Problems holding aggro in Heroic dungeons

I'm probably going to get laughed off the forum but screw it.

Feral tank, just over 30k HP buffed with dungeon buffs, 3.3k GS and I'm landing in RDF Heroics with people who have 5k and 6k GS and I can't hold aggro to save my life. I can't macro my abilites with !Maul because I'm getting rage-starved since nothing is hitting me.

Do I just need to buy more ICC BoEs before even bothering? Should I just be gemming/enchanting for DPS stats ignoring EHP stacking because of how OP the DPS is compared to the content?

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Originally Posted by HerpLeDerp

I'm probably going to get laughed off the forum but screw it.

Feral tank, just over 30k HP buffed with dungeon buffs, 3.3k GS and I'm landing in RDF Heroics with people who have 5k and 6k GS and I can't hold aggro to save my life. I can't macro my abilites with !Maul because I'm getting rage-starved since nothing is hitting me.

Do I just need to buy more ICC BoEs before even bothering? Should I just be gemming/enchanting for DPS stats ignoring EHP stacking because of how OP the DPS is compared to the content?

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Never ever macro your Maul to other abilities. You will sometimes ragestarve by this even at bis.

RDF hc is a joke for geared ppl. Pretty much any dps (especially platers) can tank it with similarly geared healer (cca 5k+). Dont even bother trying to hold all mobs now, its impossible. Focus on holding one, or two most dangerous ones in each pack. As you get more emblems from rdf hc your gear will improve and you will be able to hold a bit more. (even bis tanks cant hold everything with 3 geared dps all attacking different targets)


You should probably focus on your ehp to be able to join raids soon. Best way to tank rdfs once you get raid gear and second set of that gear for your cat is imho in bear form and pure dps cat gear (make sure your healer can keep up). Then you will not have any problems with aggro, and rush through dungeons much faster. But thats only in the distant future. Continue to farm emblems, get your defensive gear first, join raids.

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Originally Posted by jendah

Never ever macro your Maul to other abilities. You will sometimes ragestarve by this even at bis.

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My god, so much disagreed on this point. YOU'RE ONLY HAVING ISSUES BECAUSE OF THE FACT YOU'RE NOT MAULING. IF YOU MAUL, YOU WON'T HAVE ISSUES.

*Ahem* Let me explain.
Maul is an extremely big part of a druid's threat. I'm talking like, more than 50% of your single target threat. If you have only enough rage for maul, then you should spend ALL of your rage on maul. Not anything else. Faerie Fire costs no rage at all, which is what you should use otherwise if rage-starved. It's never worth using an Auto-attack to generate rage, you lose way too much threat, and will 100% lose aggro by skipping your maul. The best way to generate rage is to never lose threat. Which means mauling. Always Maul. The 10 rage you get from an auto attack is nothing compared to the hundreds of rage you'd gain by keeping aggro on a monster.

A few pointers for RDF tanking;
It's okay for a few enemies to not be attacking you. Your DPS generally won't get 1 shot, and your healer is able to do enough healing to keep up as long as you're at least trying to aggro some of the mobs
Use the tidyplates addon to know what you have aggro on, and what you need to taunt, and how much HP everything nearby has.
Use your growl on the HIGHEST health monster that isn't attacking you. There's no point in growling an almost dead monster. Again, tidyplates addon is mandatory here.
If your growl is on cd, then you can Bash an enemy to stun it. You don't need to hold aggro from a monster if it's gonna be stunned for the rest of its life anyway. RDF monsters usually die in a matter of seconds, especially if your DPS are 5k~6k+ gs

Also, learn to chain pull;
You need to be the first one to engage enemies, aka, you MUST get to enemies before you DPS do. This is especially important for bears because if your DPS pull first, you won't have anything attacking you and therefore you won't get any rage from getting hit.
When there's only 1 or 2 low health enemies left alive in your current pull, start moving forward to your next bunch of enemies, as soon as you're in range; Charge, then Swipe. Thats all you need to do to "chain pull". Super simple.

Chain pulling does numerous beneficial things.
Turning your back to a couple of low health monsters at the end of a pull is actually extremely beneficial for Rage generation, gives you a nice amount of Rage to start your next pull with. Also, it kites enemies so they won't be able to attack you, once you get far enough away.
Secondly, if you're low gearscore, chances are you will produce less threat-per-second than any of the DPS you're trying to protect. You know for fact you can't out-TPS your DPS, so don't try to contend with them on TPS-output. Instead, getting to the enemies first means you get a HEADSTART. It's like if you know you're slower at running during a race, you jump the gun and get started earlier. That's the only way you can win. You can hold threat even from 6k+ GS dps by doing this.
Thirdly, chain pulling is simply the fastest way to get RDF's done. Seriously, you can save like 5-10 minutes per RDF run by chain pulling. Sooooo much more efficient. Just make sure your healer has mana, and is keeping up. Use defensive cooldowns (Barskin, Survival Insticts, Frenzied regeneration) as needed. If you notice your healer is OOM before a pull, pop out of bear and innervate them. Then keep pulling.


