Tanking protip: Use your cooldowns

A common healer complaint is that a tank is too “squishy”. When faced with two tanks of equivalent gear, a healer is going to find the tank that does not use cooldowns to be “harder to heal”. All tank classes have cooldowns and part of being a good tank is knowing when to use them.

Some tanks withhold all of their cooldowns for the potential bone-crushing event on a boss or in case a healer goes down. Other tanks blow all of their cooldowns with no thought. In both cases, the tank is missing out on the tactical use of a cooldown to alleviate healing strain and chewing up the healers’ mana.

I do not have a quick and easy checklist to demonstrate when you should use your cooldowns. This can only come with practice and with monitoring your performance. Talk to your healers and get an idea of the times in the fights where they were strained. Do a post-fight analysis of your health to see where your health dropped or where you did not get lots of heals. Talk to your other tank to see where they felt the most pain.

All of this helps to avoid this kind of post-fight meter:

[13:16:12] Recount – Damage Taken for Last Fight
[13:16:12]: 1. Geared-no-cooldowns (43.8%)
[13:16:12]: 2. Lesser-geared-used-cooldowns (24.5%)