Comprehensive tanking guide for warriors (part 2)

2b. Onto Tanking..

# a) Mitigating Damage:

Maintaining the target on you, creating threat or aggro on that target so it will stay hitting you directly, and not others in your party will obviously incur in you taking that damage. Why you and not someone else? First of all, if you have been appointed or decided to become a tank, you will be geared in such a way (gear is reviewed in another section, check summary) that you will be taking less damage per hit than other possible options in your party or raid. This will not always be true, since an assigned tank could die and you could find yourself becoming the Main Tank due to your threat, over a better geared tank, who could not create such a high amount of threat in time, whose taunt was resisted, who just got a blue screen, or was afk (away from the keyboard) with auto-attack on.

Your first and most important job is done even before engaging, and that is knowing how the encounter works. Whether you read a guide about it before-hand, or you are in a learning process, you must take into account what the mob that you are about to face is able to do. Does it have a cone breath attack 90º in front of his face? Does it have a tail with which it can kick other people? Does it spit venom clouds on the ground in a controlled way? Etc.

All these are factors that you must be aware of, and take them into account while tanking. After making sure the target is on you ( creating enough threat or aggro to have it on you), this will be your biggest worry, and must act accordingly and POSITION the mob in such a way that none of these factors will be a problem for the raid, if they are avoidable at all.

Once the immediate damage to the raid issue has been corrected, the damage to you will be your primary worry in this area. There is not much you can do in the middle of a fight to change the way you are geared other than make sure to switch to MH/Shield if you suddenly become tank in the middle of the fight (this is best done via a macro that will switch between your other weapon sets and this one, and if you can't do a macro, here is a good mod that can do it for you: StanceSets v3 http://www.curse-gaming.com/mod.php?addid=2617). Shield Block will immediately become your friend, not only will it help mitigate, but it will trigger a block which will trigger Revenge, an excellent threat creating ability.

There are several means to increase your mitigation via gear and talents. Not going too deep into the subject since it'll be talked about again in the Gearing section, we'll talk about a few stats and introduce you to them. First of all, dodge, parry and blocking. All three of them prevent damage, the first two the whole hit, and block for as much as your block value.

Next we have defense, a very important stat for tanks. It'll affect a brutal number of factors while tanking, such as your dodge, parry and block, but not only that, it'll also decrease the chance of your character being hit (or increase the chance of being missed), decrease the chance of suffering a critical strike and the chance of suffering a crushing blow (this one though, you can't avoid by means of gear). The exact number of the increase for dodge, parry and block is 0.04% per defense point, and the same figure for the chance of being crit ( and a mob has 5% chance to crit, hence at level 60, you would become immune to critical strikes from mobs at 440 defense).

Last of all I'd like to talk about the Avoidance Cap "Myth". You'll hear people every now and then tell you that there is an avoidance cap, that you can't reach a certain point where you would be able to 100% dodge or parry a mob (I think the biggest idea going around is that you can't go over 60%). This is in fact false, there is no such cap, and it has been stated by Blizzard that this cap does not exist, although you obviously can't reach it at this point in the game.

In any case, just keep in mind that your job isn't to avoid all the damage (you would get no rage for getting hit then!), but to avoid a good percent of the damage so your healers don't have major problems, making your best effort to avoid spike damage as much as you can. Spike damage would be a lot of criticals being received, and your health bar spiking a lot, making it very difficult to heal. It is always good to talk to your healers and find out what worries them and what they think would be best while gearing up, to prioritize stats. In any case, your best weapon to fight spikes is Defense.

# b) Pulling and Positioning:

The first thing once the battle has started, and you have studied how to approach it, is gaining aggro on your target and force it to stay on you. As you know by now, this is done by rage, and high threat producing abilities, such as Sunder. You have two options to go on this, which can even be mixed. Whether the target is being pulled to you or not, you can either start with a taunt, which will give you time to land something else even if the first misses, but is a dangerous ability, since you will be without it for quite a few seconds, where many things could happen and you could have used that taunt (luckily, you can still use Mocking Blow or Challenging Shout at this point).

