Warrior Tanking Strategies

The Basics

The primary role of the Warrior in a group is to tank, or take all the hits from the monsters, so that the fragile healers and damage dealers don't get hurt. Warriors have mail (and later plate) and a shield, making them ideal tanks. Also, Warriors have a skill called Taunt, which taunts a monster off from attacking another person, forcing it to attack you.

Whenever you do an instance, you should be the Main Tank, unless there is another Warrior whom is higher level, has better gear, or is specced better for tanking (Protection). For that reason, always carry a shield with you, especially when doing an instance. This is essential. Forget any notions of being a damage dealer right now; your time will come to deal damage, but for now, you are going to absorb the damage.

In a standard group for an instance, you will have a primary healer/rezzer (Priest, Druid), a tank (Warrior/Druid), and a damage dealer (Mage, Rogue, Warlock, Hunter, Warrior, Shadow Priest). The other two slots will be filled with, hopefully, a secondary healer/rezzer/tank (Paladin, Shaman, Druid) and another damage dealer. As long as the first three slots are filled well and you have a rezzer and means of wipe prevention (Shaman, Druid, Paladin, and Warlocks can fill this role), you should have a solid group.

When you start an instance, you will be fighting "trash" mobs, mobs that are not bosses and fairly weak (although still elite), but often travel in pairs or groups. Here, you will tank one, or fight it so that it attacks you, and not others, and the other(s) will be crowd controlled somehow (Polymorph, Sap, etc.), while any remaining mobs will be offtanked by a secondary tank. Here, it is important to always have the aggro (short for aggravation, or attention) of the mob you are tanking. If you lose aggro, and it goes straight for a caster, you could be in trouble. That is where Taunt comes to use. If you, for some reason, lose aggro, use the Taunt ability to draw the mob back to you (you should almost always be in Defensive Stance, so you mitigate more damage, generate more threat, and have abilities such as Taunt at the ready). Once you Taunt, however, you will need to reestablish aggro by using high-threat generating abilities, such as Sunder Armor.

Keeping Aggro

In order to hold aggro, you will need to generate more threat than the damage dealers and casters. To do so, you should stay in Defensive Stance and use high-threat generating abilities, such as Sunder Armor and Shield Slam. Use these often enough to maintain aggro, but don't forget to help relieve the stress off the healers by using mitigation abilities, such as Shield Block. A good combo (especially if you have the Improved version of these abilities) is the Shield Block/Revenge combo. Use Shield Block, helping to mitigate some damage, and then use Revenge, causing more threat and damage.

As you tank more and more, you will learn which techniques work and which do not for holding aggro.