Protection Warrior Guide

The Way of the Protection Warrior


Introduction
Stances
Warrior Abilities
Talent Builds
Glyphs
Getting Geared
UI ands macros
Your First Tanking
Single Target Tanking
Multiple Target Tanking
Tips


Introduction

So you've decided to try out a protection specced warrior. As a plate wearing tank your job is to make sure, that the rest of your party doesnt take too much damage and dies. You rely heavily on the party having someone who can heal you, when you take damage.
By making sure the mobs hit you instead of the dps or healers, you keep the party alive, and the rest of the party can do their job.
This guide applies to warriors who are familiar with their class, but unsure how they tank with a lvl 80 warrior.
I am a warrior myself (ofc) and I try to express my ways of looking at the warrior tank and help others who might need some tips.


Stances
Warriors are masters of combat, and to perfect this we have been given three stances, Battle Stance, Beserker Stance and Defensive Stance. Each offers its benefits and disadvanteges, when tanking you should always be in defensive stance. The 10% less damage taken is too valueable compared to 10% damage, from both other stands, or the 3% crit from Berserker which also makes you take 10% more damage, which is bad .

Warrior Abilities
Here I will explain some of the most important abilities a warrior have.

Shield Slam
This is one of the big threat making attacks a warrior have, depending on you Shield Block Value, it makes more damage and threat. It has a 6 second CD and should be used once every CD is off.

Revenge
This ability only becomes available after you block, dodge or parry. It also has a 5 second CD and should be used once CD is off. It will almost be up all of the time, so its only the 5 sec CD who keeps you from not using it.

Heroic Strike
This ability will make your next white hit, your next auto attack, cause alot more damage and alot more threat. The downside is it wont create rage like a normal auto attack, but only use rage. This makes this a way to dump rage if you have too much (always around 100 rage). So on most boss fights, having Heroic Strike up on all auto attacks is a great way to increase your threat.
But in rage starving situations, when you outgear the mobs and you dont take as much damage, you wont get the same amount of rage, you shouldnt use Heroic Strike. Use Shield Slam and Revenge as these are more rage efficient.

Taunt
If some dps or healer manages to overagro you, you can taunt the target back onto you. When you taunt a target you only make it attack you and set your amount of threat equal to the person who has the highest amout atm. This means that the target vil agro you, but you need you keep making threat on the target to avoid it from running away again, and this time your Taunt will be on CD.

Mocking Blow
This will NOT taunt the target, it will only make the target attack you for 6 seconds. In these seconds it's your job to regain top threat on the target. Though it can be glyphed to also taunt, more about that in Glyph Section.
With a 60 second CD this should only be used when Taunt is on CD. Some mobs are also immune to taunt, here Mocking Blow is also the ability to use.

Challenging Shout
This AOE Taunt should be used with caution, as all mobs within range will attack you. This might give the healers a surprise, but still compared to wiping, they should be up for it. It can also be used if your taunt somehow didnt do its job alright, just be sure you dont get something unwanted with you.

Shield Block
This will make you block all melee attacks for 10 seconds and also increase you Block Value by 100%. This ability has two uses:
1: If you know you're going to get alot of melee damage, fx. you are gonna aoe tank melee mobs, it will significantly decrease your damage taken for the 10 seconds.
2: Since your Shield Slam is based on your Shield Block Value, using this right before shield slamming, it will increase your Slam by a great deal, and combined with trinkets like Lavanthor's Talisman you can reach Shield Slams that makes DPS jealous . And its not just hot air, these high numbers also increase your threat by a great deal.

Thunderclap
One of our best AOE tanking ability. Makes a reasonable amount of damge and slows melee attack speed of all enemies with in 8 yards, and with a 6 second CD you should use it on every available CD while AOE tanking. Since it applies damage it should be used with brains around CC'ed targets.

Shockwave
Talented Ability
Combined with Thunderclap Shockwave is 95% of our AOE tanking. After using Thunderclap, you need to get the mobs alligned infront of you, the reason for this is that shockwave is only done in a cone in front of you, so walking backwards will align the mobs infront of you making you able to hit all of them with Shockwave. Even though the tooltip says 10 yards, its not very far, so you need to be sure that the mobs are pretty close to you, practice makes perfect.

