Naissa’s Rage

Naissa’s Guide to Instance Tanking.

There are a lot of tanking guides out there but a lot of them work off of the assumption that you’ll be in ideal conditions. Most of the time you won’t be. I’m not the world’s greatest tank but I do know my stuff and I’m going to share some information with you that might help to avoid or reduce the headaches that I experienced while tanking.

(Pictures coming as soon as I can get them)

This is really a work in progress but I wanted to get it out there as soon as it was readable and in some kind of order. I’ll add pictures and videos and a lot more to it as I get the time to do so.

First of all there lets discuss the roles in your basic 5-man. Heroic or otherwise.

Tank - Thats you. Its your job to keep the mobs on you and off of the squishies. To hold aggro and not die. Usually to mark, and to guide your group through the instance.

Healer - This is the person that keeps you alive. One of your main jobs is to keep this person alive because if they die its all over. Much like how its one of their main jobs to keep you alive, because if you die its all over.

Crowd Control/DPS - The job of these people is to take a mob out of the fight through Sap/Sheep/Trap/Shackle and usually DPS the main target, except in the case of shackle, which can be done by the healer if its a priest.

DPS - These are just the damage dealers that aren’t CCing or can’t CC. Their only job is to kill the mob before it kills you all. (And not pull aggro)

Now that we’ve discussed the roles and what they’re meant to be doing, lets go over what you can expect.

Tanks:

The One-Mob Tank: This is the tank that refuses to tank more than one mob or even make any effort to tank more than one mob. I’ve seen a Normal Magister’s Terrace run fail because the tank was unable to hold more than one mob. If you see this guy, RUN.

The CC Breaker: This is the tank that constantly breaks the CC instead of taking two steps backwards before using Thunder Clap or what have you. This is slightly less dangerous than the One-Mob Tank.

Healers:

The Heal Spammer: The Heal Spammer is the kind of healer that will spam you with heals regardless of how much damage you’re actually taking. This can be frustrating when you’re pulling and trying to get the mobs sorted how you want them and suddenly there is heal aggro. Its more common than people would think.

The Space Cadet: This is the healer lets people die because they’re spacing out and not paying attention. This is also pretty common.

The Late Healer: This is the healer that waits until you’re at 15% while tanking two mobs to start casting a heal.

The Chatty Bitch: This is the healer that lets you die or almost lets you die because they were too busy chatting in party chat. This annoys me most of all.

Crowd Control:

The Useless Rogue: This is the rogue that doesn’t know how to use distract. Doesn’t know how to sap without being seen. Falls off the edge and into the water in heroic slave pens while trying to sap a mob that is nowhere near the edge. etc. Best thing you can do here is to just not make use of his/her sap.

The Lazy CCer: This is the person that, on a pull of 5 or so mobs, will not re-sheep/trap/shackle/banish their target.

The Pain in Naissa’s Ass: This is the person that WILL Re-sheep/trap/shackle/banish the mob until the first mob is dead, even if you’re rage starved and need that mob hitting you, even if you’ve already informed them of this several times in party chat.

DPS:

The No Imp Warlock: This is the warlock that has the Sacrifice talent and doesn’t like using an imp. Now I’m very understanding about this but I prefer that Locks in my group use an imp until we establish that we don’t need it. No Imp + The Late Healer can be fatal. If its smooth sailing and the imp isn’t making a huge difference, I don’t mind them summoning a Succubus and Saccing it.

The OMG I HAS BLADE FLURRY Rogue: This is the rogue that doesn’t wait for aggro to start with but also uses blade flurry everytime its up and then wonders why it gets aggro from the second mob and dies.

The OMG I HAS CLEAVE/WW/Sweeping Strikes Warrior: See above.

The “lol aggro is for scrubs” DPS class: This is the person that attacks the mobs before you do anything to them other than shoot them once. So when you shoot something and and immediatly see a frostbolt whizz by, you know you’re with one of these geniuses.

