Pally Tank Raid boss threat issues.

Hello, I have a question and would like some insight into my problem a little bit.

So I have level 359 raid gear, all specced into as much Mastery as I could, while still having expertise softcap and a small amount of hit. Here is my gear: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/e ... ath/simple

My problem is this: The first minute or so of combat especially the opening 20 secs or so, I cant seem to keep aggro. I open with all my hardest hitting abilities to generate as much threat as I can, however it doesnt seem to be enough sometimes during the window I gave. Later in the battle its not a big deal, because of vengence stacking. During one of the pulls I lost threat, and the raid wiped. I was replaced as tank because of this. The raid leader and myself had a conversation and I told him everything ive been reading says I should spec into mastery and not hit, and dps should wait 5 secs or more until I have a strong threat lead. He said, the dps cant wait that long because they need as much uptime on the boss as possible, and that hunter misdirects and rogues tricks of the trade should be enough for me, and that I should consider speccing into hit or strength rather than mastery. This however goes contrary to all the advice I have read. Am I missing something, or can someone give me some advice on this situation please? Thanks you.

death123 wrote:I open with all my hardest hitting abilities to generate as much threat as I can, however it doesnt seem to be enough sometimes during the window I gave.

I would start here. What exactly is your opening? Are you getting 3 HoPo for an Inquisition, then going to rotation? Or something else?

Devil is in the details, we'd need the details to see what's up.

I pop devine plea, then wings, inquistion, then AS, then cs, judgement, cs, consecrate, cs then SoTR.

death123 wrote:I pop devine plea, then wings, inquistion, then AS, then cs, judgement, cs, consecrate, cs then SoTR.

And you have MD, and ToT? Sounds a bit odd, the only thing I would suggest is swapping the AS and the Judgement. Judgement will net you two stacks of censure, one from Judgement and one from JotJ. The only other thing would be if the DPS out gear you by a fair bit or are just being careless.

I am in a 10 man guild, with just a hunter. My opening threat is much better than our Bear's, although occasionally our Frost DK or Feral kitty will get a little close. I just pop HoSalv on whichever is higher and it isn't an issue after that.

EDIT: In my gear I have 0 hit, and 26 expertise (10 from GoSoT, and 3 from Human Racial).

death123 wrote:I pop devine plea, then wings, inquistion, then AS, then cs, judgement, cs, consecrate, cs then SoTR.

I don't think it's right to point all blame on a tank and have them respec to account for DPS pulling agro....but hey that's just me. It's a stupid decision. I'm sure the raid leaders "think" that those 5 seconds of DPS are "make it or break it" but in 99.9% of all cases it's simply not.

Since it sounds like you're getting tricks one thing you can change right off the bat is to use Wings right after the tricks is gone (so ~30 seconds after the pull). There are a bajillion different ways to start off a rotation on the pull, yours seems fine. I'm sure people will suggest other changes but to be honest they aren't going to make a substantial enough difference. If people are pulling agro the exact moment that tricks falls off, even my suggestion won't make a difference. There's little else you can do except to ask them to watch it. Which you've apparently tried but the raid leader still blames you.

Another thing (which I do when DPS really forces me to) is to make sure I just stand in one spot until I get a couple good whacks in before finally positioning the boss. In my raids, on a fight like Atramedes for example, the DPS is going buckwild on the pull while I'm no where near melee range trying to run the boss into position. It annoys the crap out of me but I do what I can do. In other words, make sure you make good use of those tricks. If you're spending most of your time with tricks up trying to maneuver the boss then you're losing out of a good chunk of important threat.

Keep working at it, and showing the raid leader that you're making changes and doing what you can. Hopefully that's enough to keep him/her happy. They probably have a slightly different idea about what's "normal" than yourself.

Gab wrote:

death123 wrote:I pop devine plea, then wings, inquistion, then AS, then cs, judgement, cs, consecrate, cs then SoTR.

And you have MD, and ToT? Sounds a bit odd, the only thing I would suggest is swapping the AS and the Judgement. Judgement will net you two stacks of censure, one from Judgement and one from JotJ. The only other thing would be if the DPS out gear you by a fair bit or are just being careless.

I am in a 10 man guild, with just a hunter. My opening threat is much better than our Bear's, although occasionally our Frost DK or Feral kitty will get a little close. I just pop HoSalv on whichever is higher and it isn't an issue after that.

