Threat is important.

In actuality, generating sufficient and quick threat is your second most important task as a tank, arguably equal with the first.

It’s a toss-up really. A tank that can generate threat but can’t survive is just as useless as a tank that can survive, but can’t generate threat. For sake of argument though, we’ll leave it as a close second as while you’re alive, you can still conceivably do something while once you’re dead, all hope is lost.

Something that most tanks tend to forget after a long period of raiding is that they don’t always have access to multiple misdirects from hunters and tricks of the trades from rogues. A long enough straight period of tanking in raids and you forget just how fragile and ephemeral your start-up threat can be.

Start-up threat with the help of threat misdirection is like strolling along a moving walkway. You don’t realize just how much it helps you until you reach the end and stumble when you step off.

In the same way, I’d recommend that now and then, maybe on some farmed boss fights that you can afford to experiment on, ask your hunters and rogues to lay off and see how your straight threat compares to your raid’s current dps. You might be surprised with how quickly a lucky bursty combo can help them shoot over your threat (I’m looking at the destro warlocks and elemental shamans).

There are a lot of little things that you can do to make it a little easier on yourself though and lucky for you, I’m here to throw them your way. Keep in mind though, a lot of these little tips might be things that you already know but they’re small enough that they might be overlooked.

The most important being to make sure that your threat building rotation is spot on. Make sure that after your sunders are stacked, you’re prioritizing Shield Slams > Revenge > Devastate.

Another thing that you can do your best to control is your level of rage. Do your absolute best to ensure that you’re carrying some rage over from the previous fight whenever possible on trash so that you can front load all of your high threat abilities on the enemy right off the bat the second combat starts. Now this is obviously not something that you can always control especially on boss fights but you can maximize what rage you CAN get. Something like your Blood Rage shouldn’t really be used the second you pull the boss; instead, you would have just a little bit more rage to work with if you hit it about 6-8 seconds before you’d reach the boss, give the extra 10 rage time to build up, just enough for one more move assuming both you and the boss missed the first couple of hits.

The last thing is through talent and glyph choice. A spec including the Impale > Deep Wounds combo in the Arms tree will have an easier time with generating threat than one without due to the higher threat from special crits. Another great threat choice is the Devastate glyph, the one that applies two stacks of sunder armor instead of one with every Devastate.

It may not seem like all that much but with just that glyph and spamming Devastate and NOTHING else, you can easily hit up to 5-6k TPS, let alone what you can do when you throw in the rest of your rotation.

There are undoubtedly a lot more little ways to increase your snap threat generation and with the expansion coming up, you’ll likely want to find each and every one to handle those new dungeons.

Go forth and tank!

So you’ve had a nice vacation the last few weeks, how does it feel to be back?

Feels a little weird doesn’t it? I don’t blame you. After spending the last little while chasing after fiddly little mobile critters like other players, it’s a bit of a change in mentality to be leading around something as large and ponderous as a dragon again…or as the case may be, a giant bloated pile of stitched together body parts like Festergut or Rotface.

It’s a bit of a change isn’t it? The simple fact of the matter is that the bosses don’t quite move as smoothly as you want them to, especially after a bit of a sojourn into the realm of PvP where all of your targets are nimble foot and quick to run.

It’s important that when you return to tanking that you understand how important positioning really is. The primary reason is of course, that positioning matters in a boss fight. Bosses usually need to be at a certain place at a certain time or bad things tend to happen.

The secondary, and arguably more important reason is that the melee tend to blindly follow the boss regardless of what else is going on during the fight. If you treat the boss as a carrot and your melee group as the horse, you’ll soon come to the realization that you can lead them around wherever you want them to be at any given time by simply moving the boss around the room.

In time, you will learn that YOU are responsible for the safety of your melee group as you personally can move them out of aoe damage and away from the hazards of the fight by just moving the boss away from it and watching them chase after it.

