what is my tank doing wrong?Follow

He looks awfully armor starved. I have almost 4k in caster form right now and I don't even have my tanking set 'complete/raid ready' yet: http://wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Arygos&n=Ranawaran (I'm already in Bear Form but if you do the math in reverse it's about 3800 armor). It's possible they were simply hitting him so hard that the healer was seriously having to pump mana into him, to the point that he couldn't out-threat the healer.

Tanking multiple mobs at the same times requires quite some concentration and help from your party members. It is always best to build up a few seconds of threat before the DPS start their damage dealing. So tell the party when to attack the main target.

Your spell rotation should actually be the same as on 1 mob, except for the lacerates changed for swipes. I normally mangle and lacerate the main mob a few times to ensure aggro, and then spam swipe between mangles and apply spot mangles or lacerates if it appears that a particular mob is not getting hit enough. If a mob starts to get loose, I feral charge, growl and mangle to bring it back to the fold.

To hold aggro on 4 mobs or more you pretty much do the same thing. Only now you gotta Tab between mobs alot to keep aggro on them all. While tabbing through all the mobs, Swipe while returning to the main target to thrown in a mangle.

And yes, it is very annoying if you have a mob sheeped close to you when you are tanking multiple mobs, because you can't use swipe. It is important that you either pull the rest of the mobs away from the sheep, or let the mage pull the mob a bit away from the group before sheeping.

Edit: spelling

Edited, Nov 6th 2007 10:21pm by nightmareke

That can't be his tanking gear. Just can't be. If it is, he's not ready for heroics with under 14,000 armor. (2718x5) Hell, I'm a casual player who barely runs an instance a month and I'm not rep'd up for a single heroic, and even *I* have almost 21,000 armor. I'm not braggin' as lots of druids dwarf that, just pointing out that 14,000 armor is so low that I really don't believe that's his tanking gear.

If that IS the tanking set he's assembled with his best effort, I'd recommend he either respec resto like he wants or...if he wants to be a better tank...go to http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/class.html?wclass=6;mid=1184859383323516343;num=1;page=1 and go shopping/questing.

As others have said, the problem of secondary mobs going after the healer is solved by spamming swipe, or by tabbing through the mobs lacerating them if there's CC to worry about. In my experience it takes very little threat on a mob to keep them from peeling off toward a healer.

I've got go with the consensus so far. I've started heroics recently, and even in my full Heavy Clefthoof, Earthwarden (etc etc etc) with over 21k armor its still a "world 'o hurtin' " compared to normal 70 instances. Granted, it is doable at this point, especially with a good healer.

I'm impressed the healer could keep up, as most of the times I've tried a heroic with an undergeared tank, he simply splatters, but the amount of healing needed is indeed the problem here.

Some advice I'd give would be:
A.) Like everyone said, Clefthoof, etc...just get the poor boy's defenses up.

B.) I might get slapped for saying this, but keep Demoralizing Roar up all the time. The rage cost is negligible in heroics; there is enough pain hitting you to never be rage starved. I started doing this when I started doing heroics, and the healers have always said they can notice a difference with and without.

The problem here being that if he can't hold hate at all, that one global cooldown for Demo Roar might mean the difference between help mobs and mobs munching the healer...

It hasn't been mentioned yet so I may be wrong on this, but it's my understanding that Feral Faerie Fire also generates at least a little bit of threat. It's free in terms of rage/mana/energy, too, so I throw it around whenever I think of it, which admittedly isn't often when I'm trying to hold aggro on multiple mobs.

Posters above has mentioned most of my thoughts, I rarely have any trouble
keeping aggro on the second or third mob to be tanked, just tab around and get
in a mangle/maul/lacerate the more the better as long as you have rage.
Swipe is also a winner.

Anyway, had two thoughts I felt I wanted to add:
Very often, at least in heroics, you wont be tanking more than 2 mobs as rest
will be cc'ed. When he makes the pull, make him pull the 2nd target rather than
the first for a wee bit initial aggro. Switch to 1st kill target to stay ahead
of the trigger happy casters, and tab a bit back and forth. Sometimes I starfire
2nd targer, change targets while it's casting and moonfire the 1st mob, then
shift to bear. Not too much threat, but anything better than nothing :P
Probably even more than faerie fire, dont have any numbers right now.
A better than bad mage should have polyed his target by the time kill targets
hit the tank, and tank should be free to swipe away.
Personally I don't like charging much either, as it puts me in the middle of the
pack but more importantly use most of the rage I would have at the beginning of a
fight.

Second thing I'd like to bring up is you said he keeps growl on cooldown.
Please do correct me if this is wrong, but as far as I know Growl does not
cause any amount of threat when you are on top of the threat list.
Growl is something a tank should use when he is far behind another player on
threat, and needs to get aggro fast. Growls matches your threat to the highest
on the threat list, and forces the mob to attack you. In the following seconds
you need to generate enough threat to stay ahead.

This has sort of been mentioned, but not directly. I can't help but feel group composition makes a big difference in heroics. 3 targets hitting you or 2 targets hitting you makes a colossal difference in the amount of healing you are going to need.

I realize a good group could run with less, but I always recommend trying to form a group that can apply enough CC to lessen the brutality of any given pull. This is also why I've grown to appreciate hunters so much recently. Universal CC ftw!