AoE Tanking

Ok, it's been awhile, but lets try just diving back in...

Once upon a time, Paladins were the undisputed kings of AoE tanking. I was the most beloved toon in all of Mt Hyjal for many moons way back in the day. I spent a lot of time spamming Consecration and Shield Block and trying to find a camera angle that let me see anything at all beyond a screen full of dizzying spell effects. Or I'd just give up on the screen and watch the raid display to taunt off the warlocks and mages whose AoE would very occasionally outpace Consecration threat.

But that was a long time ago and with 3.0 came AoE tanking abilities for all tanks. The mechanics all differ a little bit, but Blizzard was clearly flattening out the niches that had existed for tanking. In theory, my hp/mitigation caught up with the prot warriors a bit and they got some talents for grabbing a room full of mobs all at once. While it was nice to be less reliant on specific classes for specific fights, you do also miss being able to best fill a specific job. It's a obviously constant balancing act for Blizzard between maintaining class distinctiveness and not requiring hardcore raid stacking and toon swapping for specific fights.

Of course, then we gradually learned that we were both lacking the best elements for tanking Sarth+3 -- the ridiculous hp pools of a bear tank and the zillions of cooldowns of a DK tank. Look, niches again. Except that this time, we didn't have anybody ready to fill the niche and so we never managed to beat that last fight. :(

But on AoE tanking, since Ulduar came out, I've been gradually coming around to the idea that I'm actually maybe currently the worst AoE tank. We've been running into the problem that Consecration doesn't work that well on rapidly moving mobs and the Warriors ability to stun/slow while building AoE threat -- Sarth + 2/3 whelps were a good demonstration of that, too. And it looks to me like the Consecration threat building hasn't kept pace with the level of AoE damage that the locks and mages can put out.

For awhile, I've been thinking I wasn't doing it well enough (and that might be true, I have some ideas for improving). But I think if there is a current niche for pally tanking, it's not actually full AoE tanking, but 2-3 multi-mob tanking. I have several abilities that hit 2-3 mobs hard so it's very easy for me to spike threat in situations like this. Then the extra shield blocks and consecration should be plenty to hold them. So I think I should be looking for fights where we have a few more mobs than tanks and be thinking about mechanics for collecting them rapidly. Macro targeting works well for one mob. I wonder if it's possible to construct 2-3 mob macros -- something like a /targetsequence chain instead of a /castsequence chain. Currently, getting exactly the correct 2 mobs tanked is occasionally a problem. I grab one and the other runs and I have to try to grab and taunt it with the mouse, which is sometimes slower than ideal. If I shield throw, sometimes I get the wrong mob or one of the targets isn't in range of the bounce. If I can't come up with a macro solution, maybe I should just contract out initial threat on one of them to a hunter or rogue. If only we had more hunters and rogues.

Speaking of nostalgia, remember when the whole server was overrun with NE hunters and rogues? You couldn't swing a Thunderfury in MC without hitting 10 or more of them.

I've also been thinking about how to improve my AoE tanking efficiency. There are a couple of Glyphs that help with multi-mob damage that I don't use in my normal single-mob tanking gear (+2s to Consecration and +1 target to Hammer of Righteousness). That lead me to think about setting up a dual spec just to keep an alternate set of Glyphs around. I think I could tweak a second tanking spec to have a little more generic Ret damage too, which could also help. I've also been wondering about the Consecration mechanics. I know it gets buffed from both attack power and spell power. I wonder if it's affected by +haste. If so, maybe I can swap in a piece of either Ret or Holy +haste gear and increase the output a little. I could spare to lose a little defense if necessary. I think a little experimentation on the target dummies might let me figure the gear issue out.

I had been mulling over changing to a 2-tank dual spec even before I noticed last night that during some recent patch, my Holy second spec got reset. So now, I think I'll just bank the Holy gear for a bit and experiment with setting up a single and multi mob tanking specs/glyphs/gearsets.

If I get a some time to work on it over the weekend, I should be able to try out improved AoE tanking by Thorim next week. We struggled a lot with Thorim this past week and I really felt like my inability to keep the whole room of mobs locked down was a big part of the problem. I'd like to reconquer that Keeper next week so we can get back to properly wiping all night on Mimiron. :)