Tanking Primer

last updated for 4.0.1

What is tanking?
The idea of tanking is to get the mobs to focus on you, leaving everyone else (dps/healer) to their stuff without having to worry about being hit. In tank talk you have to 'establish aggro and keep threat'.

Keeping track of how you're doing:
First thing you want to do in every fight is get a good idea of who has threat and by how wide a margin. This is pretty much impossible without addons. Personally I use a combination of 3 addons:
1) Omen Threat Meter: this is the main threat-addon. It gives you an overview of the threat status of the mob you've got targeted. It'll show you who has threat, how much overall threat everyone's got on that mob, and how much TPS (threat per second) everyone's doing on that mob.
2) Magic Targets 2: this one I use for multi-mob tanking, tells me which mob is hitting who, and wether I have threat or not (alternative addon is Diamond threat meater, though that one takes a lot of screen space). Also shows which mobs are cc'ed and how much time is left on that cc
3) Tidy Plates, with the threat theme: this one changes the name plates to show threat status (as tank it'll flash em red if you don't have aggro, yellow if you're about to loose aggro)
4) some kind of unit-frame mod so you can place move around your own, your target's, and your focus frame complete with buffs/debuffs showing, castbar, healthbar (the default placement of your buffs/debufss sucks, and will make you mess up in raid situations where you need to keep track of a buff/debuff)

What your party members can do to help you:
1) Let the tank pull. In order to avoid accidental pulling, stay behind the tank on pulls.
2) Give the tank a couple of seconds to establish initial threat on all mobs in the pull (and if a widespread pull for the mobs to cluster)
3) Focus Fire: If everyone hits the same mob keeping threat is fairly easy, if everyone is attacking a random mob it's pretty much impossible. For marked mobs standard attack order is skull, cross
4) Loose mobs: if you pick up a loose mob, pull it towards the tank, so he can take it over (doubly so if tank is on a caster/ranged mob as those generally won't follow if the tanks runs towards the loose mob). To reinforce this point watch the youtube song Run To The Tank
5) If you get aggro: DON'T run around around like a chicken without a head and (further) out of range, DO run towards the tank.
6) use CC abilities if you have em: freezing trap (usually marked square), sheep and moon (both usually marked with moon), repentence (usually marked with purple icon), root, icy chains, .... . Also remember that everyone can mark now, not just the party leader, so if the tank doesnt (or hasnt yet) feel free to put up your own cc-mark

Positioning:
- make sure you don't have any mobs behind you (you loose avoidance from parry and dodge on attacks from behind)
- face mobs away from party (as lots of mobs have attacks that do damage in a cone in front of them):
- pull rest of the mobs away from the cc-ed mobs (avoids cc being broken by wrongly placed AoE attacks)
- try to keep mobs in 1 place and orientation during the entire fight to make things easier on everyone else in the party
- on mobs that do knockback: position yourself in a corner/against a wall
- pulling to behind an obstacle (the so called Line Of Sight pull) can help concentrate a group of casters/ranged if your group cooperates

Hard to pull mobs:
There's 2 kinds of mobs that are problematic in pulls: casters and ranged attack types. By default they'll keep their distance making it impossible for you to keep aggro on them, they also have an annoying tendency to backup up when they're not being actively hit. Because of the above casters and ranged are priority targets in any pull.

In general you'll either:
1) go to them (by e.g. charging them)
2) pull them with the 'ranged attack + get out of Line Of Sight (LoS)' trick (which is often hard due to freaky collision detection in game that often lets mobs attack through corners or objects).

