Better gear=less threat

[drae]

Discretion when selecting your gear is important. There are a certain set of shoulders that while i245 are not very well suited for a warrior. I take the honorbound helm over the tier one because of the expertise, same with feverish dedication legs, and tower monstrosity BP. I'm rocking 45 expertise plus in my standard gear, and maintaining about 22 hit. (only piece with hit is the throwing weapon).


Remember that when it comes to warrior tanking, 90% of our standard rotation is avoidable. This means that expertise becomes extremely valuable.

Expertise and hit provide a very similar result, but go about it in different ways. Both "Increase the chance an attack will land against your target". While hit effects every skill, expertise only effects those which are avoidable. Obviously before the expertise soft cap expertise is better, but what about after the soft cap and before the hard cap? Expertise is still better. As long as your attack is avoidable they both increase the chance your attack will land by the same amount. However, expertise still reduces the chance of parry gibs, while hit does not.

Hit is obviously critical for those abilities which are not avoidable. Stuff like taunt, demo shout, thunder clap, shockwave. All of these (among others) are only effected by hit, not expertise. Many have work arounds like the taunt glyph, or demo shout being applied by your ret pally and TC applied by your DK etc.

The trick is understanding when hit is important... can't miss an interrupt? Get hit. Need to push insane TPS on Hodir? Expertise.

Regardless, gear is not nearly as important for generating threat as rotation priority and spamming heroic strike. Heroic strike is a good 38% of my threat on a good night... that's insane. Many people like the heroic strike on the mouse wheel, I prefer it on my "back" button on my mouse. Either way, find ways to make spamming it easier, and you'll do it more.

Outside of that there are rotations that will allow you to maximize your sword and board procs in order to push out more shield slams. Devastate glyph also makes a noticeable difference, but these final two points are only meant to refine and maximize your threat as needed.

[drae]

I had a chance to examine your armory.

I would advise losing some hit rating and picking up more expertise. Like you need at least 26 expertise, the expertise soft cap is a serious priority after 540 defense (which is super easy to achieve today).

I would upgrade your legs asap. Block is a terrible mechanic for warriors at end game. Then I would upgrade your helmet, ideally the honorbound helm for 75 triumph badges. Also each 10 defense rating hybrid gem is worth about 2.5 defense skill. I would recommend getting rid of all of them. Don't gem for socket bonus'. Use expertise purple gems if you need to reach the expertise soft cap, otherwise use straight stam. Socket bonus' are only worthwhile if they award 9+ stam.



Finally with the amount of hit rating you have, your taunt glyph is totally a wasted glyph spot. With your current hit rating I would use a devastate glyph in that location. And I would lose the 4/5 cruelty and put those 4 points into imp TC. (aoe tanking) and incite, 10% crit on those attacks is worth FAR more then 4% across all attacks. Just doing this final paragraphs suggestions should net you ~5% increase in TPS if not more.

[Griff]

What Drae said - also:

+20 defense to shield>+18 stam
+275 health to chest>+10 stats
Armsman for your mittens>+18 stam

[Mughalkhan]

Well as u can see now i have better gear and that 75triumph helm helped a lot and also i got a new axe so as a war it gives me 15 expertise just for using that.Ty again

[Mughalkhan]

The World of Warcraft Armory

[Badfactory]

Well, I think your threat problem is related to your rotation and your glyphs. In my opinion, there is no better threat glyph than devastate. Think about it -- three seconds into the fight, you already have 5 sunders on the target, which by itself is enough to keep threat for a good 25-30 seconds (and that's if you just stood there -- trust me, I've tried it). Now, the other bonuses that brings -- you start the fight by BR, Charge, Taunt, Devastate x3 (all of this as you position the boss mob). You should in most cases have 5 sunders on the boss by the time you have the standard back-to-raid position in place. What this allows you to do is take your eyes off omen and recount for a few seconds so you can start using your normal threat rotation. I usually go HS, Rend, HS, TC, HS, Shockwave, HS, Conc. Blow, HS, Devastate to reapply sunders, HS, Rend, HS, Shockwave....that exact rotation. Keep in mind that I'm spamming shield slam and revenge whenever sword and board/enrage proc, as well as keeping my mitigation value high with SB.

