Tanking Warrior Guide
For a Warrior Talent Guide for 1 - 70 click here.
Warrior Tank Guide by Cardaxar
Originally posted on the Official WoW Guide Forums on 8-24-2006
This is older but still applicable to Warriors as a class guide.(continued)
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 8), 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.