Note: that casters tend to behave as melee mobs when silenced

Spec
Choose the tanking tree for your class and make absolutely sure you specced the talent that makes you uncrittable:
- Protection tree with 'Bastion of Defense' for Warriors (in tier 3)
- Protection tree with 'Sanctuary' for Paladins (in tier 3)
- Feral combat tree with 'Thick Hide' for Druids (in tier 3)
- Blood tree with 'Improved Blood Presence' for Death Knights (in tier 4)

Gearing
As tank you want to stack a combination of Stamina, Avoidance (dodge/parry) and Mastery. Hit and expertise are no longer very important as taunts can't miss anymore, and with vengeance keeping threat is not a problem even with extremely low hit and expertise (for a threat-gearset hitting expertise softcap and hit are still important, for your avoidance set they aren't)

Your primary set should focus on avoidance, if you have the gear for it, you might also want to build a threat-set (for the fights you very much overgear, or certain raid fights where there's a mechanic making threat problematic).

Info on the web
Tankspot -> this is the general tanking site for all classes, bosskill videos, strategies from tanking perspective, theorycrafting, getting help from the expert tanks,...

Class Specifics
For specific info on each tanking class, see the follow up posts below (1 per class):
- Warriors
- Druids
- Palladins
- Death Knights

Where to find (Plate) Tanking Gear (Cataclysm)
see the post at http://www.tanklikeagirl.com/2010/12/05/cataclysm-faction-rewards-for-prot-warriors

Where to find (Plate) Gear (Wotlk)
- Start with the Cobalt set at 70
- Replace with the Tempored Saronite pieces as they become available (If you don't have better from dungeons/quests ofc: the coldarra questline into nexus rewards several tanking pieces)
- At 78 the crafted daunting pieces and the cloak of peaceful resolutions from wyrmrest rep
- At 80 have a look at the epic crafteds, especially Saronite Swordbreakers which is best in slot till ICC (buy the rest of of the crafteds depending on your budget, or not as they get replaced by emblem gear fast)

Good trinkets are:
- the dodge trinket from final boss in normal Halls of Light
- Black heart from normal trial of the crusader
- Essence of gossamer from 2nd boss in azjol-nerub heroic
- Block trinket from 3-headed dog boss in Violet hold Heroic

Easily available tanking weapons:
- Crescent of Brooding Fury: Quest 'Ragemane's Flipper' in Zul'Drak
- Eternally Folded Blade from normal Halls of Light
- Infantry Assault Blade from first boss in Utgarde Pinnacle Heroic
- Cloudstrider's Waraxe from 2nd boss in Occulus Heroic
- Red Sword of Courage from final boss in Utgarde Pinnacle Heroic
- Teldrassil Protector, from Argent tournament vendor
- Peacekeaper Blade from Trial of the Crusader Heroic
- Falric's Wrist Chopper from first boss in Halls of Reflection Heroic

Overview of enchants to use on your tanking gear.

last updated for 4.0.1

Ability use:
As things stand there's no fixed rotation for tanking, instead there's a priority list, where you use the highest priority ability that's not on cooldown. Priority list is thus: Sword & Board Shield Slam Proc > Revenge > Shield Slam > Devaste

For single-target you want to use Heroic Strike (HS) as your rage dump in addition to the above.
For multi-target you should be using Thunderclap and Shockwave whenever they're not on cooldown, and you should be cleaving as rage dump.

-> you can practice this on a dummy if you leave out the rage dumps

Note: the 2 rage dumps Heroic Strike and Cleave are off the global cooldown (they're instant attacks) so they don't interfere with the priority list above.

Note: as a prot warrior one of your main advantages with the warbringer talent is high mobility (warbringer makes charge, intercept and intervene usuable in combat and in any stance). The following macro combines all 3 in a single button (using charge if not on cooldown, intercept otherwise on non-friendlies, and using intercept if friendly):

/castsequence reset=15 Charge, Intercept
/cast [help] Intervene; [target=targettarget, help] Intervene;

Glyphs
Prime Glyhps, no choice here take:
- Glyph of Shield Slam
- Glyph of Revenge
- Glyph of Devastate

