Tanking Guide (The War Within 11.0.7)

Table of Contents

• 1. The Purpose of This Article
• 2. Introduction
• 3. Profile of a Great Tank
• +4. General Concerns
  • 4.1. Add-ons and User Interface Settings
    • 4.1.1. Threat Meter
    • 4.1.2. Name Plates
  • 4.2. Cooldown Trackers
  • 4.3. Keybinds
  • 4.4. Gear Optimization
    • 4.4.1. Tailoring to the Encounter
  • 4.5. Knowledge of the Encounter
    • 4.5.1. Marking Targets
• +5. Aggro
  • 5.1. How does Threat and Aggro Work?
    • 5.1.1. Threat
    • 5.1.2. Aggro
  • 5.2. Ability Rotation
  • 5.3. Initial Aggro
    • 5.3.1. Picking up Adds
    • 5.3.2. Using Offensive Cooldowns
  • 5.4. Maintaining Aggro
    • 5.4.1. "Tab Targeting"
  • 5.5. Regaining Aggro (Taunting and Tank-Switching)
    • 5.5.1. How to Taunt
    • 5.5.2. How to Tank-Switch
• +6. Survival
  • 6.1. Active Survival
  • 6.2. Cooldowns
    • 6.2.1. General Guidelines
  • 6.3. Positioning and Movement
    • 6.3.1. Pushing
• 7. Maximizing Your Raid's and Your Own DPS
• 8. Consistency
• 9. Leadership and Attitude
• 10. Conclusions
• 11. Changelog

This article is a comprehensive guide to tanking. It will cover every aspect of the role, from the fundamentals to more advanced concepts — everything you need to understand and apply in order to be a great tank. Whether you are new to the role or a seasoned veteran, this guide will be of use to you.

This article will not go into technical details about talent specs, proper gemming or anything else that is tedious, and specific to a class or spec. You will find specific information pertaining to tanking classes and specs in our existing tanking class guides. This is not to say that we will never ever make a mention regarding a specific class or ability, but do not expect to gain any class-specific knowledge from this guide.

A common misconception about tanking is that it is the most difficult role to perform, and should therefore not be attempted by new players. This is not the case; while tanking does demand a lot of up-front knowledge, it mechanically is quite simple to execute. The barrier to entry can be daunting for those who have never tanked before, which we hope to remedy with this guide.

The characteristics of a great tank can be summarized in a few sentences.

• A great tank is intimately familiar with their class — its strengths, its weaknesses, and its limitations — and knows how to take advantage of its toolkit to maximize their play.
• A great tank comes prepared to every dungeon/raid encounter, and is aware of important mechanics and how to deal with them when they occur.
• A great tank is able to maintain threat on all targets they are assigned to tank, including picking up new targets and quickly taunting back targets they lose threat on.
• A great tank understands the various positional requirements of DPS players (especially melee), and does a good job at minimizing their movement and downtime.
• A great tank plays proactively by pre-positioning for mechanics and using cooldowns in anticipation of (and not in response to) damage spikes.
• A great tank prioritizes consistency above all else, keeping damage intake and boss positioning the same every pull to facilitate great play from the rest of their raid.
• A great tank has the qualities of a leader, and is not shy to step up and take control of the group, including coordinating interrupts and stuns, and calling for defensive cooldowns from their healers.

In addition to this, as tanks are the drivers of the party or raid group, a tank who is able to set a fast pace will make a dungeon or raid go extremely smoothly and quickly.

In this section we will cover a number of things which will improve all aspects of your tanking ability, but are not related specifically to game mechanics.

While Blizzard's standard user interface is fully functional, and will allow you to successfully perform any encounter, it is far from optimal. There are several add-ons and features which will make life easier for both you and the rest of your raid.

Omen Threat Meter is, by far, the best threat add-on out there. It will show you how much threat you have, as well as how much threat other people on the boss' threat table have. In addition to this, it also displays other useful information, such as how long is left until the effects of threat modifying abilities ( Misdirection, Fade) end.

