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.

As such, it’ll probably take a couple posts for me to get into stride both in terms of using the wordpress interface and in finding my own writing style, so I’d appreciate any ideally constructive feedback people have to offer in the upcoming weeks, hopefully without me destroying anything in the meantime.  Hopefully my first true post will be ready in a day or two.

Durante!

Durante has expressed the desire to write some articles for the site in my absence, we are working out the details of getting him added as a contributing author. In the future sometime I may decide to start writing again, or just pop my head in from time to time, but for now it will just be durante. So be sure to give him a warm welcome when he makes his first post

Let the Hunt begin!

A little over one year ago I started writing this blog. It developed naturally out of my involvement on the ptr and my love for pets, and of course a long time dream to use my pet as a tank. Over this time we have seen buff after buff to pet tanking, and only a few nerfs. Of course, the taunt nerf hurt alot though.

I have not been writing as much lately due a major change in my work schedule, mixed with normal business of life. And now, quite un-relate-ed-ly, (word-check?) my life is changing drastically. Alot has changed for me, and I intend to change even more of my life. One change is to put wow on the backburner permanently. I will still play, but in depth theorycrafting and writing are right out.

I have enjoyed my interactions with all of you, and I have enjoyed watching your interactions with each other. I am not going to kill the site or especially the forums, as I know they are useful to those who use it. If any of you who are more involved with the site are interested in writing articles for the site in my absence, shoot me an email. (But be patient, I’m not big on checking it lately)

LET THE HUNT BEGIN!!!

-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.

One thing I did want to mention is that if you haven’t gotten a chance to tank a brewfest run yet, get on it! It’s not very challenging, my turtle wasn’t taking much damage, especially with shell shield up. I threw on some pvp gear and an ap flask and tried to maximize threat. Overall it went very well, only losing aggro once or twice, with a quick taunt to fix that. Of course, it was with all guildies so yeah, they knew the drill.

It was fun, and maybe it did some good on the ‘political capital’ front, but mostly it was just fun. The great part is that there is no pressure because its not seen as a serious encounter, and its just a tank and spank with an extra mob thrown in half way through. The encounter is short enough that if you just ask people to wait 3 seconds, they shouldn’t be able to catch you. Also, there is no gear requirements, so half your group won’t be able to catch you ever.

Anyways, anyone else take a crack at tanking this guy?

Well, Durante has done it again, and frankly I am impressed and inspired. He has done a full write up in the forums and you can watch the video below and see the awesome in action!

Durante has been eyeing this fight pretty much ever since we first got the details on the ulduar bosses. He had some trouble getting his guild to give this a shot, as we all do. I was especially impressed with his gear layout. Full pvp gear and frost resist set mix with stam trinkets, all gemmed out with epic stam gems, save the meta and meta-requirements. Thats alot of cash and time put into the preparation for this fight. The cool thing is that hopefully he can use the gear on some other fights.

I haven’t heard yet the reaction from his guild, but my hope is that the success of the encounter will open their minds, and the notoriety that the feat will bring for the guild will be appreciated. I can assure you this is the first time hodir has ever been tanked by a pet!

Let’s hear it for the dynamic duo!

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 started writing this blog.

I knew nothing of the blogging world at the time, I had no interest in them at all. But then I was looking up how hit chance worked for pets and landed on 35 Yards Out . I suddenly realized that wow blogs could be very informative, and decided to put all the stuff I was researching out there for anyone to find. My lack of knowledge of the hunter blogosphere only sped me towards deciding on the name of my blog, Big Red Rhino, completely unaware of the thousand pound gorilla in the other side of the room. I started checking out mania’s blogroll, I was familiar with her site (what hunter doesn’t love petopia?) and soon realized my faux pas. But by then I was very attached to my name, and I wasn’t about to change things.

And the rest most of you already know. I have been lucky to have found a great community based around a love for tenacity pet’s and their great abilities for tanking, soloing, and aoe grinding. Oh, and let’s not forget pvp! I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next patch and expansion, alot is changing. It may be that changing up the focus and idea behind this site will be the natural course of things, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the changes bring. Depending on how reaching the changes are, we may need to change the scope here.

