The WHU’s pet tanking guides recommend either a bear or a croc. And while I still use a croc for heroic tanking (a bear’s swipe is still only 180 degrees, despite being able to hit as many targets as possible in that radius), it was high time I tamed a bear for my single target and/or raid endeavors. So say hello to Archibald!
Archie’s first assignment was assorted tanking in ToC. Before I start, I’d like to make a quick distinction. What you’ll see me tank on the WHU is either encounters where I’m not hindering my group, or the group has agreed to nerf itself beforehand. I’m not a huge fan of achievement grinding as a tank; meaning, if the dps isn’t in their rotation because my threat is low, I’m not doing my job. That’s achievement grinding, not true tanking. There’s nothing wrong with achievement-style tanking, and it can be impressive as hell, but know the difference beforehand. Because what we can technically tank and what we can legitimately tank like other classes are two different things. Some concessions will always need to be made for pet tanks, yes. But it’s important to know the distinction, because it helps us understand our limits as tanks.
As luck would have it, by the time my guild lets me tank things, we’re usually bringing in alts to them. So with the exception of a rogue who needed to nerf his dps occasionally (he pushes me in my MM spec in our ICC raids, and has hung 7K+ on every boss in ToC), I didn’t have as daunting a task as I might have had a month or two ago.
ToC 10M (Regular Difficulty)
I. Northrend Beasts
No tanking here, sorry. Our taunt is on too long a cooldown to do the tank juggling for Gormok. In theory, we could dps Gormok in BM, then tank a worm and/or Icehowl. But with two tanks in the group already, just steer clear.
It’s a shame we can’t fully tank Beasts. Otherwise, it would be entirely possible to run through the entire raid with only one other tank, since we can contribute in every other fight. But alas, we’ll have to wait for such a raid.
II. Lord Jaraxxas
Affectionately known as Lord Jackass in my guild, he’s ideal for us because there’s adds for the dps to deal with, making threat manageable. Strats, pics, and videos below.
Unbuffed Stamina (Hunter): 2033
Unbuffed AP (Hunter): 4182
Pet Buffed Health: 36.5K
Strats:
1. Blow your cooldowns early (MD, Bestial Wrath, etc.), and get as many MD’s as possible. Because once the dps switches to the first add, you should be golden on threat.
2. Many groups keep a rogue on the boss at all times for interrupts, which creates threat issues. And they can’t cast Tricks of the Trade on your pet. Solution? Have them cast it on you. You should never be close to your pet in threat anyway. Add in FD and we can easily deal with the extra threat. You’ll see this in the video (the large, hastily created Power Aura that pops up occasionally is for when I have Tricks), as well as the rogue that danced with my pet on the threat meter (though he stayed under 110%, so all was well).
3. Have melee call out the fire debuff if they get it. There may be some slight boss kiting involved.
4. I don’t normally advocate having Mend Pet up during tanking. If your regular healers can’t heal your pet, it’s likely yours won’t make the difference. But it’s not a bad idea during the busier heal sequences (adds, various debuffs, etc.).
5. Dps adds if needed, but your first priority is tanking. Make sure your group remembers this and accounts for it in the group’s composition.
6. The nature of my videos means that I rarely have second chances to smooth things over. A couple broken macros meant I had a Power Aura mistakenly showing at all times, and had to apply MD manually to my pet. The rest was like clockwork, though.
Hunter Pet Tanks Lord Laraxxus
III. Faction Champs
Eh, not really a tank fight. Ask your raid leader if he wants you to try to occupy someone with your pet. Otherwise, switching back over to MM/SV for the zerg is a better option.
IV. The Twins
I really believe my group was a bit too cautious here. They let me tank one, but put ALL the dps on the other twin. This actually isn’t a bad strat, and worked for us, but after about a minute of solo-tanking it no one in the raid group could have realistically caught me on threat. Our pets don’t get a black/white aura from the portals, which would doom a normal tank, but the damage they take as a result of not having an aura counts as AoE damage, of which our pets ignore 90%. As a result, it’s no harder to tank/heal than any other class.
We tried moving them close together about midway through, ostensibly to get some extra cleave damage in the melee. I don’t remember if it worked or not though.