Cleave
When AOE tanking, its about hitting as many enemies as hard as possible. If you are not rage starved, you should use Cleave on every attack. Same mechanics as Heroic Strike, so it only uses rage.

Devastate
Talented Ability
If you havent taken Devastate in the talent tree, your equivalent ability would be Sunder Armor
Devastate is a enhanced version of Sunder Armor, where Sunder Armor only applies a debuff reducing armor, Devastate will also do damage depending on the amount of sunders. Devastate should only be used if the target is not fully sundered (5 stacks) or Shield Slam and Revenge are on CD.

Concussion Blow
Talented Ability
If both Shield Slam and Revenge are on CD, you may fire this off. Its good threat and damage, but nothing more. Only most trash in heroics are stunable.
Concussion Blow are affected by Global Cooldown, but when fired it does not trigger one. This means you can fire a Concussion Blow and immediatly after fire a Shield Slam, making it a great way to start a fight.

Vigilance
Talented Ability
In fights where you have to move around alot and cant keep your max threat output going, this truely helps. Just put it on the highest dps, and you get an extra tps boost for free. Also if someone who's gonna OT who doesnt need to think about threat (4 Horsemen fx) you can make them take less damage, helping the healers.

Last Stand
Talented Ability
This ability very useful if you know the healer wont be able to get a heal of in time, you fire this and gain 30% extra maximum health points, and 30% health. This will give your healer a few moments to regain control. This ability can nicely be pared with Enraged Regeneration, just remember to pop Last Stand before Enraged Regeneration.

Shield Wall
For 12 seconds you take 60% less damage of all kinds of damage, physical as magic. Again this comes in handy if the healer needs a breather, is dead or in some other way cant heal you, The ultimate "Oh shit" combination is to fire Last Stand -> Shield Wall -> Enraged Regeneration. This should give your healers a moment to get back on their feet.

Intervene
In a fight where you know a certain player is gonna take a big blow in a few seconds, you can intervene this target and take the damage yourself. The buff you apply to your friend, only lasts a few seconds, so it requires a bit of timing. Alternatly this can also function as your second charge, but instead of charging a hostile target you charge a friendly target, getting you out of trouble or into trouble.

Shouts
Warriors have their shouts:
Demoralizing Shout - Should be kept up on a melee boss always, if you have a fury warrior with Improved Shouts, you can put him/her on demo shout duty.
Commanding Shout and Battle Shout - If a fury warrior, again with Improved Shouts, is in the raid, always make him use the shout that is needed. If its a HP intense fight, make him buff Commanding, if not, make him do Battle and just do Commanding yourself.

Talent Builds
These are different talent builds:

Base Talentpoint Build 8 / 5 / 54 - Very basic talent build. It has 4 free talent points for you to spend where you like.

High Tps Build 15 / 5 / 51 - This is one of the best dps and tps spec for prot warriors, it sacrifices a bit of surviveability, but not much.
Both talent builds include all the talented abilites mentioned.

Glyphs
None of the Glyphs are crucial to tanking, its more what you want and what need.

Major Glyphs
Glyph of Blocking - Great way to increase you threat output.
Glyph of Cleaving - IF you're having trouble AOE tanking, adding another target to your cleave helps.
Glyph of Devastate - If you're tired of having to spam Devastate to get your target fully sundered, this will make it a great deal faster. Giving you more Global Cooldowns to use on Shield Slam and such.
Glyph of Heroic Strike - Not a top glyph. Your crit chance on Heroic Strike is not high enough to weigh up the rage spent.
Glyph of Resonating Power - This is only usefull you are rage starving constantly when AOE tanking, else its a wasted spot.
Glyph of Revenge - Quite useful, as it gives you a free Heroic Strike every sixth second. The rage gained from an auto attack is still lost though.
Glyph of Sunder Armor - Again can be used if you want to improve AOE tanking, but its not as powerfull as Glyph of Cleaving.
Glyph of Taunt - This glyph will make your taunt never to miss. Its not worth it IMO, as you have other abilities like Mocking Blow and Challenging Shout.

Minor Glyphs
Glyph of Bloodrage - At lvl 80 you have around 10k hp with no armor on and Bloodrage uses 16% of your Base Healthpool. This means 1600 hp is lost before you fire your Bloodrage, you can avoid that with this glyph.
Glyph of Charge - Its always nice to be able to charge around and the longer the better.
Glyph of Thunder Clap - A very nice minor glyph, the bigger the area you hit, the more mobs.

