Elite’s Classic Low Level Warrior Tanking Guide
Description
There seem to be a lot of people getting frustrated with tanking, threat control, and confusion as to what items a warrior should have equipped while tanking lower level dungeons. This guide aims to offer advice, and a starting point for warriors who are leveling, and wish to tank, while in a DPS spec, like arms, and is completely viable at least up until RFD BRD. It will be updated based on feedback, and experimentation, if needed.
Recommended Addons
Threat Plates (Classic) is the only addon that I would consider non-optional for tanking, as it displays colors (green, yellow, red) on the health bars of mobs, depending on threat levels.
Sword & Shield Tanking vs 2 Handed Tanking
Whether to tank with a 1 hander and shield or a 2 handed weapon is, at least in my opinion, a personal preference, and not to state the obvious too much, but it’s also dependent on the confidence levels/comfort of the rest of your group. Something that I have found useful is to say something like, “I’m going to be tanking with a 2hander. Let me know if you’d prefer me to slap on a 1hander and a shield.”
The advantages to tanking with a shield include not having to weapon swap to interrupt with Shield Bash, or block an attack with Shield Block, as well as taking less physical damage, and gaining the stats from your shield & 1hander (obviously). Advantages to 2handed tanking include higher damage, more rage generation, arguably more fun (depending on preference).
Core Tanking Abilities and Uses
- Charge - cannot be used in combat. Generates 15 rage (learned at level 4)
- Demoralizing Shout - costs 10 rage (learned at level 14)
- Revenge - must follow a block, dodge or parry - costs 5 rage (learned at level 14)
- Sunder Armor - reduces targets armor, causes high threat - costs 15 rage (learned at level 22)
- Defensive Stance - 130% base threat (learned at level 10)
- Tactical Mastery - Talent - requires 5 points in Arms to learn (optional)
- Taunt - Taunts target to attack you - melee range, 10 second cooldown (learned at level 10)
- Mocking Blow - Forces target to focus attacks on you for 6 seconds - melee range, 2 minute cooldown (learned at level 20)
- Blood Rage - Gives 10 Rage - 1 minute cooldow (learned at level 10)
There are some others, as mentioned above, such as Shield Block or Shield Bash, but these are not particular relevant for maintaining threat, which is the primary concern of a low level tank, and the focus of this guide.
A note on Demoralizing Shout: There was some talk about reducing the amount of threat generated by Demoralizing Shout. While I am not sure if this has been implemented or not, Demoralizing Shout should still be an excellent skill to keep up for maintaining AoE threat.
Opening
Note: If you have 5 points of Tactical Mastery, you will keep up to 25 points of rage when changing stances. If you don’t have Tactical Mastery, you will want to make the best use of your rage prior to changing stances.
Ideally, open out of combat, so you can charge (generate 15 rage). This means you’re in Battle Stance, and have 15 rage. Sunder Armor costs 15 rage, Demoralizing Shout costs 10. If there are multiple targets, get all with Demo Shout then proceed to sunder your kill target and/or off targets, as needed. White hits also generate a good amount of threat. If you are in Battle Stance, and find threat is too low, swap to defensive stance.
If you face pull, someone else pulls on accident or intentially, you may be in a situation where you cannot charge, have no rage, and don’t have aggro on anything. This is a good time to use Blood Rage, and Demo Shout, in combination with white hits, which may be enough to pull aggro, esp. if you are in Defensive Stance.
If you still don’t pull aggro, Taunt is useful, however if there are several mobs, keep in mind that the healer will be generating high amounts of threat by healing, which is likely happening, while you are casting Demo Shout and moving to collect mobs. If none have targeted the healer, they almost certainly will the moment you taunt off the DPS, so use this sparingly, favoring a Demo Shout/White hit combo, and watching the colors of threat plates, to prioritize taunting off your healer.
Also note that in addition to Taunt, a 10 second melee range CD (which requires defensive stance), you have Mocking Blow, a 2 minute melee range CD (which requires Battle Stance).
If DPS is regularly pulling mobs, tunnel visioning 20 yards away, rogue tanking, etc. you can just let them. Likewise, if a pet is taunting, pulling, etc, rather than go out of your way, you can just let them. In these cases, what tends to happen is either:
- Nothing: Everything is fine, and the dungeon goes smoothly
- Healer Stress: The healer tries to heal the DPS, and prioritizes them over the tank (inexperienced healer)
- DPS dies: The DPS or pet dies, and that person either continues doing the same thing later, or learns from their experience
- Communication (optional): You can try to discuss things with the group. Often, (of course, this is totally just my opinion), if people are not playing their roles properly, they either feel that they know what they are doing, and you don’t, or they have no clue (often both). This option is generally not required. I will typically communicate if I see a healer prioritizing healing a life-tapping warlock over a tank with low health though.
Tips: Keep Demoralizing Shout up at all times, Sunder your kill target, and off targets, if possible, always prioritize Taunt and Mocking Blow for pulling from your healer, avoid moving away from a group of mobs you have a good amount of threat on to Taunt a mob off of a DPS.
Macros
Macros can be very useful for changing stances, using different skills in different stances, or even saving messages to spam looking for group channels with. Here are some of the basic building blocks to make macros with:
-
#showtooltipis used with the?macro Icon to display a skill’s icon depending on options -
[stance:1]Battle Stance ([stance:2]Defensive Stance,[stance:3]Berserker Stance,[stance:1/3]Battle Stance or Berserker Stance) -
[equipped:shield]/[noequipped:shield]- self explanatory
Here’s an example of a macro for of a Shield Bash macro. If in stance 1 or 2 (Battle Stance or Defensive Stance), and a shield is equipped, cast Shield Bash, otherwise cast Battle Stance. /stopmacro says don’t do anything more here here, if the condition is met, which is [equipped:shields]. So the macro will stop if a shield is equipped. If a shield is not equipped it will run the next two lines to equip Shield_Name (replace this with the name of your shield), and 1Hander_Name (replace this with the name of your 1 handed weapon):
#showtooltip Shield Bash
/cast [stance:1/2, equipped:shields]Shield Bash; Battle Stance
/stopmacro [equipped:shields]
/equip Shield_Name
/equip 1Hander_Name
Marking Targets
Assigning raid markers and letting the group know what they mean can be a good tool in your arsenal, and quite helpful. Here’s a priority list macro for telling your party the markers and their assignments that you can customize however you’d like:
/p Markers and kill priority
/p {skull} primary kill target
/p {cross} secondary kill target
/p {moon} sheep target (please mage)
/p {triangle} hibernate or roots (please druid)
/p {square} distracting shot to frost trap (please hunter)
/p {star} twinkle twinkle
You can also assign these though the menu under key bindings > target markers. Or, you can create macros, e.g.
/script SetRaidTarget("target", iconNumber);
where iconNumber is:
- 0: no marker
- 1: Star
- 2:Circle
- 3: Diamond
- 4: Triangle
- 5: Moon
- 6: Square
- 7: Cross
- 8: Skull
It is helpful to know a bit about the CC (crowd control) your group may have. As an example, mages have a 1.5 second skill Polymorph that can be cast on Beasts, Humanoids and Critters, will turn them into a sheep for 20 seconds, and can be recast.
This hopefully gives a good starting point for low level warrior tanking for anyone who does not have experience with these things. If you have any suggestions, or would like to point out any mistakes, please do so, as any feedback is greatly appreciated.
