One of the biggest challenges for a hunter tank is keeping aggro. Compared to the abilities of traditional tanks a hunter pet’s threat generating abilities just don’t match up, and this greatly reduced threat output can be a major challenge for new hunter tanks and their groups. Fortunately there are things that we and our groups can do to prevent our favorite squishies from meeting an untimely demise.
The first step to ensuring our healers don’t pull threat is to understand how they generate threat. At a basic level a healer will generate threat on each mob in combat equal to half of the total healing they do to all friendly targets in combat. That means that whatever we can do to reduce the amount of healing they have to do, the less threat they’ll generate and the greater the chance that they’ll still be standing at the end of combat.
The easiest way to reduce your healer’s required healing output is to reduce the unnecessary damage your group takes. Simply making sure people aren’t standing in the fire can greatly reduce your healer’s threat. On fights with a great deal of AoE make sure that you’re using any available resistance buffs through paladin auras, shaman totems, our very own hunter aspect, and Mark of the Wild. On fights with frost based AoE your group can throw on some frost resist gear (the DPS will likely be holding back a bit anyway, so they won’t really miss the stats much). Finally even though your healers might complain at first, putting Dampen Magic on the raid will reduce the damage they take and thereby decrease healer threat, just make sure they don’t put it on your poor pet.
Don’t group with this guy.
The other major way of reducing the necessary healing is to reduce damage in on your pet. Beyond armor and avoidance talents, there are several class buffs and debuffs that will reduce the damage your pet takes. Stoneskin Totems, Mark of the Wild, and Devotion Aura improve your pets armor, decreasing damage taken. The attack speed lowering debuffs other tanking classes bring, attack power reducing abilities of several classes, and the his chance reduction from Insect Swarm of Scorpid Sting combined together hugely reduce the damage your pet will take in melee.
Finally, the most effective way to reduce your healer’s threat…
Remember this?
Crowd control is your friend. There hasn’t been a lot of CC since WotLK launched, so much so that people forget that it can be a valuable part of a group’s toolbox. If you can cut the number of mobs hitting your tank in half, you reduce the damage in half and your healers threat in half. Be careful though, in some circumstances when you break crowd control your healer could have a large pool of threat built up on CCed mobs, so be ready to taunt if needed.
So here I sit, staring at a strange new interface littered with buttons and toggles that I’ve never seen and mostly don’t understand. Only once before have I ever written for an audience (a satirical article on professional eating competitions) and I’ve never written on, maintained, ect. any sort of web site. So here now I run into a nexus where two difference types of incompetence and potential public embarrassment intersect.
-Picture Unrelated- Well, I havent written but once this entire month. I have been going through what is easily the most difficult time I have ever gone through. Good news is i am still intact, both physically and mentally. 
Well, Durante has done it again, and frankly I am impressed and inspired. He has done a 
Well, in some ways its hard to believe I’ve been doing this for an entire year, in other ways it feels like it’s been way longer. I started getting into some theorycraft and just researching my character in general, posting my findings on my guild’s forums. Shortly after that I got into the wrath friends and family beta and started seeing the changes to pets and saw the awesome direction they were going in with pets. That inside knowledge, coupled with a reawakened desire to use my pet to tank 5-mans, (I had liked the idea before, but never thought it possible) got me 
I’ve got to get you guys the summaries for the poll we just took, and I will… but this couldn’t wait.
Now that I know what you guys think of the tenacity families in general, I want to drill down and find out what you guys think about the different models in each family. If you didn’t already vote on your favorite family, head back to the previous post and throw your voice into the mix.
You may have missed it, but at the very end of my last post, I expressed curiosity to know what you, my readers, thought about the various tenacity pets. So what we are going to do is use the polling system to find out which tenacity pets are your favorites, and which ones you don’t really care for. I have gone back and forth on whats the best way to set this up, and I finally just gave up and settled on blasting you all with two polls for each family and hoping you don’t get tired of it by the end.
