I’ve run some of the new instances in Cataclysm, and along the way I’ve seen a lot of really good tanking out there. It’s exciting the way the tanks I’ve found in random pugs are taking the content seriously and using some pretty solid movement, positioning and spell balance abilities in their play.

What is this ‘communication’ you speak of?

One thing I noticed in the pugs was that, while the tanks were individually skilled, and DPS players and healers played their roles well, each person played as individuals, without much in the way of teamwork or communication.

The only points where communication came into play was for a brief pause to ensure each player understood the strategy for the next boss encounter.

In a random pug, this is a fairly common story. But it shouldn’t be, and I’ll explain why I feel that way before getting into specifics.

In each pug, I had a different tank. Each tank controlled group pulls in a different way. There are two different core styles of  group tanking, and each tank used one of those styles, with personal variations, without telling the rest of the group what to expect.

The DPS players in these runs played with their own expectations of how the tank would be pulling, but in some of the cases, it was clear that what they expected, and what the tank was actually doing, were not the same thing.

That right there is where communication should come into play.

I’ll get into a more comprehensive breakdown of the two core styles of group tanking in a minute, I want to nail down why this is important first.

When the DPS players are unsure of what the tank is going to do next, or how the tank is handling the pulls, the single greatest effect is to instill confusion in the group during the transition from target to target.

I noticed some DPS players were trying to follow the tank’s lead and always stay on whichever mob the tank currently had targeted. This caused problems when the tank used a style that involved frequent switching of targets to apply threat evenly amongst an entire group using direct theat spells.

I also noticed that some DPS players were picking a mob and sticking with it during the entire course of each pull until that mob was dead. These players had higher overall DPS during the run due to being able to fully engage a DPS rotation on a single mob, but sometimes the DPS player picked the first mob the tank targeted in the pull and stayed there while the tank had moved on to another mob, and did not continue generating sufficient threat to hold aggro in the face of determined DPS. Also sometimes, but much rarer, the DPS player just picked something at random regardless of the actions of the tank, and fired away until the mob died. This caused problems when the tank wasn’t applying enough threat to that particular mob, which would happen pretty frequently.

My opinion is, if the tank took the time at the beginning of a run to explain how they would handle group pulls, and what their expectation of the rest of the group would be, then the likelihood of the group overall to succeed would improve.

Here is an example. If you do not communicate what you intend to do, the assumption for most DPS players will be, without a way to read the tank’s mind, to believe that whichever mob the tank is currently targeting is the mob having the most threat generated upon it. 

The logic flow is simple – DPS players can generate damage up to the limits imposed on them by the tank’s threat output. If they go over, intentionally or not, they pull the attention of the mob away from the tank.

In a group of four mobs, the one the tank is focusing his attention on tends to have the highest threat generated if the tank remains on that target and uses Direct Threat spells, and thus is the mob the DPS has the best chance of dealing massive damage to without pulling it’s attention off the tank.

If you, as the tank, intend to spread your threat amongst the mobs equally, and thus will not be focusing on and building threat more on one mob than any other, and you do not tell your group that’s what your plan is, then the other players will not know who they’re supposed to kill at any given moment. They’ll have to guess, based on direct observation.

“Is it this one? That’s the one the tank grabbed first. Okay, shooting, shooting, OOPS! Tank’s on someone else now. But this one is still over half health. Do I switch to his new target or stay? I don’t want to go over and pull, I’d better switch. Damn, now he’s moved on to a different one!”

This level of confusion results in reduced effectiveness at it’s best, and pulled aggro and an unhappy healer at it’s worst.

Why this is mostly directed at the tank

As the tank, you are going to be pulling or charging into mobs, either mobs you’ve personally selected or at the direction of a raid leader. 

Once you have engaged the group, how you generate your threat amongst those mobs is all in your paws.

Your threat generation is very important to the team. Every single member will be counting on you to hold threat on the mobs to prevent healer aggro, and to build sufficient threat to allow the DPS players in the group to perform their tasks to the best of their own abilities.

You are the one that the rest of the group takes their cue from. Everyone watches you to see where to focus their attention next.

As the tank, even if you are not the one directing or leading the raid, you ARE the one choosing how you will prioritize threat generation. 

As there is more than one valid way to generate and prioritize group threat, communicating to your team exactly how you intend to control the group of enemies will allow everyone to anticipate your actions, prepare themselves for the fight, understand their own responsibilities and help the entire team work together. 

Tanks lead from the front, no matter who sets the overall goal.

Laying a little groundwork on the terms

For the rest of the discussion, I’m going to talk about threat using two terms, direct threat and AoE threat.

Direct Threat is when you use a spell or ability that must be targeted on a specific mob, and when the majority of generated threat from that spell or ability is applied to that one targeted mob. Splash damage from a direct threat spell tends to affect other mobs less severely than the primary target. 

AoE Threat is when you use a spell or ability whose function is to generate threat amongst a group of mobs equally. The AoE may take the form of a circle targeted on a position on the ground, a cone in the direction the tank faces, or an area centered on the tank himself, and the threat may come from a persistent Damage Over Time effect, a single pulse or burst, or a combination of them both.

Got it? Let’s go.

Our tanking style is based on our intended goals

There is a reason we try to study how to generate threat, and look for ways to improve our style and technique.

It’s all about controlling what we can.

We don’t have any control over the rules of the game, the basic stats, the cooldowns, the spell effects, or the actions of the mobs.

What we can control is what gear we choose to seek out and equip, and how we play our own character using the tools provided.

Gear lists and stat prioritization are all about learning how the core rules work, and making sure we are personally seeking out and equipping the best gear we can, reforging the stats that are most important, enchanting and gemming most efficiently, and basically becoming as powerful as the rules of the game will allow us to be. It’s all about timing, stats, offense and defense, and can be mathematically calculated.

What cannot be mathematically calculated, and thus is frequently overlooked, is how to actually play our character using the tools provided.

If Blizzard chooses to reduce the effectiveness of an ability, we have no control over that. If some of our gear is buffed, or nerfed, or removed entirely, all we can do is recompute the importance of stats and make new lists.

What we do have control over is understanding how our abilities work, what situations or conditions they are most useful for, and using them to the best of our skill based on our intended goal for the fight. How to prioritize which abilities to use, based not on more powerful over less powerful, but more useful for one situation compared to another.

Intent. How we pull and handle a group is going to depend on our intent. 

The core styles of group threat

There are as many styles for tanking a group of mobs as there are tanks out there, but there are two core group tanking philosophies most commonly in use today.

Prioritized and Even Split.

Prioritized is what I call it when the intent of the tank is to build as much threat as possible on one target to give the DPS a double rainbow opportunity to go all out. The general technique is to identify a first kill target that you will focus the majority of your Direct Threat against, with the expectation that all DPS players will be focusing on that one target to kill it first. AoE Threat abilities will be used to maintain anti-healer threat on the rest of the group, and no more.

