Using Recount As A Tank

One of the mods that I sacrifice some some of my screen real estate for is Recount. So what’s a Tank doing staring at Recount? Well, I’m not raid leading so I’m not monitoring the DPS levels. It wouldn’t matter much anyway because the DPSers in my guild tend to be very good.

I don’t have Recount opened to Damage Done or DPS. I have it opened to a page called Deaths. Recount will faithfully count up the number of times your raid team members have died.

I’m usually up there, but sometimes an ambitious mage or rogue will lead the way.

While it’s nice to know that I’ve now died 11 times in this Ulduar run, that’s not really important.

However, by left clicking on my toons name in the Recount frame I can bring up the Death Report. This will show me the last 10 seconds or so of my toons life. Heals received and damage taken, and help a Tank answer the most important question of any raid, ‘why did we die?’

The first thing I look for it mistakes on my part. It’s fairly easy to see a 10k+ Biting Cold and know that I let my stack get too high.

I can also check for mistakes on my teammates fault.

For instance, on General Vezax, we had new Priest. When he died, I looked at his death report and saw the Saronite Vapor had hit him for 20k. He stayed in it too long. You have to be very careful how you handle this information. For us, we had our other priest, who had done the encounter several times relate how difficult it was for him to learn. Something like, “Yep, you stood in the Saronite too long and it killed you. Man, I remember when I was learning this fight; it took me a couple of attempts to figure out, too. You’ll get it.”

We let him know what the issue was and how to correct the problem, but we tried to make sure he didn’t feel called out or belittled.

It’s also fairly easy to see a 5,000,000 damage rocket strike.

After looking for mistakes, I look at how long I went without heals. Sometimes, this is because the healer was killed by some AoE damage or a loose mob. Other times, it’s because the healer left HoTs rolling on me and switched targets. This was an issue on some of the keepers. We had to tell certain healers that they simply couldn’t come off the tanks.

You occaisionally catch the classic Ardent Defender leapfrog. That really makes me upset. Currently with Ardent Defender, it only works on hits if you are below 35%. Since I was above 35%, it didn't do a bloody thing on this hit. Thankfully, it’s being fixed next patch.

Recount also has a nifty feature that you can broadcast the Death Report to the Raid, your party, or as a whisper to another player, like your Raid Leader or Tank Officer. This is fantastic for when you are having a disagreement with someone about what happened. You say you got no heals for 5 seconds. Healers say they were on you; you link the Death Report showing only Blood Presence ticks and Judgment of Light healing.

I read somewhere that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. Every wipe needs to be a learning experience. What did we do wrong, how did we die, what can we do differently next time. Recount’s Death Meter is a treasure trove of information to figure out what went wrong and fix it.