There are several useful nameplate add-ons, such as Tidy Plates.

Name plates are essentially bars which appear over various enemies (and friendly units, if you so desire) in your proximity. They not only allow you to select enemies with ease (by clicking on the name plates) but they can also provide other useful information.

Threat Plates allows you, at a glance, to see which targets you have aggro of, and which you do not, as well as which targets you are likely to lose aggro of soon (where someone is catching up to you in threat).

This is achieved by providing different colors and/or sizes to the name plates of nearby targets. For example, targets of which you have aggro are green and smaller in size, while targets which you do not have aggro of are red and larger in size (making them easier to notice and click).

A name plate add on is an essential tool in every tank's arsenal.

In order to coordinate stuns, interrupts, and cooldowns with your party or raid, it is strongly recommended that you use an add-on or weakaura to track the cooldown status of each ability available to your group. We recommend Method Raid Tools, (previously known as Exorsus Raid Tools) which has a Raid Cooldowns module that you can set up to track the cooldowns of any important spells you may use or call for during a dungeon or raid encounter.

Keybinding is a near-mandatory practice for all classes and specs, and tanking is no exception. As a tank, split second decisions can make or break your raid's chances to succeed. Furthermore, as a tank, you often have to move and rotate your camera, while at the same time using various abilities. You simply cannot do this efficiently if you must use your mouse to click them.

As a result, we recommend making ample use of keybinds for your tank. You do not have to bind everything; consumables and various items that are not used or are used rarely in combat can be clicked. Rotational abilities, cooldowns, and utility spells like your interrupt should all be bound to keys that you can easily press in combat.

Needless to say, you should research your class and specialization, in order to find out what the best stats are for you, and adapt your gearing strategy accordingly.

One of the ways in which you can make the transition from being a good tank to being a great tank is to understand that tanking is all about adapting your gear (and talents) to the encounter.

As such, you should always collect and carry with you as many alternative gear pieces as possible.

This will allow you to change your gear on a fight-by-fight basis. For example: if an encounter has infrequent periods of extremely high burst damage on the tank, you can use a large absorb trinket with a long cooldown. If a boss deals heavy but frequent melee damage, you can use a trinket that increases your Armor passively.

Understanding the damage profile of an encounter (the pattern, frequency, and type of damage that is being dealt to tanks by enemies in an encounter) is key to making good decisions about gear and talents. A great tank's gear and talent setups are always dynamic.

As a tank, you should be intimately familiar with all of the encounter's mechanics, to a much greater degree than a DPS player or even a healer must.

Only when you are familiar with the encounter will you know what the best time is to use defensive or offensive cooldowns, what position is ideal for tanking the boss, where you will need to be positioned to most easily pick up new adds.

Additionally, as a tank, you are in the unique position of having a good general overview of the encounter, and how your raid is performing it. With a solid understanding of the encounter, you can easily offer advice and suggestions for improving execution. This is why many high end raiding guilds often have raid leaders who are tanks.

While not applicable to raid bosses, being familiar with the various trash groups (in both raids and dungeons) is also essential for a tank. Knowing exactly what the trash mobs do, how damaging they are and what kind of crowd-control is (possibly) needed allows you to better gauge whether or not you and your healer(s) are prepared to take them on.

In addition, understanding your party's various strengths and weaknesses is key to having a successful dungeon run. For example, if you know your DPS players with strong AoE capabilities have their cooldowns available you can do a larger pull, or if you have a specific crowd control available (like Soothe or Control Undead), you can use those to make troublesome packs easier to deal with.

The game allows players who are party or raid leaders, or assistants in raid groups, to place specific markings above the heads of friendly or hostile targets.