The first thing you need to keep in mind to turn the boss into a carrot for the melee is that the physical space that the boss occupies is NOT accurately represented by the bosses model. If this statement puzzles you, take a look at a boss like Sindragosa or Marrowgar. You can be hitting the boss perfectly fine from a position where it looks as if you’re waving your weapons at nothing but air. In order to move a boss such as these ones, you have to understand the maximum range and then exceed that to get the boss to chase. Failing to do so will easily get people killed from cleave damage when you have to move the boss immediately but waste a precious 3-4 seconds simply running to that max range.

The second thing to consider is the bosses turning point. In the previous example, to turn Marrowgar around, you can stand at maximum range and move around him in a great big circle just to get him to turn to the left. Conversely, you can move into the bosses model, move a quarter of the distance to get the boss to turn the same amount.

It’s something that you definitely need to experiment with to learn to use it most effectively but once you have experience tanking each boss and learn where their model ends and where their hit boxes begin, you’ll be able to move around those bosses in ways that you would never have believed possible before.

If you want practice before you experiment with the real thing, you can always grab a healing buddy and go hunt up a level 60 world dragon or two. You should be able to tank them pretty effectively with a bit of help and you can make a game of seeing just how you can move them around the map and how quickly you can turn them round and round.

Last week, we took a quick overarching view of what a protection warrior to the PvP table; control, mobility and the ability to take one hell of a licking and keep on ticking.

We’re going to take a deeper look at what the protection warrior brings to the table and exactly how those skills are implemented when you’re being chased by a ravenous horde of opposing team members.

For starters, let’s take a quick look at the build that you’re going to want to run with. The prot pvp warrior has a lot more variation in his build depending on what role you’re responsible for and the size of your team. Instead of a spec though, I’ll outline a couple of the primary talents that you’ll want to look out for.

You’re obviously going to take a lot of the defensive options available for you, though maybe not every single one. There’s a lot of defense against physical damage in your gear so you shouldn’t focus completely on it in your spec. Your defense against casters lies in a combination of your high HP pool and a few key talent choices. Something like Vitality, Improved Defensive Stance and Improved Spell Reflection are all good choices to take against casters.

On the other hand, the tools of your trade and the reason for your presence forces you to take certain other talents like Improved Revenge, Concussion Blow and Warbringer to make yourself useful.

As you walk into that arena or that battleground, keep foremost in your mind your purpose. You are control, pure and simple. By all means, if you see that squishy priest with no more cooldowns and little health trying to run away from your CC’d dps, charge after it and make it dead. But by and large, you’re going to want to save your cooldowns to disable the danger members of the opposing team.

Consider that if you toss all of your cooldowns and abilities at a single target without being interrupted, you can keep one or two enemies locked down for upwards of five to six seconds a piece between alternating between your Charge, Intercept, Concussion Blow and Shockwave.

Wait for a time when one of the opposing team is about halfway to dead and then go and pick on the enemy healer for a while to give your team a chance to finish someone off. When your team goes in for a kill, you should concentrate on maybe throwing a token stun at the kill target to keep him in place and then focus your attention on the healer. If you can keep that healer thinking about you instead of the dying team member, you pretty much have a kill.

On the other side of the loaf, you’re a powerful force to be reckoned with when it comes to peeling people off of your teammates. Don’t let your view be clouded by the enemy. Be aware of the health levels of your teammates and when you see one getting low, DO something about it. Charge the DPS chasing them, stun or interrupt the casters from nuking him to oblivion, dart over to their healer just long enough to make him call for help from his teammates, getting them off your team.

When you’re out there, keep your cool and don’t forget all of the skills you have at your disposal and all of their various uses. Remember to keep Spell Reflect on cooldown against a caster team, make sure to Disarm their melee and throw Intervenes and Vigilance onto your allies.

You have all of the tools available at your disposal to be an overwhelming nuisance to the enemy team as well as a lifesaver to your own so long as you don’t forget to make use of them.