How Many Tanks Per Guild?

[porigromus]

I am interested in tanking in raids. I haven't raided in the past but am familiar with tanking 5 man dungeons as a warrior. How many tanks does a guild usually run in a raid? A little nervous about being primary tank, are their off tank roles in MC, BWL, etc? Thanks

[Drain]

Guilds struggle to get enough tanks to begin with, so you shouldn't worry much about lack of slots. But typically, 3 will be MTs, and given all of the gear first. This is in case the first 1-2 guys miss a raid or has to be replaced. There's also plenty of bosses with 2 guards, so you need 3 geared tanks. After this, additional tanks are just for a few fights, and kept around as insurance for 1-3 have to be replaced. Your top 3 tanks won't be at every raid, or might have to leave mid raid, so no guild would stop with that. If you're not prepared for this, it can mean scrapping a whole raid, which no one wants to do.

Assuming you simply can't get a slot with guild A, there's still guild B, C, D, E, F, and so on, most of which will be looking for tanks/healers... these roles literally have the pick of the litter for guilds.

[porigromus]

Thanks for answering my question.

[Spottedcow]

Disagree. Yes, you're probably going to have 3 prot tanks (and a couple of fury warriors with a half-assed tank set for random fights with lots of adds like Garr). One is the MT, the other two are OTs. Sometimes you'll have 4 tanks, a MT and 3 OTs. But if you're in a guild where your MT is not making 99% of raids, that's probably a good sign that it's a bad guild. Being MT means knowing every fight better than everyone else and always bringing your A game. A DPS can slack off for a night without it really impacting the raid, a lazy tank can make the experience awful for 39 other players.

Any way you slice it, 3 or 4 prot warriors is 10% or less of the raid composition. The other 90% is DPS and healers. So tank slots are far rarer than dps and heals, which means there's healthy competition for those spots. You can always find guilds that are TRYING to build a raid team and get a tank spot there, but established guilds generally don't see a particularly high turnover rate on tanks. And up-and-coming guilds are usually a crap shoot, more of them fail to get 40 level 60's on the roster than succeed. So while you *can* find spots easily, finding spots where you actually step into a raid instance and down bosses are... significantly less easy.

Tanking is incredibly rewarding and I wish I'd done it in retail vanilla, but don't go into it expecting rainbows and sunshine. You'll work harder than other roles to get a raid spot and once you're there, you'll work harder than other roles to keep it. Warriors are also a pain in the ass to level and the BoE pre-BiS tank gear is ridiculously expensive. Tanking is a commitment, so be sure that it's something you're ok with sinking a ton of time and gold into before you go down that path.