So You Want to Be a Prot Warrior: Endgame Gearing, Part II

Yeah, I know, I know.  I’m not exactly the fastest in the world at cranking out these things, but, hey, quality takes time, right?  And if I ever produce something that’s high enough quality to justify taking this much time, I’ll let you know!

Anyhoo…in the first part of our SYWTBAPW treatise on endgame gearing, we talked about stamina and Defense and why they’re your priority stats, at least at first–and why “540″ is the first magic number you need to remember when getting ready for tanking heroics and raids.  There are two other magic numbers that we’ll blow through very quickly, because we already talked about these months ago in the SYWTBAPW post on tanking stats:

263 – this is the amount of hit rating you’d like to get.  You have a base 5% chance to miss a mob of your level on any attack, assuming it’s the same level you are and you’re swinging a single weapon.  (When dual-wielding, it’s more like 24%.)  That goes up by 1% for each level higher that the mob is.  Since bosses are always considered as your level +3, you need 8% hit to push misses completely off the table; at level 80, that translates to 263 hit rating.  If you’re a Draenei, or have managed to graft one to your back, you only need 7% hit, or about 230 rating, thanks to the Draenei racial Heroic Presence.

26 – this is the amount of expertise you’d like to get.  Mobs have a base 6.5% chance to dodge you, and each point of expertise reduces your chance to be dodged or parried by .25%.  In order to push dodges completely out of the picture, you thus need 26 expertise points; that translates to about 140 expertise rating.  Note that I was wrong when I wrote months ago; the chance for a mob to parry is actually a lot higher than 6.5% (I don’t remember the exact number, but it’s around 12-15%); it’s probably not feasible to stack that much expertise without crippling yourself somewhere else, so don’t worry about it.  Just remember that any expertise over 26 is definitely not wasted.

Which one you should prioritize?  That’s a tough call.  I’ve heard opinions expressed both ways.  What I’ve found on Linedan is that it seems to be easier to stack hit rating than it is to stack expertise.  You probably won’t have either of these maxed out when you start tanking heroics, and that’s OK.  In general, stacking expertise will increase your threat by the greater amount; stacking hit will too, to an extent, but it’s more helpful in preventing catastrophic failures like a missed Taunt or a missed Shield Slam as an opener.

One thing to remember–expertise over the “magic number” is not wasted.  Hit rating over the “magic number” is wasted.  It’s not an uncommon malady among tanks or melee DPS at the Ulduar level of content to have excessive hit rating, because Blizzard put +hit on everydamnthing in Ulduar.  Linedan, ironically, only has 215 hit rating as I write this, though he is set on expertise (28).  But in his DPS gear, he’s got 300 hit rating.  That’s wasted stat points, but I haven’t been able to get his gear switched around to fix it.

Now, speaking of gear…you may think that a given class and spec only needs one set of gear.  Generally, that’s true.  I can’t think of a circumstance where a marks hunter would need two distinctly different sets of gear to be, well, a marks hunter.  Oh, you may switch trinkets for certain fights, yeah.  But all your stuff?  Nah, that’s crazy talk.

It’s not crazy talk for a warrior.  As a prot warrior, you’re going to find that you need two near-complete sets of gear for your prot spec by itself.  To shorthand things, I’m going to call them the “trash” set and the “boss” set.

A trash set (sometimes called a threat set) is optimized for two functions–large amounts of relatively light-hitting trash, and situations where you’re forced to DPS in prot spec because you may have to either offtank later in a fight, or be ready in case of emergency.  It is a more offensive-minded set of gear, which gives up effective health (stamina and avoidance) to concentrate on stats that give you more damage and threat output.

Trash sets tend to lean heavily on shield block rating and value, because we as prot warriors lean heavily on Shield Slam as one of our two big nukes (Revenge being the other).  Plus, the entire concept of block value is as overpowered against trash as it is underpowered against bosses–you’ve noticed that as you leveled, hitting Shield Block can all but make you invulnerable for 10 seconds against many mobs.  So look for pieces that have high +Strength and/or high +block rating or value.  Pieces with +block value aren’t hard to find.  By the time you hit T8-level gear, a single piece of armor can carry over 150 block value.

A boss set is the opposite.  Boss sets are designed for tanking single, hard-hitting bosses.  They are built around maximizing your effective health, through a combination of high raw health (via +Stamina) and high avoidance (block rating, dodge, parry, defense).  They do this at the expense of DPS and threat.

There’s two ways to build a boss set.  Some go for brute force by maximizing stamina; others try to be slippery and maximize avoidance by stacking +dodge and +parry.  I try to steer a balanced middle ground, but in general, I tend to slide toward the +stamina side of things.  Part of that is with Lin being a Tauren, I just can’t picture him as the most, y’know, agile thing on two hooves.  But I can sure picture him shrugging off a hit that’d cleave a gnome into gnome chops.  The random number generator can always find a way to screw up your dodge and parry, but big health numbers are always there for you.

Now, one caveat here–of course, your trash set still needs 540 defense and enough stamina to survive while tanking (or avoidance to avoid getting hit).  And your boss set still needs a reasonable amount of +Strength so you can crank out enough DPS and threat to actually keep agro.  But within that, you will, after a while, find that having these two sets of tank gear, and being able to switch quickly between them, helps your flexibility…and flexibility, IMO, is a hallmark of a good tank.

Here’s what I mean by that.  Linedan has a boss set and a trash set.  In his current boss set, he’s got a bit north of 550 defense and about 34k unbuffed health, but only 1700ish shield block value even with raid buffs.  In his trash set, his defense drops to 543 and he gives up over 2000 health, but his block value catapults up to a very tasty 2593 with a full rack of 25-man raid buffs.  I even swap in two crit trinkets on the trash set, just for higher DPS output.  When running up against a slightly gimmicky fight like the Nerubian Burrowers on Anub’arak in ToC, all I have to do is swap my two tank trinkets back in but keep the rest of the +block set on, and now I’m only down 1400 health from my boss set, still above the defense floor, still rocking almost 2600 SBV, with a 60% chance (due to Crit Block) of that doubling, and able to double it again 10 seconds out of every 40 with Shield Block–which makes tanking the block-sensitive Burrowers easysauce.  The ability to mix-and-match gear for any situation is a huge help to any tank.  It means you’ll never have any bag space anymore, especially if you’re like Lin and have to lug around a third set of gear for your dual-spec, but hey, bag space is overrated, right?

Now you may feel overwhelmed when first starting out–”wait, I don’t even have one decent set of stuff yet and you’re telling me I need two?“  Well, no, not at first.  Having two sets of gear is something that you tend to end up needing when you raid.  For heroics or regular five-mans, one good, solid set of items that give you the basics–540 defense, 20-21k health for regulars and 23-25k for heroics, as close to 263 hit rating and 26 expertise as you can get–will serve you just fine.  As you work your way up through heroics and maybe get a crack at raids, you’ll find that you can pick up pieces that will serve as the foundations of trash or boss sets.  Don’t sweat it, the gear will come naturally…especially now that Badges of Conquest drop out of each heroic, and the heroic daily gives 2 Badges of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.  Run heroics regularly, which you should be doing to keep your tanking chops up, and you’ll have yourself one (hopefully more!) nice set of gear soon enough.

Happy tanking!

The Latisha Experiment: Update #2

Yep, that's Shattrath behind her. Thanks for the free flight point Blizz!

So when last we left the intrepid Miss Latisha Morganson, late of Stormwind and Northshire Abbey, she had just broken level 39 and was working through various odd jobs in Theramore while resisting the crude advances of Theramore Deserters.  That was a bit over two months ago.

And here is Latisha now, resplendent in her twink plate, level 59 as of this morning.  (What can I say, I woke up early.)  As I expected, the grind post-40 got a bit easier than the grind pre-40.  She is still pure Prot, currently 0/0/50, although I did deviate from my own build advice a bit; she’s still got 2/2 Improved Disarm.  My plan is to respec her at 60 to the same 0/0/51 build that I reference in the So You Want to Be a Prot Warrior series, dropping Improved Disarm for 5/5 Toughness, and then follow my own advice from there.

I haven’t quite had the guts (or masochism, take your pick) to try tanking a pickup group with her…not that anybody actually gets groups together for old-world instances anymore, sadly.  She’s gotten blendered through Zul’farrak to clean up quests for xp, and other than that, she has been leveling the old-fashioned way, solo grinding.  Not exactly optimal for a prot warrior, but quite workable.  It’s left her gear a tick behind where I’d like it, although it’s certainly not bad.  I got lucky and found some crafted Imperial Plate pieces on the AH for reasonable prices, but before that, she didn’t ditch her last piece of mail until somewhere around level 49.  Why?  Because anything “of the Bear” was commanding triple-digit prices, no matter how crappy it was, and her Raging Berserker’s Helm and Scarlet Leggings were very good pieces of mail armor indeed.  Other than that, she’s geared up through quest rewards and a little AH here and there.  She’s even rocking an honest-to-Light Belt of Valor, picked up on the AH for a mere 20 gold.  Now she’s got something that Linedan never even had.  (Oh, and I did break down and spend almost all of Beltar’s Conquest badges on a Polished Breastplate of Valor for her.  I hardly ever get to raid on the dorf anymore so I figured why not, he can hang with his Naxx gear for now.  Besides, the breastplate’s a lot better looking than the shoulders.)

