So, last night I decided to test my tanking mettle against the insanity that is 5 mans. It was different, just not quite in the way I expected. I ended up in Drak’Tharon.
This was a really smooth run.
Before queuing up, I macroed maul into swipe, lacerate and mangle.
I’d run up to a group, swipe, gather them all up and keep swiping until there was one left and then would use single target tanking on him. Honestly, this wasn’t really the group to test my aggro holding abilities, I ended up 2nd in DPS, which makes it rather difficult for people to grab aggro on me. I’ll see if I can get a bit of a crazier run next time. 🙂
Feral Instincts 
January 22, 2010 at 10:22 am |
hey Feral, it is good to hear about your smooth run in DTK. Keeping in mind that DTK is a easy instance and the most tricky part, IMO, is the last 5 mobs before boss. those 5 mobs (forgot the name) will fear you and your party member. you need to pull back to the stair and have more room if anyone gets feared. It is lame but it is wipe prevention position.
Here is my suggestion to learn as a tank:
entry level: H FoS
– on the path to the tunnel, there are 4 waves of mobs to handle. How you can want to do? Killing order? CC?
– In the tunnel, how you move your group save while wave of mobs keep coming.
moderate level: H PoS
– how to build aggo on the range dps mobs (casters, in this case)
– what is your killing order? Melee 1st or Caster 1st?
– Which mobs you want to CC? sheep? stunned? or even hex?
Hard level: H HoR
– on 10 waves event, how you determine the 1st mob to kill? which mobs you want to CC? how you can hold on aggo on each mob?
– on escape event, which mobs you are going to kill 1st? A-bomb or Doctor? How you build threats on each mobs?
If you can make thru those 3 instances without problems, CONGRATZ! You are a great tank in heroic. 😀
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January 22, 2010 at 10:27 am |
Well, I was hoping to get one of those nightmare pugs that happen far too often and see if I could try hold aggro when the mage unloads or any number of things that go wrong in those groups. Maybe next time I should cross my fingers and go, “Bad pug, Bad pug, Bad pug.” 😉
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January 22, 2010 at 12:26 pm |
Heyo, since most bears use FFF as part of their rotation, macroing maul into that can also give some nice DPS and threat boosts. It just fails the maul if you pull from a distance, but it wont hurt anything or slow you down 🙂
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January 22, 2010 at 1:18 pm |
A note for every bear out there. I find that, sometimes even as well geared as I am, I’m rage starved in heroics. Right now my keybinds are 1) Swipe+Maul, 2) Mangle, 3) Maul, 4) Lacerate+Maul. Those four give me good access to all of my abilities, and I just end up spamming 2and3 together on Berserk or when I have lots of rage and want both to trigger. I just find this useful because sometimes when I’m low on rage, I’ll hit Lacerate and the next Maul will eat up that rage and I won’t get my lacerate out. I also like to have that extra bit of control with one ability NOT assigned to a rage dump.
Also, for Drak, keep in mind that if you get feared on those last five mobs before the final boss that your Berserk will drop fear and you can get back to owning those fearmongers before your groupmates are slaughtered 😉
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January 28, 2010 at 4:08 pm |
Luckily he almost always has a pally with him to cleanse (or bubble/cleanse if need be) 😉
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January 23, 2010 at 1:36 am |
Hey feralinstincts, nice blog! Heroics are a great way to be exposed to all the different styles of players..I wrote a bit about pugging heroics as a bear tank on my blog, post titled, ‘Learning to Tank – Part 2’.
Setting a positive tone at the start (lets face it, you only have 10 secs!), being a little ahead of the dps helps a lot (charge, maul, swipe before they even catch up), and setting the pace of the run…lets you keep some control and therefore have more of a chance to be on top of the tanking and aggro holding. H HoR can still sometimes be great, or a nightmare though…
I look forward to reading more of your posts!
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September 3, 2010 at 5:04 pm |
Hello I have a question about tanking as a deathnight what are the best spells and what is the best specdk to make me top of my game. I have researched several other sites and urs seems very indept. Thank yoiu cpearce
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September 3, 2010 at 5:51 pm |
Well, this is more of a druid blog, I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t know death knights very well.
I can give you some general tanking advice though.
Like I said in this post, tank a lot of randoms, either where you don’t know anyone or you only know the healer. This helps a lot with situational awareness. If you can “react” in a moments notice to what’s going on around you, that is a vital skill for any role, but doubly so for the tank. You have to be ready to keep yourself alive and be able to keep aggro off the DPS.
Secondly, knowing the fights you’re up against is always huge. Read up as much as you can before going after any new boss. That seems contradictory to what I just said, but it’s not. With as much randomness can happen during a fight, if you know what’s supposed to happen, that takes more of the “unknown” out of the fight.
Finally, take time to really read about and learn your class. The more you know, the more options you have. The right spec and gear won’t put you “at the top of your game,” as you ask. Knowing what you can do and how to deal with things when they go wrong will put you there. And that’s done by reading up on and playing your class in different situations.
It’s not good enough to have the “best spec” to be “at the top of your game,” you have to know *why* it is the best spec.
Like I said, that’s general advice, for DKs, you might want to try the DK forums at Elitest Jerks:
http://elitistjerks.com/f72/
Wow.com has a lot of data, but you’ll want to sort through all the Cata stuff:
http://www.wow.com/category/death-knight/
As for the rest, just do a Google search on “Death Knight Blog” or “Death Knight Theorycrafting.” I’m sure it’s a lot of info, but that’s what you want a lot of info. The more info you have, the more you know and as the old GI Joe said, “Knowing is half the battle.”
Hope that helps.
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September 3, 2010 at 6:46 pm |
I actually made a post out of this e-mail and some of the readers might have some good blogs for you to look at as well.
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September 3, 2010 at 6:25 pm |
[…] Tanking Advice By feralinstincts This is in response to a comment someone left in my post, “Testing my Tanking in the 5 Mans pt 1.“ […]
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