[Guide] What You Need To Know: Protection Warriors

[Amedis]

What You Need To Know: Protection Warriors

This guide was written by me - Amedis, 70 Warrior of Tichondrius, with a little help from WoWWiki, Elitest Jerks, and some other guides written by knowledgable WoW'ers

Table of Contents

I. Introduction
II. Introduction to a Protection Warrior
III. Races
IV. Basic Stats

V. ‘Rating’ Stats

A) Dodge Rating
B) Parry Rating
C) Block Rating
D) Block Value

VI. Defensive Stance & Defence

A) Stance
B) Defence

VII. Damaging NPCs

A) Hit Rating
B) Expertise
C) Boss Avoidance

VIII. Threat

A) Threat/Abilities
B) Taunt

IX. Skills & Rotations
X. Talents
XI. Gems

XII. Consumables
A) Potions
B) Flasks vs. Elixirs
C) Food
D) Scrolls
E) Other

XIII. Class Buffs
XIV. Class Auras & Totems
XV. Thanks



I. Introduction

This guide is a collection of knowledge that I have acquired over my Warcraft career as a Protection Warrior. I have written this guide from the view of a Main Tank, because this is what I have spent my time doing.

While this guide is written by me, and therefore may be slightly biased with my own opinions, I will try to give only fact, unless stated otherwise. I also want to apologize, for I have not included a Horde section for the race. Every other section however is beneficial to both factions.

As said above, this guide is written by me, with a little help from both WoWWiki, the endless pool of knowledge, and Elitist Jerks, the kings of theorycraft.

II. Introduction to a Protection Warrior

The Protection Warrior is arguably the most important person in the raid. It is easy to say that without healers, no one would live long enough to kill anyone, or without DPS classes, you would never kill anything, while this is true, the Protection Warrior is the only person in the raid group who’s living or dying immediately determines the outcome of that particular fight. If your Main Tank dies, it is almost always guaranteed to be a wipe.

Being a Protection Warrior also means you need to know your class extremely well. While others will argue that Healing and DPS takes work too, how hard is it to spam lightning bolt, fireball, or backstab or to spam flash of light, or stack HoT’s on the Main Tank? Having fulfilled all three roles in raid, I can safely say tanking takes the most practice.

III. Races

As a Warrior, your options for races’ only limit, is the races blizzard has provided us with. Every class, now with the exception of Blood Elves, can be a Warrior. Now, as said before, this was written by an Alliance player, and hence, only has Alliance stats.


Race Strength Agility Stamina Intellect Spirit Armour

Human 23 20 22 20 19 47
Dwarf 25 16 25 19 19 34
Gnome 18 23 21 24 20 53
Night Elf 20 25 21 20 20 53
Draenei 24 17 21 21 22 36

While the base stats are almost identical, I think it’s a good idea to take a look at everything, before making your choice. After all, you’re going to be playing this character for awhile.

Based on base stats alone, your best choice for a warrior would either be a Human, or a Dwarf, based on the most important stats for a Protection Warrior; Stamina, Strength, and Armour.

Another thing you might want to know before choosing a race is the racial abilities.

Humans:
Perception - Activate to dramatically increase stealth detection
The Human Spirit - Increase Spirit by 10%
Diplomacy - Gives 10% bonus to faction point gain
Weapon Specialization: Expertise increased by 5 when using a Sword or Mace.

Dwarves:
Cold resistance: All Dwarves get +10 Cold Resistances.
Stone form: While active, grants immunity to Bleed, Poison, and Disease effects. In addition, Armour increases by 10%
Gun Specialization: Your chance to critically hit with Guns is increased by 1%
Find Treasure: Activate to find treasure on mini map.

Gnomes:
Escape Artist: Activate to break out of a Root or Snare effect
Arcane resistance: All Gnomes get +10 Arcane Resistance.
Engineering Specialization: 15 skill bonus to engineering
Expansive Mind: Increase Intelligence by 5%

Night Elves:
Shadowmeld: Allows the warrior to become invisible, as long as he is out of combat.
Quickness: Dodge chance increased by 1%
Wisp Spirit: Allows the player to move 25% faster then a normal ghost.
Nature resistance: All Night Elves get +10 Nature Resistance


IV. Basic Stats

Strength [Str]: An increase of 1 strength point will add 2 to attack power. Every 14 attack power increases melee damage per second by 1. This yields a relationship of 1 str for a change of 1/7 melee dps. (1 str = 0.14 dps) 20 Strength also gives 1 Block Value.

Stamina [Stam]: An increase of 1 stamina point from equipment will raise hit points by 10. A Warrior with 5/5 Vitality will gain 10.5 from 1 stamina.

