Harsh Words and Steel: A Protection Warrior Guide

Tip for questing as protection:

You should always strive to have as many things hitting you as possible as long as you can take the damage.

At least in the 85+ zones, I discovered that if I was focused on using shield block that I would have issues where I had to pop defensive cooldowns or rely on focusing down mobs one at a time to get heals from victory rush.

If I use shield barrier instead, and shield block as an incidental rage dump, I am an immortal god who happens to kill things somewhat slowly. If I can find something that drops damage zones that I can stand in and spam shield barrier, I instead am an immortal god who kills things quickly.

Probably the best example would be the rare spawn mogu. If I focused on staying out of the massive cleave zones and using shield block to mitigate melee swing damage, I had some issues with the mob's stacking enrage buff and adds (meaning I occasionally didn't get out of the way fast enough as I couldn't see where the cleave zone ended). If I used shield barrier to eat the first couple of cleaves, I had a nice big vengeance stack and downed the mob much faster.

Or:

Bad tanks stand in the fire.
Good tanks avoid the fire.
Really good tanks use shield barrier to stay in the fire as long as they can safely absorb or heal off the damage, then let loose with a massive vengeance stack.

This also can improve your survivability, since your shield barrier scales with the attack power you gain from vengeance. This makes soloing often faster than playing as a dps, speeds up heroic 5-man runs, and can be a huge source of free damage in raids AS LONG AS YOU COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR HEALERS.

If you're going to mass pull like this out in the world make sure you damage everything you pull (especially use heroic throw/throw instead of taunt when pulling at range). If you body-pull or taunt a large group and another player drops an aoe right before you get some damage out, they'll get credit for all the mobs and you'll have to deal with them being stuck on you. Some enterprising folk (read:bastards) will also drag their mobs into your aoe once they've been tagged.

The best way to avoid this sort of thing is to pull every mob within leash range of your current position. Not only do you make it difficult for people to use you to get free kills, but you make everyone else regret not rolling a tank, as you effortlessly keep ten or more mobs swinging on you and your health bar barely moves because of shield barrier.

Also, group with people. You benefit from their dps, and you can use them to gather up even more mobs for you.

Or take second wind whislt questing and use the rage for HS/Cleave, or alternatively Tab out to answer the door for pizza, eat the pizza, discuss the pizza with your loved ones, take the empty pizza box to the bin, realise you need the john, read the next chapter of a Brief History of Time, wipe yourself off and return to wow to find every mob in a 30 yard radius has died to your auto attacks and your sitting on 35% health.

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Originally Posted by Tengenstein

Or take second wind whislt questing and use the rage for HS/Cleave, or alternatively Tab out to answer the door for pizza, eat the pizza, discuss the pizza with your loved ones, take the empty pizza box to the bin, realise you need the john, read the next chapter of a Brief History of Time, wipe yourself off and return to wow to find every mob in a 30 yard radius has died to your auto attacks and your sitting on 35% health.

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This.

I have tried questing as Arms with the Archeaology polearm, went to Fury because I didn't like Arms (and wanted the BT heals), ended up going back to Protection once I hit Townlong Steppes. (As he's my only Blacksmith, I needed to get the Klaxxi rep, so figured I'ld just get it from questing)
With Second Wind, I can heal up to 10k health per second, which means I can easily grab 5-6 mobs at once and AoE them down like that. I also solo'd a Monk rare simply because as long as I didn't take the big 100-150k ability hits, I could easily survive 4 minutes of melee combat, regardless of my shitty prot DPS (and it wass extra funny having an audience thinking I was gonna die soon so they can tag it :p).

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Originally Posted by Tengenstein

Or take second wind whislt questing and use the rage for HS/Cleave, or alternatively Tab out to answer the door for pizza, eat the pizza, discuss the pizza with your loved ones, take the empty pizza box to the bin, realise you need the john, read the next chapter of a Brief History of Time, wipe yourself off and return to wow to find every mob in a 30 yard radius has died to your auto attacks and your sitting on 35% health.

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That works excellently while questing, but Travelsize also mentioned rares. The rares have special attacks that deal damage based on your maximum health (and much more than 35%). Second Wind is rather pointless against them--if you have problems with them, you'll likely never hit below 35% before dying.

