It seems that my guild always runs in difficulty with anything involving mob packs that need to be AoEd down. We are currently clearing all of SSC including Vashj and are working on Solarian. Solarian is the reason that brings me to the forums with my questions.

We are having a hell of a time on the trash before Solarian as well as controlling the AoE packs of Solarian herself, and I know the reason is poor execution on our part in terms of controlling the AoE. Usually the sequence of events is that tanks go try to pick them up as good as we can (Thunder Clap, Swipe, Etc..) AoE DPS starts and rips all of the mobs off of the tanks in which they begin to run around one rounding all of the different AoE classes. This is normal for any situation that involves AoE.

Since we kill Vashj we obviously kill Morogrim, but we use a protection paladin alt, that just comes specifically for that fight to control the murlocs. We are also considering phasing out that protection paladin in place of a holy paladin, and from what I've read on most other topics, is that that is what most other guilds opt to do.

We gave brief thought on the topic of possibly implementing the protection paladin as a full time tank in our raids, but the brick wall we run into there is that we are only interested in bringing two tanks that are gimped to be able to "only" tank (Protection Warrior, Paladin) to each raid. We fill in the rest of the tanking slots with two feral druids, and a fury warrior, if a 5th tank is required. So in order to use that protection paladin he would have to fill the shoes of one of the protection warriors and I'm really not sure if the itemization is there for a Paladin to step up to the plate.

It seems to me that the only class capable of truly holding threat on mobs that will be AoEd seems to be the Paladin. As druid and Warrior abilities just don't hit enough of the targets to hold solid threat on all of them. I could see possibly using AoE taunts, but the long cool down on the ability makes it relatively unreliable. Theirs also always the option of snaring up the mobs, and having whoever gets threat kite them, but it seems that they can split up between multiple people and things sometimes get nasty. I may just flat out be wrong, and warrior and druids are able to hold threat through AoE for other guilds. I really am just unsure and thus is why I come here.

I know there is good information about AoE, in other threads on this forum, and I have dug through a lot of their pages and came up with a lot of good finds. As AoE seems to be a nasty subject for my guild, and I'm sure many others I decided to try to create a thread to generalize ideas in.

The only "tanking" done during aoe phases is where the tanks basically generate more threat on the mobs than the healers in order to group the mobs up for the aoe to start. Once aoe starts, tanks won't be able to hold much threat on anything. Aoe should happen something like this:

A) Tanks aggro mobs, pulling them close together while generating more threat on them than the healers.
B) Aoe starts.
C) Mobs die.

The only "trick" that I could think of is to minimize the time between B and C. The only way that can be done is to make sure as many mobs have seeds in them when the mages start putting frost novas and blastwave/flamestrike/arcane explosion...etc. I don't think it's possible to a non protection paladin to hold aggro over mobs being ae'd down (and he'll need a good head start). And I'm not too excited about having a prot paladin in my raids.

One thing that helps us a lot is to have one of our mages go spec imp blizzard, it helps at times. He does that pretty much every week for Solarian/Tidewalker if we have less than 6 aoe classes.

Also, on the trash leading to Solarian, there are two Squires per pull that need to be tanked by tanks. Otherwise the squires will start one shotting your aoe classes.

We're pretty terrible at AoE fights too...that's why we have our resident warlock tank, Unstoppable, just spec soul link and hellfire tank everything. It seems to work well enough and he's mostly already specced that way for arenas.

I can't really speak to the rest of your post, as we don't encounter any of those problems being that I myself am a Protection Paladin. But as for this portion, you may want to check out this thread for information on Paladin tanking benefits and pitfalls. In my personal experience, you're going to find that the following hold true about Paladin tanks:

1. They offer superior AE control to any other tank, and have the highest potential threat cap of the three tank classes as they gear up in their Tiered sets.
2. Paladins take next to no crushing blows, ever, even on dual wielding targets. This makes them optimal tanks on fast hitters. Their threat also ramps up dramatically on fast hitters, because of the nature of Holy Shield.
3. They have less health than a comparably equipped Warrior; anywhere from 1200 to 2000 less, depending on how they choose to gear up. This makes them suboptimal tanks on hard hitters.

