Warrior Tanks, I could use some advice

Taunt does two things- it forces the mob to attack you for 3 seconds regardless of other players threat and also makes your threat match the highest person on the threat table. so that 3 seconds of guaranteed aggro is pretty damn useful. Taunting a mob that is already attacking you guarantees that he will continue attacking you for 3 seconds, which is super useful off the pull when you havent had time to build a ton of threat.

Plus the threat you get from it allows for some pretty neat tricks like letting a rogue go HAM to build a ton of threat, you taunt to get his threat, then he vanishes and youve got an absurd amount of threat. Works with threat drop classes and is a useful trick sometimes

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So why does the tooltip for Taunt, and also the Bear equivalent, say “but has no effect if the target is already attacking you”?

Your explantion WOULD have an effect, while the game says it doesn’t.

/confused

Definitely take tactical mastery so you can charge and swap to d stance during the charge but still maintain some rage.

I open a lot with shield block and demo shout if I’m not dual wielding. This should make the first hits more manageable for the healer but will proc revenge right away which is our best aggro building ability. Unless shield block and revenge are already on CD the 15 rage you would spend on a sunder is better spent on shield block (10) and revenge (5). You will take less damage and build more threat.

Past that try not to taunt unless you actually lost aggro and preferably have rage to fire off a sunder or block/revenge combo.

Your post is tremendously helpful, thank you for taking the time to write all that out.

I’d be willing to try this, as long as the dps isn’t taking too much damage, and taking away Mana to be used on the tank.

It’s still unclear if/when they are going to fix battle shout threat. It did a lot more threat in vanilla. They claimed they were going to fix it when they nerfed demo shout threat, which was bugged to give a multiplier based on the number of mobs affected, but from what I’ve heard from some warriors, demo shout seems to be nerfed but battle shout didn’t seem to be fixed yet.

It has only been mentioned in the bug report forum here: Demoralizing shout is bugged and it is why we have this AoE meta - #64 by Aggrend-1483

so it’s not clear if all hotfixes involving these abilities are live or not yet, but they claim that they want the abilities to work just as they did in 1.12. Once that happens, you then would actually generate a lot of threat with battle shout. To the point that if you’re hitting enough targets with battle shout, every mob that has you on their threat table would essentially be hit with more threat than if you had sundered them, but it happens to every single one in one cast. It will be less threat than the bugged (and I think now fixed but I don’t have a warrior myself to test it on) demo shout if it hit enough targets, but still better AoE threat than anything else you have.

I don’t believe it’s working/fixed yet though.

But as someone pointed out to them a few days ago and heard nothing back, the patch notes for the BC release (2.0.1) said it was fixed THEN, implying it WASN’T fixed at this stage of the game.

Right but battle shout is actually bugged and not working as it did in 1.12 in that it is currently less effective than it should be.

The demo shout fix was a bugfix/nerf to bring it down to what it actually was in 1.12.

The battle shout being fixed would actually be a significant buff to its threat compared to what it is/was doing in classic vs. actual 1.12 vanilla.

At least that’s what I’ve read, again, I don’t have a warrior alt yet.

If you’re Fury without Tactical Mastery, you can still Charge in for rage to Cleave, Demo Shout, or Thunder Clap on pull.

If you’re Arms with Tactical Mastery, you can Charge and immediately switch to Defensive Stance before unloading your rage.

Once you get higher level, Enrage is useful in Fury for more damage/threat, but Sweeping Strikes is incredible for 2h tanking. While dual wield tanking is generally superior by a great margin, this operates under the idea that you’re not hitting mobs higher level than you. In that case, 2h tanking becomes better due to the hit tables being more in your favor.

Once you reach 30+ and get Berserker Stance, and Berserker Rage, you can make use of 2h tanking with Sweeping Strikes a lot easier. I plowed through SM Library for a good while doing that. The standard pull setup is: Berserker Rage -> Charge -> Sweeping Strikes (Bloodrage where you want) -> Cleave (or go to Berserker Stance and Whirlwind at 36+).

