Warrior tank feeling squishy

So after taking a short break after hitting 90 on my warrior, I came back to tank some raids. The general consensus among the group seems to be that I'm rather squishy and spiky. I've looked at guides and followed them, and I've looked at WoL, but quite honestly I'm not very good at analyzing them.

Recount shows me taking as much damage as the other tank (a paladin) even when I'm only tanking 1 dog on stone guard.

I'm not sure if I'm doing anything wrong or what.

Armory and recent WoL

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...s/Sonas/simple

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-sdakxiuzwrjp7vyg/
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-k17zf9ahdgy94xbj/

Ok, I glanced at your character sheet and the first thing that jumped out at me was your Hit/Exp. I know it can be tricky to do at a lower iLvL and you will probably take a little bit more overall damage, but being fully hit/exp capped should be your first priority just because it gives you the ability to effectively prevent and manage bursts of damage. So, that means: Gems, enchants and, reforges should all be focused on your hit/exp cap.

Second thing, I believe with the use of Shield Block the Eternal meta gem (+1% block value) is still better than the Austere on most fights.

On to the logs:

First thing I looked at on the log was the up-time of Sword and Board. On your Garajal kill from the 15'th you had 14 procs and spent a total of 54 seconds with the buff. That means that it took you an average of 3.8 seconds to respond too each proc. In most situations it should take you no more than a GCD (1.5 seconds) to use that proc. So, making sure your SS is absolutely always on cd is something you can work on. Looking at your Will of the Emperor attempts from Friday night, particularly your longest attempt which lasted 11:54, you were doing a better job of responding to SNB procs, with a average SNB uptime of 2.6 seconds.
One statistic I find very troubling though is your rage usage... or lack thereof. According to WoL you gained a grand total of 3,445 rage over the course of that 11 minute fight from SS, REV and Enrage procs. That's enough rage to use Shield Block 57 times. You only used it 27. You only used Shield Barrier once, so you weren't spending rage there. You gained 32 Ultimatum procs but only used Heroic Strike 22 times (bad use of procs, btw) so I know you weren't spending rage there. SO, I do believe I found your problem:

Rage capping is bad, don't do that.
Using rage = reducing damage.
Not using rage = trying to reduce damage taken just by being 100% mad at the boss.... it doesn't work very well.

So, the fix. Were you aware that you were rage capping?
If yes, and you just have trouble managing your abilities and resources, there are tools you can use to help out.
If no, first thing I recommend doing (after you fix your stat priorities) is going and tanking something easy (like LFR or a 5 man) where you can REALLY work on just playing your class correctly and not worrying so much about mechanics until your recourse management becomes much more fluid. Actually, go hit a target dummy for at least 5 minutes, and use your Shield Block whenever available. It will be different than tanking obviously since you will not have revenge or enrage procs, but just make sure that you can in fact easily keep an eye on your rage bar and action bar at the same time.

As far as rage capping goes on Will of the Emperor, I was putting off using shield block during Devastating Combo since they do not appear to do melee swings during that time (wasting the blocks). If that is incorrect I'll start using Shield Block during the combos. Ultimatum procs, yeah I wasn't watching for those during that fight as I was more concerned with avoiding the combo (admittedly something I haven't quite mastered... especially the stomps). I also wasn't watching Ultimatum as much throughout the whole raid because (as far as I know) it does not increase survivability beyond doing more damage.

If I appear to be capping badly on other fights then I'll look into it, and during easier bosses I'll watch my rage closer.

Ok, yes, that is correct, there is no reason to use Shield Block during a combo. But if your next ability will rage cap you, or bring you close, I usually do one of two things, and not necessarily in this order:

1. Hit Heroic Strike once or twice. Damage done on boss = shorter fight = happy healers.
2. Use a Shield Barrier. If in Titan Gas phase, definitely use a Shield Barrier. If there are less seconds left in the combo than there are seconds in the duration of a SBar, use Sbar to absorb the first melee hit you're going to take after the combo.

There's really no reason to only use half the rage you get though.

And yeah, the stomps..... they be real b#tches some times. My suggestion, tank that fight with your camera fully vertical and ALL the way zoomed out. Then just watch his feet for the dust from the stomp, and the arcs are pretty easy to spot due to the large blue arc animation before they are cast. If your keybinds aren't set up in a way where you can easily strafe in both directions you'r going to have problems.


Ok, and I looked at the rage gained VS ability usage on Stone Guard.
On Stone Guard on Wednesday Febuary 8'th, you gained 1500 rage from SS, Rev and, Enrage which (divided by 60) is enough for 25 Shield blocks. You used Shield Block 17 times, Shield Barrier none.

All right, I'll keep that in mind. I usually don't think about the damage I deal (with the exception of times where I'm not tanking anything) and mentally associate doing damage with being the DPS's job.

