Tanking in mythic plus often scares players away
from even trying. Not only are you responsible for keeping yourself alive, but you have to
manage the route, take into account the team you're playing with, the affixes, the dungeon,
and you're the one everyone will look to for answers mid keystone giving you no opportunity
to learn for yourself. This guide will aim to be these important moments for you to learn how
to manage basic tanking as well as all the tank responsibilites and I promise you'll end this
video more confident and more informed about tanking any level of mythic plus. Before we
get into it, here's an important disclaimer, this video was made pre-dragonflight release but
everything in this video is fundamental meaning it won't matter when you're watching this, it will
always be relevant. Any addons or weakauras I mention in this video, if they ever change or
are updated by something better I will update those links in the description constantly so
you don't have to worry about that either. The description might also be incredibly long so make
sure to check the top pinned comment as well for updated links and notes far in the future. With
that, let's begin. First you want to pick what tank you want to play. All tanks can do almost
any type of content. Not all tanks will tank the bleeding edge of keys but if you're not
literally on the top of the key leaderboards any tank will perform very well. Blizzard
has historically been bringing tanks closer and closer in balance and unless something
is bugged or goes catastrophically wrong, this trend should maintain, especially in the
long run. Here's a quick rundown on what each tank plays like but I wanna mention a few content
creators on screen who play some or all of the tank specs that you should watch to get an idea
for how each tank spec performs. There's lots of other amazing tank players to watch but these
are specifically the ones I personally watch and can recommend you watch as well. Now for the
rundown of how each tank spec feels to play. Remember that even if a tank is good in the meta,
if you do not enjoy it or don't understand it, you'll be better off picking something else, just
because something is at the top of tier lists, doesn't mean it's best for you the individual.
Blood DK feels like a case of don't get one shot, and use banked runic power to heal up via death
strikes. The more damage you take, the more you can heal. Blood will look very impressive on the
meters but is the spec that in my opinion has the most direct player control over whether or not
you live. A good Blood DK can live without major cooldowns in situations where a worse DK would
need those cooldowns. Vengeance DH has a similar snapshot healing style to blood death knight
but with more mobility, and with gaps in its mitigation which requires preparation and quick
thinking. The resource management isn't as intense as DK, as it relies a lot on cooldowns as well.
It feels kinda similar to blood overall but has safety nets such as a very powerful cheat death,
so it ends up being more forgiving. Brewmaster Monk has built in mitigation because they stagger
most damage, spreading it out over many seconds, while leaning on absorbs as well as tools they
use to cleanse their stagger, effectively deleting incoming damage before it even happens, they also
have high mobility, and feels easy at first but is very hard to master and is also decently APM
intensive. Prot Warrior is a very fast tank, in my opinion it's the highest APM tank at the moment,
it also requires active management of mitigation, nearly nothing is passive but the cooldowns you
have access to are very strong. Overally prot feels like a very balanced tank playstyle that
has an equal reliance on cooldowns as well as a blisteringly fast rotation. Probably the most
difficult tank at first, but it's my personal favourite tank spec to play when the tuning is
right. Very very high APM tho. Protection Paladin, is similar to warrior in that you have a shield
and blocking is a core part of your class, paladin also requires active management of
cooldowns but not as much as warrior, and trades a lot of warrior's mobility for a ton of healing
and massive external immunities and cooldowns to help the party. Prot's defensive gameplay also
shares a lot with its damage rotation so you will passively do decent damage but mistakes are
heavily punished as without your defensive buffs, or if you move out of your consecration, you are
very very squishy. Bear Druid presents a heavy cooldown reliant spec, the core of the spec is
a simplisitc rotation but that does not mean its necessarily easy all the time. The defensive
cooldowns present a balance of mitigation, healing and absorbs. But being a cooldown reliant