This is typically done by right clicking the unit frame of the target and selecting a mark, but it can also be done with a keybinding (they are listed in the Key Binding settings menu in the default Blizzard interface). There are also add-ons which serve this purpose, but we do not consider them to be needed.

Marks above targets can be seen by all of your party or raid members, and serve as a means to coordinate your efforts. Marks have no specific meaning except for the meaning your group gives to them, although there are a few universally understood marks. When placed on an enemy, the skull marker, for example, typically indicates a priority target which must be killed right away. Other markers can be used at your discretion, as long as their meaning is communicated to and understood by your party.

As a tank, you should bind at least 3-4 marks to accessible keys, and make frequent use of marking targets, in order to indicate which mobs you wish to be killed first, and which you wish to be crowd-controlled.

Keep in mind that, during raid encounters, marking is generally the prerogative of your raid leader, and unless specifically directed to, you should not interfere.

This section will cover everything you need to know, as a tank, about gaining, maintaining and regaining aggro. First, however, we need to look at some introductory concepts.

Generating threat and maintaining aggro are the defining characteristics of a tank. Understanding these concepts is crucial to your performance.

Threat is a means of measuring the level of animosity a mob has towards a specific player. Each mob has a threat table, and every person who performs hostile actions towards that mob or beneficial actions towards players who are in combat is put on that table.

There are two important actions which generate threat: dealing damage and healing. Other actions, such as casting a buff or debuff also generate threat, but in very small amounts which are not worth discussing.

Normally, threat is generated at 1:1 ratio with damage done to the mob, and a 1:2 ratio with healing done. However, in order to facilitate tanking, tanks generate far more threat from their damage done.

Furthermore, threat does not decay (decrease) over time or otherwise, unless a specific ability is used which has this effect, or if the encounter mechanics specifically affect threat.

Lastly, threat is reset if the player dies, or otherwise leaves combat with the mob, and it cannot have a negative value.

There are many abilities that reduce your threat (such as Vanish and Fade), and some abilities can temporarily transfer threat you generate to another player (such as Tricks of the Trade and Misdirection). Some raid and dungeon mechanics can reduce or reset threat occasionally as well.

Having aggro is a state in which players find themselves when they have the highest amount of threat against a particular mob, and that mob attacks them because of it. Needless to say, in principle, this is the aim of every tank.

It is important to keep in mind that there will be times when you will want to avoid having aggro of mobs, even as a tank. This is the case in fights which require multiple tanks, each with their own assignments. It is also the case when the fight mechanics debuff you with something that makes you extremely vulnerable to the boss or other mobs.

It is worthwhile to know that you do not gain aggro of a mob simply by overtaking the current top-threat target. For example, if the person who currently has aggro of the boss has 1,000,000 threat, simply reaching 1,000,001 threat will not cause the boss to attack you. There is a threshold which must be met: 110% of the threat of the current aggro target, if you are in melee range of the boss, and 130% if you are away from the boss.

When either of those thresholds is exceeded, the boss will switch targets to the new top-threat player, and the old tank will have to exceed this person by 110%/130% again to regain aggro.

While knowing how to master threat-generation and how to maintain aggro is important, you must first know very well what you are supposed to be tanking.

While tanks have rotations similar to those of DPS classes (a number of damaging abilities that spend and generate a particular resource), for them, this rotation is not the core part of their gameplay. Instead, the rotation of tanks only exists to generate threat and resources, but in addition to it tanks also have to dedicate a large amount of time to actively staying alive.

Tanks generally have four categories of abilities:

• important damaging and threat-generating abilities that make up a rotation;
• active mitigation abilities, which have short cooldowns and help survival;
• defensive abilities with long cooldowns;
• other, miscellaneous abilities: buffs, debuffs, stuns/slows, taunts, mobility abilities, and so on.

As a tank, generally, it is your responsibility to start the encounters, or, in other words, to pull. This means that you get the opportunity to attack the boss before anyone else. This should, in theory, offer you the opportunity to gain initial aggro.

