New Prot Warrior - Advice Please?

[Bukkit]

I've recently begun playing as prot, and done a bit of research, but i'm unsure what I should do.

Heres my armory:
The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm currently aiming for the expertise cap of 6.5% (H ToC everyday in hopes of the tank sword). I realise I have some blues and im the process of trying to upgrade them. I'm in a casual 10man guild, so I can't really be garuenteed to do all the raids per week.

My question is, what should I be doing after I have reached my hit/expertise/defense caps? Do I regem my current exp/def gems into stam for more EH, or should I be trying to raise my dodge/parry/block?
To be totally honest, I don't know which I should be stacking more of (dodge/parry/block), but i'm just using what I get from gear. Is any of them more important then the other?

Also, and tips on my spec will be VERY apprectiated. I've been tanking a little with my druid as an offspec, so I have an idea about rotations, and i've done reading for them.


Anyway, any tips or help will be MUCH apprectiated.

[Varagar]

I'm by no means an expert on what you should/should not do here, but the general idea of being a Casual 10 man tank like myself is pretty straight forward:

1) Get to the 540 Defense Cap ASAP, else you can't tank bosses.
2) Concentrate on EH exclusively unless there is a stamina bonus of +9 or better to match the sockets (assuming no more than one non-blue socket). So your gems of choice are Solid X over all else (the +24 is just fine for 10 man normal modes).
3) Leave your Hit/Expertise/Dodge/Parry to your gear, and don't gem for it. There is simply no need at the moment.

Here is the link to my armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

Very boring, bland Prot spec to work with that is used by a good 90% of the Warriors out there.

As a casual tank we can't be caught up in the hype. Hardcores will carry 2-3 sets of gear (EH, Threat, Block, 100% Taunt/Interrupt Guarantees) for different tasks and will often times re-glyph (if they don't already carry two Prot specs, which I'm considering as well) between bosses simply to be more effective at a certain thing (cooldowns, blocking, etc.). Ignore all that. Just use a mainstream boring talent selection like mine, and pretty much any upgrades you get focus on EH and you'll be fine.

[Kron]

Agree with the above poster, def cap, and gem/enchant for stam exclusively. Until you hit 35k health unbuffed I would not worry about anything else.

If you are currently running mainly 5 man hc's to gear up I would reccomend the build and glyphs linked here:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

As a new tank you will find this build easier for managing multi-mob aggro when there is a lot of AoE flying about from party members. If you find you are not needing to use shield wall to much switch it out for a glyph of devastate, but again as a new tank having shield wall available on a 2 min cd could come in very handy, so I would start out with that initially.

[uglybbtoo]

All pretty good advice given .... EH over other stats after def min.

I prefer bukkit's deep wound spec when starting out but glyph differently mainly because I am always worried about threat when undergeared you usually have some fairly hard hitting dps behind you in heroics.

I used to set my baby tank up like

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

it is setup to generate threat via

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/4...-rotation.html

You can debate whether to squeeze the glyph of blocking in exchange for revenge or devastate .. diff situations have merits.

The big diff is I in AOE tanking I am not expecting to be able to hold off mobs with cleave ... infact I dont even have it on my normal keys it banished to a remote location in my toolbar.

If you are tanking for dps around your sort of level cleave will work if the dps outgears your forget it nothing short of tabbing and using one of your high threat moves will lock them.

Hence you will get a sort of seperation between those who cleave and those who don't when AOE tanking. There is no right and wrong here it is just different the advantage of not using cleave is you can tank easily for much higher geared dps the downside is it takes a bit of practice.

[Aggathon]

The generalities spoken above are good. I see you are inscription, which makes the shoulder enchant choice much more controversial. I don't know a whole lot about inscription, but if I were you I'd try to make a metric crap ton of the tanking glyphs (sheild wall, last stand, blocking, devastate, taunt, and cleaving) so that you can switch them in and out as you need then, then drop inscription and herbalism and pick up a different profession. Unless inscription can offer something similar to the ~60stam that other professions can give you that I don't know about, it is kind of a sub-par tanking profession. I'd recommend any combination of the following:
Alchemy
Jewelcrafting
Mining
Blacksmithing
Engineering

Alchemy gives ~650hps from the mixology bonus from flask of stoneblood (and might be easy to level if you gather a whole bunch of herbs then drop herbalism)
Jewelcrafting gives 63 stamina in the forum of 3 51+stam gems (so 21 extra a piece x3 = 63)
Mining gives you a flat passive 60 stam
Blacksmithing gives you 2 extra sockets to put on your gear, so 2 30 stam gems = 60 stam
Engineering gives a +885 armor to glove enchant, which is about 645 more armor than the current armor to glove enchant, which equates to roughly 61stam buffed, depending on your stats (possibly more effective at lower levels).