class means its especially punishing on mistakes but it's not a case of you mess up and you die,
it's moreso a case of you misuse cooldowns then you come to a dangerous pack without the cooldowns
you need to survive. And then you die. Now this video isn't gonna go over every tank rotation in
detail, that's pretty much as indepth as i will pick apart each spec. I'll have anecdotes on them
all here and there, but i'm expecting you from this point to know what your spells do and have
a general talent build and legendaries or tier if those things exist when you're watching this. You
just wanna have the basic tools necessary but you do not need a lot of item level. It's incredibly
surprising how much a tank can be undergeared comparative to the content it's trying to do. Make
sure to reference those tank players I mentioned if you feel confused or are stuck just choosing
a spec. And of course feel free to come back to this video for a referesher at any time. Now
that you've picked a tank. You need to practice, it's important for your effectiveness as a tank,
and also it'll make it more fun later on if you practice how to be tanky without a group to bail
you out before you die. Go into content that is higher than you're geared for. So for example
if your tank is around heroic dungeon gear, you're going into a mythic 0 dungeon. However if
you have a higher keystone that's perfect, you're gonna be breaking your key a lot but it'll be
worth it i promise. Now this exercise is exactly what I do every time I roll a new tank alt and in
my opinion it's the fastest way to get comfortable with tanking. This'll take you about 30-45 minutes
but feel free to stay on this stage for as long as it takes because each person learns at a different
pace. Go into a dungeon at the difficulty that you chose, or keystone level you chose and your
goal is to find a pack of mobs that can kill you but doesn't have any overly complicated mechanics
that was clearly made for 5 people. I'll update the description with the current best dungeons
for this as time goes on. Now that you're in the dungeon or key, pull the first pack of mobs and
don't press any buttons. Just walk into them. If you live for more than 10 seconds, the content
you're doing is way too easy for your gear, so bump it up a difficulty level if you can. If
you're in a keystone and that's all you got then we'll have to work with that. Pay attention to
how fast you die, and write it down. That's how fast you'll die if you freeze up and panic mid
pull in an actual M+. Now pull that pack again, and only use abilites that have a cooldown of
under a minute. So remove any abilities on your bar that is a one minute cooldown or longer.
Chances are the first few times you do this on a new tank you won't live much longer than when
you didn't press any buttons at all. The goal is to keep trying this until you feel like you're
living as long as you possibly can with only using short cooldown abilities. It'll take a few tries.
The reason for only using short cooldowns is because these are the things you are going to have
available to you at every pull in every dungeon. A big mistake I see new tanks doing is over reliance
on their massive cooldowns to the point where once they mess up and don't have a cooldown available
they just panic and die. Once you get caught in a loop of just relying on your biggest cooldowns,
that's a really really hard habit to break and it leads to a lot of unfun frustration. Every time
you die doing this, open up deatils and switch to the Damage Taken by Spell section to see a
breakdown of what types of things are dealing the most damage to you, and also open up the
deaths log to see what is actually doing the killing blows. It's really important that you are
using the proper types of rotational abilities to defend against that type of damage you're taking.
For example if you're dying to magic casts, spamming iron fur as bear, shield block as prot
warrior or shield of the righteous as prot pala, or demon spikes as vengeance may not be your
best options. When paired with some talents things like blocking as paladin or warrior may
help spells. But if you're pressing an ability that gives you armor or physical block chance
against a hard hitting spell, it isn't helping at all. Similarly, pressing spell reflect as
warrior, or anti magic shield as blood dk if you're dying to melees is literally not doing
anything. Just pay close attention to tooltips, in the context of how your specific tank spec
works and make sure you're using the correct rotational defensives for the situation. Damage
Taken by Spell window is also really nice just to have open when you're tanking new dungeons.
