Main Tank Strategy: Sapphiron

Sapphiron in both 10 and 25 man Naxx is a great fight to flex your muscles a bit as a pet tank as there are several factors that lend very well to pet tanking.

1) Sapphiron never needs to be moved by the tank once in position.
2) Sapphiron never needs to be taunted.
3) Sapphiron has no enrage timer, so DPS can go as slowly as needed.
4) A small portion of Sapphiron's damage is frost based, which your pet will have a massive amount of resistance to with the proper gear.
5) Pets are immune to Sappiron's air phase Frost Breath, so while the raid is hiding behind Ice Blocks your pet can stay in and gain threat.


Preperation
Because of the quantity of damage and lack of enrage timer, by far your main concern in gearing for this fight is Stamina. Your gear, spec, and consumables should all revolve around this.

Gear: I highly recommend all three pieces of the Icy Scale mail frost resist gear and the Titanium Frostguard Ring with full Stamina gems. These pieces are easily the best in slot pieces for stamina, and will also provide a huge amount of frost resistance to your pet minimizing the danger of standing in the Chill blizzards. For the rest of your slots just get as many best in slot for stamina pieces you can, using mail over leather whenever possible.

Consumables: For even more stamina I recommend using the Guru's Elixir and an Elixir of Protection for extra armor. Spirit of Zanza or Lung Juice Cocktail could be used in place of the Elixir of Protection for even more stamina, but each is unique so you'd only have them for one attempt, and rumor has it they don't stack with other stamina buffs. Make sure to use either a 80 AP/ 40 Sta or 40 Hit / 40 Sta food, and Spiced Mammoth Treats for your pet.

Talents: If you're picking a spec specifically for this fight it will be based upon how much stamina you've managed to gather and the longevity of your healers. Your pet will need a minimum of about 35K HP after buffs, so if you're a little low you may need to use a build with the 51 point BM talent and Survivalist (53/0/15). This will severely hurt your TPS however, so if your healers cannot go the duration of the fight without running out of mana you'll need to either switch to a GftT or Hunter vs. Wild build. For pet specs your main goals once again will be stamina and durability. Without 51 point BM and with 51 point BM.

Group buffs: Virtually every class has a buff they can provide that will help pet tanking in some way, but I'll briefly list the players most important to you and what they provide.
1. Prot pally - Provides bonus healing and armor from Imp. Devo. Aura and 3% damage reduction from Blessing of Sanctuary.
2. Enhancement Shaman - Improved Strength of Earth Totem for extra dodge from agility (unconfirmed)
3. Holy/Disc Priest - Imp Fortitude when applied to both the hunter and pet make for a huge HP boost. Same for Mark of the Wild.
4. Warrior - Improved Commanding Shout provides nearly 3k HP.


Execution

Positioning: If you've adaquately prepared for this encounter, most of your hard work is over. Your main responsibility from now on is proper positioning. I prefer to tank the first ground phase with Sapphiron facing the room's entrance (especially if its not the first attempt and he's already spawned) even though on subsequent phases he is tanked facing the stairs in the back of the room. This avoids any unnecessary repositioning during the very aggro sensitive first few seconds. Your pet can be left in during the air phases to generate additional threat, but since Sapphiron drops his target during the air phase your pet will automatically attack him from the rear. After each Deep Breath, briefly run to the bottom center of the stairs and call your pet to your side to pull him back in front of Sapphiron, then send him back in to attack as Sapphiron lands. Alternatively, you could assign your pet a Stay position in its normal tanking spot, then put your pet on passive to get it to go back to its stay position. You will have to adjust your positioning strategy depending on the positioning our guild typically uses on this fight.

Healing: Your healers are the real All-Stars of this fight. Your pet will need at least 2 dedicated healers capable of spam healing the entirety of the encounter. Sapphiron's Cleave hits for about the same amount as its normal melee attack and does not reset his swing timer. This means its very possible to get hit with Melee Crit (20k), Cleave (10K), Melee attack (10K) over the course of a second or two. Even when your pet is at full health, the MT healers should still be casting their next heal. I prefer two holy paladins for this role, but other classes are also capable depending on your guild make up. Raid healing priests, shaman, and druids should also keep a Renew, Riptide, and Lifebloom respectively on the tank. If one is available, place a resto shaman in the tank group for Healing Stream Totem.