As a competent tank, you should at the very least know which of your abilities generate high amounts of threat. Once you know this, you should always have a plan for the pull, as well as for picking up adds which join the fight later on. While this is class specific, and up to you to perfect, there are several guidelines to follow.

1. Always begin with the ability which generates the highest amount of threat.
2. Be prepared to use your taunt ability the moment you notice that you have lost aggro of the boss.
3. Delay your debuffs and other survival cooldowns until you have stabilized your threat (obviously, if the fight mechanics require you to use a survival cooldown right away, then you should do so).

While your threat output will generally be stable, you can encounter problems at the very start of the fight when your threat is low and all the DPS players are under the effects of their cooldowns and potions.

Therefore, you should plan accordingly and have your most powerful abilities available. These should be coupled with any offensive cooldowns which your class possesses, to maximize the amount of damage that you do, and thus your threat. If you are struggling with initial threat, you may open with a taunt ability to benefit from its increased threat generation.

Depending on the environment where you are tanking (guild raid, pug group, 5-man dungeon, etc.), you may find yourself having to literally fight against DPS players in reaching the boss first.

This may be due to the desire (or sometimes, the necessity) to maximize damage done to the boss, or it may be due to impatience and lack of consideration. In any case, you should always take the initiative and be aggressive in engaging the encounter.

In addition to the normal way in which you will find yourself gaining aggro (pulling the boss), you will often encounter situations where new enemies, generally adds, enter the fight while it is in progress.

Good knowledge of the encounter is crucial, because it is important to know when and where the adds will appear, especially if you want to use ground-based threat abilities.

You also have to pay special attention to healer aggro, when picking up adds. Indeed, it is quite likely that, as healers are constantly casting spells, they will take aggro of the newly spawned adds before you even have a chance to react. You must prepare for this situation, be in a good position, and not hesitate to taunt the adds to you.

Generally, practice over successive attempts will allow you to gain invaluable experience as to which way is best to pick up the adds in a particular fight.

Most tanking classes have some kind of offensive cooldown. Sometimes, these reduce the cooldown or resource cost of some abilities, while other times they simply increase damage done.

It is a natural reaction to think that, as a tank, you will focus on using defensive cooldowns. However, in order to be truly successful in managing threat, especially in crucial moments of the encounter (such as the pull), it is important to use your offensive cooldowns as well.

There are times when maintaining aggro can be difficult, such as when you are severely under-geared compared to DPS players, when you have to switch off the target in order to pick up a different one, or when encounter design grants increased damage done to DPS players, but not to tanks.

In any case, the absolute best way to ensure that you never lose aggro over a longer period of time is to know your ability priority. It is essential to understand which abilities must be used on cooldown, and what other threat-generating abilities to fill gaps with. Proper knowledge of your abilities will, in most cases, guarantee that you do not lose aggro.

Tab targeting is a technique which involves using the TAB key (the default key for automatic targeting) to quickly switch between multiple targets. It is very useful when you are tanking multiple targets (adds, for example) and all of your usual AoE abilities are on cooldown or are proving insufficient.

Essentially, you want to cycle through all of the targets by using the TAB key (you can do it manually, as well, though it is less efficient) and apply single target threat-generating abilities on each individual add. For best results, check Omen to see if there are any targets on which you have a large threat lead, and do not bother attacking those.

There are two situations when you will need to regain aggro of a mob: when you have lost aggro, unintentionally, to DPS players or another tank, and when you are engaged in a tank-switching rotation. While taunting a stray mob on which you have lost aggro is rather simple, a few notes are in order regarding tank switching. First, however, you must understand exactly how to best use your taunt.

Taunting a mob has two effects:

1. It forces the mob to attack the player who taunted it, for 3 seconds.
2. It grants the player who taunted it an amount of threat equal to that of the player who had aggro on the mob at the time of the taunt.
3. It increases the threat generation of the taunting player for the same 3-second duration.

