Raiding as a warriorFollow

There are several general tactics for stable positioning of a raid type mob (and honestly, you can use some on normal group mobs as well). One of the first things to remember is that raid mobs, somewhat by definition take longer to kill then normal mobs. They also often have AEs that require precise positioning, and they may have nasty ripostes and/or directional procs/AEs that require that all but the tank be behind the mob. The result is that raid mob encounters are more vulnerable to the melee effect then normal group mobs. When you've got 30 people all beating on one side of a mob, and just one on the other, the mob will move in the direction away from the 30. When that fight lasts several minutes (sometimes 10s of minutes) that become significant, since it's entirely possible for the mob to be pushed far enough so that the MT is out of range of the healers. You'd prefer not to have your healers have to move anyway, and in some fights they *can't* move because they need to stay in a particular spot to shield them from the Mob's AE effect.


Cornering: This is probably the simpliest tactic. Find a nearby corner and back up to it, dragging the mob with you. The mob can't move through the wall, so it'll kinda smash up against the corner, hopefully leaving it's rear exposed to the rest of the melee force. The problem is that depending on the mob and the tank, the melee boxes may cross in such a way that the "center" of the mob gets pushed past the tank (despite how far back the tank is). Sometimes, this can be fixed by growing the tank. Sometimes by shrinking him. Sometimes, you can't avoid mob turn in a corner at all. It's something that's specific to each situation and has to be learned as part of the strategy for killing the mob.


Walling: If there's no convenient corner, you position against a wall. Tank stands with one side to a wall, with mob in front of him. Melee force stands as much as possible at a 90 degree angle to the wall (facing the wall). Done correctly, the majority of the melee push will be sideways directly into the wall. You'll still tend to get a small amount of push back into the tank, but it's much slower then if everyone was behind the mob. The nice thing about walling is that you can theorectically move the mob forward or back along the wall at different speeds by shifting the melee force from anywhere directly behind the mob (180 degrees) to directly in front of the mob (0 degrees). This brings us to the next tactic:

Boxing: This is a varient of walling. Normally, in walling you want to avoid having folks in front of the mob, but also don't want them all behind, so you try to range around to the side as much as possible. In some specific situations, you need to have them move from one end to the other to move the mob, or you just need the mob as stable as possible, so you arrange your force evenly around it. Against mobs with minimal riposte, but maybe a really large AE that'll decimate your healers ability to heal, the precision of the positioning matters more then some membrs of your melee force taking an occasional riposte. In those kinds of fights, you might have someone designated to watch the position of the mob and call out "front", "behind", and "middle" to tell the melee's to push from the front, behind, or range in the middle (try to keep it in one spot). Alternatively, you can also do boxing without a wall, but it's pretty freaking hard to do. Usually, if you want a mob in one spot, but not against a wall, you do the following:


Pinwheel: The pinwheel is when you need a mob to be kept in a specific spot, but don't have a convenient wall or corner to use (or perhaps don't want to use a wall or corner due to LoS issues perhaps, which was a huge deal with archery in some expansions). Perhaps there's an AE, but the only way to shield your casters requires that the mob be in the open and the casters behind a block or wall. Perhaps there isn't an AE at all, but you'd rather your casters not have to move to adjust to mob movement. Perhaps due to the encounter, there's some reason you have to fight a mob in the middle of a room (leashed to a spot perhaps). Heck. Maybe there just isn't anything around at all. In any case, it's kinda similar to walling, except without the wall. The tank stands at the front of the mob. Everyone else gets to one side of the mob. This will tend to push the mob to one side, but since it's agroed on the tank, it'll constantly adjust its heading to face the tank. This will cause the mob to slowly rotate around a point. The tank just kinda keeps turning around on a single spot while the rest of the melee force keeps moving around in a big circle, keeping the flank of the mob in front of them as it rotates around the tank. Done properly, you can keep the MT in a single spot, and the mob in a relatively small circle around him, while keeping the rest of the melee group safe from ripostes. This is probably one of the more difficult tactics to pull off because it requires that your entire melee force move constantly. You will lose some dps doing this, and lag spikes can easily result in riposte damage to lots of people. But it's a better alternative to just having the melee force push the mob around in front of them, and can be used when that's going to cause a problem.


Most encounters will use some varient or combination of one or more of those 4 techniques. In many situations, it really doesn't matter. All of them require that the tank and the melee force understand what is being done and why, and do the right thing. In any encounter where mob positioning really matters (which is a good number of them), you're going to want to figure out which method to use. That's going to depend on the geometry in the area, the melee box size and type of the mob, the push rate of the mob, what AE/procs the mob has, what rate and degree of ripostes it's got, and potentially a number of encounter script specific issues that are way to numerous to discuss here.

And you thought raiding was easy? ;)