Split Evenly is what I call it when the intent of the tank is to try and spread the threat from all of your AoE Threat and Direct Threat abilities evenly across the entire group, to provide the DPS the ability to use AoE damage spells and target whoever they wish freely. 

Prioritized group tanking style breaks down in the following way.

The tank identifies a mob in the group that will be killed first. That mob is the first kill target.

The tank targets the first kill target, and charges into or otherwise pulls the group.

In the first few moments of the pull, the tank starts by dealing Direct Threat to the first kill target, immediately followed by AoE Threat to counteract healer threat amongst the remainder of the group of mobs.

Over the course of the next several global cooldowns, the tank focuses all Direct Threat on the first kill target, while using just enough AoE Threat to maintain a respectable lead over the threat generated by the healer.

At this time, it is the expectation that the DPS players are all focused solely on the first kill target. It is also expected that, because the tank is focusing his Direct Threat generating capabilities solely on the first kill target, that the DPS players are limiting themselves mostly to single target attacks rather than AoE, and if AoE is used, it is of the low-threat style.

Once the tank judges for herself that she has generated sufficient threat on the first kill target to hold aggro for the remainder of the fight until the mob is dead, no matter HOW much threat the DPS players cause, the tank switches over to a second kill target.

The tank begins using Direct Threat on the second target, and continues using AoE Threat as a secondary mission just to stay above the healer.

The rest of the DPS rides the first priority kill target down until it dies before switching over. They do NOT follow the tank to the new target.

By the time the first target dies, the tank will have built up sufficient advance threat on the second target that the DPS players will have a healthy cushion allowing them to go all out immediately.

The rest of the encounter is, for the tank, about watching and preparing for emergencies. With the continued use of AoE Threat for the duration of the fight, there is rarely any need to mark a third target to prioritize. The DPS players can focus on and burn down whichever remaining targets they wish. If someone begins to accrue high threat, well, that is what Taunt is for, along with Tidy Plates/ Threat Plates for pinpoint threat accuracy.

This style of tanking has several advantages. Every player knows who to be targeting at all times; whoever the tank has targeted first until it’s dead, then whoever the tank is on next. If the tank is practised in using them, this is the style that supports marking targets with Skulls and Stars and Green Nachos. Using these marks only improves the flow of the fight, because it ensures that every player remembers who the first priority kill target was supposed to be.

By knowing exactly who you should be paying attention to, it allows the tank to devote the majority of her Direct Threat spells to one target, providing the highest level of threat possible. This allows the DPS the best opportunity to go ‘all out’ on a target with a full rotation, and still stay under the threat threshold.

Confusion in the transition from one mob to another is HIGHLY reduced, and the chance that aggro will accidentally be pulled is minimized.

Another advantage to this style, is that it’s excellent practise for incorporating marking targets for Crowd Control. Once a team is comfortable with the idea of using single target damage spells and marked kill targets, it’s a small step to suggest that a target be marked as the “last to die”, and be crowd controlled by one of the DPS players for the duration of the fight.

There are drawbacks to this method, though.

The first issue is, this style is very rigid. The tank directs who the DPS is to kill, and the DPS players are expected to obey. There is very little room for independant decision making. For some DPS players, it can feel as though the tank is having fun, and the DPS players are merely along for the ride, and are not trusted to innovate or unleash the full potential of their characters. This is actually a pretty telling argument, as most characters have a wide variety of tools available, and many players are keen to experiment and vary their methods of play to enliven a run.

The second issue is, this style requires willing teamwork and coordination. If a player in the group decides they simply will not follow the marks or first kill target priority, then this style will result in a run that quickly degenerates into chaos. The tank is not focusing on building infinite threat on everyone; just the maximum possible on one mob. If a DPS player decides to go ‘off the mark’, they will easily blow past the tank’s threat on the secondary mobs and pull aggro.

Take as an example a pull of a group of four mobs, where the Prioritized system is being used, but one DPS player decides to ‘do his own thing’.

The tank marks a target with Skull as the first kill target, another with a Star, and leaves the last two untouched. The tank charges in, uses two instant cast Direct Threat spells on the Skull target, followed up with an AoE Threat spell, then a Direct Threat DoT, and another AoE Threat. From this point, healer aggro is counteracted, and some serious pounding on the Skull can begin for the next three global cooldowns.

Dri$$t the Night Elf Hunter decides the unmarked mob with the bow tie is looking at him funny, and goes all out on it. He blows right past the tank’s meager threat on the mob, and it goes running after him.

At this point, your average Dri$$t will panic, forget that he has Feign Death, and go nuts with even MORE DPS, in the hopes of killing the mob before it reaches him. If this fails, then he will begin running around the room screaming and wailing while the mob smashes him in the back, which, of course, means he’s not Parrying or Dodging.

The healer will change focus from the tank to the DPS in trouble, and begin chain casting like crazy to keep him alive. Most healers will, anyway. The instinct to try and save a life is strong with healers. It’s a pride thing. “You’re not dying on my watch” and stuffs.

The tank will stop attacking the Skull target in order to grab the loose mob, Taunt it, and get it back under control. Unfortunately, in such situations, the mob is frequently out of Taunt range, and the tank will have to go chasing the mob down first… leaving the group he was fighting to begin chasing the tank from behind… where, again, the tank has no Parry or Dodge chance. The tank thus takes accelerated damage. This happens because most tanks take their responsibility to hold aggro and protect the party very seriously, and like a hound can’t resist chasing that fox that he lost aggro on.

The healer sees the tanks’ health suddenly drop like a stone, the DPS player is dying, there’s running all over the place…. and since the tank is no longer on the Skull target, one of the DPS that were following the original game plan just got one sweet crit, and pulled aggro himself. Oh crap.

It is usually at this point the healer has a nervous breakdown, and Dri$$t says, “Learn to tank, noob.”

Does any of that sound familiar?

No. Of course not.

Split Evenly group tanking style breaks down like this.

The tank does not mark a target. The tank instead selects one for other reasons, spellcaster perhaps, and charges in/pulls.

The tank uses all AoE Threat abilities, uses one instant cast and one cooldown Direct Threat ability on the current target, and then switches to a different one.

The tank uses more AoE Threat, and then applies two more Direct Threat abilities, trying to include DoTs if possible. Then the tank switches to different target #3 and continues the process. The whole idea is to use AoE Threat at all times when off cooldown, and fill in with Direct Threat on every mob in rotation evenly. Spread all the threat out like cheese on a cracker.

The DPS players are given no direction as to which mob to attack. It is understood that each DPS player is on his or her own during this encounter.

The tank is operating under a much different priority list. First, the healer must be protected. Second, the tank must survive to deal threat and stay as still as possible to give the DPS players a clear field of view, and third, the tank must be on overwatch during the entire battle, prepared to shift attention to any mob that shows signs of breaking free…. if necessary.

This style is much more fluid, and puts more of the responsibility on skillful play and proper use of judgment on the DPS players.

