Generally speaking, how does tanking for pug dungeon groups in Classic play out? I’ve been debating making a warrior alt to tank dungeons, but I’d like to get a rough idea of what to expect first. Specifically, what should I expect at the higher levels? Is it fine for a tank to stay in dungeon blues, or is there some sort of expectation to grind out epics on it?
Dungeons are relatively trivial, and you almost have no need for a tank in a lot of cases. If you are able to establish (and even better maintain) threat, that’s typically good enough.
Team composition may matter, but if you have issues and anyone blames you, as a tank, you can tell them that Frosto personally said they are wrong.
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Lol the mage above would like to think tanks don’t matter. Yes tanks matter in dungeons at high level and I mean ST and up for sure. If you have an UBER raid geared furry warrior then yeah they can tank the dungeons because they’re going to be out dpsing the whole party anyway. But most of the dungeon runs at the higher levels do not have the highly raid geared dps or tanks going in them so healers are going to be pissed if a furry warrior wearing half greens and half blues wans to tank a BRD.
Now if you plan on only ever doing dungeons for fun and never raid then nah you’re good finding your dungeon prebis gear and you will have a blast tanking.
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Do you mean feral druids?
Worgen/Vulpera/Pandaren aren’t in the game yet.
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Tauren are the OG furries.
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Spec doesn’t matter as much as you seem to think. Tanking is baked into the Warrior class. I tanked every boss in Vanilla as 31/5/15 arms/prot.
In TBC, I was MT for several server firsts as a similar arms build.
There’s a reason they kept buffing prot every expansion until finally they decided to gut Fury and Arms to prevent them from tanking.
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The Honorable Druids Union would request that you not refer to us or associate us with Furries. We TURN into animals, not dress up as them and do…Goddess knows what!
EW!
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As long as you can build more threat on melee mobs then anyone else in the group, then you will be fine. Just try and not tank dungeons with mobs higher level than you too often. Can get frustrating when you can’t build threat on anything because you are under leveled for the content. And learn the pulls. Always look out for places where you can LOS mobs to.
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If you are into dungeons mainly, playing a tank is the way to go - otherwise you will spend most of your time sitting in chat looking for a tank for your dungeon group in the current community atmosphere. You can also easily form groups in such a way as to not have excessive competition for the loot drops you will want.
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Most are so grateful to have a tank at all its usually a non issue. Just do as well as you can, and if someones being difficult(insta aoe instead of letting you get aggro, dot a pull.as it runs to you then whine when they get aggro, etc) just ask them to stop. I pug tank 5 mans and ZG and as long as youre engaging the group as well as the instance, its all good.
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This is solid advice.
The Caveat is that people are stupid and if you LoS stuff they’ll probably start DPSing as soon as you pull.
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At 60 you will never wait more than 5 minutes to form a group.
Expect dps to go all out on every pull in dungeons, you’ll always have to deal with stray mobs. Any tank spec that has Tactical Mastery makes dungeons easier.
At the least try to get some ZG weapons and the snake looking shield, those will make your dungeon running way smoother
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If dungeon tanking is your goal don’t roll a warrior. Make a druid or a paladin because 5man tanking as Warr will give you carple tunnel AND aids.
Seriously though a pally in 5pc deathbone will make any 5man easy money.
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It isn’t that bad if you have half a brain. Just pick the melee mobs and tank those. Mark the caster mobs for primary kill. Don’t even need to tank the casters if DPS focuses them. This allows annoying casters to die quickly AND gives you some additional time to build threat on the melee mobs. Sure pally/druid is easier for 5 man, but good luck finding a spot in a raid as druid/pally tank. Most guilds have maybe 1 feral druid spot and most likely already filled.
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This is not the way. Any time there are casters you should be Los pulling to group the mobs for aoe and cleave. As a pally you don’t even need to “build threat” you can consecrate and go afk while you auto attack the skull target and never lose aggro. Their threat is insane.
Also, the op is asking specifically about 5man tanking. And druid tanks shouldn’t have a hard time getting a raid spot out side speed clear guilds.
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He also specifically asked for advice on a warrior. Telling OP to roll a different class is not the greatest advice when a warrior can do it just fine.
You cant AOE everthing with every group comp. And you can still los pull and mark casters and still AOE cleave everything while you only tank the melee. This changes nothing on tanking strategy.
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I recently rolled a warrior alt to try out tanking as well and so far its been great. Only level 39 atm, but it’s not quite as hard as it seems unless you have people off doing their own thing.
I’ve been leveling as arms so I can still do some sort of damage and its been fine for tanking purposes at the lower levels. I think as long as you keep a tank set with you then spec doesnt matter as much until you get to about level 50+.
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In my opinion, it’s asking for a repair bill to allow any mobs not to be tanked by the tank in a pug setting. If you want caster dead first mark them skull and tank them. You should be able to keep aggro on anything else with tab tageting. But the thing is you’re gonna have 10x more key presses than a pally or druid because warriors don’t have effective aoe threat. A warrior would be my last pick for almost any 5man content compared to an equally/comparably geared druid or paladin.
If your dps are dying from dungeon caster mobs, then they have other issues. I literally run dungeons almost every day for guildies/people paying for a tank. I have never had an issue with dps dying in this manner. Most of the groups that pay me for a tank are pretty badly geared too…
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In my opinion, you couldn’t be more wrong, and it’s one of the main reasons people get discouraged playing tanks and quit.
Hold aggro on the things that will murder the dps/healers. You don’t need every mob every second.
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