Adapted from Matthew Rossi (taken from WoW Insider,cut ,edited and pasted several posts)
Most of the tanking guides get way to serious and explore all the maths ,gear,costs and commitment to tanking. This collection of articles has a lighter touch and can be pleasant reading and informative at the same time
.Will soon be adding a TBC tank gearing guide pre Kara,with enchants etc..
Basics
If you've been tanking forever, have done all the 60 and 70 endgame instances, and are wearing purple and orange all over your 'toon as if you were the offspring of a traffic cone this wont tell you anything new. It seemed important to spend at least a little time going over the basics of tanking, however, for all those people who have picked up the warrior class and now find themselves strapping sword and board on and heading into an instance for the first time. I promise, we'll get to issues of PvP balance, DPSing, and other fun stuff in the future. But the main role of the warrior is to tank. If you're in a five man, you're usually there to tank the instance, and if you're in raid, you will probably be asked to tank from time to time even if you're a full DPS spec. Tanking is neither everything nor the only thing warriors do, but it is the most common and the role we're most associated with, and all warriors need to be good at it.
Warriors are unique among the classes in World of Warcraft due to the rage mechanic. While druids sometimes find themselves using rage, warriors are the only class that hasn't an option to switch to something that starts at full like mana or energy. As a result, a warrior starts every fight at his weakest and gets stronger as he takes and deals damage. While this difference is essential to just about every aspect of the class's performance, it is in tanking that it becomes the most crucial. In effect, a warrior tank starts out with less rage to use his abilities, while everyone else in the party starts out with their gas tank full, so to speak.
This is the origin of the oft-heard phrase 'wait for sunders', three words so ubiquitous in the game that there are even guilds named after them. When you're tanking, if your group won't let you establish solid aggro on a mob, you simply won't be able to do your job. No warrior can tank without the support of his group or raid, because ultimately the entire time you are struggling to hold aggro on mobs, your party is generating aggro through damage and by healing, and while their aggro expands with the damage or healing they do, yours is static and based primarily on your tanking abilities, your damage being secondary. In essence, while tanking you are actually fighting with your own party for the monster's attention, and if they play poorly they can easily outstrip the threat you can generate to keep the monsters focused on you.
It almost... almost... goes without saying that unless you grossly out-level and out-gear an instance, you should be tanking in Defensive Stance and using a main or one-hand weapon and a shield. But while we've all done that instance run where the warrior didn't have a shield or hadn't trained D-Stance yet, I'll mention it anyway just to be safe. While even our humble correspondent has, at times, found himself tanking in an unorthodox manner, that doesn't mean he recommends doing so.
The primary abilities a tank should rely on are Sunder Armor, Shield Block, and Revenge (which will usually be used together), and Heroic Strike. Taunt should be held in reserve for when you lose aggro on a mob, as using it when you already have aggro on a mob is a complete waste of the ability. Taunting when you have aggro has no effect at all, save to put Taunt itself on cooldown, so only use it when you lose aggro or see a mob running towards the healers. All of the abilities listed above will be available to you by level 20 if not before, meaning that you can begin to practice your tanking by the time you're starting Ragefire Chasm or the Deadmines. A brief rundown of each ability I mentioned and how they work follows. Please note that I am using the base levels of the ability, and not the improved ones available through protection spec because this is intended to be a general guide for new warriors.
Sunder Armor lowers the armor of a mob you apply it to and also generates a high amount of threat. It's a good idea to get five sunders stacked on a mob as soon as you possibly can, and then refresh the stack once every 20 to 30 seconds to make sure the armor debuff stays that high. This will increase the damage your melee can cause while also helping to keep your threat high. Note that if you are in a group with a rogue, you will not be able to sunder the mob if they use their Expose Armor ability.
Shield Block increases your block rate by 75% for 5 seconds or until you block an attack, whichever comes first. As a result, it will not only greatly increase your own damage mitigation, but by practically guaranteeing that you will block, it allows you to use Revenge, a counterattack move which you can only use when you have successfully dodged, blocked or parried an incoming attack. While Revenge is not based on weapon damage and is never a particularly damaging attack (it was enhanced in 2.1.1) Revenge is one of the highest threat moves at a warrior's disposal and, barring instant attacks that require speccing into protection, is the best instant threat generator most warriors have. It's common for warriors to work to get five sunders placed on their target before switching to spamming Shield Block to force a block, and then Revenge for its high threat, refreshing sunders in-between this process.
