Tanking as a warrior is alot like having a retarded brother who throws rocks at people. You will normally have to step in and take the beating for him.
Stats to have
All warriors use 2 primary stats no matter what spec you are. Those two are Strength and Stamina. Depending on what roll you want to play either DPS or tanking(focus of this post) will determine which will be more of a priority. Tanking Stats
Stamina - This is your lifeline as a tank. The more of this stat you have the more health you have. As your gear gets better you will get more of this stat naturally. Also socketing for this stat is well accepted and should be placed in any blue socket.
Defense - This is what decides whether or not you can tank in any kind of instance no matter what level of instance (heroic, normal, or raid). Currently at level 80 you need 540 Defense to be able to tank in raids. That is the Defense cap. All gear designed for tanking will have this stat on it. Current Defense rating : Defense ratio is 4.92:1. So, for almost every 5 Defense rating you have on your gear, it will give you one Defense. You also receive a small amount of your Dodge and parry chance from this stat. If you are at 540 you will have a 5.62% chance increase to both dodge and parry, not to mention that same 5.62% chance for the Boss to Miss you. The reason behind the 540 Defense cap is because of the fact that Bosses can no longer get a critical strike on you. You can always have more then 540 Defense but the comparision ratio to what benefits you more at that level is that dodge, parry, block, STR, and STAM give a greater return value.
Dodge Rating - This stat adds to the chance that you will dodge. It's that simple. The more of this stat the more likely you will dodge a attack. Agility also adds to your chance to dodge however it is minimal. Not to mention, most tanking gear no longer has this stat on it.
Parry Rating - This stat adds to chance to parry. This stat takes more rating then dodge rating to get to 1% value.
Armor - The more armor you have the less physical damage you will receive from attacks. By most standards, in all blues you should have around 55-60% damage reduction without Defensive Stances additional 10% damage reduction.
Strength - This stat adds to your Attack power, which determines how hard you attacks will be, as well as how much you can block with your shield. the conversion ratio is 2STR:1SBV or 1STR : 2AP. AP is more valuable now as a warrior tank, but is not something you should actively seek out in tank gear. AP increases your all over damage as well as affects the damage of your Concussion Blow, Shockwave, and Thunderclap.
Hit - The likelihood you will hit with your abilities, very beneficial for your threat. 280 is a good place to be for this stat.
Expertise - Reduces the chance that your target will dodge or parry your attacks. This stat is very beneficial for your threat. The expertise soft cap is 26. At 26 expertise, the boss can no longer dodge your attacks. He can still parry them, but once you have 26 expertise the benefit of this stat goes down by half as much before.
Block Rating - The chance you will block with your shield. How much damage you block is determined by your Shield Block Value. Currently the worst Mitigation stat in game for warriors atm.
This is currently one of the highest TPS builds in game atm. It is lacking in rage conservation. It focuses mainly around a Revenge spam threat rotation. Link to Build: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LAMuzf0t0brR0MZZVcxrx0zib Video Accompanying build, which explains more about it.
Glyphs Major: Glyph of blocking - This glyph gives you 10% SBV for 10seconds after using Shield Slam which is on a 6 second Cool down. This is a free 10% increase in SBV passively while in combat. It is great for threat and beneficial for mitigation.
Glyph of Devastate - Adds a extra Sunder armor stack when using devastate. Depending on how often you use devastate this can be very beneficial even if you just use it at the start of fights.
Glyph of Sunder Armor - Adds a sunder armor effect to a nearby enemy of your target. Helpful in AoE threat.
Glyph of Last Stand and Shield Wall - Both reduce the CD on these abilities by 1 minute. Helpful in the Survivability spec's.
Glyph of Heroic Strike - 5% crit chance on your Heroic Strike ability. This can be very beneficial for threat, considering you will probably be spamming Heroic Strike alot.
As for the Glyphs that I did not list they are more or less pointless to have. Resonating power isn't needed unless your rage starved which in most cases you wont be. Revenge is also another rage starved glyph. You shouldn't be using Intervene that much in PvE unless you have problems with AoE threat and if a single person keeps pulling use Vigilance on them. Shockwave is too little of a CD to be worth it. Barbaric Insults is pointless, it's already a taunt, I don't see how putting a taunt mechanic on something that already taunts a target is of any use. Taunt glyph is pointless too, since most of our gear has alot of hit rating on it, which effects taunts chance to hit.
