Multiple Tanking Guide for Warriors

Well it’s about time I got my arse in gear and decided to right something about warriors holding more than one mob, aka “AoE tanking.”

First things first, let’s be honest. Warriors aren’t that great at AoE tanking, compared to a paladin tank we look disorganised and unattractive, but that doesn’t mean we can’t stick it to the Man! Or Dragonkin, whichever. The one thing to remember is that with the same gear and the right skill you can take less damage than a paladin in raids, that’s your speciality - so just put up with palas putting you to shame by tanking everything in KZ by themselves without any kind of frantic button pressing!

Anyway, enough of about holy tanks, more about us beefcakes. In my experience (call me a noob if you wish) tanking more than 4 mobs at once starts to become very very tricky and a little bit luck based and frantic. However, tanking 4 mobs at once should not be too much of a problem. “Why is this? Tell me why for the love of all that is good and pure!” I hear you cry! And so, after a nice cup of cocoa and a calming lie down I divulge to you the simple fact of why warriors shouldn’t have too much trouble tanking four mobs : Thunderclap. Nothing more than that, it’s just thunderclap. I’ll explain why now.

How to use thunderclap to control two - four mobs:

• Step 1)
  Sort your dps out. Tanking up to 4 mobs can be relatively simple if you make sure all your dps is on one target. This way you can focus your single target threat on the kill target and just periodically thunderclap, provided your healer isn’t causing too much threat keeping you up (more on this later)
• Step 2)
  Sort yourself out, and sort your crowd control out. Talk to the people in your team about where you will be tanking the group if it is a tricky pull, make sure mages sheep immediately so you have space to thunderclap and that hunters don’t place their traps close to your tank spot. If there are caster mobs make sure you use Line of Sight to bring them to you along with the melee. Look for doorways or room corners to hide behind!
• Step 3)
  Keep enough threat up, needless to say, if thunderclap isn’t on cooldown you should be using it. If your healer is madly healing you you may have to use tab to cycle through targets to apply an equal smattering of sunders to all the additional mobs, remember not to forget about the main target the dps are targetting though, in my experience they tend to be a bit impatient on threat :p
• Step 4)
  Remember you do have panic buttons, if all the mobs start moving off on a bad pull you have challenging shout, used quickly this is the most effective way of regaining aggro, but remember you don’t have long to build up that threat before they run off again! It’s NOT an aoe taunt! The threat is TEMPORARY!

Well I hope this helped you my happy readers, more from me soon. Bye for now!

Teh Bobrek