shannox heroic ----> druid/dk tanking combo

so for the past 2 weeks my team and I have been trying to get heroic shannie down. We seem to have lots of problems rather than a little thing we can change. What I'm looking for here is to tweak better at least my end (tanking) of things so we can make the fight easier on healers.

We are using the strat where one tank slows/gives hell to riplimb and the other one drags shannie around in a big circle, in order to maximize the time the doggie needs to finally get over to shannie and hand him the spear. Tankwise, this strat has proven to work for us, cuz we are able at lest most of the times to allow enough time for the jagged tear stacks to come off from both tanks. DPSwise, though, we seem to have bigger issues, cuz some of the guys are having a hard time running rageface thru the right traps. I might be being a douche here, but Ive been the Riplimb tank on normal for so long, I just don't see how ppl can't see the difference between the fire traps and the crystal traps. I mean we do get ppl in vent saying there aren't any red traps when i can easily spot like 3 of them right there. We have tried to call their position in vent, but ppl seem to be getting even confused about them. On the healing end of things I see 2 major problems going on: 1) When I'm on riplimb (dk) we always try to have the priest on me, but she will constantly complain I'm out of range, or that she doesn't have enough time to cast with the whole running around going on, so I will eventually take a bigger hit and die or she runs over a trap or rageface gets her 2) When I'm on Shannox it seems to work better, because we were able to get him closer to dying more often that way, but then the healers still will miss a heal here and there or take a trap or die to doggie.

We have been blaming the wipes mostly on healers because they could be doing a better job avoiding shit, and our meters have shown the overall healing done is lower than average for heroic Shannox fights, which can not only explain why tanks are dying but also show that our healers aren't handling the whole heal and run thing wisely. But on the other end of things, we do have rageface running amok most of the time because ppl aren't doing a great job trapping it. They are doing a good job on it, just not a great one, see what I mean? We have 2 guys who are good in trapping, the other 3 are not that good. And regarding the tanks, I do die more often than my partner druid tank, which shows me I must be doing something wrong somewhere.

So DPS and stat wise, how much of the fight has been compromised if the dog is not trapped enough? And how much of it is due to the healers having to run around so much? We have tried to have the healers stand in this middle spot as long as they can to maximize healing done, and as much as that helped, it didn't quite solve it yet. They will still die to dog/trap.

Now aiming at my end of things:
- When I'm on riplimb, i try to hit it as little as possible, basically just hitting it with DS to keep the blood shield always up, and I use the Icy Trap on it as often as I can can, but sometimes I will have my health full and suddenly die to what seems to be a single blow. Is that Separation Anxiety? Cuz I'm not getting that far away from shannox (or so I thought). When that happens I often won't even have more than 3 stacks of jagged tear on me. Or is it the healer being oor or missing a couple heals?
- When I'm on Shannox, it seems to work a little better, mainly cuz my partner is better with the whole slow the dog thing than I am, and I do seems to get more consistent heals (different healer though) but i will still die kinda out of the blue, specially when I'm moving shannox out of traps and stuff. Again I can't quite spot if it's healer missing heals or me failing to keep my mitigation up. It does get harder to keep stuff up while moving, but I do make sure I have blood/bone shield up before I move, at least most of the time.

What am I missing here?

That's a long story, but there are some specific details that you haven't included (which might be your problem).

How are you breaking facerage? You talk about 5 dps 'trapping rageface' but normally the person who is breaking facerage is also the person who handles the trap. After facerage is broken, rageface will go on the person who crit him for a few seconds. That can become the perfect time to trap rageface and for the raid to move. A smart player in this role will make the whole fight easier, especially if they are good at communicating when to move.

How many stacks of feeding frenzy are the dogs getting? This is the acid test of the fight. If you aren't resetting feeding frenzy at regular intervals, your healers will not keep up with the fight. Most good unitframes will allow you to see boss frames, and you can display buffs on there - so make sure you can see how many stacks of feeding frenzy the dogs have and also if they have the 'wary' buff (meaning they can't be trapped, normally because they got kited through an immolation trap). You do not really want to waste a trap on rageface if he has less than around 10 stacks, but you will start to struggle once he gets up to 20 or so (depending on your gear levels). It helps a lot if you can get an 'attack speed slow' debuff on rageface to slow the rate at which he gains stacks (frost fever, hunter fox pet or arcane mage 'slow' for example).

