Marking, where did i go wrong?

Marking monsters is part of the every tanking experience be it 5 mans, 10 mans or 25 mans the majority of the time as a tank your going to be marking and explaining your marks. There are somethings to take into consideration when marking.

1. Are your marks clear and easily understood, the last thing you want is someone saying after a wiped pull “what was i doing again?”. There are a couple of solutions to get over this, firstly don’t change marks after you’ve set them. You have 8 marks at your disposal use them. For a standard 5 man set up of a tank, healer, rogue, mage and warlock you can set the marks as the following. Skull and Cross tanking targets, circle is sheep, star is sap and diamond is banish or fear chain.
   

   Setting up macro’s for telling people the targets helps and prevents confusion, saying it over a voice chat system can sometimes leave the person your talking to unaware. Macroing your marks means they can quickly be changed and displayed without hassle.

2. Don’t take forever, the worst thing in an instance run is to wait 5 mins for the tank/RL to mark targets, it reducing your progress and the concentration of mobs. To prevent this know what the mobs your facing are doing and what you have at your disposal. Use a mod like Raid Mob Marker to make your marks 1 click, you can even keybind them with this mod. You can find resources for what mobs can be CC’d on WoWWiki for example Hellfire Ramparts.
3. Set a kill order, you don’t want to be remarking in combat unless you really need too. A typical setup like the one before mentioned would beWarrior - Tank
   Priest - Healer
   Rogue
   Mage
   WarlockOn a pack of 5 mobs the first thing you must do is wait for the Sap, steal can be seen sometimes or resists can happen so be careful, then wait for the rogue to return to the group unless he’s re-sapping a mob for the maximum duration (for example on the 3rd boss of MgT, you want the sap to last as long as possible). Then charge in on the cross, this will mean you’ve already got some threat on your off target and also its surrounding mobs. That will allow the skull to get within melee range and you can build up your sunders.

   By now your sheep and banish are have been cast. When you’ve kill the skull and cross you need to pick your next target, this should always be the sap first unless its going cause you to body pull something. If sap is included in your CC then you must take that first because once that and blind are up the CC from the rogue is limited. Next should either be the sheep or the banish depending on cooldown, if the banish cooldown is large enough for you to dispose off another mob then go for the sheep otherwise keep it polymorphed and wait.

   Tanking Note: In 25 mans the duration of a polymorph can vary, have your mages spam it constantly this way the only way it can break is for another mob to dispel it or another ability that blocks it. This can be quickly announced on a voice chat system and can be picked up quickly by an unoccupied tank.

4. What’s going to make your tanking easier? Isn’t that the point? If you’ve got 5 mobs with these abilities :-Warlock Mob (demon) - can fear, can see stealth.
   Hunter Mob (human) - Can root the tank
   Warrior (human) - Conc blow
   Mage mob (human) - aoe damage
   Priest mob (human) - can heal, sleep and dispel (2 second cast time) but very low health compared to othersBelieve me some people really don’t do the obvious, the first thing is mark the skull with the priest mob, if he sleeps the MT then he’s going to go running around like a mad chicken dispelling and healing his comrades however you still have the problem that he will be able to do that while he’s a skull, well you have a rogue with kick and a warrior with shield bash you should cope with the dispel. Cross as the warrior because he’s melee so your not going to have to go running after him if he tries to cast. Sheep the mage mob, your healer doesn’t want to have to deal with extra aoe damage while other mobs could be running round hitting people while your trying to gain agro, make his life easier and he’ll make your repairs lower. Sap the hunter mob your going to have to chase these mobs and without blessing of freedom its not going to be nice, get the rogue to stun as much as possible and keep Conc Blow for him. Finally banish the warlock because you may as well make use of it because you do have a demon in this group. Bare in mind this is just an example of the way you need to think about these groups, you could have polymorphed the hunter and sapped the mage however you then have the eventuality that the AOE damage will kill either the rogue or the mage before they have chance to renew there crowd control.