Majors Glyps, lots of choice here choose from:
- Glyph of Cleaving: major AoE-Boost
- Glyph of Heroic Throw: utility
- Glyph of Long Charge: utility
- Glyph of Rapid charge: utility
- Glyph of Resonating Power: skip, rage is no problem in AoE situations thanks to shield specialisation
- Glyph of Shield Wall: survival-boost in exchange for longer cd
- Glyph of Shockwave: AoE-boost (And cc-boost on trash as shockwave stuns)
- Glyph of Sunder armor: AoE-boost
- Glyph of Thunderclap: utility (makes it less likely you'll miss a mob running past you)

Minors glyphs:
- Glyph of Intimidating Shout: This is te one musthave, as it makes intimidating shout actually usefull as short CC in (crowded) dungeons, where runners are a no-no
- Don't take Glyph of Furious Sundering, it doesn't apply to devastate, and we don't use plain sunder as prot
- no really wrong choices otherwise

Spec
At 85 you have a mandatory 31 points in the protection tree, you always want to take Field Dressing (2 points in the Arms tree), which leaves you with 8 floater points to put anywhere (probably 'War Acadamy' for dps boost, 'Blood Craze' for survival boost, 'Cruelty' is another dps boost option, 'drums of war' in second tier arms is also a very nice talent to have, 'Battle Trance' is extremely weak don't take it)

As you must use up 31 out of a possibly 39 points in the prot tree at 80 (34/39 if you put your floaters in prot), this is basically a question of what not to take:
- Never take 'Safeguard' (Safeguard is a pvp talent or a very ocasionally a utility talent when an encounter needs stacking of external survival cooldowns)
- 'Blood and Thunder' provides an AoE boost at the cost of a pain in the ass opening on every pull -> save to skip, use glyph of cleave instead (shield specialisation pretty much lets you spam cleave on 3+ mobs)
- 'Gag Order' is a Trash-only-talent, though an extremely useful one -> potential skip if you need to free a couple of points this is an option for a raiding spec
- If you need a couple of extra points dropping the combo 'Concussion Blow' + 'Vigilance' is another potential skip (vigilance is great when offtanking as it keeps your vengeance up, now rather useless otherwise)
- 'Thunderstruck' -> safe to skip, boosts your aoe, pretty useless otherwise

Pulling:
Generally a pull sequence goes through the following steps:
1) Heroic throw and then either immediately charge or start peddling back and charge when the mob gets to where you want it
2) Thunderclap (may be done while charging) to get initial aggro
3) Wait for mobs to cluster around you, then step back a bit and Shockwave
4) Attack skull mob to get a head start on aggro
5) Cycle through rest of the mobs in pull to get some aggro margin on all of them
6) Go to main rotation on current focus fire target, cycling back to other mobs if your aggro margin starts dropping

When charging a pack of mobs you generally either:
- charge the furthest priority target (thunderclapping while charging through the pack, and turning around to face the pack at the end of the charge), or
- charge the closest priority target

Video Pulling Guide

As a warrior there's 2 ways to reliably silence a caster:
1) (Heroic Throw + Gag Order talent)
2) Charge + (Shield bash + Gag Order Talent)

For problematic mob combinations following tactics work:
- 1 caster -> either charge it, or heroic throw it
- 1 ranged -> charge it
- 1 ranged + 1 caster -> heroic throw caster, charge ranged
- 2 casters -> heroic throw 1 caster, charge the other
- 2 ranged: if close enough togetter, charge one, then cycle between the 2 to keep them melee-ing. If not close enough togetter, charge one, nuke it, charge the other

last updated for 4.0.1

Ability Use

Bears pull with Faerie Fire (talented so it applies a full 3 stacks in 1 go)

Rage management at the start of a pull is a pain in the ass:
- use your furor talent (i.e. shift out and back into bear for 10 rage, you always have it as the other option in tier 1 is cat-only talent)
- Use the combo Barkskin+Enrage to get 20+10 rage before the pull if up (1 min cd so can't quite use this every pull)

Your rage dump is Maul, which is off the global cooldown. So add it on top of your rotation whenever you have enough rage (glyphed to hit 2 targets on trash).

