Tank like a girl

I managed to convince someone from my guild that blogging is awesome (and it is), so please welcome Yasura and her ‘heals, smites and prayers‘ blog to the fold! As the name suggests, she’s a priest, and really the pocket-healer priest that’s saved my butt the most. She’s most awesome, and I am looking forward to all her healer stories. Hopefully she won’t gripe about squishy tank too much.

While I am tossing out links, I would also like to mention new awesome tanking blogs on the scene:

• Yakra’s Mirror Shield
• Durnic’s ORLY Factor
• Talldar’s Warriortanking
• Albinobeard’s Defensive Stance

Protection warriors, the world is our oyster!

I split this up, because I tend to ramble a lot (as any regular reader knows already). So, day 1 we killed three animal bosses, but it wasn’t our best raid. Sunday we had Dragonhawk on our list, and more Hex-Lord attempts.

Dragonhawk trash was the smoothest we’ve ever done it. Druid roots went perfectly, we only got adds from one Scout, and no wipe, even in the evil pull with the trolls throwing ball for their dragonhawk. In no time we stood before Dragonhawk, and I slapped on my trusty friend, the Petrified Lichen Guard. Our first try was pretty awful, as the assigned hatcher killer fell asleep or something, and the whole platform spawned. The next two tries were a little bit rocky, and the last try was perfect. Cleared all dragonhawks, went on to kill him, with one minute to spare on the Enrage timer. I can now pat myself on the shoulder and be proud of having successfully tanked dragonhawks without a paladin tank, pre-3.0. Go me!

We cleared up to Hex-Lord, had some real problems with the pull of four mobs, had to double tank them. That was pretty rough. And then Hex-Lord himself. As adds we had the ogre, the wight, the snake and the imp. After much trial and error, we killed the ogre, wight and snake to get CC burdens away from the healers and then started DPS on Hex-Lord himself. I will not lie, it took many tries, 8 all in all, but we learned a lot from them, to respond to the various Siphon Soul effects. On try number 8, our DPS stayed alive, the healers worked their butts off, and Hex-Lord kept siphoning warrior and rogue continuously, yay for him not healing himself. Down he went! And like idiots we all excitedly ran out to turn the quest in, thinking we’d get a quest to kill Zul’jin himself, so there’s no screenshot of the firstkill. It wasn’t pretty, but it’s the kill that matters, right? In that anonymous WWS, my name got butchered to Sifr, and I ate four crushes. Sloppy!

After turning the quest in, we went back in. People repaired outside, things were a bit slow, and I got bored and opened the door. Haha. Funny moment of the day. People came back to face death and destruction, but the silly MT who opened the door lived. So, should you ever be faced with the situation of first going through the door to Zul’jin, expect millions of mobs to come running out of that door. Wussy mobs, but still. Good times.

Then we tried Zul’jin and in our first attempt learnt what happens when only the tank and a healer are standing on the platform. The next couple tries, we tried to deal with the Eagle phase and got him to 46% in our best try. We had a rogue and a hunter, but that wasn’t enough DPS to get him down to 40%. Any advice welcome.

Killing new bosses is exciting, and I met my biggest goal before the expansion: getting to see Zul’jin. Next up we’ll actually have to kill him, we’ll see how that goes. Wish us luck.

I am interrupting useful stuff about the upcoming patch with lengthy stories about personal progress. Rar!

This weekend was another Zul’Aman raid for my guild. We had a great line-up, so my hopes were high to get the first chest again on the first day and progress further on the second day. But some things don’t work out as expected. Our top DPS frost mage had computer problems so didn’t show both days. We replaced her with a warlock who’s not quite in the mage’s DPS range, but better a full raid than not going, right? We start, rush towards Bear, have pretty chaotic pulls with at least one death per pull, and basically 9-man it because the shadowpriest disconnects every single pull. One of the holy priests crashes several times. Nevertheless, we push on, get to the pull before Nalorakk, and I die pretty quickly, because I have two bear riders beating on me instead of just the one I was supposed to tank. In our next try we get the pull down, but again, 9-manned, as the shadowpriest disconnected for the umpteenth time. At that point we only have a couple minutes left on the timer, I call it, and with heavy heart I had to ask the spriest to leave. In we brought the ele shaman boyfriend of one of our girls, who supposedly pulls 650 DPS, which did not quite turn out that way. At least he was enthusiastic, that matters for something.