Now that you've probably died like 20 times, ideally living longer and longer each time. If
youve somehow been able to kill the pack, i think you might be overgeared for whatever dungeon
level this is. But the next step is to perform as you were before on the same pack except now you
can use all your cooldowns. MOST tanks, depending on the current tuning, your gear, and what
level of dungeon you're doing, and the affixes, should be able to live indefinitely. Even tanks
that do not have or aren't known for self-healing do have ways to make their effective health
massive and/or using absorbs or moments of heavy damage reductions to clawback hp. Specs like blood
dk, prot paladin or vengeance should absolutely be able to live indefinitely. You can pull bosses if
you get to them, but most bosses are not designed to be just soloable and at that point you'll live
almost certainly but you won't really learn much soloing a single target boss over 10 minutes. Just
keep playing that pack or any similar packs nearby and feel free to run out and reset the dungeon or
drop your key level accordingly. Just make your goal living longer and longer each time, until
you get to the point that you are living until all your cooldowns come back up a 2nd time. What
makes this entire thing so effective is that you have no safety net, no dps or healer to fill gaps
in mistakes, but also there's no one else to see you die over and over. After you feel super
confident in whatever dungeon you chose to do this - and remember I'll keep a running list of
dungeons that I think are really good for this in the description. Your next play should be go into
that same dungeon or whichever dungeon you feel the most comfortable in, and run it with a group,
pug or queue in to one. If you're not comfortable spend more time in the dungeon by yourself until
you are, and again remeber to reference or watch the players I mentioned earlier, they all have
lots of detailed tank guides per class and lots of vods and videos to see what they're doing
in every dungeon. Then try to apply what you see there in your own solo adventure. If you're
like me, you probably just spent an hour or two in that dungeon. Now that you've mastered your
tank's basic rotation and cooldowns, you need to understand how to pull mobs in a dungeon and how
to manage threat. Let's talk about what you do NOT do when pulling packs. Do not pull every pack
by hitting one mob then hiding behind something, that is some 2008 style of tanking and not
only will your healer get agro 90% of the time, but it's super annoying and frustrating as a
DPS player when there's a 20 second wait period for the pack to run to the tank each pull. Not to
mention if there are ranged mobs in the pack, the entire group will have to LoS behind something to
get them to run to you, further delaying the start of the pull. There are of course some situations
you'll need to pull some mobs back, like when the pack is in a boss room with a patrolling boss,
you'll definitely need to pull that back, and that's best done by throwing a couple abilities
and hitting them for a couple seconds then running back while throwing out any interrupts
or silences your spec has access to. This way you have a decent buffer of threat on the mobs so that
they don't just start massacring the team on their way back. Whenever you're running into a pack
that does not need pulling back, which is nearly every single pack in the entire game. Your goal is
to run INTO the pack, not to the side, not behind them. But you want to enter the pack, so you're
in range of all the mobs and they're in range of your interrupts and basic abilities, this ensures
that you can start damaging the mobs as fast as possible so that when your DPS rips in after
a second or two, you have the best chances of not losing agro. This'll be especially important
for mobs that are casting since they have a much higher inclination to start casting on the healer
since they may not be one of the first mobs you damage going into a pack, which is why it's super
important to have them in range of your interrupt. And your goal should be to pull the melee mobs on
top of the range mobs, that's just simply the best way of grouping up a pack. The melee mobs will
follow you around but if you don't have enough kicks the range mobs will stand outstide of the
clump, so just always aim to bring the melee mobs on top of ranged archers or casters. All tanks
have a toool to make grouping much easier, things like prot paladin shield silence, DK grips, Demon
hunter silence sigil, bear typhoon vortex, warrior spear of bastion/challenging shout are extremely
helpful in grouping up the pull. Then at any point in the pack if you're losing agro, you'll want to
pay attention to that and have your taunts ready. As soon as you lose agro on something you should
be able to click it and taunt so that no one dies. Having nameplates that change colour or warn you
when you're losing agro makes this a lot easier. If you're a tank with large up front burst damage,
like prot paladin's divine toll or brewmasters and their kegs, or vengeance with sigils and fel
dev, you may save taunt for when you're losing agro. But some tanks - like when this video is
made - blood DK is one of them that will need to use death grip and taunt to maintain agro at the
very start of the pull but once their damage and diseases ramp up they can hold agro until the
end of the pull. Also always pull bosses and singular minibosses with taunt, if the boss hits
a DPS or a Healer it's almost always going to one shot them so you absolutely cannot lose agro on
a boss. And finally, if the boss is rooted in the ground there is most definitely going to be a
mechanic where the boss nukes the group if there is no tank in range. So be very careful when
fighting bosses for the first time that don't freely move around or follow you. Alrighty so
we've covered mastering your rotation and managing agro, now on to the tools you need when tanking
mythic plus. Remember anything I mention will be linked in either the description or the pinned
comment. Firstly, of course make sure you have the updated versions of DBM or big wigs as well
as the current patch's dungeon weak aura pack. But there's some other things I think are really
crucial. Being able to place markers quickly is important. World markers have been in the game
for nearly 2 decades so even inexperienced players will know that a marker requires their attention.
