CC: How to run instances without a net
Running 5 man instances is the bread and butter of gearing up any PvE character. There are some short instances, and some longer ones. There are some bosses that are ready for fun, and others that like to die fast. Many people consider it a universal truth that all you need to do these instances is solid crowd control. When you're faced with a pack of six or seven level 70 elite mobs, the last thing you want is one or two of them running loose.
But what can you do if you don't have any CC available? Are you just out of luck? Nope! There are a few tricks to running instances without CC, and if you pay close attention, you won't miss the lack of sheeps at all.
In fact, you might just start preferring to run without crowd control entirely.
Off the bat, we're going to mainly focus on doing a no-cc run with a Warrior or Druid. Paladins have a natural AoE tanking ability and it's not very challenging to tank or run five mans with a paladin and no-CC. Consecration FTW.
So first, you want to always allow your tank a few extra seconds for agro. Give them a few seconds to hit each mob, and then start the DPS. This is particularly important in saving the lives of your healers. No matter what your healer does, they are going to be building healing agro with all the mobs that are being engaged - not just the focused target. There for, the tank's threat must be above the healer's threat at all times, unless you want your healer taking a dirt nap.
This brings us to the second tip – heal lightly and heal often. It's not a good idea to spam big heals – those are going to generate more healing aggro and easily pull off a mob on the peripheral of the tanks threat generation rotation off to the healers. If that happens and the tank is under some movement impairing effect, expect a wipe to follow. Save the big heals for only when absolutely necessary. There are some healers I run with that never use them, and things go just fine.
On the opposite side to healing aggro is the DPS aggro, and our third tip: keep it low. DPS aggro is much easier to control. You should be running Omen, don't bother with anything else. Omen makes staying below the tank at all times an easy task. How can you do this when multiple mobs are being controlled by the tank? Single target everything down. Don't let that pretty Arcane Explosion graphic tempt you – because the tank won't be able to taunt the mob off you fast enough.
The best way to stay on the tanks target is for the tank to have setup a predefined charm as their current focus. If the tank binds the charm to a key, they can just bounce the charm around as each mob dies. This is a very easy and effective way to quickly dispatch a large number of mobs.
If you don't use a bouncing charm, or some sort of charm order, you can setup hotkeys to assist the main tank. A quick way to do this is to select the tank and press the "F" key. F will automatically assist the current target, which means in the case of a tank, you'll get the mob he is currently focused on. The only downside to this is that if you do it as the tank is switching targets to generate more threat on a non-focused mob, you have a good possibility of pulling the mob off and causing problems that can only be resolved through a taunt, aggro dump, or your death.
Finally, when dealing with a multimob tanking situation, the tank wants to be sure to apply threat to each and every mob. The best way to do this is to group them all up in front of you – faced away from the DPS, and tab target through everything. On my warrior, I do this by initially getting all the mobs attention with a Thunder Clap, and then applying at least one Sunder Armor on each mob before returning to the focus target mob. About twenty to thirty seconds later, I repeat the cycle. On the interim, of course, I am still building threat on the focus target mob.
As you can probably tell, the primary thing to concern yourself with when doing five mans without crowd control is threat management. A mob isn't going to hurt you if it doesn't hate you the most out of everyone – so don't give it a reason to. You won't pull aggro if you have just 1 threat less than the tank, and in the end that's all that matters.
What are some tips that you have for those groups without CC?