Single-target bears have a basic 5 cooldown rotation with procs. The basic rotation is mangle, 3xlacerate, Pulverize.
Whenever clearcasting (the yellow spell alert) or berserk (the white spell alert) procs you use them for a free mangle.

Multi-target you:
- swipe on cooldown
- tab-target around using: Procced Mangle > 3 Lacerate Pulverize > Lacerate (add in FF whenever you have rage problems)
- Use mault whenever you have rage
You also need to be very carefull to gather up mobs before you use your swipe as it now has a 6 second cd and it's your only many-target attack (maul hits 2 if glyphed, everything else hits only 1)

NOTE:
- When multi-mob tanking, tab to the next mob after each Maul to spread to love, especially when dps is aoe-ing
- FFF is ranged so can be used to keep threat on a ranged mob that might otherwise switch to a healer or ranged dps, though obviously making sure that mob is in swipe range is preferable
- if you can afford it Threatwise it's a good idea to put FFF debuff on all mobs as you cycle through them (instead of using it on focussed target each cooldown for the threat)

Glyphs
Prime Glyphs are easy as there's no choice 3 slots and 3 applicable glyphs:
- Glyph of Berserk
- Glyph of Lacerate
- Glyph of Mangle

Major Glyphs, are kinda meh:
- Never take Glyph of Barkskin (where uncrittable as tank outside of pvp anyway)
- Glyph of Entangling Roots: minor utility, entangling roots switches you out of bear though
- Glyph of Faerie Fire: minor utility, FF already has 35 yard range though so meh
- Glyph of Feral Charge: minor utility, 1 second of bear charge, rather meh
- Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration: utility, you loose your self-heal dot in favor of boost to normal heals
- Glyph of Maul: major AoE-boost, your maul now hits a second target
- Glyph of Rebirth: major utility, rebirthed players now start with 100% health, makes sure your rebirth isn't wasted
- Glyph of Thorns: major utility, about halves your thorns cd
Personally I'm running with Thorns, Maul and Rebirth glyphs.

Minor Glyphs:
- Glyph of Challenging Roar, is the must have one
- choose whatever for the other 2

Spec
At 80 you have a mandatory 31 talents points in the Feral Combat tree, and you take Heart of the Wild from Restoration, leaving you 2 floater points to put anywhere

In the Feral Combat tree you must take 31 out of a possible 43 points, so it is mostly a question of what not to take:
- Never take 'Predatory Strikes', pure cat talent
- Never take 'Nurturing Instinct', pure cat talent
- Never take 'Primal Madness', 12 rage every 3 minutes is not worth 2 points
- Never take 'Blood in the Water', pure cat talent -> this brings us to 31/35
- 'Stampede' snap-threat boost following charge, possible skip
- 'Endless Carnage, ups the crit-boost from pulverize to 18 sec instead of 10 (your single target rotation is 5 cds = 7.5 sec so allows 1 proc per cycle wihout falling of), so this is a possible skip
- 'Fury Swipes', dps boost, possible skip, not sure about relative value vs 'King of the Jungle' at the moment.
- 'King of the Jungle', dps boost, possible skip, not sure about relative value vs 'Fury Swipes' at the moment.
- 'Brutal impact' gives you makes skull bash a 10 second charge, and 10 second interrupt, so you basically get a warriors warbringer+short interrupt. So best not to skip it, though if you really need the points it's a possiblity.
- 'Feral Aggression' makes FF apply the maximum 3-stack 12% armor reduction, great utility but possible skip.

last updated for 4.0.1

Ability Use:

First thing you need to know is that for pallies tanking mode = 'Rightous fury' is active . If you have threath problems this is the first thing you check.

