Single mob tanking:

Bloodrage, shield slam. For aggro sensitive hard hitting bosses i sometimes queue up heroic strike before the shield slam. This way if either 1 of the attacks is missed, dodged or parried i'll increase the chances of landing a high aggro move at the start.

Revenge whenever it's available, build up the sunders then proceed to devastate if you have it. Whenever you have rage make sure you queue up a heroic strike.

Also if it's a hard hitting boss, try to keep shield block up as often as possible. Throw in a demoralising shout and thunderclap to reduce incoming damage and pray your healers are on the ball.

Tbh it's not really a science as long as you spam your instant attacks and make sure you throw in an occasional heroic strike it should be enough to hold aggro.

Heroic Multi mob tanking:

Bloodrage, thunder clap, demoralising shout, shield slam first target, sunder, switch sunder/revenge or whatever is up, cleave when you have the rage and keep switching . Spend more time on the mob that's meant to go down first. Go on feel esp if mobs keep dodging and parrying to see how much aggro to pump on a mob. Also, just make sure that a kill target is assigned and your group doesnt dps all the mobs at the same time. Throw in an occasional concussion blow, disarm to reduce incoming damage. And by all means taunt away if you lose a mob or 2. You can use your intimidating shout if it's safe to do so and things get hairy or challenging shout if you need to pull mobs onto you if it's an emergency.

The moral of the story is: don't stick to shield slam, sunder and revenge and hope to keep aggro especially on multiple mobs.

Aye.. It's not about how big your rage bar is - it's how you use it.

or to rephrase it - It's not the size of the oar, it's the motion in the ocean

Threat values:

I did not do the work to get these numbers and therefore I can't vouch for the accuracy or take credit for them. link to source: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...=94319875&sid=1

These are before the defensive stance multiplier and defiance talent multiplier (which are additive afaik 1+.3+.15=1.45) and BEFORE damage to get a rough idea of how much threat you're pumping out from your attacks.

Sunder Armor (Rank 6) _________ 301
Heroic Strike (Rank 10) _______ 196
Heroic Strike (Rank 11) [book] _____220 (guess)
Revenge (Rank 8) _______________417
Shield Bash (Rank 4) _____________230
Shield Slam (Rank 6) _____________307
Devastate (Rank All)______________101
Thunder Clap (Rank All)___________+75%dmg
Cleave (Rank 6) _________________130 (split)
Disarm_________________________104
Mocking Blow (Rank 6) ___________290
Demoralizing Shout (Rank 7) ______ 56 (split)
Battleshout (Rank 8) _____________ 69 (split)
Commanding Shout ______________68 (split)
Hamstring (Rank 4) ______________181
Excecute (Rank All)_______________0 (nostance)
Spell Reflect ____________________0
Piercing Howl ____________________0
Concussion Blow _________________0

Like Reis above says, swapping gear improves your versatility in 5 mans. It was the same in vanilla wow, you really couldn't tank in 5 mans in your raid gear (well you could but it was always more efficient to tank those instances in DPS gear) because you may have already outgeared those instances. +hit gear is great for tanking but note that it doesn't get rid of the mob's ability to block/dodge and parry your blows.

With my current level of gearing, i don't feel comfortable dps tanking as yet. However neither am i tanking in my raid gear. I have a nice in between set which i use for 5 mans which prioritises block value. It uses a combination of tbc blues and lvl 60 epics and i find that the aggro i get with 550 block value shield slams far exceeds threat that can be pumped out by dpsers. My max shield slam so far in the game is just below 2100 damage, however finding mobs with 0 armor is not realistic. Crits of 1600 and above are not rare though. With the innate threat value of 307 above i can get about 2.7k+ threat from a single shield slam crit.

You can tell from the threat guide above that sunder with static threat of 301 is easily outstripped by anything with innate threat+damage>300 for threat. So really it shouldn't be the major threat generator for a protection warrior.

I personally use heroic strikes a lot. But how much I use it depends on how much threat I need to frontload. Innate threat above is 196 and the extra damage from HS is around the same as well at 176, resulting in 533 extra threat in addition to the threat you would have done normally from your white hit damage (also the 176 extra damage can crit!). All well and good but you also lose out on the rage you would have gotten from the white hit, which means to cause the extra 533 or more threat you would have used more than 9/12/15 (depending on talents) rage.

So it's really depends on whether the rage income from mob damage is sufficient to spam heroic strikes or to hold back to use your instants when you're not getting hit. It's encounter dependant on whether you want to maximise threat per rage or threat per second.

The threat is not as bad as it looks.

sunder=301 threat + 0 damage threat

devastate =101 innate threat +(125 to 300 damage?) threat
=225 to 401 threat with a chance of critting

So there's 2 effects, increased threat and secondly actually doing some damage.

As long as you're hitting for more than 200 with devastate you'll be generating more threat than sunder. Sure it's an underwhelming 41 point talent but are endless rage and rampage any better?

In the next patch devastate will hit with both weapons if dual wielding so that's a damned nice buff for prot warriors while grinding and for raid dps (if required eg aran). see: http://surl.se/akoc

Side note.. at the moment, my nub level 68 shadow priest without any aggro reduction talents is generating between 400-500 dps before you take into consideration high threat attacks like mindblast and SW:death. Probably in raid situations, I would need to generate >600 threat per second to keep up with raid damage and that's even after considering effects like Blessing of salvation.

That's one of the main reasons why i specced protection. I noticed i couldn't keep up with threat on vael and my ping was at about 1000. The tank transitions were bad enough as we didn't use ktm at the time. I was tanking on the Prince the other night with about 1-1.2k ping, it wasn't as much fun as it could have been but it was doable. However trash mobs are a lot harder to handle with that type of ping.

My guildies know that i lag a 'bit' though so maybe they hold back slightly.

This post has been edited by Kidicarus: Apr 17 2007, 04:01 PM

That's what intervene is for