Are you as tanks getting regular resets of the Jagged Tear dot? If you aren't, then you are going to start pressuring your healers unnecessarily. You really want to be getting rid of the dot before it goes above around about 6-8 stacks, although it's quite possible to survive using cooldowns and big heals when it gets higher (again, depends a lot on gear).

I've only done this as DK + Feral once, we had the feral on riplimb so he could use dash/feral charge/stampeding roar to get away from the spear throw, and I kited shannox in a little circle when riplimb was about half way back if necessary. I'd try to time DRW to be up when the spear is thrown, in the hope of avoiding that last arcing slash before the spear - that dramatically increases your chance of getting a dot reset.

We have a very mobile fight when we do shannox HC, we use a druid on riplimb, a warrior on shannox and have a mage tank rage face. If your DPS aren't handling Rage faces stacks, the fight will eventually become unhealable you're only options are either blowing shannox up before Ragefaces stacks reach that point (not entirely sure that's even possible yet) or get the DPS to actually look after there dog. Be careful about comparing healing done, its artificially capped by damage taken; my raid may have higher healing done than yours but that might be because we take more damage or because we take longer to kill the boss. Your lower healing could be becuase you're dying earlier, which you will be if DPS are totally ignoring the one mechanic they have to deal with.

Our mage is arcane his main job is to break face rages and then kite Rageface into crystal traps, now since there aren't many crystal traps he and off tank need to be communicating to make sure they are both able to clear stacks before raching unhealable levels, the shannox take also needs to be communicating so that he can also clear his stacks and not have riplimb run over a fire trap when he returns the spear, and lastly the rest of the DPS need to be positioning themselves so as not to put rage face in fire traps and let the tanks know where the crystal traps are.

If you're dying to one shots that could very well be seperation anxiety. I use Power Auras Classic to track stuff like that, aswell as keeping mitigations up, and me and my co tank have experimented with with range so we can know how far apart we can go. However remember both dogs get a 5% damage buff each time they land a succesful melee, so the riplimb tanks has to clear both Jagged tear off himself, and the damage buff of his dog, you could be clearing the bleed but not the buff.

We have a lock handling the face rage breaks, and getting it trapped, but then we have the ppl he goes to next also try and get him trapped if they can, and they end up running the dog thru fire traps either trying to get away from it or trying to trap it. The goal is to keep it trapped as much as possible, but it might be counter-productive... The stacks aren't falling off that dog, but jagged tear is falling off both tanks.

from what you guys have told me, on riplimb I'm dying either from the separation anxiety or the melee buff the dog gets. so the dog gets the buff when the DOG hits me, rather than when i hit the dog... I think i got it reversed somehow. I'm gonna talk them into letting me be on shannox, cuz it does work better that way, my buddy tank has more tools than I have to slow/get away from it. Out of us both, I really don't seem to be the best choice for riplimb. I ended up on him cuz I was used to handling the trapping of riplimb on normal and my partner was more used to handling shannox.

the thing about the healing done i mentioned... our RL has been saying healers are slacking, but I disagree actually. except for the one healer who gets out of range from the riplimb tank, or healers hitting fire traps, I don't think that is an issue. I see more confusion around how to handle rageface than around the healers running around.

and yeah I might not be timing the hits I get right.... Or I am becoming unhealable when on shannox. When on shannox, I seem to die torwards the end :/

Sounds like you are also short of information. Get some logs onto worldoflogs.com (use the loggerhead addon to make capturing logs easy). Use an autopsy addon like Deathnote to see in game 'why did I die'. Don't guess, learn to inspect and understand. For this fight, I also picked up a very lightweight addon called Focus Range (wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/focus-range.aspx) to ensure I knew how far away from the other tank I was. 100yds is the max before causing enrage, so keep to the 80ish mark.