I first began tanking seriously as a druid back during Burning Crusade. At the time I was running with a guild of r/l friends, and we all tried to fulfill the roles normally needed in a dungeon: As a druid I decided to focus on tanking since one of my best friends, who played almost as much as I did, was a priest, which allowed him to take over the bulk of the healing. (I also ran with a shaman who could heal, too.)

I found that on those occasions when I was doing DPS instead of tanking, I was often bored. While DPS is an important role in a group, it’s not really very demanding: you simply need to run through your rotation of skills and try not to pull aggro off the tank.

Tanking appealed to me more because it required more thought. A good tank must be able to react quickly to sudden surprises: he must be able to taunt adds or a mob that an overzealous DPSer has pulled aggro on. He must be able to accurately judge when to direct his DPS to use crowd control and must also be aware of not breaking a CC’d mob before the group is ready. He must also be aware of the healer’s mana and health: if the healer is being attacked, it is the tank’s responsibility to taunt the mob(s) off the healer.

Because of these responsibilities and because of the difficulty involved in performing some of them, even in 5-man dungeons during TBC (but especially in Heroics), tanking was easily one of the hardest jobs in the game. As a result, good tanks were hard to come by. A good tank isn’t born: they are trained. While some aspects of tanking require good reflexes and there are some people who just aren’t well suited to the role, no great tank ever started out that way. But unless you had friends running with you who didn’t mind wiping while you learned, it was hard to convince people to stick with a group that was being led by an inexperienced tank.

One of the most important aspects of good tanking is knowing the encounters. Knowing what to expect before it happens can go a long way towards making a tank’s job easier. For example, if a new tank went into Shattered Halls without knowing what to expect, you could anticipate at least 3-4 wipes, even if the tank was quite skilled.

Sadly the difficulty of most instances in TBC led to an impediment to casual players. For example, many instances required good CC. This meant bringing at least one player capable of solid crowd control. Since most pure DPS classes had decent CC, they usually won the DPS slots over the hybrid classes, who were usually relegated to healing or tanking. Since Blizzard didn’t want people to have to bring a particular class for most runs (assuming no one was over-geared for the encounters), they decided to reduce the difficulty of most instances to where CC was not necessary in most cases, therefore allowing any DPS class to fulfill the role.

The direct result of this reduction in difficulty was that tanking become less a matter of accurately directing and coordinating encounters and more a matter of spamming AoE abilities to try and hold aggro on the multi-mob pulls. Tanking went from one of the more challenging aspects of the game, to one of the more rote. This in turn allowed less skilled players to shine in the role, thus increasing the number of available tanks, since the learning curve for tanking went down dramatically.

Now, since Wrath I was often tempted to try my hand at healing on my druid but the task of assembling a healing set, coupled with the tanking and DPS sets I was already using, seemed too daunting a task to worry about. Plus since I was already running with several other healers, it just wasn’t necessary.

However, when a few of my friends from devnull decided to level Horde characters on our old Hellscream realm, I decided to join them. I deleted an unplayed twink druid I had made for the 20-29 bracket and created a female Tauren druid named Fujimoo. Initially I was tempted to make a shaman but as my friends had both made druids already, I thought it would be neat if we could do stealth runs together, which would require me to play either a druid or a rogue and I felt the druid simply had more versatility. After all, I already knew how to tank with one and the ability to heal with a druid gave it additional depth. (As it happened, Byaghro decided to level a paladin (Prognosis) instead of a druid, so the whole stealth run thing never came up anyway.)

In the end I managed, in between raiding on my main, to level my Horde druid to 80 and started working on gear. During the leveling process I had decided to pay for dual speccing and I went with a feral primary spec and restoration off-spec. This, I felt, would allow me the greatest freedom in terms of roles, since I could easily tank, DPS or heal any encounter. It definitely worked well and I not only was able to easily find groups for most instances I wanted to run but I even found myself getting random whispers from people I had run with before asking me to join them on some run or other.

Shortly after reaching level 80, Prognosis and I decided to relocate to another realm: Whisperwind. The reason was that Prognosis knew a guy in r/l that was the guild leader of a Horde guild on Whisperwind that was not only actively raiding, but was also in need of good tanks. Prognosis had leveled Ret and went with a Protection main spec, Ret off-spec configuration.

While running instances for upgrades, and emblems to buy even better upgrades, I found myself more often than not being relegated to the healer role. Partially because Prognosis, who I often ran with, didn’t have a healing set but mostly because as a two person group, with both tank and healer roles set, finding three other players for DPS roles was usually quite easy.

