Contents 1. The ethos of Warrior Tanking 2. Why play a Warrior Tank? Pros and Cons 3. A Perfect Match: Tank Pairings. 4. How to Gear: stat priority 5. Talents and Glyphs 6. Your tanking Arsenal – Abilities 7. Active Mitigation and Cooldown management 8. AddOns 9. Finding a guild as a Protection Warrior 10. Reflection and Improvement Section 1 – the Ethos of tanking Before I even get into how to play a warrior tank, the aim here is to go over the attitude and ethos that a good tank, not necessarily even a warrior, but just a good tank in general should have. You should be clear on what your role is in a group and what you can do to help your group’s progress. We’ll start with what I like to call the “Tanking Hierarchy of Needs”. The Hierarchy has five levels, with one being the lowest and five being the most advanced. Just like Maslow’s Hierarchy, it starts with the most basic and finishes with the most complex. The further you climb the hierarchy, the more advanced you become. As you get better at tanking, you should envision yourself to be climbing up the Hierarchy with every tanking class you play, not just warrior. The model is as follows: ------------------------------------> Self-Actualization ^----------------------------> Increase ^-----------------> Reduce ^---------> Control <Survive> Level One: Survive Many people say that a tank’s most important job is to hold aggro and keep their group safe. This is not true: you can’t hold aggro if you are dead. How does one meet this criteria? Have the correct build and gear to be able to deal with the most basic tanking situation. Make all reasonable preparations to meet the ilvl requirements of the dungeon or raid you wish to tank. Make sure that you have your flask (stamina, usually) and your food (again, stamina, or failing that, mastery) and a heavy supply of Draenic Armour Potions. It doesn’t matter how brilliant a tank you might be, you won’t last long in Mythic Highmaul or Blackrock Foundry with 630 gear. Level Two: Control Now that you are effectively equipped enough to carry out your job, it’s time to actually start carrying it out. As a tank your role is to control the flow of the fight. You need to ensure that hostile creatures (mobs) are attacking you, rather than attacking the rest of your group. If you can’t effectively control the mobs you are fighting, you are going to do more harm to your group than good. You are going to cause wasted healing, low DPS and potentially put other members of the party at risk. If the tank is not in control, the group is not in control. Think of yourself as the driver of a vehicle, and the group members are the passengers. As well having the physical attention of the adds, you must also be able to control their positioning. Everything should be tanked facing away from other party members (especially melee). The first reason for this is because melee DPS do naturally more damage from behind because they cannot be parried. The second, is more important, and this is to avert the risk of cleaves – if a mob cleaves, it can damage anyone that stands in front of it. If melee DPS stand in front of a boss, they risk getting cleaved and killed. You can’t rely on melee DPS to always hit from behind – they might not realise they have to – but you as a tank have the ability to control what direction they attack from, by positioning mobs appropriately. Likewise, if AOE spawns underneath melee DPS, you will need to drag targets away from it so that they can continue attacking without taking damage. Ranged and healers can generally look after themselves, but melee have the tendency to get shat on during fights that involve ground AOE, and this is almost always due to bad tanking. Melee are pretty much at the mercy of tanks – look after them, and they will love you. This is the essence of control, and the core of being a good tank. You control where mobs stand. You control where they are attacked from. You control how much DPS the group does. You control how much damage the group takes. You control how well the group plays. You control how quickly the boss dies. You control how quickly a raid progresses. That is an extremely powerful position to be in, and it is a burden that no other role has to cope with. Level One and Two are best viewed as being generic. They apply to every encounter in the game, and once you have mastered the basic essence of these, you can go out and start learning how to tank on a fight by fight basis. Level Three: Reduce Tanks are going to take damage during fights, and being able to control and reduce this damage is a vital skill that all tanks need to be able to do. Controlling your damage is generally done through passive mitigation, which comes from your stats and passive abilities, and your active mitigation, which is a tank’s ability to respond to incoming damage. This is a Warrior Guide, and for the sake of clarity, I will use Warrior as an example. We two abilities for Active Mitigation - Shield Barrier, and Shield Block. Shield Barrier is a variable absorb shield that stops incoming damage based on rage and current resolve. Higher resolve will yield higher absorb values. Both physical and magical damage is absorbed by this ability. Shield Block gives the Warrior an additional 100% chance to Block all incoming physical attacks for the next 6 seconds. It costs 60 rage and has two charges. This mitigation form is “Active” as opposed to “Passive” because it requires the tank to actively choose which ability is best for that particular situation. Obviously Shield Block only works on physical attacks, but it is very powerful and reliable in doing so. Shield Barrier is your main defence against magical attacks. Tanks also have powerful cooldowns, such as Shield Wall, that can reduce huge amounts of damage. They can use these when they come up against particularly hard hitting abilities. I’m not going to get too much into Active Mitigation here (I have an entire section on it later) but it should serve to illustrate the point – you have an arsenal of tools at your disposal to improve your survivability and reduce incoming damage. It’s important to know that passive mitigation might reduce your incoming damage taken, it does not control your incoming damage taken. Parry is a great way to not take any damage at all... when it works. You won’t parry every single attack. Avoidance is generally inferior to less damage taken per hit. You don’t want to parry five hits and have the sixth hit knock you down to 20% HP and suddenly your healer