Tanking Basics

While a tank must approach every fight differently, there are some basics things to consider that can make most pulls easier for everyone in the raid.

In addition to the list below, always remember to work as a team with your raid, especially your healers, they are your lifeline!

• Face the mob away from the raid - many mobs, even trash mobs, have a frontal cone effect. This also makes it easier for melee dps to position themselves behind the mob
• Use LoS to pull casting mobs towards you - duck around a corner and they'll all follow
• Get into a good position and stay there - some fights require you to move around a lot, but if you don't have to then it's best to hold still. Moving around a lot will find you on your melee dps's hit list
• Put your back to the wall - there are a small number of pulls where this is not a good idea because you can get pinned behind an effect. A far larger number of mobs have a knockback effect, standing against a wall will minimize movement and help you keep you threat level up
• Hit rating is important. Taunt is on the spell hit chart for most, if not all, tanks. Get yourself to melee hit cap and pick up the glyph for your taunt (if applicable). Taunt aside, if you can't hit the mob you can't build threat.
• Speaking of stats, be familiar with what is important for your class and spec
• When you move a mob out of a damaging effect, make sure you move it far enough that the melee group can get behind it
• Try to stay in range of your healers whenever possible
• Don't pull if the healers are out of mana or AFK!!
  

Dragons

Dragons are quite common in raids and instances, and many of them share a number of abilities. These shared abilities make it easy to know how to begin to approach a fight with any dragon. In the image above the safe zones are indicated in green. Standing in the orange areas may not cause you damage but you want to move from them ASAP. No one (with the exception of the tank) should be in the red zones.

In front of the boss you must contend with three abilities typically:

• Cleave
  
• Wing Buffet
• Magical Breath Damage (eg Fire Breath)

In addition to that the rear of a dragon boss will usually mean Tail Swipe.

Because of these abilities, the best place to stand when fighting a dragon is between the front and back legs on the side of the dragon.

Rogues and feral druids can still stand far enough back to be considered as "behind" the enemy without passing the back leg.