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Originally Posted by Taelas

That works excellently while questing, but Travelsize also mentioned rares. The rares have special attacks that deal damage based on your maximum health (and much more than 35%). Second Wind is rather pointless against them--if you have problems with them, you'll likely never hit below 35% before dying.

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Actually his point about rares was using Shield Barrier rather than Shield Block, not about the Second Wind talent.

And the healing talents are all pointless if you're having issues with rares. If you have problems with them, stop standing in the coloured stuff!! If not, damage intake is meh anyway, so Second Wind is the easiest (and you don't even have to switch back to it after you loot that useful BoP cloth chest!)

I love second wind, but I dislike relying on it- it's a wonderful backup for questing, and the extra rage on stun is nice as well.

Seriously though, if you're not already: On a boss like ook-ook or the illusionist in the new Scholo- pop shield barrier and stand in the bad (strafe out of wondrous rapidity once you start taking damage or have a second shield barrier prepared), and then marvel at just how much faster the fight goes. On the trash just before ook-ook you can pop shield barrier, detonate a napalm barrel on yourself, and get 30k attack power going into the room with all the monkeys - if you're not pulling this room all in one go, you're missing out. Then you can stand in the boss' little frontal aoe thing and pick up more free vengeance.

Getting a pack of adds to beat on you on the trash event before Rattlegore is another example of an area where taking extra damage to up your damage output can really speed up a 5-man run.

Also: macro Avatar and Skull Banner together since they're on the same 3 minute timer. Macro both of those into Recklessness. The best time to use these are during lust/warp/hero, not necessarily because heroism does anything for you, but skull banner does good things for everyone else, and that's the most likely time for other people to be popping party/raid-wide and personal cooldowns as well. Alternatively just use it at the start so you can use avatar and skull banner again in a longer fight.

Vengeance batteries aren't exactly a new thing, neither is stacking CDs, but in raids its prefrable to have manual control of you banner, especially if you raid with another warrior as clipping one another's banners is bad. I raid with 2 warriors and we rather linke have 30s of bannerage.

The earlier post by a person newly leveling a tank got me thinking "what sort of useful minutiae would be helpful to know if you don't have three or four expansions of tanking under your belt?"

Also let me pose this question:

In an extremely magic-damage heavy fight, something with little to no or negligible melee swings - something like KT phase 2, for instance...

Mastery, Dodge, and Parry are almost equally useless. You could stack stamina, but with the ability to arbitrarily raise our effective HP pool with shield barrier I'm not sure if we really need any more than what we already get from gear.

So in that case, with a pretty good vengenace stack from constant magic damage intake, once you cap hit and expertise to keep shield barrier going, what about throwing on some crit-heavy dps gear with hit/exp to at least make the fight shorter? The other traditional tank stats - dodge, parry, and mastery, do almost zero for us in such a (possible but not generally common) situation, and haste is also next to useless on a prot warrior.

More generally, how magic-heavy does a fight have to be to cause crit to be a stat you at least get SOMETHING out of compared to parry, dodge, and mastery?

(Yes you do have KT phase three to worry about, if you're taking the fight directly from my example. But you also had another tank available who can be wearing more traditional tanking gear. Don't claim such a thought experiment is useless or impractical since I KNOW some of you out there will juggle your gear for every fight if you have the gear and you would see even a marginal performance gain.)

Magic heavy or magic exclusive? you'd need alot of Crit on a magic heavy fight to overcome the DPS addition of extra revenges. On magic exlcusive phases ALL your parry/dodge/mastery should be in hit/exp/stam and everything left over should be crit.

If melee attacks still happen, though possibly negligible, then mastery/parry/dodge will still be > crit.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

If melee attacks still happen, though possibly negligible, then mastery/parry/dodge will still be > crit.

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Without a doubt, and realize that tanks are topping logs due to vengeance, if anyone needs more crit the DPS classes could use it.

I've recently started raiding (other than LFR) and I have a question regarding stat priorities I'm hoping someone would be able to answer.

Since I took a break for a short while before MoP, I tried to read a few guides (a couple of weeks ago) before leveling my Prot Warrior, just so I'd know which stats to look for as I got closer to lvl 90.