At first I was quite tentative about healing. I wasn’t sure how good I would be and I was nervous that the role would prove to be too difficult to handle. I had often run with people I thought were good healers and with those I thought were terrible healers, but I was hard-pressed to explain what the difference was, beyond the obvious: bad healers let people (especially the tank) die and good ones didn’t.

As I played the role more and more I discovered several things about healing that I had often taken for granted. For one thing, a well geared healer doesn’t usually have a hard time healing in most situations. The most difficult situations are those where the tank takes a lot of spike damage: seeing the tank’s health drop below 35% in a second or two can often lead to panic and heal spamming to try and prevent the inevitable fatal blow that takes the tank out. But unless a healer is absent minded, this situation really only tends to happen rarely, and then only on the most difficult encounters or when the tank is under-geared for the content.

Another thing I discovered is that the healer probably has more of an impact on the ability of a group to clear content than any other role, assuming that the tank and DPS are at least competent. That is to say, that as long as the tank can keep aggro off the healer to a reasonable extent, the healer should be able to keep everyone alive, even through the occasional massive damage spike. A group consisting of a well geared tank and excellent DPS will still struggle to clear content if the healer is not up to the task of keeping everyone alive. On the other hand an excellent healer will allow even an under-geared group the time needed to down mobs and bosses, at least to the limit of the healer’s mana pool.

One of the things that non-healers sometimes don’t grasp is how they died. This is often especially true of DPS, as tanks usually chalk it up to the healer either making a mistake or being inexperienced. Tanks differ in the amount and type of healing they require not only from one individual to another, but also based on the tank’s class and based on the boss or mobs that are being tanked.

One of the common reasons for a tank to die is that non-boss mobs will sometimes produce unexpectedly high spike damage on a tank. If the healer is not prepared, it may catch him unaware. There’s also a common misconception among the WoW community at large that more health directly translates into a better tank. But stacking stamina is a tactic that only people who are lacking mitigation should be doing. While having 30k health is obviously better than having 25k, a tank that takes 5k damage a hit is going to need that 30k health a lot more than a tank that only gets hit for 3,500 damage.

When DPS take damage it is usually due to one of four reasons:

1. The DPS pulled aggro. In this case the damage is usually high and severe and the healer will not likely be able to keep the DPSer alive, at least not for very long.
2. The DPS was hit by an avoidable beam or AoE attack. This includes things like the Void Zones common on may bosses, as well as things like Poison Nova. In these cases the damage is usually sufficient to one-shot the DPS. This is the most common reason for DPS death, particularly in raids.
3. AoE damage that may, or may not, be avoidable. This includes things like Intense Cold from Keristrasza, or Ingvar the Plunderer’s Smash and Staggering Roar attacks. Although not typically deadly, they are the most common reason for healers needing to heal the DPS.
4. Finally, there are some random target abilities that may or may not be avoidable, such as Eadric the Pure’s Hammer of the Righteous, or the Poison Tipped Spear attack of the Titanium Vanguards. While some, like Ick’s Pursuit, are avoidable, many are not.

The presence of #3 and especially #4 are interesting because they render a certain old axiom of instance and raid group roles moot:

If the tank dies, it’s the healer’s fault,

if the healer dies, it’s the tank’s fault,

and if the DPS die, it’s their own damn fault.

Obviously if a player is hit with Hammer of the Righteous, or especially with Poison Tipped Spear, and is not healed and/or cleansed, they will likely die… which is certainly not their fault.

That being said, there are occasions where a healer must make a choice. I’m reminded of a Penny Arcade comic: Le Choix De Sophie. Although usually a healer is more than capable of healing multiple targets at the same time (this is especially true of druids), there are also times where it simply isn’t possible to heal EVERYONE. Wild Growth, for instance, has a limited range. It only heals everyone in the party if everyone is within 15 yards of the target that WG was actually cast on. A good druid will try to position himself between the ranged DPS and the tank/melee and just cast it on himself, but sometimes this just isn’t possible. On those occasions, especially where the tank and at least one DPS is taking massive damage simultaneously, the healer often needs to choose: who will live, and who will die. (Hint: Smart money is on the tank.)

After facing these situations often enough, and especially if a healer finds himself in this position but somehow manages to keep everyone alive, well… it’s a rather heady power. It feels a lot like playing God. And it’s enough to make even the most seasoned tank rethink his position on healing and healers in general.