The “LOL I CAN’T ASSIST LOL” guy: This is the person that attacks the wrong target. This is the most common of all of these.

I think that covers the most common things.

What you’ll want before starting an instance:

Consumables:
Stamina food. Doesn’t have to be big fancy +30 stamina food.
5 Healing Potions. After these are gone its time to say “OMG MY CAT IS ON FIRE BRB /logout” because the run has already cost you 20g.
Maybe MAYBE a couple of fortitude and agility elixirs. Maybe. Or a Flask if you’ve got lots of money to throw away.
200-400 arrows/bullets.

So now you’ve got your tanking supplies and know the basic personality types that you’ll encounter. Lets move on to Mods and Macros that I find helpful.

Macros:

Mouse-Over Devastate:
#show Devastate
/cast [target=mouseover, harm, nodead] [] Devastate

What it does: It uses devastate on the mob that you’re mousing over. This allows you to devastate without having to switch targets. It makes tanking a bunch of mobs at once easier because you won’t have targetting issues and you won’t confused the simple people that switch targets the second that you do.

Mouse-Over Sunder Armor

#show Sunder Armor
/cast [target=mouseover, harm, nodead] [] Sunder Armor

What it does: Same as mouse-over devastate, but for CC’d mobs. The beauty of this macro is that you can use this on CC’d mobs without breaking the crowd control. So if you mouse-over the mob or the mob’s nameplate and hit this macro, you’ll build threat on that mob without targetting it or breaking the crowd control.

Those are the two main macros that I use. 2 is Normal Devastate, Ctrl-2 is Mouse-Over Devastate, Shift-2 is Mouse-Over Sunder.

Mods:

Markbar: This is a great mod for marking. It makes a Mark Bar (Funnily enough) enabling you to quickly mark targets as well as asign marks to people. So if you right click on a symbol while you have someone in your party targetted, it will assign the symbol to them and let them know. So when I start an instance run I assign myself the Skull, X, and Star. Moon to the Mage, Green Triangle to the Rogue, Blue Square to the Hunter. etc. Then if someone forgets their symbol there is an option to repeat the symbols, who they are assigned to, and what they’re for. I love this mod.

Omen: Pretty much THE threat meter.

Aloft: This makes your nameplates pretty and helps with the mouse-over macros. (Mouse-over the nameplates)

ItemRack: Allows you to quickly swap gear.

Rotation:
Now lets talk about rotations very briefly, since I mentioned Omen. Shield Slam -> Revenge -> Devastate -> Devastate is considered by many to be THE Protection Warrior rotation for threat. When you’ve got excess rage (40-50+) use heroic strike. Or if you can’t remember that I’ll just go ahead and say to use whatever you can when you’ve got the rage to do it. It might not be as efficient as Shield Slam -> Revenge -> Devastate -> Devastate but it will work in 5 mans.

Now you’ve got your consumables, mods, macros, and you know what kind of people to expect while pugging. Lets talk about marking and pulling.

The Mark and The Pull:
In my groups Skull dies first, X dies Second, Star dies Third. Then the sap if there is one. Trap after sap but before sheep. Sheep is always last. With the exception of hunter traps I almost always have the ranged/caster mobs CC’d. I then stand around the corner so they have to run to me. Unless there are no patrols in the area and the mobs don’t flee. I’ll explain that in a little while. The reason for not assigning a hunter trap to ranged mobs is because most hunters don’t like it. A couple that I know DO like it, so they get ranged mobs.

Spell Reflect Tanking:
So if X, Star, or a crowd control target are casters, there are no patrols, and they don’t run away when they get low on health, SPELL REFLECT. It makes your job easier. Spell Reflect tanking is seriously under-used and under-rated. The best example I can give off the top of my head is the group of mobs in Heroic Underbog that consist of One BIG Wasp and Two small Wasps. The big one is _mostly_ melee. The little ones are casters. I shoot the big one, get enough rage and hit spell reflect and then go on with my normal threat building rotation. What happens is that both wasps will hit me with their poison sting at the same time and it will be reflected back at them and deal a large amount of damage and apply a DoT. This is pretty much all the threat I need on those mobs to start with. I hit spell reflect every single time that it is up and by the time the Large Wasp is dead I’ve got enough threat on the little ones that I don’t have to even touch them. (I still do though.)

