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 
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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):
- Taunt mob off dps
- Wait for rage, pop shield block
- Pop procced revenge for 1 pt threat
- 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
Also if taunt isn’t up and you have enough rage switch stance -> mocking blow
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Classic tooltips suck is pretty much the answer lololol
Lol its really bad dude. To say 19% extra lost hit is not a big deal is total bs and im kinda embarrassed for you. 19% is fine? Youre drunk
19% is so big its literally trash tier in comparison
IMO, SS is worth the rage for every single pack with 2 or more mobs. 30 rage is a lot, but most of that comes from charge so its not as much of an impact. Its less about WW, more about doing double the threat from your first 5 hits for 30 rage. Thats worth it to me.
Macros is really personal preference, so sorry if i kinda ignore this part. /startattack is mandatory imo though
When it comes to sunder, 3 stacks is an arbitrary hold over fron real vanilla. Use a threat meter and stack sunder until you feel comfortable with your threat on trash. On bosses i stack to 5, but revenge procs and shield slam is priority.
Happy to answer any more questions, im not necessarily an expert but 13 years of warr experience and emp kills at 53/LBRS clears at 55 seems pretty damn rare so i think i have a basis to speak from
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tactical mastery is great early on since it lets you charge in, TC, DS, demoshout for some initial burst of aggro but it’s situational, you don’t want to charge into a huge pack of mobs or Thunderclap CC off of a mob.
As far as i’ve experienced, every group is entirely different. Some groups are chaotic AF, some are silky smooth, with well used CC, focus fire and patience. You want to be able to adapt. If you have dumb DPS you’ll be ping pong’ing on mobs all the time.
You will be tabbing all the time, even if you manage to hold complete aggro from the mob that is currently being focused down, you’ll want to tab to nearby targets and apply a few sunders, revenge so you have some leverage when your DPS switches or your healer doesn’t pull aggro. Healing pulls quite a bit of aggro in classic.
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Defintely get used to ping ponging.
Ah thanks for the reminder. I keep forgetting to make those startattack macros. Any abilities besides the obvious ones you find handy to have startattack on?
As far as sunder, I wasn’t really basing it on how things used to be just what felt solid in the groups I’ve ran with. I have Details! which has a threat plugin but I’m not sure if it’s showing that or still showing damage. Haven’t ran a dungeon in a minute and don’t remember. I’ve only just started messing with the threat plugin as I only noticed it recently. The only other threat mod I’m seeing on twitch is one for nameplates so I’ve mostly been judging threat based on DPS and who’s focusing what (hopefully skull). But I agree I need to sort this threat meter out.
Thanks for the solid advice fellow Tauren in arms!
Anything that is an actually melee range ability has startattack for me pretty much. If it does damage and needs a target, startattack is prolly a good idea
Threat meters are important for us because most dps dont have them, so if you see someone pass you you can prepare for them to pull aggro. dps is kinda irrelevant when it comes to threat, cause some classes have baseline threat reduction talents and others dont. A shadow priest at #2 on the dps chart without w/e their threat reduce talent is more terrifying to me than a rogue, for example
Also, the amount of threat you need to pull aggro increases by the distance you are from the mob
% threat to pull aggro at max range is 130%, for example, so be aware of that. If a mage at max range passes you on your threat meter, they wont pull real aggro for awhile. Something to he aware of
What threat meter do you use? The one that comes with Details? Only other ones I’ve seen are the nameplate one and one that only showed other’s threat if they had it installed too, and it didn’t look like a lot of people had installed it so I didn’t bother with it.
I use details. It sucks, but they all suck. Classicthreatmeter needs EVERYONE to have it, so i use details because almost everyone has it. If youre not using details you probably suck is my rationale
Like who uses skada or recount these days?
I do use Plater classic for threat nameplates, but that p much ends the tank mandatory addons list
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I don’t understand why people have so many issues with multi target threat. I tanked WC at 17 against a 24 mage, 21 hunter, 19 enhancement shaman, priest healer. Never once had aggro taken from me long enough to hit a dps or healer. It felt like tanking did during TBC. Tab your butt off and spam heroic strike, revenge, sunder armor and keep shield block up as much as possible.
WC is not representative of the rest of the game is p much your answer
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