Mark 'em All and Let Elune Sort 'em Out

I promised in my first post that I wouldn't do much theorycrafting or anything of the sort here, but I wanted to touch on something that Millea said in the comments of my last post. Specifically, I wanted to talk about marking targets.

WotLK made it easier for warriors to tank more than one mob at a time...easier by a long shot. The thing is, though, that we're still not "AoE" tanks in the purest sense of the term. We just tank more than one mob at a time better than we used to.

Because the perception seems to be that all of a sudden warriors are on par with pallies as far as AoE tanking goes has led to a number of people thinking that marking groups isn't necessary anymore. I contend that it is.

First of all, because warriors aren't really AoE tanks powerful AoE classes (mages, warlocks, I'm looking at you) can very easily pull aggro off of a warrior when he or she is tanking 4 mobs and the dps is in AoE mode. We can thunderclap, shockwave, and tab-target all we want, but a well-geared lock or mage can and will pull aggro off of us if they're lighting up circles on the floor.

Second of all, chances are that one of the mobs in the group has an ability that makes them a problem if they're left alive too long (healing comes to mind first, but it's certainly not the only problematic ability). If the group is marked and focus-fired down, you can single out that troublemaker in the pack and get them out of the fight as soon as possible. On the other hand, if your group is AoEing the pack that mob has the potential to wreak havoc on your group (in the case of something like a mana burn) or make the pull last longer than necessary (in the case of a healer).

Marking makes the pull cleaner and helps the tank out quite a bit. If the dps is focused on one mob at a time, the tank only has to worry about keeping the rest of the mobs from running off because of global heal aggro. He or she can maximize threat on one target, giving the dps room to work, and t-clap/shockwave to keep the additional mobs off of the healers.

There's no real need to mark the whole group, either, unless you're using some form of crowd control. Just throw a skull up on each target when the previous target falls. I've got my raid marks bound to the number pad on my keyboard, which makes it even easier to throw up a mark or change it if necessary.

Just something to think about when you run your next instance.

Thanks, Millea, for making me break a promise on my blog 7 posts in.