Prot Warrior Guide by Armilus v2

[Armilus 6]

Given the amoral behavior of this project I've decided to remove my tanking guide from these forums since it seems to be linked all over the place.

 

Please update your links to point to my tanking guide on the Nostalrius forums. I will post on the official forums when classic is closer to release.

Edited October 1, 2018 by Armilus

[`Xdembe` 47]

not correct for Heroic Strike

A strong attack that increases melee damage by X and causes a high amount of threat.

Bloodlord's Defender do much more damage than Alcor so amount of difference will be less than 102 (change green color pls) (~_+)

Edited December 10, 2016 by `Xdembe`

[Armilus 6]

not correct for Heroic Strike

A strong attack that increases melee damage by X and causes a high amount of threat.

Bloodlord's Defender do much more damage than Alcor so amount of difference will be less than 102 (change green color pls) (~_+)

 

I am only comparing the threat of the heroic strike ability in that example. The point is to keep it simple and explain one concept at a time.

 

In addition, you can't include threat from the auto attack portion of the ability. It doesn't matter if you use heroic strike or not, the difference in threat due to damage between bloodlord's defender and alcor's is exactly the same. Only weapon speed effects the TPS of the heroic strike ability. Differences in damage affect auto attack only because heroic strike damage increase is not multiplicative, the damage increase is additive.

 

I changed the weapon names to reduce confusion.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Armilus

[Shayss 43]

Armilus, this post is absolutely amazing.

 

Even for a non-tank vet like me, very insightful.

 

Good job and keep up the good work.

 

Edit: Infact it's so good i'm gona steal it and post it on my guild forum. I'll give you the shoutout ofc ^^

Edited December 15, 2016 by Shayss

[Armilus 6]

Armilus, this post is absolutely amazing.

 

Even for a non-tank vet like me, very insightful.

 

Good job and keep up the good work.

Edit: Infact it's so good i'm gona steal it and post it on my guild forum. I'll give you the shoutout ofc ^^

 

Thanks!

[Moomo 0]

Hello, I wanted to ask if it's absolutly crucial to be a tauren if I want to tank? How good is the racial extra hp? I know it's differ from other expansions? Also I don't have a guild yet, would it affect my application if I was a orc tank?

[Elviss 5]

It's not crucial but it helps.

 

Hello, I wanted to ask if it's absolutly crucial to be a tauren if I want to tank? How good is the racial extra hp? I know it's differ from other expansions? Also I don't have a guild yet, would it affect my application if I was a orc tank?

It's not crucial, but it helps.

 

Can't say about application, I'm on alliance, you orc scum

[Aquamaria 1]

The way that I see it is that no content in vanilla necessitates 5% extra health in order to be cleared. There'll be extremely few boss encounters that breaks you as a tank if you don't have the tauren racial. However most hardcore guilds I know follow the philosophy of maximising every potential stat in everyone of their raiders to be at the forefront of progression. You risk being shunned by these people if you don't follow the same philosophy.

I've been in those kinds of guilds in the past. And although it was really great playing with so many people who where so dedicated to the game, it did chop away at the experience of the journey a fair bit. It's really not all that much fun to have a new raid tier being released and clearing it in a matter of a few hours because you've maximised gear in the raid by mixing in a 50/50 ratio of mains and alts in the previous raid tier and doing the same raid twice a week in order to gear up twice as fast. You'll be ridicilously overgeared for when the next raid tier hits. Couple that with every extra buff imaginable and everything becomes very easy. This really reduces the experience of the journey in my opinion.

I guess I've been rambling on for a bit, but to answer your question; no you do not need to be a tauren in order to tank everything in vanilla. You might be shunned by the people who's got a tunnelvision when it comes to raiding and maximising stats, but in my opinion you're better off experiencing the vanilla raid content in a not so hardcore guild anyways.

Edited December 17, 2016 by Aquamaria

[Armilus 6]

The way that I see it is that no content in vanilla necessitates 5% extra health in order to be cleared. There'll be extremely few boss encounters that breaks you as a tank if you don't have the tauren racial. However most hardcore guilds I know follow the philosophy of maximising every potential stat in everyone of their raiders to be at the forefront of progression. You risk being shunned by these people if you don't follow the same philosophy.