Particularly past level 50, with Devastate and then Critical Block becoming available, her DPS picked up markedly.  No, she’s no mage capable of vaporizing stuff, but then again, there’s certainly nothing wrong with being hard to kill and occasionally being able to produce a 1300+ Shield Slam crit.  With her gear optimized for simple strength and stamina, with agility here and there, she has a respectable 12% crit.  Yes, she misses a lot still, especially when fighting things over her level, but that just goes with the territory.  Hit and expertise gear is almost impossible to find in the 50s (since expertise kinda, y’know, didn’t exist in vanilla).

Bringing her to Outland at level 58 has proven to be a mixed bag.  She actually hasn’t died yet, her closest call being in Zeth’gor where she ended up killing two grunts, a wolfrider + wolf, a peon, and a bonecaster + skeletons and came out with exactly 23 health after blowing all cooldowns and using a potion.  But she’s really being pushed to the limit.  Her agro range at 58-59 means she’s always got an escort of helboars anywhere she goes, and makes working around Zeth’gor problematic as hell, because that place will unload an assist train on you in a heartbeat if you’re not very careful.  She misses a ton fighting level 60-61 fel orcs, and forget getting her across the Path of Glory to burn Horde siege engines quite yet.  Sure, my DK Moktor blew through Hellfire Peninsula like it was a kiddie ride…but let’s face it, a level 58 DK fresh out of Acherus with a diploma and a full set of blue gear is redonkulously overpowered compared to a level 58 prot warrior with mostly level 52ish greens.  My advice to prospective prot warriors is, if you want to try HFP at level 58, go for it, but make extra-sure your gear is up to snuff beforehand.  Otherwise you’ll just frustrate yourself.

So sadly, she may have to retreat back through the Dark Portal for a level.  That would give me time to complete some quests in the Plaguelands that I want to do, or maybe visit Silithus.  (OK, Plaguelands.)  It’ll also give me a chance to catch her mining up to where it needs to be.  She has picked up enough initial upgrades–sword, pants, shield–that nothing back in the Plaguelands should give her much trouble.  And at level 60, I can train the huge amount of new ranks of abilities she gets, plus Shockwave, and be much more ready to face Hellfire Peninsula.  Plus I need to get her rested XP built back up, I burned it all leveling her quickly between 54 and 58.

I’m looking forward to leveling her in Outland.  It’s been long enough since I leveled a character there–my last was Moktor many months ago–that I’ve gotten over any burnout I suffered with it.  I’m going to try and hit some areas that I skipped on Moktor, places like the Bone Wastes, and maybe head to Netherstorm and Shadowmoon instead of just immediately hopping the boat to Northrend at 68…because quite honestly, having gotten four characters through the 70-80 grind in 10 months, and with two more now at 72, I’m fried on Northrend leveling.  I really want to see how Prot Warrior v3.0 carves a path through Outland content.  I expect it’ll be pretty damn fun.

If you’ve got any questions about her experiences leveling as pure Prot through the 40s and 50s, fire away!

So You Want to Be A Prot Warrior: Endgame Gearing, Part I

You’ve arrived.  You’re level 80.  No more level grinding for you, no sir!  Now it’s time to go forth and tackle the real game of World of Warcraft!  TO HEROICS!  TO RAIDS!  LET’S DOOOO IIIIIITT!  (Done in my best TF2 Demoman voice.)

Not so fast, Spanky.  Uncle Panzercow is here to give you a little 411 on the reality of being a prot warrior starting at the endgame.

It’s a sad fact of life, really, but a fact nevertheless.  You, as a prot warrior tank, have extra steps to take before you’re ready to sally forth and start acquiring tasty, tasty epix.  See, because of the bog-standard “1/1/3″ method of instance grouping (one tank, one healer, three DPS), Joe Scrubdeeps can finish opening his package from Rhonin and promptly walk into a heroic dungeon…and if the other four members of the party can write their own name and all five of them aren’t the product of a brother-sister marriage, generally, he can survive.  It’s possible to carry one weak DPS through a heroic…hell, even two, if your third DPS is really tricked out and your tank and healer are either very good or very overgeared, or both.  It’s also difficult, but possible, to work with an undergeared healer in a heroic–again, everybody else has to be on their game, the composition has to lend itself toward crowd control, and the healer has to be very good at what they do, just lacking high-level items.

You can’t do that with a tank.  If you walk into a heroic–or God forbid, a raid–wearing a mish-mash of level 77 greens and a couple of quest-reward blues, rocking 500 Defense and 19k health, and try to tank it, you’re going to die.  The DPS can’t just turn it up to 11 to compensate for you, because then they’ll yoink agro off you and they’ll die.  There’s no way around it.  The one member of the group that absolutely, positively, has to be geared up somewhat before they can enter a heroic is you, the tank.

Fortunately, things aren’t quite like they were in Burning Crusade, where if you were a warrior, it felt like you needed to be wearing Tier 5 epix from SSC/TK before you could even think about tanking a five-man heroic.  If you’re smart about your gearing and willing to be patient, you can be quite ready to run a heroic without setting foot in one–and you don’t need a raid willing to carry you through Ulduar and give you a full rack of T8 to do it, no matter what that idiot death nugget told you in your last PUG.

So what I’m going to do here is tell you what stats to prioritize.  I am not going to give you a hyper-detailed gear list.  There are a lot of them out there that are much better than anything I could come up with.  A number of the excellent tank websites like Veneretio’s Tanking Tips, or Elitist Jerks, or Tankspot, or even the Blizzard warrior or tanking forums, have great and specific lists of gear that you can look for.  I’ll mention a few pieces, but not many.

The two most important things to worry about first off, in my opinion, are Defense and Stamina.  Stamina is a no-brainer, of course–more health is always good.  But especially in the beginning of your heroic career, you simply cannot brute-force stack enough stamina to handle a heroic without also loading up on Defense.  The reason is critical hits.  Defense reduces your chance to get critted.  Pushing critical hits off the table smooths out the damage that you take and makes it easier on your healer(s).  Damage doesn’t necessarily kill you, but damage spikes will.  And a crit is the ultimate damage spike.

You have a base 5% chance to be critted by a mob of the same level at level 80, plus 0.2% for each mob level over 80.  So since heroic bosses are level 82, you need to reduce their crit chance by 5.4%; skull-level raid bosses are always considered your level +3 (level 83), so you need 5.6% crit reduction.  In order to completely remove your chance to be critted, you need 535 Defense skill for heroics, and 540 Defense skill for raids. 

I italicized “skill” because the pieces of gear you get will have Defense rating on them, and as you should know by now, rating != skill.  At level 80, to reach the “floor” of 540 Defense skill (often erroneously called a “cap”), you need a base Defense skill of 400 augmented by 689 Defense rating from your gear.  It sounds like a daunting number, but actually, stacking 689 Defense rating isn’t that hard.  Defense stacking should be your number-one priority when getting ready to tank a heroic, and Stamina stacking should be number two.

Fortunately, you can load both stats off the same pieces of gear.  Blacksmiths can make some really good “starter” gear for the budding heroic tank–for example, Daunting Handguards and the Tempered Saronite set (especially the Tempered Saronite Helm) are easy to make, relatively cheap, and provide the basics of Strength, Stamina, and Defense while filling in gaps in your current set.  If you have built up a significant amount of money–enough to afford things like Titansteel Bars and Frozen Orbs from the AH–then you can go for the high-end blacksmithing gear and be really good to go–the Tempered Titansteel Helm and Treads, and the Titansteel Shield Wall.  Expect to pay several thousand gold to get all three of those crafted, though, unless you have friends and/or a guild to help out.

If your healer’s willing to risk it, of course there’s nothing stopping you from tanking a heroic with less than 535 Defense skill.  Each point of Defense below 535 means there’s a 0.04% chance of you eating a crit, every hit.  Hey, if you want to swim with great white sharks wearing nothing but a chum bikini, go for it.  Me, I’d take the safe route and load up my Defense first.

Now, on to Stamina.  Once you get your Defense up to scratch, start adding in +Stamina pieces as you can.  You might be wondering, “how much is ‘enough?’”  When I first started tanking heroics on Linedan several months ago, he had between 22,000 and 23,000 unbuffed health.  Compared to the 33k+ he’s got nowadays that doesn’t seem like much, but add on a PW: Fortitude or Blessing of Kings and Commanding Shout and you’re looking at between 26,000 and 28,000.  That should be more than enough to handle some of the “starter” heroics like Utgarde Keep, assuming your healer is reasonably competent and your DPS pumps out enough pain to kill stuff before your healer runs out of mana.

