That is correct. I mentioned it because it can cause a problem if you're mid-fight and think, "I need to throw my axe now," but you have your normal tanking weapon equipped. If you wait to swap it you'll run into the problem where it won't be ready for another 30 seconds. Or if you swap early, that's 30+ seconds without the added spell damage from your normal weapon.

But Omen must have picked something up in the combatlog to remove him from the table if your statement about him dropping from Omen is correct.

I recently tanked Veras and found a basically foolproof strat for him. He appears near where he vanished, but has about a 15 yard wander range. I just tanked him way off to one side and when he was due back I positioned myself in the middle of the raid facing the area where he vanished and mashed

/targetexact Veras Darkshadow
/cast Avenger's Shield

I used [Praetorian's Legguards], [Glory of the Defender] and [Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart]. That much hit combined with 3/3 Precision puts me missing 1.5% of the time or so but means at least I am facing him and in a good position to intercept him if I do miss. Stacking some random + hit gear for this job seems prudent though since he doesn't hit all that hard. I picked him up once with spell warding on but I just got lucky, he was near me and I bonked him with my stick for a bit and somehow got him to stick to me.

One idea for picking him up with SW up is LOH. You could just find a person at low health and LOH them and drink a mana pot. It isn't ideal, but it does make some threat and hopefully puts you above other healers. I have never done this on Veras, but I did use it on Illidan once. I was tanking him and I died just as human phase started and had to be rezzed. I stood up and dropped LOH. Turns out that was plenty of threat to get him on me and we continued from there minus a dpser or two. I don't know if LOH has a 50% normal threat modifier like other pally spells but healing myself for 18k or so was enough. As a note though, my LOH heroics on Illidan were for nought, we died anyway. I did tank our first kill for him though, which made me no end of pleased!

I may be mistaken on the Omen part, but I don't think so.

I combed over the WWS log, and see absolutely no buff/debuff gains on the warlock tank that could explain anything like this.

Perhaps Omen picks up on it when someone that is the listed MT suddenly loses aggro to someone that it thinks should be way below him on threat?

Hi guys,
I see up above people are looking for good ways to pull mobs to them.

On several different fights I use Healing threat. Essentially I have two warlocks assigned to me that life-tap down to about 60% of their HP. Every healer in our raid knows not to heal these two warlocks at certain moments. I heal them. This generates the required threat to pull mobs to me. In particular I use it effectively for

Al'ar - Add tanking. I stand in the doorway into Al'Ar's room. When the add's spawn during Phase 1 I heal the warlocks lifetapping and the add's come straight for me. During phase 2 I position myself under the ledge of either ramp (because of the knockback I don't move in this position) and heal to bring the adds to me "IF" they spawn to far away for me to easily AS them. (we always have hunter's misdirecting too, FYI).

Morogrim - I tank add's in a corner where I can not be Graved. When the adds pop I heal the two warlocks up with holy light or FoL and all the adds come straight to me, I consecrate when they get their and they're mine. It's quite beautiful in it's simplicity.

Of course it's helpful when all healers have BoSalv on (including paladins) I usually do this blessing so I always remember to BoSanc. myself. Also it's important for no other pallies to have on RF, other than you of course.

Try it out, it's great and sounds like it would work fine on that boss you in BT, which I have not seen yet.

Like Redcape mentioned, if you keep Veras on the far side away from Gathios/the raid you should have plenty of room to pick him up. He stands still for a moment after reappearing, so if you have a mark on him and stand between his vanish point and the raid you should have plenty of time to locate him and get aggro between AS, JoR, Consecration, melee attacks and RD. I normally stand him near the bench on the left side of the room.

You can AS through BoP, and taunt through the spell warding. White damage with my Sun Eater and SotC has been enough for me to hold aggro for the duration of the spell warding. Capping melee hit is certainly not a bad idea for this fight if the trade-off in avoidance isn't too heavy for your assigned healing.

Last time I tanked Veras I actually seem to remember seeing an "Immune" message when I attempted to use Righteous Defense to grab him when he had a Blessing of Spell Warding on him. That's very anecdotal however, I haven't tanked him often, and I've only had a single opportunity to even test this.

And as the others said, he has to run a fairly large distance to even reach the raid if you tank him a good bit away. The only minor nuisance I've noted is that BigWigs at least (Unsure about other boss mods), does not report it when Veras gets Blessing of Spell Warding, so you have to give a yell in raid yourself if it happens at a bad time.

I'd also recommend keeping an avoidance trinket and Hammer of Justice ready. While Veras himself doesn't do much damage on you, he's the one source of damage you can easily put a stop to in the fight, which can be useful if you get a Flamestrike and Divine Wrath on you at the same time.

You also don't really need to use much mana to keep him on you, so you might want to consider helping out on healing people that get Deadly Poison while he's vanished; your Holy Light won't do much healing, but it beats doing nothing, and who knows, that 2.5k heal might mean someone just survives where he wouldn't have otherwise.

I'd like to point out again that "healing threat can't miss"

Once he's close enough hit him with a judement, AS etc.. but get him coming to you by being highest on his threat meter due to healing. I haven't done the fight but my guess is noone else is touching and thusly he's going for healers first, you out threat them on healing meters and he's yours. Once he gets to you it's threat generation as normal.

I see it like this
he stealths (or whatever), warlocks life tap, you spam holy light on them, he pops, aggros you, consecrate, heal heal heal, gets to judge range, judge righteousness, *GG*

Due to the nature of the Illidari Council fight (It has extremely heavy random raid damage) having a Warlock life tap to very low amounts of health is as likely to result in a dead warlock as it is likely to result in Veras heading for you. It also means you can't count on your healers to do low/no healing, because again, that's likely to cause dead people.

There's also the factor that Veras getting Blessing of Spell Warding is only an issue if it happens immediately after his reappearance, and that doesn't happen very often at all.

While healing aggro certainly has it's virtues, in this case it's going to be an unneeded complication. You don't have to aggro him from a large range, nor do you have the chance for him to appear any place in the room (Instead he reappears about 15 yards away from where he initially vanished).

Okay, thanks for the info everyone. We had a lot more time to work on the Council tonight (~40% on our second to last attempt) and I noticed the effects you guys are talking about. I'll give the tank-in-a-corner strat a try next time we hit it.

For anyone who's wondering, Decapitator works like a charm when spell warding is up. It's instant-cast with what appears to be a 40-yard range, which makes it very nice for this particular fight.

If everyone is taking heavy damage then it makes it even easier for us to heal and get threat. Because you don't have to heal warlocks, just heal anyone who needs healed. If everything is working great for you awesome. I'm just saying if you have an issue picking him up you may want to try my suggestion. I was skeptical at first until I saw how awesome it worked and it only fails if I don't have RF up and healers aren't salved.

However take this with a grain of salt since I have never seen the fight and don't know the specifics. I know alot of folks are hesitant to try healing threat with pally tanks. It works awesomely when applied correctly.