This style is where you will frequently see a tank stand back and not interfere if a DPS player decides to go all out on a mob that is close to death, to try and burn it down before it reaches them.

The difference between doing that in this style as opposed to prioritization, is that in this one, the responsibility of NOT pulling threat is solidly on the DPS players. If they go over, that’s their ass. 

In this style, it is expected that a DPS player knows how to watch their own aggro on a targeted mob, and if they are getting close to going past the tank, they will simply switch targets to one they haven’t blasted yet.

The biggest advantage to this style is that it requires no teamwork or communication with the rest of the group at all. As long as everyone understands that all mobs will have threat spread evenly among them, and that it’s up to the DPS players to NOT go over the tank, then it doesn’t matter who attacks what when. Anyone can attack anything, and the tank’s main priorities are right up front; healer, then tank. 

The second main advantage to this style is that it really does open up the DPS players to pulling all the tools out of their toolbox. If a hunter decides to use a Frost Trap, or kite a mob around, or send in their pet on one mob while attacking another, it’s no problem at all. DPS players are trusted to know what they are doing, and that if they get into trouble and just can’t drop aggro, to run TO the tank to get the mob pulled off, and to use threat reducing abilities if possessed.

The main disadvantages is that the higher the individual DPS of the player, and the higher the health of the mobs, the harder it will be for the tank to generate enough threat spread out on all the mobs without having someone go over. It works best on groups of mobs with relatively low health that die quickly, so that even if a DPS player pulls, it’s a simple task to burn it down fast.

Another disadvantage is that it does not train groups in how to incorporate Crowd Control skills, at a group level. Individuals may see their use of CC increase as they play with their food, but it does not train a player how not to break another players’ trap. This style also encourages DPS players to use low threat AoE damage spells more than direct damage, and that is a bad mix to have been practising when it’s time to worry about Crowd Control.

With this style, as long as the tank focuses on AoE Threat and spreading Direct Threat out evenly, and watches the entire field of battle closely, then most group pulls will go very smoothly, with the additional frequent use of Intercepts, Charges and Taunts. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as playing in this fashion and succeeding can be just as exciting for the tank as for the DPS players.

The last major disadvantage, of course, is that with the hijinks of the DPS players to consider, the healer is likely to have a very, very rough time if they don’t prioritize their heals and give DPS players a chance to pull themselves out of the weeds on their own.

A Bit of Wrapup

Both core styles work very well depending on the intent of the players using them. Many long time tanks don’t even think of these as the seperate styles they are; they blend both styles together to greater or lesser degree, depending entirely on the situation. Perhaps they mark one particular mob with a Skull because of the special attack or property it has, but go half and half on Direct Threat and AoE Threat, and switch to a Split Evenly style as soon as that mob is dead.

The key thing about them, and blending them together, is that if your group has no idea why you are targeting the mob you are at any given time, they’re not going to know if they should go all out, or switch around, or follow your target on /assist, or anything else. This means that your groups aren’t playing to their full potential.

So, please do me a favor. If you actually care about tanking a smooth run, then take the two minutes at the start to let the party know your intention.

Macro a mini-speech if you like, or type a simple sentence, but do something to let them know, “Hey, I’m going to be spreading my threat around as evenly as I can, so attack whichever mob you want, but if you go over my threat and pull from me, you either better kill it yourself, feign it off or run it toward me to taunt.”

Or, alternately, “I’m going to be marking Skull as the first to die, stay on it until it’s dead, don’t worry if I switch my target to Star halfway through, it’s cool. Kill Star second, and Mage, please sheep the Moon, and everyone leave Moon untouched for last.”

A Last Word, or, Advanced Teamwork

The way I have described Prioritization and Split Evenly may sound melodramatic, but that’s because I used the extreme examples of the styles. As I mentioned briefly, many players already use both, blended together smoothly.

If you’re new to tanking, and these styles make sense but sound kind of boring, please keep in mind one thing; when you play with a team often, and get to know each other a little, everything loosens up and you all learn to trust each other.

Being able to trust each other means that, even when using the Prioritization style, your DPS players change up who they attack based on how they flow through mob transitions.

For example, you mark a Skull and a Star as first and second kill targets. All DPS players get on Skull to start, but once it is down to about 40% or less health and the tank has switched to Star, the melee DPS can feel comfortable switching over to Star and letting the ranged DPS burn Skull the rest of the way.

Why would this make sense and make your players happy?

It’s because the melee DPS players can use an extra two seconds to move over to and get properly behind the Star. During those two seconds, the ranged DPS can finish killing Skull, and then with a single click be already going to town on Star. No manuevering or physical repositioning necessary.

Those are the kinds of things that a group of players comfortable with each other, and trusting each other, do all the time without worrying about it.

But it all starts with clear communication of your intentions, and the understanding and cooperation of the rest of the team.

And above all else, having a healer with nerves of solid chrome-plated steel.

Hmm, a tanking post that has nothing to do with math or stats or technique.

WoW is a social game, and tanking is, by definition, something done as part of a group effort. So, let’s talk for a bit about the social aspect of choosing to tank.

I think the biggest potential obstacle facing a good player who is contemplating trying to tank in a group is finding a way to deal with the consequences of failure, real or perceived.

Real or perceived by the tank, and by each individual of the groups they will be in.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the phrasing of that statement.

I said good player, and that’s at the core of where I’m coming from.

By good player, I meant people who care about what they do. Care about how well they do while playing their role, care about not screwing up and causing a wipe, care about whatever it may be that they’re doing, just care.

I think, sometimes, that it’s not fashionable to care about things in the game. That, somehow, if you allow yourself to care, to become emotionally invested in something thats “just a game”, you’re tossed off as a loser.

To me, the structure of WoW is a video game, sure, but as soon as you move from interacting with programmed AI to a group, to actually playing with other real living people, it’s no longer “just a game”. It’s now all about playing, interacting, and socializing with others.

Suddenly, the only difference between grouping in WoW and getting together at a party, bar, pool hall, hopscotch tournament or sporting event is that if you act like a dick, the people around you can’t grab you by the throat and choke the living shit out of you.

“Just a game”? Like hell. It’s the biggest game there is; interacting with other people, working together towards a common goal. Whether trying to be a leader or a team player, putting the success of the group above your own snotty feelings of the moment.

Who are the losers in real social situations? Assuming a group of people who share similar interests and could be considered part of the same clique, it’s the people who act like self-centered asshats that become ostracized by the rest of the potential group. Nobody will hang out with them except, of course, other asshats, who splinter off and console themselves by saying the rest of the group were losers anyhow.

Enough BS pop psychology so simplified it’s nearly insulting. Let’s move on before Cassie flames me.

To me, it’s the players that just don’t care, who don’t “give a f%&^” that are the players I never, ever want to see again in my groups. They’re the ones you run into that are in it for themselves, care nothing about anyone else, and who, if feeling themselves slighted or inconvenienced, whether from a slow run (by their standards) or a repair bill or just from having things not go according to THEIR plan, will lash out with hatred and venom instantly to make sure everyone else suffers too.