This same refrain–Defense and Stamina–holds true for enchanting and gemming…up to a point.  I’ll talk more about enchants in the second part of this post, for now, I’ll just say this about gems.  Do not gem for Defense or any other rating-based skill (parry, dodge, hit, crit, expertise, etc.) unless you absolutely have to.  Why?  Those slots can be better used giving you more Stamina or Strength, depending on what type of set you’re building.  (More on that in the next part, too.)  If you’re turning up a few points short of 535 or 540, then go ahead and slap in something like a Thick Autumn’s Glow.  But remember, you’re only going to get about 3 points of Defense skill per blue-quality yellow “pure” +Defense gem, and slots are precious on “starter” heroic/raid gear.

In Part II of my extremely long-winded treatise on endgame gearing, I’ll talk about why you, as a level 80 tank, need not only one set of good gear, but two–a set for big bosses and a set for small trash.  I’ll talk about avoidance versus health, enchanting, and after all that, I’ll throw in how version 3.2 throws the old gearing paradigm out the window because of the easier availability of badges and Tier 8-level gear.

A Latisha update (for reals this time)

I should have worn the red shirt, shouldn't I? Damn.

Now that I’ve gotten my silly cheesecake post for her out of the way…if you remember, Latisha Morganson is my little experiment to test how well my own So You Want to Be a Prot Warrior guides work.  I am leveling her according to the guides, straight up from 1 to 80 (or until I lose interest, whichever comes first).  When last we saw her, Latisha was level 22 and splitting her time in between Menethil and Lakeshire.

Now, a few weeks later, with 2 days and 12 hours played, Latisha has just hit level 39 and is, for now, going to be based out of Theramore while I rapid-fire the various Dustwallow/Mudsprocket quests to try and push to 40.  She is, as per the SYWTBAPW guide, 0/0/30, and now stands 62,000 or so xp away from the big Four-Zero, the ability to wear skimpy plate bikinis as opposed to chainmail halter tops (sigh, Blizz, just sigh), and most importantly, the Holy and Inviolate Shield Slam.

I’ll admit, I borrowed my wife and her level 80 shaman to blast me through Scarlet Monastery and pick up a few things.  Those are Scarlet Gauntlets and Scarlet Leggings she’s wearing, along with Herod’s Raging Berserker’s Helm, and her weapon is the SM quest reward sword, the very nice Sword of Serenity.  (No, she can’t kick ass like River Tam when she wields it.)  The rest of her stuff is a mixture of 30ish greens, either AH purchases or quest reward items like her Crest of Darkshire shield.  I haven’t been able to keep her quite as upgraded as I’d like, mainly because of the utterly ridiculous prices that mail and plate warrior items command on the Feathermoon AH.  Seriously, guys, WTF.  30 gold for a level 30 green set of boots?  Two hundred and sixty gold for a level 40 plate breastplate “of the Bear?”  Do people actually pay those stupid prices?  Well, maybe they do, but I don’t.  I’ll muddle along without, and so far, so good.

Nothing that’s happened to her so far has really caused me to change my original premises in SYWTBAPW.  Yes, you can level with a full Prot spec and have fun doing it.  No, you won’t kill as fast as a DPS warrior or any other class except maybe a prot paladin or holy priest.  Yes, you can survive stuff that would kill those other, higher-deeps classes.  But actually going through the steps myself has shown me a few things that may be helpful for anyone else wishing to walk the first portion of the Way of the Meatshield…

- Your #1 problem, if you choose to level via the sword-and-board route, is going to be rage generation.  I can’t understate how horrible your rage gen is in the 20s and 30s when using a single one-handed weapon.  You must learn to be extremely judicious with your special attacks because you won’t have the rage to spam anything.  Going in Battle Stance and using a two-hander–pretending you’re an Arms warrior–gives you much better rage generation and higher DPS, but you trade it off against taking more damage and needing more downtime.  The choice is yours.  Personally I have done most of my work with Latisha using 1H+shield, and just accepted the lousy rage generation.

- One rage strategy that’s easy to learn is this:  Switch to Battle Stance when targeting a mob, get in Charge range, hit Charge, and as you start moving, hit Defensive Stance.  If you time it right, you’ll shift into Defensive Stance before your first weapon hit lands, preserving that rage.  Even if you mistime it, you’ve closed the distance to the mob, stunned it momentarily, and bought yourself 10 rage.

- Rend is more useful than I gave it credit for being.  I still have it on her bar, although it may go away when she hits 40 and gets Shield Slam.  Most of your fights will last long enough for it to tick its full duration and it’s a good bunch of extra damage for the rage cost.

- Shield Block is so your friend at these levels.  Basically, with any sort of reasonable gear, hitting Shield Block will give you 10 seconds of effective frontal invulnerability against all but the strongest melee mobs.  In addition, it guarantees at least two, usually three Revenge chances in a 10-15 second span, and until you get Shield Slam, Revenge is your big whammy.  By level 30 you’ll have it talented down to 40 seconds cooldown; since you kill slowly, you’ll have it ready almost every fight.  This is an absolute lifesaver when you’re pulling an entire camp.  Shield Block early and there’s a good chance, with all those Revenges, that you’ll have one mob dead or seriously injured quickly.  Plus, again, since you do not kill quickly, you’ll probably have Shield Block back up later in the fight when you need the damage mitigation.

- I went with the Improved Disarm version of the Prot build, taking two points out of Toughness and moving them over to Improved Disarm.  This gives a 40-second cooldown on Disarm and causes the mob to take 10% more damage while disarmed.  I don’t remember to use it that often during normal grinding, but against things that are 3 levels over me, or the occasional elite, it’s very handy.  I’ll probably swap the points back sometime in her 40s.

- Get used to missing.  It’s hard for me going from an Ulduar-geared prot warrior who’s very close to both the hit and expertise caps, down to a mildly-geared alt with no +hit and only the human racial +expertise with her sword.  She whiffs and clanks her swings.  A LOT.

- Shield Bash isn’t just your primary caster interrupt.  It’s also your best way to handle runners.  Go upside their head when they’re at about 20-25% health, since you can’t Hamstring in Defensive Stance.  And if Shield Bash is on cooldown, there’s always Concussion Blow.  CB hits hard enough that it’ll probably kill a runner instead of just stopping him.

- Glyph of Revenge is awesome for leveling.  With your rage so hard to come by, a free Heroic Strike after each successful Revenge is too good to pass up.

- Don’t be afraid to pull more than you think you can handle.  More than likely, you’ll surprise yourself with how capable this class/spec combination is.  Just scout out a good spot to pull the mobs to to minimize or eliminate getting any adds, and also a spot you can safely rez if you do indeed bite off more than you can chew.  If you’re lucky enough to have a healer friend?  Pair up with them and you can work on your tanking skills while tearing a path of total destruction across the landscape…albeit slowly.

- One day, I’ll figure out why Blizzard had such a boner for putting +spirit on low-level warrior gear.  Spirit.  On warrior mail.  And it’s everywhere.   So not only is she running around in some bizarre scalemail version of bondage gear, it’s poorly itemized too?

So You Want to Be a Prot Warrior: Levels 71-80

OK, gang, this is it.  The last 10 levels.  You’ve hung with me this far, and I appreciate all the great feedback and comments that I’ve gotten over the last few months of writing the various chapters of SYWTBAPW.  (And it’s not over yet, more on that later.)  So let’s get down to it, and start grinding through Northrend to get you those last 10 levels and arrive at your ultimate destiny–the endgame.

When we left you back at level 70, your build looked like this:  5/5/51.  For this guide, we’re taking all 10 of your last talent points into the Arms tree to reach the “cookie-cutter” 15/5/51 build that’s the most popular prot warrior build right now, and for the foreseeable future.  As we go through the talents, I’ll explain why we’re going 15 deep into the Arms tree, which might seem surprising considering we’re, y’know, tanks.  There’s a reason behind it, don’t worry.

Levels 71-73:  3/3 Improved Heroic Strike.  One of the more messed-up mechanics of the warrior class (IMO) is that when tanking, in order to maximize your threat, you will be spamming Heroic Strike every time your rage permits it.  If you’re tanking heroics or raids, there’s a very good chance that your rage will always permit it, hence you’ll literally be smashing that button on every weapon swing.  With that in mind, having it take 3 points less rage can’t hurt, and it will let you spam it more in situations where you have decent, but not unlimited, rage.

Levels 74-75:  2/2 Improved Charge.  This is a tossup.  We’ve got to put these two points somewhere in the Arms tree in order to open up the third tier of talents.  You can make a case for putting them in Iron Will instead for the stun and charm resistance, especially if you PvP a bit on the side.  (Note that a dedicated Prot PvP spec is very different from what we’re working with here.)  I put them in Improved Charge because I rarely PvP on Linedan anyway, and the ability to generate 10 extra rage on a Charge, for a total of 25, gave me more options when initiating combat.  Improved Rend would be a waste; it doesn’t do a lot of damage with a one-hander anyhow.

