Please help, I can't hold aggro in heroics

I'm looking for any thoughts or suggestions.

This is my gear http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/k ... eus/simple

We haven't had any success in raids so no raiding gear at all for me. I've read the guides here but it's all focussed on raiding and in that environment you have a lot more vengeance. I'm set up and geared for survival but my problem is pretty much every pull a decently geared dps will pull something off me and I end up spending the rest of the pull taunting and trying to avoid having dps or healers die. It is pretty much the least fun I've had in 5 years of WoW (this from someone who has the insane title).

I'm doing the rotation as best I can (within my skill level) but it just isn't enough particularly early in a pull. Should I drop survival talents for threat talents? SHould I drop my avoidance for more expertise/hit?

Any suggestions for a spec or gear set up for heroics that could help out?

Your armory profile shows you in prot spec with ret gear on.

bjanssen wrote:I've read the guides here but it's all focussed on raiding

Not all of it. My stage 1-3 guides are for dungeon content. Yappo's guide is exclusively for non-raiders. My item enhancement guide and Petrus' gear list can be used by anybody as well.

Swarlie wrote:Your armory profile shows you in prot spec with ret gear on.

Doh. Will change it at lunch time.

In general, I think there is nothing wrong with being expertise and hit capped in 5 mans. From your ret gear, it looks like you will be around 346 item level or higher, so in some sense you outgear heroics and are instead ready to raid. Survival in 5 mans should not be a big issue for you. Hence tweaking your gear for hit and expertise should not jeopardise your runs. I suspect you will lose about 5-10% block, which is not the end of the world.

It is true that people can run 5 mans with no expertise nor hit quite comfortably. So re-gearing is probably not necessary. But it is also true that getting capped will help your threat quite a bit. (Note that the caps are lower for 5 mans than for raids - check that you won't miss a level 87 mob and go for 24 expertise.) Try it and see. It will mainly be a matter of changing trinkets, maybe the weapon and a few items. You should not need to regem or reforge your survival gear.

Your spec looks fine (I would get pursuit of justice, but that's for utility not threat).

While I suspect the problem is not gear, it's hard to know what the problem is without more detail. A few pointers:

- (1) Mark a skull and an X. If you are the dps and both focussing on the skull, it will be hard for them to grab him off you.
- (2) Use CC: the fewer mobs active at anyone time, the less problem you will have locking them down.
- (3) If CC is not an option (impatient puggers), then adopt the opposite play style - be very aggressive. Pop divine plea, inqusition, judge skull, running in with avenger shield and hotr to double tap a trio. Make the dps play catch up and pray your healer can keep you up (do keep an eye on their mana bar before pulling!).
- (4) Use the threatplates add-on to provide better information on which mobs you have aggro on. You may be able to take pre-emptive action before they go awol.
- (5) If you are running with guild mates, make sure they have omen and look at it. I have a guildie who keep apologising for pulling aggro: it's awkward, as he's almost always blameless, but it's a healthy attitude for dps, especially if you as a guild are trying to start raiding.

Go shop extra copies of the reputation gear you already have. Configure those copies for threat.

At your gear-level survival shouldn't be a major concern in heroics, but I'd still advice to have one survival-set and one threat-set in you bags so that you can swap back to the survival one for those pulls you really dislike.

Btw, socket those gloves

Thanks for the tips. My prot gear is on now. You're right I probably can lose avoidance. I'll try seeing if hit capping and upping expertise works.

I usually mark more when I'm Pugging than on guild runs and thinking about it it's mostly guild runs that are really bad. Maybe they are also expecting more of me. My biggest problem is a Boomkin guildmate who happens to be my wife and playing right next to me, sometimes it's not possible to criticize a guildy's play style without buying more trouble.

I hadn't thought of buying extra copies of rep gear - that could help a lot.

It sounds like just marking a skull and a cross on trash in guild runs may solve your problem. I'd be surprised if people can pull aggro off your main target and even if they do, if it is everyone's main target, trash will die fast enough so that it does not cause problems. Your gear is good and even as it is now, should not be causing threat problems. Some classes can just rip aggro quite easily if they play fast and loose - boomkin used to be in that group iirc, maybe they still are. If the problem is bosses, asking them to hold fire for a few seconds (inc delaying cool downs) would do the trick.

BTW: with the Red Rock Band, don't reforge mastery to parry. Mastery is better than parry and dodge for both damage reduction and combat table coverage. Likewise with the second trinket, reforge some parry to mastery.

My main is a mage, which I played exclusively for many years. I can say that DPSers these days are so unskilled, it angers me occasionally. One of the primary goals of a dps is not to pull threat from the tank. If dps pulls threat, it's their fault (usually). If a healer pulls threat, its the tank's fault (usually).

On my fully raid geared mage, I will not pull threat off a tank in all greens because I watch Omen, I'm not stupid, and I don't feel like getting killed. That being said, I do think that marking the kill target would help with unskilled PUGs (although they are also the ones most likely not to be attacking the kill target... sigh).

If your talking about aoe tanking then yes its hard to hold threat especially if you have 3 dps attacking different targets and they are all warriors!

Remember to use Inquisition especially just before a pull (DP + Inq) use all your aoe stuff and keep spamming it while keeping up your judgement for mana. In the end if a dps really wants aggro on something you ain't tanking he will get it, but then you can just RD it back and then take his target to build a bit more threat on it.

As someone said if the DPS is high enough for them to pull from you, then the mob will be dead pretty fast anyway.