A good player, to me, is simply someone that cares. Everything else is negotiable.

Any time I am playing any character, if I’m running solo I’m fine. I will be relaxed and confident that whatever happens, nobody but me will get annoyed.

If I’m grouping up, then it’s a different game entirely. Why? Because whatever I do affects other real people, and I don’t want to be the one that screws up or causes the group to fail, or even annoys people. I’m playing for fun, I am inferring that THEY are playing for fun, and I don’t want to ruin other people’s fun with my idiocy.

As soon as someone in the group reveals through their words or actions that they don’t care… well, I’ve said it before, you don’t have to be anybody’s bitch. You deserve a certain amount of consideration and respect, too.

The group requirement is a big obstacle for potential tanks.

By definition, tanking is a group activity, right? So, no matter how well you know your character or spec, at some point you HAVE to face the very first time you will be tanking for someone else.

Tanking a group run consists of a different set of concerns than soloing, regardless of spec.

Let’s say you level as a tanking spec. That will help you to become familiar with the mechanics of the spec, and be more comfortable with what you’re capable of. That’s a great thing.

Even if you dual spec at 80, practising your technique while soloing will help you get comfortable with what you can do. Sure, it’s a good idea.

When you’re soloing, though, the mobs you attack aren’t being distracted by other players. You’re not learning what your big threat generating attacks are, what speed sequences work best for different situations, or have a need to practise generating reactive threat.

You never have to fight to keep the attention of the mobs on you.

Also, while soloing you don’t have an opportunity to practise manuevering yourself and the mobs into positions tactically advantageous to the rest of the party and seeing how well it really works.

Yes, you CAN practise line of sight pulls around terrain obstacles to bring ranged casters closer, and yes you CAN find groups of mixed melee and ranged mobs so that, as a Bear, you can practise our unique skill of Feral Charge to leap from ranged mob to ranged mob, pounding them in sequence and building threat in turns.

But you’re also limited in the size and frequency of that kind of training by not having a healer… and again by not having competing threat generators (those pesky DPS) to challenge your control.

Those skills only really come from experience in groups.

At some point, to be a tank you’ll have to volunteer to tank for others without having any actual group threat and mob control tanking experience.

It’s the very first time thats the worst, when the fear is highest, the fear of failure, of screwing up, of letting the team down.

That first experience, I think, is where we lose a lot of potentially great tanks.

Just the knowledge that you have to tank cold and learn as you go is daunting.

How much worse if you have to join group for the first time with strangers?

Some quick advice; do not, do NOT group up as a tank for your first time with a group of strangers. You might get a group of good players, but chances are high that at least one will be a self-centered snot.

All it takes is one to ruin that first time. Please, don’t do it! Ask some friends, or friends of friends, to go with you knowing that you want to take it slow and ease into it.

My second bit of advice, reiterated from before, is practise your actual skills and talents ahead of time. When you go into an instance (or group situation) for the first time, you should already know what the buttons do.

My third piece of advise is, study the instances ahead of time, and be familiar with them. Most especially, read up on what various mobs and bosses do before you go in, if possible. This isn’t meant to spoil new content, but is very important when tanking content that everyone around you has memorized already. Wowwiki and Wowhead both have excellent comprehensive resources describing each instance, and the mbos and bosses within. 

When you enter that instance with a group for the first time, you should know your buttons, be familiar with your surroundings, and know where to go next. That frees you up to focus on learning/practising two new group-only aspects of tanking;

1. How to grab mobs and build threat as fast as possible. Controlling the mobs.
2. How to manuever your camera view to watch the room around you, and do it all the time. Situational awareness.

The first one is obvious. The DPS especially, but also the healer, will generate threat. This finally gives you a means to compare your own ability to generate threat against others. Use your Omen, use your Tidyplates/Threatplates, and concentrate NOT on generating your highest DPS but on cranking out your highest possible THREAT per second. You’ll find that is situational. Some of your best threat abilities will be single target only, and if you use a Global Cooldwon on them, you’ll be losing threat on a group of mobs. For Bears, learning when to start with group AoE threat abilities first like Maul and Swipe, and when to ease off Swipe and switch in others during your GCD comes from experience… and learning what your party will do.

The second one goes with the first. If you lose aggro, being fluid and watching your surroundings will show you what’s going on behind you. If you don’t see the mobs break off and go after your healer, then you can’t react to it with, say, a Feral Charge to a mob on the healer followed by a Challenging Roar.

Also, sometimes members of your party will stand in the wrong place and pull mobs from another group. You have to be able to move your view around and see what those chuckleheads are getting into.

It also helps to be able to see if someone in your group is just an idiot, and stands in the green slime all the time. Knowing that the reason their health is dropping is that they won’t move their ass helps take the feeling of personal responsibility over their life off your shoulders.

It also helps warn you that the healer is probably having to spend their own Global Cooldowns on saving said idiot, rather than on healing you. Time to be prepared to pop your own Survivability and Damage Mitigation cooldowns? Could be.

Please, the first time you run with a group, do it with considerate friends that will help. And try and keep at it, practising until you’re pretty happy with it.

But, that being said, the next hurdle will be deciding if you are willing to put up with random bullshit from asshats to tank for randoms.

It will happen. Nobody that tanks randoms gets good players ALL the time.

From that point on, having given yourself every possible opportunity to learn and practise and master the basics and nuances of tanking…

It’s your call.

I know of several really good players that just don’t tank for random groups. They’ll DPS, and they MIGHT heal, but they won’t put up with the casual abuse. They tank for friends, and that’s it.

I hear that from far more people in private comments than you might believe.

If that’s what you choose, I support you 100%. I’ll say it again in a different way; you do not have to suffer abuse from other people. It’s not your job to be somebody else’s chew toy. If you tank in randoms and people throw abuse your way… you don’t have to deal with it. Put them on ignore at the very least.

What I hope is, if you’re facing that wall, the fear of failing a group, if THAT is what is keeping you from trying tanking for the very first time…

I really hope that you’ll prepare, give yourself every chance at success, and then give it a try with friends. Tanking is an incredibly fun aspect of the game, and you’ll never know if it’s that one thing that really ‘clicks’ with you until you give it a try.

As with all of my other posts, what I’m going to say represents my opinion. No more, no less. 

The tanking role is a mighty strange one. 

There is a saying that floats around sometimes, “Perception is reality”. I think some of the implication is that it doesn’t matter what may have been intended; once something goes live, people build expectations, and the longer it’s around, the more entrenched those expectations become, and the more people accept them and work to fulfill them, the harder it’ll ever be to change it.

Take tanking. There is no rule that says a party has to be led by the tank, any more than a raid has to be led by one.