Levels 76-77:  2/2 Impale.  Increases the critical strike damage bonus of all your “abilities”–i.e., yellow-damage attacks, really anything but a normal melee swing–by 20%, giving you +120% damage on crits instead of +100%.  You don’t have the high crit percentages of a DPS class as a prot warrior, but with several talents giving you +15% crit chance to some hard-hitting abilities (Shield Slam, Heroic Strike, Devastate, Thunder Clap, and Cleave), you’ll crit enough to where this talent adds noticeable damage output.  Plus, it’s required for…

Levels 78-80:  3/3 Deep Wounds.  I covered in a prior post several months ago why a prot warrior can get good use out of Deep Wounds.  The quick recap:  ANY crit will make your target bleed for 48% of your mainhand weapon’s damage over 6 seconds (3 ticks 2 seconds apart), and it “rolls,” basically stacking as the 6-second durations of several Deep Wounds applications overlap.  The numbers don’t seem huge at first.  Linedan, in largely Ulduar and Naxx-25 gear, puts about 280 to 290 extra damage on a target with a single Deep Wounds while raid-buffed, in three ticks of 95 or so points each.  But, remember, Deep Wounds activates off any crit, and warriors throw out a LOT of attacks…including the passive damage from Damage Shield.  So you will be able to keep Deep Wounds on your targets quite a bit, and over a fight, the high uptime means that the damage adds up to surprising numbers.  Looking back over the last four Ulduar raids I’ve had him on, Deep Wounds is between 6% and 10% of Linedan’s total damage output.  That’s a lot when you consider that he’s doing between 7 and 9 million damage output on a three-hour raid night.  And it’s all bonus.  More damage = more threat.  More threat = the other DPS being able to push hard without fear of me losing agro.  More DPS = stuff dies faster.  It’s win-win-win all the way around.

And hey, there’s three new spells you get to play with!

Level 71:  Shattering Throw.  You throw your weapon at the target, doing some damage, reducing their armor by 20% for 10 seconds, or removing any invulnerabilities.  Basically, it’s a ranged five-stack Devastate.  The trick is that it removes invulnerabilities–yes, folks, Shattering Throw will literally burst bubbles.  Or Ice Blocks.  It’s primarily a PvP move as far as I’ve seen, and I don’t think I’ve ever used it in anger, but I might going forward, because it hits harder than firing a gun or bow, and while I haven’t been able to confirm it, it may apply the silencing effect that Heroic Throw does due to the Gag Order talent.  I’ll have to check into that.

Level 75:  Enraged Regeneration.  Yes, you, a warrior, now have a self-heal.  You have to be Enraged to use it, but with 2/2 Improved Defensive Stance and decent defensive stats, you’re Enraged most of the time anyhow.  Hit this, and it burns the Enrage (and prevents reapplication of an Enrage for the duration), and heals you for 30% of your total health over 10 seconds.  Protip:  If you really want to get the most out of this, pop Last Stand and then pop Enraged Regeneration.  ER uses whatever your total health is at the moment you hit it, so it will calculate that 30% heal including the extra health from Last Stand, making it more like a net 40% heal.  Three-minute cooldown.

Level 80:  Heroic Throw.  This is Shattering Throw’s more useful cousin.  It does a reasonable amount of damage, silences the target for 3 seconds (if you have Gag Order), and generates significant bonus threat, which Shattering Throw doesn’t.  It’s an awesome pulling maneuver, and something I use frequently.  Bloodrage for initial rage, and Heroic Throw to pull, and pulling casters is now no big deal anymore.  It does, unfortunately, have a one-minute cooldown.

As for how you do your leveling from 70 to 80, it hasn’t really changed.  You are at the peak of your survivability.  You are one hard mofo to kill.  Grinding entire camps of Northrend mobs should be a non-issue, if you’re keeping your gear up to date.  You can easily hammer down some of the wussier elites solo.  But again, let me emphasize–the point of this spec is to tank.  You should be tanking instances every chance you get.  I’m a broken record, I know.  (Or a “skipping CD” to you younguns.)  But if you’re not going to tank, there’s very little reason to go prot and stay prot.  Keep tanking instances to keep your skills sharp–warrior tanking is a lot more than just hitting “969.”

Your tanking rotation does not change between level 70 and level 80.  You will have more pulling options with Shattering Throw first and Heroic Throw later, and Improved Heroic Strike makes your Heroic Strike spam easier, and you’ll have new ranks of your same old friends, but the foundational basics of how you gain and hold agro, and the priority of your attacks, haven’t changed.  What you’ll find in the Northrend dungeons is, mercifully, a move away from the godawful huge five- and six-mob mixed melee/caster groups in Outland instances like Shattered Halls and Shadow Labyrinth.  You’ll still have casters and melee mixed up, but rarely more than four at a time, which makes handling them much easier because you’ll need to stack less crowd control in your groups.  Maybe even none, once you get more confident.

Just because we’ve dinged 80 and gotten our special present from Rhonin in the mail, though, doesn’t mean the grind is over.  Ohhhhh no.  Far from it.  In the next installment of SYWTBAPW, our talk will move from talents and skills to gear and enchants and gems, as we talk about your progression toward being ready to tank Northrend heroics and raids.  In another installment down the line, we’ll talk about alternate warrior specs–why dual-spec is a fantastic thing for many tanks, whether you should use that second spec for DPS or not, and possible other tank specs besides 15/5/51.  We’ll also be looking at the differences between raid tanking and instance tanking, which are bigger than you’d think.

So You Want to Be a Prot Warrior: Levels 61-70

A group of tanks meet to discuss strategy, resplendent in their high-60s Outland gear.

Well, here we are again, gang.  I’ve gotten you to level 60 and all the way through the Prot tree up to the pinnacle, Shockwave.  And there you are, in Hellfire Peninsula, ready to rock and roll your way through Outland and get ready for the ultimate challenge of Northrend.  So let’s see if we can get you Northrend-ready!

Here is our starting spec for this discussion:  0/0/51.  All Prot, all the time.  (Yes, I know I have too many glyphs in there for a level 60; don’t sweat it.)  Now, you’ll start learning that yes, Virginia, there are other two other warrior trees, and they can serve you well even as a tank!

Levels 61-62:  2/5 Cruelty.  Finally, we branch out into the Fury tree and take what is, for any DPS warrior spec, a 5/5 required talent.  2/5 Cruelty gives us +2% crit chance.  Why don’t we take 5/5 Cruelty as a tank, you may ask?  Because we already have +15% crit to five of our most important abilities from our talents.  So instead, we take…

Levels 63-65:  3/3 Armored to the Teeth.  When you’re running around Northrend at level 80 with over 24,000 armor value in your epics, you’ll really appreciate Armored to the Teeth and its 3 bonus AP for each 180 armor value you wear.  Even a modestly decent set of Outland tank armor, with a good shield, will give you over 200 bonus AP with this talent…you’d be hard-pressed to squeeze that much out of stat boosts on your gear.  Now note that this gives AP, not Strength, so it won’t boost your block value or the damage on your Shield Slams.  (The originally planned version of this ability did give +Strength, but Blizzard changed it.)  But the bonus AP will increase your damage output on all your weapon-based attacks, and more damage equals more threat and faster kills.

Levels 66-70:  5/5 Deflection.  Pretty straightforward here…+5% to your Parry.  Yes, a handy defensive talent in Arms, supposedly a DPS tree.

Now you can change the order up on these to suit your needs.  If you are running around with gear that gives you adequate crit, but you’re short on AP, take Armored to the Teeth first.  If you’re tanking a lot of instances, you can load up on Deflection first for better damage avoidance.  The journey here is not so important, it’s the destination–5/5/51 at level 70, so we can load the last 10 points in the Arms tree in Northrend and come out with our cookie-cutter 15/5/51 spec at level 80.

As for spells and skills, you start getting some new ones again after going for quite a while only leveling up old ones.  (Remember, starting at 60, you can train something every level, not every two levels!)

Victory Rush (level 62):  Yay for free attacks, boo for stance restrictions.  Victory Rush allows you to get what amounts to a free attack within 20 seconds of getting the killing blow on something that gives you honor or experience.  It costs no rage, so it literally is free except for a global cooldown cycle.  The catch?  You can’t use it in Defensive Stance, and you’re going to be in Defensive Stance most of the time from here on out because it’s more efficient to grind that way.  Still, if you’re DPSing in a group or find yourself in Battle or Berserker for whatever reason, it’s free damage.