Is SS still worth using if you’re not fighting at least 5 mobs for it to affect WW hitting an extra target? I know it affects all weapon swings not just WW but it’s 30 rage which still feels like a lot.

I’ve seen a lot of people recommend this, but I still haven’t felt compelled to use a lot of macros yet at 34. I have my stances bound to Z (Battle), X (Zerker), and C (Defense) and similar abilities share the same bind on the bar. E.g. Mocking Blow is Battle only and Disarm is defense only. They have the same cooldown so I bind them to the same key (shift+3 in my case) on the same bar slot.

I also have Taunt as 5 in defense stance, which shares the same slot as Berserker Rage in zerker stance and Tclap in battle and I like that for now.

Just feels like if I made a stance macro for these kinds of abilities I wouldn’t be taking advantage of the fact that each stance gets its own hotbar, but I probably will start once my bar space fills up more. Not arguing with you saying my way is better just pointing out what I do in case I’m missing something.

Also have a question pertaining to sunder spreading. I usually don’t stack sunder more than 3 on trash because it doesn’t feel necessary threat wise. However, on the pull is it better to get a couple sunders on the kill target first before spreading, or should I be getting 1 sunder on everything ASAP while holding aggro on kill target with Revenge?

I flip flop between both ways but I’d like to know for sure so I feel more consistent.

Thanks for the good info in this thread so far.

Charge whenever it’s safe to do so. Get very good at determining when it’s safe to do so.

It isn’t. Defiance is helpful, but not mandatory for most of the game. Around 55 you can respec for the essential 15 in prot, and if you aren’t a raid MT that’s all you’ll ever need.

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Consider thunderclapping first then changing stance then doing demo shout or sunder. If you do demo shout then thunderclap then likely you’ll still in battle stance for all of it, which means all of your abilities is being multiplied by 0.8 for threat. Whereas if you do thunderclap first right after charge, you can then swap stance for sunder and demo shout which means those abilities will do more threat :slight_smile:

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Boy, you have posted the perfect forum thread. Aight heregoes:

Tanking in vanilla is crazy deep, starting tanking you usually can just get away with holding threat, but the more you get into the meta, the better you become. Lets start with the basics:

If you want an easier leg up, go for tactical mastery talent first, being able to charge in battle stance, and swap to defensive. In my current playthrough I forgot about this, and I dont want to burn a gold respeccing and it >sucks<. In vanilla threat is hard as all get-out to aquire. Go down the fury tree to help build rage, rage=threat. Fury also leaves you open to swap to dps with an offhand weapon so you can easily pop into groups/grind/quest. Deep prot spec isn’t needed until late game/raiding.

Rotation: your main buttons are going to be shield block, revenge, and sunder. Easiest way to think about it is shield block will normally proc revenge for 1 point of aggro, if you can build up enough rage sunder is 2 points of aggro. Heroic strike is in there but I can’t remember the last time I used it and Im level 31 almost exclusively tanking dungeons.

Tanking is very situational, tanks aren’t the end all be all of a groups success. (Despite what alot of dps might tell you) we just set the pace, and specify which enemies should die first, and which to CC. Starting out, be ok with pulling one pack at a time. If those groups die super quick and your healer is constantly pegged at 100% mana, maybe try a double pull. Be careful though, one of our jobs, (if you’re a good tank), is picking up the slack of the less self aware party members. Your one pull can easily become a double when the rogue steps back juuussst a bit too far.

Now this one is super important:

AWARENESS. This comes in many forms but it’s the number 1 skill a tank uses.

First, awareness of aggro ranges, pats, mobs around you. Knowing when to pull with a bow, vs charging in, knowing when your position is too close to another pack and you need to pull back for group safety. Know your aggro radius and be extremely careful with it. Many times a mob runs at 10% and im standing there like an idiot, because if I chase it, I’ll pull 15 mobs, but if I let it go catch a friend, we have 2 more to deal with.

