Basically, your job is to keep the healer alive. If the dps aren’t staying alive, they could always slow down, CC, attack your target, wait for you to build threat, etc. If they want to go faster than that, fine, but you then can’t be expected to hold all the mobs.
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For a leveling warrior Gear >>> spec
Better geared warrior tank in DPS spec is better than crappy geared tank spec warrior, all I can say at least until LvL 56 that is.
At 56, change to 31 prot spec to do BlackRock dungeon spam and hit LvL 60.
Get into Blacksmith and mining and craft your gears as you level up and you will find that you can tank even in DPS spec.
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First I’ll say, not every dungeon run or every pull will be as clean as you want it to be. Just keep working at it, keep improving, and keep looking for ways to improve at every aspect.
Be the best tank you can be for the group that you’re in. Know your priorities and manage the situations as best you can. You’ll eventually develop your own style and build confidence as you gain experience.
Humans’ weapon skill should help somewhat, but you’ll find in dungeons that your attacks will often fail to land. That’s just a contingency you’ll have to deal with. If [Revenge] isn’t up, [Sunder] misses, you only have 10 rage, and you don’t need the interrupt, [Shield Bash] them in the face. If you’re disarmed, [Shield Bash] uses your “unarmed” weapon skill.
Study the tooltips on all of your abilities and think about the rage cost, threat generation, and other effects that they offer.
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This is Taladril’s Threat Guide and Reference Table:
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Thank you so much for this advice. I will no longer be a warrior. I really appreciate your feedback.
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Try arms spec. Warrior sucks early game but you will be a god at 60 with practice. Tanking is not for everyone.
As for all of these aoe trash mages giving tanking advice, please stop.
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In Deadmines specifically, my best advice
- Don’t tank it until you are at least 20 or higher. You will have a much better time.
- Buy a ranged weapon for pulls if you don’t already have one.
- After the first 3 bosses there will be a patrol of elites that will spawn behind you so make sure your group is constantly watching their back.
- Kill the engineer’s first in the foundry first and pull enemies back to the ramp. They will run, aggro more, and can potentially wipe your party.
- Set up key binds to mark skull and X on pulls for kill priority for your group.
- No matter what you do, your rage generation is going to be terrible, so don’t be too hard on yourself.
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I think the foundry is probably the trickiest room in that dungeon. With the spiral ramp, weird los, ranged mobs that summon and flee, and a boss at the bottom, there’s a lot that can go awry.
I find the human hunter pats to be pretty annoying too sometimes, because they like to run out of melee range whenever they can. That dungeon has a lot of ranged pats in general.
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Yeah but at that level, it’s pretty high end for damage and allows you to run with shield. It beats the heck out of running 2handers since you don’t have to worry about gear swapping macros.
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Use sunder armor, you might ant to use a few other abilities like shield bash to interrupt casts and revenge procs, but you can tank perfectly fine with no issues if you just tab through mobs and put up sunders, even with a full 5 stacks its raw threat per second means you wont need to worry about dps if you tell them to wait for sunders.
Learn a ranged wep skill if you havent, you need one to pull, always pull mobs back farther than you think they need to be, if there are casters, you need to line of site them to pull them back.
Do these 2 things and the only thing you will have to learn is how to try and salvage a pull with your CDs when your group messes up.
Dont overthink it, its not as hard as people make it out to be.
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Don’t tank DM till level 20. Otherwise VC fight will look like this:
Miss
Miss
Parry
Miss
Resist
Healer dies
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I Like to use my keypad with them keybinding target markers and mark kill target / cc target / etc.
your dps and healer need to let you get something like 3 sunders on a kill target to build threat
hold your taunt as a sort of o carp get threat back button
2H tanking assumes good gear and an understanding healer.
Threat meter is a very handy add on for DPS / tank / healer. When on priest I fade often.
Tanks need to read their group. It is usually best to run an instance the first couple times with a group you know and everyone lets you get used to the pulls and building threat.
LOS pulling and watching for pick up patrols and things like that mark better tanking.
Preach has a series on tanking, even though it is retail it is possibly worth listening to his talk.
Be the leader as tank, if you run master loot, have a trusted friend to the ML
Is something for the group drops that upgrades one or more people try to help them upgrade, use /roll if more than one wants it. (how I handle things, ymmv)
Sometimes I use a dagger n shield for more threat per second dps while tanking at certain points. Usually a sword just on account of I like the rpg feel of tanking with a sword. If I were pally tank i’d rpg prefer a mace, but use the best tool for building threat.
OH, and ya can get a healer friend and tell them you want to practice tanking in open world stuff to see what works and doesn’t work so it is all automatic time you are in instances.
Situational awareness is important I stay zoomed way out. put a raid icon over my healer and never LOS heals and watch heals MANA, let them drink when they need to. Any mana pots that drop give to your healer keep them alive and they will take care of you.
Keep some healing pots and bandages up to date. sometimes one self heal can prevent a wipe.
We did DM two weekends ago with 3 17s a 19 warrior tank and a 21 dps. It was hard but doable. I was tanking rage was an issue. Get a gun! LoS pull, mark, save your taunt to peel off the healer and hold bosses. 17s will face pull capt off boat so be ready. Kill casters first or their fireballs will hurt. Kill goblins then their pets. Be wary of almost all forum advice.
If you’ve never tanked it, it’s a lot easier at 20-22.
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All this talk has me wanting to level my warrior so I can tank. Never done it before but it sounds like fun.
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Not trying to hijack the thread, but I had a similar question on
low level warrior as dps. The same issue comes up in lack of rage.
The tank has aggro, thus the dps warrior isn’t getting much of any rage, so what is a good tactic for dungeon dps in the level 20 range.
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You stand there and wait.
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Just to be clear, I’m asking for advice on doing dps, I completely understand making sure the tank has aggro before starting in.
I want to know how to contribute my part, when rage is limiting.
You stand there and wait for your rage to build up. Use rage pots or Bloodrage if you feel it’s necessary.
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Really? Actually, if you look at any numbers, it doesn’t seem like bad advice at all, and I doubt there will be much issue with holding threat either.
Although, I’d personally go with Thunder Clap for dmg mitigation over threat, this is not a bad opener at all, imo.
A lot of people spec deep Arms while leveling, some prefer Fury, and still some go deep prot. There are trade offs to each decision, and ultimately it’s up to the individual, but all choices are viable while leveling, though I’d say going deep Prot early will likely push you to run more dungeons, or party more often than you may otherwise (not that that’s a bad thing).
I put together a low level warrior tanking guide that may be of some interest, and I’d love some feedback on. I’ll be updating it for higher level stuff shortly.
There are some sections on macros as well, which I find helpful. I’m a big fan of understanding the reasons behind the advice, and digging into how to know how to know for oneself, so I also recommend having a look at Magey’s WIKI for Threat Mechanics: https://github.com/magey/classic-warrior/wiki/Threat-Mechanics
It can be very helpful to understand precisely how threat is generated, and which skills to use in which situations.
One such skill is Battle Shout, and having an understanding how its multiplier works on party members (and their pets) who are currently on the threat table of a mob, makes it clear when and how it can be beneficial for keeping aggro on mobs over AoE damage dealers.
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Re-read his comment. He advocates for tanking in Battle Stance and repeatedly using Thunderclap. While only swithing to Defensive stance to taunt. How you can think this is good advice is mind boggling. You will not hold aggro at all if you do this. The healer will pull threat off you.
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