Also I wanted to thank you for the heads up on threat plates. I tried it once when you mentioned it a month or 2 ago, didn’t like it and dropped it (mostly because it had defaulted to showing all plates instead of just enemies), then picked it up again a week later and loved it. Can’t hardly imagine tanking without it now.

One thing every tank needs to take away from this post: You have 2 jobs. Get threat, stay alive.

A word to DPS migrating to tanking work: When you’re tanking, gear doesn’t matter much past the defence cap and basic HP requirements unless you’re running hardmode raid content. Work on situational awareness, knowing your abilities, and everything else will fall into place. At the end of the fight, so long as everyone is alive (granted its not always your problem) and the boss is down, you’re a hero.

To HerrDrache: about the rhinos and warriors. You never noticed that you can’t thunderclap while silenced? ^_^ apparently the rhinos wrap bubblewrap around your feet so its real quiet when you stomp on the ground.

One of the things I do in heroics is to focus the healer. That way I can tell what their mana bar looks like, how their health is (hopefully they moved
out of the cleave in H-Nexus), and if I can keep pulling. I don’t ignore DPS, but yes, they’re lower on my attention scale. The cat that attacks the unmarked mob *just* far enough away that I can’t hit him, or the melee that stands next to me in front of the cleaving boss… well, I can’t help you. And if casters would please stand at caster range, as the 130% rule does NOT apply when in melee range? I’m dreaming again :)

There’s an issue I ran into at 80 on the warrior when I was getting better gear. In raid gear I was rage starved, and in my “heroic tanking set” (still with everything stam/def/agi) I *still* ran into threat issues. At that point (please don’t try that as a fresh 80!) I decided to try to “threaten up” by increasing my damage. 2 DPS trinkets, a (bad) agi-DPS ring, and playing with a DPS weapon while upping my expertise helped a TON!
And yes, I use ThreatPlates as well – next step is to turn on “mouseover threat” and see if/how well that works :)

Lastly, knowing mobs… yeah. About that… Gun’Drak Rhinos. I tanked them on the warrior, dozens of times. I face-tanked them as a bear several times. They are no problem, right? I tank them as a Pally. And discover that they have a silence?!?! WTF is up with that? Whatever rotation I have is shot, I’m just trying out everything because of course I don’t know exactly what’s a spell and what’s not a spell… Most of what I tank with is a spell!!!

My ‘old’ main is a level 80 Ret Pally. I created a new Pally so that I could have a tanking toon (read a few articles and decided Pally was right for me). Rather than just pick up gear on my existing 80 and wing it for a while, I created the new toon to learn the mechanics from the beginning. I believe this has really helped me. I just hit 65 last night, and everything is going very well.

I do have to laugh at the occassional trade or guild post stating, “I out dps’d the tank”…. well, thanks for doing your job.

Tab: targets the creep in front of you. If you waited 0.5 seconds, he should be beating on the tank.
F: targets what the creep is attacking (the tank).
F: targets what the tank is attacking.
Unload DPS.

Three taps on two keys. Will really help the tank/group out.

As an 80 prot warrior, I add cleave to the mix to burn off a bit of rage and maintain a large lead on threat in heroics. Sometimes I do need to divert my attention for a second or three, and having a huge lead on threat on the whole group makes that easy.

I also hate all those that mock my abilities when I use thunder clap on single targets. Do they not read the tooltip and see what else it does? Wow.

Also, I started a frost DK tank just to see what the other side is up to. My advice for the pugs that get one of the hordes of frost DK tanks? Remember that they don’t have a ton of threat tools at that level. They may be level 60 or 61, but their abilities are limited because that is still the starting levels for them. Give them a break and hold off on groups to let them get aggro. It all comes back to Butt’s advice on worrying more about the group’s success and less about your own personal deeps.

I have to tell this one, too: I was playing my baby paladin (Ret lvl 25) and got a group as DPS. The tank? A 24 fury warrior that didn’t even own a shield. He started dual-wield tanking and of course couldn’t hold aggro or anything. I popped on my sword and board and upped Righteous Fury and pretty much ignored him. The group saw how well this worked and also ignored him. After he died 6 times in a row by not being healed when he attacked something other than what I did, he got mad and left. We did a group /cheer and 4-manned the rest of it. I respecced prot and just queue as tank now.

I’ll let you in on a secret. upgrade sunder to devastate, and toss in shield slam and shockwave (basically, a second, better sunder, and a second, better tclap), and I rarely use more than that to tank at 80. Sure, I’ve gotten into the habit of tossing other abilities in there as needed, but that’s the core, the 90% of situations.

As to other new-tank experiences, I was doing Oc on my DK, typically dps but I’d recently changed his second spec to tank, and had better gear than when I started tanking on my warrior back in the Emblem of Heroism days, including a 232 weapon, but still at least half blues. Thus, I knew how tank in the ways that go beyond any class’s particular abilities, I had gear I knew was up to the challenge of the zones, and I was entirely comfortable with my position. The full t10 warlock who’d pull boss aggro off me every time Dark Command’s fixate wore off? He didn’t say a word. I was waiting for him to, ready with righteous indignation, since clearly this was not a “tank sucks” moment but a “tank is decent but has mostly blues” moment, and figure he probably knew that too. Probably helped that I was solid on trash aggro, kept a good pace, and knew what I was doing.

However, I know a lot of people who are tanking in youngish gear don’t have that experience, and I’ll typically cut them some slack. Then I see them do stuff like barely seem to notice when a mob is on the healer. Gear not withstanding, some folks have it, and some don’t. For now, that’s usually acceptable, since healers tend to have pretty solid HP pools and can survive a lot more, and the with-it dps just burned down the mob in a few second anyhow, but that won’t be the case come cataclysm. We won’t have random parties which greatly outgear the instances, and mistakes will be far more costly. With luck, the easy mode we’re in now, due to groupmates being able to pick up the slack, has served as enough of a training platform, teaching young tanks the basics in a low-cost environment and that they’ll adapt to higher stakes, but I’m not really that hopeful. I figure too many people, tank, dps, and healers, have learned too many bad habits, gotten too complacent. We’ll see.