I quickly drop markers on the location of pulls, so if I want to combine 3 packs together, I'll
drop some markers in the middle so players know to focus their attention there, and usually once they
see me pulling the packs back they immediately know that the markers mean the location of the
pull. However do not use markers using the marker bar in whatever boss addon you use. There's a much
easier way. In Details, the damage meter addon, click the cogwheel to open up the menu and go to
Auto Run Code, then make sure the dropdown tab says on initialization. Copy and paste this code
from this description and save it there. Then head to your macros and copy paste this in a macro
then reload your UI and you can drag that macro to a bind, join a group and test it out. You press
whatever key you bound it to then click and it'll drop a marker. Then you can do this multiple times
to drop more markers and it will rotate through them all. This means you just have to press one
singular keybind to drop many markers. The way this whole things works is basically details
is auto running that code when you log in, that creates a hidden button that drops markers.
Then the macro is enabling you to press that button. The reason for using Details is just to
run the code on log-in, otherwise you'd have to rerun that code in your chat every single time you
logged in or switched characters or reloaded your UI. Deatils is just the tool to simplify the
process. Now that you're able to place markers to let the team know whats going on, you need
to know if the team is ready for whatever it is you're pulling. For this we download the
addon omni CD. This addon is super simple, it'll add people's cooldowns to your party frames
so you can see what's available at any moment. I only have major dps cooldowns added as well as the
healer's external cooldowns as well as any major crowd control or utility buttons like monk leg
sweep or druid's typhoon vortex. My recommendation is to keep it simple, it's really easy to make
your omni CD super cluttered but like the rest of your UI you want to make it only show essential
information as if it shows too many things you'll just end up ignoring half of it. The last thing
you'll want is optional but it'll help. No matter what season or patch you're playing, there will
be Tank Frontal weak auras as well as Mythic Plus auto marker weak auras. You can always head to
wago.io and search for either "tank frontals" or "auto marker" and usually the most recently
updated one with a lot of downloads is the best. I'll try to keep these updated in the description
also but weakauras like these are updated VERY frequently so I don't make any promise that I'll
be able to keep up but i'll try. The Tank Frontal aura simply yells when there's something on the
tank, so it'll say watch cleave, watch frontal, basically just warning messages in say chat but
if you don't like the spam it's not necessary it just helps. The auto marker weak aura will simply
mark mobs in dungeons that have dangerous casts or things that need to be paid attention to, but it
does this automatically when you get into combat with the pack which means one less thing for you
to worry about. To round out the UI section, just make sure you update your addons and weakauras
very frequently. Having outdated weakauras that are making false callouts are really bad. So
if you can't keep things up to date it's best just to not use them. Before I move on to the final
part of the guide, which is the most important, let's quickly talk about routes and how you
decide what to pull in a dungeon. The best way to do this in my opinion, is to watch better tanks.