If you don't have the devastate glyph, you are generating so much less TPS, it's not even funny. You've got to use five global cooldowns (not to mention the rage cost) instead of three, which prevents you from starting your standard rotation by two more than you should -- preventing you from using two more threat spells as you struggle to build threat against the dps, which will start to open up when the boss is in the correct position.

In my opinion, the devastate glyph is just absolutely essential to any single boss raid encounter. Also, the Last Stand and Commanding Shout (glyph of command) glyphs will be much, much more useful to you than cleaving/charge. The charge glyph is actually pretty worthless overall in PvE and is probably focused more towards PvP. Not that these are threat related, but yeah.

Switch out that hit gem for defense/stam. Your gear in general has a ways to go, but that's a given -- threat doesn't come down to gear. I've never had a boss yanked off me by a dps midfight (with the exception of retards on Onyxia. If they pull her off of you before she's even in position, that isn't your fault). As the guys before me were saying, thunderclap and heroic strike are your threat bread and butter for the beginning of the fight (with devastate as well, obviously).

Here's my armory if you have any questions.

The World of Warcraft Armory

[Kherberos]

I realize there are some ,, mmm empty spaces in itemization when your progressing through totc (10man especially ) Where you just either have no hit / have hit or have buckets of exp./no expertise.
Personally I went through togc25 with 22 hit rating and between 45-50 expertise.
Gearing through ICC now and looking @ future possible upgrades I will have about 240 hit and 20 expertise from gear. (but also about 2.500 hp more and 3-4% more dodge/parry so instead of gemming dodge/sta ill be gemming exp/sta once more for reds to get +9/12 bonus)

But in the end , the higher my gear gets the MORE TPS im doing relatively.
Dont forget that higher ilvl gear usually comes with alot more STR on it.
Basically ALL your moves scale with STR.
Ive seen some people in this thread speak about rotation , and mentioning revenge. Short answer = stop using revenge unless you are low rage or cant use any other move . A devastate (especially with glyph of devastate which is a MUST HAVE) does more threat than a 2/2 impr revenge specced revenge. Basically all you need to do these days is spam devastate + SS on cooldown + proc and keep heroic strike queued . Just doing that nets me close to 10k tps 25man raid buffed and when you have tricks/MD's running you'll see some ridiculous high numbers. (and ofc thunderclap and all that stuff weaved in if needed. )
Someone also said armsman on gloves > 18sta? You know thats like 180tps when your doing 9000 already? Armsman gets better the more tps you do and its worthless once you reach 8-9k tps/s. And for the rest its 10parry rating. Basically you can say its 10 parry vs 18 sta. Its definately 18 sta > 10 parry.

[Rhetorica]

whats expertise cap ?

[Kherberos]

56 iirc due to like 1-3 bosses ingame having that much parry orso. Basically most bosses have varying amounts of parry chance which is how they try to balance them a bit in difficulty.
Personally anything above 30 is pretty decent . In ICC exp is a bit more rare so having 30ish is quite good and you can gem/food for more . (But rly you should have 0 issues about threat anyway at this point)

[Aggathon]

There was some misinformation in this thread. Thank you for correcting a lot of it though Drae, great post.

As far as expertise in general, it's not a huge need, up until 26 it is better than hit, and most high end tanks atm have less than 80 hit, I run with 60, I know some people that only run with 22. Threat generally isn't a huge deal. Also 56 expertise is the parry cap (14%).

The biggest thing you can do is to change your spec!!! 1 point in deep wounds does not cut it, and frankly I'm surprised no one else picked that up. Drop 3 points in shield spec, put 1 into focused rage and 2 into deep wounds.

Also, try and pick up either the legs off of Maly25 or the ToC25 Lord Jaraxxus legs. They have a lot of expertise on them and are much better than the legs you are using now.

Also: follow people's advice on rotations, shield slam is your bestest friend, followed closely by devastate if you are glyphed for it.

For other gear upgrades and advice on all of the afformentioned topics and gearing, I made a guide that covers that and has lots of links to a bunch of other really good posts made by people in the TS community. http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f97/6...ing-guide.html