My personal dungeon Refresher

Its been a while since i have had to really think about my 5man groups when tanking (Wotlk syndrome), Months of blasting through them without a thought about threat positioning or even towards the end of the last xpac encounter design. The new Cataclysm heroic dungeons (not so much normals but this will still help there) are going to require us as tanks to reign in our groups we run (little green tick aside you tank it you run the show). The control of a 5man group is easy when you have a few things sorted, simple things in theory but they to take time to master. With these new 5man dungeons i cannot stress enough, go with people you know from your guild. If that fails and your only option is to go "LFD" then you may as well come prepared!.

My big list for 5man group efficiency

> Attitude
> knowledge
> Target marking
> The LOS pull
> Threat

Attitude

Tanks, having that instant Queue is great but it comes with allot more than easy gear or even JP. You can have all the skills in the world but if you walk into a group as a tank trying to throw your weight around people will leave VERY quickly or in my opinion worse still start to pull groups on their own / ignore aggro. The groups we run with are random people sure, will we ever see them again? probably not. BUT while they are in your hands they are all potential new friends, so please treat them as such.

Knowledge

The people you group with one one hand are VERY important sure, but the main focus of any "LFD" group is to get things done. Cataclysm bought us some really (reeally) fun encounters to learn, the are involved and sometimes even a little indepth. Much much more to what some new guys are used to so as the tank it is your job to make sure that you A. Know the encounters you face and B. are able to articulate to your group (or anyone who is new to the instance) how they work. Now this means a bit more than "Void zones are really power us lewl", it boils down to having the knowledge to makes sure from your end that you yourself knows whats going on and to the best of your ability make sure the group does too.

Encounter design info hunting's a neat tuesday night down time type deal. The other very important chunk of knowledge that all tanks need is class knowledge. Many of us are familiar with our classes from vanilla or any of the later expansions, Cataclysm basically turned it on its head and we had to re-think much of how we gear / gem ourselves. READ UP ON THIS, so many times on forums i see people asking about their own class when they have multitudes of sites or even their own testing to draw conclusions from. But no they sit there with their thumb up their backside waiting for some one to hold their hand and walk them through it, Don't do this put those fingers to use and do the fact finding yourself if builds player confidence for their own class.

Myself for my warrior i did the hunting and came up with this:

*Stamina

*Mastery

*Combat ratings (hit/exp).

Letting my gear take care of dodge / parry

In the end with this set up ill have boat loads of rage (abusing inner rage as much as i can for threat + Vengance), Giving me a big kick in tps. very high Block / crit block for the melee reduction and having the hp for the magic effects. Should get me through just about anything.

Target marking

We have all been in this situation before as DPS, the tank rolls up lazily to a large pull...nothing ...happens..... a skull mark goes up....then nothing......

This situations down to low experience and just not being prepared. Before you even enter an LFG queue have your marks keybound. Make sure these binds are easy to access when you need them and not in a place that you will smack it while in your runs to generate threat. Here is where a Shift + (random key) really shines, mine are mapped to Shift F1 all they way to Shift - F5.

When coming up to a group of mobs have yourself ready with a routine (burn this into your brain)of identifying target types. This one basically comes down to experience. In short its healers first, Caster dps then melee.


Initial kill order marking:

1st: Skull
2nd: X
3rd: Square

CC types

1st: Sap - star
2nd: Sheep - Moon
3rd: Hex / other- Triangle
4th: Diamond - Fear

kill target Priority:

1st: Skull
2nd: X
3rd: Square
4th: Diamond
5th: Triangle
6th: Star
7th: Moon

Note:

Diamond is really only when fear is a last resort must be broken and tanked ASAP if this is the case

Circle: Marking tanks / General notification (Slow people / afk)


The L.O.S pull

Line of Sight. For many years and where ever possible this type of pulling groups has been a personal favorite (yes the face pull / charge pull has its uses). Inform your group you are doing a line of sight pull and get them to stand out of harms way (excluding CC'ers!). Identify your targets, mark your targets for as much CC as you can (nice and fast now you have them all bound right?). Tell your Crowd control guys to be out in the open with you initially and to get back next to the healer IMMEDIATELY after they perform their Crowd control spells.

Next step is to jump out and shoot one!...run back to your buddies hoping the Crowd control guys are doing their job and following you...spin around and smack out the few mobs you have then return to the others picking them off in the order above. This will be slow at first but once you and your group have it down pat the margin of error is greatly reduced and you will be setting up and knocking down generally very hard pulls with ease!.

Threat

With the new talents us tanks had in my opinion a buff to our general threat not to make it easier but to give us more options. By now we all know how to build threat, most tanks today would have been in a raid group at some time so the basics are built into us. For us tanks threat is a constant battle in the new dungeons with Wotlk style dps still stuck in the old ways of "ITS RED ZERG RUSH IT". Not only are we building threat on our main dps focus target but we must also maintain threat on the other targets within a pull.

If you are a warrior like me you have much you can do to maintain this, but as always there is a dps that gets off track and starts laying into a target that's not the groups focus. It pulls aggro and says hi to the Graveyard. The solution here is having one eye on your main dps target and the other one well....everything else.

Pick your main 1-2 targets, build threat and scan around you. do this again and again. Get comfortable doing this and you will be grabing mobs off dps / healers before they even have a chance to get there or even better before the dps / healers have a chance to react and avoid the impending doom.


Once you really get down to it there's allot involved but allot of fun to be had.

its 11pm here and if you cant tell by my rather large rant I'm exhausted and have to be back up in 6hrs for work. I do hope you enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed making it and maybe refreshed your mind a little.

Night all.

Late night update: Pt 2

NOTE: Please read first part of this post before starting here

With this in my mind this doesn't mean that ill be earning minimum wage all the time, I'm hoping to have a few things that will help, Tickets for operating heavy machinery and the like. hopefully going this other direction will get me the income needed and actually enjoy myself.

ok enough of "srsbznz" more fun stuff to come