long time reader, first time poster.

http://ctprofiles.net/5377536 trash set

http://ctprofiles.net/5377538 boss set

i recently hit level 70, roughly a month ago, and have begun grinding the level 70 instances rigorously. i've read the "threat gen tips" thread numerous times, trying to maximize my TPS and rage efficiency wherever possible, but i seem to have trouble maintaining 700 TPS in normal-level 70 instances.


On trash mobs my TPS usually hovers around 550-650 (edit) for both singular and group pulls. however, in some cases, i am able to achieve 700 to 800 TPS for both singular and group pulls.

I have a standard threat cycle of which im sure you are all familiar with, but i'll list it anyways incase i am wrong.

shield slam, revenge, sunder, sunder. with heroic strikes weaved into the rotation if threat allows.

Im not completely sure as to why i am able to obtain 700+ TPS in some fights, most of which involve trash mobs and finite rage situations. Are there some minor details i should be aware of that drastically affect my TPS?

A few questions for the forum.

1. Would using heroic strike ocassionaly in place of sunder, as opposed to using it as a rage dump, noticeably increase my TPS without drastically affecting my rage efficiency?

2. In multi-mob situations (3+) is spamming improved thunderclap an "bad" way to maintain aggro? I often spam it once as my first skill to ensure i have a solid hold on aggro and then begin focusing between the target being dps'd with a heroic strike, revenge, shield slam combo, and then tabbing to one of the targets not being dps'd and adding a sunder armor and heroic strike. and then another thunder clap. i rinse and repeat as many times as i can until something ruins my rhythm and things start to get off more hectic or all the mobs have a confident number of sunders on them. would it increase my threat by not using thunderclap so many times, since almost has the same threat generation as a sunder, and using the saved rage to generate more threat on the main target?

3. Are the 2-3 global cooldowns wasted on thunderclap be better used for another skill to better maintain aggro?

4. In multi-mob situation, how does a good tank hold aggro? Is it possible to perfectly tab through the mobs one-by-one, alternating between sunder armor and heroic strike to create initial aggro on each mob? for example, in a 4 mob pull, would it be possible to sunder the 1st mob, heroic strike the 2nd mob, sunder the 3rd mob, heroic strike the fourth mob within 3 to 4 seconds, assuming a <=1.6 speed weapon?

5. if so, is this a common technique used or is it too difficult to time on a normal basis?

sorry if my questions are a bit vague, i can further clarify if needed.

For the sake of completeness, please post a link to a profile of your character, at The Armory or elsewhere. In fact, if you intend to talk shop as a warrior on these forums, you may as well update your profile to show the warrior as your main.

It's usually a combination of low mob armor and a fair amount of non-physical damage you're taking. In a 5-man, your attack power and tanking weapon will have a measurable impact on your threat generation. Be also aware of how KTM calculates your TPS, which can sometimes generate misleading values.

In a regular 5-man? No.

Improved Thunder Clap on 2+ mobs is excellent threat/rage.

Probably not. Single target Improved Thunder Clap tends to be only a little worse than Sunder Armor.

While it's probably possible, Improved Thunder Clap is really all you should need to offset healing aggro (barring resists, and with the exception of certain pulls in heroics/Karazhan). The problem with Tab + Sunder (or other aggro generators of choice) is that you take too much time away from the focus-fired mob. I still use it if it's necessary to not break CC, of course. With two mobs to be tanked and one or more CCed at my feet, I tend to use "Target Last Target" for more precise retargeting (just be aware that it turns off your auto-attack).

Also, a mouseover Sunder macro can be helpful in such a situation:

updated with tank gear + better explained question number 2.

I would definitely recommend a new weapon.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=31071

Or any of the plethora of 71.x dps weapons from the 5-mans.

yeah, i'm in the middle of that quest line. how much difference will a 1.6 speed weapon make over a 2.1 speed weapon? the increase in speed is almsot 25%.

Post removed.

for holding threat on multiple mobs use demoshout, thunderclap and cleave. when multiple mobs hit you will have enough rage to do this. you just have to beg they got no knockdown cause knockdowns suck!

other then that just have a priority list of abilities and click them accordingly.

enemy dodge, parry, block and your miss is a big problem in raid encounters though.
~15-20% of your specials will never hit.

For multiple mobs a tc, ss, rev cycle adding cleaves is probably the most effective. Keep ss on your dps target and toss revenges for the other ones and you will have a solid lead in threat when it's time to take them out.

Just pointing out that citing TPS numbers is somewhat useless without specifying the conditions.