If you are preparing for a fight, and until this is fixed, you can select your target, hit attack even though you are far away, and start hitting Bloodrage every minute. The rage will stay there, and even increase if you have the talent Anger Management (this will be fixed). At the moment of the pull, you can have a Heroic Strike ready to go, taunt and sunder, and unless you are very unlucky, all three won't miss and you'll have enough rage to even hit some more abilities, or you can hit Shield Block, taunt and use revenge immediately after, which is a ton of threat, there are even more ways to get initial aggro. In dungeons like Molten Core, if your guild wants to go fast and steady, you can stop hitting targets with rage-needing abilities to have enough rage to continue pulling and keep the targets on you even if warlocks and hunters are attacking before you even hit the target.

So basically, rage is your friend, keep a few rage potions with you no matter where you go, as they always are handy, and needed to maintain aggro.

Positioning, which was already mentioned in mitigation, is a part of pulling too. As soon as the target is on you, and you are secure enough that it will stay like that, move it to a position where it will not endanger your party or raid. Some mobs heal themselves if too close, others have cone frontal attacks, other spit venom or throw bombs. Positioning is one of the most important parts of tanking, and doing it correctly will mean victory for your group. For example, do not position a cleaving mob in the middle of your healing camp, they won't last long.

Many fights in the game are based around using walls or doors, each fight itself is different, but you must always be aware of your surroundings and how to use them. A wall properly placed and used can avoid your group from taking damage, while you must remember that you need healed, and if you are out of Line of Sight you will get no heals, and die. So this takes us to the next part of positioning.. which is the damned Line of Sight and Out of Range!

No matter what you do while tanking, you must remember that you need heals. And if you position yourself and your mob in an unreachable area, without previous warning, and not enough time given to healers, you are toast. Communicate heavily with your healers, either by voice-communicating software or learning how to type quickly while tanking.

In any case, remember that positioning is no matter what one of the most important things while tanking, and must be always present on your mind.

# c) Threat:

So we got to this, which is quite simple to explain quickly, but so hard to understand. There is a post in the Warrior forums that explains quite well the value of certain abilities through testing. There is even a mod by Kenco that will measure your threat. Studying these values certainly helps, but it's not all that it takes to hold aggro. Taunt spamming every time it's up is not the answer either, this ability is dangerous to use.

The best way to hold aggro, is whatever you make out of it. You can study it as well as you wish and still be surprised every now and then. I will cover the use abilities in it's own section and explain how much threat each of them produces and how they are best used (in my opinion), but in this section I will mention that a good combination of them will do wonders. Sunder is one of the best abilities we have to hold threat, and as you should know by now, after 5 sunders, it still produces the SAME amount of threat.

You do not need to be protection for tanking and holding threat well, in fact, you may find it easier to hold threat with other specs while keeping Defiance. That's going to be highly depend on how your guild/raid/party plays, and there is no absolute truth about it, simply because the situations vary so much. One thing is true though, if you understand all of the threat terms well, you will have a much easier time adapting to a style of play or another, and do your job way, way better.

In battle or Berserker stance, a warrior produces 80% of threat per damage point or innate threat of abilities. Defensive stance produces 130%. Defiance adds 15% to this. This information is not all that useful on a daily basis unless you are calculating your threat, so by saying that "You produce much more threat by being in Def. stance" and "Defiance helps produce more threat" you'll be safe. Knowing those numbers though, is usually something good to remember and will tell you, just so you know exactly how much more threat you need to be making in different conditions.

No matter what, all of this doesn't matter if you don't have rage. Rage is how warriors produce threat, and without rage, then you'll have no threat generation. So a few things on this:

Taunting, make use of this skill when needed, but remember that if something bad happens, you need to have it available. Using it to force the target to hit you and gain rage is great, or to hit shield block and a rage and keep it on you, or whatever you may think of. Taunt will also equal your threat to that of the highest target, but then you will have to make up a 10% of extra threat to keep that target on you. This is what we call the "10% rule".

