. The second tank will parry 4 and dodge 4, taking 400,000 less damage, and then block 6 more attacks stopping 40% of the damage from  each, or another 120,000 damage. This means that the second tank only needs to be healed for 480,000 health over the minute fight, instead of 1,000,000.  Ask a healer which tank they would rather heal and I think you can guess the answer.

While in real life the stat difference may not be as drastic, healers can very easily tell even a 5% difference between characters and will start questioning why a stamina tank is so hard to heal compared to an avoidance tank.


How to Tank - How do I increase my Tank Survivability?

Now that you know all about survivability stats and effective health, the trick is how to go about improving them the most effectively. This really comes down to a few things, some of which are class specific so will only be glossed over here.

First, all tanks must realize that stamina is not king. Sure you need enough health to take the big hits, but stacking stamina to the exclusion of all else is just turning you into a big mana sponge for your healer. You will take so much damage so often that your healers will have issues keeping you up. To many tanks focus solely on stamina and are horrible to heal.

Secondly, improve your items as much as you can in the best possible way. This means following the reforging and stat priorities for your tanking class as best as you can. You can find the stat and reforging priorities for each tanking class in our Reforge This Guide, or look at specific class priorities here: Paladin, Druid, Warrior, Death Knight.

Even though the WoW tank reforging guides are aimed at just reforging, the stats are valid for all types of item enhancement. Keep them in mind when gemming and enchanting your gear as well.

Lastly, even though stats have priorities try to keep some balance between them. There are certain fights were some stats serve you better than others so stacking just block for example can lead to disaster. Also due to diminishing returns it is best to balance dodge and parry as much as possible so that you are not taking as big a hit on them.

The example to consider here is a character having 20% parry and 10% dodge. This essentially means you are losing a huge amount of stat points to diminishing returns on parry. Reforging a lot of parry over to dodge could net you a resulting 16.5% parry and 16.5% dodge. As you can see just by shifting points between the two stats you pick up 3% more avoidance!


How to Tank – Balancing Threat and Survivability

Now that we know all about how to increase threat and increase survivability we come to the $64,000 dollar question: How do you balance them?

Remember, this is not WotLK WoW Tanking anymore.  You can not just AOE tank everything, you need to think about balancing tank threat and tank survivability.

In the short term and for most situations the best answer is that as a tank you should really focus on survivability first. If you are dead, the group is dead, period.

Even when working with PUG groups where DPS pulls threat all the time, it is generally better to just worry about survivability first. What can help sometimes is to post a message when you join a group saying something like: “Sorry guys, just came back to WoW after a few months off (or been up all night cramming for an exam, interview, got called into work, etc), I can tank, but need a bit of a head-start on threat please as I’m a bit rusty (slow).”

This simple message will get DPS to lay off for a while at the start of a fight and even the craziest group to calm down a bit and just get through the content. Sure it may be a bit of a white lie, but if you move through the instance in 45 minutes with no wipes, isn’t that better than DPS trying to push for a 30 minute clear that ends up taking 2 hours because of 10 wipes?

There are times when in a raid with a preset group in certain fights were threat is key. This is generally when dealing with boss fights that have a DPS race component where the DPS players need to hit harder to down the boss in time. In these cases, or in situations where you have a preset group with DPS that constantly pulls threat even when giving you a head start then you need to focus more on threat.

Ok, down to the final answer here, and sorry it’s really not a concrete answer at all. The best way to balance threat and survivability is to generally focus on survivability and have your DPS players slow down and give you time to build threat initially.


World of Warcraft - Related Content
Reforge This Guide| WoW Tank Guide | Class Guides


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Byron has been playing and writing about World of Warcraft for the past ten years. He also plays pretty much ever other Blizzard game, currently focusing on Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, while still finding time to jump into Diablo III with his son.

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