On Nalorakk I usually tank bear phase, and I still find this boss ridiculously easy to tank. Like for real, this is just easy. And what does he drop? Jungle Stompers. These boots are huge, considering the 3.0 warrior changes, and considering I am sporting Boots of Elusion, which will not be re-itemized for 3.0. I never got the boots from Chess, so the Jungle Stompers are really a big deal for me. You can see where this story is going, right? Yup, right. I lost the roll to the other prot warrior, the one who was wearing the Chess boots. She actually whispered to me I could have them if I really wanted them, but I didn’t want to seem like a sore loser, especially as she used her bonus points to roll on them (we use a bonus point system for rolls that rewards attendance and contributions to the raid bank). Here you can tell that a girl is writing this blog, because I actually burst into RL tears from sheer frustration and disappointment. I really pour a lot of myself into our raids, and a pat on the shoulder and thanks in form of the first piece of tanking loot to ever drop for us in ZA would have been great. ZA is only on our raid calendar twice more, and given the drop tables, I might never see those boots again. And now I feel totally silly afterwards that I did. Silly loot, what it does to people, I say!

So that’s my sob story for the day, I seem to have one of those every weekend now. I couldn’t talk on Vent for a while on the way over to Eagle, because I had to blow my nose and stuff. We actually wiped in the gauntlet the first time, on the Tempest pull, tank death and it was over. Second try went a lot better. We then tried to down Eagle and I still really don’t know why we wipe on this fight so much. I don’t get it. Several times we had tank death, several times we had people too slow with collapsing for the storm. Then the gauntlet respawned and we had to do it again. Then we finally got him down and he dropped a paladin chestpiece. Our invisible paladin was happy and then cried when we sharded the piece.

On to Lynx. The trash I always find kinda relaxing and fun, no big deal. Smooth progress, in we go, and Halazzi is one-shot. How can we wipe so many times on Eagle and just one-shot Lynx? You tell me. Invisible paladin rejoiced again as the plate shoulders dropped. Again.

We usually call it after Lynx, but I am hoping that for our next raid, we can actually kill Eagle in under 5 tries and actually do all animal bosses that day. For realz.

I will continue this ‘exciting’ report of our ZA raid with a follow-up post later today, and there will be no loot sob story this time, promised. That doesn’t mean that I got anything, because it was invisible paladin weekend! Does tanking plate really exist in ZA? I have lost faith.

Well, look who didn’t post like she said she would. If you checked back yesterday, my apologies, I got carried away stockpiling herbs and watching cheesy movies. But I am back today!

In the last countdown entry, I was talking of what you can do to keep yourself uncrittable until WotLK post-patch. Today I will start looking at protection warrior changes. Our whole concept of tanking has been overhauled. Formerly we were all about avoidance and mitigation. This made soloing tedious and considerably slower than for other classes. Many compared druid soloing to warrior soloing, and they were lightyears apart in terms of DPS. Warriors, welcome patch 3.0, hug it warmly, we get what we wanted, and even more!

So what exactly is changing? Currently we are building our threat mostly through abilities with innate threat. The classic threat rotation of protection warriors uses Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, plus Heroic Strike as rage dump. None of these abilities do a lot of damage, though Shield Slam is okay. This will change with the patch. Threat will scale directly with the attack power we have, and every single ability I have listed will do quite a bit of damage. In some cases we might actually give the DPS a run for their money.

