Off-Tanking Naxx

My Thursday night began as many others do. With no raid scheduled, I logged on to do some dailies, a battleground or two, and maybe tweak my Power Auras. What I got was much different:

“Arth, we need an off-tank for Nax 10. You in?”

After giddily accepting, I quickly put on my game face. This was the big time. I couldn’t shoot myself in the foot by turning in a sub-par performance.

Because it will apply to a few of the fights, let me briefly describe the group I ran with. Our MT (pally) was geared to the nines. 232+ level gear across the board. In the interests of time, he handled almost all trash tanking. Two of our heals were also from our main raid group. The dps had one hunter that could pull about 4K, a shaman who could push similar numbers, and an otherwise motley assortment of slightly undergeared alts, doing anywhere from 1.5 to 3.5K dps on bosses. A good setup for pet tanking: good heals, and no ridiculous dps, making aggro manageable.

And the verdict? It’s possible, and some fights were not nearly as hard to tank as I expected. However, Naxx was good for a couple reasons. Not only did it provide a great challenge and showcased a hunter tank, but it also highlighted our shortcomings as tanks, as I learned with a few fights that I absolutely couldn’t tank. The following is a bunch of random observations, tips, videos, insights etc. from my night. The bad is included with the good, because it’s great to see what we can do, but just as important to know our limits (and, be honest, to hear about my amusing failures).

Spider Quarter:

Anub’rekhan –
Pet tanks are surprisingly good with initial aggro when we hit all our CDs (MD, BW, and Intimidation). I tanked the big adds, and they were down before any of the dps could get close to me on aggro.

Grand Widow Faerlina –
I should add early on that healing pets is still a challenge. We can do a lot, but some of it will come down to the gear and skill of your heals. But if they can, this is another relatively easy intro fight. Our MT took the boss, I tanked the adds off to the side. The dps was on the boss, and the tank taunted adds off of me one by one to kill the enrages. I switched targets often among the 4 adds to ensure that they didn’t die prematurely, but I’m not sure Witwicky (my croc) could’ve killed any of them too soon anyway.

Maexxna –
A single-tank fight, so there wasn’t much for me to do. Pets don’t get web wrapped, though, which would help with threat if I ever MT it. We can main tank this, as long as the healers keep enough HoT’s on our pets during the web wraps.

Plague Quarter:

Noth –
The aforementioned uber-geared tank took the boss and all adds in the middle. I just dps’d. If you do split it into a two-tank fight, I’d actually recommend that the hunter take the boss, not the adds. Holding multiple-target aggro is tricky in raids, especially when you can’t make a kill sequence in fights like this one, and there’s very little time for initial aggro.

Heigan –
Unless you do the fancy corner-to-corner strat for this fight (we didn’t) I can’t see much use for us. Maintaining boss aggro while kiting isn’t something I relish trying. It’s possible, but would be inefficient because we can’t have our pets attacking while we pull them back during the lava dance. Witwicky sat this one out on the upper platform with me, as a backup in case the MT got hit by the lava.

Loatheb –
Fun story, I actually ripped aggro off our main tank in this fight. How? Spores. They negate aggro, our tank got one eventually, and pets are unaffected by spores. So not only are we great on threat for this fight, but we’re potentially the best tank class for threat on Loatheb. If I get to do Naxx again, I plan on trying to MT this, with the entire group getting spores.

Construct Quarter:

Patchwerk –
Here’s where things got fun. This fight requires two tanks maintaining the top 2 aggro spots. This wouldn’t have been a problem, since I was comfortably holding single target aggro up to about 4K (the 4K-ish hunter and Witwicky would usually be vying for 2nd aggro on fights where I wasn’t tanking). But when our pets don’t have top aggro, they attack from behind, which presents a problem for damage mitigation on Patchwerk. So Witwicky had to have top aggro, which means I needed to MT it. For our pally tank, this turned into an amusing trial of self-restraint, since he was reduced to auto attacks a lot of the time. For our healers, it meant that my pet would be taking the vast majority of damage from Patchwerk. The dps, with an occasional MD or FD from the hunter, could at least go nuts.

I rooted my croc in place to tank and put him on passive before MD’ing to him. Only after Patchwerk had positioned himself in front of Witwicky did I put him on defensive. At that point the group waited about 10 seconds for initial aggro, our MT waited a few more, and we were off.

Booyah.

Grobbulus –
Picking up and tanking the slime adds wasn’t terribly hard. We just have to make sure we don’t kite them into one of the plague clouds. It can be problematic to target them, since they like to cluster around Grobbulus’s feet. A macro for targeting them and sending in your pet is a good idea for this.

Gluth –
We can’t tank the Zombie Dog. Sorry guys. Two tanks have to bounce back and forth with their taunts because of the stacking debuff they get from Gluth. Our pet’s taunt is on too long a cooldown. But what can we do instead? Kite adds in the back. So we found another tank and proceeded.

The key to kiting the adds in the back is, well, kiting. Don’t tank them for long. Your pet will die. I found this out on the first wave of adds. That said, when done properly we can be incredibly affective in the back. A single attack/thunderstomp was enough to hold aggro off of my healer, so I’d simply have Witwicky attack each new one once, then put him on passive and run away with him trailing me. You never really want to attack them ever except for the initial attack. Frost traps help immensely too. And with a DBM notice for Decimate, you can run them to the very back wall, giving your dps a silly amount of time to down the adds before they reach Gluth.

Enjoy the video of what I just described. You’ll even get to see me hurriedly rebuff Witwicky after the sloppy first half (I <3 the new LW drums, btw, for moments like this).

[Frost note: probably a much easier method is what we do in our 10-mans:  just hunter kite the zombies without the pet. Between cheetah, freezing traps, and jump-shot it's not too difficult.]

Thaddius –
We had some debate over this one. In phase 1, when the two mini-bosses do their tank throw, will they throw a pet? Will he be out of range after the throw, disappearing? Would I get thrown too? I desperately wanted to find out just for the amusement value, but with our recruited tank from Gluth I couldn’t win the group over. Alas.

Pets don’t get a charge from Thaddius (much like Loatheb spores), and since the charge gives us increased damage, which would make threat rough, it’s likely that we can’t effectively tank any phase of this fight.

….

Real life intervened and broke up the band at that point. I had been looking forward to the Horsemen and KT, but maybe for another night. A small part of me died a little each time it dawned on me that hunter tanks can’t do certain things that other tanks can (I secretly want to replace other tank classes just to infuriate them). But on the whole, it was an awesome night, and made Naxx fun for me for the first time in months.

As a precautionary measure, I wouldn’t go into Naxx as a tank with less than about 3700 AP and 1700 Stamina (unbuffed, not fed, no aspect, just spec and gear, etc.). I went in with roughly 3850/1800, had the benefit of two excellent healers (one a Disc. Priest, our pets’ best friends), mostly sub-4K dps, and it still wasn’t a walk in the park. Otherwise, kick ass and take names. Hunters are raid tanks now.

-Arth