Just the type of mob you are tanking can have some serious consequences on yout TPS. Starting with his armor mitigation, special abilitites (knock down, stun) ...
On some mobs you have to upkeep your mitigation skills (shield block, shouts sometimes), on others you can concentrate on your threat.
You get the point.

In 5man instances it also is heavily dependant on your group members. Sometimes 500 is enough, and sometimes even cruising at 800 TPS one loses aggro.

The only advice I can give you is to stress to your group that keeping aggro is a group effort. First control the pull, THEN start DPS. This really sounds trivial but it makes the difference between wiping on the multimob pulls in heroic SH/SL (the 6 mob pulls e.g. before Blackheart) and being able to tank them half asleep.

As for a typical threat cycle:
On multimob pulls I start with Demoshout (to grab the attention of all mobs, so they beat on me and rage starts flowing), TC (unless in CC range), shield slam, then the usual cycle of high aggro instants and heroic strikes/cleaves as rage dumps. If you have piercing howl use it too ... very helpful on mobs which can (temporarily) aggro wipe (fear, stun, sleep, ...) as it gives you time to react to these effects. I'm always the group leader and put a symbol on the mob to be focused down (usually the skull ^^) once the pull is under control.
This can be further automated e.g star for sheep, triangle for MC, circle for fear, square for banning ...
Yes such trivial tools really help and to put it in a catchy phrase:
Aggro is nothing without control

thanks for all the helpful comments.

a little off topic, but how much TPS can most of you achieve while tanking the level 72 elite dragons in Black Morass (Normal). I'm just trying to get some comparisons so i know how much more i need to work on my tanking.

I would agree with others when I say that it's more important that you are holding aggro -- no matter what your TPS. Focus on control on pulls, and generating multi-mob threat while still holding aggro on your DPS target. Someone else said it earlier, I will say it again. The tank should always be the one that paces a 5 man, and marks targets for people. Do yourself a favor, create a macro that is a listing of the target icons. I use it for 5-mans and raids (which is where I assign healers to tanks).


STAR = JON
CONDOM = BOB
...
...
SKULL = TANKY (BIGNUKES Healing)


By and large, the most problems you will have in threat in a 5 man is on pulls where mobs stun or knock you down and DPS is a asleep at the wheel and continues. I can't tell you how many times people have pulled aggro when I tank the 2 packs that can't be CC'ed and each do a direct target stun on the tank. People keep DPSing the same as normal and the next thing I know I am chasing a target after the mage, and a DPS warrior who was cleaving has the 2nd target on him.

As far as multi-target threat -- I tend not to spread threat to anything other than the kill target unless one of the mobs I am tanking is not actually the kill target (i.e. range burns down a sharpshooter on the first hallway pull in SH while I tank the rest of the mobs). In that case, I would spread the threat around. But generally speaking just using TC will give you more than enough head start on the DPS to not have to worry about tabbing. I do throw in a cleave instead of a HS every other swing if I have enough rage to burn. Which is pretty often in a heroic like Shattered Halls. If I am with a DPS warrior I do spread threat a little more. Otherwise cleave and WW will overtake my threat on a 2nd target.

Although I don't use it due to not having space on my bar, the mouse over sunder is very nice for 5 mans.

EDIT: Someone else said this earlier as well -- but depending on how zealous your DPS is, go with BS over commanding and might over kings for 5 mans.

TPS is so very relative to your group composition as well, as you may have gathered by now from the above posts. Are you focusing on your TPS because people are pulling aggro from you? Cases you want to look at are if people are pulling aggro off you from single mob pulls, or from multi-target pulls.

If it's the former, you may intuitively look at yourself, but never forget the hilarity that is ranged dps'ers who open up with poorly chosen initial spells (infamous pyroblasters). If it's multi-target mobs, then a simple suggestion for DPS to wait a moment or two for you control the pull is absolutely essential. The measure of stress I see in my usual tanks ramps up considerably in 5-mans like Shattered Halls when dps simply does not wait for him to control the pull. And controlling the pull can take bit more effort when you start mixing in ranged mechanics with LoS pulling and such.

The summary is, never discount the rest of the variables in the circumstance you're observing. Single metric TPS is nice to boast about, but ultimately not very useful unless you're purely theorycrafting, and even then ... very difficult to truly gauge. Much like healing, as long as everyone is alive at the end (or at least the healer? hehe), then you've done your job.