is blowing mana on big, emergency heals. You want each hit to deal soft, predictable damage that is easy to heal with weaker heals and HoTs, with big heals being saved for when you really need them. Level Four: Increase When you start consistently getting the first three levels right, it’s time to start thinking about level Four. As a tank, you deal damage, and Level Four is all about trying to increase not only your own, but also the damage done by your group or raid. Ask yourself, on this fight, are you doing everything you can to make sure that as much DPS is being done? Increasing this DPS can be achieved by things like faster positioning – the less time a boss spends being carted from one side of the room to the other, the more DPS the melee get to unload on him. A good Rogue is generally not going to unload all of his DPS onto a target that is being dragged around, in case the tank suddenly pulls the boss out of melee range and causes him to miss an ability. By moving the boss around, you are essentially preventing him from doing that. Nothing annoys a melee DPS more than a boss that is constantly and needlessly moving out of melee range. It hurts their DPS and their ability to top meters and they will hate you for this. If you do have to move, move predictably; never move without alerting the melee in advance. Even if it is as simple as saying “moving left” on voice comm, they will appreciate the warning. Once you are satisfied that you are doing everything that is within your power to Increase your group’s DPS, then you can start increasing your own, but never at the expense of your survivability. This means that dumping rage into Heroic Strike when you could be spending it on Shield Barrier is absolutely not acceptable. Level Three and Four are specific, and they are mastered on a Fight by Fight basis. For instance, I might consider myself to be level Four on one fight, but only level Three on another, if I have not yet worked out how to totally maximise DPS output. On any new fight you go into, you will first aim to figure out how you can achieve these two levels. Once you do, you can finally move onto Level Five. Level Five: Self-Actualisation Once you get to Level Four, you are effectively tanking at the level that is required for mid to high-end raid progression. You may think you have learned how to tank and mastered everything there is to know about tanking. Truly exceptional tanks are the ones who never stop learning and never stop testing their limits. Level Five is all about further learning, coming up with new innovations and experimenting with different methods of dealing with mechanics. It’s about reviewing your performance and reflecting on what you did well and what could have gone better. It’s about conducting your own experiments and learning from the results. Have you tried the fight using this tactic? Did it work well? What could have been improved? You will be doing a lot of this anyway throughout your development of Level Three and Four. Level Five looks at multiple possibilities for doing these even better, because no matter how many times you do something, you can always do it better. Why Play a Warrior? Pros and Cons Warriors are one of five tank classes currently in World of Warcraft. We’re by far the oldest serving tanks and for much of WoW’s early life, we were the only viable tanks. As such, the incorporation of other tanks into a raid team has been a paradigm shift that has changed with every expansion pack and opinions have varied from Patch to Patch. In essence, every expansion has had tanks that have been stronger or weaker, and while player skill generally trumps the class in most situations, very high-end raiding guilds at the top level of progression will tend to utilise stronger tanks over weaker ones during progression. Here we examine the pros and cons of a warrior. With the pros, we highlight how this makes them better than other tanks, and with the cons we highlight how this may be compensated for by other tanks. Pros So many to list, but here are the main ones that set them aside from other tanks - Very high mobility. Playing a Warrior is very liberating - it’s like sleeping naked. Paladins or DKs feel extremely sluggish in comparison to a warrior, who can charge, leap or intervene his way around a battlefield. It makes warriors very useful for any role that requires getting somewhere quickly. - Very good at dealing with physical damage due to Shield Block. - Very effective at tanking multiple mobs. In fact, warriors actually get stronger the more mobs are beating on them. More hits > More parries > More Revenge procs > More rage > More Shield Barriers, which will be more powerful due to more resolve. They really shine on any fight that involves add management, such as Blast Furnace. It’s one area they beat Monks, DKs and Druids in, who do not gain any significant benefit from having multiple mobs attacking them. - High damage output. Warriors, along with Monks, do the highest damage out of all tanks. - Reliable active mitigation. Warriors are generally not spiky tanks (unless played wrong). Shield Block is reliable, it works 100% of the time, reducing physical damage taken. If you’re not stupid with your rage, Shield Barrier will almost always available when you need one. - We have a large array of glyphs and talents that can be tailor made to fit specific encounters. We probably have more useful glyphs than any other class in the game. Does the fight require an extra dispel? Do you need to move somewhere extra quickly? Are you picking up lots of spawning adds? Would the fight benefit from additional cleave? All of these are important questions that a warrior tank must think about when learning a new boss encounter. Not all tanks have the luxury of being that adaptable. Cons Here are what I perceive to be the two biggest drawbacks of the warrior - While they are good at managing adds, they can struggle to pick them up due to a lack of spammable AOE. Our main AOE threat builder is Thunder Clap, which is on a 6 second cooldown. If it misses, you can end up with a mess of loose adds if you don’t actively single target them and taunt. Compare this to every other tank in the game that has some form of AOE threat builder that is either continuous, or can be spammed indefinitely (Consecration, Thrash, Blood Boil and Spinning Crane Kick). I’d rather Thunder Clap did half the damage, but was only on a 3 second cooldown. - A common complaint many Warriors have is that we tend to be more