Let’s compare the big 3:

Shield Slam in 2.4.3 does 420 to 440 damage, modified by block value. The new and improved Shield Slam does 549 to 577 damage, modified by block value. This is a nice change. Which becomes a lot bigger when you realize that our tanking gear will be changed to fit the new tanking concept, gaining strength. Strength directly improves our block value (2 strength per 1 BV in 3.0), so get ready for amazing new Shield Slam crits. My highest on the PTR was 3.8k, and I have heard of 6k crits on level 70 warriors. You can imagine what this much damage does for our threat. You got it, awesome things. For soloing, you will always want to use the Auto-Blocker or Coren’s Lucky Coin. Or both if you have them, they stack!

Fitting right into this concept is the new Shield Block. This ability is changed forever, they work completely differently. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it. Our current Shield Block has a 5 sec cooldown, increases our chance to block by 75% and is popped every cooldown on bosses to keep us from getting crushed. The new Shield Block has a cooldown of one minute and increases our chance to block by 100% for 10 seconds. Mini Shield-Wall! A new ‘Oh Shit’ button. But on top of the Oh Shit effect, the new Shield Block will increase our block value by 100% in those 10 seconds. Savor this. Use Shield Block, use the Auto-Blocker, Shield Slam to the face. Aaaah. This is going to be excellent macro material.

So, block value is going to be huge, that’s covered. How do Devastate and Revenge fare? Very well, I dare say, very well! Devastate has seen a couple changes in the beta but is currently back at applying 50% of the weapon damage plus 56. This is a damage improvement from the current form on live, where it’s 50% of the weapon damage plus 35. Revenge has seen a huge increase in damage, and it now scales directly with Attack Power instead of a set amount of damage. It’s going from 414 to 506 damage to a scalable 855 to 1045 damage, each of the values modified by AP * 0.207. You won’t trigger it with Shield Block reliably, but I have still seen it available a lot on the PTR, and it’s just a joy to behold the kind of damage it does.

But that’s not all. We are getting another old classic protection warrior ability revamped to actually do damage! I am talking about Concussion Blow. The current form stuns a target for 5 seconds. Which mostly makes it an ability to use on Trash as bosses are immune anyway. The new and improved Concussion Blow stuns a target for 5 seconds and does 0.75 * AP damage. Prepare for four digit Concussion Blows, I kid you not. Which you can still use in boss fights, even if they’re immune to the stun they will still take the damage. That is definitely an ability you want to start using every cooldown.

Let’s talk about another pimped ability: Thunder Clap. The non-talented version does 184 damage up from 123, but the most important part? No target cap! The talented TC will increase the damage by 30%, and we get a talent to improve our crit rate for TC, Heroic Strike and Cleave called Incite, which is going to be a must in every prot build.

Speaking of Heroic Strike and Cleave, their damage output has been increased as well, making our rage dumps hit quite a bit harder.

We all might have to re-learn how to gem and enchant our gear, for maximum threat we’ll want as much strength and attack power that we can get our hands on.

In my next install in the countdown, I’ll talk about more warrior abilities that are changed in 3.0 to make our tanking lives easier and more fun.

Who has cheesy music running through their head now? I do! Don’t tell me I am the only one who remembers Europe’s The Final Countdown.

Patch 3.0.2, Echoes of Doom, has been confirmed for October 14, leaving us 11 days until a slew of changes, a new chapter in the history of WoW will begin. There will be a multitude of changes, be it class, UI, video engine, game mechanics changes. My goal here will be to write about those changes as I have experienced them on the PTR, and what you need to be ready for, about once a day. Hope I can keep up the pace!

I can wholeheartedly say that protection warriors have nothing but awesomeness to look forward to. I was unable to find anything that I don’t enjoy. A lot of warrior talents and abilities have changed, there are a lot of new talents, so I’ll have some info to cover.

Today however, I am looking at how you can prepare for one of the more drastic changes for protection warriors in tanking epics: how to remain uncrittable.

