The main thing that's missing from the second screen above is the full raid status bars. Mostly it's dumb stuff like silly DPS being all GOGOGOGOGOGO when I'm talking to the other tank, but there can be good info here. I don't do fancy raids with teamspeak and the like LFRs use chat to communicate. My threat meter here is the parchment-style display below the minimap. If you're a tank, your threat should almost always be first or second out of your 25-man raid otherwise, the boss will probably be attacking a DPS or a healer, and most of them will die in one or two hits from a raid boss. Tanks usually do far less DPS than dedicated damage classes, but we dish out more threat to a boss due to built-in modifiers and stances. Threat is basically how much of a badass a boss thinks you are, and thus how likely they are to keep attacking a character. Like most MMOs, fights in WoW use a threat system. These aren't necessarily required to live through a fight, but they can make life easier on my healers for a bit. Most of my panic buttons (usually damage reduction for a short period of time) have three-minute timers, shown as a rotating circle of dark and light on the button itself. That's the red meter counting down over the stack of damage/healing numbers in the picture above. Similarly, mods will let you easily see what the boss' cooldowns are for his or her abilities.Most of the time this is the result of a stacking debuff like the Flaming Spear above the more stacks you get of something, the more damage you take, so the other tank will have to taunt the boss off of you (or you taunt it off of them) and disengage from the fight for a second to let the debuffs wear off. Most raid bosses have a set of phases that they go through during which they'll use different attacks or will force you to hand them off to another tank to survive the onslaught. I like to save my Lay on Hands for myself, but I'll burn it on a party member if they get in trouble. In this case, the second tank's health is above and to the left of the boss' head. I can throw them a quick Lay on Hands if I need to if I focus on them. Not all fights require two tanks (some require more than that on harder difficulties), but enough of them do that losing the second tank is usually a bad thing. I set a focus on the other tank in LFRs to ensure that they stay alive. As a raid tank, I'll usually have a healer or two focusing on me, so this usually isn't an issue, but I have plenty of cooldowns to pop if things get hairy. As a tank, there are a few different things I have to keep track of in a fight, in no particular order: Here's one where I'm actually tanking a raid (albeit an LFR):Īs you can probably tell, WoW is not just about gameplay and adapting to what's happening in the world: it's also about data. And note that this is not a particularly pretty or well-organized screen it's very utilitarian and focused only on what I absolutely need, without much care for aesthetics. That is, of course, a relatively placid screenshot. Hey, since we've been talking about WoW lately, and seemed curious about WoW addons, here's a screenshot of my current addon setup: