WoW: Big Guide to Tanking

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In World of Warcraft when you are doing any kind of grouping for quests, instances, heroics, and raids there are three key class types. The three types are DPS, Healer and the all important Tank. To be fair, you need all three types to be successful, and a tank is only as good as the healer and DPS teamed with them, but for the sake of argument and my ego let’s call the tank the most critical.

Tanks are generally viewed as the character in charge of a run through anything. This may or may not be the case for any specific group, but if a random group is assembled most players look to the tank to lead. This is because the tank is the player that generally controls the pace of the group, controls pulls, manages the enemies, establishes kill order, and much more.

If you are going to play a tank in World of Warcraft then there are some basic things that you will need to know. The items in this guide are the basic items you need to know to be a competent tank in any group you enter. There are many players out there that just tank so they can get a group quickly, but do not really understand what they are doing. Learning and understanding the fundamentals laid out in this guide will put you head and shoulders above the “average” tank out there and ensure that you get invites to many groups over and over again. Once you know these basic items, you will be in a position to learn the subtle nuances involved in tanking and specific fights over time, and will surely go on to become a great tank.

My current tank - Gradiel
 

Before the guide dives into the specific details on what it means to assume the role of Tank in World of Warcraft, here is a bit of info on my personal experience in the role. Over the years playing World of Warcraft I have ended up tanking with all of the various tank classes. I started out with a Warrior until getting sidetracked healing as a Paladin in the original end game raids. Then, in the Burning Crusade I ended up being my guild’s main tank on my Paladin and off-tanking alt runs on my Druid. Once Wrath of the Lich King launched I started up a Death Knight for a DPS character but soon found myself tanking on it as well. Therefore, having tanked on all of the possible classes I feel pretty confident in my tanking ability and my ability to teach the basics.

Talents

Before you actually go out and tank, make sure you are set and ready to assume the role. This may sound overly simplistic; however some players who have never tanked do not understand how important some things truly are. As a last resort any tanking class can shift into their tanking stance / form / presence / aura and tank an enemy really quick, however that is not good enough for all but the shortest time frames (a pull gone wrong in an instance). If you are going to tank for a group you really MUST ensure you are geared as a tank and have your talents spent in tanking talents.

Starting with talents, what talent tree you need to spec into varies with the class. For Warriors and Paladins it means that you are deep into the Protection tree and for Druids you need to spend most of their points in the Feral tree. These classes do not have a choice. You can not tank effectively if you are mainly specced into any other talent tree.  Sure, you will have some points in the other talent trees, but most will be in your classes tanking tree.

Death Knights are a little different than the other tanking classes. They have the most choices available to them and can effectively tank while specced into any of their three talent trees.  The main tanking tree, however, is still the Frost tree and there are several abilities you will want to have there no matter the main talent tree you use.  However, you can tank as Blood, Unholy, or Frost (as long as you are actively using Frost Presence) in almost any instance or raid.

Since this is an overall How to Tank guide, I will not go into specific builds here.  There are builds in our Class Guides, our forums, the official forums, and the various tanking sites around the internet.

Tanking Stats, Enchants, and Gems

Once you have figured out your build, it is time to worry about the stats you need for tanking, which directly corresponds to the gear you need. There are various character stats that are required that you need to worry about as a tank; they include Stamina, Strength, Defense, Dodge, Parry, Block, Hit, and Expertise.  The amount you require of each and the priority it should receive is entirely dependant on your class.  For example as a Death Knight you don’t use a shield, therefore Block is meaningless.

The first thing you need to worry about as a tank is getting to be defense capped. This term is a little bit of a misnomer as you can not become capped in defense, it provides bonuses forever, however what it really refers to is having enough defense to remove critical hits from the hit table against you. This is the actual defense score on your character sheet, not the amount of defense you have on your gear.

An Example of a Tanking Build
 

The amount of defense varies based on your level and what you are tanking. There are many different calculators out there to help you figure out exactly what you need to have, but the most important numbers to know are for the current end game at level 80. To tank level 80 heroics you must have 535 defense while to tank raids you need 540 defense. For players still levelling up you require 485 to tank level 70 instances in the Outlands, and 435 to tank level 60 instances back in basic WoW.

Now that everyone knows about the defense cap, if you are a Druid, ignore it. As long as you put three points into Survival of the Fittest, you can not be critically hit unless the enemy is over 5 levels higher than you are.

Once you are defense capped you can move onto worrying about the other stats. I will repeat that for emphasis: ONCE you are defense capped you can worry about other stats. Meaning until you reach that magic number for your level you will NOT worry about any other stat. Being defense capped is your one and only priority, only after you are capped should you even think about other things. To get to the cap initially you are very likely going to have to enchant and gem for it forsaking stamina and mitigation. Don’t worry though, as this is normal until you have been in the end game for a while.

Once you are worrying about other stats make sure you balance them. DO NOT just stack Stamina. This is a trend I have seen in far too many new tanks to ignore. They want to see big health numbers and miss out on everything else. Balancing your Health, Mitigation (Armour, Block), and Avoidance (Dodge, Parry) is what creates the best tanks.

Ask any healer which they would rather heal: a 50,000 health tank with no avoidance, or a 30,000 health tank with 20% in each of dodge and parry. The answer will be the lower health tank every time. That is because of something called effective health which is long and complicated to explain in any great detail, but can be summed up quickly as follows:

Given a series of 100 10,000 health hits the first tank needs to be healed for 1,000,000 health. The second tank will dodge 20 of the attacks and parry another 20, meaning they will only need 600,000 health to be healed.

Obviously there is more to it than that as mitigation and block also play into the calculation, but hopefully you can see what a difference avoidance by itself can make. Therefore, when you are gearing up be sure to look at Stamina, Armour, Dodge, Parry, and Block as appropriate for your class.

As a tank, enchants and gems are there to help you meet your defensive cap until you have end game gear and can reach it easily.  Once you can reach the cap without worrying about using enchants and gems they are a method to gain health.  Other than meeting your meta-gem requirement all gems should usually be Stamina.  Enchants vary depending on which item they are going on, but are once again usually used to help you reach your defensive cap and then for Stamina or threat (hit or expertise).

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Threat

Now that you are specced and geared for tanking, it is time to actually get around to learning how you go about tanking effectively. The main thing to remember when you tank is to gain threat. Sounds simple right? Well for the most part it is, especially against a single target.

Each of the types of tanks have a specific thing they need to do at the most basic level to generate enough threat to hold aggro and tank an enemy. For Druids you must be in bear form and for Warriors you need to be in defensive stance. For Death Knights and Paladins it is all about their presence or aura, which are Frost Presence or Righteous Fury respectively. These abilities allow you to generate much more threat than you would normally for the damage you are causing. This is what allows you to hold threat while other DPS classes are causing significantly more damage than you do.

In addition, each class has access to several abilities that cause additional threat. These vary from class to class but are generally identified as abilities that cause high threat, such as a Death Knight’s Death and Decay ability. They cause even more threat than they should due to their damage and then this is multiplied by the normal threat increase of your tanking ability.

AoE Tanking

Tanking a single target is all well and good, however you do not normally come across single targets in an instance other than bosses. Most of the time you need to hold threat on multiple enemies at once. It is your responsibility to put enough threat on all enemies you are fighting so that they do not go after the healer or any DPS player doing AoE damage. It is not your responsibility to generate enough single target threat on each and every enemy so that DPS can go full out on random targets. DPS should still focus on your main target or switch when you do.

One very simple thing you should learn to do when AoE tanking is to mark a kill target, or have a DPS player mark one for you.  This gives single target DPS the knowledge as to which target you will generate the most threat on.  Once tanking the group, focus mainly on that target, however target swap to other targets and hit them as well to maintain threat on the entire group.  Simple target swaps is an old school, but effective, method to tanking multiple enemies as long as DPS does not go crazy on anything but the main target.

Each Tanking class also has several abilities that allow them to tank multiple enemies at once and generate enough threat to hold them. Warriors use Thunderclap and Cleave to hold aggro while also switching targets occasionally. Druids can use Swipe which hits additional targets, and they can also manually change targets. Death Knights and Paladins are the kings of AoE tanking through. Death Knights, especially Frost based ones, have access to several AoE abilities such as Death & Decay and Howling Blast that will keep large numbers of enemies locked onto them. Paladins are even better, since they have Consecrate, Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, Hammer of the Righteous and more to hold threat.

No matter your class you need to be able to handle multiple enemies at a time. So make sure you play around with your abilities and learn how.

Engaging the Enemy (Pulling)

An important part of any fight that you are in is how you handle things at the very beginning. More specifically, how you choose to engage the enemies makes a big difference. The priority is to establish initial threat against all of the enemies as quickly as possible. This means getting in there and mixing it up with them.

For single enemies it could be as simple as charging in and starting to beat on them with your normal rotation. For large groups it could mean running in and dropping your biggest AoE skill right off the bat. In fact for large groups of melee enemies that is exactly what you want to do. When you encounter casters or ranged enemies it changes up a little bit, but we will cover that in the following section on positioning..

