As an old MMO player, I have been noticing an influx of newer blood. This makes me very happy, but leveling an alt in dungeons I have noticed some people dont know how to play with a tank. This is just a general guide on how to make a tank's life easier.

First we need to go over a few terms.

MOB = Enemy charachter that will attack you
AOE = Area of Affect. All those nice abillities damaging more than one enemy
Aggro/Hate/Threat = The priority a MOB has on attacking you
DPS = Damage Per Second
OT = Off Tank
WIPE = Everyone DIES (to be avoided at all costs)
CC = Crowd Control. These are spells and abillities that causes sleeping/disabling and slowing effects.

AGGRO:

This is an ingame mechanism that is used to have the mob prioritise which person to attack. Now, what causes this value to go up or down you may ask. The answer is everything you do in his AGGRO range. If you heal someone, your AGGRO or THREAT level goes up. If you attack a MOB, your THREAT level goes up. If you just move into a MOB's aggro range, your threat level goes from -1 to 0. Now, an aggro level of 0 doesnt mean he wont attack you, it just means you are going to be last on his hitlist.

Now, the creaters of WOW have graciously added a nice little THREAT meter into the game. If you target a MOB, it shows on it's little picture on your target screen, a little meter that shows your threat level. So, if your threat level is 30%, then you are still ok and can attack/heal without pause. But the moment it goes to about 80%, you should stop attacking/healing. This will allow the tank to regain the AGGRO. This will usually take only a few seconds. This is called Threat Management and is your job to manage, to make sure that because you CAN outdamage everyone else, it might not always be a good idea. Especially with inexperienced tanks.

Playing with a tank:

As you will later on notice, tanks dont have a great deal of DPS. But what they do have that you dont, is a large amount of health (why they are called tanks) and defensive skills to avoid a lot of damage. This makes them easier to heal for healers...so the less damage you take, the less stress on the healer (which is a good thing). Tanks also have a couple of skills to generate AGGRO, so that offsets the DPS lag they have.

Now, this is a small part for warriors, paladins and death knights. Wariors, do not even think about going into defensive stance. This will make it extremely hard for the tank to maintain aggro, because you will propably out DPS them as well as generate extra aggro, ergo, you will die. Paladins, remove Righteous Fury before entering the dungeon. Same reason. Blood pressense for Death Knights is also a no no. The only time you enter a raid or a dungeon with these abilities on, is if you are filling the tanking role, or the OT role. I only add this because I have been seeing so much of it lately and its causing a lot of wipes.

The wrong way to handle unexpected aggro:

So, now there you are, standing a way away from your tank, hurling fireballs/arcane arrows/heals and along comes a roaming mob. This is a mob that walks around. The roaming mob aggros on you. You panick, your health is going down, you stop attacking your target and target the one attacking you and you start trying to get away by running away. YOU DIE

The RIGHT way to handle unexpected aggro:

Same scenarion, but instead of panicking, you run TOWARDS THE TANK, do NOT target the new mob and let him pick him up off of you. A good tank, even with the tanking nerfs, can keep aggro on 5 mobs without much difficulty. So if he is tanking 3, picking up yours wont be that hard. The only time it gets hard is when you have already attacked that mob, because now he has to outaggro you with the innitial aggro and whatever damage you have done to it. So just relax, and take the mob to the tank, even if u have to run past the tank because its a ranged mob. The same goes for HEALERS, but you just play it by ear if you heal the tank or not during that time...just see if he REALY needs it. Remember, your healing causes AGGRO too, and whatever you build up, the tanks has to beat. This way, you live.