Hunter Pet Tanks Twin Val\’kyr
V. Anub’arak
Kiting adds to ice patches, frankly, shouldn’t be a problem for even non-tanking BM hunters. Save your cooldowns for the adds to maintain aggro, and monitor threat levels. Don’t try tanking Anub, because any raid group worth their salt will have dps that we can’t hold aggro off of (I’m usually good up to about 5K single target, with no extra MDs or add-switching in the dps to help). Our pets can take the punishment, but can’t maintain threat against elite dps from most classes. No video here, but if you can tank up to this point, this fight shouldn’t be a worry.
….
General Notes:
- I’ve had some issues with Cower, which is now an excellent damage mitigation ability for us. It doesn’t want to auto-cast for me. If you notice this, just write it into a macro with a lot of your regular shots. Euripides at Outdps (of Podcast fame) suggested macro’ing it to your Mend Pet, which is an excellent idea.
- I’ve seen some tanks talking about running with BM/SV builds for extra stamina instead of BM/MM for threat. Okay. But. You lose an absurd amount of threat from not having Go For the Throat. And the extra stamina in SV is, at best, an extra 2K health or so for your pet (and less for most). Stack stamina in your gear if needed, grind out some PvP gear or something, and stay in MM. Only the most survivability-challenged tanks should be dipping into SV.
- I don’t know if this has been mentioned: Our pets take HUGE heals. Blood of the Rhino in our pet’s spec and additional talents in ours means that a healer’s spell is hitting for 150% of its normal value on our pet. That’s bigger than any tank class, though our health pool is smaller. But let your healers know this. If they’re skilled enough to apply this knowledge, they’ll thank you for it.
- I’m not tanking ICC (yet!), but there’s other places besides raids in which we can push our class to its tanking limits. Expect a couple new entries soon.
Happy Tanking!
-Arth
(15 votes, average: 4.87 out of 5)
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Member
It would be awesome to tank parts of ICC! However, recently running with a friends alt in Reg FoS, PoS, and HoR we were having trouble finishing HoR at the very end. So to help out I switched to my tanking spec, which has a little of Frost’s Soloing involved because thats the gear I had on me, and held the Abominations or Witch Doctors (whichever came up 2nd) while the DPS killed off the others. Surprisingly enough, I had enough DPS on single targets at that point to kill off what I was tanking not too long after the rest of the group killed off the others. We were even able to get the “We’re not Retreating, We’re Advancing Differently” or something like that. Needless to say the pug group I was in was trying to get gear. /facepalm But oh well, its part of it.
Dues Payer
Well done:D
If I could I would rate your video “1″, due to effed up music in your vids. Turn it OFF!!!
The fight itself was good, but I had to watch it with a muted sound.
Contributor
lol, the music. I’ve had some complaints. I may change it. I like it though.
Member
Personally the music reminds me of Original Nintendo games. One in particular comes to mind is Contra. I like it but there again I’m into music (which is why I teach it).
I’d just like to add that one “normal” tank and your pet on beasts should actually be viable. On normal mode the impales don’t hurt that much and you can let it stack a little longer on the other tank . At one time we had our second tank disconnect right as gormok appeared. I tanked it solely untill the other tank was able to log back in. At that point I had 9 impale stacks and gormok was dead. Just have a pally remove the stacks and it’s not a biggie. You can have the other tank go first, untill he has like 5 stacks, then your pet taunts, the other tank has his stacks removed by a pally. He can taunt back when the pet has 2-3 stacks and shortly after that gormokk should be dead.
Contributor
It was a bit harsh, and not everyone’s thing. I replaced it with some generic techno track from youtube’s library. It should be more palatable. Just don’t ever say the WHU doesn’t cater to its readers…
Contributor
Nookzy – You’re probably right. The stacks are relatively quick to build up though, so it would definitely be a challenge. A d-capped pet can take hits comparable to other tanks, but the health pool is smaller. I may try to talk my guild into experimenting with it in the future.
Still, I think we can agree that the cool part of this is that we’re having a discussion on the viability of pet tanking close-to-endgame raid bosses.