Upon first logging in after the patch, prepare to have lost between 10-30 points of defense. If you have 5/5 in Anticipation, you will have lost 20 points of defense right away, as the new Anticipation provides dodge rating instead of defense. All tanking gear from raid content and badges has been adjusted to provide strength to work with the new tanking mechanics, and in return, defense has been cut, to balance out the item budget. If you e.g. sport the Chestplate of Stoicism the new version comes with 34 strength, but defense goes from 51 to 34. Prepare to lose about 10 points of defense total from your gear.

There are several ways you can prepare for the loss of defense: enchantments, gemming, using different gear. This should be the priority order in fixing the deficiency.

Defense enchantments:

• Enchant Bracer - Major Defense: 12 defense rating to wrist
• Enchant Chest - Defense: 16 defense rating to chest
• Enchant Cloak - Steelweave: 12 defense rating to cloak

Using all enchants gets you a total of 40 defense rating, which makes your defense go up by about 17 rounded up (2.4 points of defense rating are 1 point of defense at level 70). If you didn’t spend talent points on Anticipation that should be enough to get you back to uncrittable status.

Gems:

You got badges lying around and nothing to spend them on, before WotLK? How about buying some nice epic gems and boosting your defense that way? There are two different cuts for epic gems that award defense rating: Enduring Seaspray Emerald and Thick Lionseye. The uncut gems cost 15 badges each. If you don’t have the badges for such an endeavor, you can always buy the rare versions Enduring Talasite or Thick Dawnstone, the difference between the epic and the rare version is pretty minimal.

Gear:

If you’re still not back to the sacred grail of 490 defense, your last option is using gear with more defense. Veneretio did all the legwork for me and posted a list of all items with maximum defense values on them. I shall just pretend it was my masterplan to make him do my legwork.

The natural choice for changing gear are trinkets. I knew there was a reason that I saved my defense trinkets in the bank, now is a good time to use them again. The default defense trinket is Adamantine Figurine from second boss in Shadow Labs. If you don’t have it anymore, it should be easy enough to farm.

The information here should assist you into getting back to 490 right after the patch hits. Farm enchant mats now, see if you can snag the gems cheap (some realms report really low gem prices as people burn their badges) and look if you still have defense trinkets and other high defense gear lying around in the bank. Be prepared!

Tomorrow I’ll have a look at the game mechanics behind the new protection warrior, like abilities that scale with Attack Power and the ever so precious Block Value.

This change is huge enough that I felt it warranted its own post:

Warrior - Berserker Rage will now be usable in all stances.

This change, it has a flavor, and it is awesome. No more being dependent on Fear Ward and Tremor Totem. It feels slightly OP. Old school warriors might probably feel it’s another step to dumb down the class, but honestly? I always hated spamming my stance-dance macro button in situations like the Nightbane fight. Does this give us an edge on bosses with a fear mechanic? Yes, I think it does.

I expect outcries over this change all day, but I for one wholeheartedly embrace it.

Thanks to Aylii I stumbled over my first tanking glyph today: Glyph of Revenge Holy crap, is that awesome, or what? While Revenge might proc less reliably with the Shield Block changes, it still lights up a whole lot. With that Glyph you could use a Revenge macro that would queue up Heroic Strike, for awesome TPS. I am in love. Which means I actually have to look at Inscription and what it can do for us tanks.

You will be able to use three major glyphs and three lesser glyphs. I actually don’t know if you can replace any of your glyphs, we’ll have to wait and see. Now, let’s see which of the glyphs could prove useful for tanks:

Major Glyphs:

• Glyph of Barbaric Insults: Clearly wins for the name. What it does is that it adds a Taunt to Mocking Blow. The current mechanics of MB are that it forces the mob to attack you for six second, without any threat change. Unlike Taunt, which will actually put you on top of the threat list. With the Glyph, Mocking Blow will be able to do both.
• Glyph of Blocking: increases block value by 10% for 10 seconds, after using Shield Slam. Mmmm, block value.
• Glyph of Devastate: applies two stacks of sunder per Devastate. My immediate reaction is to call it weak. To proc S&B you will use a lot of Devastate anyway, so keeping a full stack of Sunders up is no big deal.
   
