Need Pally Tanking Advice

In short the name says it all....I'm a fail tank. So I'm here for advice and to learn. My main spec is holy and I do just fine there. I'm raid experienced and have an 80 priest (some healing, mostly dps) and an 80 mage. I've been around since right after WotLK, started a few days after it came out, but did take about a 6 month break earlier this year. I enjoy healing and dps and wanted to try tanking. I've been collecting tank gear using emblems (now JP) and while the gear is not fully gemmed yet, I'm getting there. I've done a lot of reading on equipment, gems and stats for 4.0.1 and I feel pretty comfortable in that area. My biggest problem is that I seem to know how to play from a ranged perspective and not a melee perspective. I have a lev 66 DK I've been playing around with dps wise also, which is also not going as well as I'd like.

Yesterday I tried to tank H Nexus. The gear I have (all 200 and above) should be fine for this instance I'd think. My biggest problem seems to be that when I get into a group of mobs I cant seem to keep all of them targeted and I end up losing aggro. Then the mobs start running around all over the place and it seems I'm running around gathering them up and I have no idea on who is taking damage from what. At this point I'm pretty much blindly hitting anything I can see. Pretty sad, I know....you can laugh, its ok, I dont mind. Anonmalus was disaster and the healer died. I apologized and told them I'd drop group so they could get a better tank.

So what I'm wondering is if there is an add on that can help with this. I tried tauntmaster, but I could never seem to get it to work. Tried reinstalling, configuring till I was blue, etc. But in the heat of battle I'd click....and nothing happened. So I gave up on that. Or maybe some key bindings or macros I should be using? I dont know. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

I wouldn't worry to much. At this point in the expansion, you are likely just getting blown away by the dps who outgear your tank set. Their damage is so high it's pulling threat. Cata will level the field again.

That said, make sure you have Righteous Fury on (i forget from time to time). I've also found Holy wrath to be good for snap aggro on large packs. Consecration, even with its new cool down is still good for emergencies. Don't forget about Righteous Defense either.
Best of luck!

Thanks. I suspected that might be part of the problem. However if I could get any advice on how to quickly spot mobs that are hitting someone else so I can get them back as well as quickly targeting things that would be great.

Well in 5 mans at least, if I see someone's health dropping, I just cast Righteous Defense on them. You can also enable "target of target" with your unit frames and tab through mobs, If one of them is targeting someone other than you, toss a taunt.

Positioning is the easiest way to see if you're losing a mob to the damage dealers. Run in to a pack, toss your Avenger's Shield, get to the middle, throw Holy Wrath, hit the first and best thing with Hammer of the Righteous and lay down the Consecration. If a warrior/death knight/paladin/hunter pet manages to pull anything off you, no big deal, they can probably handle it. If a mage/priest/warlock manages to pull aggro, you will see the mobs running about 20 yards away from you giving you 2-3 seconds to target the mob and taunt it back.

Remember that you're fighting damage dealers that outgear you by a ton and who have yet to re-learn the vanilla WoW "wait for sunders" attitude. The game changed back to that, it will take some time before the Recount-staring player generation understand this. Until then, it'll be a lot of "crap tank lol" comments.

basically, if you're just starting tanking, there's 1 really important thing to remember - don't panic when things go crazy because they will at times

being able to position mobs and judge what mobs will be pulled off by dps will come with practice

if you can, you might want to run with one of your tank friends to see how they position and react

for initial pulls, what i like to do is toss avenger's shield at a caster to get it moving at you. if there are more than one caster and its out of range of the shield bounce, position urself there as the silenced mob + melee will come to you.
from there, use holy wrath and hammer of the righteous to build up aoe threat with consecrate thrown in as long as mana allows for it

for mobs that are about to be peeled off by dps, tab or switch to it and use shield of the righteous to generate snap aggro on that mob

i'm assuming u have righteous fury on and the seal you are using is seal of truth.

there is a mod out there that should help you determine which mobs are about to be pulled, its called cael's nameplate for tanks or something like that

Okay, some things to consider.

First and foremost - use a mark. Skull whatever you hit first, and give that mob a little more attention. While most dps act annoyed when you use marks, it shouldn't take any more time, and it will help you to no small extent, since most classes with AoE do have some single-target dps as well. Chances are it's this single target dps that tips the threat scale their way.

Secondly - positioning. Many fights (anomalous is a good example) have a choke holy built into their arena. For Anomalous, it's the bridge leading to his platform. Tank him at the top end of the bridge, and your AoE will pick up the adds that spawn before they reach the healer.
In fights where there is a more open arena, you should know where the adds come from, and position yourself between that location and the healer. If this also isn't an option, try to tank the boss relatively close to the healer, so your AoE can pick up adds.

Consecration, Holy Wrath and Avenger's Shield are all very handy when it comes to picking up adds. Consecration effectively lets you build threat in two seperate locations as well. Know your fights and know when you should save these abilities to pick up new adds. For Anomalous, I would probably save consecration for his immune phase, and use Holy Wrath and Avenger's Shield to pick up additional adds.

Skill use is important. In any fight where there is a significant number of adds, you should be using hammer of the righteous, not crusader strike.