Spell Reflection (level 64):  CRY MORE, MAGES.  As if being able to slam somebody in the face for 6000 damage isn’t enough reason to carry a shield, this skill seals the deal.  It’s expensive at 25 rage, but hit it, and it will reflect the first spell cast on you within five seconds back at the caster, hitting them with the full normal effect of their own spell.  Now there are a lot of restrictions with it.  It won’t stop you from taking AOE damage in, say, a Hurricane or Blizzard.  It’s on a 10-second cooldown and only lasts 5 seconds, so timing is critical.  It reflects one spell, although sometimes, latency will cause weird things to happen like being able to reflect two or three that hit you at the same time–don’t count on it, though, it’s not reliable.  And certain mobs simply are not reflectable, because Blizzard loves giving us abilities and then making them useless on many boss fights.  (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, KARAZHAN.)  Still, this is an awesome ability.  It’s one more weapon we have against casters both in PvE and PvP.

Commanding Shout (level 68):  A very, very nice ability for tanking instances and raids, especially if you’ve got a paladin with Greater Blessing of Might in your back pocket.  It adds a significant amount of health to everybody within range in your group or raid.

Intervene (level 70):  This is the third leg of what I call the “mobility trinity,” Charge and Intercept being the other two.  Intervene allows you to charge at a group or raid member and intercept the next attack made on that person; in addition, it lowers their total threat by 10%.  Personally, I don’t use it as much as I should, because it’s tricky as hell to switch targets mid-fight.  There’s ways around that with macros, though.  It has a myriad of uses; in PvP, it’s great for catching up to friendly forces, in PvE, it’s obviously good for saving squishies that pull agro.  We used it in Gruul’s Lair for occasionally eating hits off the main tank to keep rage up and stay higher on the threat list (when I was supposed to be eating Hateful Strikes).  Blizzard added the 10% threat reduction specifically to break this strategy of using Intervene on a main tank.  Your talent point in Warbringer allows Intervene to be used in any stance, and it does not share a linked cooldown with Charge or Intercept.  Once you get good at using those three abilities, you become a giant plate-clad pinball of doom.

You can hit Outland as early as level 58, and most people nowadays do that.  The reason is simple–the gear they throw at you in the introductory quests is a quantum leap over anything but the best of old-world dungeon blues or level 60 40-man raid gear.  You’ll start building your “Outland clown suit” not long after you set foot on Hellfire Peninsula.  You may have a little trouble with some quests at first if you’re 58 or 59 and your gear is weak coming in, because certain areas (Zeth’gor comes to mind) are crowded and can have fast respawn rates.  Just consider it good practice for instance tanking, and learn to love the inherent survivability of the Prot spec as you slowly grind down entire groups of fel orcs.  This is where all those hours spent leveling first aid, cooking and fishing can pay off; a good stock of bandages and buff food will go a long way toward making the early Hellfire levels less painful.  Once you push forward into Zangarmarsh or Terrokar, things actually get easier; your gear’s improved, you’ve got a few levels, and the mob concentration is more spread out in most areas.

Instance tanking in Outland is simultaneously better and worse.  Better because the instances are no longer as massive or confusing as a Mauradon or BRD; worse because some of them feature huge trash pulls that will push your tanking skills to the limit.  Prior to 3.0, despite Linedan being very well-geared, I would simply refuse to tank heroic Shattered Halls or Shadow Labyrinth (OK, I wouldn’t tank most Outland heroics), simply because both dungeons featured many five- and six-mob pulls that were beyond brutal for a warrior to keep agro on.  With our new and highly improved AOE tanking abilities, it’s a lot less painful now, but still not easy.  The same tips still apply–use a kill order and crowd control in level-appropriate groups on big pulls.  Work on line-of-sight (LOS) pulling to bring casters to you, this is a skill that you should learn now because you’ll surely need it in raids.

Again, I can’t state this enough–tank something every chance you can get.  Tank outdoor group quests, tank instances, act like you’re tanking when you grind by pulling multiple mobs and practice shifting targets to spread agro.  You don’t want to get to level 80 and then have to learn this stuff on the job in a Northrend heroic.  A significant part of being a good tank is mindset.  You need to have the mindset that you WANT to tank.

My apologies if this is a little disjointed today.  I’m tanking three projects at work while I’m putting this together.  But, hey, at least I’ve got solid agro on ‘em all, eh what?

Coming soon to SYWTBAPW…welcome to Northrend!  It’s cold.  It’s full of things trying to eat your face.  And it’s where you’ll finish your journey–for now–and get ready for the ultimate test of your tankitude, level 80 heroics and raids.  Tune in again, same bat-time, same bat-channel!

So you want to be a prot warrior: What do all those stats do?

Prepare for the Great Wall of Text!

Up until about level 50 or so, gearing up your protection warrior is pretty straightforward.  You want gear with as much stamina and strength as you can stack.  Agility, crit, hit, and defense are good secondary stats, but not as important–at first–as strength and stamina.

But as you start heading toward being able to tank the high-end “vanilla” instances–Scholomance, Stratholme, Dire Maul, anything with “Blackrock” in the name–or to head to Outland, your gearing requirements begin to subtly change.  You have to start looking at more than just raw strength and stamina.  You have, in fact, a metric bleepton of stuff to take into consideration as you get closer and closer to level 80, and not all of the stats are as important as others.  You need to know what’s indispensable and what you can live without.

If your prot warrior isn’t your first character, you should already be familiar with Blizzard’s sliding-scale “rating” system.  Instead of increasing your abilities like Dodge, Parry, Block, Defense, etc. by a fixed amount, these “ratings” are variable.  If you get a piece of armor that has +20 Dodge rating, that increases your percentage chance to dodge more at level 50 than it does at level 60.  It’s designed to keep you constantly grinding for replacement gear, because your current gear becomes less and less effective as you level.

Now, for this part of SYWTBAPW, I’m not going to get too much into the math behind the numbers to tell you how much a point of Dodge rating gives you at level 60 versus level 69, for example.  Why?  Because until you reach the endgame, it really doesn’t matter that much.  With your newfound warrior abilities and some practice, at level 60 you can walk into any old-world instance and tank the place in any reasonable mixture of easily-obtained items.  You don’t have to start really pushing the min-max on your gear until you’re closing in on level 80.  That doesn’t mean that you won’t make choices and need to keep your items as updated as possible, but in general, you’re not going to be worrying about squeezing every single point out of what you wear.  At this intermediate stage of your career, the concepts are more important than the actual numbers.

(My suggestion, if you’re a number-cruncher like I am, is to go snag a wicked nice little add-on called Rating Buster.  This slick piece of work will convert ratings to percentages and put them right into your item tooltips.  You can see it in action on most of the tooltip pictures here on Achtung Panzercow.  I find it indispensable when I’ve got to make quick decisions about whether or not I’m going to ask for loot during our raids.)

So let’s talk about what each of these various ratings do, why we need them, and their relative importance for a tank…

Defensive Stats

Dodge. It’s pretty self-explanatory.  You dodge an attack entirely, taking no damage.  Since druids don’t have shields and can’t Parry, this is their primary method of avoidance, but it’s also quite important for warriors.

Parry. You parry the attack entirely, taking no damage.  Note that being parried, however, speeds up the mob’s swing timer so that it can hit you again faster.  Back in Burning Crusade, many tanks facing Prince Malchezzar in Karazhan fell victim to “parry gibbing” during phase 2 of the fight when repeated parries caused him and his axes to hit that much faster and spike a ton of damage. It’s still a good stat to have, though.  (EDIT:  Your Panzercow is a moron.  I got this completely backwards.  When you parry, your swing timer is decreased by up to 40%.  When a mob parries you, their swing timer is decreased.  So tanks got parry-gibbed on Prince Malchezzar not because they were stacking too much parry, but because they didn’t have sufficient expertise, and Malchezzar was parrying them or other melee stacked in front of them. This is one big reason for melee DPS to do their attacking from behind.  Thanks to Zippy in the comments for pointing this out!)

Block. Block is your chance to passively shield-block an attack, removing part of the damage.  Don’t confuse your block rating or block percentage with block value.  Your block percentage is how often you block; your block value is how much you block.

Defense. Defense is an interesting stat.  It does multiple things.  Its primary function is to reduce your chance to be critically hit.  Its secondary function is to provide small increases to dodge, parry, and block per point.  It can be a confusing stat to track, because it’s actually a skill, same as a weapon skill, and thus levels up from 1 to 400 as you level.  Additions to Defense from items use the same sliding-scale rating system as everything else; an item that says it’s got “+40 defense rating” might actually only improve the Defense score on your character sheet by, say, 12 points.  Defense is a vital stat for a tank to stack.  To give you an example of how important, at level 80, in order to reduce your chance to get critted by a raid boss to zero, you need 540 defense skill on your character sheet; that means +683 +689 defense rating from your items, gems, and enchants, assuming your Defense skill is maxed at 400.  That’s a lot. You can, of course, tank with less, but that leaves you risking getting critted for OMGWTF damage and making your healers cry.  (Thanks to ribby47 in the comments for catching my error on the needed +defense rating.)