The duration that the mob attacks the taunting player for is subject to diminishing returns. Subsequent taunts, within a 15 second window, will reduce the duration of the fixate and threat increase window until the spell eventually has no effect. Note that all taunts share the same diminishing returns, so a Warrior's taunt will cause the Paladin off-tank's taunts to have diminished effects, for example.

You can use taunt pro-actively as well. Taunting a mob you currently have aggro on can be a good way to make sure the target will stick to you for the duration of the taunt, or to help you keep your threat high and maintain aggro if your co-tank or DPS are catching up in threat.

Taunt's cooldown is relatively low, and it is a key part of any tank's toolkit, so do not be afraid to use it. While you may get the idea that having to taunt off people is "shameful", as a reflection of your ability to maintain aggro, this could not be farther from the truth. A good tank is one who makes liberal and efficient use of taunt.

Keep in mind that simply taunting is not enough to maintain threat; if you do not subsequently attack the mob you just taunted, it will simply return to attacking the player who initially had aggro after the fixate has ended.

Finally, due to the diminishing returns on taunt, it should not be used as part of your "rotation". Rather, taunt should be saved for when it is actually needed.

There are a great many encounters in the game which require two (or more) tanks to taunt the boss off of each other at specific intervals of time, usually due to some debuffs applied to the tanks.

While the practice itself is not overly complicated, we would like to make three mentions.

1. Understand exactly why you are taunting the boss, why it is being taunted off you, and what the correct timing for it is. Boss mods usually alert you as to the timing, but you must make sure that you can monitor your fellow tanks' debuffs.
2. Time one or more powerful threat-generating abilities to land immediately after your taunt lands, to ensure that you do not lose aggro after taunting.
3. When you have been taunted off of, stop using powerful threat-generating abilities for a sensible amount of time (a few seconds), in order to help the other tank stabilize their aggro. Depending on various circumstances, you may even need to stop auto-attacking.

Additionally, it is very important to observe the correct position and facing of the boss before you taunt it. Many bosses have a front-facing cleave ability which will hit anyone in front of them, and some bosses (like many Dragons) have rear-facing cleaves as well. The best thing to do is to position yourself exactly in the same place as the tank who currently has aggro, before you taunt, so that the boss does not move at all.

Lastly, it's important that you position yourself behind the boss when you are not tanking it. This ensures that you do not receive damage from breath or cleaving type attacks that the boss may perform. Keep in mind, however, that some encounters specifically require both tanks to be in front of the boss.

Instinctively, it feels as though your survival, as a tank, is all in the hands of your healers, but this could not be farther from the truth. Yes, with incompetent healers, you will die, and there is little you can do to save yourself. However, even excellent healers will fail to keep you alive if you do not make proper use of the tools at your disposal.

This section will be rather brief, but there are a few important mentions we feel need to be made.

Each tanking class has various active survival and mitigation tools at their disposal. These take the form of abilities with low or no cooldown, which offer great benefits but are also rather expensive. You must learn to make constant (and proper) use of these abilities in your rotation, otherwise you will be practically unhealable.

Going into depth about these abilities is beyond the scope of this guide, so we recommend that you read our class-specific tanking guides.

Every tanking class has at least a few defensive/survival cooldowns. You need to be familiar with what they are, how they work and, very importantly, you must have them bound to accessible keys. Furthermore, you should keep in mind that you have other survival tools at your disposal outside of the major cooldowns, such as trinket on-use effects or minor cooldowns.