Make a macro saying "/cast [@mousover]Hand of Reckoning" and bind it to one of your unused mouse buttons. It takes a while before you are used to it, but once you are, you'll have a very quick taunt option. Use it as you see fit.

Know what mobs do. Casters won't move to you, but ranged mobs have a dead zone that you can use to kite them - simply stand just out of their melee range and they'll move to you. For casters, use your shield to silence them, and make sure you don't have the dazing shield glyph active. If these all don't work, tank the pack at the location of the caster. Consecration can be used to put some aggro on the mob while you are elsewhere, and even a single stack censure should keep him off the healers.

When a healer still gets hit, pop divine guardian and some cooldowns for yourself and do something about it - even in heroics healers shouldn't immediatly die, but they will be distracted healing themselves, so make their job easier untill you have a chance to pick up the mobs.

Keep an eye on your group. Sometimes, people "accidentally" pull extra packs, and even though it's annoying, they still consider it to be your job to tank them, so pick them up as well.

Lasty, stick to it - if you fail, ask your groupmates what you could have done differently. Some of them will mock you, but there are more then enough people around that'll opt to help you out instead. The starting periods are hard for all tanks, so don't quit, just keep trying.

My advice is to find a system that works for you since your learning. My personal favourite has been tossing avengers shield, run at them hit holy wrath as you run through. Then run behind them and hit hammer of the righteous (it's changed now, it does damage like a cleave - I hit 16k dps as a tank vs the lich king for the first time not knowing exactly what to do :P ) then I hit consecration, hammer of righteous, judgement (I'm not having mana issues so it's not my number one prioriety). Then I mix it up with hammer when available (or crusader strike if single target or only one mob left) avengers shield when it's up and I mix in consecration/holy wrath. Also I'll sl them with shield of the righteousness when I get 3 holy power. Of coarse you can use word of glory, but I don't use it.

Now I do this for a various ammoumt of reasons. One it's good practice to remember to turn bosses in raids with cleaves or what not ;) also I have my view distance in what I call google earth mode :P pretty much I have a minor script that modifies the maximum zoom distance (I'll post it when I get home I'm on my phone ATM) so with this farther zoom distance I can see more of the play field, and by turning the mobs I can see where the ranged and healers are so if they manage to aggro I can easily pick up the mob with hand of reckoning. Now I also use tauntmaster but ivve changed the bindings on it for left click to be righteous defence on the target (who has aggro) and hand of salvation on right click on the target as well. I do this cause I know some classes generate lots of aggro, mainly fury warriors and warlocks (or atleast I know my lock is an aggro so and so :P ). However I also find that actually sitting there and reading all the tooltips on all your skills to see what they do and then test it to see how it functions greatly helps, you mitt find that something works better for you ;)

also on the topic of people "accidentally" pulling, in google earth mode you can see everything, if someone purposely pulls a mob that isn't needed to be pulled or your not ready to pick it up, let them die IMO. Especially if your learning and trying to get better doing that doesn't help :s

also I suggest to try and run with guildies, I've started healing myself and I only heal if I atleast hVe 1 guildmate with me so we can actively adjust what we are doing or they can give a good hand when you hit that "oh shit" situation (remember cata is supposed to bring cc back and make it more important than ever, it's much easier to get cc help over vent or whatever voice chat your guild uses :P ).

Oh yea, as for gear. I advise, as a pally tank to get the lightsworn helm and shoulders then the 264 offpieces, the 4p bonus is balls IMO ;)

Thanks for the feedback everyone, this is very helpful!

Surprised nobody has mentioned this but I think the best tanking addon is Tidy Plates. Once you have that, get the plugin fir it called Threat Plates. It is configured by default but you can customize it to your liking for scale, color, etc. What it does is change the size and color (even dtransparency) of mob name plates based on your threat level. Amazing for finding the add you are about to lose threat on before you actually do. Works great for dps also to help know when to back off a little.

My personal trick is to also use my healing addon (VuhDo for me) for tanking also. I have it configured to show marks for threat so I know who pulled off me as well as click cast things like righteous defense or intervene.

Outside of that, learning the pulls and your rotation are the best medicine. When you can tank without thinking about which button to press, it allows you to focus much better on what is happening around you.

Grid+Clique works really well, especially for a pally. It works very much the same as what sifuedition uses; it shows who has agro by surrounding their character frame by a big red box and you can bind keys to use different spells with Clique. What you can do is bind Righteous Defense to a mouse key (left click, right click, etc...) and, when you see someone gain agro on anything, click that person with the bound mouse key and it taunts the 3 or fewer mobs that are attacking that person. I haven't played my pally since the 4.0 patch so I don't know if they've changed that spell at all or not, but that's how I did it pre-4.0 and I'm sure it'll still work exactly the same.

I have an 80 paladin and i was having the same problem in full lightsworn gear after the patch. Basically if you start off with your avenger's shield, and then just constantly hammer of righteousness so it comes off cooldown you can get enough aggro to start. Then when it starts to come down you hit consecration....not initially like before....you can hold it much longer, and i dont seem to have problems anymore at all.