Stamina. Hey, look, it’s your good old friend stamina.  Stamina is NEVER a bad thing.  Why?  Because you get hit in the face for a living, you doofus, and the bigger that pool of health is, the better.

Agility. Agility is both a defensive and an offensive stat; it provides a tiny increase per point to your dodge and your crit percentages.  That having been said, it’s not worth intentionally stacking it.  The returns are far too limited and you can get more from other things like stamina, or dodge rating.

Offensive Stats

Hit. Hit rating is good for tanks because, let’s face it guys, whiffing does not impress the ladies.  That, and whiffs give you no rage and generate no threat.  Fortunately, figuring out how much +hit you need is pretty easy.  You have a base 5% chance to miss an attack on a mob that’s the same level as you, and that number goes up by 1% for each level the mob is higher than you–since raid bosses are always treated as three levels higher than you, that means you need 8% extra hit at level 80 to never miss a boss.  The tooltip for hit rating tells you what percentage of +hit your current numeric hit rating translates into.  (At level 80, you need 262 hit rating to reach the magic 8%.)  If you’re a Draenei, or have one for a Siamese twin and are always grouped with them, the handy-dandy Heroic Presence racial means you only need 7% hit.  By the way, +hit does not affect whether a mob dodges or parries you.  That’s controlled by…

Expertise. Expertise reduces your chance to be parried or dodged by an opponent.  It’s a good stat to have, because you get no rage (and generate no threat) if you’re parried or dodged.  In order to not be parried or dodged at all, you need enough expertise to get 6% worth; at level 80, that’s 26 expertise points, or about 140 rating.  If you’re a human using maces or swords, or an orc using axes, of course, you need less due to your racial abilities.

Crit. Not so important.  You get +15% bonus crit to many of your best abilities from your talents, so unlike many other classes, you don’t need huge amounts of +crit to still deliver pain.  That having been said, if you’re building a set for daily grinding or other DPS use and not for boss tanking, crit can be useful.  (Full disclosure:  Linedan uses two crit trinkets in his “trash” tanking set for extra damage output.  Handy for powering through dailies or smashing instances he overgears, but when it’s time to head to Ulduar, he puts them away.)

Strength. Still very important, because as you know by now, 1 strength = 2 AP.  More AP directly translates to more damage dealt and more threat generated.  Strength also gives tiny increases to your parry chance, and to your shield block value.

Putting It All Together

So.  Now that you’ve got all this knowledge, how do you actually apply it?  I’m going to talk more about that when we get into endgame gearing for the 70s and 80s, but there’s a few principles that hold true through the 50s and 60s as well.

- Stamina and strength are, and will forever be, your friends.  More of those is always good.

- Defense is probably the best bang-for-the-buck tank stat there is.  It reduces your chance to take painful crits, and boosts all three of your avoidance/mitigation stats (dodge, parry, block).  Even in the 60s, good +defense pieces are worth their weight in gold.

- Stamina, dodge and parry are better if you are building a set designed to keep you alive fighting a big boss, because they remove all damage–if you dodge or parry, you don’t get hit at all, but you gain no rage from it.  Strength, block rating and block value are better if you’re building a set designed to generate high threat and high damage at the expense of taking more damage yourself; you only mitigate part of the incoming damage on a hit, but you get rage, and the extra strength and block value boost your Shield Slam damage and overall threat generated.  You will almost certainly end up building at least two sets of gear, one for avoidance/mitigation and one for threat/damage…but that’s a subject for another post, later on toward endgame.

- Don’t gem for +hit and +expertise if you can possibly avoid it.  The “bang-for-the-buck” on hit and expertise gems isn’t generally worth it.  You can pick up hit and expertise rating off your gear and save the gem slots for stamina, or defense if you’re approaching 80 and need to reach the defense “magic number” of 540.  You can also gem for strength if you need red slots to activate a meta.

Is this a pretty generic post?  Yep.  Because as with a lot of the other topics in SYWTBAPW, I want to give you the information and then let you use your own brainmeats to figure out how to apply it!  There is, for the most part, no One True Way to Tanky Enlightenment.  If you’re smart and take time to understand what the various stats do and how they interrelate, you should be able to see how your gearing choices will affect your abilities going forward.  And honestly, the game really is much more forgiving than it used to be when it comes to warrior itemization…until you get up to level 80 and the endgame.  But that’s a ways off yet.

Next time, we’ll talk about levels 61 through 70 and your fun vacation in scenic, fragmenting Outland.  You’ll come for our friendly fel orcs, but you’ll stay for our disintegrating magic-ravaged deserts!

So you want to be a prot warrior: Levels 51-60

What you aspire to be.

 

Hey kids!  Are we ready to get out our prot warriors and level some more?

YAAAAAAY!

I thought you little rugrats were up for it!  Come on, let’s go!

OK, now that I’ve finished channeling my bad cable access kid’s TV show host…on with the grind!  We last left off SYWTBAPW at level 50.  Our build was this 0/0/41 setup right here, and we’d just picked up tasty, tasty Devastate.  Well, let me tell you, if you thought Devastate was good, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  These last 10 points in the Protection tree are going to give you some new and very creative ways to dish out pain in amounts that Prot warriors could only dream of prior to patch 3.0’s release.  So grab your talent pane and come along, and let’s see where these last 10 points go…

Level 51:  1/1 Warbringer.  Say hello to mobility.  Warbringer is one of those talents that you won’t think about after a while, but if you ever change specs, you’ll miss it so damn much.  It lets you Charge, Intercept, or Intervene in any stance–and any time you use any of those three abilities, you’ll remove all movement-impairing effects.  The simplest application of this talent just lets you Charge in combat (that’s mainly what I use it for).  But with some macro fu which is beyond the scope of this guide, you can stagger the use of those three abilities and become a steel-covered pinball of death.  And needless to say, the PvP applications of this are pretty staggering.  Master the use of this, and you become a mage’s worst nightmare.

Levels 52-54:  3/3 Critical Block.  This gives you a 30% chance to block double your normal amount on any successful block.  It also increases the critical strike chance on Shield Slam by 15%.  Remember last time how I said that Shield Slam is your big whammy?  It just got a metric crapton bigger.  And yes, Critical Block stacks with Shield Block when it’s up, occasionally allowing you to block obscene amounts of damage.  (At level 80, raid-buffed, my record block is well above 5000.)

Levels 55-57:  3/3 Sword and Board.  Free things are always good, right?  Well, Sword and Board gives you free things.  Most importantly, whenever you connect with a Revenge or Devastate and deal damage, you have a 30% chance of “refreshing the cooldown of Shield Slam and reducing the rage cost by 100% for 5 seconds”–in effect, giving you five seconds to get off a rage-free Shield Slam.  This is a very important ability, and in fact, becomes top dog in your priority system due to the short window of use.  You’ll know it procs because of the “clunk” noise and swirling band of shield icons that pop up around you.

Levels 58-59:  2/2 Damage Shield.  Warrior thorns, basically.  Any time you’re hit, or block, a melee attack, you reflect back 20% of your current Shield Block Value as physical damage, which the target then mitigates normally.  And yes, it can crit.  (The fact that Damage Shield can crit becomes important later on.)  This ability only works if you’ve got a shield on, as far as I can tell…and it is affected by Shield Block, so popping Shield Block gives your Damage Shield damage a noticeable boost.  It can have some interesting side effects; for example, if you get attacked by a PvP-flagged mob, even if you don’t do anything, your Damage Shield will do damage to it and thus flag you.

Level 60:  1/1 Shockwave.  And here’s the Pinnacle of Prot, Shockwave.  It’s a frontal cone attack with an alleged range of 10 yards; in actuality, it’s more like 7 to 8 yards because the cone starts slightly behind you.  The base damage is 75% of your Attack Power, and it also stuns anything it hits for 4 seconds.  This is a really handy tool, in addition to being a decent source of damage.  It provides reasonable AOE threat, it can stun to buy your healers a couple of seconds to patch you up, and it’s great for positioning mobs.  On a pull, just gather them all in front of you, and kapowie.  It does have a 20-second cooldown, so pick your shots with it.

In terms of new spells…there are none between 50 and 60.  You gain new ranks of a lot of your old friends, some of them twice during this period.  But there’s nothing shiny and new until Victory Rush at level 62.  Your only new active toy will be Shockwave at level 60, plus any reconfiguration you do of your bars and keybindings to take advantage of Warbringer.

The addition of Warbringer, Sword and Board, and Shockwave lays another level or two of complexity on your tanking priority system, and also gives you much more flexibility on pulling and positioning.  You now don’t have to worry about changing stances if you want to Charge-pull, which is nice.  A typical initial pull might go something like this:  Charge one mob, immediately Thunder Clap.  As you’re positioning the mobs, hit Shield Block; in addition to mitigating damage (thus reducing the healing you need, thus reducing healing agro) this will increase the amount of Damage Shield damage you’re reflecting back on the bad guys.  Perform your usual dance, spreading the love around as much as you can, until 10 seconds is up and Shield Block is down…then make sure everybody’s in front of you, and Shockwave.