  Update: My immediate reaction lies in this case, as my commenters have made me see the light. Fast threat on multiple targets possible, plus a fast full stack, for more grinding power when soloing. Hot!
• Glyph of Heroic Strike: you gain 10 rage for crits with HS. Not so great for tanking, when you’re limited to 3 glyphs, IMHO.
   
  Update: That’s what happens when I post early in the morning, I don’t think things through. This can be a wonderful source of rage. With the Glyph of Revenge we’ll be using Heroic Strike reliably, and will get rewarded for crits.
• Glyph of Intervene: if you Intervene a lot, and I don’t really do, you might get some mileage out of this glyph. You get an extra attack on you instead of the party member you Intervened too. With Warbringer sure to be in my build, I am fine just using that instead of Intervene.
• Glyph of Last Stand: while a reduced cooldown would be nice, the health loss makes it unattractive to me. This is something I use on bosses in a pinch, and only sometimes while soloing, so I shall give that one a pass.
• Glyph of Revenge: as mentioned above, this glyph is just awesome.
• Glyph of Sunder Armor: if this affects the Sunder Armor effect of Devastate, this would be fantastic for building threat on multiple targets. Has anyone tested this?
• Glyph of Taunt: again, depends on how much you really have to taunt in 5-mans, and how often you get resists. I won’t want to use this.

That’s it for the major glyphs. There are a couple more minor glyphs, including Glyph of Thunder Clap, which given the TC changes seems pretty nice to have.

If I had to pick glyphs right now, at least major glyphs, I would go with Revenge, Blocking, and Sunder Armor if the effect applies to Devastate. If it doesn’t, then I would go with Heroic Strike instead.

How about the rest of you, what do you think? As a note, the glyphs are of course still subject to change until Inscription goes live. I will definitely pick that up with one character, using Siha’s wonderful Inscription Guide.

That’s one way to wake up at work. I was sitting here, munching on my breakfast, idly clicking on my Dashboard in Wordpress, and then I looked at the stats chart. BAM! Holy crap, my views are going through the roof. And they’re all coming from Tankspot. Hello, friendly tanking people of the world, nice to have you over. Thanks for the shoutout, Ciderhelm, it’s incredibly flattering.

And thanks to Veneretio, I now have a Twitter account. As if I needed one more thing to keep track of. It is slightly addictive however.

The idea of a WoW blog originally sprang from me spamming my personal blog every Monday with tales of my weekends in WoW. As a German player on American servers that’s when I have it going on, with instances, etc. Everyone who comes here should get used to me rambling on Mondays.

This last Saturday, I led another Gruul and Magtheridon raid, with girls from my guild, plus friends from our guild alliance. I wasn’t anywhere as nervous as I was the first time round, but I can safely say I prefer the ease of 10-man raids. For 25-man raids, there are obstacles to smooth experiences. People not showing up. People spamming you with whispers for invites. Assigning everyone into the groups they want to be in for best buffage. I made the mistake of inviting early and then someone I had counted on and who needed Mags for the Champion title suddenly not filling in, and the person I had squeezed in refusing to leave, because of wanting a specific piece of loot. My blood pressure is rising just reading it again, aargh. So, hats off to those of you who regularly lead 25-man raids, you are stronger people than me.

We had 16 people from my guild, 9 from the guild alliance, and we started about 15 minutes after official raid start time, which I guess is alright for big raid leader noob that I am. It helped that everyone was reaaaally on time and well prepared.

