Controlling/moving casters as tank

[Novae 0]

A friend and I were discussing this last night and I wanted to pick your brains. I am a prot pally and he is guardian druid.  Both of us are starting to tank regular dungeons. When you have a caster add you want to pick up and move towards you how do you move them?  This is in general, not thinking of a specific encounter, mainly just dungeons.

For me, I'd silence and wait for them to march over. But what if your silence is on cool down, or if your tanking class doesn't have a silence? 

Should casters adds always be handled by DPS? I'm thinking of this in terms of when I need to pull a caster off a healer or something like that.  Do you taunt to pull the aggro and wait for dps to take it out? 

 

[Barracuda 0]

Usually you'd have a ranged DPS silence / interrupt the caster add to make them walk towards you, but if not a reliable way of doing it is to taunt the add then line of sight it around a corner.

[Novae 0]

This makes perfect sense.  I didn't look at this from that perspective. This helps me also understand why my interupts are so important when I play a dps class.

[SturmhartEisenkeil 0]

If for some reason, there is no range interrupt available or your Avenger's Shield is on CD you can either wait for ~2 secs to see if you get a lucky reset on the shield or just use judgement on the target. Usually it creates enough threat to keep aggro until the DDs have killed the mob.

[Tebo 1]

On 10/16/2016 at 10:26 AM, Barracuda said:

a reliable way of doing it is to taunt the add then line of sight it around a corner.

This is a very important tool in any tank's arsenal. Controlling aggro isn't just about preventing monsters from attacking other party members, it's also crucial for reliable positioning. As the tank you are often assuming responsibility for positioning mobs for optimal DPS and party safety, which usually means "balling up" packs to maximize AOE/cleave DPS effectiveness. LOS pulls are often your most powerful tool for doing so, as all mob types will travel to the same position in order to reacquire their line of site on you. The more survivability they have relative to your group's damage throughput (basically, the harder the packs are to burn down) the more important it becomes to be able to maximize your group's damage in this fashion. This is particularly important when the group comp of the pull contains mobs with dangerous abilities.

The longer it is going to take your group to burn the pack down, the more valuable expending a few seconds waiting becomes. The mythic+ environment is one such place where such a tactic would shine.

It's not always possible to do this, but I feel it should be done whenever you have the opportunity. It makes everyone's job easier and saves party interrupts for when they're actually needed.

Interestingly, most dungeons are designed in such a way that the tactic is almost always available before large or difficult pulls.

[Aegis 27]

I agree with @Tebo. One instance where this comes to mind is your third pull after hymdall in halls of valor. The 4 mobs in the centre have are comprised of 1 melee, 1 ranged, and 2 casters. Being able to LOS the pack around the corner makes life much more simple, as tanking them in the space they start at makes you vulnerable to the two patrolling sentinels. That being said, in mythic +3 or lower I still just pull the entire pack with the two sentinels, but in higher difficulties or with less gear that isn't viable.

[Taquitoo 0]

What I sometimes do is run to the mobs with Divine Steed and AoE silence them with my Blood Elf silence (or single target interrupt on 1 target) and just run back again with the steed.