An All Around Guide To Tanking Continued...
Line Of Sight Tanking (LoS)
Now that you know what it means to pull adds I'm going to tell you a little about Line of sight tanking.
What this means is pulling a certain group or groups from behind a wall, pillar, door or whatever you can hide yourself around.
A good way to perform the LoS pull is to grab a group of adds attention really quick and then run and hide with your party, behind something that keeps you away from the line of sight of the adds.
Once they cannot see you they will go find you. This also makes pulling caster adds a lot easier. If you run into a group of adds with lots of casters I recommend using LoS.
That way they cannot perform a cast on you and they are forced to run to you, which will then make them grouped up for you and your group to cleave and AoE.
LoS pulling also saves you from the panic attack that will come with spread out adds that you cannot get to quick enough, which also saves you from losing aggro which will then make your group angry for not holding aggro.
Threat/Aggro
Finally I would like to bring up Threat or aggro. Holding threat is the number one key to become a functional tank. It is your main job to hold threat! Without threat the adds or boss will run wild and take your group out one by one.
Holding threat will come easy once you know which attack generates the most aggro. Typically the attack that generates the most threat is the attack you will want to keep on cool down.
Starting off with a taunt is the best way to gain initial aggro on what you want to tank.
Once you have your target you will need to build aggro quickly by either cleaving a group of adds or single target smashing the boss because your DPS will not wait for you to pull them into place.
Keeping threat on your target while moving adds or bosses in place is not an easy task for the beginner tank. It takes time to master. But if you know your main aggro generating attacks and are able to keep wailing on the adds or boss you will hold threat and keep them off your group. Just remember if an add runs loose /taunt!
I hope this guide helped you better understand the role of a tank. There are lots of ways to tank and I could go on but I believe these are some of the key points to know as a beginner tank. Tanking is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it.
I really recommend for everyone to try it at least once. I did 6 years ago, and I haven't stopped tanking since. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or criticism please contact me any time!
Even if you just want to talk to me directly about tanking, you can find me on Twitter @leoricrep Thanks guys and Happy Tank and spank!