As for the raid, it went smooth, baby, smooth. I don’t know, I was a bit alarmed, because I had heard that our allied guild had tried Magtheridon twice recently and always had to call it because people just weren’t focused enough. In we went to HKM, where we promptly wiped, because Krosh ran over to where I wanted to pick up Maulgar, and I promptly died after a blast wave and two hits by Maulgar himself. We wiped it, went in again, I nudged hunters to put Misdirect on during the countdown, not afterwards (duh!) and we killed Maulgar and his chumps. Now let me introduce you to someone special in my life: Skirting. She’s that handsome druid over there, and she’s played by my partner. See the sparkly shoulders she’s sporting? /facepalm

It had been my goal to get the T4 shoulders. I won them last time fair and square but gave the token to my crappily-geared off-tank. This time Skirting was the off-tank, only one Defender token dropped, and I lost the roll. There’s nothing more bitter than losing the roll on something you covet so much to a person you love, heh! She hearthed to Shattrath, grabbed new shoulders, enchant and gems, and then we went in and one-shot Gruul. It was a really flawless kill, we only had one death in the raid, and that was at about 5% on him. I think druids do have an easier time as off-tank on Gruul. She took all Hurtful Strikes but two, for considerably less damage than our warrior tank last time. Of course we also killed him faster, in 11 growths. No ground-breaking record, but not bad at all.

We moved on to Magtheridon, swapping two hunters for a rogue and a moonkin, and went on to one-shot him as well. I have no idea what was different from our allied guild’s raids, but the channelers went down nice and easy, the infernals were mostly under control, and despite later seeing that I took some heavy hits (worst for 10k), my health never seemed to be down much. I had the help of an experienced guy from the other guild to call out cube clicking, because while tanking Mags I have this tunnel view of him and my action bar. I ended up rage-starved quite a lot which was annoying, but other than that, Magtheridon is as tank and spank as it gets, to the point of boring.

Two hour raid, two 25-man raid bosses down, and feeling like an accomplished raid leader, that was my weekend. Now I am trying to figure out if it’s worth running Gruul one more time, for the blasted shoulders, or to pray for the shoulders from the first chest in Zul’Aman. We’ll see if I can lay my greedy hands on them this coming ZA.

A lot of my WotLK excitement is about easier multi-tanking for warriors. I love huge pulls. I love the challenge. I love holding multiple mobs on me. It’s hugely engaging, you have to be aware of the situation, it surely beats spamming one button. My mission: share the joy. The basics behind this guide will still apply in a post-3.0 world, things will just be a tad easier.

In my efforts to educate casual protection warriors pre-3.0 how to feel invincible by binding masses of mobs on them, I present to you: Kadomi’s Multi-Tanking Tips and Tricks!

Before we start our multi-tanking adventure, let’s review our arsenal of skills, the ones we shall need to bind many mobs on us. Pre-WotLK warrior multi-tanking is hard, yet satisfying work, and here’s what needs to be on your action bars to succeed:

Shield Slam. Your big threat move needs to be laid onto your primary target as much as you can.

Devastate. Of course. Bread and butter. Tab from target to target to lay Devastates on.

Thunderclap. Our super-awesome AoE tanking skill. I am choking up right now. (The sarcasm will go away after the patch) Greatly superior to its old form, the TBC version is helpful as you can now use it in Def stance and the threat was increased. However don’t expect Thunderclap alone to keep non-tanked mobs on you, that will likely not work. You have to work a bit harder if you require more than HoT healing.

Cleave. You have rage to spare, you use Cleave. Just like Heroic Strike, it’s a rage dump, it hits two targets, use it.

Demoralizing Shout. Many mobs hitting you means a lot of damage, especially in heroics, so you can generate some AoE threat using it and minimize the damage you’ll be taking.

Concussion Blow. Sometimes stuns are nice. Rage likely won’t be an issue in any larger pull, so it’s beneficial to knock one mob out, to further minimize the damage you’re taking.