reliant on external cooldowns than other tanks. We only have two personal cooldowns, Shield Wall and Demoralizing Shout, whereas most other tanks have at least three. Monks trump everyone with three (two of which can be catered to specialise in either physical or magical damage) and Guard, which is a ridiculously powerful, two-charge absorb on a 30 second cooldown. We do however, make up for this with Shield Barrier. It’s nowhere near as powerful as Guard, but it’s much more frequently available.The Perfect Match: Tank Pairings Generally speaking, the warrior partners well with every other tank class in the game, and given the choice, most other tanks would prefer to work alongside a warrior than any other tank class in the game. It’s not uncommon to see guilds use two warriors, while it is very rare to see guilds use two of any other tank class. This next section examines the benefits and drawbacks of specific Warrior pairings. Before we really get into this, it is important to understand that Player > Class in virtually every circumstance. If player skill is really not an issue, the main factor you should be using to evaluate what the best possible tank partner is when building a raid team, you’ll want to focus on loot. When aiming for progression, it makes sense that two tanks will gear quicker if they have separate loot tables. Warrior + Warrior – Brothers in Arms Having a tank team that consisted solely of Warriors was standard practice in Vanilla and even TBC, until about Hyjal, when we realised how incredibly strong Paladins were against trash. While bringing two of any other tank class can actually be highly ineffective, warriors have always worked as effectively with each other as they have done with any other tank class. To this day, double warrior remains a solid combination because it gives the benefit of dual Vigilance or dual Safeguard. In essence, the warriors either get the option giving each other 20% less damage taken every 30 seconds, or what amounts to a third personal cooldown. This shines on any fight where they are made to stay close together to split cleave damage (a la, Kromog and Butcher) or where they must give each other a small cooldown to deal with a boss mechanic (Oregorger). Not considering loot, only drawback is that any difficulties one warrior faces are likely going to be faced by the other, with no way of compensating for this. Warrior + Paladin – Two Sides of a Coin Ever since paladins came onto the tanking scene, they have been competing with Warriors for both loot and main-tank spots. They had their day of reckoning in Wrath, where they took revenge for every time we ever mocked them in Vanilla or TBC for trying to tank. These days they offer us a useful defensive buff in the form of Sacred Shield, which they can keep on us at all times when we are tanking for additional mitigation. They also give out passive healing and bring the most useful ranged interrupt in the world to the table – Avenger’s Shield. Paladins were the traditional masters of trash, and indeed nobody controls trash like a paladin. They will pick up where you fall on that front and interrupt casters from afar, generally making your life a lot easier. We make up for their terrible/non-existent mobility. Warrior + Druid – The Shielded Bear Bears are a little like warriors, only hairier and without any armour. They have charge like us and the ability to interrupt from range. They’re great for add-pickup due to the limitless power of Thrash, and they can actively reduce the damage we take by Mauling the target as often as they can, taking a huge chunk of damage off its next attack. In return, we offer them Vigilance, giving them the ability to soak an extra big hit. Bears are great for doing this because they have such monstrous HP pools and the ability to heal themselves up at will. Additionally, their high dodge chance means that any attack that splits damage between us and the bear will be nullified if the bear dodges it. Likewise, our damage reduction means that the bear will take less damage from said ability when we block or absorb it. The best thing about the bear is the fact that they use leather armour and won’t steal our lewts. Warrior + Death Knight – Stone Cold Killers Death Knights have a lot of personal survivability but have virtually nothing useful to give their group outside of Gorefiend’s Grasp, which is the most effective builder of “death balls” in the game. It pulls every ranged mob towards the Death Knight, wherein they can be stunned, rooted and subsequently destroyed by the rest of the raid (after we have ripped aggro off them with Thunder Clap > Dragon Roar > Bladestorm anyway). This is invaluable on a large number of fights, and since trash pickup is one of the things a warrior struggles with the most (especially when trash are spread out), a DK partner can be a huge asset for this situation. Thankfully, Gorefiend’s Grasp is not restricted only to DK tanks, which means that as long as you have a DK in your raid, you still have access to this utility if you need it. As well as this, DKs have a lot of magical resistance that the warrior does not. Runetap, AMS and Death Strike are all useful for dealing with magical damage. That means that the DK can take the lead on any fight that involves magical damage if the warrior is especially struggling. The DK also has battle res, which is a bonus. Warrior + Monk – Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Stagger In many ways, the Monk is the tank with the most similarities to the Warrior, while simultaneously being the most different. Most of the top Monks rerolled from Warriors in MoP, somewhere around Throne of Thunder and have remained with the class ever since. They are incredibly strong tank-wise and can rival the warrior in terms of both mobility and utility. I’ve already mentioned their impressive array of cooldowns; their ridiculously effective active mitigation that staggers incoming damage ensures that a monk will never take an ability to the face at full force. Warriors have charge and leap, Monks have roll. Warriors have a taunting banner, Monks have a deployable statue that can sit on the floor, passively taunting everything that walks near it until the Monk gets round to picking the mobs up himself. The best thing about tanking with a Monk is being able to say “actually, I think you should do this, you have <insert Monk ability here>”. Seriously though, Monks are fantastic to tank with, and they benefit from being with a warrior more than any