It sounds like an infomercial, but actually Righteous Defense has a great post on how a pally (or any class, really -- his advice is for pallies, but it's common sense enough that any tanking class can use the tips) can
step up and increase their threat as far as it will go. I always enjoyed tanking when I did it (and now that I'm leveling up a pally, I'll hopefully be bashing heads in and taking damage again soon), and
the key to tanking is just awareness: awareness of where the mobs are, who they're targeting, and where they should be. Increasing threat is really a passive kind of upgrade -- as long as you're hitting your spells right, using the glyphs designed to keep you at the top of an aggro list, and specced and hit-capped for the gear and abilities you're using, keeping threat up is pretty simple. It's just the positioning and dealing with surprises that can be hard.
The last point on RD's list is worth repeating for everyone:
use your trinkets, as often as possible. Imagine that, in the next patch notes, you saw a spell under your class listing that did what your trinkets did (added a ton of spellpower or
increased armor by 500) and went on to say (infomercial style again) "... at a cost of no mana, focus, rage or ." Wouldn't you be spamming that sucker as often as possible? Get your gear straight, use the right abilities, and break out your trinkets whenever you can, and keeping threat should be no problem at all for any given class.
Tags: aggro, awareness, gear, hit-cap, hit-capped, increasing-threat, pally, positioning, righteous-defense, spells, tank, tanking-keys, threat, tips, trinkets, usage
Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Warrior, Tips, Virtual selves, Raiding, Bosses, Buffs, Death Knight
Operation Gnomeregan and Zalazane's Fall have begun!
Oct 23rd 2009 at 7:00PM 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Josin Oct 23rd 2009 7:17PM
Step 1: Push Consecrate.
Step 2: Push Consecrate.
Step 3: Push Consecrate.
Step 4: Push Consecrate.
Step 5: Push Consecrate.
Zrob Oct 23rd 2009 7:57PM
Fail.
The cool paladin tanks only use consecrate when absolutely necessary (large aoe pulls)
It's threat per mana is horribly inefficient
source:
www.maintankadin.com
Morningbell Oct 23rd 2009 8:05PM
Mana? What is mana?
Real tanks rely on sustainable energy for their activities.
Bring an energy-efficient tank to YOUR Totc and save the rainforests!
Mohsus Oct 23rd 2009 8:11PM
I think you have a typo thar.
It should be "swipeswipeswipeswipewin"
Kooshi Oct 23rd 2009 9:19PM
Zrob: its*
The apostrophe is for the contraction "it is". No apostrophe is for the possesive form.
Schadow Oct 24th 2009 6:02AM
@Zrob - while the damage/mob ratio isn't impressive, you also don't have anything else to do with that GCD if you are using the standard 969 rotation. Including consecrate, provided you have mana, is still an increase over not using it.
Zrob Oct 24th 2009 2:22PM
You can rout 696 all you want, but the people who came up with it now say the consecrate is wasted on a single or even double mob fight.
"Main one is: Consecrate is optional. Skip it unless you really need TPS on over 5 mobs. Learn to tank 4 mobs without Consecrate: AS three, Judge 4th, HammerTime!"
"What can you cast for half a mana bar?
• Avenger's Shield.
• One Consecrate."
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/guides/advanced-training/mana-conservation
I've dropped Consecrate on most of the pulls I make and if anyrhing I've experienced a threat increase from having the mana I need when I need it and having fewer GCD worries.
Carnagefiend Oct 23rd 2009 7:19PM
I'm not sure how hard positioning is really, I personally never had issues with it on my warrior.
I think my advice on how to position and move mobs is just pretend that, as you hit them and use your rotations, treat them like they're leashed to you. And if you need to turn mobs, look at the circle under their feet.
Using that circle, run around its border. You'll find mobs turn like... well... they're on a turntable.
If the mob isn't a big deal sometimes you can run straight through them. If you have aggro, they'll immediately pop around to face you. This is easier on a warrior if you charge first. They'll be stunned and give you time to set up behind them (obviously not raid bosses).
Angus Oct 23rd 2009 8:35PM
This would be true if half the mobs didn't act like crack fiends after a pipe in your back pocket. I consistently have some mob in a pack get behind me, turn and start attacking my back. I move backwards and one of his buddies then does it. It takes a bit before they are all hitting your front again.
Deadly. Off. Topic. Oct 26th 2009 10:27AM
I'd have to agree with Angus, the mobs will often position themselves behind you and you have to do a stupid little dance to keep them out in front of you.
selly Oct 23rd 2009 7:26PM
Thanks for posting this! I've got a fresh 80 tanking pally and I'm struggling in the threat department to hold against my geared guildies who are coming along to help gear me up( along with some other people's alts as well) I have the 969 rotation but it seems to fall out of sync and then i lose threat...
Again, thanks for posting!