EDIT: In my gear I have 0 hit, and 26 expertise (10 from GoSoT, and 3 from Human Racial).

What the real issue here is, the hit%. Yes, it would be quiet odd if I were to do my rotation and hit every single attack and lose aggro, but when I miss one or two attacks in my rotation i fall behind, and more importantly dont generate holy points. Its not so much on my rotation.

I am positively livid when it comes to my DPS peeling off me in the first 5 seconds of the fight. I have yelled at them and tried to get it through their skulls that if they peel off me it's their own damn fault. Only one person ever apologized for peeling off our MT during ANY of our fights and as soon as he did the boss was taunted and he waited about 5 seconds before continuing his rotation. The other DPS just stands there in complete bemusement, thinking that the tank will just take the boss back with zero vengeance and a Vigilance on ME so no taunt return is ever up. I've tried calmly explaining to them that the tank needs to at least hit the boss a few times before they use trinkets and cooldowns to nuke the damn thing but they refuse to listen. I've tried yelling at them to stop dps entirely to no avail, they continue to use all their abilities and burn the boss for their World of Logs records (which I might add, only ONE of our members gets really good rankings and he NEVER pulls threat cause he isn't a tunnel visioning numbskull). As soon as I get a few solid hits in and my rotation is in full swing no-one can peel the boss from me, this goes for our warrior MT as well. Al'akir is one of my least favourite encounters to tank because I've got no range on the dps behind him to Salv them or if things turn really south I can't use Righteous Defense / Hand of Reckoning spam. People pre casting before either of the tanks has hit the boss once. It's starting to get on my nerves where people are treating a raid encounter like a target dummy and just going for big numbers.

I totally agree on Atramedes, I ranged pull with Exorcism -> Judgement -> AS -> Consecrate (just so he's got some extra damage while he's running to me). I'm running back to position him when all of a sudden I see the "Losing Threat" above his head and take a look around, half the DPS are just blatantly going to town on him when I've maybe hit him 4-5 times with ranged abilities and zero vengeance when he's not even anywhere near me. Every time this happens and they don't seem to care that the boss turns to them and hits them once, we've had people do it multiple times on a single night doing Nef. They peel and we all get shadowflamed and then if we wipe they do the same thing over and over... Getting so fed up with some peoples lack of concentration for not getting themselves and the raid killed.

Good thing I found a fantastic 2's partner to blow off some steam in arena's with!

i know someone already mentioned something along these lines but ive found that if you time wings perfectly after tricks fades, about 12 seconds into the fight, it significantly helps threat. using wings on the pull becomes a waste as stated before since it does not stack with tricks, however if you use it too late it obviously increases threat but you dont really need that help once vengeance is stacking. i tank adds on maloriak HM for our guild and if i use wings just a few seconds too late i notice a huge difference with threat.

basically try using wings immediately after tricks for the most benefit from the threat bonus. hope this helps

Pre pot with a golemblood potion this will help as well....I typically run around 2% hit and 18-20 expertise and have never really had an issue, thats counting chogall and atramedes while I pull them to the back of the room with DPS laying into them. If you seeing losing threat over his head, at that point it's your warning you are going to need to taunt in a second, in most cases dps will still pull at that point while you are moving a boss due to dots....while I agree that if someone is constantly ripping they need to pay more attention, but expecting them to stand still and do nothing is unrealistic.

death123 wrote:The raid leader and myself had a conversation and I told him everything ive been reading says I should spec into mastery and not hit, and dps should wait 5 secs or more until I have a strong threat lead. He said, the dps cant wait that long because they need as much uptime on the boss as possible

I don't buy it. If you're not hitting the berserk timer this is a horribly stupid reason. Proper execution and NOT DYING is way more important than getting an extra 5 seconds up front from the dps. It sounds like your raid leader is a dps.

-- I also like to point out to my guildies that the growing 10% threshold means that a lucky crit makes them STOP when they're 5 seconds in, but doesn't make them stop when they're 15-20 seconds in. I.e. opening up so early that you're riding the tank either kills you or makes you stutter/stop your dps anyway, i.e. is useless if you're not butting up against a berserk timer.

-- That said, one exorcism up front is kinda handy for bonus damage that otherwise wouldn't be there... and I'm not convinced that we're especially competitive for opening burst threat. If we don't get SD to proc on our first judge, I don't think we actually have much TPS advantage against dps until vengeance is above 50% or more.