You can absolutely make a Paladin tank work on any of the content I've encountered so far in SSC, and in many cases they provide unique benefits that other tanks don't do nearly as well. For example, on Karathress I tank both the Hunter and his pet effortlessly, rather than having a fifth tank; this frees up a DPS Warrior, and I generate enough threat that they can freely Cleave / Whirlwind / Blade Flurry / Sweeping Strikes / Swipe Tidalvess and Sharkkis to death together. This gives us an enormous amount of bonus time to work on Karathress himself, since Sharkkis is down 20%+ health by the time Tidalvess dies.

Protection Paladins probably don't make the best lead tanks, but they are certainly a compelling number 2 tank.

P.S. Best Practices: A Beginner's Guide to Beginning to AoE

As stated above, it is highly unreasonable to expect any tank to hold that many mobs about through AOE (especially fights like solarian), but just because they aren't on a "typical" tank, that doesn't mean the AOE can't be controlled.

A few things to try to have the AOE controlled (versus tanked)
1. good frost novas / warstomps / shadowfury
2. warlock or mage AOEing early or AOEing without salv, this would cause most mobs to be on him, but good frost novas / piercing howls would keep them out of melee range. This person would probably want extra stam gear on just incase.

I just sit on the sidelines and observe solarian in my cloth AR gear, so I can't recall the finer details, just don't try to have em on a warrior/dru/pally the whole time, it's not possible

It is also a bad spiral that forms quite often. AE is poor so early (actually, on time) AEers get killed, leading them to get gunshy and AE late, leading to worse AE performance and more people dying.

To me the safest non-controlled AE (no full tanking and no full frost nova rotation) is where there is a bit of pre-seeding followed by a co-ordinated burst phase. If you time it right then pretty much anything that is designed to be AEed in that manner will explode fast enough as to not be a threat the the AEers themselves. Small things like adding in traps or other snares obviously help where applicable and tossing an earth shield or the like on the AEers themselves often inspires confidence.

Make sure all of your AoEers start at the same time. If one starts before the others, chances are he'll pull aggro and die.

Visual representation:

Basically, #1 will have mobs on him for longer, and he'll pull all of the mobs rather than having them spread out among all of the aoe, if that makes sense.

First off, I'd recommend changing the thread title if you want this discussion to go somewhere other than the Dung Heap (Kaubel said some time ago that all "Best Practices" threads will be insta-heaped).

That being said, a holy paladin in tanking gear works wonders for control on fights and pulls that require AoE as long as you give them ample time to establish aggro. Frost Nova rotations and the like don't really seem to afford the control of paladins easily keeping several mobs firmly glued to them.

Also, someone mentioned in the Morogrimm thread to have your warlocks seed mobs before your mages blow their Flamestrike/Blast Wave/Cone of Cold/Dragon's Breath AoE combos, as this frontloads a majority of the damage and seems much more controllable than the standard "everyone go" AoE tactic.

For the record I changed the title (for comedy reasons)

AOE has always for us been about controlled chaos and leans heavily on the AOEr's personal accountability.

A good example of this in Vanilla WoW is Skitterer packs in Naxx. If your AOEr's go down, it's probably a wipe, and I know we wiped the very first time we pulled that very first pack. It came to the point that we got smart and used Ice Armor and Limited Invulnerability Pots in a rotation, and of course the ever-popular BoP. We Consecrated too, but it was always more about controlling the fact that the AOEr's WOULD get aggro rather than trying to avoid that eventuality.

It's a shame they nerfed LIP's - I believe that was a shot in the foot to counter certain strategies (sup Gruul), when they are actually useful in non-gimmicky ways (i.e. AOE and pulling aggro on trash).

The key to AoEing is to jump around. This improves your dodge and parry considerably.

You're right, though, AoEing from a distance saves healer mana (and consequently, the AoEer's life more often than not). The range on Arcane Explosion is a bit larger than most people assume, you really don't need to be in the middle of the pack of mobs if they're grouped.

If they're grouped.