Arth, what server are you on? And do you pvp, by any chance ?
Contributor
Andorhal. And I have a 2′s partner, but we’re pretty awful. I only PvP to try to get myself tanking upgrades. My current team cracked 1400 this season, which got me a few nice pieces, so I was happy.
Besides tanking, how is the bear for dps?
Was doing some dungeons last night, and it seemed that bear is actually better in dps then wolf due to the aoe part in his damage.
Sure, you loose out some on bosses but thats where call stabled pet is for. Just might be something worth looking at while doing this tanking.
Member
Durante here, the new writer for BigRedRhino. First congratulations on your achievement, to the best of my knowledge its the first pet main-tanking of any ToC boss. Second, I only recently stumbled upon your articles and I’ve enjoyed reading them; its nice to see a hunter site with a larger footprint and fan base devoting some space to pet tanking because, as far as I’m concerned, the more champions for our cause the better.
Also its great to see more and more guilds putting trust in their hunter tanks to go forth an conquer on raid content. Besides prohibitive mechanics like taunting, pets are much more durable in a raid environment than people think. I found that once you prove that to your guild by getting success on that first attempt people are a lot more receptive to giving you more chances and I hope you’ve found this to be the case since this was filmed. I’m looking forward to seeing more from you in the future.
Threat and taunts will continue to be the problem for tanking raid content. But for OT’ng something and surviving … well that’s usually pretty easy. That’s why I keep a Turtle.
We all need to figure out how to max our pet threat. Durante has some good info over at big red rhino
Contributor
Myrdreon – A bear’s AoE may temporarily inflate it past a wolf on random trash pulls. But there’s no raid boss where AoE is prevalent enough to warrant a switch. So while it might be fun to experiment in heroics with the pets (where, frankly, pet choice isn’t really a concern), in our dps spec we’re almost entirely concerned with boss dps. Might be interesting to try out on ICC trash though. I’ll let you know if I try it.
BRR Guys – Good luck in your own exploits! Although, Durante, I’m a he. Confusing, I know, but I just play a girl in WoW (loosely named after the Greek goddess of hunters, Artemis, thus the gender choice). I chuckled when I saw that though.
Member
I haven’t been able to test it personally, but I’m thinking that using a bear on a purely single target fight may result in lower TPS, not higher.
I don’t have an open stable slot, so I’m assuming casting Swipe triggers the pet GCD. I also don’t have access to Excel for the next couple days, so I’m assuming that Swipe and Claw both scale the same with AP.
Going on those assumptions, when casting Swipe the bear is essentially replacing a higher damage ability in Claw (118-168/2= 143) with Swipe (90-126/2= 108). Therefore if GCD’s is the limiting factor in special casts, using Swipe would be a DPS drop.
If focus is the limiting factor, Swipe starts to look better because of its slightly lower focus cost, but still falls short compared to Claw.
Claw: 143 damage / 25 focus = 5.72 damage
Swipe: 108 damage / 20focus = 5.4 damage
I suspect that the damage to focus ratio will swing further towards Swipe once scaling is taken into account, so if your pet is slightly focus deprived that may push Swipe out ahead. All of that’s pure speculation until I can get my hands on some solid numbers though, so at this point its just food for thought.
Even if the TPS noticeably improved with Swipe, there’s really nothing wrong with using a bear since its not always practical or really necessary to switch your pet out for every fight. Heck, I still tank with a gorilla for RP reasons, but if you’re looking for the best possible TPS I suspect Crocs are the best choice since Bad Attitude adds threat without using the GCD.
Great site and vid. I just found it today (yeah, I’m one of the slow kids) and was thrilled to see such proactive hunterspeak. Cheers!
Contributor
Durante – If we’re talking single target, we have to assume it’s a longer fight, so BA would have some considerable downtime, and would only be cast when the boss does a melee attack. Focus is also rarely a factor. 2 points in Go For the Throat and current crit rates even with sub-optimal gear, ensures that Claw gets cast more than Swipe. Either way though, I doubt it will end up making a huge difference between pets. I use a croc for heroics, and my guides recommend either one, so there’s not really a bad choice between the two.
Bastille – Welcome, and glad you like the site!