Heroic Strike, which costs 15 rage and replaces your next attack, is useful for when you've got enough rage to spare and don't have Revenge or Sunder available for some reason. It doesn't rely on the global cooldown and does generate significant threat, although inferior to the other abilities already mentioned. If you're swimming in rage, it's not bad to throw a few HS into the fray. Some warriors swear by a very fast tanking weapon because it allows them to use HS more effectively, since HS is not an instant but rather replaces your next attack.
Aggro
Am I the only one who ever wonders what, exactly, I am saying when I taunt a mob?
Is there a school somewhere in Azeroth that teaches you exactly how to insult, say, a mindless undead? The other day, while running yet another Steam Vault to try and get my Devil Shark Cape I started wondering how my "Frog" knows the draconic phrase that gets the mob to turn back and attack me instead of the dude who just set him on fire for 8000 damage. I mean, what could I possibly have said to that guy?
"Your ass looks really fat today."
"I heard that your mom is sexually attracted to iguanas."
"You are a total poopy head."
It's a mystery. How do all my warriors manage to assemble a list of catchphrases guaranteed to irritate all but a select few of the vicious denizens of Azeroth and Outland? Do we get together with Paladins and Druids and Hunter pets and discuss just how to attack the self-esteem of even the most self-confident foes? I imagine a wizened old gnome in full plate resting against a stump somewhere and reading from The Big Book of Bitching Out Beasts while I take furious notes on the inside of my shield.
"...I had no idea Belan shi karkun was so offensive! That's the last time I feed a netherdrake. Gotta make sure I remember that for Aeonus..."
At any rate, the facts remain the same. If you're interested in running PvE content, sooner or later you'll probably have to tank it. You may end up being just one of many tanking options in your guild (if you're guilded) or you may be called upon to be one of the primary tanks for most runs you do. Either way, you need to know how to tank. Part of the job of tanking is knowing how to mitigate damage, and part of it is holding threat. We've talked about the basics of tanking before so now I'll just go into a little more detail on generating hate.
The weapon you use while tanking is important. If you refer back to the previous article you'll see I mentioned Heroic Strike as a threat builder. A lot of warriors love to use HS spam to hold aggro and for that reason a fast tanking weapon is useful. I'm personally tanking with a 1.4 speed weapon now. If you can get stamina, defense or +hit on your weapon, by all means do so. In general, +hit is a nice stat for a tank, because you can't build threat if you're missing everything. One bad miss streak and one lucky hit from a DPS'er can equal aggro loss faster than you can imagine, so don't neglect +hit. Try and make sure you get enough hit rating so that your special attacks don't miss. I would say you want about 6% to hit, so roughly +96 hit rating at level 70. (If my math is off I apologize.) If you're having a hard time finding that much don't sweat it, but any hit rating is helpful.
The last time I talked about tanking in any detail, I was taken to task for not discussing Shield Slam. The reason I didn't is because it requires 31 points in protection, and I wanted to write a general guide for beginning tanks. But those that commented were correct in that Shield Slam is, hands down, the best threat generator a protection specced warrior can get. It only gets better the more shield block rating you have, too. The only down side is that somewhat hefty 20 rage cost. If it were up to me my first move to establish agg on anything I was expecting to tank would be to give it a nice shield slam, but sometimes I simply can't wait for 20 rage to generate, especially not when I have a triggerhappy DPSer or two in my party and I have to tank multiple mobs. As soon as I can, though, I slam a target.
One of the reasons I tend to respec at least twice a week is to get my hands on shield slam for tanking. Other talents like Defiance are accessible without too much investment in Protection, but shield slam is far enough down the tree that you might as well go all the way once you're there. I tend to spec 48 points in protection, leaving 8 in arms for Improved Thunder Clap and 5 in fury for Cruelty. Other warriors will disagree but I've never had cruelty leave my spec on any of my warriors, and I like imp TC for establishing enough snap aggro on trash to keep them off the healer, especially combined with defiance's 149% aggro increase in defensive. It's not remotely as good as what a pally or druid can do on multi-mob pulls, but it works for the most part.