Unless you really are tight on time, DPS can wait 5 seconds. You are actually interacting with the boss instead of just throwing something at it or slicing some chunks off.

Could be that something goes wrong, unlucky string of misses etc. Seems to help that the guild leader is a tank. No one ever complained about threat or that it´s the tanks fault if he lost aggro in the opening pull because of DPS.

exiledknight wrote:....while I agree that if someone is constantly ripping they need to pay more attention, but expecting them to stand still and do nothing is unrealistic.

I expect that. Actually I expect them to pay attention and stop the rotation tunnel vision. IMO DPS doesn´t consist of pushing the right buttons in sequence, only.

DPS should also take care when not to DPS, when to use these rarely used abilities you got out of your spell book (nope they aren´t pvp only) or when to run.

As the next piece of this puzzle, I would ask: does it seem to be certain classes pulling off of you? E.g., Arms/Fury Warriors or Boomkin, something along those lines.

Certain classes do not have aggro dumps, and I find they can sometimes push aggro depending on the fight.

I have one DPS Warrior in particular that I'm trying to train to watch aggro meters. He gets one HoS per fight. After that, he's on his own, and if he dies, well ... His deaths have kind of become an injoke for our guild. "WTF? The boss is dead and X is still alive? What did we do wrong?"

Some classes have no dumps, and no threat reducing talents. These classes really need to take personal responsibility for their threat.

You would think that DPS classes would have learnt since cata came out that they just cant unload on a boss within the first nanosecond.

Maybe they need to tank the boss for a bit?

But IMHO I wish blizzard would get rid of Vengeance. Such a Kludgey solution.

Some people are just better than others. We have a top world ranking DPS boomkin in our guild (meaning, her DPS is above and beyond what a guild of our progression level would expect).

SHE ALMOST NEVER PULLS AGRO. Certainly not at the start of the fight. And if she senses she'll be in trouble she asks for a Salv in vent WAY early before it'll be an issue, which gives plenty of time.

Then we have a DPS warrior who (until recently) was just REALLY bad about it. Never seemed to watch Omen I guess.

Finally, we have some mages who occasionally get a lucky streak on the pull and I see their threat break the roof on Omen. But I never worry about them because they always seem to manage it on their own somehow.

DPS that consistently pull agro are doing it wrong, unless the tank is the one who consistently has threat issues.

If the raid leader wants better threat in the first few seconds then provide it for them.

Change a few bits of gear around / reforge some avoidance / use elixirs and food to achieve a decent amount of hit rating. Carrying 8% hit rating makes a massive difference to threat generation.

This will put more pressure on your healers.
If you live (consistently), have fun - you're doing excellent threat and more damage.
If you die, explain that it's a result of gearing for threat to compensate for dps not being able to keep it in their pants for a few seconds. The healers may well support you in this now

We tried our first raid last night (Magmaw). How well it went is a topic for another forum. But... with regard to threat, the highest DPS did about 13k and stayed around 55-60% of my threat. And I was using holy power on WoG the whole time (half on myself, half on the mages who were getting torn to pieces in the field and on the parasites). And I gear as my guides recommend - no nod given to threat at all apart from Seal choice.

So for me at least, the "standard" recommendations seem to work fine. If DPS gear scales faster than my gear, then we'll see if I have a problem.

Digren wrote:We tried our first raid last night (Magmaw). How well it went is a topic for another forum. But... with regard to threat, the highest DPS did about 13k and stayed around 55-60% of my threat. And I was using holy power on WoG the whole time (half on myself, half on the mages who were getting torn to pieces in the field and on the parasites). And I gear as my guides recommend - no nod given to threat at all apart from Seal choice.

So for me at least, the "standard" recommendations seem to work fine. If DPS gear scales faster than my gear, then we'll see if I have a problem.

Yeah it'll change. They'll start doing 20k+ single target, hitting spikes of 30k+ when prepotted and with lucky streaks (heroics)

Digren wrote:We tried our first raid last night (Magmaw). How well it went is a topic for another forum. But... with regard to threat, the highest DPS did about 13k and stayed around 55-60% of my threat. And I was using holy power on WoG the whole time (half on myself, half on the mages who were getting torn to pieces in the field and on the parasites). And I gear as my guides recommend - no nod given to threat at all apart from Seal choice.