other tank, mainly because of Vigilance (as if they even needed it) and the fact that they will rip aggro of just about anything that isn’t a warrior. The added benefit of tanking with a Monk is the fact that like a druid, they wear leather armour, but they WILL roll on your tier pieces. How to Gear your Warrior This will be a short section because there is very little here to discuss. Here is what each stat does: Bonus Armour: Increases our armour and reduces damage taken. Mastery: Increases our block chance, our critical block chance and our attack power. Critical Strike: Increases our chance to critically hit with attacks and our chance to parry. Versatility: Increases damage dealt/healed/absorbed and reduces damage taken. Haste: Reduces the cooldown of Shield Slam and Thunderclap, reduces the GCD. Multistrike: Allows our attacks to generate additional blows at a lower damage, within the same GCD. Multistrikes proc our passive Blood Frenzy, which is a 3% heal over time. Don’t worry about it, it’s virtually useless. Generally you want to gear in either one of two ways depending on your style and your stage in raid progression. Defensive: Bonus Armour > Mastery > Critical Strike=Versatility > Haste > Multistrike. Offensive: Bonus Armour > Critical Strike > Multistrike=Mastery > Haste > Versatility Gem/Enchant your primary (underlined) stat. Go for a defensive priority when you are progressing. When you are farming raids, you may opt to go for a more offensive build, but I would not personally ever do this because I always feel like a paper towel when I do.Talents and Glyphs I’m going to walk you through each talent in the tree, tier by tier and explain what it does. Then I will outline some of the more useful glyphs. Tier 1 – Dat charge These 3 abilities offer improvements to your Charge ability. • Juggernaut reduces the cooldown of your taunt to 12 seconds. Generally the best for rage generation. • Double Time gives Charge 2 charges, but removes the rage generation from the second charge if used before 12 seconds. Generally better for mobility. • Warbringer is generally a PvP talent that allows your charge to stun rather than root. Really this is only useful if you are charging to interrupt a stunnable add (and keep in mind that most raid mobs are not) and for some reason you can’t use Gag Order (but really, when does that ever happen?). Tier 2 – Dem heals These abilities offer you healing • Enraged Regeneration is an on-demand heal that gives you 10% of your HP now and 20% over the next 5 seconds. It can be used when stunned, is off the GCD and has a 1–minute cooldown. It’s a nice little on-demand heal that can be used in a pinch, or if you ever get separated from healers. • Second Wind gives you 25% Leech when you drop below 35% health. It’s stupidly overpowered for soloing old raid content, or any other situation where you are able to hit for over 1 million with Shield Slam, but next to useless for any other situation outside this. • Enraged Regeneration is an on-demand heal with a 30-second cooldown. It heals you for 15% of your health for a cost of 10 Rage. Its cooldown is reset by killing a foe. It is however, on the GCD and requires a target to be in melee range. I don’t find it to be of any practical use in a raid environment. Tier 3 – Dem deeps These talents buff your damage or give you the opportunity to deal additional damage. • Heavy Repercussions makes your Shield Slam do 30% more damage when Shield Block is active. It’s a passive ability that doesn’t really require any radical changes to playstyle in order to get the most out of. It is however, the lowest DPS increase out of the three. • Sudden Death gives your auto-attacks 10% chance to allow you to use execute with no cost, regardless of enemy health. • Unyielding Strikes gives your Devastate the power to grant one stack of Unyielding Strikes, which reduces the rage cost of Heroic Strike. It stacks up to six, effectively allowing you to spam Heroic Strike without cost. This is the highest overall DPS boost, but the most difficult to execute effectively. This is one tier where every option is totally viable and depends on the encounter, as well as the skill of the player. What you take doesn’t matter defensively (and unless you’re very good, taking Unyielding Strikes might actually be detrimental to your play, as it makes you tempted to spend rage recklessly on Heroic Strike) so it is best to make this decision based on how comfortable you are with the class. Heavy Repercussions does not require you to play differently, and is the best option for the less experienced players. Sudden Death is the least radical departure from standard playstyle and offers a moderate, noticable DPS boost. Unyielding Strikes is recommended only for advanced players looking to min-max their DPS. It really shines (on the meters at least) when used on cleave fights like Twin Ogron, Blast Furnace, Iron Maidens or Tectus, because you can use it with Glyph of Cleave and do twice the damage. Tier 4 – Dem Stuns These talents offer some form of crowd controlling damage. • Storm Bolt is the spiritual successor to Concussion. It is a single target stun that deals moderate damage and can be used every 30 seconds. It’s “meh” at best for tanking, and there are almost always better options in virtually every conceivable situation. • Shockwave is an AOE stun that is incredibly effective in dungeons or situations where you are tanking multiple adds. • Dragon Roar is a huge AOE blast of high damage that interrupts and knocks down everything in range. It’s the biggest DPS boost of them all but has the longest cooldown, at one minute. Use this for single target fights and incorporate it as part of your rotation. Tier 5 – Dat defence Tier 5 offers you 3 abilities that can protect raid members. • Mass Spell Reflection protects your entire raid from one spell that is cast directly at them. There are very few niche situations where this is actually viable. • Safeguard allows you to Intervene an attack made against an ally, and reduces the damage they take by 20% for 6 seconds. It’s a very effective and rapidly available defensive cooldown that you can use on your co-tank whenever it is available. • Vigilance is a big 40% damage reduction cooldown that can be applied to any raid member. I insist that every warrior that I raid with rolls with Vigilance so they can make use of this amazing cooldown. As a tank you should be the first to give this to an off-tank if he calls for it so as to save things like Pain Suppression for yourself. Tier 6 – Dat Bladestorm tho Tier 6 offers you Bladestorm and friends. Bloodbath being the most viable alternative and Avatar being the most “niche” (which is a politically correct term for “dog!