Early on in Warcraft*, folks formed parties wondering how all this “group instance” stuff was gonna work out, and everyone stood around looking at each other, wondering what to do. Nobody wanted to get their face eaten off by a mob, so they turned their pitiful gazes on the tank and suggested, “You go get ’em, and we’ll tag along and kill ’em and keep you alive. We’re squishy.”

So what happens? The tank is looking at all the mobs, and decides who to pull first. The players who are there to kill things are looking to the tank for their next target. The healer is watching the health bars, and their positioning if there is lava.

So the tank is seeing more of the instance, and the reactions of the mobs, than most players tend to.

When wipes happen, sure everyone sees it and everyone speculates on what the cause was, but the tank is the one that feels guilty for letting the party die. So the player that tanks tends to do research on what happened so it won’t happen to him again, and comes up with a few ideas on how to approach it differently next time.

It didn’t take very long before the expectation in vanilla WoW was that the tank was the party leader, because the tanks you met led the way through, and in self-defense researched what would happen and how to handle the pulls safely, and spoke with the voice of experience… or faked it well.

Perception became reality. As more people expected tanks to be the leaders, new players that wanted to be tanks figured that in order to be a good tank, they had to learn everything about the instances first before they could successfully try tanking it.

Tanks came to be expected to know each instance or raid intimately.

By intimately I mean that sometimes you get screwed really hard a few times before you learn what not to do. I am on intimate terms with a lot of instances.

The tank knew what the enemy would or would not do, knew where to go next for quests, knew who needed to be sheeped or sapped or banished, knew when poison cleansing was important, knew when to ask for a chain trap, just bloody well knew.

It’s pretty intimidating if you’re new to the game.

Is it laziness on anyone else’s part that the tank almost always leads? No. It’s just the way the three party role paradigm works out. The player that does the pulling tends to be the one others look to for direction on where to go next. 

When you get in a multiple tank environment like a raid, it’s a lot easier to break the mold and have anyone be the raid leader, provided the tanks aren’t control freaks and are open to direction. But in a group of five, one tank, three DPS, one healer, the expecation was, and remains, that the tank will lead the run.

If you have never been the tank, and you’d really like to try it out, there is so much baggage tied up in the role that it’s hard to know where to start.

So, let’s break things down and build on them, one piece at a time.

Is playing a tank, the actual mechanics of being a tank, more difficult to master than any other class or spec?

No. Absolutely not.

You can easily learn the basics of being a tank.

Each class has it’s own niche in a group.

If you’ve played a DPS you’ve already learned that success is measured by doing top DPS and performing your crowd control (and other class abilities) wisely.

If you’ve played a healer, you’ve already learned that success is measured by keeping everyone’s health up and cleansing, and using other class abilities wisely.

As a tank, it’s the same thing. To be a successful tank, you hold threat on all the mobs, and intercept the ones that get away from you, taunting them back. And you try to be hard to kill, but that’s all about gear first, and proper talents/cooldowns second. Oh yeah, and use your class abilities wisely.

You can practise all that without being in a group. You can ask any friend you’d like to come along in a party with you, and you can grab large groups of mobs out in the world and go to twon. Shadowmoon Valley has some great places to find clusters of mobs to try yourself out on, especially just east of that honking big volcano thingie in the center of the map. Or maybe you’d prefer grabbing huge groups of undead in Icecrown. Whatever, as long as there are both melee and casters in the mix.

Grab a group of mobs, let your friend use whatever AoE they have, and try and drag the baddies around with you. This let’s you practise moving while keeping your front to the group. You don’t want mobs to get behind you.

If the groups have runners when they get low on health, it’s wonderful. The mob will run, they’ll likely grab another group and drag them all back to you. You’ll have spell casters at range shooting at your friend, you’ll have melee running into you or at your friend, it’ll be chaos.

It’s the perfect chance to learn how to do ranged taunts to get mobs off your friend when they’re outside your immediate range. Or to learn how to Feral Charge all up in the ranged mob’s face. Or to learn how to do line of sight pulls around architectural features to make ranged mobs run to you, and find out what happens when you friend stands out in sight, and gets aggro because he keeps shooting them. Or to Death Grip, or use your shield throw, or whatever.

If you’re nervous about the mechanics of playing a tanking class, you can practise without being in a group. You can gain confidence and learn how to respond to the mobs. It’s really not hard to do, I promise you.

What is hard is trying to learn the mechanics of playing a tanking class without previous experience or confidence, at the same time as you try to perform the tasks of party leader in front of a crowd of strangers.

So, learn the mechanics of your class. Practise. Try things out yourself, in the “real world” before you go into an instance. Take a friend or two that has some patience and is fine with experimenting. I know of very few DPS players that would be upset to be told, “I need you to blow things up as hard as you can for me so I can see if I can grab aggro back. Can you do that?”

“Aw, shucks. It’s a hardship, and you’re gonna really owe me one, but if I really have to, I suppose I can help you out.”

The second part, leading a group of experienced strangers, that’s the part that I think scares a lot of people. And rightfully so.

It’s going to be hard to lead a group somewhere, especially a group that may already know the ins and outs of an instance, if you don’t know where you’re going.

Doing an instance as DPS or healer the first time, and keeping your eyes open, can help you out. It gives you an orientation on where things are, what to expect. So can watching any of the thousands of videos on YouTube showing walkthroughs of instances or raids.

Reading about what the mobs in an instance can do in advance, what their attacks and abilities are, can also help you know what to expect. Wowhead and WoWwiki are both excellent resources for researching mob tactics. Both websites have sections giving very complete details of instances and raids. WoWwiki tends to be out of date on things, but it’s still a good resource.

But the single most important thing you can do, is break down every mob fight into it’s component parts, and practise basic tactics based on those components. No matter what instance you go into, trash fights are basically going to work the same.

You’ve got two types of mobs. You’ve got melee and ranged casters.

If you walk up to your extreme range from a group, and you taunt (or shoot an arrow, or whatever) into the crowd, the ones that are melee will run to you, and the casters will stand in place and shoot at you.

It’s really that simple.

So what do you do about it?

If you learn which mobs are melee, and which ones are ranged, then you’re going to be able to move yourself with confidence right at the start of every pull.

The mobs themselves may do different things, ranged DPS or heal others or AoE or Hex or Curse or whatever, but the important distinction is ranged or melee.

When you attack a group, the melee will run right to you. The ranged enemy will stand in place and shoot/cast. Period.

With that in mind, the most basic tactical manuever is to run/charge into the group, targeted on a caster first, and use AoE as you go to do damage/threat to all the melee. Your first goal is to get within your melee range of as many ranged mobs as possible. Move yourself so as to get as many of them as you can in your AoE/multiple mob attacks.

At that point, when you Swipe, or Death and Decay, or Consecrate, you’ll be getting the casters as well as the melee.

Clear out the ranged casters first. If you have to move around, have no fear, the melee will follow you around. They like you!

Build your threat on all the mobs, and burn them down. Squishies get to die first. Once they’re all dead, you’ve won.