I'm of two minds about Devastate. On the one hand, the tooltip fooled me for a long time: I thought that the threat generated by devastate increased if you stacked more sunders on a target. In a way it does, because the more sunders you have on a target when you hit devastate, the more damage it will do, and more damage does generate more threat, but there's no static threat increase for additional sunders. Devastate does the same threat if you have one sunder up as it does if you have five. When I'm prot specced I do use the big d, but it gets in line behind shield slam and shield block/revenge, taking the place of sunder entirely. Still, it can be spammed (only limited by the global cooldown), which shield slam cannot, and it's an instant. Nothing wrong with doing a little damage, generating some static threat, and keeping sunder armor refreshed all in one go.
One of the talents I most love to have when I'm tanking isn't even one of mine, it's a hunter ability. Yes, I'm talking about Misdirection. Much like taunt, I do find myself wondering how this ability works... does the hunter step up, shoot someone and then point to me and whisper 'he did it' or perhaps simply turns to me with an astonished look on his or her face and yell "I can't believe you just shot that dreadlord!" before moving back to, well, shoot that dreadlord? But however you want to justify it in game, misdirection is one of my absolute favorite abilities and I'm always glad to see the graphic pop over my head. It's on a two minute cooldown so, if you can arrange for a hunter to pull with this ability please do yourself a favor and ask for it by name. Especially if you end up tanking when you're not protection spec, this is an excellent front-end threat dump and instead of wasting the threat the way feign death does, the hunter dumps his threat onto you. If a boss fight is going to last longer than two minutes the hunter can even use the ability again, which can help a great deal if you're struggling to keep ahead of the DPS.
Concussion Blow and Improved Revenge are both indirectly useful for establishing and holding aggro. By themselves, they don't really have the threat punch of a Revenge or Shield Slam, but they do allow for two very important things: spell interrupt and limited crowd control. If you lose aggro on a mob and it resists taunt, stunning it and working up the rage for a solid shield slam is a nice ability to have. A mob that can't attack anyone while you slam and devastate on it to build threat is a mob that's not running amok.
Dungeon Cleaning
The common wisdom is that there are three roles in an instance. You have your DPS, who kill things. You have your healers, who keep things from killing you. And you have your tanks, who keep the things you intend to kill from killing you first. It's a concept so simple and widespread in WoW that most people refer to it as 'The Holy Trinity'. The only problem with this beautiful theory is, it's wrong.
When I first thought about it, the glaring omission was CC, or Crowd Control. You have CC to help the group by deciding which mobs you're going to try and kill first and prevent other mobs from trying to kill you while you do it. Eureka, I shouted from my bathtub (almost dropping my laptop), there are four lights! But the more I thought about it, I realized that I'd fallen into a subtle trap. There aren't four roles, there are still only three.
CC, DPS, and healing. And that's it.
The reason I can say that is because tanking is just another form of crowd control. The heart of CC is in keeping mobs controlled so that they don't melt faces or eat people while you wear them down, and that's exactly what any tank, be he warrior, paladin or druid in bear form does. All tanking is just a subsection of CC, it's no more an independent role in an instance than saying that we have CC, Magic Damage, Melee Damage and Healing, or going even further and differentiating the type of healing we have. A lot of times, a group will take a second tank into Shattered Halls for the express purpose of using that second tank to help tie up some adds: she's just performing a CC role. When you think of the game in this way, divided into this new 'Holy Trinity' you suddenly get whole new ideas about what's a hybrid and what is not.
Mages? CC and DPS. Rogues? CC and DPS. Warriors? CC and DPS. Each of these classes does their job differently, of course. Mages CC by totally immobilizing their targets with a renewable effect that has diminishing returns. Rogues apply a non-renewable form of CC that generally lasts longer than the mages. And warriors CC by keeping the mob or mobs focused on them, a much longer term form of control but one that requires healing and damage to their controlled mob or mobs. Tanking is at once the most versatile and most limited form of crowd control, because while it can be applied to multiple mobs at once and doesn't automatically break when someone else hits the tanked mobs (indeed, the whole point is to hit them) it also requires the most work from the other classes as it calls for them to focus on the tanked mobs and burn them down with damage while keeping the tank up.