So for me at least, the "standard" recommendations seem to work fine. If DPS gear scales faster than my gear, then we'll see if I have a problem.

I'm not going to go back over the long discussion we had about the 'over gearing content and therefore gearing for threat' stage

However, there are some key issues here.

1. Threat when you have it is fine. This is more about the first 30 seconds of a fight.

2. We have to gear to our raid setup which means sometimes compensating for inadequacies and sometimes in allowing excellence (in healing or dps).

3. The raid leader has to be in charge. Like any team, you advance your argument then accept the decision. If the decision here is to let dps go all out right at the start then all you can do is gear for it. Alternatively you can simply let the dps tank it, die and wipe again which is probably a less effective response. Replacing the raid leader may not be an option.

A related but not directly relevant point is regarding hit rating - sometimes we need to gear for this anyway. For example, if you run in 10 man, you may need to provide reliable interrupts with Nefarian being the best example. With 3 interrupts required for phase 2, and failure usually resulting in a wipe you need enough hit to avoid missing a level 85 mob if you don't have the required raid setup.

If you can successfully kill Nef with 5% or more hit rating, then you need to ask yourself whether or not you want to go back to 0-2% hit for general tanking duties.

General guidelines are great, but we need to make sure it doesn't stop us making intelligent decisions about how they relate to our particular, diverse situations.

Dem wrote:1. Threat when you have it is fine. This is more about the first 30 seconds of a fight.

General guidelines are great, but we need to make sure it doesn't stop us making intelligent decisions about how they relate to our particular, diverse situations.

Sure. And yet some raid leaders make the wrong decisions. And sometimes it's not worth accepting them.

Note that I was even using the first batch of Holy Power for WoG. At least for us right now it just didn't matter. Though do note that I lead with a Tazik as well as everything else standard that the rest of you do.

Bad decision is bad decision and the raid leader is not omniscient and knows everything about every role.

OK in a raid you probably should just accept the decision. If everyone is doing what he wants during raid time or wants to argue, chaos follows. Argue later and he should listen. As a raid lead you either have to know something or you should listen to the experts, aka the player in question. If it turns out, he is a moron, get rid of him. Otherwise you just turn into an idiot lieutenant. Just because you have a rank doesn´t turn yo into a god. People accept and respect raid leaders that are willing to listen and admit a mistake or misjudgement. The ability to say "I was wrong" makes you into a leader people respect and talk to, just spewing BS because you are the boss turns you into a moron, no one listens to.

And I don´t understand why everything has to obey DPS wishes. Neither tanks or healers are babysitters for DPS.

Agree with all that and it's probably a discussion for another thread but you only have so many options.

Don't raid.
Convince the raid leader of the real issue - doesn't always work.
Work with/on the dps to get them to modify their behaviour - depends on how much time and effort you need to put in.
Replace the raid leader - depends on their standing in the guild and how much time and effort you need to put in to build the alliances necessary to make it happen.
Change guild - depends on your needs and whether you have friends in the guild etc.
Gear/Act to compensate for poor decision making - just one of the options but a valid one.

I actually had this issue last night. It wasn't just me either. Two bears and myself tanking H-Chimaeron were getting our aggro ripped from under us by two rogues, a hunter, a warrior, a warlock and three mages (over the span of 2-3 attempts). After yelling at the dps to invis, soulshatter, vanish etc, I felt the need to ask if they even had Omen or a threat meter or if they just felt the fight was too boring and they wanted a little excitement.

Low and behold, I had to tell the rogues to stop circle jerking it with their ToT to each other at the beginning of the fight. If the boss really has to face them before they realize they need to vanish, I think they are watching recount too much.

Threat has really started to become a problem since our guild stepped into Heroic raids. It's hard to tell whether the problem is low tank threat or ret pallies having too much front load burst though. I suspect it's a bit of both as I rarely find any problems myself if I end up tanking. (we don't have another ret)

Anakhimel wrote:I actually had this issue last night. It wasn't just me either. Two bears and myself tanking H-Chimaeron were getting our aggro ripped from under us by two rogues, a hunter, a warrior, a warlock and three mages (over the span of 2-3 attempts).

Interestingly, Chimaeron is actually one of those fights where I had the least threat problem. It may have something to do with the static nature of the fight, but I regularly hit 42k+ 10 seconds into a pull and never had to stop for the fear of threat or pulling aggro. I don't even have to use my own salv every time either.