A couple of things… If you normally use FD just as you aggro something, learn to be a better hunter… A lot of ICC fights depend on the boss being positioned in a certain way, and if you pull aggro, even if the tank taunts back, you could easily throw the positioning off… My omen flashes when I hit 100 % of the tanks aggro and that’s when I FD…

Unless asked not too, ALWAYS start a fight with MD… You can cast it just before the pull so you’ll lose no dps… It can make your job easier as well as making the tanks job easier… If you use MD, you can usually open full blast without it being a problem… And it’ll help the tank with those who won’t wait for him to gain enough threat

And to those who think your number one job is to dps, in most raids you’d be considered a liability… Your job is to help the raid get the boss down and sometimes that means less dps for you… But you stand in crap and expect the healers to heal you through and if you pull aggro, you blame it on the tank… You let the other hunters do your job (MD, traps, kiting) because you think you’re so uber… :p I was the asst RL on a 25 and hunters like that were quickly dropped from the run…

Since I have 2 healers, a resto druid and a holy pally that I run through ICC every week, I know that my healing does not generate threat that even come close to the worst dps in the group. I always have omen running, and that threat I make is insanely low. I don’t have concerns like OMG if I heal that mage, I’m going to pull aggro. If people need to be healed, I can heal freely worry free. The rare few times I get healer aggro is when in trash pulls, the warrior tank’s thunderclap misses a mob, and it goes straight to the healer. In other words, the tank had no threat whatsoever on the mob.

As a warrior and pally tank, threat is almost never an issue as being vigilant on your cooldowns and watch dbm to stay alive (and the other tank alive). On some occasions, I see a warlock, hunter, or leet boomkin riding dangerously close where I am only ahead by 20-30k threat deep into the fight, in which case I monitor closely if when they go ahead, I immediately taunt (even without them pulling aggro yet) that puts me ahead of the threat meter. Then I pump all my threat building abilities even those in long cooldowns like shockwave and heroic throw when all my other abilities are in cooldown.

There are some fights however where you can’t build burst threat right away especially when you need to position the boss at the start of the fight like in Onyxia. On several occasions, I find myself on the edge in the first 20 seconds of the fight especially if some huntard decides to dps right at the very second you pull. On the times that the hunter hasn’t pulled yet, in my mind I’m still deciding whether I let him pull, and taunt back after or to let it go, and go to business as usual.

Lastly as a mm hunter, I find myself almost always in the top 3 in threat. If it’s a competent tank, I just ride the edge. I only use misdirect at the start of the pull to give the tank a boost threat. But in the middle of the fight, when I do manage to pull, I can feign death, and the tank is the second in threat and he instantly gets aggro.

The only times that I see 3 or 4 other dps on top of the threat meters other than the tank, is when the tank is undergeared and having problems in threat generation. But since in most ICC and even ToC raids, the tanks are pre-screened, I encounter undergeared tanks mostly in VOA. On such occasions, I drop my special abilities from the rotation, and observe a few seconds if he’s doing better threat than my white damage auto shots. If he is, I feign death early to wipe my threat. But there were at least a couple of times that I run into a tank who can’t catch up with my white damage. In that case, I stop dps, and just wait for someone to pull and save feign death to save myself in the inevitable raid wipe.

I was a lonely BM hunter until 72. relaying only on wowwiki and thottbot, until someone convinced me to get into a guild. Never raided, never done dungeons till 80. But when i got in new 5man dungeons, I was always ashamed for my low 1400 DPS. My guild master advised me to go Survival and this jumped me to 3k. I have applied some of your teachings and now they ashame me because I keep getting the mobs on me. And I dont care, cause usually Kill Shot stop them in their charge…

But now I finally understand how aggro works and what that means for the entire group, being it for dungeon or raid. Because of their usual hours I cant get in raids, but if I will ever get in one, you have teach me how to play my role properly…

Thank you Frost! And thank you to all that shared their knowledge…

Hehe, when you talked about the hunter aggro fail, i was like omg then how do i use FD, almost desperately i read on and then “aaaahh that’s how you do” XD

Hehe anyways, just wanted to tell that this was very informing and that you explain things quite well =P

I can now have something constructive to send to a hunter in this situation that explains the situation without getting on someones nerves (Every time I mention something like this I seem to irritate the hunter no matter how I go about it lol). I can see this article helping me. Your post is great – i might just recommend deleting the one or two pieces of profanity in it – some of my guildmates are older and have kids in the guild and Id like to be able to cite this page directly.

Also in my limited experience in a large group even if the tank has his cooldowns ready to use (taunt, challenging shout etc). Once I lose aggro no matter what I do, Im probably not going to regain aggro if 2-3 people are bombing away on the loose mobs and/or boss pulled from the tank. Its a lot easier to just not steal aggro from the tank in the first place and this article is big help. thanks. I hate getting blamed for not maintaining aggro in situations like you propose. I think thats the reason some tanks get kinda irate – its not anything personal at the hunter – the tank doesnt want to be blamed for a wipe any more than the hunters/dpsers do I have to admit Im always eyeing the mobs near me to try to position my characters and ration my abilities to regain aggro if I need to – it is tricky to do sometimes in a tough fight with a lot of dps flying around me. As a warrior, My eyes are typically jumping back and forth from my ability bars/cooldowns, the boss and any loose mobs. I barely look at the threat meter or what others are doing. If I had a word of advice to new 80 hunters it would be that 80 dr/prot tanks are slow, ponderous to get 5 devastates/aggro going and will always have slower dps if they are geared for defense – take it a bit easy on offense at the start of a fight and when you need to during a long fight (per this article) and everything will be fine.