Getting Geared

Im gonna assume that you reached lvl 80 but dont have any prot gear. Mostly its hard to get tank drops if you join heroics and such as non-prot spec, but no point in going in full fury gear. As you leveled through Northrend you should have picked up some quest rewards, and these will make you base for you tanking career.

Let make some requirements for tanking heroic dungeons:

• Raids (both 10 and 25 man) require 540 Defense, Heroics only 535.
  
• Atleast 22k HP unbuffed.
  
• Your dodge, parry and block should be above 15%
  
• Make sure you have a healer who knows what he/she's doing
  

To get a good overview of tanking equipment you can use for tanking heroics use this link:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=828 - This is a list of plate drops, sorted by role, tanking is where you should look
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=829 - Trinkets, cloaks and rings, sorted.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=830 - Weapons, again sorted.

After you drooled abit, its a good idea to make a list of what you want. This makes picking heroics much easier, and knowing what rep to farm.



UI and Macros
Everybody have their own prefferences and needs, the most important is you are able to find everything you need and fast. I have a few things keybound, some very simple macros and then my action bars. I use from 1 to 6 on 4 actionbars.

This is my current tanking UI
Its important that you easily can moniter your own health and rage, your target and target's target. But the most important as a tank is a good view, you need to be able to look around, know when to step out of the fire, know what mobs you are tanking and know the position of you group members.

Your First Tanking
As a rage using class its important to remember that all healing classes have mana, and in order for them to be able to heal they need mana. So before every big pull you want to check your healers mana pool. Its not a problem if they have 80%, but if they are below 30% you just should check with them if they need a Mana Break.


Single Target Tanking
Since we're a rage using class we need to get our rage up pretty fast so we can use our abilities. Using your charge ability is a nice way to get your rage going, sometimes it does put you in a bad position, because the mob runs towards you, but you still charge towards the old spot, and you end up a few feet behind the mob. Being ready for this though makes it a non issue. Using Blood Rage also boosts our rage we have before engaging combat.
When you finally get to hit the mob, you should use attacks that create alot of rage. Shield Slam is the perfect attack here, you can even spice it up with Shield Block. This should give you a small headstart on the threat. From now on you just need to use abilities in a priority system.

Highest Priority
- Revenge
- Shield Slam
- Concussion Blow (Only use Concussion Blow if you are sure that you wont need it with in the next 30 seconds)
- Shockwave (Same as Cuncussion Blow)
- Devastate / Sunder Armor
Lowest Priority
These are ofcourse the basic attacks, you decide when to pop your trinkets and longer cool down abilities. And if its a hard hitting melee encounter you also need to keep your buffs / debuffs up:

Thunder Clap
Demoralizing Shout
Commanding Shout / Battle Shout
Some bosses are able to remove debuffs like Thunder Clap, so you need to keep an eye on them, to make sure they are always on them.


Multiple Targets / AOE Tanking
Warrior's are not the best AOE tanks, but we can still do the job pretty good. Our two main aoe threat building abilities are Thunder Clap and Shockwave, but have CD's, 6 and 20 seconds respectively.
Its your job now to make sure as many as the mobs get hit by these as often as possible. Since Shockwave only hit targets infront of you, I suggest you use Thunder Clap first, this way you create threat on all mobs around you, within range of Thunder Clap ofcourse. If the mobs are a bit spred out and you are not sure they all will be hit by Thunder Clap, wait for them to gather, but not too long since the DPS prob is about to start their mayhem. When you have the mobs attention, your next goal is to get all the mobs in front of you, so you can Shockwave them all.
One way to to slowly walk backwards as they follow you, this should make the gather infront of you, where you use your Shockwave on them. All of this need to happen quite fast as some dps have pretty bursty AOE damage, so you need to stay on top. After entering combat and getting all mobs on you, you need to change between the mobs and use your high threat abilities, but you need to use Thunder Clap and Shockwave on every CD also.
If you find yourself with alot of range, Cleave is a good way to get rid of it, and if you have the Glyph of Cleaving its even better, as you hit 3 targets.
Using Vigilance on a AOE player, fx a mage, is a great way also to gain extra AOE threat.