As an aside, nothing is more funny than a dps warrior starting a 5+ mob pull in Shattered Halls with a whirlwind.

that's a really good point you made, roana and brings up another question.

in black morass, i do reflect pyroblasts as often as i can. most of the time i reflect a frostbolt because they are more common.

however, as you said, reflecting a spell does no threat. i am primarily concerned with my threat generation because my definition of "optimal performance" is measured by how quickly my party can finish the instance, keeping in mind that i have not yet started heroics. from most of my experiences

with that said and an updated profile link in my forum account, how much rage should i spend towards damage mitigation with my character and in different situations?

since ive been asked to cite more specific situations, ill try to list a few off the top of my head.

1. the situation with roana described - in black morass, against the level 72 elite caster dragons, my TPS drops to the 350-450 range if i spend my rage primarily on damage mitigation instead of threat generation. i find that when i group with people who produce more than 400dps, aggro will eventually get stripped away from me fairly quickly and i'll run the risk of having to taunt the caster back. Should i try to reflect spells as much as possible or am i foregoing potential rage (from damage and the use of spell reflect)? would it be better to purposely let some of the frostbolts hit me and reflect only the pyroblasts?

2. the alcatraz against the Doomsayer (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=20885) - the debuff she casts on the tank makes healing unfavorable. would it be advised to forgo maintaining shield block in order to have the necessary rage to spell reflect the debuff after her heal is interrupted? more importantly, if i do not have the needed rage to reflect the spell, should purposely get hit by the cleave to generate enough rage to do so? is it crucial to reflect the debuff in heroic mode?

3. Arcatraz sentinels (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=20869#00Rzc) - these guys are the ones that have a weird aggro mechanic, causing them to change aggro very suddenly. on the pull with two sentinels, how should i handle aggro? i often find myself burning taunt on one sentinel and having the second sentinel run away.

4. tanking groups of 4 or more mobs with two casters - should i even bother using spell reflect? between spamming thunder clap, demo shout, and trying to keep high threat generation on my primary DPS target and a secondary DPS target (usually warlocks / priest will stack DoTs on a second target, or occasionally someone in my party will be a rebel and dps their own target), my global cooldowns are very important to me if i want to maintain aggro on all the mobs. at the same time, however, i want to reduce healing because it increases the minimum amount of threat i must keep on all mobs to prevent healing aggro.

5. tanking groups of 3 or more melee mobs, once of which has a knockdown - how important is demo shout in this situation? my normal cycle is to bloodrage, cast thunderclap initially, and then immediately shield slam, queue a heroic strike, pop a shield block, and start spamming revenge so i can use it once the GCD finishes. i try to get as much initial aggro on the main dps target as possible before i am inevitably stunned. usually if the stun delays my use of shield slam, my revenge is delayed too because my rotation usually uses one right after the other. i usually find myself forgetting to do demo shout because i am too concerned with maintaining aggro on the primary dps target so the situation Branar doesn't happen to me.

6. damage improves as dps become more geared, therefore the minimum amount of TPS i must produce must increase. there is a maximum TPS i can reach with a certain set of gear given i have the necessary rage to produce it. healing scales as healing gets more geared, so the amount of damage i can allow myself to take, and therefore the duration i can maintain my maximum TPS is increased. usually when i group with well-geared dps who can produce more than 400 dps throughout an instance i find myself rage starved while tanking more than one mob in order to prevent aggro of the primary or secondary (as i explained earlier) target from being pulled. i cannot effectively increase my rage efficiency without increasing the risk of losing aggro. is 490 defense too much for trash mobs in normal instances? should my dodge/parry be slightly lower?

With regards to Multi Mob tanking (regardless of group composition/mob type): It's the group's responsibility to make sure aggro is firmly on the tank. If that means waiting an extra few seconds before opening DPS, then so be it. On the flip side, its the tank's responsibility to communicate to the rest of the team when he has full aggro. If the tank hasn't done any aggro abilities to one of the mobs in the pull, he should communicate it so the rest of the team knows to hold off or use aggro reducing abilities such as Fade or threat trinkets. In short, be less concerned about specific action sequences and focus on group interactions.

As for quantifying the amount of TPS you should have, as others have said, the amount of threat needed is dependent on your group composition. However, as a tank, you should be aware of approximately how much rage you'll get from certain types of mobs. This assessment of incoming rage generally dictates how often you'll be able to spam heroic strike, thus bumping your TPS above global cooldown abiity spam. As such, being able to communicate to your team if you need more/less crowd control to maintain the TPS needed to overcome your DPS becomes very important. This is particularly important in the later game when you outgear various instances and rage starvation becomes a serious issue, especially when your DPS starts outgearing the instances as well.

Keep in mind that in nonheroics it really does not matter a whole lot if a DPS pulls agro on anything besides a boss...and even on most bosses, it still doesn't matter. Your rogue can take a hit or two while you press taunt, the frost mage can kite a bit, etc. As long as most of the stuff is hitting you most of the time, you're probably okay.

