Tanks are getting a lot of love from Mr. Robot recently. Here’s a summary of what you need to know to sim and find the best gear.
The DPS “Blender”
Our most advanced feature is one that tanks have for the very first time in Warcraft. Crazy, right? That even over 10 years later, there are new things to help you gear.
Here’s the deal. As a tank, your main concern is… “I can’t die.”
No problem, we have always helped you gear for that. But then when happens when you are crushing content (or maybe just smack talking because they don’t hit as hard anymore)? You probably find yourself ditching some tanky gear and looking for DPS stuff instead.
That’s where the “Blender” comes in. You determine how tanky you want to be, and where the tradeoff is for adding DPS gear and stats. Maybe you like to be 100% tank, all the time. Maybe you like living on the edge and getting juuuuust enough defensive gear and then putting the rest into DPS. I’m not here to tell you how to play… I’m here to help you play how you want to play.
To use the blender, click on the gearing strategy picker to the right of your character name at the top of the gear optimizer page. The Blender appears at the bottom of the popup.
We have provided several presets for you — just pick one from the list, and press Save at the top-right of the gearing strategy popup. The presets are:
- All Toughness: gear entirely for toughness, completely ignore DPS. If you completely out-gear your current content (e.g. you have 925 ilvl gear and are doing heroic Tomb), this option is not recommended.
- Conservative: this is the default, it will start mixing in DPS gear conservatively as you begin out-gearing content.
- Balanced: smoothly transition from toughness gear to DPS gear, but a bit more aggressively than the Conservative approach.
- Aggressive: go for all DPS unless you are horribly under-geared for the content you are trying to do.
IMPORTANT: The Blender will work pretty well with our current “default” gearing strategies, but it works really well with a custom gearing strategy, or our upcoming Adaptive gearing strategies (not quite available yet for tanks, but will be soon!)
You can customize it instead of using a preset if you want. For more details, head over to this forum post and look for the “Custom Rule Sets” section.
Realistic Simulations
If you haven’t checked out our simulation engine for tanks, you can play with it over here.
With Legion, we were determined to provide a tool that can realistically sim tanks. In the past, the only tools available simmed tanks with unlimited health who could never die. Often the theorycraft focused on tank DPS sims only.
We were never satisfied with that. So we released more realistic tank sims in Legion and incorporating feedback over the past year. We’ve tested, tweaked, and retested until it looked solid with the latest version (launched with 7.2).
So now with 7.3, you can be confident you’re getting a pretty darn good simulation. Here’s some of the cool features:
- We use your real health, gear, talents, and stats, simulating a fight as if you were tanking.
- The simulator uses actual boss fights from current content. The bosses do the actual damage they’d do to you in-game, along with the frequency of melee and special attacks.
- Boss scripts in the simulator also do tank swaps!
- You get a full healing team in the simulations, which acts like your healers would. If your health is pretty high, they hot you. As your health goes down, they start casting heals, then bigger heals, then instant heals if you health drops fast.
- You can die. Yep – if you are taking too many hits that a healing team realistically can’t heal, you will die (as you would in game).
- The ‘rotations’ for tanks will use your big defensive cooldowns when appropriate, just like you’d time them up in a real fight (cool, right?!)
A focus on tank boss scripts
Now that tank simulations have proven to be accurate (and super useful), we are trying to get more out there for you to play with.
Here’s what we currently have pre-made for you…
- Krosus (Heroic) – read description
- Spellblade (Heroic) – read description
- Fallen Avatar (Heroic)
- Goroth (Mythic) – created by Woedenaz
- Felhounds of Sargeras for Antorus (F’harg) – created by Woednaz – read description
- Hasabel (Antorus) – (also by Woedenaz).
Adaptive strategies
The stats and gear recommendations adapt to your character. If you swap talents, new gear will be recommended. As you get new gear, it also adapts.
You can use the ‘blender’ settings as well. It will be really helpful.