• Prevention is better than remedy. Unless there is a specific event in the encounter which you need to save cooldowns for, use them freely, as many times as possible during the fight.
• Damage reduction cooldowns should always be used proactively. Do not bother using them when you notice you are on 5% health, since it will already be too late by then. Use them when you anticipate a period of high damage, or when your healers are going to be unable to heal you.
• Health increasing and healing cooldowns can be used both proactively and reactively, though if given the choice, you should try to save them for moments when your health is suddenly very low.
• As much as possible, do not stack cooldowns. As a rule, if you need to use all of your cooldowns at once to survive a fight mechanic, chances are you are not intended to survive it in the first place.
• Be aware of the external tools available to you, specifically healer defensive cooldowns. You can and should coordinate with your healers to make use of these abilities whenever you are unable to ensure your own survival.

Having a good understanding of the encounter mechanics and of your raid's strategy will help tremendously in allowing you to time your cooldowns to perfection. Practice makes perfect.

Additionally, good communication with your healers is invaluable. Everything may appear to be fine, but a healer disconnecting, or being targeted by a boss ability which requires them to move are important events that justify the use of a cooldown.

In addition to not standing in any harmful ground effects — which is something that every raider should be aware of — and facing bosses and enemies in such a way that your raid is not in danger of being cleaved, there is another absolutely key piece of advice for every tank out there: never ever have your back to a mob which is attacking you. This is because when your back is turned to an attacking mob, you are unable to dodge, parry, or block its attacks and will therefore be taking more damage than necessary.

Instead, what you should do instead is strafe sideways. If your side is turned to the attacking mob, you continue to parry, dodge and block attacks, and what's more, you maintain your normal run speed.

This is slightly tricky to master right away, but you can always find a low level mob (so it doesn't kill you), aggro it and run away from it. This will allow you to practice the exact angle you need to be facing. Just check to see if you are registering any dodges or parries, as this will be an indication that you are facing the correct way.

Finally, you should always make sure that you do not leave line of sight of your healers, as this is a sure way to get yourself killed. While it is less of a problem in raids (as most rooms do not have obstacles), it can happen easily in dungeons.

In case the target you are tanking needs to be moved a short distance backwards (that is to say, in the direction that you are facing), you can employ a technique known as pushing. To do this, simple step forward until you enter the target's hitbox. This will cause them to adjust to your position, and in most cases this means that they will step back a very short distance, and face you again.

The alternative to this is to drag the target to the desired location, but in the process of doing so, you need to move a lot more, and the target is very likely to turn around for extended periods of time, making it much less desirable than pushing.

We would like to note that some mobs, due to the size of their hitbox, are not very receptive to this technique.

Holding aggro and not dying are essential aspects of being a great tank, but to move to the next level, you have to understand how each and every one of your actions impact the rest of your raid.

There are many encounters which require you, as the tank, to position or move the boss. Doing so is, generally, a requirement to completing the encounter successfully, but simply knowing when and where the boss needs to be moved is not all there is to it.

Understand that melee DPS players must be within melee range of the boss to perform their attacks. Whenever you move the boss, you should aim to move as efficiently and as little as possible. The less you move the boss, the less melee DPS players will have to move to follow it, and the more DPS they will be able to do.

Additionally, understand that many melee DPS specs gain DPS by attacking their targets from behind. This has two implications.

• You must keep the boss facing the same way, as much as possible, so that DPS players do not suddenly find that they have to reposition themselves.
• You must make sure that there are no fire patches or other void zones behind the boss, making it impossible for melee DPS to stand there.

Indeed, while it takes a good tank to know when to move the boss from place to place, it takes an excellent tank to move him in the way which is most efficient for your DPS players.

Finally, keep in mind that, even after you are generating enough threat to maintain aggro, and you are surviving the encounter, you can still improve your own performance. Any extra DPS that you do as a tank will be added to your raid's DPS and will, even if in just a small part, help you kill the boss faster. Some gains to your personal DPS come at the expense of your survivability; knowing how and when to make these trade-offs is part of being a great tank.

An often underrated quality of a great tank is the ability to be consistent. This is true of all roles, but it is especially important for tanks to play consistently. Managing your movement, your survivability, and your threat in a predictable and consistent fashion enables the rest of your raid to further optimize their own specific roles over repeated pulls of a boss. Here are a few examples of how playing consistently benefits your raid.