Awareness of mobs and what they do:

Mobs are built around basic ideas of our character classes. So, some are mages, some are shamans, a few are paladins, etc. Know which thing you’re fighting and what to interupt with your shield. This is hugely important for 2 reasons:

1: It determines kill order. If everyone is kicking a warrior mob in the shins, and the mage mob is free to do all the damage he wants while he waits, thats healer stress. Reverse that, the mage will die super fast, and the warrior mob has been smacking your shield the whole time.

2: Interrupting spells that make it a bad time. Any healer mobs extend the fight to an inane degree if not interrupted. Seeing as I have a rogue in almost every group, and I think 2 of them knew that kick existed, seems it’s up to us to peg healing spells. Also a great rage dump. It’s not super expensive, but if you end up with extra rage, you can stop a hefty frostbolt from pelting you in the face. Healers love it.

An interesting thing I’ve notied trying to wrangle retail dps aggro:

Weave taunt into your plan. Retail dps is going to IMMEDIATELY pull. This sucks, but I found a way around it. If the dps does pull immediately (read: dammit):

  1. Taunt mob off dps
  2. Wait for rage, pop shield block
  3. Pop procced revenge for 1 pt threat
  4. Wait for taunt to pick up the OTHER mob dps pulled.

Rinse repeat.

Most of my pulls go down like this. And…ugh…stay like this. It’s pure chaos. It’ll be better at higher levels, i swear.

On that topic, do not stress out if a dps holds a mob for a bit. Most dps are hardcore researched now and most of my healers are impeccable. Shaman dps helped tank on one of my runs to make things faster. Your job is to be an attention seeking wh***. If you don’t have all the mobs attention, thats ok, the rogue will be fine till taunt comes back up.

And im probably forgetting alot of meta, but this is now impeccably long so lets cut to the important bit:

WATCH<<<<

YOUR<<<<<<<<<

HEALER<<<<<<<<&&&&&^%%^**;""::

If a party is a nuclear family and the tanks the dad, the dps are three caffinated toddlers and the healer is the mom.

HEALERS ARE YOUR BEST FRIEND.

Watch their mana bar. If they go OutOfMana stop pulling immediately until they’re ready to go again. Buy some cheap water at inns to give to them before every dungeon. It’s expensive, but they love it, and…IT HELPS YOU NOT DIE! ITS A WIN-WIN!

No mob should ever be on a healer for more than a tenth of a second. They are #1 save priority. If the rogue dies, they can res after the pull. If the healer dies EVERYONE GETS TO GO BACK TO THE ENTRANCE TO HELP BRING THEM BACK.

I don’t have a caps lock that matches how hard I want to stress the teamwork between you and a healer.

If you want to be a good tank, it’s 25% skill, awareness, meta, and 75% teamwork with your healers.

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Thank you Mokthug, that was very informative.

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The hit reduction isnt that bad. You make it sound like its impossible to do anything lol.

Depends on how rage starved you’re going to be. I’ve had luck sundering the kill target, popping sb and using revenge procs to gain light aggro on the spread, then switch back to kill target for another sunder, then spread sunders/taunt dropped mobs, etc

Tons of macros. Put charge in a macro with BS. Put sunder in a macro to change to DS. Etc. Just macro everything that you use to certain stances. I also think it helps to put your initial points into the retain rage on stance change talent before going prot. Intercepting is useful when you get it for tanking, etc. Too many abilities are useful for tanking to not macro them with stances.

You can be the greatest tank to ever exist but you will still lose threat on mobs that the dps players are determined to rip from you. Personally I consider someone a great tank if they can just keep enough aggro that I won’t get attacked after throwing corruption and agony on the off-targets.

I generally haven’t been using sb when tanking multiple mobs because revenge seems to proc enough on it’s own and I’d rather use the rage on more sunders. I haven’t tanked since I got zerker rage though so I’ll have to see how much that helps with rage.

Thanks for the reply.

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Really good advice in your post :slight_smile:

Also if taunt isn’t up and you have enough rage switch stance -> mocking blow :slight_smile:

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