@#$”) talent the warrior has. • Avatar turns you into a Colossus for 20 seconds, enabling you to rape faces with 20% more damage. It’s on a 1.5 minute cooldown. This doesn’t actually sound that bad on paper, and Icy Veins loves it for some reason. The problem is that it just does not synergise well with the rest of the Warrior’s powerful abilities which are all on one minute cooldowns (Dragon Roar and Ravager). You either have to wait 30 seconds after these abilities come off cooldown to use them with Avatar, or you simply have to use Avatar every other time you use the Dragon Roar>Ravager combo. If it was a 1 minute cooldown, it would be very viable, but at the moment, it isn’t so only take this if you are fighting a boss that roots you (does not work on Imperator Mar’gok’s Mark of Chaos). There are certain fights where this ability is effective, but these are generally single target fights which employ heavy cooldown usage and would warrant the use of Anger Management (Gruul and Butcher). • Bloodbath does 30% of your physical damage as a bleed to all affected targets. Essentially if your Devastate hits for 10,000, it will deal 3,000 additional damage as a bleed effect. This synergises amazingly well with Ravager and Dragon Roar, which can be used on either a single target or on a large group of adds to deal monstrous damage, once every minute. When I roll with this ability, I have it macroed to Dragon Roar to make sure that they are always used at the same time. • Bladestorm. DAT BLADESTORM THO. It’s the most ridiculously powerful AOE DPS cooldown that we have access to, and it’s amazingly funny to see warriors cheesing the %^-* out of Bladestorm on trash packs in raids, topping the DPS meters for an entire six seconds. It’s great for trash and dungeons, but its boss utility is pretty limited because its single target usage is virtually nonexistent. You basically spin around for 6 seconds, dealing large AOE damage to everything in the immediate area. You cannot use any abilities, and thus cannot generate any rage while using it, so make sure you pool rage beforehand and have Shield Block/Barrier up while using it. The only boss I routinely use it on is Tectus, and that’s purely for quickly getting aggro on the little Tectus Motes in P3. Tier 7 – Level 100 Talents All of these are powerful and very viable. They should be swapped regularly on a fight-by-fight basis depending on the fight content. • Anger Management. Whenever you spend 30 rage, you knock one second off the cooldown of several different abilities: Shield Wall, Demo Shout, Ravager, Bloodbath, Dragon Roar, Avatar, Bladestorm, Shockwave, Storm Bolt, Last Stand, Mocking Banner and Heroic Leap. To put things into perspective. Every time you use Shield Block, you reduce the active cooldown of Shield Wall by 2 seconds. I might use 5 or 6 shield blocks every minute. That’s 10 seconds knocked off your 1 minute cooldowns. 20 seconds knocked off your 2 minute cooldowns. 30 seconds knocked off your 3 minute cooldowns. In essence, it helps with the warrior’s major problem when comparing it to other tanks, which is fewer cooldowns. We would really benefit from an extra charge on Shield Wall, or the power to apply Vigilance to ourselves. The next best thing to an extra cooldown, is to have your existing cooldowns become available faster. • Ravager drops a whirling axe of doom at a target location. It will deal insane damage to anything that walks into it, and grant you 30% additional parry for 12 seconds. This ability is a Godsend on fights that involve add management. On Blast Furnace, for example, I can drop a Ravager (empowered with Bloodbath) on an Elementalist while standing away with a group of security guards. I will parry virtually all of their attacks, granting me a metric tonne of Revenge procs, building lots of rage, allowing me to keep Shield Barrier up almost permanently. When you pair it with Revenge-Barrier, it becomes a powerful defensive cooldown in its own right, but only when tanking multiple mobs. • Gladiator’s Resolve turns you into Leonidas (or perhaps Maximus?) and allows you to DPS with a shield. It’s tanking utility is 5% less damage taken. Is it viable? Definitely. Do you need it? Depends. Some tanks will swear by this talent. The most intelligent comment I ever read about this was “I see the other abilities and see ‘it does this, but you take 5% more damage’”. That’s an excellent way of viewing it, and many tanks will take this for that reason. While you do lose that 5% bonus, the benefits from the other two abilities are functionally different and situational-dependant. When deciding whether to take Gladiator’s Resolve over the other two talents, you have to ask yourself whether or not you need Ravager to manage adds, or whether or not you will need to use Shield Wall more than once in a 2 minute period. Either case is good reason to take one of those abilities. Protection Warriors have the unique honour of having no “bad” or “useless” talents. Virtually every talent is usable in some situations. Some are certainly more commonly used than others, but in general you can swap your talents around very easily to allow you to counter specific fight mechanics better. I’m not going to tell you what talents to go with, because a good Protection Warrior will adapt and change his talents on a fight-by-fight basis if necessary. Your Tanking Arsenal – Abilities Here we examine the different abilities in your arsenal. I’ll go through what each ability does and how it factors into your rotation. Passive Mechanics Enrage: Using Berserker Rage, as well as getting critical strikes with Devastate and Shield Slam will Enrage you, granting you 10 Rage and allowing you to deal 10% more damage for 8 seconds. It’s normal for this ability to have a 60-70% uptime on most fights. Resolve: Resolve is a passive ability which you receive for choosing the Protection specialisation. Essentially, it increases your self-healing and absorption effects based on the amount of unmitigated damage you have taken in the last 10 seconds, including contributions from avoided melee attacks. Its value fluctuates with your damage intake during an encounter, and decays away over about 10 seconds if you stop taking damage. It has a built-in diminishing returns effect which limits the increase