These are options, but if you're in a casual 10 man guild and don't really want to make those changes, then I understand, these are merely the options to min/max your character to its fullest potential, however this could also lead to an increase of almost 1.5k hps without any gear.

If you do make those changes, then you can also use the 30stam/15 resil to shoulder enchant. The reduced chance to be crit from the resil makes it so that you only need 536 defense to be uncrittable to raid bosses. This can give you a lot of flexibility in your gear and allows you to get away from gemming/enchanting defense.

You are also currently friendly with the argent crusade, which is located just north east of dalaran. Go there and pick up their tabard and chain run heroics until you are revered (shouldn't take too long). Once you are revered you can buy the +37stam/+20 defense helm enchant. This enchant will also increase your hit points and your defense (wow I sound like John Madden) and is considered a must have enchant for pretty much all tanks.

Once you are defense capped, the best considered enchants for warrior are(some may quibble a bit with my decisions, and to an extent some are kind of 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other and often times can depend on your healers/your playstyle/personal preference, etc.):

Helm: The afformentioned 37stam/20 defense glyph
Shoulders: 30stam/15 resil (it's a PvP enchant, 10k honor from the org vendors)
Cloak: 225
Chest: 275 HPs
Bracer: 40 stam
Shield: 18 stam or 20 defense, I prefer stam personally
Boots: Tuskarr's Vitality
Legs: that 55stam/22agi enchant, I forget the name off the top of my head.
Gloves: 240 armor (other alternatives include the engineering enchant, 18 stam, or if you need it, 10 parry/2% threat)

For weapon enchant:
For a mix of avoidance, armor, and crit: Mongoose. Upside is it is the most well rounded, the downside is that it has a low uptime for warriors.
Raw EHP: Blood Draining. It is a small smart heal when you need it, I would recommend it
Best overall avoidance: Blade Warding. Calculations have shown that for warriors it is better for overall avoidance, many people may argue between Blade Warding and Mongoose.

I personally prefer Blood Draining.

As for spec? I completely agree with uglybbtoo, however I disagree on his glyph choice. I would use either blocking or last stand over revenge. Devestate is all the threat glyph you really need if you're needing threat, and quite handy in heroics. Glyph of cleaving is very helpful in heroics too. A lot of warriors bind something like mousewheel down to heroic strike, and mousewheel up to cleave, so that they can seemlessly transition between the two. I have a really bad habit of constantly zooming in and out, so those never really panned out for me, but it may be worth a shot for you. I also might pick up the minor glyph "glyph of commanding" over charge or bloodrage, but that may depend upon whether or not you have a fury warrior that can put commanding up.

There is another spec you might want to look in to:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
It is often referred to as the "progression" spec because it has improved demo shout and max'd commanding shout, allowing for optimal defense against bosses you may not be geared enough for. I've typically called bunk on this spec for 25 mans since you usually have other classes that cover the buffs, fury warriors for commanding presence and druids/pallies for imp demo shout, however... in 10 mans you might not have the luxery, and being able to spec into those things may end up being fairly beneficial to your raid, however it is noticably lacking in threat talents, so you need to be sure you are on top of your game threat wise.

Your gear:
That green trinket should be your first priority. I would recommend trying to get "Essence of Gossimir" off of the second boss in heroic Azul'Nerub. It is +111stam and some on hit effect that is mediocre. It is a very decent trinket until you can pick up something better. I used it until I was able to pick up the black heart when it came out partly because it is pretty decent and partly because I had kinda bad luck finding another trinket besides Heart of Iron, which btw if you can pick up I think you should. I see you have the signit of the earthmother, which means you did XT. If you can do XT, you can do Ignis, so I'd recommend trying to get that.