Rotation for paladins is divided in 9 seconds cycles where you:
- repeat 1 holy power building ability every 3 seconds (i.e. on the 1st, 3th and 5th cd of every 9 second cycle)
- fill up the 2nd and 4th cooldown with appropriate abilities
- use up the 3 holy power on the final cooldown of each cycle

Single target your rotation then becomes:
- Use Crusader strike every 2nd global cooldown (this is your '3' that builds holy power)
- every 2nd cd in a 9 second span you use: Judgement,
- every 4th cd in a 9 second span you use: Avenger's Shield/Holy Wrath (both 15 second cd's so alternate them every cycle)
- finish up with Shield of the Righteous (use Word of Glory instead if you need extra heals)

Multi-target the rotation is:
- Use Hammer of the Righteous every 2nd global cooldown (this is your '3' that builds holy power)
- every 2nd cd in a 9 second span you use: Holy Wrath/Avenger's Shield (both 15 second cd's so alternate them every cycle)
- every 4th cd in a 9 second span you use: Consecrate/Judgement (consecrate is of cd every 3 cycles)
- finish up with Shield of the Righteous (use Word of Glory instead if you need extra heals)

-> you can practice the single-target one on dummy, mana is not a problem (at least with glyph of ascetic crusader), practicing your multi-target is to manna-intensive for dummy-work

To Pull casters you have talented Avenger's Shield (aka the holy frisbee) which jumps to nearby targets.

Glyphs:

Prime Glyphs, choose from:
- Glyph of Seal of Truth: must have unless you have 53+ expertise without it
- Glyph of Shield of the Rightous: major dps-boost
- Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous: major dps increase for multi-target
- Glyph of Crusader Strike: about 30 dps increase single target
- Glyph of Judgment: about 39 dps increase single target
- Glyph of Word of glory: survivability increase

Major glyphs, choose from:
- Glyph of Ascetic Crusader: less mana used by your main single-target ability
- Glyph of cleansing: utility
- Glyph of Consecration: harder-hitting consecrate, but increased cd drops it to once every 4 cycles in AoE-rotation (instead of every 3)
- Glyph of Dazing Shield: pvp glyph, annoying on pulls in pvp
- Glyph of Divine Plea: utility
- Glyph of Divine Protection: good for fights with heavy magic attacks
- Glyph of Divinity: utility
- Glyph of Focused Shield: single-target dps boost, multi-target dps nerf
- Glyph of Hammer of Justice: utility
- Glyph of Hammer of Wrath: free attack when boss <20%
- Glyph of Holy Wrath: will be great in Cata, useless in ICC

Minor Glyphs:
- Glyph of Lay on Hands is musthave
- Choose whatever for the other 2

Spec
At 80 you must put 31 points in prot, you want 2 points in Improved Judgement, leaving 3 floater points (for Crusader or Judgement of the pure)

In the prot tree you must take 31 out of 38 possible points, so it's mostly a question of what not to take:
- Never take 'Grand Crusader', the procs don't fit in your rotation so go wasted anyway.
- Never take 'Improved Hammer of Justice' it's a pure pvp talent (possibly as utility talent for very specific fights like LK where interrupts are very important)
- 'Hallowed Ground' is a weak talent, so becomes a potential skip
- 'Eternal Glory' is a survival build only talent, so a potential skip
- 'Divine Guardian' is a situational utility talent. Occasionaly a life-saver in raids when healing massive raid damage is a problem potential skip (doubly so in cata as bliz is supposedly doing away with the need to spam-heal fast in favor of a need to keep up with an average sustained healing requirement)

Info on the Web:

Maintankadin is the main pally-specific tanking site

last updated for 4.0.1

DK Resource System
,
Resources are what you use to power your special attacks, Deathknights have a dual resource system, consisting of
a) A steady resource streams made up by runes:
- 3 pairs of runes (1 pair of frost, 1 pair of unholy, 1 pair of blood).
- Each runepair has the ability to regenerate 1 rune at a time, which takes 10 sec (so if 2 runes are down at same time, the second will wait to start regenerating till the first one is done. A waiting rune is called a sleeper rune)
- Haste lessens the time needed to regenerate a rune
- There's also death runes, which are regular runes converted to wild cards by some abilities (you can use em as any kind)
b) A resource stream called runic power that starts empty and degenerates out-of-combat (like a warrior's rage bar). Runic Power fills up at a rate of 10 RP per used rune.