What's the point, you might well be asking? Well, the point is that as you're running the endgame instances, you have multiple classes doing the tanking job. Therefore, it's time to consider the warrior as a CC class. You may already have a feral tank, enhancement shammy, paladin healer and hunter ready to go for your Shattered Halls run, and a fury warrior may NOT in fact be the worst choice for a fifth to fill out the run. The hunter will be trapping and DPSing, the shammy will be DPSing, the bear tanking, the pally healing... and when the fury warrior is not DPSing a boss, he can CC by offtanking. Sure, it means his DPS will be lower on the trash. But you HAVE enough DPS for the trash. What you need is crowd control, and simply by equipping some of his tanking gear and soaking up the occasional heal, that warrior can indefinitely control that mob. You don't have to worry about a sheep breaking, or a sap wearing off, or re-trapping, and while tanking the mob the warrior will also be damaging it, reducing its armor, and otherwise softening it up so that when the party is ready to move onto it, it will go down rapidly.
Yeah, warriors as CC is a weird idea. But it's a weird idea that needs to be considered in the era of multiple tanks. If you want to have well-geared warrior tanks for endgame, you need to bring warriors to five mans who may not be geared well enough to MT them, or unable to respec to a build that's really only useful inside instances. An Arms/Fury warrior may not be set up to establish as much aggro as fast as a full prot spec warrior can, but given ten or more uninterrupted seconds with a mob he can stick it to himself like glue. It's time to fully consider the offtank as a CC option for the good of warrior tanking as a whole.
Mistakes?
Of course, no one is perfect. We all make mistakes, be they small, trifling ones or huge, 'Oh my God did I just manage to pull Golemagg all the way up here' errors that can wipe runs and breed hard feelings and/or merciless ribbing for eons to come. Sometimes, like when you forget to bring a shield to an instance and discover this while charging in on the boss, all you can do is just hope to get through it. However, there are mistakes that can be avoided and things that might not seem like mistakes at all from the vantage point of another player, but which make a tanking warrior want to strangle the entire world with his or her own entrails, just to gross people out while they're dying. (Some of these things might apply to tanking bears and paladins, too, but I've never tanked as one of them and won't presume to speak for them.)
Here are a few things that parties can do to help their beleaguered warrior not reach 'I've been trapped in this coal mine with nothing but the sound of the water dripping on my helmet for three weeks while the radio that I cannot reach because I am pinned under the bodies of my best friends keeps play my wife's favorite song' levels of insanity. I'll also try and mention a few mistakes warriors often make while tanking that makes the rest of the party have to work harder.
1 - Please don't pyroblast the mob before I've even touched it.
This isn't just limited to pyroblast. Also don't frostbolt it, don't nuke it or DoT it up or stun it before it gets to me and start stabbing wildly before I've had a chance to so much as throw one single, solitary sunder on it. I don't want to see a big burning horned skull appear over a target's head just as I pull it. Especially not when I'm pulling it with a gun or a thrown weapon because, I guarantee this, even your weakest DoT will pull the mob off of me when all I've done it annoy it with a throwing knife. I don't know why even smart players seem to have a hard time with relapsing and doing these things when they're not being yelled at by a raid leader, but just, for the love of all you hold dear, stop doing this. It will not kill you to wait five seconds for your tank to make physical contact with the mob, really, I promise you. It will not even slow down the run. Since the tank won't be forced to chase an errant mob and blow a taunt to get it back, he'll be able to establish a better rhythm of specials and will have some rage for when the next mob is loose. Furthermore, if we're doing a multiple mob pull and the first target is yanked away early the warrior won't have the rage he needs to lock down the other mobs. There's no reason to be impatient when it will just lead to mass chaos later.
2 - Please don't randomly DPS mobs for no reason.