Frankly this has been something I have been toying with for awhile now anyways, regardless of the possible ‘choose your own tree’ change. I really love all the pets, even if tenacity pets are far and away my favorite. One idea i’ve had is to include the other families, but to avoid the subject of raid dps, focusing more on all pets in terms of soloing, grinding, tanking, pvp, etc. I’d love to hear what you guys think of the idea.

What I’m really looking forward to is getting into the friends and family beta for cataclysm and sharing all the news here on the site. There will be an abundance of changes to the hunter in general, and I am very eager to get my hands on them asap. I’ll be sure to have spoiler warnings for those who like to be surprised

I’d like to thank all of you who follow the site, and also to those who post in the forums. Cheers!

Also, a special thanks to pike, for my first comment, and to everyone included me in their blog rolls early on, especially mania

Let the Hunt begin!

I’ve got to get you guys the summaries for the poll we just took, and I will… but this couldn’t wait.

I’ve been reading through the streams of info from blizzcon about cataclysm, and most of it is pretty cool. I don’t know about some of my favorite zones getting blown to bits, but there is plenty to distract you from that. No more mana, Human and Undead hunters, pet scaling, pet talent tree choice….the list goes on!

What really has me worried is the stat overhaul as summed up on wowheads blog.
I’ll cut out all the non hunter stuff:

So why does this have me worried?

Well, because hunter tanking has always seemed like an afterthought to me, our buffs, and a few of our nerfs, always seem intended to fix some other problem, not to buff or nerf pet tanking. Furthermore, we have only had one official post about pet tanking and blizzard’s intentions, as far as I know.

So this leaves us with a stat system that will likely ‘unintentionally’ either screw us over, or accidentally set the stage for a new era of pet tanking. Im worried about the first one.

Our pets have stamina, and a handful of mitigation stats. The only way to boost survivability was to stack stamina. Recently we got resilience, providing us with crit reduction. Now, it looks like we may be stuck with stamina again, with no hope of crit immunity, since its only achieved through talents. There is a random hope, however, that we may be able to wear bear druid tank armor and really go off the straight and narrow to stack random defensive stats. I’d also hope for some blocking talents in the tenacity tree.

In the threat department, we may be a little more safe. Talents and attack power scaling is where we pick up our threat, which needs alot of help. Who knows, maybe we will get lucky here.

The stat change is not the only looming threat to my tenacity focused site here. They are considering letting us choose our talent trees for our pets, basically allowing any pet to be a ‘tenacity’ pet. Talk about blurring the lines this site is built on! If that change goes through, I’d have to completely reimagine the site. Any thoughts on either of these topics is very welcome.

I promise I’ll get to those poll results

EDIT: These thoughts are pretty raw, and I was considering something else, and that is how they plan to handle dodge from agi. If our pet gets scaling agi, we may just get a mitigation and threat stat that features heavily into our natural gear. Of course, this will have limitations, as hunters, rouges, and enhance shammies can’t have a game breaking amount of dodge.

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.

I’ve included the pictures of each model in the order that it appears in the poll for convenience. Also, some of the names of the skins aren’t very intuitive, so I’ve double checked to make sure they are in the right order. If you think one is wrong you can double check it on wowhead and let me know. Enjoy

Bears

Boars

Crabs

Crocolisks

Gorillas

Rhinos

Scorpids

Turtles

Warp Stalkers

Worms

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.

But first, I’d like to collect some general information about tenacity pets, as well as give myself one last chance to rethink the format for the rest of the questions. If any one has any suggestions for other good questions to ask, let’s hear em!

I’ll be moving this weekend to a new place, so I’ll be busy and without internet for a while, so you guys should have plenty of time to get your votes in. In the next post I’ll ask about each family and I’ll even throw in pictures for convenient polling! And now Im going to abuse my power and be the first to vote!