There is now a symbiotic relationship between rune power and runes:
- All core runic power using abilities (Death Coil, Frost Strike, and Rune Strike) have a 45% chance to instantly refresh a (random) used rune (this is called Runic Empowerment).
- Every rune you spend generates 10 Runic power

=> you want to delay runic power use till you have a sleeper rune
=> thanks to the sleeping of runes it is no longer important to use your runes as fast as possible (so as they'd start regenerating as fast as possible) as it no longer matters wether you use the 2nd rune of a pair immediately or 9 seconds after the first one.

Runes are used either as:
- a Single Rune
- a Frost-Unholy pair (FU pair)
- a Rune Set: 1 each of blood/frost/unholy)

Due to the way the rune-cost of abilities works it's best to think of them in terms of Blood runes vs Unholy/Frost pairs. Which gives you 2 UF-pairs and 2 blood runes per runeset. What this means in practice is that you don't keep track of each individual rune cooldown, but the availability of Blood Runes and FU-pairs.

Ability Use

First: Blood Presence is now the DK tanking mode (as opposed to frost presence pre-4.0)

DK's are a dot class with disease based dots, as a blood tank you have 3 diseases at your disposal:
- Frost Fever, applied by Icy Touch, spread by Pestilence
- Blood Plague, applied by Plague Strike, spread by Pestilence
- Scarlet fever (when talented), applied by Blood Boil
(- Outbreak at 81)

For snap-aoe threat you have 'Blood Boil' and 'Death and Decay' (which now only costs 1 unholy rune instead of a full rune set pre-4.0)

Your basic rotation is:
1) Start/keep diseases up
2) Use runes blood runes with Heart Strike (Substitute Blood Boil for Hearth Strike if you have 4+ or more targets)
3) Use up FU-pairs with Death Strike
3) Use up RP with Rune Strike The change that makes Rune Strike usuable all the time as blood hasn't made it to live yet, so we're still stuck using mostly deathcoil at double the cost at the moment (so half as many chances for a runic empowerment proc)

DeathKnights have a veritable mountain of survival abilities:
- Death Strike: part of your basic rotation, talented this heals for a minumum of 14.5% of your total health and a maximym of 43.5% of damage taken in the last 5 seconds (untalented that's 10% and 30% respectively). Try not to use it twice in a row unless you actually need that much healing.
- Icebound Fortitude (IBF)
- Anti-Magic Shell
- Vampiric Blood
- Bone Shield
- Dancing Rune Weapon
- Rune Tap
- Army of the Dead

Glyphs
Prime Glyphs:
- Glyph of Death and Decay, aoe-boost
- Glyph of Death Strike, must have, buffs one of your two bread and butter attacks
- Glyph of Heart Strike, must have, buffs one of your two bread and butter attacks
- Glyph of Icy Touch, aoe-boost, less then the D&D one though
- Glyph of Rune Strike, buffs your bread and butter rune dump
=> the 2 must haves are the Glyph of Heart Strike and Rune Strike, Death Strike takes third place though you might want to switch it with Death and Decay for a multi-target boost.

Major Glyphs, choose from:
- Glyph of Anti-magic Shell, minor utility
- Glyph of Blood-boil, aoe-boost, and easier aoe pickup
- Glyph of Bone Shield, dps boost
- Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon, makes DRW boost you threat (in addition to lowering your damage)
- Glyph of Death Grip, minor utility
- Glyph of Pestilence, easier spreading of diseases
- Glyph of Rune Tap, raid utility
- Glyph of Strangulate, minor utility
- Glyph of Vampiric blood, changes the ability so it no longer heals you but boosts healing received instead, raid only

Minor Glyphs:
- Glyph of Blood tap is the must have glyph
- Never take Glyph of Horn of Winter: you'll pretty much be keeping Horn of Winter on cooldown for the extra runic power whenever you have free global cooldown, so the extra buff length is wasted
- choose whatever from the remaining

Spec
At 80 you must put 31 points in the Blood tree, you want 3 points in Epidemic[b/] in the Unholy tree, leaving [b]2 floater points.