Minor: Glyph of Thunder Clap - Increases radius of effect by 2yrds. it may seem small but it is worth it.
Glyph of Bloodrage - Makes the Bloodrage ability free to use.
The last glyph slot can be your choosing I just wouldn't get Battle or Enduring victory as you won't be using either much while tanking.
Weapon: Big Debate on this one here http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=64579#comments - Blood Draining heals you 360-440 when you drop below 33% health. It can stack. Blood Draining is considered to be the overall better choice.
http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=64441#comments - Blade Ward around 2% chance to proc 200 parry rating and deals 600-800 damage on next parry within 10 seconds. Consumes charge on parry. It can stack.
http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=27984#comments - Mongoose around 4% chance to proc granting 120 agility which equals to 1.92% crit 3.05% dodge and +240 armor, also increase weapons speed by 2%. Doesn't stack, and procs about once a minute, or slightly more often due to our instant attacks.
What NOT to do as a tank. Some of these may seem simple enough and common sense, but lets face it. We are all giant noobs in this guild, so it can't hurt to go over what should already be known. This goes for all Tanking classes Not just warriors.
1 ) Do NOT let mobs attack your backside. This is flat out one way to have your ass handed to you. You can't dodge you can't parry and you can't block attacks coming from your backside. SO if you do this, you are taking unneeded damage from the mobs. Work on positioning yourself for best results when you pull or charge in. If you can avoid mobs attacking you from behind, that's perfect. If you can't, try to minimize the number of mobs attacking your ass.
2 ) If you don't have really great gear and know you might not be able to survive a pull without your healer. Do NOT pull. If you healer is oom or not, this can lead to one of two things you going splat or you going splat and then the rest of your group going splat. Also don't pull a Leeroy and aggro everything in a room, unless you can control all of the adds and won't die from it.
3 ) Try to take criticism lightly. Don't ignore comments unless whoever said it is either A ) a complete fucking moron or B ) just saying shit to tick you off. If you approach it from a learning experience aspect, you can improve your ability which is what makes this game that much more fun for everyone. Remember their are tanks out there everywhere now with 4 tanking classes to choose from. However the lack of competent tanks is still incredibly big.
Other then that remember these simple rules. A ) The Tank and healer set the pace for pulling in instances. This doesn't mean that you wont always have to pull every single mob in there though. There will be several times where a hunter or rogue(now) should pull for you, simply to just get positioning down. Positioning can be some of the most important aspects of fights. If a mob gets lose you have taunt, use it. Some times you will have to mark mobs in order for dps to focus on what needs to die first in specifically troubling compositions, or in the new VoA boss fight, he has 4 adds that are tanked and he enrages 1 every so often, and if it doesn't die fast enough will go boom and wipe raids.
B ) Protect your Healer at all costs. We can take great amounts of damage as long as we have a healer.
C ) Be a pleasant player. This goes for any class or role really, but if your not a douche and show any kind of skill at tanking people will remember you and use you for instances more.
Tanking Rotations/Ability Priorities:
Single Target: The WoLK rotation hasn't changed much since the rotation for back in TBC. You will still use Shield Slam when it us up from CD. Use Revenge EVERYtime it proc's. Use devastate at the beginning of fights to apply the sunder armor effect, after that use it once every now and then to keep the debuff applied. After that you can spam Heroic Strike. Keeping Thunderclap and Demo Shout up if you can.
Now with the current method of tanking in WoLK, you follow this same model of rotations but you are adding 2 new buttons to push when they are not on CD. Those two being Shockwave and Concussion Blow. Both of these give high amount of threat and will generally hit somewhat hard on mobs.
Multi- Target: It doesn't vary much from the single target method, only that you will be using Thunderclap every time it is off CD to keep threat above everyone else. Also make sure that the mobs are positioned in front of you so you can use Shockwave to hit them all at once. Cleave is also a AoE ability that can be used in High rage situations. Since Cleave only hits 2 mobs(unless glyph'd) you may want to use it sparingly. Tab targeting can be helpful in getting high threat on all targets but can be a bit overwhelming at times. Find what works for you in this case.