to 240% of the base healing or absorption value. In other words, at maximum Resolve your Absorbs do 340% the amount they would do with zero Resolve. I ripped this straight from Icy-Veins. If you’re getting hit really hard (Butcher/Blackhand) or really frequently by many mobs (Blast Furnace) you’ll see Resolve values into the regions of 200%. At this point, your Shield Barrier is going to be giving you around 150k absorb shields. Rage Builders Shield Slam: You smash your target in the face with your shield, dealing huge damage and generating 20 Rage. Critical hits will proc Ultimatum, making your next Heroic Strike a guaranteed critical strike at no rage cost. This ability is your number one priority. Keep it on cooldown at all times. Revenge: You instantly attack your target, as well as two additional enemies, generating 20 Rage. Parrying an attack will reset the cooldown of Revenge. Charge: Instantly charge to your target, rooting them for 1.5 seconds. Gain 20 rage. Berserker Rage: Causes you to become Enraged. It should be used on cooldown, and can be used outside the GCD. For that reason, I macro it to both Shield Slam and Revenge (moves I use to build rage anyway), so that I don’t even have to press it, and I know that it is being used every 30 seconds. A couple of people have pointed out flaws with this: “lol noob you can’t control when you use it that way and you will waste rage.” Actually that’s not true, and my logs routinely show that on most fights my wasted rage (rage you generate when already rage capped) is often less than 1% of the rage I generate. I’ve had many fights where I waste no rage at all. Plus, it frees up a keybind, and God knows we have far too many already. Fillers Devastate: This is your single target filler. It is spammable, deals decent damage, keeps the Deep Wounds DoT ticking on your target and when it hits, you have 30% chance to proc Sword and Board, resetting the cooldown on Shield Slam and increasing its Rage generation by 5. You should be filling GCDs with this when you do not have Shield Slam or Revenge available. Thunderclap: Your AOE filler that keeps Deep Wounds ticking on as many targets as it hits. It’s huge AOE threat when it hits, but should only be used when tanking 3 or more targets. Give priority to Devastate during single target encounters, for the chance to proc Sword and Board. Rage Spenders Shield Block: Your core active mitigation ability. It lasts for 6 seconds, has two charges and each charge has a 12 second cooldown. It costs 60 rage, and when this is up, it gives you an additional 100% chance to block physical attacks. These blocks can be critical blocks. Blocks reduce damage by 30% (base) and Critical Blocks reduce damage by 60%. With a Mastery build at around 680 gear level, I have over 40% chance to critically block when raid buffed. Shield Block at very high Mastery turns into Shield Wall, more or less, for physical damage. Shield Barrier: Converts up to 60 rage into an absorb shield that scales with Resolve. Very high resolve can give you shields in excess of 150k. Low resolve barriers tend to hover at around 60-80k. It’s the best we have to stop magical damage (and that’s not saying much). It was thankfully buffed in 6.1 and went from being next to useless to perfectly viable. Heroic Strike: Converts 30 rage into you shaking your fist at your target and hurling aggressive, verbal abuse at them. No? Okay. For a long time I didn’t even have this on my bar – the damage is low (less than 8k in 680 gear) and it’s a waste of rage that you could be spending on Shield Barrier. It’s only real use is an extra bit of damage that can be used outside the Global Cooldown, but you should only ever use it when you get an Ultimatum proc and it’s not only free but also a guaranteed crit. Icy Veins says “dump excess rage into Heroic Strike”. I’d rather dump my “excess rage” into Shield Barrier, thank you very much. You can glyph it so that it hits an extra target. If you take Unyielding Strikes, you can wreck the DPS meter on cleave fights like Maidens and Twin Ogron in all sorts of crazy ways at a cost of your survivability. The only time that it is ever acceptable to spend rage on this ability is when you are using it as a rage dump when you are not actively tanking, and you are not taking any form of raid damage (therefore rendering it pointless to use Shield Block or Shield Barrier). Rotation Protection Warrior is less about “rotation” and more about priority. You give Priority to rage generators when you are generating rage, and priority to rage spenders when you are approaching full rage. For single target use: (Dragon Roar>Bloodbath/Avatar>Ravager)>Shield Slam>Revenge>Devastate. For AOE use: (Dragon Roar>Ravager>Bladestorm)>Shield Slam>Revenge>(Shockwave)>Thunder Clap>Devastate. Use Shield Block whenever it is available when tanking a physical hitting enemy, all spare rage should be used for Shield Barrier. You can generate 60 Rage in as little as 2 or 3 GCDs if you get lucky with crits and parries. You’re never going to be in a situation where you are not generating enough rage to keep Shield Block on cooldown, but the more rage you generate means the more Shield Barriers you can use. Active Mitigation By now, if you have been reading this guide, you will be familiar with how our active mitigation works, but I should probably explain exactly what the term means. Active mitigation is the act of the player choosing to use an ability that mitigates incoming damage. Mitigation obviously means “reducing the severity of” incoming damage, and it is active in the sense that it is the player that initiates the process, as opposed to it being passive, i.e. happening without the player needing to do anything. Before Mists of Pandaria, tanks used an old model of passive mitigation that we referred to as CTC or “combat table coverage”. It took things like armour and avoidance into consideration, and the idea was that your combined avoidance (block, dodge, parry, miss) would total out to 104.2% (iirc), giving you full combat table coverage against a Boss monster. Anything less than 104.2% CTC meant you had a chance (however minor) of taking a full boss hit to the face, and getting wrecked. You would have to gem and gear in a specific way in order to reach optimal CTC, and ensure that you never took a full hit to the face, and that every boss swing was blocked, dodged, parried or avoided completely (miss). This mitigation was all passive, and the only “active” mitigation you did was timed use