Why do it this way?  Because you’re getting rage from being hit.  When you Shockwave, you aren’t being hit.  Getting beaten on for the first 10 seconds of the fight while you’ve got Shield Block up gives you more rage, puts more Damage Shield damage on the off-targets, and lets you drop two Thunder Claps for AOE agro in addition to everything else you’re doing.  If Shield Block is up, and you Shockwave and stun all the targets, you’re just wasting four seconds of your precious 10-second Shield Block uptime.

Your normal tanking priority system looks like this now:

• Is Sword and Board up?  This comes first due to the short uptime and high damage potential.  For some gear configurations Revenge may hit slightly harder than Shield Slam, but Shield Slam has the +15% crit from Critical Block.
• Is Revenge up?  Revenge is now your solid #2 move.  As always, if you have a Glyph of Revenge, follow the Revenge with an immediate Heroic Strike, since it costs no rage.
• Is Thunder Clap off cooldown and I’m facing multiple targets? Use Thunder Clap to try and keep other mobs beside your current target on you, and for damage mitigation by the 20% attack speed slow.
• Is Shockwave off cooldown and I’m facing multiple targets stacked in front of me?  Go for it.  Just don’t do it if you need rage from taking a few hits.
• Is Shield Slam up?  Give ‘em the pimp hand.
• Do I have more than 40 rage? If so, it’s time for Heroic Strike or Cleave to convert it into damage.
• None of the above? Devastate, for threat and extra physical damage.
• Debuffs:  Don’t forget to drop Demoralizing Shout if you have a spare global cooldown.
• Long-cooldown attacks:  If Concussion Blow is off cooldown, and you don’t need it to stun casters or runners?  Heck, use it if nothing else is handy.  It’s extra damage and a stun, why not?

Also, remember, you will certainly have to target-switch and spread the love among the multiple targets you’re no doubt tanking.  One trick I find helpful is, when possible, to orient myself so that I have no other mobs than my tank targets in my screen view.  Ye olde TAB key is notoriously weird about tabbing to a mob 20 yards away when you’ve got four nomming on your face, so only having those four mobs on the screen helps prevent that.

For instancing, the old world is your oyster by the time you hit 60.  You leave behind the piles of suck that are Mauradon and Sunken Temple and head into the Blackrock instances, Stratholme, Scholomance, or Dire Maul.  Strat and Scholo in particular will challenge your multi-target tanking skills and push you to improve.  Not that many people head into BRD, LBRS, or UBRS anymore, but go if you get the chance.  Even though they’re too damn big and too damn long, personally, I still like them just for the look.  One thing I wouldn’t do is tank Outland instances until you’re about 61 and have replaced most of your gear with Outland items–then you can look into Hellfire Ramparts and Blood Furnace.

Your gearing priorities start to shift subtly in the high 50s.  At 58 you head to Outland, and don’t worry about whatever you’re wearing at the time, it’ll be gone by the time you hit 61–you’ll replace everything in short order.  You should start looking, in addition to strength and stamina, for pieces with some +hit and +defense on them.  We’ll talk more about this in the next post in the series, which is about tank gearing for the 60-80 stretch.

Now go forth and Shockwave, my minions!

So you want to be a prot warrior: Levels 41-50

(You might want to wear a little more armor than this, no matter how studly you think you are.)

Hokai.  I think I’ve given you, my faithful little tanky padawans, suitable time to get caught up to level 40 and ready to push forward through your next 10 levels of Prot warrior l33tness.  By the time you get to level 50, you will (if you’re not just getting blendered) have gained a decent amount of tanking experience in instances, have long replaced all your mail armor with plate, and in general will really be beginning to unlock the power inherent in the post-Lich King Protection tree.

We’ve had some spec divergence in the last couple of SYWTBAPW posts, so in the interest of my own sanity, I’m going to use this 0/0/31 Prot spec as a baseline to work with today.  Yours may be slightly different, depending on if you took Improved Disarm earlier on or tried something else, and that’s OK.  There isn’t that much flexibility in the cookie-cutter 15/5/51 spec we’re heading toward, but there’s a little.  But I’ll use this one spec as a baseline.  OK, off we go!

Levels 41-42:  3/3 Focused Rage.  We’ll go ahead and finish out Focused Rage so all our offensive abilities now cost 3 less rage.  It doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, it adds up fast.

Levels 43-44:  2/2 Improved Defensive Stance.  This is another subtle little talent that is totally passive, but a big help.  Not only does it cut your spell damage taken by 6%, whenever you block, parry, or dodge an attack, you pick up an Enrage effect that boosts your damage by 10% for 12 seconds.  At later levels in particular, with good gear, the Enrage effect is almost constant.

Level 45:  1/1 Vigilance.  I’m assuming that you are doing a bit of tanking and not just questing or getting blendered through your 40s.  If you are tanking or running with a friend quite a bit, then it’s time to go ahead and get Vigilance.  If you are mostly grinding solo, then you won’t see any immediate help from this ability.  When you put it on a party member, it reduces their damage taken by 3%; more importantly, it does two things that help your tanking.  It takes 10% of their threat away from them and transfers it to you, and also, if they do somehow manage to get hit, your Taunt cooldown is instantly refreshed.  If you have DPS in your party that is pushing you on threat, put this on them; you’ll bogart some of their threat to help you stay ahead, and if they do still manage to get agro, your Taunt will instantly be available to save them.  Y’know, unless you want to see them die, which is occasionally very tempting.

Levels 46-48:  3/3 Vitality.  +6% strength, +6% stamina, and 6 free expertise.  Yum yum.

Level 49:  5/5 Toughness.  We’re finally filling this out to get maximum armor value from our items.

Level 50:  1/1 Devastate.  You can now remove Sunder Armor from your bars, because this replaces it.  Think of it as Sunder with benefits; it Sunders, and it does half your normal weapon damage, plus an extra amount for each stack of the Sunder effect on the target.  It’s not as important as it used to be pre-3.0 when it was our best spammable, always-there threat move; with the changes to the class, and its relatively inefficient rage-to-damage ratio, it’s now pretty much the “if nothing else is off cooldown” move.  But, you do still keep using it.  The armor reduction helps you and your melee friends, and in a few levels, this skill becomes even more important because of its synergy with Sword and Board.

We’ve now got a build that looks like this, 0/0/41.  There’s some wiggle room in there, for example, taking two points out of Toughness and moving it into Improved Disarm, or possibly swapping the point in Vigilance for, say, another point of Shield Specialization or one in Puncture.  If you’re doing much tanking, though, I’d take Vigilance instead.  It’s pretty handy.

Believe it or not, between levels 41 and 50, you only get one new skill.  It’s at level 50, and it’s called Recklessness.  This is a Berserker Stance-only skill on a 5-minute cooldown; when hit, your next three special attacks within 12 seconds have +100% to crit (basically, guaranteed if they don’t miss), but you take +20% damage for that time period.  You won’t use it all that much, but on those (rare) occasions where you’re DPSing and not getting hit, it can give you a nice boost, especially near the end of a fight where you’d be getting into spamming Executes.

At level 50 you also get a second minor glyph.  There really aren’t all that many good warrior minor glyphs; I tend to prefer the Glyph of Battle because you’ll still be using Battle Shout a lot unless you have a paladin for a Siamese twin, the Glyph of Thunder Clap to give you two yards extra range on those, or the Glyph of Bloodrage so your Bloodrage ability gives you 20 free rage a minute without damaging your health.

Your tanking rotation doesn’t change much from level 40, when you got Shield Slam.  You just slot Devastate in there in place of Sunder Armor, and you’re good to go.  You should see a decent damage bump when you do get Devastate at level 50, but other than that, you’re fairly steady through your 40s.

Tanking in the 40s can be a pain.  In my clanky opinion, there’s only one non-terrible instance for that level range, and that’s Zul’farrak.  Zul’farrak has some fun fights, and will keep a level-appropriate group on its toes in terms of crowd control and pulling (it’s a good instance for learning things like line-of-sight pulling and how not to get multiple groups).  Uldaman is at the low end of the 40s, and it’s confusing and has way too much outside-the-instance non-elite trash to slog through.  Mauradon is a giant festering piece of suck; a few strange people like it, but to me it’s just too big, too convoluted, and ugly, not to mention it’s in one of the ugliest zones in the game, Desolace.  At the high end of the 40s is Sunken Temple, although I wouldn’t go in there until the low 50s.  Again, Sunken Temple shows a lot of things wrong with “vanilla WoW” instance design, namely being very large, hard to find your way around in, and absolutely jam-packed with trash.  IMO, however, it’s a distinct improvement over Mauradon–at least Sunken Temple looks cool to wander around lost in.