Priorities: Ability Priorities are somewhat simple. If and when Conc. Blow, Shockwave, Revenge, and Shield Slam are up from the CD use em. These are in fact your biggest threat abilities you have. Now Sword and Board proc's off Devastate and Revenge. Does this mean you should spam devastate and revenge to try and proc it? NO, you will use Devastate normally at the Beginning of fights and to keep sundered armor on the target. Overall Devastate loses out on TPR(threat per rage) to Heroic Strike, but if you manage to keep up in threat by spamming devastate be my guest. Shield Block is more of a threat increase button more then it is a Oh Shit button(which is what blizzard claims it was meant to be.) It increases your SBV by Double which means your Shield Slam will hit harder and generate more threat. Other then that you should be using your other abilities to keep threat.
Macro's: I currently use two macro's for when I'm tanking.
Shield Slam/Shield Block, this allows you to string Shield Block with Shield Slam whenever Shield Block is off cooldown. It also allows the ability to spam this macro without getting spammed with Error Messages.
#showtooltip Shield Slam /scriptUI ErrorsFrame: Hide() /cast Shield Block /script UIErrorsFrame: Clear() /script UIErrorsFrame: Show() /cast Shield Slam /start attack
Revenge/Heroic Strike, stringing Heroic Strike with Revenge, also allows for use of Heroic Strike when Revenge is on CD.
Edit: Was joking, but cmon... '540 is the Defense cap' You'll say that dodge increases dodge chance, but not that defense increases dodge/parry/block/miss? You listed a non-deep wounds spec but not the hilarious Unrelenting Assault build all the pro's on tankspot are dual speccin? No glyph of revenge? I understand my cleave glyph is personal, but revenge is one of the better ones. 2 and 4 are the same thing. 4 and 5 are the same thing. 2 and 4 and 5 are the same thing. A is wrong. C is just flat out wrong.
I'd be tempted to whine a bit about our mediocre avoidance/health/armor scaling, but that's just me. GG DKs with 45k unbuffed hp, GG.
--
You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget to watch for fight mechanics when you're asking someone how they could possibly be so stupid as to have missed said fight mechanics.
First off, i wrote half of this while very much sleepy or a bit drunk last night. Secondly, I was planning on editing this more. And yes, I listed a non-DW tank spec for more survivability, please read where I said that right above the post. Also if you have to spend 36 points in a tree that isn't prot, your doing it wrong. I will compile 2 4 and 5 as you pointed out, they are the same. As for C I'm keeping it in here, since not every player can bitch all the time and still have nice things like certain people. A needs to be rewritten since there are several times where you pulling isn't that great a Idea, like i said before sleepy and a bit drunk last night. Other then that thanks for the comments Kaern. Oh and lastly as for the revenge glyph, I have this aspect to say about it. Count how many times you will more then likely use revenge on a boss fight. Now tell me how much rage you have normally during any Boss fight. Now tell me will a free Heroic Strike Help you out that much? The fact of the matter is Bosses hit really hard, and we have a constant flow of rage. I myself spam everything and try to dump all of my rage for maximum threat, but can't do it. So unless either your OTing and not getting hit that much, which means more then likely you wont be able to hit revenge all that much either or are somehow starved for rage in a boss fight(which there is no fight like that in the game atm unless you do old world content). A free Heroic Strike to me seems a bit on the weak side. However this is my personal opinion, other people are entitled to theirs as well, I just simply wanted to show my argument for not using it. As for DK tanks, that is their game mechanic's, every tank class gets the same amount of values from dodge rating and parry rating (except druids, bears can't parry). They have more armor and Health to make up for the fact that they can't block, which can be said for the same as druids. So you just bitched about 2 classes at once Kaern GG.
--
Healers are like artists. No one truly appreciates them until they are dead.
