Hunter Tanking ICC: Darnavan

Solaryn, Hunter tankWell we’re back and we’re randomly tanking things in ICC today. For those who have had the opportunity to do most of the weekly ICC quests, arguably the most annoying one is Lady Deathwhisper’s. Done in a conventional way, you remove an entire player from your team to go OT/babysit Darnavan, to keep him alive without letting him slaughter your raid. Fortunately your raid has a hunter with a properly specced Tenacity pet! Or at least it should.

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Hunter Tanking ICC: Prince Keleseth

Hunter TankAhh… ICC is a marvelous thing, every encounter a new mechanic, every encounter a different way for a hunter to shine!

Today I’ll be talking about one of the ideal bosses to plop a hunter on as tank, Prince Keleseth.

Prince Keleseth is one of the three Blood Princes, and the only one that doesn’t need a conventional tank. A hunter is an excellent choice for him for a variety of reasons. We have several instant ranged abilities and Kill Shot, which is a fantastic ability to generate a lot of initial threat upon him.

This guide is going to presume you have a basic understanding of the encounter. We’ll be focusing on the role of a ranged tank exclusively.

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Deathbringer’s Will

Greetings again all you intrepid hunters. With your permission I’ll be sidestepping my usual exotic hunter tanking topics to discuss the much more mainstream subject of hunter DPS. The focus of today’s journey is a little toy I managed to snag a couple weeks ago, the trinket, Deathbringer’s Will. For those of you in the know, this drops from Deathbringer …

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Team Deadeye Clears Heroic Nexus

Hello again all you happy hunters! As I began gathering interest with this endeavor in my guild, we’ve formed a regular group of hunters and one gutsy healer. “Team Deadeye”, as we lovingly call ourselves, has made a few Heroic 5-man runs so far. Today we’ll be following our journey into the Nexus. It began simply enough, MD pulls of …

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Tanking 101: For Hunters..?

Hunter TankWe all know hunters are excellent as a DPS class and possess useful CC abilities, however recently I’ve had the itch to try my hand at a much less conventional hunter role… tanking.

I have tried countless experiments with this concept, and the following is the result of my experiences. No doubt, most of you have begun reading this post and made an incorrect assumption. No, my pet is not going to be the focus of this topic.

Don’t get me wrong, this was one of the first places I went to try and make this work. However, after several talent and gear builds based around making my pet the best tank it could be, I came to a most disappointing conclusion. While I most definitely can talent so that my pet has excellent armor, hp and crit immunity… even with all the avoidance talents available for my pets, they come up ridiculously short of what a tank needs to have for long-term survivability.

Fully buffed and tenacity defense talented, all my parses reveal that my pet only dodges between 5% and 10% of the time. Basically this means, unlike the occasional spike damage a player tank may take, the pet tank is going to be a constant mana drain on any healer. Which pretty much removes its usefulness right there.

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