I've been in those kinds of guilds in the past. And although it was really great playing with so many people who where so dedicated to the game, it did chop away at the experience of the journey a fair bit. It's really not all that much fun to have a new raid tier being released and clearing it in a matter of a few hours because you've maximised gear in the raid by mixing in a 50/50 ratio of mains and alts in the previous raid tier and doing the same raid twice a week in order to gear up twice as fast. You'll be ridicilously overgeared for when the next raid tier hits. Couple that with every extra buff imaginable and everything becomes very easy. This really reduces the experience of the journey in my opinion.

I guess I've been rambling on for a bit, but to answer your question; no you do not need to be a tauren in order to tank everything in vanilla. You might be shunned by the people who's got a tunnelvision when it comes to raiding and maximising stats, but in my opinion you're better off experiencing the vanilla raid content in a not so hardcore guild anyways.

 

You are right that 5% HP is rarely needed, however; with a free 5% HP you can change your gear a bit to have less stamina and more hit/crit/dodge/parry/armor/defense.

[Cletus 1]

This post is solid gold, thank you Armilus.

[hurricane24 0]

Really good post, Thank you.

[BogyOne 2]

On 12/10/2016 at 9:16 PM, Armilus said:

One big advantage of battle shout is that it generates rage on all mobs in combat. If you pull a pack with your bow then use battleshout, this will give you a small amount of threat on each mob. Compared to 0 threat on every mob but 1, this can make a HUGE difference. The entire pack is far more likely to at least get into melee range with you before anyone else pulls agro. Without this, anyone drinking to refill their mana or any heal over time ticks will pull agro off of you and you will be chasing mobs around for the rest of the pull.

Is this in black font on purpose?

 

Do you happen to have any links to the TankSpot web archives? This used to be damn good site but I read some time ago that it's been devastated beyond recovery by hacker.

[burnswhenpeeing 0]

Someone mentioned to me that fast weapons (daggers) with the new rage fix are pretty much useless now and slower weapons are better. Can someone confirm or deny this?

[aeruwynn 3]

hell yeah now i can be a good ok tank

[Undertanker 88]

5 hours ago, burnswhenpeeing said:

Someone mentioned to me that fast weapons (daggers) with the new rage fix are pretty much useless now and slower weapons are better. Can someone confirm or deny this?

Fast weapons were only previously used due to the ability to spam heroic strike, giving you so much aggro per second that your str/AP/+hit gear really no even in consideration for your average raid DPS.

Now heroic strike is only used at the expense of not using the shield block, and even then you do not generate enough rage per second to spam heroic strike with a 2.9 speed weapon.

Therefore the speed of the weapon does not matter.   What you look for in a weapon now is the overall DPS, weapon speed, base stats, if it has a proc or not / weapon skill (orc/human). *still have a 1.3 speed weapon for Val in BWL.

Ideally you'll want two different weapons for tanking:  A Mitigation weapon and a Threat per second weapon, depending on if your target is being killed first or if tanking a boss that requires a lot of threat gaining.

In a mitigation weapon you are looking for good base stats which you then enchant with +15 agility.

In a threat per second weapon you are looking for slow weapon speed > overall dps > has a proc or not / base stats which you then enchant with crusader.

The reason having a slow weapon is the first priority here is due to crusaders proc rate being based on the base-weapon speed of the item you put it on.  Example:

With a 2.9 speed weapon crusader's proc rate is around 5%.  In 1 minute you have 20 auto attacks, 40 possible global cooldown abilities to use allowing for 60 total attacks in 1 minute that crusader could proc off of.   This gives you 3 procs in that 60 seconds, if no procs overwrote each other, this gives you 45 seconds of the buff, or a 75% uptime.  Average AP increase of 150 Attack Power without buffs.

With a 1.3 sepeed weapon crusader's proc rate is around 2.16%.  In 1 minute you have 46 auto attacks, 40 possible global cooldown abilitiies to use allowing for 86 total attacks in 1 minute that crusader could proc off of.  This gives you 1.85 procs in that 60 seconds, if no procs overwrote each other, this gives you 27.75 seconds of the buff or a 46.25% uptime.  Average AP increase of 92.5 Attack Power without buffs.

In short, Crusader on a 1.3 speed vs 2.9 speed, you get 62.16% more Attack Power on the slower 2.9 speed.