Tumleren Oct 23rd 2009 7:43PM
Do you have 1 point in Imp. Judgement in the Ret tree? It should take your 10 sec judgement to 9, making it fit into the 969 rotation
Schadow Oct 24th 2009 6:11AM
Make 2 macros.
Macro 1 has a castsequence of Hammer of the Righteous and Shield of Rightousness. (the "6" abilities).
Macro 2 has a castsequence of Holy Shield, Consecrate, and Judgement of Wisdom/Light (the "9" abilities).
Now you don't have to worry about your rotation other than alternate between the two macros.
Keep the individual skills hot-keyed so you can use them out of sequence or skip one, etc., but for tank-and-spank fights, the macros are great.
If you are new to tanking, then you need all the focus you can give to keeping track of what's going on in the fight. If you keybind those macros next to eachother, you can literally just mash away both keys and it will maintain a 969 rotation while you keep your eyes on the mobs you are tanking.
I don't recommend this for all situiations, obviously, but if you're just starting out it will help you dedicate more of your brain time to what you are doing instead of how you are doing it.
The other thing I found handy is to bind a Hand of Reckoning macro to a mouse button (target = mouseover), so I can pick up any strays with one click.
Teaspoon Oct 26th 2009 6:44AM
Talenting Judgement down to 9 seconds or shorter stops that Judgement part of the rotation from going out of sync, and then you just need to make the Consecration part work by NOT GLYPHING IT. The glyph brings it up to 10s and your rotation will have a consecrate-shaped hole in it 9s after the last time you cast it. If it's not up at that point, you have to either skip it (boo!), idle for a second to let it finish and thus miss out on a whole second of casting time (boo!) or completely fumble your rotation and get some DPS players killed when their dots outthreaten you (*sigh*).
Zamn10210 Oct 23rd 2009 7:36PM
Why would anybody not employed in the advertising industry use the word 'informercial'?
Karilyn Oct 23rd 2009 7:53PM
I've found that the best way to increase threat (And increase DPS, and increase HPS), is to simply press buttons faster.
In general, if you try to push buttons as quickly as possible, instead of wait until the global cooldown is over, or the cast time is finished... you'll cut off tiny bits of your latency. An extra 50ms, 100ms, 200ms.
For many people, it's enough to increase their TPS/DPS/HPS by 10-15%
...
More often than not, that will have a bigger impact than any other assistance you can give to a player... spec, gemming/enchanting, or rotation.
Randomize Oct 23rd 2009 11:05PM
A good addon that helps with this is Quartz, its casting bars show when it is ok to cast another spell due to server latency. It does not however help with GCD, but your advice to hit it earlier is sound.
Teaspoon Oct 26th 2009 6:57AM
This is true of cast bars and Quartz is one of a handful of mods that will show the chunk at the end of the castbar to tell you when it's (probably) time to recast. I've found I can get away with going a little ahead of when Quartz says it's OK to and squeeze out an extra couple of hundred DPS on an elemental shaman.
But the global cooldown is a different beast. When you click to cast a spell, the global cooldown starts on the client side immediately and your client will reject any other casts attempts until the GCD is over without trying to send them to the server so if you're spamming an instant-cast button in the hope that it will go off early, you're wearing the paint off your keys to no benefit.
There is one trick to speed up the recasting of a GCD ability and that's to know that the game sends your casts to the server when you RELEASE a key, not when you press it. If you pick your next ability and press it down while you're still on GCD you'll be able to let go and send it immediately when the GCD finishes, which reduces your time between casts by however long it takes you to push a button down. Yes it's a tiny delay, but everything in WoW from talents to gear to playstyle is about tiny numbers adding up and this technique WILL help you close in on the cap of 40 instant abilities per minute.
Teaspoon Oct 26th 2009 7:17AM
I should mention that it's likely that the server also performs it's own GCD checks to prevent people with hacked clients from being able to peel off GCD and dish out faster damage, and with latency being variable you're likely to have things fail to cast if you're too precise when it comes to recasting right as the GCD finishes.
Also, if you cast something that will be rejected by the server your client will still go into GCD mode and prevent you from sending any other casts. When the server rejects the cast, the client will cancel that GCD and allow you to send the next thing. This is why casters with high latency (hello, fellow Aus/NZ players!) are better off carefully choosing when to recast instead of spamming the button - if you have a 400ms ping and you try to recast 100ms early your client is going to go into lockdown and not send anything else for the next 400ms until the server comes back saying "You can't cast that, you're already casting something", which means that your next cast will be delayed by 300ms. That's actually a biggish chunk of a spell (15% of a 2s lightning bolt, for example) to be losing regularly and will probably cost you a couple of slots on the damage meters.
KronosIII Oct 23rd 2009 8:16PM
/facepalm
Whats the point of this? I guess you just need to fill today with something.........