Next!

Congratulations, that’s how 90% of your isntance run trash pulls will work.

Now, if you can’t get all the casters into your melee range in one shot, then you’ve got more tactical decisions to make from there.

Your first step is always bringing the fight to the ranged. If you can’t get all the ranged in one go, you can get them to come to you.

You can do that using a line of sight pull. This takes into account the fact that mobs will move the shortest distance possible in order to get their target within line of sight to continue the attack. Line of sight is blocked by most architectural features. Like walls and corners and really, really wide pillars.

The line of sight pull means you taunt/shoot one mob in a group, then duck around a corner out of sight to them. This does threat to one mob, and gets the attention of the rest. (While doing no threat to those other mobs. For more on how threat works on group pulls, check out my incredibly ancient post on the subject from 2007. Most of the multiple mob stuff there is obsolete with the introduction of Maul Glyphs and Swipe, but threat still works the same way.)

So, you stand there hiding around the corner, and the entire group will come running in a straight line least distance manuever until they can all get you within their sights to attack. This clumps them up beautifully as they round the corner, right into the maws of your fully automatic machine guns and nuclear powered chain saws.

Sadly, most heroic groups don’t let you do this anymore. If you do a line of sight pull, you’ve got a good chance that someone will either shoot them, pulling aggro and making them stop to attack their new favorite target, or the healer will run forward to stand within sight of the mobs and “top your health off”, thereby pulling aggro so that they stop in their tracks and shoot him.

Another tactical choice you could make is to move to and stand on as many ranged casters as you can just like normal, build aggro on them with your AoE, but keep the most distant ranged caster(s) targeted, and use ranged attacks/Taunts on them to keep them focused on you for a short time while you build up a nice threat lead on your current group.. After the current group within your melee range is nice and smacked up, you can do whatever you’d like to get the distant mobs. Feral Charge over, Shield Throw with Silence, Death Grip, walk over swinging a sledgehammer, whatever floats your boat, honey. 

The point is, the goal is to keep threat on all your targets. The melee targets will run TO you and even follow you around, conveniently staying in your AoE and multiple mob threat attacks. The ranged casters will not. So, your special attention goes to planning how you intend to get the casters’ attention and keep it.

It doesn’t sound all that hard, does it?

That’s the secret. It’s not.

You don’t have to know the exact names of every mob, and what they all do. It helps, sure. Experience, and knowing when to apply the right ability at just the right time is great. Studying instances beforehand will help you feel confident, at keep you from getting lost.

But that works the same for all classes. Is the tank the only one expected to know what mobs do? Of course not. Every Shaman knows that when you’re going up against King Dred in Drak’theron Keep, that’s a real good time to drop Tremor Totem, amiright?

But my point is, if you already know how to, and feel confident with, tanking and holding groups of combined melee and ranged, then you’re in the zone.

From there on out, it’s fine tuning the process for each situation, learning from experience what flows best from group to group.

Do that, and you’ll quickly build up the confidence to tank any random you’d like.

Confidence built from being comfortable with what your abilities are and how to use them. Confidence that when you pull a group, you know how you’re going to handle casters and melee mobs.

Once yuo’re solid with the basics, go for it. The more real experience you get from that point on, the more confident you will be that when the shit hits the fan, you’ll be ready. 

Sure, mistakes happen, but they happen to everyone. Tanking can be a lot of fun, and take it from me… you really don’t need to be an obsessive control freak to be one, and do well at it.

No, no matter what you think, I’m serious. Really. You don’t.

No, put down the straight jacket and back away, I swear I’ve seen tanks that aren’t obsessed control freaks with an encyclopediac knowledge of every mob and instance in the game.

Like… and… well, then theres… hmm. Right! Oh, wait no….

Okay, I’ll get back to you on that.

* Changed from Everquest, since I never played Everquest, and while my friends have told me stories about tanking, someone said I was wrong, so hey, go with what you know.

If you’re thinking about tanking, then no matter what class you might intend to try, there are a few ideas you should have in the brain housing group to help you along the way.

Over the years I’ve said all this stuff, so none of it is particularly new or ground breaking. I don’t think I’ve ever put it together and stickied it before, though, so here we go.

When you want to play the game, you want to be successful. You want to be a good tank, a successful tank, a tank that other people will want to run with again.

Before you prepare, you need to get it clear in your mind, what is a successful tank? How do you measure success as a tank?

A successful tank is one that can hold threat on all appropriate targets, and can regain threat when it’s lost as soon as possible.

You can go above and beyond that, but aggro is the key measure of success.

In any combat encounter, there are mobs you intended to fight. Maybe you as the tank pulled them, or charged into them, or maybe another player attacked from range, or maybe a Rogue stealthed in and got busted before you got there.

However the pull happened, if you immediately grab aggro on all intended mobs, you build threat on those mobs to the point that your other players find it difficult to pull it away from you when they are dealing strong DPS, and you ride the group down until they’re all dead without chaos or confusion, then you are performing well as a tank.

I’d like to say you would be graded as “meeting expectations” on a performance review, but I’ve BEEN running heroics and randoms in LFD at all levels, and I’m here to tell you; a tank that can grab and hold aggro is exceeding my expectations these days.

That’s it. All the rest of this post is going to be meandering tips and suggestions on how to prepare for the mission of grabbing and holding threat.

First, study your abilities as you get them when leveling up. Take the time to read the player comments on Wowhead for any abilities you are not intimately familiar with. You’re not expected to know everything about how an ability works the second you get it. If you read what other people have to say, very often you’ll get some helpful tips on how other people use it… or whether people even use it at all.

As you read about your abilities, make a list of the ones that specify they deal “high amounts of threat”. What that phrase means is that, while all normal attacks will have a standard amount of threat per point of damage, some abilities have a built in multiplier; they do more threat per point of damage, or even do massive threat without dealing damage at all.

Also, make a list of abilities that affect more than one target. Those are your prime “multiple mob” abilities.

Read through the list of Glyphs available to your class. Some of them may modify an ability to affect additional mobs, or cause your AoE to have a greater range of effect. Any time you can use a Glyph to have a core threat generating ability affect more targets for free, it’s something to take notice of.

With Glyphs, don’t get locked into the idea that what works best at max level or for raiding is what you need to use all the time, or at all levels, either. You can find some things helpful at lower levels, then upgrade as you go.

So, build up your own repertoire of abilities based on threat, and on affecting multiple targets. Plan your Glyphs to help out.

Put your Taunt abilities, single target and group, someplace on your bar or hotkeyed where you can get to them fast. No matter how good you are, every tank has experienced someone pulling threat from them. Everyone. It’s how quickly you grab that aggro back that counts.

Finally, try and control the battlefield.

Controlling the battlefield is the absolute hardest thing for tanks to do.

I like to suggest that, when you don’t know how the group will work together, you try and mark a Skull target for a “first kill”. That will be the target you’re going to focus on when you’re not spreading AoE/multiple mob threat around.

