Shay Shays Retarded Prot War Guide, part 3

Final installment of my zomigorsh awesome tanking guide. Sorry it's in reverse chronological order, but I trust your ability to scroll down and then read up.

This section I am going to deal with tying everything together and how to execute the combination of threat, damage mitigation, gearing, pulling, and dealing with situations that make you almost shit your pants into a section I call...

Execution)

- Situational Awareness:
Each situation is different, and with WotLK, Blizzard did a good job of making sure that happens frequently. Some fights involve a lot of threat, some mitigation, some aoe tanking, some, no tanking at all. The key is to know what mods you are using, what they all mean, how to interpret them. A few key mods are Omen, a good dot timer, and a good unit frames mod (I suggest DoTimer and Perl, respectively). Also you need to have enemy cast bars on, or have a mod like ECastingBar to make sure you can see what spells opponents are using and when. The most important mod you will use however, is Omen. Knowing exactly where you stand in terms of threat defines how you budget your rage. If you got a mage, shadow priest, paladin, and all these other guys riding your threat tail, you need to push out as much threat as you can. Its more important for you to stay alive and have healer heal you more, than for you to lose aggro on a big bad mob, and for the raid to wipe. It should be noted that ranged dps must do 130% of your threat to pull aggro, and meele must do 110%. These are based on the 5 yard meele range. If you have a huge commanding lead in threat to everyone, stick to heavy damage mitigation abilities and keep your healers' from having heart attacks.

Triage:
Sometimes the shit hits the fan and mobs run everywhere, or someone is attacking the wrong target, or you just fucked up and lost aggro, you gotta be ready to taunt or intervene or charge to get the mob back on you. However, even with that, sometimes things are just too out of control for you to get everything back on you. At that point, you need to assess whats going on and figure out what you can get a hold of and what your healer can handle as far as dps on healers or dps. Generally if you lose aggro on a trash mob and cant get in under control, let it run around and smack people while you gather everything else up. Sometimes, thats not feasible of course and you need to get that certain mob back on you. Fortunately, in many situation, blizzard assumes tanks are going to suck and a healer can heal a mob on a dps for a while without any serious consequences. This is in no way a rule of thumb for every encounter, but if shit hits the fan, look around, figure out what you are most able to do and help with, figure out where you are least needed, and put yourself where you can do the most good.

Pulling:
There are tons of ways you can pull, but with the addition of the combat charge and heroic throw, you have potential of having a lot of threat immediately following a pull. BE CAREFUL CHARGING IN! I can't tell you how many tanks think that just because they can charge in defensive stance, they should. If you are really itching to charge, hit the mob with a heroic throw, run back and then turn around and charge when its clear. But even if things are crowded, a heroic throw is usually sufficient, assuming you dont get some stupid mage starting with a pom pyro or something. Generally, a Tclap is a good bet after any pull, but adjust accordingly. Pulling aint hard. Just don't pull adds and you are usually good.

I'm going to add an extra post of summarizing key points because i realize a lot of this is sort of verbose, so see my next post if you want the cliffnotes for all this crap i took the time to write for you.