Challenging Shout. If the shit hits the fan, it makes more sense to blow that cooldown to get mobs back on you. With its vastly reduced cooldown in WotLK, we’ll be able to use this more often too!

Disarm. When multitanking causes too much damage to you, minimize it. Especially handy in heroics, where fearsome non-CCable mobs turn into puny harmless puppies for the Disarm duration.

Everything ready? Then let’s go to ‘Outland Multi-Tanking School, Class 101′. The place is otherwise known as normal Shattered Halls. Your classmates should be a healer, and 3 people of the kind that pew-pews. For extra added difficulty to make you an A-level student, do not take more than one pew-pewer of the crowd-controlling kind with you. Be brave. Take a resto shaman, an elemental shaman, an enhancement shaman and a shadow priest along. Do your best.

To start off the class, you will pull the legionnaire at the entrance, and run forward to invite his two buddies to come play as well. Three is a good-sized group to tank. Initial move should be a fancy Shield Slam to the face of the legionnaire, followed by a hearty Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout. That bit of AoE threat needs to tide you over while you lay on some Devastates on primary target. Next up, tab to mob number two, and Devastate. Tab to mob number three and use Concussion Blow. Back to the main target, to see if you still have a threat lead. Shield Slam and Devastate, weave in Thunderclap every cooldown, and with plenty of rage Cleave. If your lead is solid, switch to mobs 2 and 3 again to apply sunders via Devastate. There’s always something to do when multi-tanking which is my favorite part.

One often-cited reason for warriors to stick to single target tanking is that it’s so difficult to properly tab-target, and that you end up having mobs on the other side of the room targeted. Not quite correct. You can control what mobs you will target when tabbing through them. Tabbing uses a cone around you. Let’s say your primary mob is in the center of your group, and you want to tab to the mob to the right. Turn to the right so you’re directly facing the mob, then tab. Voila, you have it. Now you want the mob all the way to the left. Again, turn, face the mob, tab. Another slight turn, and the next tab takes you back to the primary target. There is a system to the madness, you can control what mobs to tab-target to. Positioning is the name of the game, and it’s fantastic practice for Shockwave, which is also a cone effect. Are you currently bored? I recently read one of Veneretio’s recommendations what to do til WotLK. You could level a mage to 26 and play with Cone of Cold, to learn how to master the cone effect.

After the first hallway of pulls which is just a warm-up, you end up in the room where the legionnaire paths from group to group. Pull the legionnaire when he’s either all the way to the right or the left, and pray you haven’t pulled the whole room. Note that you have mixed groups of casters and melee for the rest of the instance. Of course it is crucial that you tank right where the caster is. The easiest part is to bring casters to you, by using Line of Sight or rather, the lack of it. When you have mixed pulls, look around for opportunities to break line of sight. It’s relatively easy in my example. There’s a niche you can duck into on both sides. Stay against the wall until the caster is running around the corner towards you, then start your tanking cycle. In the following hallway, there are large niches with statues, you can also use those to your advantage to bring the sharpshooters into melee range. The golden rule: look for LoS breaking opportunities, and warn your group to hold the DPS until all your mobs are in melee range.

And that’s it, really. It’s not the easy Consecrate button that paladins have, and your DPS will not be able to AoE without drawing aggro. But warriors are more than capable of tanking multiple mobs if they get the opportunity and if the pulls go as planned. It requires that your group plays along. Last night, e.g. I tanked Heroic Shattered Halls, a line of sight pull, and some of the DPS did not wait for all the mobs to be in melee range. Mobs ran in different directions, splitting them up, and once your mobs are scattered all over the place, it’s very difficult to round them up. Ideally, they’re all on you in the first place. If pulls go wrong, explain what you need, and don’t give up. It’s possible, and it can be fun. And we want to have fun too, right? And just remember, this will all still work in WotLK, and we’ll get some added perks. Me, I can’t wait to re-visit Heroic Shattered Halls post-patch.