Tank Companion

Tank Companion

Tanking in Midnight is a different job. Patch 12.0 took the combat log away
from addons and made your own health, resources, absorbs, cooldowns and buff
timers "secret" while you're in combat. That's why so many tank addons have
spent this expansion quietly doing nothing, or throwing errors mid-pull.

TankCompanion was built after that change rather than patched through it.
Everything it shows comes from what the client still tells addons: what you
pressed and when, the timing of every hit you take, your stagger pool, and
Blizzard's own server-side damage meter. No combat log, no guesswork, nothing
that breaks the moment you zone into a key.

A HUD THAT KNOWS YOUR SPEC

Not a generic bar pack. Each spec gets what it actually needs:

  - Stagger meter with Light/Moderate/Heavy zones, the size of the next tick,
    and your Purifying Brew charges right on the bar (Brewmaster)
  - Bone Shield stacks, a rune row, and a line on your Runic Power at Death
    Strike's cost (Blood)
  - Soul Fragments (Vengeance); Ironfur as stack depth, with a line at the two
    stacks that answer a big hit (Guardian); a Consecration pill that greys
    when you step out of it (Paladin); Shield Block and Ignore Pain (Warrior)
  - Active mitigation bars, defensive and utility cooldowns with charges and
    proc glows, and a row of its own for what you press for the group.
    Charges follow your talents: take Down in Flames and Fiery Brand shows both
  - Live coverage: how much of the time you're being hit your mitigation is
    actually up, while it's happening

Only mitigation you're meant to keep up ever reads DOWN. Guardian's Ironfur
isn't nagged, and while Metamorphosis or Fiery Brand is covering for Demon
Spikes, Vengeance's bar fills with its time instead. When the game hides a
buff in combat, its bar is timed from your casts and drawn striped, so you
always know which numbers are the game's and which are estimates.

Pick a layout (Focus, Standard or Everything) and switch any part on or off
from there. Four panels you can dock together or scatter, in a Dark or Light
skin, with grades and stagger in the classic greens or in blue and orange for
red-green colour vision (picked for you when the game's colourblind mode is
on). /tc unlock or Blizzard's Edit Mode unlocks the HUD, alerts and report
card together so you can place them alongside everything else, or attach the
HUD to Blizzard's Cooldown Manager so it sits where your eyes already are.

WARNINGS BEFORE THE HIT, NOT AFTER

  - Tank buster incoming — and the name of the best defensive that will be
    ready for it. A Guardian is told to stack Ironfur when fewer than two
    stacks will still be up as it lands
  - Your active mitigation has been down for too long while you're being hit
    (never in a pull's opening seconds, before you could have pressed it)
  - Heavy stagger with a Purifying Brew charge sitting there
  - Death review: exactly which cooldowns you still had when you went down

A more important warning is never overwritten: anything less urgent waits on
a second line under it. Each kind of alert picks its own sound, or none.

Tank-buster warnings come from DBM, and work in any language: TankCompanion
reads DBM's own tank timers rather than guessing from English ability names.
(During a fight the game keeps its built-in boss timeline's abilities hidden
from addons, so DBM is what makes this possible.)

A PRIVATE SCORE THAT TELLS YOU WHAT TO FIX

This is the part other tank addons don't do.

Every pull is scored across five things that are actually in your control —
mitigation coverage, avoidable damage, cooldown usage, survival and utility —
and you get a grade plus up to four plain-English insights:

  "Shield Block covered 62% of the time you were being hit; 14 of 58 hits
   landed without it."

  "Died at 1:12 with Last Stand and Shield Wall available."

The model is built to be fair rather than harsh. It knows every tank opens a
pull resource-starved, so the ramp before your first mitigation isn't counted
against you. It knows a Shield Wall isn't owed to a pull that never threatened
you. It knows some defensives are saved for a specific incoming hit rather
than rolled on cooldown, and judges those on whether something was up when the
hit landed. And a pull it couldn't measure properly is marked that way, not
handed a score it didn't earn.

It judges each spec the way it's played, too: Guardian's Ironfur by stacks
under heavy melee and into big hits rather than constant uptime, Brewmaster's
purifies by the stagger level you pressed them at, Blood's Death Strike
cadence, Vengeance's Metamorphosis and Fiery Brand alongside Demon Spikes. It
reads your talents, and a second charge held back for the next big hit is
never counted as a missed use.

After each pull a small card shows your score and the one thing most worth
fixing. It only opens between pulls, never mid-fight; click it for the full
breakdown, with each part of the score against your own median and every
insight marked with the part it explains. Want less on screen? Swap it for a
score splash (just the grade, big, for a moment) or a line in chat, chosen
separately for keys, dungeons, raids and delves.

When a dungeon, Mythic+ key, raid or delve ends, a run summary adds it all up:
kills, wipes, deaths, your best and worst pulls, your weakest area, and for a
key the time, upgrade and rating change, with every pull of the run laid out
in a strip you can click through. Delves count too, solo or grouped, and are
only ever compared with other delves.

You're compared against your own median over your last 20 pulls in that spec.
Never against other players. Your scores never leave your computer: the only
thing the addon shares is its version number, so tanks in your group or guild
hear when an update is out.

YOUR HISTORY, KEPT PROPERLY

A sortable log of every pull. Click one to see its breakdown beside the list,
and switch to Runs for every dungeon, key, raid and delve you've finished.
Narrow it with a click (keys, dungeons, raids, delves, a spec, bosses) or by
typing a place or boss, and the count, averages, best and the trend of your
last 30 pulls follow whatever is listed. Scores are shared across all your
tanks so you can see them side by side, or narrow to just the character
you're on.

Your pulls keep the measurements they were scored from, so when the scoring
model improves, your old pulls are re-scored under it automatically the next
time you log in, instead of being stranded on an old one. The score each pull
showed at the time is kept, and you can switch this off.

EVERY TANK SPEC

Blood Death Knight, Vengeance Demon Hunter, Guardian Druid, Brewmaster Monk,
Protection Paladin, Protection Warrior.

The same download also runs on WoW Forever for Warrior, Paladin and Bear Druid
tanks. It recognises you by stance, form or Righteous Fury (or the tank role),
keeps the pull going through a mid-fight stance dance, and handles vanilla's
spell ranks for you. Out of your tanking stance in a dungeon, the HUD says so
in one dimmed line rather than vanishing.

It works whatever language your game is in. On Russian, Korean and Chinese
clients it draws everything in the game's own font, and the HUD uses the
game's own names for your spells and resources. Menus and coaching text can
be translated on CurseForge, under Localization; each release includes
whatever has been translated so far.

GETTING STARTED

Install and tank something. It configures itself from your spec and talents.

  /tc          your pull history
  /tc run      your last dungeon, key, raid or delve summary
  /tc options  everything else
  /tc unlock   move the HUD, alerts and report card
  /tc help     every command

DBM is optional, but it's where tank-buster warnings come from. WeakAuras is
optional too; a WeakAuras and plugin API is included for anyone who wants to
build on it.