Crafted gear that you can acquire:
Boots: Spiked Death Dealers
Belt: Indestructible Plate Girdle
Ranged: Armor Plated Shotgun or something like that made by engineers. It's got a nice amount of stam with a blue socket, would be worth picking up until you can get blades of the sable cross.

These are all fairly good upgrades, but the belt would be a TPS loss since you'd lose all the hit fromt he current belt, so if you're having threat problems you might want to wait until you've gotten your rotation down.

Gloves: I'd say run Gun'drak every day. There are some gloves that drop off of the last boss that are pretty good if I recall correctly. Buncha defense and some expertise, they are good until you can pick up some teir gear.

Cloak: There's actually a very good entry level cloak from Wyrmrest Accord rep. There's also a badge cloak that is pretty good, look into picking those up.

I'd also recommend that you start running ToC10,VoA10, and Ony10 as much as possible to try and pick up the goodies from there and start getting triumph badges. There are some very good rewards from there, esp the Ring: Cluth of Forititude, the trinket: Glyph of Indominability, and the ranged weapon: Blades of the Sable Cross.

As far as future gemming goes once you get your defense straightened out:
Warriors currently have the worst stam scaling because we only get +6% stam. Therefore our HP pools are lower and thus it is my arguement that we need to stack more stam, and your guild will love having a tank with a large HP pool, you become much easier to heal and give your healers more breathing room between the minimum EHP of a fight and your maximum EHP. Especially if you are undergeared for a fight, gemming for stam can go a long ways. Therefore it is my personal recommendation that you hit the highest +stam bonus you can with a red gem (I'd go with agi/stam for the extra armor from agility, conversely you can go with exp/stam for a tad more threat or dodge/stam for the avoidance) for your meta gem, then gem straight +30stam in every slot after that ignoring any bonus, or if you do hit a bonus only do so if it is a +9stam or +12stam bonus.

I hope this helps and isn't overwhelming, holy tacos batman! I wrote a lot. Let me know if you have any more questions.

Also, on the rotation subject, does anyone have that picture laying around of the prot warrior rotation?

[squats]

[Aggathon]

Thank you squats!

Ya, that for rotation ^^^^^^^^

[Bloodyconfused]

Aggathon, does that rotation work well with the "progressive" tanking spec you posted above?

In other words when is it best to do Thunder Clap and Shockwave.

Also just to clarify, if I have a board and sword equiped I never make it far in Step 3 or Step 4? (I don't use concussion blow or shockwave?)

I'm about to make the switch to Prot and want to make sure I have a decent idea of what to do before I start tanking the 5 man Northrend dungeons.

[Aggathon]

Aggathon, does that rotation work well with the "progressive" tanking spec you posted above?

In other words when is it best to do Thunder Clap and Shockwave.

Also just to clarify, if I have a board and sword equiped I never make it far in Step 3 or Step 4? (I don't use concussion blow or shockwave?)

I'm about to make the switch to Prot and want to make sure I have a decent idea of what to do before I start tanking the 5 man Northrend dungeons.

Sword and Board is actually the "proc" that is a chance on hit from revenge and devastate that resets the cooldown on shield slam.

For the progression spec, you simply want to make sure that you keep thunderclap and improved demo shout up at all times. Tclap is 30 seconds, improved demo in that spec is 45 seconds, so just make sure to hit them once every 30 and 45 seconds respectively, and you'll be fine.***

I personally use conc blow and shockwave on cooldown for threat, the only ability I prioritize over them is shield slam because shield slam is the beast of all threat moves.

I would also recommend using "shield block" as much as possible with the progression spec for the extra threat unless you really need it to avoid some incoming damage.

But ya for any spec that is the rotation you are going to use, the only deviation from it is a cooldown every now and then to keep up tclap and improved demo shout OR if you use glyph of devastate. Glyph of devastate makes it so that devastate is more threat than revenge, so you simply replace "revenge" with "devastate" every where in that rotation flow chart.

***edit: for some reason I forgot how long tclap stays up... it might actually be 20 seconds, point is keep it up.

[Bloodyconfused]

Haha that makes a lot more sense that sword and board is a proc. Thanks a lot for the help.

[Aggathon]

Haha that makes a lot more sense that sword and board is a proc. Thanks a lot for the help.

No problemo, happy to help!