No matter how many enemies you face, you need to be the one to engage and hold them. Never let a DPS player or Healer wander ahead and bump into enemies, as it makes it much harder to tank them. The only exception to this is anyone misdirecting threat back to you, like your favourite hunter.

Positioning (while fighting and pulling)

Once you are tanking enemies very often position is critical. Think of all the enemies out there (bosses especially) that have frontal cone or cleave attacks. All of these enemies need to be faced away from the rest of the players in your group, otherwise the healer will have a hard time keeping everyone alive. In addition melee DPS can avoid having their attacks parried by attacking from the enemy’s rear. This means that anytime you tank an enemy you should face their back towards your group, regardless of the enemy having a special attack or not.

Something to consider as well is the fact that many enemies have knock back attacks. Any time you happen across one you should make sure you plant your back against the nearest wall so that you are not thrown back and away from the enemies.

Also, as promised in the previous section here we talk about positioning casters and ranged enemies and getting them into position to tank. This really depends on your class and group makeup, as sometimes you can simply have them silenced and let them come to you. Other times they are in the wide open with nothing else around them, in which case you can go to them and let the melee based enemies come to you. In many cases though you can not and must make them come to you. This is where positioning comes in.

What you need to do is a Line of Sight (LoS) pull. This involves finding the nearest corner or stairwell that will block the LoS between the enemy and yourself. Step forward to engage the enemies and then retreat to the corner that you found that will break LoS to the enemy. The rest of the party should be waiting there. Once you get there and break LoS, the enemy casters and ranged damage dealers will start coming towards you so that they can once again attack. Make sure everyone waits until they get there before attacking or stepping back into the open.

The last thing to consider with positioning is the plant. No, I do not mean a plant as in one that you water to keep alive. I mean that you should plant, as in not move, once you get into position. Any movement makes it more likely that DPS players need to move, healers need to reposition, or that someone gets into a front arc where they shouldn’t be. Therefore, anytime you do not have to move, you shouldn’t. You are not a rogue strung out on caffeine trying to stay alive and out of front arc in an arena match, you are a stoic tank, stand there and take it.

Cooldowns (Minimizing Damage and Surviving)

While it is generally the healer’s job to keep you alive, there are times that they will just not be able to. This could be due to LoS, fear, burst damage, or in the worst case, their death. When these situations occur you need to start using your available cooldowns to survive.

As opposed to DPS classes that should use their cooldowns and trinkets as often as possible to increase damage and their effectiveness, tanks use theirs reactively. In fact the best case is to never have to use your cooldowns at all.

Cooldowns – For anyone unsure of what I am talking about here, I refer to any ability that is on a cooldown longer than about 30 seconds as a cooldown ability.  These are the abilities that you need to plan and watch for.   Many players refer to them as their “Oh crap” buttons.

Depending on your class the exact cooldowns vary drastically so get familiar with them.

• Warriors have Shield Wall, Last Stand, and Frenzied Regeneration.
• Druids have Survival Instincts, Barkskin, and Frenzied Regeneration.
• Paladins have Ardent Defender (which activates itself), Lay of Hands, and Divine Protection.
• Death Knights have Icebound Fortitude and Anti-Magic Shell.

In addition, Trinkets can provide some great cooldown-like abilities. Many trinkets have huge on-use abilities such as large amounts of health, dodge, or parry granted. These all factor in and should be used whenever the need arises.

Lastly some racial abilities can play a big part in surviving a fight. For example the humans’ “every man” ability can get you out of almost any loss of control ability. Also the Dwarfs’ “stoneskin” ability can reduce incoming damage for a short while and remove some nasty poison. If you are a Draenei or an herbalist you also have your own heal ability that you can use.

Watch the Group

Since in most cases you are going to be in charge of a group’s pace, in addition to your base responsibility of their survival, you need to pay attention to them. This means that you need to pay close attention to all of their health and mana bars, and their threat status. During a fight this is critical as you need to know if your healer is about to go Out of Mana (OOM) or if your group’s top DPS player has drawn aggro and needs to be saved.

Learn to watch for DPS that draws threat, or for enemies that reset threat, and taunt back any loose enemies quickly. Once you have taunted them, hit them to re-establish threat and start tanking them again.

Watching the party is im portant even in between fights. Do not go charging blindly ahead without checking your group’s mana and health. Getting a large group of enemies rounded up to tank while DPS AoE’s them down is no good if your healer doesn’t have the mana to keep you alive, or the mage doesn’t have mana to burn the enemies down. Take mana breaks as required, don’t make them ask for it. If they are low and you see them sitting to drink, wait until they are above 80% mana before moving on.

Source: tentonhammer.com

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