of your cooldowns (i.e. Shield Wall, and the old style Shield Block, which was on a 60 second cooldown back then). Death Knights had already been using Active Mitigation for two expansions, and in MoP, Warriors, (along with Paladins and Druids) were dragged, kicking and screaming into the new Active Mitigation model. The tools we were given were Shield Block on a much shorter cooldown to actively stop incoming damage, and Shield Barrier, an on-demand absorb shield with no cooldown that scaled with our Vengeance (old resolve). In the past, most of our mitigation happened passively, now we are told that we have to actively choose how to mitigate attacks. We are faced with a whole new problem of what do we use and when? The tl;dr version of this is: Shield Block for physical attacks, Shield Barrier for everything else, but it isn’t quite as simple as that. Read on and I will explain. When we judge what makes a good warrior, before we start analysing the fight and looking at things like DPS, DTPS, EHRPS and KRSI/TMSI, the first thing that we tend to look at is; how well is this warrior using his active mitigation? To do that we first look at his Shield Block uptime; anything in the regions of 40% and above is good on most fights. My personal record is 47%, which was achieved on Heroic Butcher. With a two-set bonus from BRF, I’ve seen some warriors get as high as 58% uptime. The thing is, Shield Block uptime is great – the more it is active, the less physical damage you will take on average, but what if the damage you are taking is not physical damage? What if you can’t block it? Some fights will involve heavy magical damage. We have Shield Barrier to counter powerful spells and magical damage. Shield Barrier gives you an absorb shield that scales with rage and resolve. 60 rage Shield Barriers with no resolve will give you around 35-40k absorb. With high resolve you will get around 120k or higher. The highest values I’ve ever seen from shield barrier were in the regions of 150k, which was on Heroic Blackhand and Mythic Butcher and that was at near-maximum resolve. Bear in mind that when your resolve is that high, you are likely getting hit for very high amounts. Normally, no matter what your resolve, one barrier is usually enough to stop all the damage from one boss hit. So the million dollar question is: do you barrier or block? No guide in the world is going to give you that answer. Most of them say the same thing – it depends on the fight and what type of damage the encounter involves. It’s true - knowing what sort of damage you are coming up against is the key to being an effective tank and using your active mitigation effectively. Warriors in particular benefit hugely from knowing what type of damage they are facing and when it is coming so that they can plan their active mitigation ahead of time. You cannot play reactively as a warrior: you can as a Death Knight, Monk or Druid because you can heal yourself up after taking damage, but you cannot do this as a warrior. This means that learning fights is going to be a case of trial and error or your part. It will take time, it will take wipes, but this is what makes you a better tank – being able to learn quickly and adapt your play to counter the damage you are facing. As for what you should use, sometimes the answer is Shield Barrier, sometimes the answer is Shield Block. Other times the answer is “both”, because with a 120 rage pool, you can do that quite easily. For magical damage, always use Shield Barrier – that’s pretty obvious. For physical damage, it comes down to numbers. Shield Block reduces all physical damage taken by 30% for 6 seconds, with a reasonably high chance of things getting reduced by 60%. Barrier lasts for 6 seconds or until eaten. When assessing which to use, you need to decide which would give you the most mitigation in that 6 second period – an absorb shield of a fixed value, or 30% less physical damage taken. Most bosses swing on a 2-3 second timer, so one might assume a maximum of 3 hits in that 6 second period. Let’s say you get hit three times for 40k damage, a total of 120k over that 6 second period, or 20k DTPS. If you shield block, assuming none of your blocks are critical, each blocked hit is going to hit you for 28k damage meaning 84k total damage taken over that 6 second period. Now let’s take the same scenario, using Shield Barrier, and for argument’s sake, let’s say your shield Barrier is a 60k absorb shield, which is approximately what you would get at 80-100% resolve. Assuming no hits are blocked, dodged or parried, the first 40k hit would be soaked completely, the second would be partially soaked and the third would be taken fully to the face, assuming you didn’t rebuff your barrier at any point. That’s 60k damage, compared to the 84k taken with Shield Block up. Mathematically, Shield Barrier reduces more damage when you are taking lower damage. It is generally true that unless a boss is going to hit you for more than 350k, Shield Barrier will reduce more damage from a single boss hit than Shield Block will, but Shield Block will keep this damage reduction up for longer. The tricky part is that healers tend to prefer smooth damage intake. They would rather you were getting hit continuously for lower values (28K) than went for periods where you weren’t taking any damage (while Barrier was up) and then suddenly took a large hit when it finished. They spend more mana using big heals. Better to let lower values through that HoTs can deal with. When you’re looking at logs, look for how many times a tank got a Mark of Blackrock proc in any fight. If he gets loads, that means he is constantly getting to a point where his health is below 50%. That means he isn’t getting healed effectively. If he has only a few, it means he didn’t go lower than 50% health very often. So what does this look like in practice? Generally, if you use Shield Block on cooldown, use Shield Barrier whenever you have an abundance of rage, you won’t go far wrong. Learning when to use Barrier is an art, and will take time to develop this skill. In the end, effective mitigation all comes down to rage management. A good Warrior manages his rage well: the less rage you waste, the better, and generally the higher your Shield Barrier uptime, the less rage you are wasting and the more damage you are preventing. I’ve seen Warriors fall into the trap of thinking “oh this is a physical fight, I’ll just use Shield Block, it will be fine,” or think that they should be using either Shield Block