The guides I read then seemed to say that there were two ways to gear for most fights, either you could prioritise Hit/Expertise and Mastery and use Shield Block as your main defensive Cooldown, or you could go for Dodge/Parry and rely on Shield Barrier to keep you alive. From what I read then, Shield Barrier would lead to taking slightly less damage, with the disadvantage being that damage taken would be more spiky compared to trying to keep Shield Block up.

When I look around today, it seems like Hit/Expertise/Mastery with Shield Block is the way to go (of course swapping in Shield Barrier for magical damage).

So, is it correct that further theorycrafting (or just more practical experience with Hardmode raids and the actual encounters) has shown that the more reliable damage intake from keeping Shield Block up is preferred over going for Shield Barrier, or is there something else that has changed?

I've currently been going for a mixed setup with Hit/Expertise->Parry/Dodge->Mastery but since I've been doing mostly 5man heroics and LFR I've liked being able to rely on Shield Barrier to keep me alive, however as I'm switching over to proper raids I'd like to make the healing as easy as possible for my healers (who seem to have more than enough to do on Stone Guardians). Here's my armory link for reference: Armory

You said you read some guides, did you read this one?

@Gurrgel, your conculusions are correct, you've not missing any key details.

Yeah, I read both this guide and guides from other sites when I first reached lvl 90, it may not have been this guide that recommended both Hit/Expertise/Mastery (with Shield Block) and Dodge/Parry (With Shield Barrier) as two equally (more or less) gearing options but I know I read it at one or two places.

Now that I've gone back to read guides, most seem to say things similar to what this guide says:

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For most fights we should could use the following generalization
•Hit>Exp>Mastery=Stamina>Parry>Dodge

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I was almost certain this guide once said both options were viable for gearing, and in that case I'd like to know what has changed, however, if I'm mistaken and this guide never recommended anything like that, I guess I'm asking in the wrong place.

I update this guide as new information becomes available, Theck has done a lot more work since i originally wrote this guide and we've had several major changes. I've also had people bitch about wanting one general gear strategy to follow and not options. People seem to not want to understand what the stats do, but just be told what they should do. Eventually you just have to say "get a spore bat" it may not always be the right answer, but it's an answer.

Well and there's been a lot of debate between dodge/parry/sbar and hit/exp/mastery/sblock. It's basically the same discussion that happened in WotLK between "avoidance tanking" and "EHP tanking". Eventually EHP won over TDR, which is what's happening here. hit/exp/mastery/sblock is the "EHP" of Cata and dodge/parry/sbar is the "Avoidance tanking." TDR looks good on paper but typically falls on its face in reality.

Also it didn't help that Theckk's original simulations were WAY OFF. He even admitted as much. They were really botched but people took him at his word and moved on because he's usually dead-on. No one read his followup where he said, "hey guys I goofed, here's the real stuff."

@ Aggathon & Tengenstein

Thanks for the clarification both of you, I figured something like this had happened, but since I hadn't followed the discussion as closely this time, I didn't notice it when it happened, just what the end result (for now) looked like.

Happy to switch over to mastery, always preferred that method of tanking over avoidance, although I will miss Shield Barrier, almost having a self heal (absorb) that I could more or less spam felt quite nice :)

This is a great guide, thanks, Tengenstein. I've followed it from inception and admired it, but now am finally getting around to gearing up my L90 warrior so am interested in the new stat priorities (iirc mastery used to be recommended as the top dog).

Just out of curiosity, why is hit>exp rather than hit=exp? i.e. which warrior abilities can miss but can't be dodged or parried?

And I guess it's exp to 15%? That's an awful lot of expertise for lower gear levels. I guess there's no argument for "balancing stats"? ie. getting some hit/exp at somewhat lower levels to leave more room for mastery? (Theckhd couldn't see one for pallies.) So now the gearing priority for warrior tanks is like that for protection paladins (which is what my main is), except warriors don't have haste challenging mastery for third place.

On the banner ability - does anyone have a macro with it to share? Putting it on my bars so you click it, then have to select which of the 3 banners you want, etc makes it look so clunky, I haven't used it yet.

I cannot answer your question about stat priority's. When you click on the war banner and it gives you the option to click which of the 3 you want to drop, instead of clicking and letting go, click and drag it to an empty slot. You can put all 3 of them in individual spots on your bar.