Also, consider using the glyph of maul, which is an absolute god-tier glyph for RDF tanking. Definitely use "/use !Maul" macros on all your abilities. Like I've said earlier, a bear falls into a vicious cycle once they lose threat. It's NEVER worth auto-attacking, the tiny bit of rage gained per auto attack isn't worth it. Much better to maul 100% of the time and actually keep aggro, which gives you the rage you need to actually do your job.

That's literally the secret to tanking as a bear is to go all out, 100% of the time. Once you lose aggro, you'll never get it back. If you lose aggro, IMMEDIATELY growl it, and remember to use your abilities such as Enrage, Challenging Roar, Bash and so on to keep mobs under control.

If you want more info than that, you can check out my bear tanking guide:

Most bears who run out of rage are bears who don't keep aggro. That, or a bear that dodged 10 attacks in a row due to sheer bad luck. You need to always be getting hit. That's how Rage works.

@above

Eh, dont agree. You want to maul all the time sure, but you want to be able to not maul occasionaly(!) and use other abilitys, having maul macrod into everything kills your flexibility to much.

Not to mention that sometimes dps>threat and sometimes the fights are way to short to maul effectively, you might be a lot better off spamming swipe or something else (especially in RDF) and getting one maul in an a non elite can be worth less then the rage you save.

posting a response for posterity

@Raenel

Thank you for the thorough response. I'm very familiar with your guide (that's why I !Maul all my macros, I use to manually trigger O-N-S abilities manually like a scrub).

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My god, so much disagreed on this point. YOU'RE ONLY HAVING ISSUES BECAUSE OF THE FACT YOU'RE NOT MAULING. IF YOU MAUL, YOU WON'T HAVE ISSUES.

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The issue was that I was including !Maul and I couldn't hold aggro and I was wondering if the GS difference was the cause. It was but there was a bigger issue.

That being said, I did figure out where I was going wrong and your post hit on it; It had been several years since I played WoW and I was coming in soft but tanks and apparently, bears in particular, can't play that way. I wasn't chain pulling aggressively as I should have been but since doing so, the issue has resolved itself and if something gets away from me now, it's lucky to be at 10% health so no biggie.

TL;DR: Aggressively chain pulling fixed it.

Agree with Raenel. My swipe is macro'd with maul so it's always queued up to go off. I've tanked a bunch and those 5k-6k players will pull aggro no matter how hard you try at 3k gs. Getting a head start helps.

Sometimes, i'll purposely let a high gs dps pull aggro. A plate fury war can handle his own for a bit while I take care of the rest. Perhaps a 5.9gs ele shaman is doing his job (awesome dps). As the mob runs to him, i'll growl and ping-pong it back and forth between us. It can't do any damage if it's just running around the whole fight. I do this quite a bit in Violet Hold. You usually kill the mobs before another portal spawns. I kill a rat to get some rage, start mauling when mobs spawn, and will let one run off then just growl it back. Or just sit there doing nothing the last 20% to gain some rage for the next portal, knowing the dps will drop it quickly

As long as I do agree with Raenel, That post is very useful and correct. Good job mate. Respect for taking time to explain how things work.

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Originally Posted by HerpLeDerp

Feral tank, just over 30k HP buffed with dungeon buffs, 3.3k GS and I'm landing in RDF Heroics with people who have 5k and 6k GS and I can't hold aggro

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But biggest part of your problem with aoe threat lays in this part of post. Up here ^
If 2/3k higher gs, dps player, doesn't chill for second or two/three, to let you generate some threat, or there is no hunter that is willing to Missdirect, you can expect trouble.

if it's warrior getting aggro, just accept it. They are made to get aggro, every their rotation ability is +additional aggro generator (as tooltips say)

Yes, chain-pulling is a great advice... as long as your healer can keep up with it. 3k bear is extremely squishy. I dont think chain-pulling would help anything unless you got better gear meanwhile. (with 3k heal you would likely just die)

As for maul.. I really think it should never be macroed to anything. Sometimes you want to pool rage for next pull (you want to be always able to use 2-3 swipes before dps arrives) or for enraged regeneration. Bear has few buttons to press in comparison to other tanks, so making room for 1 additional ability, even with this minor benefit is easy.