If you DO need to *really* tank in nonheroic situations (e.g. the rest of your group is horribly undergeared and you just can't bear to let them be hit) consider swapping in some of your better DPS pieces. This both increases rage gain from incoming damage, as well as increasing agro generation.

Personally I'd forgo Shield Block for Spell Reflect against most caster mobs - bouncing a frostbolt for ~1500 or a Pyro for ~3k is a lot better than 5 blocks for 250-300, both in terms of damage prevented and in terms of killing the mob faster. Of course, neither generates threat, so if you're feeling iffy about your agro that 25 rage might be better spent...but as I pointed out above, you can probably afford to let the DPS take a hit or two.

In heroics, Spell Reflect is often even more important. A well-timed Spell Reflect against the shadow priests before Inciter in shadow labs will *literally* shave off 50% of the mob's HP - Mind Flay ticking for 1500 is no joke.

It should be a lot easier to use now that it's off the Global Cooldown, and fortunately mobs are too stupid to see the new SPELL REFLECT AWOOOOGAH AWOOOOGAH graphic.

If you're talking about nonheroics, I'd cut demo shout from your rotation period. Especially when you're getting knocked down every 6-10 seconds, you're spending anywhere from 15 to 25% of your available cooldown time doing a skill that generates almost no agro. On big pulls that still hurt a bit, use it once the pull's under control.

This is a very good point. If people are genuinely dying from lose mobs, don't let them blame YOU specifically. Mob control is no longer the purview of the tank. If your DPS is pulling agro, work with them. Say that if they want to open up on the mob so fast from the start, they need to kite it because you're just wasting time trying to catch up to that (believe it or not, depending on your group make up, this may be a very real and useful option in some situations). If your healers are pulling agro, ask them if they can wait a bit longer before healing you (or, if it's obvious they can't, you need to get more of the mobs CC'd or wear some real tanking gear).

TPS is very much balanced at this point in the game so that the whole group has to work to keep everything hitting the warrior. It doesn't take a lot - wait a few seconds before DPSing, fade before the first heal, etc - but it's not something a warrior can do on his own anymore.

1. Depends on your gear. With a slightly undergeared tank/healer the fast pace can really take its toll. Just use your judgement...do you really care if you take the damage? Can you laugh it off? You're losing ~40-50 rage, which is a lot if you're fighting to keep aggro.

2. I usually don't shield block in 5 mans, period. Not worth the rage cost. If you tell your dps to watch out it's easy to keep a 25 rage reserve. I mean, if you're not taking enough damage to spell reflect on demand with a decent tps, who really cares what you do? If you get a long string of dodges, just tell your party you need breathing room.

3. Usually you can kite/stun one. It's pretty nasty, ideally you just burn them down fast.

4. Again, it depends, you get a feel for when you have enough aggro to keep them off the healers. 25 rage is a huge amount at the beginning of a pull. Don't spam demo shout, it's worthless as an aggro builder unless you REALLY can't thunderclap.
(Thunder clap is really incredible though, it made tanking practically easy mode. I feel like someone has to really try to pull off an off target.)

5. Demo shout is pretty important to have on, cuts damage by a sizeable amount. Usually there's time to use it just before they reach you. Again, it's your dps's job to hold off. I work on keeping everyone off the healer before worrying about the main target, you can usually taunt that one if your party is trigger happy.

6. If you're really rage starved you can just swap out gear for some dps pieces. I usually don't have a problem as prot, as arms I just pulled out a 2hander. All my gear and gems are stamina focused though, only have ~30% avoidance.

It's like this: if the healer dies it's probably your fault (gear or play), if a dps dies I just laugh at them.

A question coming from a non-warrior about raiding TPS; I hope you warriors (and druids?) won't be too adverse to answering. :P

First, I noticed a huge increase in TPS by our MT on Solarian (MT had nearly 1400 TPS sustained for the duration of bloodlust, 900~1000+ afterwards). Is this completely due to her clothie armor and the large amounts of rage generated by her arcane missiles?

On Morogrim (only real example of a true stationary tank fight I can think of off the top of my head), the same MT had around 750 TPS without windfury, low enough that I had to vanish to keep from aggroing. After he got windfury, his TPS jumped to nearly 900. Is WF really that big a deal?

After recieving WF, our MT's TPS on normal bosses (those without aggro resets or other variable mechanisms) averages out to around 850 to 950 (I could be slightly exaggerating, as I'm DPS and I only check KTM from time to time, and perhaps I'm only remembering peak numbers). Is this normal TPS for an MT in an unlimited rage situation? Our MT typically recieves Strength of Earth + WF, Might and Kings besides the normal array of buffs and elixirs.