Next up, we’ll talk about levels 51 through 60, and the last 10 points you’ll spend in the Prot tree–the tasty, creamy, luscious dessert after the hearty meat-and-potatoes dinner of the last 40 levels.

So you want to be a prot warrior: Levels 31-40

ALL RIGHT, MAGGOTS, FALL IN!  WHAT?  YOU NEED SLEEP?  YOU CAN SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE WAITING FOR A REZ, SLIMEBALL!

Let’s talk about your next 10 levels as a Prot warrior.  If you’ve been following along with SYWTBAPW up till now, you’re level 30, have all three of your stances, and are running around with one of two different 0/0/21 specs.  Where we proceed from here is pretty much the same whether or not you’ve got the 2/5 Toughness or 2/5 Improved Disarm build, so let’s get to leveling!

Levels 31-32:  2/2 Gag Order.  It’s a silly name for a very useful talent.  Gag Order is a talent that doesn’t really come into its own until past level 40.  Right now, it has one nice feature; whenever you Shield Bash a spellcasting target, in addition to interrupting and dazing it, you’ll silence it for 3 seconds.  Very handy on those pesky spellcasters.  Once you get this, you’ll start dragging the two-hand weapons out of your pack less and less.

Levels 33-34:  4/5 Toughness (or 2/5 Toughness if you took Improved Disarm).  We’re just filling in points here to get to the next tier of talents.

Levels 35-39:  5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization.  The late 30s and early 40s are when the two-handed weapons finally get put in the bank and you become a true sword-and-board devotee.  This talent, once maxed, gives you +10% to all damage you deal with one-handed weapons, including if you’re dual wielding.  But by level 40, you’ll keep a shield in your left hand instead of another weapon.

Level 40:  1/3 Focused Rage.  By now you may have noticed that rage can occasionally be hard to come by.  Focused Rage helps that by reducing the rage cost of all your offensive abilities by one point per point spent.

You may be asking, “OK, why didn’t we put any points in Puncture or Vigilance?”  Good question.  Puncture only reduces the rage cost of a single ability at this level–Sunder Armor.  (You won’t have Devastate until level 50.)  It’s an inefficient use of points, even though Sunder is your main spammable threat generator.  As for Vigilance, it’s a controversial talent.  A lot of endgame/raiding builds don’t even take it.  I have it on Linedan’s Prot build, and think it’s worth the point…at endgame.  For now, I think the point’s better spent in Focused Rage.  Remember, this is a leveling build, we’ll tweak it later.

Most of the new abilities you get in the 30s have to do with Berserker Stance.  You won’t use them all that much, but they may come in handy if you’re grouped with friends and, for some reason, find yourself not doing the tanking but doing DPS instead.  You’re smart, you can figure out when it’s appropriate to use these!  And then, at level 40, the skies open, shafts of light come down, and Chuck Norris descends from On High, Mankrik’s wife by his side, to give you the talent that truly sends you on your way to Prot fearsomeness…

Berserker Rage (level 32):  aka, “HULK SMASH.”  Hit this (Berserker Stance only) and for 10 seconds you are immune to Fear, Sap, and Incapacitate effects; plus, you get extra rage when you take damage.  I still use this on fights where I am not tanking and attempting to do “l33t prot deeps” (cough); with so many raid encounters pumping a lot of damage around an entire raid, getting more rage out of that splash damage lets me do more damage in return.

Whirlwind (level 36):  Another Berserker Stance-only gem, when you hit this, you hit up to four targets in melee range with your weapon (both, if you’re dual-wielding).  Sadly, Whirlwind does not count your shield as a weapon.  Even against multiple targets, with a single one-hander, this is very inefficient.

Pummel (level 38):  And yet another Berserker Stance restricted ability.  This is a spell interrupt; not only does it stop casting, it locks out that casting school for 4 seconds.  Unfortunately, Pummel and Shield Bash are on linked cooldowns, so you can’t Shield Bash, then stance-switch for a second interrupt.

Plate (level 40):  Not really a spell or ability, but you suddenly gain the ability to figure out how to wear plate armor.  It was all alien to you before, but then your trainer showed you how.  Miraculous!

Shield Slam (level 40):  This is it, baby.  It’s clobberin’ time.  Shield Slam was originally the Prot 31-point talent, but for patch 3.0, it was replaced by Vigilance and given to all warriors at level 40, to increase off-spec tanking viability.  They can use it, but we raise it to an art form.  This is your “nuke,” as it were; it hits hard, it removes a magic effect from the target, it causes high bonus threat, and it makes a really cool “CLANK” sound.  What’s not to like?

Shield Slam damage, unlike most other offensive talents, does not scale directly from Attack Power.  It scales with your Shield Block Value; the “block” number on your shield, modified by your strength (2 strength = 1 SBV).  Your 2 points in Shield Mastery give you an automatic +20% SBV, and your 2 points in Gag Order give you +10% net damage on Shield Slam.  And yes, when you hit Shield Block to double your block value for 10 seconds, your Shield Slam damage will skyrocket.  This is not just a threat move.  Shield Slam will, if you’re doing things right, consistently be your #1 damage-dealt move over time.

Getting Shield Slam changes your tanking priority system.  You remember it, right?  Revenge if it’s up, Thunder Clap if you need it, Heroic Strike if you’ve got the rage, Sunder Armor otherwise, lather, rinse, repeat next cooldown?  Well, here’s what it looks like at level 40:

• Is Revenge up? Use it first, even before Shield Slam.  Why?  Because it goes away after 5 seconds.  Your window of opportunity is small, so you have to take advantage of it.  Remember, if you have a Glyph of Revenge, follow the Revenge with an immediate Heroic Strike, since it costs no rage.
• Is Thunder Clap off cooldown and I’m facing multiple targets? Use Thunder Clap to try and keep other mobs beside your current target on you.
• Is Shield Slam up? Use it.  It hits hard and gives you excellent threat.
• Do I have more than 40 rage? If so, it’s time for Heroic Strike or Cleave to convert it into damage.
• None of the above? Sunder Armor, for threat and extra physical damage.
• Debuffs:  Don’t forget to drop Demoralizing Shout if you have a spare global cooldown.

Shield Slam changes the way that you pull, too.  Shield Slam should always be your opening move on a single-mob or boss pull, assuming you have the rage.  A Charge + Shield Slam combo, with one white attack in there, should give you a solid threat lead on the target.  For multiple mobs, you’ll probably still open with Charge, then Thunder Clap; but Shield Slamming the kill target as soon as possible is very much advised.

If it sounds like I’m making a big deal out of Shield Slam, I am, and you’ll see why when you start to play with it.  In mostly epic-level Naxx gear and raid buffs, Lin’s dropped 7200-point SS crits on Naxx trash (with Shield Block up).  You’ve probably been feeling a bit underwhelmed in the DPS department through the mid- to late-30s, but Shield Slam will give you an immediate damage boost.  Combine that with new ranks of Cleave and Heroic Strike at level 40, and you may well feel very invigorated about your Prot warrior.

As always, take opportunities to practice those tank skills.  There’s not always a lot of call for tanks at these levels, as folks tend to push through them quickly and prefer to be blendered through instances instead, but if you do get a chance to tank for a group, take it.  Shield Slam changes the rotation you’ve probably gotten used to so it’ll take some time to work it in and get comfortable with it.  The problem is, most of the instances at this level range suck. Scarlet Monastery is the one good one; your other choices are Uldaman and Gnomeregan, and going to one of those is like being asked “which would you prefer, a one-way ticket to Kabul or Pyongyang?”  Learn to love Scarlet Monastery.

Finally, a note on gearing.  At level 40, you can wear plate.  Save up some money for the occasion and start prowling the AH.  Do not switch a mail piece to plate if the plate piece has inferior stats; be intelligent about what you’re looking for.  The higher armor from plate is nice, but if you’re 41 or 42 and still have some mail on, that’s OK if it’s good mail.  Strength and stamina are still important, but at this level you’ll start to see a very few pieces of gear with other stats on it.  You’re not worried much about crit rating.  Hit rating, on the other hand, is good even in the 40s, so if it doesn’t cripple your strength and stamina too much, by all means, grab it.

One point to remember:  +strength is superior to +attack power. Why?  Because +AP just increases attack power.  +Strength increases attack power, and shield block value (for Shield Slam damage), and parry percentage.  It’s more bang for your gold.

Also, you’ll be able to start using better enchants with items over level 35.  If you’ve got the gold to do it, by all means, enchant what you can, although I wouldn’t spend a massive amount on it considering how fast you’ll replace some gear.  Weapons are good candidates since you tend to hang onto those a little longer.  Fiery Weapon is a good and reasonably available enchant, but if you’ve got the gold and are willing to go all the way, Crusader is probably the best for you under level 60.

Next post covers levels 41-50.  You can run any instance you like between 41 and 50, except they all suck!  I’M LOOKING AT YOU, MAURADON!