This rule is very simple, and it just means that even if you have more threat than another target on a certain mob, it must be 10% higher to that of the person who currently has aggro to gain aggro, else, it will stay on it's target. Taunt will automatically reach that person's threat level, so you can make the other 10%.

On controlled fights where you must switch aggro and the mob is tauntable, remember this and start saving rage right before you are making a switch, so that you can make it clean, and by clean I mean taunt, spam your abilities, and keep aggro, instead of watching the target bounce back to it's original target after you taunted.

Now let's talk about white damage. Many people don't think that much about it, but this is quite a huge amount of threat. Remember all those percentage numbers that Defensive stance and defiance add to your abilities? Well, they also multiply the threat of your white damage! So let's try to understand this, because it is not easy to. You have abilities with innate threat, with Sunder and Heroic strike being great examples. Sunder Armor deals no damage whatsoever, but it's obvious it produces threat (261 in comparison to damage without any modifier). Heroic strike, deals damage, so on top of it's innate threat (145 with no modifiers at rank , it will be dealing that extra damage that is also multiplied by your threat modifiers.

Quite damn nice isn't it? HS rocks! Why use Sunder at all?! Well, first of all, Sunder is an instant attack, whereas HS is not. Second, Sunder increases the damage of your abilities and the threat you will cause on a fully sundered mob with other abilities (not to mention the rest of your party's and raid's damage). And third, which is what interests us in this paragraph: HS uses your next swing attack, so you will not be hitting with white damage, which not only gives you it's normal threat, but also adds rage by hitting, while HS only removes. So with slower weapons like Spineshatter, HS becomes less attractive as rage generation is not normalized. You will be getting more rage per white hit, and, although slower than with a white weapon. It is really going to be dependent on how much rage you have to decide whether you will be using HS or not.

So yes, DPS does in fact matter while tanking, but threat producing abilities are needed to hold aggro, and produce a higher amount of threat (although not all that much). This bit of knowledge will help you throughout the rest of your tanking career, every 1.9, 2.0, 2.3, 2.6 seconds or whatever your tanking weapon speed is. HS will sometimes be good to use, and other times it'll be best to save it so you can obtain more rage per hit. The only exception is when you have unlimited rage, and there is only one fight in this game that has that description, Vaelestrasz the Corrupt in Blackwing Lair.

Dual Wielding along with 2H tanking is something that may not sound so bad after studying it for a bit. As we know by now, rage is our primary source of threat, and white damage helps as well. So, although personally I have not tried using the 2H method because of my Protection spec and devoted love to fury while leveling, I will leave that for whoever wants to comment on 2H tanking and go ahead with dual wielding tanking. Basically, throughout trash mobs in many instances you will find yourself more suited using two weapons than a shield and a single weapon, if your party is very aggressive. By aggressive I mean that they will start attacking the mob as soon as it's pulled, and they will not be waiting for you to have a comfortable amount of threat. Dual wielding you will be obtaining more rage to use, and producing more threat through white damage. You may find it useful while OTing too, since you have to stay on top of threat versus all those damage mongers and you won't have the benefit of being hit on by the mob and gaining rage through that. Have your macro ready to switch to Shield though, no matter what the situation and place, things can always get freaky and that extra bit of mitigation could save someone else.

Remember that your job is to protect. Your healers may complain sometimes "why aren't you wearing a shield?" and thinking "uh oh, we got a tank who wants to be a DPSer", you can either explain to them how threat works, or ignore them and keep doing what you must do to protect your party. This is situational as well, like most of what is explained on this guide, because every guild is different, and players play differently. So get yourself a good offhand weapon that will give you rage and a bit of extra DPS for all the time you're not on bosses, as long as your healers can afford it (they should). Theory-craft only can teach you to a certain point, so go out there and smack some beasts!