Basic Positioning: Trash

So, now that I have power cables for my computer and my monitor...

Trash can be overlooked when you're first getting ready to take the plunge into heroics. How many people could honestly say that when a group to heroic Gun'drak dropped them an invite their minds immediately leapt to the horrors of tanking groups of trolls rather than dodging Poison Nova and being beaten on by Moorabi's mammoth form? There's (rightfully) a lot of focus on having enough defence to tank bosses and enough avoidance and health to survive the beatings they dish out when we're first preparing to tank heroics, but it's wise to remember that while trash may not drop emblems or require so much defence, it still makes up the bulk of the instance.

So, what should be considered when approaching a trash pack? For this post, I'm going to focus on positioning. There are several elements to keep in mind when moving mobs around:

1. How easy will it be to move them? Some mobs are casters or ranged and hence unwilling to run up to you like their more compliant melee counterparts. With Gag Order in our toolbox, prot warriors have two silences to hand to help them move casters around. While Heroic Throw makes things easiest as you don't even need to get too close to the caster to silence it, Shield Bash is perfectly viable, especially when teamed with one of your charge skills. Ranged mobs (spear throwers and hunters, usually) are somewhat more annoying: your best bet is to run right up to them and move them back slowly. Both forms of ranged mobs fall victim to the line of sight pull: attract the pack's attention and leg it behind a corner so they have to turn it to hit you.

2. Are there patrolling mobs in the area I need to avoid? Tanking in the path of a patrol is generally inadvisable. Figure out a safer place to hold your pack and shift them over there pronto.

3. Is this pack particularly close to another? If yes, you may want to pull your pack back a bit to avoid accidentally body-pulling the next. Even if you think you'll be fine tanking on the next group's doorstep do consider the fact that your meleers are going to want to attack the mobs from behind and may well blunder too close to the next group if you don't make sure they have space. A good method of pulling back is to use a ranged technique to grab their attention, run back a few paces and then charge when you have them roughly where you want them.

4. Do these mobs have frontal cone/cleave effects? You should be turning most mobs away from your group anyway, but if a mob has an attack liable to flatten non-tanks in front of them that's just an extra incentive to do it and do it fast. If you don't have room to turn them all away around, at least turn them to the side.

5. Can these mobs fear? While you may be able to break out of fear sharpish or even pre-emptively with Berserker Rage, most of your party members are unlikely to be capable of the same. Try to move fearing mobs away from other groups, and also consider the possibility that your healer might be feared around a corner and out of line of sight from you.

With all this considered, you should have a pretty good idea of where to tank your packs and how to move them as you like. Threat can be generated on the run with Thunderclap and Demoralising Shout, and if you're used to strafing you can even Cleave, Devastate, Revenge and Shield Slam over your shoulder. The king of multi-target tanking, however, is undoubtedly Shockwave.

Shockwave comes into positioning for two reasons: you need to position mobs for it to hit as many as possible and it makes positioning yourself relative to the mobs infinitely easier. As any tank is liable to know, mobs can be stupid sometimes: if you twitch to the side some of them may take this as an opportunity to sneak in behind you. Therefore I find it best to use Shockwave as soon as possible, preferably when the mobs are still running at me. For this to work, I need them all running at me from the same direction, so Shockwave tends to dictate which mob I want to charge into. As my screenshot key tends to lock up my game for a second, here are some out-of-instance-where-I-could-kill-people mobs as an example group:

If I charged a middle mob I'd have the rest collapse in from the sides. While I could handle this by taking a few steps backwards after charging, then Shockwaving, the simpler solution is to charge one of the mobs on the end. If I did this from my current angle I would have to then swing around to face the rest of them. The stun from Charge should keep my target in place but there's always a chance that I lag for a second or the mob resists Charge's stun, so it's somewhat safer to change the angle of my attack so that I don't need to move at all for every mob to be in Shockwave's cone area of effect. Something like this:


Once Shockwave is off you have a few seconds of group-wide stun in which to get to whichever side of the pack you want. It's the perfect instant to turn them away from your party.

Of course, most mob packs don't come in handy straight lines. Nevertheless, there's usually a "corner" mob that gives you a good position from which to hit the others, and if you need some initial threat while you move around a bit before Shockwaving there's always Thunderclap. Good places to practice this include the shoveltusk packs in Howling Fjord or the mammoths running around in the Storm Peaks. It's definitely worth experimenting with there, as the AoE-happy nature of WotLK DPS demands solid AoE tanking, which in turn demands a good grasp of Shockwave.