by Byron Mudry on Jan 25, 2010
In World of Warcraft there are three primary roles that you can fill as a player. These roles are that of a damage dealer, healer, or tank. In this writers opinion no role is more important than the tanks, since they tend to have more control over the groups success of failure than any other player. Knowing this is such an important role, how do players get ready for it if they are new to it? Don't worry, Byron "Messiah" Mudry is here to walk you through all the basics you need to know to tank in World of Warcraft.
Since in most cases you are going to be in charge of a groups pace, in addition to your base responsibility of their survival, you need to pay attention to them. This means that you need to pay close attention to all of their health and mana bars, and their threat status. During a fight this is critical as you need to know if your healer is about to go Out of Mana (OOM) or if your groups top DPS player has drawn aggro and needs to be saved.
Check out all the details in this second part of TenTonHammer's Big Guide to WoW Tanking. In it the Messiah covers Threat, AoE Tanking, Pulling, Positioning, and much more.