Hi, I’m Caesar of Honorbound. Inspired from a recent post I thought I should post a little (basic) guide how I tank. Outlands tanking is pretty different from pre-tBC tanking. It’s not uncommon with 6 mobs in a single pull. This is not an advanced tanking guide it’s more the basic ABC for new warriors.
Gear
Stamina and defense. Burst damage is your biggest enemy, and stamina and defense is what’s going to make you survive. And surviving is your goal. Parry, Block and dodge rating is nice too but stamina and defense comes first. Second most important is always keep stocked on consumables. Always ask the warlock for 2 stones (one major and one greater health-stone or whatever the new health-stones are called) and keep some healing pots on you. And bind the consumables to a key! Weapon damage is important, a lot of your threat (30-50%) comes from your white damage, and more white damage also means more rage witch equals more threat. Get a fast weapon unless you intend to Devastate. (And even if you do intend to devastate it’s nice to have a fast weapon and switch mid-fight to the slower).
Key-bindings
Bind your skills to keys, you need to mouse to move etc. This is extremely important, and learn your bindings by heart. You also have to ‘get to know’ your skills, if you find yourself starting in the bottom left corner of your screen and see when the cool down for revenge is over you don’t see the details of the battle. If you have trouble seeing this without looking at the spells move you health bar, rage bar, revenge action and shield slam to the middle of the screen (maybe scaled down) so you can see them and the battle! In time you’ll learn to see this without looking at it even without moving them.
Talents
You can tank in any spec, but some talents makes tanking a lot easier and I would not recommend going without them assuming you tank much. I will not go over all the talents as I think you have brains enough to realize 5% parry talents etc are good for tanking.
Shieldslam – incredible single threat, a must have for tanks.
Defiance – incredible for threat, a must have for tanks.
Imp thunderclap – incredible threat opener (more on it later). Strongly recommended.
Imp Cleave – an incredible tool for multi tanking. Strongly recommended.
Devastate – crap in multi pulls and without a good weapon. In the right situations it’s very good but speccing in to sunder and focused rage is a better choice for 5 man instances and without the proper gear. This talent can easily be skipped.
Main Assist (MA), Main Tank (MT), Off Tank (OT) & Puller
It’s very important every one fires on the same target. If they don’t you cannot keep agro on everything. Some people find it very hard to follow MA, but they just have to learn if you intend to do any harder instances. One very helpful method is for the MA to replace his favorite action with a macro like the following example.
/script SetRaidTargetIcon("target",
;
/Cast Frost Bolt
The MA has to be party leader in order for this to work. What it does is mark the mob with a death skeleton above it’s head (similar to hunters mark). If you are MA do not switch target unless it’s really required. Mark your mob well in advance so everyone always knows what mob to attack next. Mark the next target just before the current one dies, and mark well before the pulls so CC classes knows what’s going to be attacked first. MA and MT can never be the same person, having the OT as MA is perfect though.
MT
Your job is to keep everything that is not tanked by the OT tanked. Don’t try to tank the OTs target if there is a OT who can do the job and there are more mobs who need to be tanked. Trust the group!
OT
Your job is to tank the current MA target while the MT tanks everything else, especially the first mob to go down, after that the MT should have so good threat on everything that he can tank the rest of the mobs for the reminder of the fight, in big pulls it’s not bad to have the OT tank all MA target though. MA and OT is great if it’s the same person so there are no misunderstandings in what needs to be tanked. Hunters are incredible offtanks (use pet with growl) as is a second warrior, feral druid or tankadin. If you have nothing of this a rogue or shaman can work, but preferably the MT then, after gaining agro on the other mobs, taunt the main targets and takes on tanking that one too.
Pulls
Use charge as much as you can, it’s important you start the fight with some rage in case you get a miss or two in the beginning. If the mobs has to be moved back (because they fear or knock back for example) stand really far back and ask someone else to pull and then charge in as they come running in. If it’s a hard pull with risk of adds, ask the hunter to do the pull so he can feign death if it goes bad. If you can’t charge; use bloodrage before fight starts.
In multi mob pulls be sure that all crowd control (CC) is done away from where the fighting will be going on. A sheep, icetrap etc in the middle of 5 mobs will get broken because of multi-shot, blade flurry, cleave etc. move the fight away from CC’d mobs if something has to get CC’d in the middle of a group.
Crowd control is always good. Use it as much as possible.
LOS pulling
Quite often there are casters in the group. Casters hurt like hell and when pulling they will stand back and nuke you (and your pretty armor is useless). Pull the mobs and then immediately run around a corner where they cannot see you. And tell everyone to stay out of line of sight as well so the mobs don’t start nuking them. The mobs will then have to run forward so they can see you, and around the corner you’ll be waiting on the in melee range!
Single pulls
Revenge and Shield slam is what you should be using. Be sure you always have rage for this and do not mindlessly spam sunder armor. Only use sunder when both revenge and shield slam is on cool down. Soak up extra rage with Heroic strikes or shield block. There is almost never any excuse for not using all rage you have. Single pulls are great for learning your shield slam, revenge and sunder rhythm so you don’t have to look at those abilities but can instead look at the fight, your rage and health.
