Tanking Guide

[Mr. Parts]

Hey everyone today I wanted to bring a tanking guide to you. This is not a specific guide telling you to use ability X, but more a general tanking guide that gives you tanking tips and tricks on UI setup and addons. I have tanked endgame content on both a warrior and a deathknight. Today I am sharing my tanking knowledge with you.

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Know your class
3. The Basics of Tanking
4. Your Interface/UI
5. Addons
6. The Pull
7. Summary


1 Introduction:
With Cataclysm around the corner a lot of people will want to gear up as fast as possible. Fastest way to do this is by queuing as a tank for dungeons. While leveling don't just take the dps gear as quest rewards, but also save up some tanking gear.
Sure you can queue as a dps-er and wait...and wait... and wait some more. As a tank you usually get instant queues or close to it, so gearing will be faster. Don't be afraid of tanking JUST DO IT! If you want you can start off by tanking for guildies or friends. If you are new to tanking just tell your party at the start of the dungeon you're new to tanking and ask them to take it easy on you and give tips where needed. Practice really is the key to success!


2 Know your class:
As I said this is not a class specific tanking guide so you will have to look up info on your class on different sites.

A few good sites are:

• Elitist Jerks
  On these forums you can find very specific information on all classes and their mechanics
  
• World of Warcraft universe guide - WoWWiki and Portal:Main - Wowpedia - Your guide to the World of Warcraft
  There is a lot of information on all classes and roles on these sites
  
• TankSpot - World of Warcraft News, Guides, and Community
  The forums here are a good resource on all kinds of information on tanking
  
• YouTube - Ciderhelm's Channel
  This is Ciderhelm's Youtube channel. A lot of specific boss encounter tactics can be found here.

3 The Basics of tanking:
Threat/agro is the most important as a tank. The aim of tanking is making sure no one else is getting getting hit by mobs. You want them all to hit you! You want to have more threat on mobs than the dps-ers and even more important your healer. It's not to bad if a dps-er dies, but if the healer dies it most likely means you are going to die yourself.
Which also brings us to another important role as tank: Keeping yourself alive! The reason you have cooldowns is to use them. Don't depend solely on the heals from the healer. Some boss fights will require you to use cooldowns like shield wall, icebound fortitude or whatever to survive. Always be ready to pop cooldowns even on trash packs. Watch your own health at all times!
If you have problems with keeping agro on mobs use marks and ask your dps to target those first. That way you know which target they will be going for and you can put some extra focus on those mobs yourself to keep agro. Still having issues? Ask dps-ers to please use agro reducing abilities or agro transferring abilities. Ask the rogue to tricks of the trade you or the hunter to misdirect to you or simply ask the group to give you 5 seconds before starting their dps.

4 Your interface/UI:
It's important to be able to see as much as possible of what is going on around you. You don't want to be zoomed in to far. You can only see the enemies right in front of you that way.

Wrong:
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Good:
[spoiler][/spoiler]

As you can see in the second picture I am zoomed out and this way you can watch the next pack, a patrol or the rest of your group to make sure they don’t accidentally pull another group. If they do, this way you can immediately respond to it and get agro off them.

This is a clean picture of my current UI:
[spoiler][/spoiler]

It's important to keep an eye on your own health, so you know if you need to use a cooldown. That’s why I have my health showing in two locations.

Another important thing is being able to see buffs and debuffs on your target and debuffs on the target of your target. For example the boss gets a buff at some point and you need to use cooldowns when he does. This way you can see when you need to use this cooldown.
Being able to see the target of target debuff is useful in raid situations where you have two tanks that need to switch if one gets a debuff for example, so you'll know when you have to taunt. Having a Focus frame also works good for this! My focus frame is not active, but usually I set the offtank as my focus so I can always keep an eye on his health/debuffs.

Having a threatmeter is also useful. This way you can see if your dps is really close on stealing your agro, or if you can slack a little

Make sure most of your important abilities and cooldowns are bound to keys. There is nothing wrong with being a clicker, but it will be easier on yourself if you start using key bindings. Just start practicing!

The UI I use is mostly Tukui (Tukui). With some adjusted settings and extra addons.


5 Addons:
This section will cover some useful addons for tanking
Deadly Boss Mods
(Deadly Boss Mods :: A World of Warcraft AddOn)
Pretty much a must have for raiding. This will announce boss abilities and show the cooldowns of the boss.

Tank Warnings
(Tank Warnings - Addons - Curse)
Will announce the use of your cooldowns or taunt resists to your group.

Omen Threat meter
(Omen Threat Meter - Addons - Curse)
This will show how much agro you and your party/raid have on your current target.

Tidy Plates
(Tidy Plates : Unit Mods : WoWInterface Downloads)
This will change the health bars over the head of your enemies.

Tidy Plates:Threat Plates:
(Tidy Plates: Threat Plates Beta : Plug-Ins & Patches : WoWInterface Downloads)
This is show if you have agro on the enemies. Their health bar will be green if you have most agro. So when 1 turns red you know to target that one and taunt back.