Remember those tank players I mentioned earlier, just go watch them play a dungeon and see their
route and try to copy it as long as it's not super complicated.The other way is to browse the
website keystone.guru click the dungeon you want, and then find the popular runs for the current
week's dungeon affixes. Then you can open it up and browse and see what they do. The final way
is to simply go to raider.io or wowhead and use their weekly routes. My only problem with this
and this also applies to running any routes, is blindly running a route is kinda pointless.
You need to understand why the routes combine certain packs, why their skip certain packs, and
what pathing they take and this knowledge really just comes from playing the game. So my advice
is to try to think during the dungeon why is the route doing this, and if a route does not combine
2 packs that are next to each other, try combining the pulls one day and see what that route was
trying to avoid or what's dangerous about it. A lot of the time, popular or weekly routes are
very catchall, meaning they're to make what the author subjectively thought was the easiest and
most simple route for most group comps. However, that may not be the easiest or simplest for
your group, so just something to always take into consideration. The final part of this
guide is the most important and by far the hardest to teach. The tank role in mythic plus
is way more than just tanking mobs and not dying. You're responsible for the pacing of
the dungeon, how large the pulls are as well as making sure the group has an understanding
of where you're going and what you're doing. If you're not prepared to openly communicate what
you're doing with the team then you won't have fun tanking and you'll also be making everyone
else have less fun. And at the end of the day we're playing games to have fun. Make sure your
group is always updated with what you're doing, let them know you're pulling back, let them
know you're doing a small pull now then a big pull later, but most importantly treat mythic
plus like a blameless game. Sometimes you will encounter toxic players and that's just the way
things work on the internet and it's not your job to be a psychologist for anyone mid key so
in those situations it is best to quickly move forward and get out of the dungeon as fast as
possible. However it's important to make sure that from someone else's perspective you're
not the toxic tank. If someone dies to agro, just type care agro or something simple,
there's no use flaming someone for Blizzard's archaic threat and agro system. Even if you
mess up and die, just release and run back, or accept a quick battle rez. It's much better to
get up and keep running than to start frantically apologizing in party chat. Similarly if mechanics
are failed but without any instruction, there's just absolutely no grounds to say anything in chat
except new instructions about what should be done. If you go into a pull with an absolute group wide
one-shot cast, and no one says anything pre-pull, then no-one interrupts and you wipe, there's no
one to blame at all. You can't expect every single player you pug with to know everything about every
mob. Now if you typed kick that cast and the name of the cast prior to the pull and no one kicks
it, well first of all why didn't you kick it, but if you couldn't then just reinforce with
the group that if that cast isn't kicked, the dungeon simply can't be completed. Mythic plus is
a small group size, you're just there with 4 other people, so destabilizing just one person could
completely ruin the entire run and end up with no one having any fun at all. Also it's ok to stray
from your route or plan, in certain situations. Like let's say you wanted to combine 2 packs,
but after you pulled the first pack, the DPS ripped all of their cooldowns, and because you're
running omni CD, you'd know that. It's ok to just stop and kill this pack, it's obviously slower for
the dungeon but sometimes people make mistakes and the tank adjusting to those mistakes helps smooth
the dungeon out a lot. You're not expected to be able to cover everyone's mistakes, but it's just
a good thing to keep in mind. And as the tank, people will listen to you, 9 times out of 10.
So if anything cringe is happening within the group or in comms. I guarantee you as the tank if
you say something, the situation will get better. Dungeons can be completed without a dps, or with
bad dps, they can be completed without a healer or with an off-healing dps. But dungeons cannot
be completed without a tank and people know that, so your hidden job as tank is to be the voice
of reason. If you're super short tempered or generally annoyed with people, I really don't
think you'll enjoy tanking cuz while the tank does have good control in carrying a dungeon, there are
things you are completely helpless with as tank, and that can be a trigger for heavy frustration.
But that about sums it up, hopefully this video was a good comprehensive introduction for you
to start getting into tanking. If you haven't subscribed yet, let me know what I did wrong and
I'll try to fix it. That's all for now tho, later.