• Using your mitigation and defensive cooldowns in the same manner every pull — provided they are being used effectively in the first place and not putting you at unnecessary risk — assists your healers in understanding the pattern of incoming damage and enabling them to plan their own cooldowns around that pattern. If your mitigation is inconsistent, you force your healers to react to your unpredictable health bar and potentially spend more mana, or be caught off-guard by a sudden spike in damage that could kill you.
• Moving the boss predictably each pull — again, provided the movement is already efficient and does not interfere with the raid's ability to execute their strategy — allows melee and ranged DPS players alike to know in advance where the boss will be at any given time, and plan their own movement accordingly. If you move the boss inconsistently or unpredictably, your DPS will have to chase the boss reactively and lose DPS in the process.

As the tank, whether you desire it or not, you are in a unique position of control over your group. Healers and DPS players may be the assigned leaders, or they may wish to take charge, but at the end of the day, they are unable to do anything without you.

Due to this, it is often preferred that a tank simply be the leader, as this simplifies matters greatly. Furthermore, because tanking attracts leaders, it then becomes an expected quality of all tanks to lead their groups.

So, exactly what qualities should a tank have, in terms of leadership? They should be confident, they should not be shy to speak up, they should have a plan for their group (which, incidentally, should also be the correct thing to do, hence why knowing the encounter mechanics is important), and they should have the vigor to execute that plan.

Tanks have a lot of responsibility, as a tanking mistake is going to lead to a wipe a lot more often than a DPS or healer one would. For this reason, tanks are most likely to receive criticism. But, because, as we said, tanking is all about confidence, you cannot let it get to you! If you did indeed make a mistake, then learn from it and apologize, but do not let it impede your drive.

This concludes the tanking guide. If you have followed us all the way to the end, you now know exactly what a great tank is, and what you need to do to achieve that.

You must understand, however, that tanking, more than any other role in the game, is all about repeated practice. Only when you have done something many times will you be so confident as to do it effortlessly, consistently, and quickly. So, if you are wondering how you can start, then remember that you cannot practice tanking on a training dummy. There are a few steps you can follow.

1. Set up your user interface, add-ons and keybinds, and do a few high level quests to familiarize yourself with your new settings.
2. Look up the tactics for the bosses (and trash pulls, if possible) of a specific heroic dungeon, and just go and do it! You can do it with friends or guild members, for added support, but the anonymity granted by the Dungeon Finder may suit you better.
3. Be polite and considerate with your fellow party members, but do not let them get to you, regardless of what they may say.

If any of this seems daunting, fear not, and remember that the best quality of a great tank is confidence! Remember that we have all lost aggro, accidentally pulled in DPS gear, or fallen off of platforms.

• 17 Dec. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 11.0.7.
• 23 Oct. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 11.0.5.
• 21 Aug. 2024: Reviewed for The War Within release.
• 10 May 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.7.
• 18 Mar. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.6.
• 20 Jan. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.5.
• 07 Nov. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.
• 05 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7.
• 04 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
• 22 Oct. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight prepatch.
• 07 Dec. 2020: Reviewed for Shadowlands release.
• 15 Apr. 2020: Fixed broken Omen link.
• 25 Sep. 2018: Updated the guide to bring it in line with the current state of the game.
• 29 Jan. 2018: Added a note about active mitigation checks some bosses in Legion have.
• 23 Jul. 2016: Updated the guide to bring it in line with the current state of the game.
• 28 Aug. 2015: Updated the link to the Brazilian Portuguese translation.
• 05 Apr. 2015: Updated the URLs for Omen Threat Meter and Threat Plates.
• 27 Oct. 2014: Made a few updates to account for the fact that tank abilities cannot be parried anymore, and also made some updates to the taunting sections.

+ show all entries - show only first 2 entries