Multi-mob tanking
Ok this is trickier. But first learn to trust your OT and don’t think your not doing your job because you are not tanking -everything-. Thunderclap (improved) is very good threat and beats demo shout. Use that at as your first ability instead.
There are basically two openers, either you have a hunter that can do the misdirection (lvl 70 hunter ability that transfers their threat to you) and do a multi-shot for opener. Use blood rage right before and thunderclap the mobs. Focus on the ones the multishot did not hit for the first hits.
Second opener is charge->thunderclap->defensive stance
It’s not too uncommon one mob resist and go straight for your healer and tries to pass you, immediately target this mob and either taunt or do some agro ability on it. Trust your OT and let the main target through out of the group. Any rage or damage spent on this target is totally wasted.
Cycle through the mobs and place either a shield slam, auto hit, revenge or sunder on each of them. Use cleave a lot, it’s incredible for tanking multi mob pulls and can generate a very high threat output. Do a demo shout on them too (either before, during or after the first cycle depending on how many and if you have been healed yet etc) Do not keep autoattack on only one mob, use tab and spread it out. Then either continue to either apply threat at all of them with special focus on the next MA target or taunt the main target (if you do not have a proper OT) and tank that one too.
Fearing mobs
This is pretty common. First learn to watch the cast bar of the mobs (this is also very good for interrupting their spell casting such as heals or damage spells). Stance-dance the fears if you can. If it’s an instant cast AoE fear then keep your healers close to you. If you become feared you are temporarily removed for the mobs agro list, so it’s not uncommon for the healer to be beaten then. And that is a common source for a wipe. Instead have both the healer and tanking being feared (so the boss will go for neither) and let some other class tank the mob (preferably some class with some ability to survive tanking the mob for some time or able to kite the mob while the healer and tank are feared).
Common sources of wiping and how to avoid them.
Tank becomes CC’d, all mobs go for the healer.
Especially when fighting new mobs where you don’t know what abilities they have this is not an uncommon situation. Once you know the abilities of the mobs, try to avoid this situation by killing and OT any mobs witch can do this first. But if this do happen hopefully the healer will survive it (fade, bear form, kiting are great ways of escape) until the CC is over. Make sure everyone understand this is primary concern and that you are dispelled/warded/tremor totemed etc if possible. It seems that even if you where top of the agro table you have to “update” the threat on mobs for them to switch target, often a demo shout do the trick. If you are not sure a demo shout will suffice, this is the time to use Challenging Shout (aoe taunt). To quickly move in to the mobs, quickly going berserker stance and intercept is a good way. The following macro is great for charging/intercepting and changing to appropriate stance:
/cast [nocombat,stance:1] Charge; [combat,nostance:3] Berserker Stance; [nocombat,nostance:1] Battle Stance; [combat,stance:3] Intercept
Tank dies due to burst damage or healer going oom.
Assuming you have a good healer and the reason you die is because you simply take too much damage either as burst or over time (healer go oom). First use CC! This is superb for mitigating a lot of damage. Secondly, a major source of damage is from spell casters. Do not ever let spell casters stand in the back use LOS pulling (read above). If it’s not possible they should be silenced pulled (counter spell, earth shock, silencing shot etc). If you have them in melee range learn to use shield bash and concussion blow. Always look at the mobs and see when they start casting something. Turn on the “see enemy castbar” option in the interface options and interrupt it.
If you still die it’s time for kiting, hunters are the experts of kiting, but experienced shamans and mages can do the trick too. Basic kiting of melee mobs is to try get so many as possible and start running back. As you fight off the mobs not being kited the agro will increase on the kited mobs to the healer (the healer drawn healing agro on them). If the kiter applies different amount of threats to different mobs they will be coming back one at a time (for the healer so be ready!). With a good kiter this tactic is very powerful.
Adds.
Always pull back to a safe position with room for being feared etc. In some of the new instances mobs will randomly appear (stealthed assassins seems to be blizzards new thing!). These have to be picked up immediately off the healer. Preferably the rest of the group will help too pull agro on them and move them to you, OT really should be in his toes for this!
Tank looses threat to the healer.
Learn to ignore putting threat on the main target. Your job is to make sure you are a meat-wall until the dps picks them off one at a time. The rest of the group can take care of one single mob that comes if they are prepared for it (stunlocking, frost nova etc works wonder if nothing can tank the mob). If you repeatedly loose aggro to healers, ask them to fade heal or go with low healing in the beginning. If that is not possible (you would die if they didn’t instantly landed a 4000 heal on you) use more CC or start kiting. Multimob tanking is not easy and having a good and even threat output on 6 mobs will take time to learn, realize your own limitations and ask for a hunters to ot some mob with their pets etc if you think it’s needed.
Tank looses threat to dps.
Tell them to focus fire on the MA target and not to dps to their liking on random mobs. Blade flurry, sweeping strikes, multishot or AoE is great dps, but it means the tank has to be able to see what mobs are being hit and can be one step ahead (or the healer able to heal the dps drawing agro). Again this comes with experience and getting to know your group, people will know when it’s fine to start doing damage to several mobs, if the healer can cope with some mobs attacking other targets etc.