Ok so back on track here. You’ve marked your mobs, you’re ready to pull. Personally I shoot the Skull, unless its in the back and then I’ll shoot the mob thats going to be sheeped (Before its sheeped obviously) and this gives me just a tiny bit of threat on that mob. When the mobs get to you there are a couple things you can do.

If the mage has already sheeped the mob that its going to be sheeping (If you have a mage) or the priest has shackled, or the hunter has trapped make sure that you’re far enough away that you can thunderclap without breaking the CC. Do this everytime that the CC is re-applied as well and use Thunder Clap every time its not on cooldown.

If the mage/priest haven’t CC’d yet, but are in the process of doing so, wait for them to do it before you use Thunder Clap if possible. As far as hunter traps go, you can usually get a thunderclap off because the hunter should be trapping away from the group.

If no CC has yet ocurred and it doesn’t look like its going to happen anytime soon (ever) just go ahead and Thunder Clap and then re-position as needed if/when the CC happens.

When tanking multiple mobs the easiest way that I’ve found to do it is to use Thunder Clap every time its not on cooldown and then put 2 devastates on each extra mob as soon as you can, but don’t do it right at the start or else you may lose aggro on the main mob. It depends on your group really.

So Skull/X/Star are down and now you’ve got to pick which CC to break first. Why do I do it the way I do it? Well Sap can only be used once per pull, so thats the obvious choice there. Traps are harder to apply than sheep and if a trap gets resisted it can get really ugly really fast. So traps are next. Sheep are last because of how easy it is to repeatedly sheep something.

If you’re having issues with someone being on the wrong target because they aren’t remembering what is supposed to die after skull, target the X as skull is about to die and use Markbar to switch its Symbol to Skull. I’ve found that this helps. If it doesn’t, and reminding them of the kill order doesn’t, you’re pretty much screwed and are going to have to lose your cool and kick them or just live with it.

There are some pulls where the pull itself is small, and the next pull is only 1-2 mobs. If your group can handle it (Read: If your healer is good.) and people have mana, you can pull the next pull immediatly after the current pull dies. Or sometimes before. When I’ve got plenty of threat on a mob and its health is low enough that the DPS won’t catch up, I’ll pull the next mob. An example of this are the Underbog Giants in Heroic Underbog. When one is at 20% or so, I’ll go and grab the next one. I don’t recommend trying it if your healer is already having issues. I also don’t recommend doing it to the Underbog Lords because surviving two of those would be pretty difficult.

As you do the instance more and more you’ll get to understand all the pulls and bosses and how they work and the best way to do them. Its a good idea to let people know how YOU do an encounter. There are multiple strategies for some encounters and it works best if everybody is on the same page.

Questions and Answers:
The boss fight/trash pull didn’t go quite right and now someone is blaming you. What do you do? What I do in this situation is I look back on the fight, try to figure out where it went pear shaped, and then see if it WAS my fault. The best thing you can do is to NOT let people make you feel like shit. Mistakes happen. Frequently. If someone wants to make an ass out of themself and point the finger at you for something that went wrong, thats fine. Don’t get too worked up over it. Politely disagree or just ignore them and continue on with the run.

I pulled/marked wrong and somebody died. I feel like a moron. What do I do?
Believe me, making a mistake while pulling/marking is part of the learning process. Don’t feel bad about it. Now you know that what you just tried doesn’t work. You’ve learned something and thats good.