Since you must put 31 points in a maximum of 42 points into the Blood tree, the real question is what not to take:
- Never take 'Butchery' the talent is to weak to be worth the points (as tank you rarely get killing blows, which leaves it at about 20 RP per minute)
- 'Hand of Doom' is a utility talent, likely skip
- 'Scarlet Fever' is skippable IF AND ONLY IF you can be 100% sure you don't need to supply the damage reduction debuff in all your raids
- 'Scent of Blood' is a very strong talent, but dropping down to 2 points here is acceptable
- 'Blood-Caked Blade', dps/threat boost, optional skip
- 'Abomination's Might', raid utility and dps boost, optional skip (doesn't stack with pally BoM, and can also be supplied by marksman hunters and Enhancement shamans)
- 'Crimson's Scourge', aoe-boost and makes your scarlet fever upkeep free, skip it if you skipped 'Scarlet Fever'

With regards to the 2 floater points:
- 2 first tiers of frost are useless for a blood tank, don't go there
- We're already taking 3 points in unholy for epidemic, and Desecration and Morbidity are possible targets in tier 2. If and if you're planning to go for tier 2 in unholy you take 'Unholy Command' in tier 1. Do not take virulence in tier 1 as it only applies to Icy Touch and Death Coil (the former we only use to apply frost fever, and the latter we'll use only for ranged threath as runestrike is a superior runicpower dump) and is thus of very limited utility.
- Best bang for your buck is probably to put your floater points into the Blood tree

Info on the Web:

pwnwear is the main DK tanking site (aside from the general tank spot)

Well Baridin, you're really on a roll! Well done mate, well done!

This should help out anyone who is interested in tanking, great read.

Hello Bari,

glad to see you after long time again yesterday when we almost owned Lord Marr. Do you think you could contnue with your tanking primer also for other classes? I am planning to level quickly dwarf warrior through tank role as she is 71 lvl so its a shame she is sitting and collecting electronic dust :-).
And one more time thank you for great overview. Could you also say something about gems and equip for fresh lvl 80 tanks?¨

Ty mate a lot

Happy Horde hunting

Hubero wrote:
Do you think you could contnue with your tanking primer also for other classes?

Yeah need to fill in the paladin tanking now that I've got my pally tanking down, I'll try to get around to that one sometime next week. Still don't have a dk tank so that one will have to wait

Hubero wrote:
I am planning to level quickly dwarf warrior through tank role as she is 71 lvl so its a shame she is sitting and collecting electronic dust :-).
And one more time thank you for great overview. Could you also say something about gems and equip for fresh lvl 80 tanks?¨

For the 3 plate classes gearing tips are:

start with the cobalt set at 70, start replacing with the tempored saronite pieces as they become available (in as far as you don't have better from dungeons/quests. the coldarra questline into nexus rewards several tanking pieces, and there's a tanking axe from a quest in zuldrak ), then at 78 the crafted daunting pieces and the cloak of peaceful resolutions from wyrmrest rep.

make sure you run normal hol once available untill you get the def trinket from the last boss.

Once at 80, I'd skip the tempered titansteel crafteds (they'll get replaced fast by emblem gear) and get yourself the saronite swordbreakers (nothing better before ICC or possibly heroic toc-10), then start chain-running heroics to get your full emblem-tier set (good trinkets are black heart from normal toc and essence of gossamer from 2nd boss in azjol-nerub heroic)

for the gems/enchanting see the warrior post
otherwise nothing changed except corresponding epic gems in place of rare gems (see the links in the warrior post)

Paladin info = nice.

ty Baridin, very usefull.

Bari,
bump again, and many thanks for super duper guide on tanks.
Hifive to you.

Happy dots

bump, added linkt to cata rep rewards for tanks