I didn't put all those colorful symbols up over the mobs because I expect a leprechaun to provide me with a delightful balanced breakfast, I did it because we're going to kill them in a specific order. Yes, I will be tanking two of them. No, that doesn't mean you should try and alternate DPS between the two of them. Kill the one with the skull first, he'll be the one I'm focusing most of my effort on holding. I know you can pop evasion or ice block if you get aggro, that's not the point. Unfortunately for me, I can't just let mobs chase you around, because if they kill you or lose aggro on you they might go eat the healer, especially if they've been run into the proximity of that aforementioned healer who has been spamming heals on you. I don't want the healer to die. The healer doesn't want the healer to die. So please, please, stop hitting every mob. You can make an exception for DoT's on mobs after they have been aggroed by the tank. If I'm standing in the middle of three mobs, tab sundering and using thunderclap, then it's okay to put DoT's on each mob to soften them up. It's not okay to start burning them all down at once.
3 - If you have a tanking pet or minion, please learn when to use it and when not to.
I am not one of those warriors who freaks out about pets in instances. There are lots of times when you want the tanking pet to tank things. Is there an extra mob we'd like to tie up for a few seconds and we're out of other CC? The pet can tank it and we'll just make it second on the kill priority. Is a mob breaking loose and about to kill the healer? By all means, fire up growl and take him out. Otherwise, unless your pet is doing one of these two things, please turn off whatever form of taunt it may have. If a pet is constantly growling and turning my target, I have to burn taunt to get it back, and that's a few seconds of cooldown. It may not seem like much, but if I have to fight your Felguard for aggro and then another mob runs to devour a healer, we'll all wish I had my taunt up instead.
4 - Know when to use stuns, shields, and other abilities that deny me rage.
If a mob I am tanking is stunned when it is too far away from me, I have to move to get back to it, which makes multi-mob tanking even more complicated. It's generally best to wait to use stuns or interrupts for at least the first ten seconds of a pull unless they're being used as CC on a mob that's not being tanked, because a mob that isn't hitting a warrior isn't helping him generate any rage, which means he has less rage to use to build aggro. Once a warrior has had a chance to sunder every mob he's expected to hold aggro on at least once, it's okay to stun the mob to keep its damage low. Similarly, when using PW:S, be careful to not use it directly before or just after a pull. I know it's not considered to block a lot of damage, but in those first few seconds unless it's against a boss that can actually one-shot the tank, it's not worth using it. Feel free to throw it up after aggro is fairly secure, however.
5 - Please do not taunt my mob.
This goes for warriors and anyone else who has a taunt. Do not use it on my mob. See the post above for pets. Use it to offtank, use it to pick up a runner on a healer. Don't taunt a mob I have solid aggro on. The healer doesn't know you've decided to be main tank all of a sudden, she or he won't know to heal you, you'll take a lot of damage and maybe even die, and then the mob may well go for the healer who desperately tried to keep you alive. This is the worst case scenario, yes, but the best case scenario is that I just taunt it back: why waste everyone's time?
I'll wrap this up with advice to my fellow warriors who may still be learning the tricks of tanking.
Don't rush the party.
I know your rage bar is declining. Suck it up. They need mana to function. If they can't function, you can't kill anything. You'll get more rage once stuff starts banging you in the head with blunt objects or lighting you on fire, it's a renewable resource.
Don't set up CC and then charge in and thunderclap in the middle of it.
We didn't sheep and sap those guys because we're barnyard enthusiasts.
Pay attention to the whole battle, not just the part happening directly in front of you.
Tunnel vision is a big problem for warriors as they start learning how to tank. It's great that you kept those two mobs agged on you the entire time, but if you let a third mob eat the healer or kill the DPS, you've failed. You're not there to glue mobs to yourself, after all, you could wander around any zone you like solo and have as many mobs attacking you as you could possibly want, all the colors of the rainbow. What you are there for is to keep the mobs from killing the rest of your party while your party kills them. You're better off letting a rogue dodge tank a mob for a few seconds and running over to pull another off the priest than you are standing static in one spot. The fight is fluid and you need to adapt to it.
Seriously, don't rush the party.
Man, they hate that. Sometimes they'll let you run ahead and die while they finish their drinks.
Bring consumables and use them.
Bring buff food, buff pots, heal pots and bandages. Be willing and able to use them. Consumables are one of the few advantages a warrior tank has over a bear, if you're not out there farming them up or getting them some other way, you're a less effective tank. Level your cooking, level your first aid, get an alchemist alt or herbalist (to shower your guild alchemist with herbs
...)if you have to but keep stocked as best you can.Koren