 

This should answer all your questions about tank weapons.

Edited January 12, 2017 by Undertanker

[burnswhenpeeing 0]

15 hours ago, Undertanker said:

This should answer all your questions about tank weapons.

Pretty much yeah. Back in the day I use to see a lot of tanks using the BWL axes for tanking (Edge of Chaos/Dooms Edge), so that makes sense. Did I read somewhere that lifestealing was better for TPS than Crusader?

[Undertanker 88]

10 hours ago, burnswhenpeeing said:

Did I read somewhere that lifestealing was better for TPS than Crusader?

This WAS the case when you drank Shadow Power potion and Arcane exlixir and had Warlock Curse of Shadows on a boss, and Night Fall proc made it even stronger.   During the last weekly Wednesday morning PVP update / 40 Man instance reset, they put the 1.9 patch updates to +Spell Power on certain items, Such as Fire Proof Cloak, Force Reactive Disk, and Life Stealing all no longer scale with spell power.     Therefore Lifestealing is trash for a TPS standpoint.  Your 2 go to enchants are 15 agil on your def/mitigation weapon, crusader on your TPS weapon.

Edited January 13, 2017 by Undertanker

[Asherdoom 5]

appearently the AOE tanking is on existant for us lol

i tried tanking dungeon yesterday (to be precise gnomeregan and scarlet armory) but when it comes to AOE we are pretty much done. no aoe ability can keep aggro on mobs if a mage uses a blizzard or warlock rani of fire and i end up always running around taunting and spamming shout in hope that mobs will consider me agian lol

 

any suggestion?

[KonigsTiger 2]

This is really good guide for MT, but does anyone have a guide for dungeon tanking?

Also, when should we stance dance? is thunder clap worth using? considering that we will be using it in Battle stance, generating a low deal of aggro with it.

[Undertanker 88]

In raids, off tanks should thunderclap/demo shout on hard hitting bosses or if you are progressing.

[Asherdoom 5]

19 hours ago, KonigsTiger said:

This is really good guide for MT, but does anyone have a guide for dungeon tanking?

Also, when should we stance dance? is thunder clap worth using? considering that we will be using it in Battle stance, generating a low deal of aggro with it.

this i can answer you. Thunder clap i never used. only in low level dungeos to have some starting aoe aggro but nothing more.

Stance dancing is simple. For example if you know that a boss use fear, prior his fear usare change to berserker stance and use berserker rage then swap bac to defensive stance.

 

for dungeon tanking i never found one

[Undertanker 88]

I would use TC in specific pulls where I can charge in, and my auto happened to crit giving me way over 15 rage.  Then swap to berserk do a blood rage whirlwind, berserk rage, the def stance, proceed with normal rotation when it's a chargeable AoE pull, like BRD when I am speed running jailbreak or lava runs for people.

TC, if you have established threat you can work into your rotation to save healer mana.  Pool a bit of rage at around how ever many points you put into tactical mastery, wait for the mob to auto attack, then swap, clap, swap back before they hit you again.  

[Asherdoom 5]

2 hours ago, Undertanker said:

I would use TC in specific pulls where I can charge in, and my auto happened to crit giving me way over 15 rage.  Then swap to berserk do a blood rage whirlwind, berserk rage, the def stance, proceed with normal rotation when it's a chargeable AoE pull, like BRD when I am speed running jailbreak or lava runs for people.

TC, if you have established threat you can work into your rotation to save healer mana.  Pool a bit of rage at around how ever many points you put into tactical mastery, wait for the mob to auto attack, then swap, clap, swap back before they hit you again.  

i would not do so. in aoe situation if u fod that no matter what you use a mage or lock as soon as start blizzard/rof/multishot or volley willspread mobs away from you. Better charge>thunder>go def and spam demo shout hoping will hold.

[Undertanker 88]

Only been playing this class on 1.12.1 for 8 years, but I'm sure your "I would not do so" supersedes any legit advice.

[YcbshadowE 1]

Question

I see you stated that Sunder Armor provides 260 base threat, but then after applying the Defensive Stance and 5/5 Defiance modifiers, Sunder Armor provides 388 threat.

You then state that Revenge (Rank 5) provides 315 Threat. Is that before or after applying the Defensive Stance and 5/5 Defiance modifiers?