   Banish

   Banishes the enemy target, preventing all action but making it invulnerable for up to 30 sec. Only one target can be banished at a time. Only works on Demons and Elemental

   You can still taunt this mob while its banished, this is very useful particularly in 25 mans where a banish may need to occur 2-3 times in a row. Tank your mob near the banish your Thunder Claps can’t break it so there is no problem, taunt after each re-banish. A re-banish can only occur when the demon/elemental is no longer banished therefore this gives the warlock that 1.5 seconds off uninterrupted cast time he needs to re-banish.

5. Check mana before pulling, this is one I do often. Most of the time people will loot before they think about getting ready for the next group. Make sure you check that everyone is there and ready before you pull, nothing worse than an AFK healer at the start of a pull wipes your 5 man and can sometimes loose you a pug (pick up group).
6. What’s the aggro radius of a monster? This all comes down to personal experience for instance there is a group just before the Dragon Hawk boss in Zul’aman there is a group with two casters and two charging melee, these melee dispel all types of crowd control you can do on the monsters thus making successfully polymorphing very difficult, a trick in this situation is to use Mind Soothe (priest ability, it reduces the aggro range of a monster) to allow him to get close enough to a caster to Mind Control him, this will cause the other 3 mobs to kill it, at this point if your mage is clever they can spam polymorph the caster (it will be dispelled untill the melee are out of range) but it will prevent it from making group towards the priest when the Mind Controlled monster dies, by the time the two melee are picked up and tanked far away from the caster the sheep will hold and the mob will have only moved a few feet. This is an example of employing your knowledge of aggro range to make your life easier, you can perform a sheep pull rather than having a mage body pull and sheep (yes there is a difference).

Once everything is marked there is nothing else you can do but pull, for more information see my article on pulling techniques. There is only so much about a monsters behaviour you can learn from WoWWiki or any other resource like that, if your progressing in a 25 man and you aren’t 100% sure what can be polymorphed then try it out, i don’t advice this with sap unless your rogues enjoy repairs.

There are many types of Crowd Control I haven’t covered such as traps, shackles, fear stun technique (paladin) and even seduce, i will cover them briefly because the purpose of this article is to educate you in a way of thinking about Crowd Control not what they do, you should know this already.

Trap - Hunter

A trap is exactly what it sounds like, its a trap that must be set off by a mob running near it. A good hunter will be able to kite until he can trap again or even have the talent points to allow for traps to be dropped before the effect wears off. Traps can resist quite often but if your hunter is experienced he will know how to kite a mob, if your assigned mob is dead then watch the hunters mob and taunt and drag over traps to help out, target yourself after the taunt to stop attacking it.

Shackle Undead - Priest

This ability only works on undead, thus the name. Its particularly useful in karazhan because its effectively a polymorph for undead. It should be treated in the same manner as a polymorph.

Fear and Stun Technique - Paladins

This was probably invented to deal with trash in karazhan when your short a hunter or priest, it involves using the paladins ability to wear plate, fear undead and stun. I say wear plate because it means they aren’t going to take unhealable damage from a free monster. When pulling the paladin fears the mob (much like a warlock would) and it gains threat for it, when the fear is over the cooldown on the next fear won’t be therefore when the mob gets close to the paladin he can take a hit or two then Hammer of Justice the undead creature, this will cause a stun giving him enough time to cast Turn Undead for a second time. This process repeats, I would consider this as unstable as Sap and should be dealt with accordingly, as soon as you have a free tank get him to get a few sunders on it.

Seduce - Warlock Pet

A seduce is an ability of a succubus, a warlock pet. Typically sacrificed by Destruction Warlocks or not used by Demonology/Afflication Warlocks. Its another unstable form of crowd controlling and not advised on mobs that have some resistance to it, when its free its difficult to get back agian. I typically use it if I need a mob in a 5 man held for up to a minute. If your using it in 25 mans then your raid setup is wrong.

I hope that covers everything, if you have an questions or disagree with me then post a comment. Don’t forget to click the button the right to sign up to the RSS feed!

Aughban