Edit: Our MT is wielding King's Defender, which is the only piece of equipment I can remember ATM. I'm in a Korean guild so no armory link is available, but he had pretty much optimal KZ/SSC/TK gear up to Solarian.

Regarding WF, it is that big of a deal in my limited experience.

The general rule is that you can use your rage for threat (Shield Slam, Sunder Armor, Revenge, Heroic Strike, Battle Shout), mitigation/survival (Demoralizing Shout, Commanding Shout, Spell Reflection, Shield Block, Concussion Blow), or both (Thunder Clap, Shield Bash, Improved Revenge, Disarm -- though Disarm's threat is pretty low). You need -- and this comes only from experience -- to find the right balance between both. This also depends a lot on the instance, the fight within the instance, and your group composition (e.g., do you have a DPS warrior/warlock to put up some debuffs to help you out with mitigation, or a hunter to help you with threat)?

Haven't done it on heroic mode yet, but in non-heroic, it's just a matter of the healer not putting up a HOT at the wrong moment. As long as your healer keeps you topped off outside the debuff (which is easy on even a moderately geared tank in the non-heroic version -- speaking from my experience with my priestess) so that you can be on your own for a few seconds until the debuff goes away. And even if she gets healed by it once in a time, it's not a big deal (much less than missing the spell interrupt on her self-heal).

And Shield Block in regular instances is generally a waste of rage, I fear (though there are exceptions, such as when you need to mitigate every last point of damage because your healer is temporarily incapacitated and you're low on health).

Depends on what your group is comfortable with. When healing that encounter, I generally just ask the tank to make sure the second sentinel stays off me, and to let me worry about keeping the rest of the group up. There are various other approaches that can be used to control one sentinel that doesn't involve tanking it if your healer isn't comfortable with that, or just using two tanks (assuming you have another warrior, or a druid or paladin who isn't healing). Trying to tank both generally means that you will lose at least one.

First of all, I wouldn't spam Demoralizing Shout. The threat is negligible, its primary use is damage mitigation. Second, if somebody insists on DPSing a secondary target, it's their responsibility to not draw aggro, not yours to cover up for their desire to top vanity meters (that being said, a moderate amount of DOTs/Multishot/Chain Lightning/etc. can generally be used).

But, to answer your question, spell reflect has very situational use in non-heroic 5-mans (whereas in heroics, you're going to use it a lot). The threat/mitigation tradeoff just isn't very good in a normal instance (there are exceptions, of course, such as Nexus-Prince Shaffar in Mana Tombs or Aeonus's Time Stop in Black Morass, or your healer being low on mana in a timed encounter/on a bad pull, but in general, loose aggro is more likely to stress your healer than a moderate amount of additional spell damage you're taking).

Depends entirely on the pull. On the large pulls in normal Shattered Halls (especially the gladiator packs without CC), I put up Demoralizing Shout as a matter of course, because these can be pretty nasty to heal through, and healing aggro can be a bit tight as is. But on the majority of pulls, I don't worry about it (but then I have the benefit of having healed almost everything I'm tanking, so I've got a good gauge of where you want maximum damage mitigation and where it doesn't matter that much).

In heroics, Demoralizing Shout goes up on pretty much any mob that hits for significant damage, and so does Thunder Clap (assuming the CC permits). The mitigation is that significant.

Stuns and knockdown are annoying, but often you can buy yourself some time by using Concussion Blow or Disarm. Remember that Concussion Blow does not trigger the global cooldown.

I generally tank regular 5-mans with a minimum of 485 defense (crit immunity against normal level 72 or lower mobs). Having less is not really going to buy me much (and there are the occasional mobs in regular instances that do have surprising burst damage potential), so I may as well remain immune to crits. I do stack attack power, though, and use Battle Shout over Commanding Shout. I also tend to forgo unnecessary CC, basically using an additional light-hitting mob or two that can't fear, silence, heal, AE, or do other inconvenient things, as a rage battery.

As with your gear you probably havent started heroics yet, Its probably safe to assume that 99% of the mobs in every instance you come across are tauntable. You can get away with 150tps on a target aslong as you control your taunts accordingly. Charge in a pull, get a demoshout/tc on and start rotating your sunders revenge around the mobs. I usually dont even focus anything on the skull mob. Once the skull starts moving to a dps-er I taunt him and shieldslam and continue bashing the other mobs. The taunt/shieldslam alone buys enough time for 5 more seconds. Usually the mob will be dead already then.