I had not thought about using Shield Barrier toward the end of the combo, that should help me take less damage as well since the melee swings hurt.

I'll try the camera thing, fortunately DBM or Tomtom helps a lot with the swings themselves.

I'm not seeing anything Massively wrong. You're a little sloppy with your procs and don't time your active mitigations particularly well. But you may want to consider this You're tanking considerably less damage than your paladin co-tank, about a third less, despite taking more damage from the Combos. Willy is the only real fight for comparing tanks this tier. due to how vengeance works fights like Dogs really unfairly punish the one dog tank. Willy is your fight for comparing, both tanks get to tank in relative isolation with nigh identical bosses.

On the subject of active mitigation you really need to get used to having Shield block up most of the time you're actively tanking and pooling rage anytime time you're not.due to how Shieldblock recharges you can be rather clever on taunt swap fights like feng and go through cycles of having it up for 24 seconds and then 12 seconds of nothing. the idea is that you taunt the boss and go to 2 stacks during the 24seconds of shield block and then have the other tank taunt off giving you 20 seconds or so to fit in the 12 of nothing whilst shield block is recharging. You can do the same on Willy except you use the dance phase as your shieldblock recharge phase, the boss will do his normal melee for ~20 seconds, and then force you to dance for ~15. doing this correctly means you never need take a melee hit to the face on those sort of encounters. Your active mitigation on the elegon kill is aweful, shield block all the time and try to time a shield barrier just before his breath attacks.

You want to reforge to your hit cap, not gem for it, Hit shares a colour with Stamina and you can't reforge Stamina so we have to be a little careful with where we get stats from you've got a mastery reforge that could be Hit/Exp reforge on your legs. Your Glove enchant is mastery, would be better as Expertise and your Cloak enchant would be better as hit if you absolutely can't make the cap any other way. Reforging out of Hit on your MH into mastery is straight up counter productive. Your trinkets are bad choices, the brewfest one is just meh and the other one is probally the 3rd choice of the 5man trinkets, Lessons of the Darkmaster and Heart of Fire are both available from dungeons i suggest you get them in the interim before 5.2.

Judging from the logs, and my overall lack of information about current paladin tanking, I assumed that the (on that fight) 8 mil damage difference was made up for by his 14 mil healing. However this isn't about paladin tanking so I'll move along.

Looking at the Elegon kill, unless I'm reading it wrong I am getting shield barrier up for most of the breaths. Should I have been doing something else? Because from what I'm reading I'm doing what you said. I seem to be misunderstanding something about that.

I will switch my enchant over and tweak my reforging so that I can switch more gems out. I will attempt to gem for some more stamina after tweaking things around.

I have Heart of Fire and the stam Brewfest trinket as well for backup (since I prefer to swap trinkets around even if I've forgotten to do so frequently). The choice of a exp trink with a Strength proc does confuse me though as that seems better suited for a DPS.

I apologize for any confusion regarding what has been said. I'm just thrown off when I'm told I'm doing something wrong when I appear to be following the very instructions you are giving (regarding the Elegon kill). However it is quite possible I'm just doing a poor job at reading logs since I have not studied logs much before.

The problem with the elegon Kill is that whilst you got 7 Barriers up you also only got 3 shield blocks up. thats alot of the fight where you're leaving yourself wide open. The thing is you should have ALOT of shield blocks whiolst tanking the boss or his adds AND a barrier up for every breath. Just getting the breaths isn't enough.

The Lessons of the Darkmaster is a decent trinket becuase Str converts to parry at a 1:0.9 rate for warriors. Expertise is one of our best defensive stats, better than mastery/stamina, and parry or dodge are neither here nor there you can take either. Same reason you've taken Dancing steel over Riversong as your MH enchant. having a huge chunk of Expertise in one slot allows you alot more flexibility in your gemming/reforging.

Ah, I see what you mean now. I must have been over-considerate to worrying about the breaths compared to the melee swings (as the healer was complaining about me getting murdered by the breaths as opposed to the melee swings). I'll work on managing my rage and Shield Block/Barrier better from here on out as I did not even notice the shield block issue at the time.

I'll also run Scholomance regularly and attempt to get that trinket.

Thank you Teng and Greg for pointing out where I'm screwing up so I can work to fix it, as I was having more issues figuring out where I was going wrong than I have had in the past.

IDK, if you saw my last edit on my previous post or not, i don't think you did, so here's what i dug up:

On Stone Guard on Wednesday Febuary 8'th, you gained 1500 rage from SS, Rev and, Enrage which (divided by 60) is enough for 25 Shield blocks. You used Shield Block 17 times, Shield Barrier 0 times.

So yeah, you really need to work on resource management.