A lot of players seem to resent such marks these days. I’m not sure why, since the idea is to help the tank hold aggro and let the DPS open up without worrying about pulling threat. Maybe people WANT to pull threat. Maybe people resent being told what to do by anyone, and want to be their own boss. Maybe some people are just dicks. I dunno, a little of part A, a little of part B with some C mixed in for flavor?

Still, it’s a fact. I’ve seen people bitch about Skulls, I’ve seen people intentionally target anything BUT Skull, I’ve even frequently seen Skull be the last mob standing in runs, even after asking everyone to please focus on Skull first.

Like I said, I suggest using Skull as a starter. All you can do is try. If you get good enough at threat generation, if you have your own ways of knowing whos got threat on what, you always have the option of not using a kill mark, and if someone pulls off you, just taunting the mob back and moving on with your life. There’s less drama that way.

Amazing how quickly people get prickly if there is the slightest suggestion that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t the greatest group player in the universe if you mention that they’ve pulled aggro fifteen times during the run so far. So, you can just deal with it as an added challenge, suck it up and move on.

Or, if you feel like you’re doing everything you possibly can and should do and they’re still pulling aggro, you can always let them pull and die. What the heck, it’s their repair bill. Tough love, right?

Back to controlling the battlefield.

Knowing which mobs in a group you DO or DO NOT have aggro on is very, very difficult. You’ve basically got three options.

The first option is what I call “Spray and Pray”. You start with your AoE threat ability, like a Druid’s Swipe, Warrior’s Thunder Clap, a Paladin’s Consecration or a Death Knight’s Death and Decay.

Then, you build on that by spreading around attacks that have multiple mob affects. Specifically, you target the mob on the center and use a multiple mob attack, then target the left most mob and attack, then the right most mob and attack. Since you have no control over who the extra mobs are that get hit by “target plus x” attacks, this is an attempt to spread your damage/threat as wide as possible among the group.

An example of Spray and Pray for a Druid is, start with Swipe, target the left most mob and get a Maul triggered (plus attacks), Swipe then target right most mob and Maul plus other attack, Swipe and hit the center, Swipe and Maul the left again, etc.

You’re hoping to build up group threat across the board before settling in on one main kill target. Then if you haven’t already, you can mark with Skull and keep the Swipes going, and hope that the group either switches their main focus to your Skull target, or that your Swipes and the Mauls you laid down at the start stay ahead of the DPS. Your healer will be fine.

If you lay a Skull down at the start, use that as the target you keep coming back to as you spread threat around. That’s the target that would get the Sunder Armor, the Mangle or Feral Faerie Fire, etc.

The problem with this method, of course, is that you won’t know if you’ve lost threat until a mob breaks from the pack and either heads for someone, OR if they’re ranged, begins shooting someone else. In a messy enough scrum, you might not have noticed you lost threat at all.

Still… guess what? It’s what at least 50% of the tanks out there do. And it works. If you really work at it, work on threat generation and gear, you’ll never need anything else. But when you do lose aggro, it’s gonna be frustrating as heck to get it back.

The second method is what I call “Information Overload”. It’s a variation of Spray and Pray, but instead of working blind, you add in the results of a threat meter like Omen. If you use Omen to show you threat levels on targeted mobs, then as you target various mobs in the group using your Spray technique, you can glance over at Omen on each mob, doing spot checks on threat levels.

As you do the circuit of mobs, if you see for example, that the Mage is building threat really fast on one particular mob, then you can choose his target as your primary kill target. If that’s who the Mage wants to kill first, and you’re way above threat for the rest of the group, just switch to that target for the rest of your main attacks, right?

The problem with Information Overload is exactly that; lots of things to watch all the time.  If you’re always glancing at Omen, then you’re not watching the mobs, and you might react a few seconds later when one breaks from the pack.

On the other hand… if you’re doing it right, then you’ll know long before the mob breaks loose, right? This is the method I’ve used since just about forever.

The third method, and one I just started using a few months… oh heck, I have no idea how long ago now,  is what I call “Evil Overlord”.

I call it that because, first, I’m silly, and second, using it can feel like you ARE an evil overlord when you feel so in control of the battle. It’s just using mob nameplates with a Threat Plates addon like Tidy Plates (with Threat Plates plugin) to be able to see in real time exactly who you do or do not have threat on.

With a nameplate addon, If you start to lose threat on someone, you see it as it happens, because that one nameplate will change size and color. If you’ve got thirty mobs in front of you all with tiny green nameplates, and one suddenly turns yellow and grows in size, you know exactly who to target and unload on to bring him back in line.

Just like smiting an uppity minion.

The wonderful thing about Evil Overlord is that you can see you are losing aggro before it happens. You get a warning, as the mob’s nameplate shifts from green and small, to yellow and bigger, to red and big, to flashing red and really big and THAR SHE GOES!!!! Plenty of advance warning to give you a chance to taunt and keep going, leaving nobody else the wiser.

Wrapping up threat.

So, a tanks main responsibility, and your means of measuring success, is grabbing and holding threat. You’ve got abilities that do lots of threat to one target, to multiple targets, and to every target within an area of affect (including behind you). You’ve got taunts on fairly short cooldown to grab threat immediately if someone breaks from the pack. You’ve even eventually got a mass group taunt, although they vary in ultimate effect. Some of them just force the mobs to focus on you for a few seconds… and then if you didn’t build up enough threat, off they go again.

Aggro and threat management is the core of it. Sure, if you are too damn squishy, you won’t get TOO far, but if you can hold aggro on your targets, all of your targets, then you’re well on your way.

Yes, study your class, learn what makes you tough and strong. Stamina never goes out of style. Be as hard to bring down as possible. Be as tough, as strong, as healthy as a brick shithouse.

Advice on that is better found elsewhere, depending on your class.

A few of the basics, if you intend to tank, you’re going to want to have your armor value as high as possible to reduce the physical damage you suffer as much as possible. We call this physical damage mitigation.

Then, you’re going to want to talent into whatever abilities you have that reduce damage from magic. Physical armor values do NOTHING to reduce magical damage, you might as well be standing there naked against it. Fortunately, most Talent trees have some form of Spell Damage reduction.

After physical and magical damage mitigation, you want to really build up your health. It’s fine to reduce how much damage you take overall, but you really want to have a high health pool, too.

Finally, you’re going to want Agility, Defense Rating, Dodge Rating, Parry and Block (where appropriate), whatever your class uses to increase your avoidance. Not only do avoided attacks do no damage, but most classes have special attacks/threat generating moves that activate when you Parry, Block, or Dodge. The better your rating in these areas, the more often you get your special moves.

The importance of high damage output.

Don’t worry about your DPS. The important thing to know about DPS is that DPS is NOT your job.

I’ll say it again. Doing tons of Deeps AIN’T YOUR JOB.

Your job, as the tank, is to hold aggro and survive. That is the only standard by which you should measure your success.