OR Shield Barrier, but never both. In fact, if you have the rage to spare, it’s never a bad idea to use both Shield Barrier and Shield Block at the same time, as long as you are confident that you will have enough rage to use Shield Block when it becomes available. Learning this takes time and patience. The Shield Maid addon, which I will discuss in the AddOns section, really helps when deciding what to use. AddOns I’m going to list the core AddOns that I believe you need to be a) An effective raider, and b) An effective tank. General raiding AddOns Deadly Boss Mods or Big Wigs. Either is fine, I’ve always been a DBM fan, and it’s never given any problems. Some guilds swear by Big Wigs and it does indeed offer marginally more customisation than DBM does, but DBM is probably easier to learn how to use and does not require much input from your part. Getting either of these addons will make you a better raider, because it will give you visual and audible alerts regarding specific events in a fight, such as tank swap mechanics or movement warnings that you will need to take heed of. GTFO. This is another addon that most serious guilds will check that you have before they let you in. GTFO does one thing – it spams you with audible warnings whenever you stand in the fire. Very handy to have as a tank. Tanking specific addons Shield Maid. When I first got back into tanking, I found this addon immeasurably helpful. It tracks both Shield Block and Shield Barrier and it tells you exactly how much damage you can expect to mitigate with either ability. It also displays their uptime in a very clear format. I would definitely recommend Shield Maid to anybody who is starting out tanking on a Protection Warrior. Tell Me When. This is a very important and extremely useful Addon for any class. It allows you to create custom alerts for when things happen that you need to react to. The possibilities of what you can do are endless, but most of the time you will be using it to track when abilities come off cooldown, or when buffs that you need to keep active are about to fall off. Hermes or BLT Raid Cooldowns. These are generic addons that track raid cooldowns. I use Hermes because it’s lightweight and not visually offensive, but I used to use BLT Raid Cooldowns. Either addon allows you to check what raid cooldowns are available, and you can customise it so that it checks the cooldowns that you want to know about. As a tank you need to be checking external cooldowns such as Pain Suppression, Ironbark, Hand of Sacrifice and Vigilance, and see who has one available so that you can call for it. Classtimer. Tracks the uptime of certain buffs and procs. Highly customisable, and a good alternative to the Aura Bars function in ElvUI. Omen3 Threat Meter. Allows you to look at the threat table to see how you and your co-tank are doing. Being able to check on threat was more important in the days where a poorly timed Pyroblast crit would cause the offending Mage to pull aggro. Now it’s only really useful to see whether or not your co-tank has enough threat on the target or are you about to pull aggro. KUI Nameplates, or any other Nameplates addon. Most Nameplates addons have the function that allows you to see which mobs are targeting you by the colour of their nameplates. I use ElvUI as a reskin of my default UI, and this addon comes with this function, but you could use KUI Nameplates (as I did before I converted to ElvUI) to get this same effect. Nameplates will be a different colour depending on whether or not you have threat on a mob – this is very handy for seeing at a glance which mobs you are actively tanking and which mobs are attacking other players, and need to be controlled.eflecting on and improving performance A good tank always strives to get better. We improve by understanding where we are going wrong and developing strategies to correct our mistakes. Logs are a fantastic way to do this. www.warcraftlogs.com is an excellent website to record your raiding performance and analyse it. It allows you to see how much damage you are taking in comparison to other players of your class. It allows you to view what your buff uptimes are and it gives you a comprehensive log of everything that happened to you during the fight. Consumables are very important. You should always turn up to a raid with a bare minimum of this: - One Draenic Stamina Flask (or Draenic Strength Flask) for every hour that you intend to raid. - Enough food to make sure you have a well fed buff for each pull. 30+ is a good start. I buff Stamina with Talador Surf and Turf. - Enough draenic armour flasks to have at least one per pull. Ethically speaking, you should always pre-pot (taking a potion before the pull so that it is off-cooldown in time for a second potion later), but if it comes down to it, it's more important to save a potion for later (during the Execute Phase, or when there is a healer down and you need to survive for another 20 seconds). Pre-potting allows you to get a good threat lead and get some fat deeps during the initial phase, but if you're not taking right away, it's a waste of a potion. I only ever pre-pot if I know I am tanking and taking damage right away, otherwise I tend to just rip aggro off other tanks. No point taking a pre-pot if you have to hold back on damage. The best way to learn is simply to listen to other tanks that are more experienced than you. Tanking with DPS that will push you to your limits as a tank is also a fast way to learn, but only if you have the skills to cope with this. You have to build this up gradually, and never get yourself down when you get criticised. Tanks take beatings, not just from mobs but also from other players. You will be chastised, insulted, raged at and even abused when you make a mistake. This comes with the role and it is something you will have to get used to. Never flame a flamer. It never leads to anything good. I’ve been told to “up my game” and “get my act together” in the past when I was making mistakes. I’ve been tanking in raids with people that have made me so nervous that I would sweat. I would feel scrutinised for every action I took. This is normal. You will eventually develop a skin. Try and take all criticism you receive as constructive and ignore the flamers – tanks are an easy target for their frustration because your mistakes are very visible. Their mistakes often don’t show up until you go through the logs. Learn from this and try to correct your mistakes and you will become a better player for it.