Somebody pulled aggro and died and they’re blaming me. Do I suck? Do I fail as a tank? Am I horrible?
That I can’t tell you. There are some pretty bad tanks out there, but if you’re here and reading this or another tanking guide you’re already ahead of the rest of them because you’re trying to learn. More likely than not the DPS did something stupid like attacking too soon, not watching their threat meter, or just not caring. DO NOT ASSUME THIS TO BE THE CASE THOUGH. Think back over the fight, watch the next fight, see whats happening. See if your threat is just low because your rotation is off or rage gen is poor, or if they’re just not holding back.

The healer went oom and we all died before the boss did, am I taking too much damage? Am I bad?
Not necessarily. Part of PUGing is realizing that the damage output of your group will most likely not be anything to write home about. Its entirely possible to have such poor damage output that a boss fight will go on for too long. Its not really common but I’ve seen it happen more than a few times. If you were consistantly taking a ton of damage and the healer was struggling to keep you alive the entire fight you might have some Mitigation/Avoidance issues. These can be corrected with proper gems/enchants/gear/etc. I’ll get to that later.

I got ROFLSTOMPED by a trash mob, am I just not ready to do this instance?
It depends. There are certain mobs that hit really really hard. Underbog Lords and quite a few of the mobs in Blood Furnace are good examples of this. With my current level of gear on Naissa the bog lords have stopped hitting very hard unless they get lucky. Even with her gear though the mobs in Blood Furnace still hit like a MACK truck. These are mobs where you don’t want to be tanking more than one at a time if you can help it. For those experienced tanks reading this it might seem like I’m being a little over-dramatic, but when you’re still in some blues those mobs can be quite deadly. Or if its your first time there. Now I know to stun/disarm/etc those as often as possible but when I first encountered them I was surprised at how fast they could drop me.

OMG A group declined my offer to tank for them because my gear isn’t great. What do I do?
Don’t let it get you down. A lot of people don’t really realize that it doesn’t take great gear to do most of the common heroics. When I first hit level 70 on Naissa I was still wearing a few pieces of Wrath and my friends wanted to play around in heroics. It was a little painful at first but we made it through the instances and some of those instances have been toned down in difficulty since then. If you’re wearing a full set of blues and are at the “uncrittable point” through defense and maybe some resilience (from the S1/2 shield) and have around 11k health, you should be good for Underbog/Slave Pens/Mechanar/etc. Those ones will be easy and you can do some of the hard ones as well. Just see what works for you. Test yourself, see what you can do. Don’t let some random bunch of people make you feel like crap because they just want to be carried by someone in full epics. You CAN do it. They most likely just don’t want to have to pay attention and work with you. Please don’t get discouraged by things like this. Don’t let people make you feel horrible about yourself and your gear. At one point they had gear just like you.

Gems/Enchants/Gear:
You can go to TankSpot here and it does a pretty good job of explaining how to Gem/Enchant/Gear. One thing I noticed is that under the weapon enchants section it says theres not a clear choice. What most people, myself included, will tell you is that for an Avoidance Weapon like Sun Eater you want to go with Mongoose and for a threat weapon like Mallet of the Tides you want to go with Executioner. By that logic I SHOULD have Executioner on my King’s Defender, but I went with mongoose. If I had the money/mats right now I’d switch but with as little as I’ve been playing Naissa recently its not worth it. Cow’s KD will have executioner though.

The Nai Promise:
Now I’m going to make you a promise. If a bad experience has got you down or if you’re unsure on something or want to know if you’re ready for whatever instance/entry level raid/whatever and you write to me about it (Include an armory link!!) with the contact form on this site, I will get back to you my thoughts/advice as soon as I possibly can. I want to help as many people be better tanks as I possibly can. If I can help/reassure you I promise you I will try.

Most of tanking can’t really be taught. Sure we can teach people tanking rotations, how to gear, how to gem and enchant and that kind of thing but I’ve yet to see anybody take the massive amount of time it would take to teach how every pull works, every strategy for every mob/pull in every instance. All the little ways to make each instance go smoother. What to pull, what to skip, etc. Most of it comes from experiencing it yourself. Do the instances, make a couple mistakes here and there and learn from them.