First off, i wrote half of this while very much sleepy or a bit drunk last night. Secondly, I was planning on editing this more. And yes, I listed a non-DW tank spec for more survivability, please read where I said that right above the post. Also if you have to spend 36 points in a tree that isn't prot, your doing it wrong. I will compile 2 4 and 5 as you pointed out, they are the same. As for C I'm keeping it in here, since not every player can bitch all the time and still have nice things like certain people. A needs to be rewritten since there are several times where you pulling isn't that great a Idea, like i said before sleepy and a bit drunk last night. Other then that thanks for the comments Kaern. Oh and lastly as for the revenge glyph, I have this aspect to say about it. Count how many times you will more then likely use revenge on a boss fight. Now tell me how much rage you have normally during any Boss fight. Now tell me will a free Heroic Strike Help you out that much? The fact of the matter is Bosses hit really hard, and we have a constant flow of rage. I myself spam everything and try to dump all of my rage for maximum threat, but can't do it. So unless either your OTing and not getting hit that much, which means more then likely you wont be able to hit revenge all that much either or are somehow starved for rage in a boss fight(which there is no fight like that in the game atm unless you do old world content). A free Heroic Strike to me seems a bit on the weak side. However this is my personal opinion, other people are entitled to theirs as well, I just simply wanted to show my argument for not using it. As for DK tanks, that is their game mechanic's, every tank class gets the same amount of values from dodge rating and parry rating (except druids, bears can't parry). They have more armor and Health to make up for the fact that they can't block, which can be said for the same as druids. So you just bitched about 2 classes at once Kaern GG.
Wall 'O text hits kaern for 9001 (1000 blocked) (5,000,000 overkill)
Thanks for taking it as me giving advice and not just bitching, that's what I was going for but I'm used to typing in sarcasm and it was 5am.
Revenge glyph is probably the best rage saving glyph we've got, and I know a lot of tanks use it. If rage is a non-issue, go nuts. I might look into the aoe sunder glyph... I like cleaving but was really only using it because it was in my fury glyphs and I got used to it when prot was my offspec.
Yeah, A was a 'what about misdirect or crap like the Auraiva pull'. And leaving dps to tank when it isn't me with mezdems beacon on is a bad idea... taunt at least once. Might want to mention marking a bit as well, 80% of aoe pulloffs are because the tank didn't mark and the dps either didn't assist or assisted while the tank was tabbed to another target for a second.
C I still think is BS. ;p
Now I want to glyph last stand and shield wall and pretend I'm a DK by blowing them every pull. Mechanics-wise block is really mediocre on bosses, I'd much prefer the additional armor/health those other two classes get.
Edit: And stop saying 540 is the defense cap. It's the soft cap, or the defense floor, or anything but the cap. Cap implies more is worthless.
Some rotation/priority advice would go far too. 'Never miss a sword and board proc', that sort of thing.
--
You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget to watch for fight mechanics when you're asking someone how they could possibly be so stupid as to have missed said fight mechanics.
Noted Kaern, and I still don't see why not being a dick is something all classes can't stand to learn. Alright anymore comments before I have this thread locked, and Updated from time to time.
--
Healers are like artists. No one truly appreciates them until they are dead.
Multi-target should include cleave in high rage situations.
" Does this mean you should spam devastate and revenge to try and proc it? NO. The only time this could be of any use is when you just popped Shield Block. That is the only time that it would be the best to spam those two abilities. Other then that you should be using your other abilities to keep threat. " Feels misleading. You should be spamming those two abilities like 50% of the time hoping for a proc, since there's nothing else to use. What does shield block, even critical block, have to do with fishing for sword and board procs? The rotation shouldn't change 95% of the time.
--
You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget to watch for fight mechanics when you're asking someone how they could possibly be so stupid as to have missed said fight mechanics.
First off, so they didn't chance Heroic Strike Glyph. I forgot about Cleave. Thx for pointing it out.
Also, I think your right I should reword the S&B comment. It isn't very clear. It isn't that S&B are linked with Critical Block or Shield Block. It is just that Shield Slam is based off of your SBV. Which if you read the tooltip for Shield Block is doubled when used. Which means SS will hit harder, which equals more threat.
--
Healers are like artists. No one truly appreciates them until they are dead.
Also, I think your right I should reword the S&B comment. It isn't very clear. It isn't that S&B are linked with Critical Block or Shield Block. It is just that Shield Slam is based off of your SBV. Which if you read the tooltip for Shield Block is doubled when used. Which means SS will hit harder, which equals more threat.
Yeah, but it won't matter most of the time as you'll be spamming away between slams anyway. I guess you can leave it in. ;p
"Lastly due to Kaern's persistance on this particular spec..." Hey, if it's good enough for Cider, it's good enough for me. 3-4k dps from revenge spam has gotta be a little fun.
--
You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget to watch for fight mechanics when you're asking someone how they could possibly be so stupid as to have missed said fight mechanics.
Amangur Empire
Lucifer
Public Chat
Raid 1
