For those of you new to tanking in general, there are several number and stats you must become deeply familiar with. These numbers will be even more important than your significant other’s birthday or the oft-forgotten date of your anniversary (assuming you’ve had time to get married between fighting Quilboars and Leper Gnomes). Tanking relies almost exclusively on your gear. If a Mage could wear plate with tanking stats, she would be a very formidable tank.
So, saunter on up to the bar and let’s get started. You might need a drink or two to get through some of the “technical numbers” and theory behind tanking, but I’ll try to keep it as brief as possible. You may not want to learn this, but you need to.
Whether you are a Warrior Tank, Bear Tank, or our favorite Holy Meatshield (a tanking Paladin), your number-one task is damage mitigation. When the 72 Elite is smacking you with his gigantic fists of flurry you need to be able to mitigate the damage caused so you stay aliveand by staying alive the rest of your team stays alive. For those of you who are already dumbfounded, Wiktionary gives us some synonyms to think about when describing damage mitigation: reduce, lessen, or decrease damage felt. So, if the 72 Elite hits for up to 3500 per swing of his massive rock fists on someone wearing cloth, then the tank must mitigate that damage to the point where it’s barely even noticeable.
More like a slight knocking sound on your helm rather than the *splat* sound your friendly mage might hear when those fists come smashing down.
There are mainly two ways of getting this done:
1. Stack the fight in your favor, and
2. When you have stacked the fight in your favor as much as you can, reduce as much of the damage that gets through, or
3. Don’t fight anything more than 10 levels below you-just kidding, besides, I said there were TWO ways, not three, Poindexter!
Issue Number 1: Stacking the Fight in your Favor.
Every time you go up against a mob the magical battle engine prepares the attack table. The attack table contains all of the possible outcomes from the attack: Miss, Dodge, Parry, Glancing Blow (though this only occurs by players and pets towards mobs), Block, Critical, Crushing Blow (though this only occurs by mobs towards pets and players), or Normal Hit. This table has a certain number of possible outcomes and each entry is assigned a range of values and is always situated in the following order:
MISS
DODGE
PARRY
GLANCING BLOW
BLOCK
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