Now, once you learn the ropes, nail down threat, and know exactly what your capabilities are, you can change your style if you want to. I still hesitate to recommend ever tying to go for DPS over threat.

IF you decide you can do so much threat that the other DPS players cannot possibly come close to matching you, THEN you can start mixing in DPS attacks over threat attacks.

Never forget that your job is to hold threat.

Why is it hard to hold threat sometimes? It’s hard, because DPS players are trying to do as much damage as possible. That’s how they measure their success.

So they are often going all out to be top cock of the block. They want to prove their worth. To be the baddest badass in the group. To strut, if only to themselves.

Or, to be kind, to feel that they contributed the best they could to the group’s success. 🙂

In order to do damage without pulling aggro and getting killed, the DPS have to stay under the threat of… guess who?

So, the higher your threat output is on targets, the more DPS the other DPS players can safely put out. EACH of them.

There is one of you, and at least three or more of them. If you worry about your DPS, if that’s what you are pushing instead of threat, then great, sure you’ll be up there on the meters, but if your threat output suffers for it, you’re bringing everyone else down. The DPS players will have to throttle back on their potential just so you can get your jollies.

It hurts the entire group.

If your threat output is so high that nobody can ever come close to you, then sure, do some DPS. Just like a Healer that never has to heal, so they start using Hurricane or Chain Lightning.

But if you are the tank, then every other properly played DPS class is using your threat level as their benchmark for how much DPS they can do without going past you.

If you’re worried about your DPS, and your threat output suffers for it, you might never actually LOSE threat, but most DPS players doing comparisons will quickly decide you can’t tank, because they can’t go all out with you like they can with good ol’ Frank.

Don’t be that tank. Focus on threat first, not DPS.

If, at the end of any given run, you can look back and see that you either held threat all the time, or were able to regain threat as soon as you lost it, then you did a good job.

If, when you look back over a run, you know that you put out so much threat that players could go hog wild on their damage without fear, you did a GREAT job.

You have to start with grabbing and holding aggro. You build on things from there, being able to take a beating and survive for a while, giving your healer a chance to stay on top of things.

But that’s where it all begins. If you start with “I’m going to grab this group, get aggro on them all, and hold it”, with the addition of “Now I got ’em so I’m watching the area around me, and any other mobs that get pulled are getting taunted on me right away”, then you’re going to be doing a great job.

End of line.

Rambling thoughts… I’ve seen people in various forums ask for advice on abilities, Talent specs and gear ratios for tanking while leveling. Often, in fact more often than not, the return advice seems to be that you don’t have to spec as a Tank. Warriors are told that they can just go Arms as a tank while leveling and they’ll be fine. Paladins can go Ret. Druids can focus on Kitty spec and gear (which, okay, is actually pretty accurate).

There is a significant difference between “you CAN do something” and “you will do WELL at something”.

The truth is, if you’re going to tank a random instance with strangers, if you do it in anything other than tank spec with properly prepared abilities, you are letting yourself in for a miserable ride.

I’m leveling a Warrior as Protection. I hit level 35 last night. I’ve tanked a ton of randoms, and I’ve done a ton of quests. I am 100% Prot specced (except for 5 points in Parry, which in my mind still counts as Prot).

My gear is Strength and Stamina. I have enchants for even more Stamina.

I find that I like Battle Stance when questing for the fast Charges, Rend and the slow debuff to keep mobs from running when they get low on health. But it doesn’t really matter what spec I am, I’m questing just fine, and it’s really nice knowing that if things get tight, I can switch to Defense Stance, and swap in Sword and Board. You can change Weapons/Shield while in combat, unlike other armor pieces. So, just like with Lances, I put the icons for them on my button bar to swap faster in combat.

It doesn’t matter in questing. Sure, my DPS is undoubtedly lower than it could be. But I sure don’t notice it being slow to kill things at all.

But when I’m in instances as the tank, every single run I hear variations on “Good lord, finally someone that knows how to tank”. Almost every time, they want me to run another one with them, queueing us up immediately, or asking me to keep going for more.

With a new group in a random, I kept seeing DPS just run ahead without waiting for me, and start pulling themselves. As a longtime tank, this pisses me off. It’s hard to grab and hold aggro when some jackass just takes off without a word and starts pulling. The first thought that comes to MY mind is, “You want to tank, next time queue as tank, jackass.”

And some of them probably would if they let Hunters queue for randoms as tanks.

What I’m starting to figure out is, based on running in groups as DPS on other classes, lots of people are used to having tanks that may have plate armor or high health, but do not have high threat generation. They have standard DPS spec threat generation.

Those wonderful Arms specced Warrior tanks in Gnomeregan. Yay.

People leveling in groups at this point have gotten used to thinking it’s a free for all, every DPS for themself, everybody try and kill targets all by themself and hope the healer keeps them alive.

As soon as I run in and grab the whole group and just take them away, the attitude of a run typically changes immediately. Well, that coupled with my “Hi, I’m leveling as Prot and am gearing and specing for it. Give me a chance, and I’ll control this chaos, and we’ll have a smooth, fast run. Thanks!” macro.

People calm the heck down and approach it as a regular old run, instead of a chaotic free for all. Although amazingly, I get snotty “macro lol” comments, too. At least, I do until they see I actually hold the damn aggro on the group.

That can be you. No, really. And a LOT easier than you might believe.

If you want to try tanking, and you’re nervous about it, you’re scared you’ll suck, people in randoms are mean pricks, etc… give yourself every advantage first.

Get a nameplate addon and try it out on your own, or in a party with a friend. You don’t have to have one, but it can sure give you a feeling of improved confidence that you’ve got better control over the fights. I love seeing that distant nameplate turn bright red, Taunting it back to green, and then watching it stay green as I take care of business where I’m at. And, if someone panics and starts shooting it cause they don’t know I got aggro and am ignoring it because I know, for a fact, that I’ve got aggro but they don’t… well, there’s always Feral Charge, or another ranged Taunt, or running over and beating heck out of it before moving back to the first group.

Get some gear that focuses on Stamina and high Armor value, and get some enchants on it for more Stamina. Look at Glyphs, you get a Major as early as level 15.

And get your tank spec settled, know what your abilities do, and focus on the ones that give you the biggest bang for your global cooldown.

I’m serious, as a Warrior tank at 35 in instances, I rarely use more than Thunder Clap, Sunder Armor, Cleave and Revenge. Sometimes I have to Taunt when someone pulls the next group before we’re ready.

In Scarlet Monastery Library, there are lots of mobs that Stun you. I don’t lose aggro, because I’ve already blasted the hell out of the groups with Thunder Clap, Sunder Armor to left and to right, and Cleave. I get stunned, and I watch the nameplates show that I don’t lose aggro the whole time.

You can do it. You can even do it easily, especially if you give yourself every advantage.

Remember the tired old saying; Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

It may be a tired old saying, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true!