How to tank as a druid (or any class), Part 4

I realized recently that my last few posts on how to tank as a druid had no advice for people just starting with the roll of tanking. There are certain things we tanks know that we take for granted, but there is no way for a newer player to find them out. As such, I will post about them now. These are pieces of advice that apply to all tanks, not just druids.

1. Know how to do an LoS pull
LoS stands for line of sight. If there is something standing in between you and an enemy (like a wall or a corner, for instance), then your and their LoS is obstructed. You won't be able to attack them, they won't be able to attack you. This is key, though. You see, melee enemies, when pulled, will run right up to you. Enemies that mostly attack with ranged attacks and magic, however, will stand where they are and attack you. This makes it really difficult to pull them together into a group, which you need to do to effectively tank them. However, if you pull an enemy and then move to obstruct his LoS, he'll run towards you until he can attack you again.

What does this mean for you? It means that if your next pull contains enemies that use magic or ranged attacks, you'll want to do an LoS pull. How do you pull that off? Start by identifying a corner you can run behind. If you aren't sure if something will block your LoS, try hiding behind it and pulling the group. If you can't attack them, it will work. Next, get within pulling range of the group or enemy while staying as close to the enemy as you can. Pull them (bears should use Faerie Fire (Feral)), and then run behind your corner. The ranged and magic fighters will try to attack you and not be able to, so they will run to you, allowing you to make the group more compact and easier to manage. Note that the ranged/magic using enemies will not run farther than they need to in order to see you, so don't run too far beyond the corner. Also, melee fighters will get to you before the magic fighters, so be ready to pick them up when the show up.

2. Face the enemies/bosses you are tanking away from the group
This is applies to almost every fight you will ever engage in. Even if the boss has no frontal area-of-effect attacks, I can't think of a singe boss fight where you need to face the boss towards your group-mates. As such, unless you know that the boss must face your group as part of the strategy for defeating him, place the boss/enemies between yourself and your group. Do this by running around to their backside, since they won't move on their own.

3. You set the pace of the run
Tanks determine how fast a run goes. They are the ones who pull the enemies, so they decide how quickly the group progresses through the dungeon. As such, you want to find the perfect speed for your run. Go too slow, and your group will lose interest and the run will take too long. Go too fast, and your DPS and healers will run out of mana. Generally, you want to use your healer's mana as the gauge of how fast you should go. It's generally ok to pull trash enemies (those between the bosses) when the healer has half of his mana, but for bosses, you'll want the healer and everyone else to have full mana.

4. You will most likely be group leader, so know how to mark your enemies
This won't be as relevant once patch 3.3 is released and everyone will be able to mark, but even then, I suspect that people will still look to you to decide the kill order. If you and everyone else in your group outgears the instance, you may wish to eschew kill order entirely and just AoE everything down. Otherwise, you should mark a kill order. Enemies that do heavy damage need to die first, so its helpful to look up an instance on WoWWiki and see if any of the trash in the instance do major damage. Otherwise, it generally wise to kill healing enemies first, then offensive casters, then ranged attackers, then DPS. As a good rule of thumb, anything with a mana bar should die first.

To mark your enemies, click on the enemy first, then right click their profile and you'll see the option. Generally, skull marks the enemy that needs to die first, followed by X. It's ok to not mark the last enemy in the kill order, since people should assume that if they are not marked, they should die last. If you need to use more than skull or X, then it's likely the pull is big enough that it doesn't need a killer order, but if that is not the case, then be sure to tell your group the kill order. I generally start with skull, then go through the rest of the symbols in order of color (red X, orange circle, yellow start, etc.) Finally, though this may not be as common as I think, I usually see people mark a patrolling enemy with a green triangle so that people know to stay away from him, and if an enemy should not be attacked at all, I usually see people use a moon to mark him.