HeroicsFollow

Folks;

I was in Heroic Blood Furnace last night with:

1) warrior tank
2) holy priest
3) me (affliction lock)
4) BM hunter
5) Enh Shaman

What would happen was this:

We engage 3 enemies at 1 time. One of them is taken by the hunter to an ice trap. The warrior is tanking the 2 others. The warrior would be applying sunders and such and *pow*, the 2nd mob to be killed (that the warrior is supposed to handle) is running to the priest and killing her. This happened so many times... poor priest. Was the warrior not doing something he ought to have been? I want to help this guy as he's a friend and he'll be our guild primary tank, so better for him = better for the guild.

Thanks.

I did pull the succy out on some of the fights... when we came to 4 mob pulls, you would still have 2 on the warrior (of which, one would almost always kill the healer). We finally stopped when we saw the first 5 mob pull and said, "we can't do this". The tank has okay gear, he has 11.5K health on him (unbuffed), 498 defense, 48% base avoidance.

make better use of Intervene?
got Omen? have the healer and the tank check their standing in threat?
once you have aggro, don't spam Taunt too much and use it for loose mobs?

I actually learned this when after MT kara so many times and who knows how many heroics. "The tab key is key" if you're tanking just two mobs and you're not up to spar with easy on heals gear what you can do is throw down your thunder clap(if there was a hunter in the group I never worry about cc cuz I know he'll pull it off me soon anyways) and quickly slam 1 sunder on skull and hit your tab key which automaticly switches you to your next target instead of trying to click over them. Doing this you can hold up to three targets even if someone doesn't pay attention and Dps on X while everyone else is on skull. Just get use to using your tab key to get that second target and warriors are almost as good as a pally AOE tank =P


Me

Once you have agro you should never ever even touch Taunt.

Taunt doesn't work like it did it in EQ. It doesn't build threat.

It does two things;

1. It forces the mob to attack you for 3 seconds no matter what.
2. It puts your threat equal to whoever has agro.

After the three seconds if nobody else's threat is 130%/110% (ranged/melee) then the mob will stay on you.




As for the OP. It sounds like your tank needs to learn to aoe tank. Use Thunderclap at first and anytime CC isn't being used. After that you can use demo shout for small aoe threat but he'll need to learn to tab between the mobs.

Usually what I'll do is use devistate & revenge on the main mob and switch to the add and shield slam it. Shield slam generates a lot of threat and should keep it off the healer. Having devistates & revenges on the main mob should keep it off the dps in the meantime. I use thunderclap a lot by pulling my group of mobs away from sheep and frozen targets. If I can't I'll spam demo shout which sometimes is enough to keep the adds off the healer. Sometimes that's not enough and a tab-devistate or tab-shield slam is required. Cleave is also nice but it's not as direct as targeting yourself.

As an affliction lock, I did save the group twice, and got us in some deep stuff once, using Howl of Terror (& Curse of Exhaustion) to get mobs off the healer (who I was standing by), and using death coil.

My question to this forum was, "could he be doing something better"? I have a lvl 24 tank, but at that level, tanking <> heroic instance tanking. ;-) I have very little experience there, so I decided to ask the folks who know about such things. I've played 2 dps classes to 70 (mage & lock) and know both pretty well, additionally, my pally was prot for a long time, but prot pallies work a ton differently than prot warriors. Prot pallies can go in and cause an enormous amount of threat to mobs immediately (e.g. their 'rage' bar is blue and starts full), and their viability as a tank decreases as the fight drags on, where the opposite is true for a warrior tank (I think). I try to be a student of all classes and such, so I'm filing all this away for my tank as well.

I appreciate all the advice.

Edited, Mar 18th 2008 3:25pm by ktangent

So in Heroics, how do you do a 5 mob pull (which exists in some instances) if you shouldn't tank 2 at a time? At max, you can have 3 CC'ed mobs and then you'd have to have the tank take 2 of them. Perhaps our group composition (shamans have no CC) contributed to this? I do appreciate the advice given so far and will share this with our guild tank.

Thanks to all.

it has alot to do with balance, this tank is just on the verge of being able to tank heroics, and BF has some of the hardest hitting mobs, therefor he very likely shouldnt tank think one yet. this is not just about him staying alive, but also about keeping the healer alive. any tank needs to be able to keep aggro on 2-3 mobs at once, or hees not doing his job well enough, you might think you can keep it down to 2 with alot of CC, but accidents happen, and if you then cant pick up the mobs its not good enough.
as some have said before, the key is to spam cleave and TC(improved ofcause). if you do this you will generally be able to keep aggro on up to 4 mobs, again depending how much healing you need while doing it..
if your having much trubble for some reason you can tab around and sunder, but honestly this aint advised unless you cant do without since your aggro on main target will be close to none for quite some time.

Buzak

As a healing priest, this also sounds like it could be partially the priest's fault. If a priest casts Prayer of Mending on the tank before every pull, then Prayer of Mending again as soon as that golden frisbee jumps, he'll have a hard time pulling aggro off the tank with heals. On the other hand, if the tank starts the pull down a little health (having just used Commanding Shout, for example) and has a Renew ticking, the priest could easily pull aggro before the tank can establish any, particularly on a ranged pull.

I'll assume the priest wasn't a total dope who was casting Power Word Shield right after a ranged pull or something.