Mik's Scrolling battle text
(MikScrollingBattleText - Addons - Curse)
Replaces the Blizzard combat text with this one. This is highly customizable and can play warnings if one of your procs is available for example.

Power Auras
(Power Auras Classic - Addons - Curse)
Another addon that can show a visual or play audio when abilities proc.

Doom Cooldown Pulse
(Doom CooldownPulse : Casting Bars and Cooldowns : WoWInterface Downloads)
Will show a pulse when one of your cooldowns or abilities is available again

Tukui
(Tukui)
A unitframe interface

Pitbull Unitframes
(PitBull Unit Frames 4.0 - WoW AddOns - WowAce.com)
Instead of using Tukui as unitframes you can use Pitbull. This addon is highly customizable.


6 The pull:
Your group is assembled and everyone entered the dungeon. Make sure your group is ready to go. I usually check if the healer is there and ready, you can tell this if you have the healer's buff or earth shield or something. Just because that hunter is shouting “Pull FFS” or “C'mon already!” does not mean the group is ready. This just means you're in for an interesting ride with this guy. If the dps-er starts doing the pulls tell him to stop or he can tank them

Now that we're at the end of a expansion we are used to aoe pulling trash packs and just aoe-ing them down. Forget about that, because Cataclysm promises to bring back Crowd Control (CC) into the dungeons. Which means you'll have to assign marks for CC. For example tell the rogue to sap star and the mage to sheep moon as soon as you pull.
(It's important to know what kind of CC you have in your group so check out the Crowd Control article on Crowd control - Wowpedia - Your guide to the World of Warcraft if you don't know all classes.)


The actual pull is coming up. I can't express how important it is to check the healers mana before almost every pull. Check his mana bar and see if its full or close to full. If you see him sitting down to drink. WAIT! Don't piss off your healer by pulling to fast. You want the healer as your friend. You can ask your healer at the start to let you know when he needs a manabreak (MB).

Is this the pull before a boss? Do a quick ready check to make sure everyone is ready to begin this fight. There's no need to do a ready check before every pack. That will just annoy the hell out of your group. But doing one at the start of the instance and before every boss is not uncommon.

You've made your pull. Now make sure all the mobs are facing you and are facing away from the healer and group. 99 out of 100 times you want to have a boss or trash pack facing away from the party/raid. Some mobs may cleave your friends otherwise. So face them away and position yourself so you can see a lot of your surroundings. If you see a mob facing someone else check if the mob is just casting something or if the person actually has agro. If the mob is casting something try to interrupt it and if someone else has agro on that mob taunt it back. If a mob runs away from you that will almost certainly mean you lost agro so immediately target it and taunt back.

Line of sight pulls can be a useful trick if you have a pack full of casters to tank. Ask your group to stay back and not dps/heal for a few seconds. Then you agro one of the mobs. Run around a corner or get behind a pillar or something so the mobs can't see you anymore. This will force these mobs to come to you. You can then jump out of hiding and fully agro the pack without issues.

Always make sure you are in line of sight and range of your healer. Don't run off too far or charge in while your healer is behind. This will get you killed and in turn the rest of the group killed.

Make sure you know the tactics to the bosses in the instance. Read up on bosses and their instances or watch video's. Knowing the tactics is half the battle already. As a healer I wouldn't care less if a dps-er died because he didn't run away from the explosion. But as a tank you are considered the group leader and you should know stuff like this. That's right... as tank you're considered the leader to a group. You have to make a lot of important calls. Experience, practice and knowledge will help you make the right ones


7 Summary:

• Get your UI sorted. Your UI can be a big help
• Know your class and rotation or ability priority
• Know the instance and the bosses in there
• Make sure the healer has mana and is ready
• Check if all mobs are facing you. Dead healer = dead tank
• Try to make sure you can see all your party members and nearby patrols/packs
• Use your cooldowns wisely, they are there to be used
• Practice by doing a lot of instances
• Be the highest on threat!

I hope you enjoyed reading this guide. HAPPY TANKING!


If I forgot to mention something please let me know and I will add it to the guide! And credit you for it of course.

[Spaceman]

Excellent guide, really enjoyed it.

Don't be afraid of tanking JUST DO IT! If you want you can start off by tanking for guildies or friends. If you are new to tanking just tell your party at the start of the dungeon you're new to tanking and ask them to take it easy on you and give tips where needed. Practice really is the key to success!

Perhaps add not to jump into heroics asap, but start with the normal dungeons till confidence and knowledge is gained - Some might forget to start in normals!
Heroics are a scary place these days with the gogoers and pullers.

Tanks for life! <3

Edit: Also a macro I like to use if the pullers are hunter or rogue:

/cancelaura Tricks of the Trade
/cancelaura Misdirection

They soon learn their lesson! (If they forget to vanish/feign)

[Mr. Parts]

Excellent guide, really enjoyed it.

Thanks it did take me about 4hours to write the damn thing