Tips
I have mostly spilled all my tips throughout this guide, but just remember a wipe is never 100% bad, either you learn something or you can laugh at somebody either way, a gain.

reserved

/Xath

Nice one Xath. Really well done

Very nice Xath :-D!

A typo/naming error: Frenzied Regeneration is for bears, Enraged Regeneration is for you

/Dura

Durandi wrote:

Very nice Xath :-D!

A typo/naming error: Frenzied Regeneration is for bears, Enraged Regeneration is for you

/Dura

/fixed

Hehe, thank you very much, cant have that filth around my neato guide.

Xathrina wrote:

The Way of the Protection Warrior

Last Stand
Talented Ability
This ability very useful if you know the healer wont be able to get a heal of in time, you fire this and gain 30% extra maximum health points, and 30% health. This will give your healer a few moments to regain control. This ability can nicely be pared with Enraged Regeneration, just remember to pop Last Stand before Frenzied Regeneration.

Shield Wall
For 12 seconds you take 60% less damage of all kinds of damage, physical as magic. Again this comes in handy if the healer needs a breather, is dead or in some other way cant heal you, The ultimate "Oh shit" combination is to fire Last Stand -> Shield Wall -> Frenzied Regeneration. This should give your healers a moment to get back on their feet.

Remember the text aswell

ok ok, I admit just taking the first and best thing and fixing it... should be sorted now though

I'm working on a much similar guide to Unholy 2h dps. Godsbane is abit poorly specced so instead of going "omg l2spec" on an officer in a guild I just joined, i'll write a guide for how it should be done And also because I think it's fun

EDIT: Gah, Endelar ofc

Love the guide mate, some great tips in there for Strategos as prot looks like a fun spec to try out.

Wanted to ask you about gearing for different fights, do you keep a seperate set for block, EHP and avoidance? What is the best way to start gearing for heroic tanking and the occassional Naxx run? Guessing there isnt a huge amount of choice at that level as long as you get Defence capped.

Looking for advice from the BEST WARRIOR I HAVE EVER SEEN whose name starts with an X.

unvincible wrote:

Looking for advice from the BEST WARRIOR I HAVE EVER SEEN whose name starts with an X.

Xendelar????

Hey Unvi Thx for the compliment.

About the gear, take what you can and get def capped. That is the number one prio. After that you should go for stamina until you get around 25k hp, this will make healing of you a lot easier because you have this buffer. After 25k you should start evaluating what you gain and lose every time you get a new piece of equipment.

About me having a EH, Block and avoidance set, nah not really. Most of the encounters in Wotlk so far dont have specifik requirements, but I do shift my trinkets around for some fights, fx Sarth 2/3D I use two stam trinkets, since thats the only way to live through the evil flame breaths.
Sometimes I also drop my 111+ stam trinket, but it usualy finds it way back cause i wants teh hp!
I never throw a piece of epic tanking gear away, so if I need to shift something around I can make a specifik set from what I have in my bags / bank.

Hey Unvi, I would love to get some feedback, since you now have been running 'round on a warrior for a while.

/Xath

Still think the guide is great but could use an update for the mechanics of Devestate. Using a fast tanking weapon it can now match the threat output of Revenge and Concussion Blow, using a slower weapon makes it our top priority (after SS and rage allowing). This is more apparent with T8 and T9 2 piece bonuses. Plus it procs S&B.

Vigilance choice is more in depth than putting it on the highest dps, an arcane mage with 10% more dps than a lock would have lower threat output. Locks in general have higher threat in my experience and give a better tps bonus. If the threat reduction is needed to stop a dps taking aggro then priority may be a melee (warrior) as they dont have the ranged threat bonus. Also great on an OT who is being hit if you need to spam taunt in a fight. If every way to get aggro on a mob is on CD and a dps has aggro you can use a last resort Vigilance> taunt combo on them (if they can survive a hit).
One of the most interesting buffs in game now.

I was thinking about testing a prot build with more points in fury for Imp Cleave, combined with the Cleave glyph it would be a decent trash build. Any feedback?

The best for vigilance is imo hunters. They have no threat reduction and generally put out alot of dps (and therefore lots of tps)

True, and with feign death we can keep pushing for tps.
Though i am not sure whether or not we can keep up with other casters in AoE threat, but volley got a very good boost last patch and MM hunters cannot be interrupted during their AoE giving a stable 1.5k dps on each target (average hunter in pug, in raids it would be 2.2k or so)