DPS: Make sure your DPS know they have to be patient with this one. With as much stamina stacking is necessary for this fight, your threat will be underwhelming. During the first ground phase anyone without a threat wipe should probably not DPS, or DPS minimally. All DPS should be watching their threat carefully, preferably with Omen. Rogues should use Tricks of the Trade on your pet every cooldown, and hunters should also be using MD. If you have several hunters in your raid, you yourself should not MD as only one can be up at any given time and your MD will provide the least threat.

Great write up! This is really inspiring me!

I have some questions.

Is the frost aura not aoe damage? is that why you dont recommend picking up avoidance?

Also, for moving the pet for frost breath, instead of moving to the stairs and back, will putting your pet on stay before the beginning of the fight allow us to send him there and back again?

Could you go into a little more detail on the first seconds of aggro? I'm assuming this has to do with the healing aggro since healers can't wait to start healing. What is your inital sequence to get quick threat?

With misdirect, while only one can be on a target, cant they be chained one after another? So while you wouldnt want to be the first in line, wouldnt you want to eventually start using it?

Again, thanks for the write up, this is good stuff! I hope I can get a shot at this soon!

Durante, may I use this for my "Tanking Naxx" featurette? Great post.

Frost Aura is applied as a debuff that deals damage over time, so I believe its not effected by avoidance. Either way will all three pieces of FR gear and raid buffs your pet will have over 400 frost resistance, only taking about 25% of normal damage from frost spells.

For putting the pet on stay after air phases, I can't think of any reason why that wouldn't work. Seems like an ideal spot for the Stay trick actually, I'll update the original post to mention that.

For the first few seconds of aggro, I start with a MD and make sure to hit my Kill Command & Bestial Wrath macro just before the first hit lands to ensure a large Thunderstomp hit, not much to it. If you have priests available try to start off with a PW: Shield up, and make sure they use Prayer of Mending as neither or those spells will cause aggro as long as they're cast before combat starts and will delay the amount of time before the first heal needs to be cast.

Our raids are very hunter heavy, typically four or five in every 25 man raid. Not only can only one MD be up on a target at a time, but it also seems like there's a few seconds after an MD where it can't be cast on the same player again. There were either 4 or 5 hunters in the raid the night I tanked Sapph, and on the first few attempt I'd spam MD for 20-30 seconds at a time before it'd finally go off, even though each hunter's MD should only be up on the tank for a second or two. By the final attempt I figured that if I was just going to push another hunter's more effective MD back, it'd be better if I didn't use it at all. I hope to do a little testing on this phenomena soon.

And be my guest to use it Nordh.

The hunter MD problem is caused by server lag. The information about when the buff fades isn't processed fast enough (it will still only be 3 hits though). I recommend the addon SimpleMD. It's got options to broadcast when cooldown is up, when the MD is applied and used up. Plus it will show bars for every used MD in the raid so you can track your fellow hunters MDs. It's been a very good tool for me to check which hunters slacks on MD at threat important fights such as Malygos so I can nudge them in the right direction of using it.

When you're talking about deep breath, just to clarify, the ability is called frost breath, and to many known as the frost bomb. The emote however says that Sapphiron is taking a deep breath. I don't think any hunter that is planning to tank this boss did not understand that, but just wanted to make it clear.

Thanks for the permission. I'm going to get to it asap. Will also make a graphical layout of the tactics, with stay position and everything.

Nice find with the addon; with the importance of MD in a pet tanked raid it'll be even more useful than normally.

Also it might be worth mentioning if you use this guild as a base that the positioning we used was primarily because that was they way we always do it: two groups on opposite sides of the boss, gather in the back of the room during air phases. It works well for us, but many (most?) guilds keep the entire raid on one side.

We prefer everyone on one side because of shaman's chain heal. But with 1 group on each side you get less rain in the raid.

I figured this would be a good thread to post this in.

For video of Durante's famous tank:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXIsN5RU8qM

I prefer this one to the 'music video' one because it lets you hear the battle. And the comments over vent.

"OK, Durante. I'll let you have my account now since you like tanking."
"I LOVE THAT MONKEEEYYY!"
"Are we famous yet?"

Yes. yes you are.