Agility [Agi]: 1 agility is 2 points of armor. 33 Agility gives, 1.0% crit, and 30 agility gives 1.0% dodge

Intellect [Int]: Intellect gives no bonus for a warrior.

Spirit [Spirit]: Spirit increased health generation out of combat. Also useless for a warrior.

Armour: Armour is your defence against physical attacks. The more armour you have, the more damage you will be able to take.



Raid Boss: Armor = (467.5 * Enemy Level - 22167.5 ) / ( 100 / %Reduction - 1)

Damage reduction
Enemy lvl _50% ____60% ____70%_____75%
60 ______5883 ____8824 ___13726 __17648
63 ______7285 ____10928 __16999___21855
70 ______10558___15837___24635___31673
73______11960 ___17940___27907___35880

Armour required to get 50, 60, 70, and 75% mitigation.

V. ‘Rating’ Stats

A) Dodge Rating

18.92 Dodge Rating gives 1% to Dodge.

The forluma for dodge is:

Dodge% = Base dodge + (AGI / AGIodge ratio) + (Dodge Rating / DRodge ratio) + Talent and Race contributions + ((Defense skill - Attacker's attack skill) * 0.04)

Which, simply put, takes into account your base dodge, plus dodge gained from agility, racial (NE only) defence skill, and attackers skill.

B) Parry Rating

22.4 Parry Rating gives 1% to Parry.

Parry% = 5% base chance + contribution from Parry Rating + contribution from talents + ((Defense skill - attacker's weapon skill) * 0.04)

Parry is much simpler then dodge, as you can not gain parry via stats. Parry only comes from items with Parry Rating, Defense, or Talents. The downside of parry, though it negates all damage taken, when you parry, the timer left before your next attack is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed. This is a bad thing for tanks, because it could result in 2 very fast attacks. (Attack, Parry, Attack) within a second or two.

C) Block Rating

7.88 Block Rating gives 1% to Block.

Block% = 5% base chance + contribution from Block Rating + contribution from talents + ((Defense skill - attacker's weapon skill) * 0.04)

Block, like armor, is another physical damage mitigator. Warriors have an advantage when it comes to block because of their ability Shield Block, which grants an additional 75% Block for 2 attacks, or 6 seconds. The amount blocked is determined by another stat, which leads us to..


D) Block Value

+1 Block Value gives 1 damage absorbed by your shield upon blocking an attack. +1 Block value also gives +1 damage with Shield Slam.

When an attack is blocked, the amount blocked is determined by the formula:

X = [(Shield [[block value]]) + ((Strength / 20) - 1)]

For warriors with Shield Specialization, the formula becomes

X = [(Shield block value * 1.3) + ((Strength / 20) - 1)].

Note: When it comes to block, the amount blocked is taken after other physical mitigators (IE Armor)

VI. Defensive Stance & Defence

As a Protection Warrior, you will spent the majority of your time in Defensive Stance. In Defensive Stance, you take 10% less damage, and generate an additional 30% threat. Most Protection Warriors will have Improved Defensive Stance, which gives the only spell damage reduction (6%) aside from resistance gear.

Defence: 2.4 Defence Rating gives 1 Defence. 1 Defence gives 0.4% chance to Block, Dodge, and Parry, as well as 0.4% chance to be missed, and crit. 490 Defence is needed at level 70 to not be crit by a level 73 mob (AKA a Boss)

A universal goal of all tanks is to be uncritable, and uncrushable. A handy script to have:

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Need 102.4 combined avoidance. Currently at:",0.8,0.8,1)
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(GetDodgeChance()+GetBlockChance()+GetParryChance() +5+(GetCombatRating(CR_DEFENSE_SKILL)*150/355 + 20)*0.04,1,0.5,0)

Remember to cast Shield Block before hitting this macro.

VII. Damaging NPC’s

A) Hit Rating

15.8 Hit Rating is 1% hit.

To become ‘hit capped’ you need 9% hit. At 9% hit, you will not miss with your main hand. This also counts towards shield based attacked such as Shield Slam, and Shield Bash.

B) Weapon Expertise

Expertise is a new stat as of 2.3. The idea of expertise is to reduce the chance that your attacks will be dodged or parried. Unlike Hit, it reduces the mobs chance, rather then increasing yours.

Each point of Expertise will reduce the target's chance to dodge and parry your attacks by 0.25%

A tanking warrior gets the most benefit from Expertise, as they attack from the front. So each point of Expertise effectively increases your chance to hit by 0.5%

Assuming 6.5% dodge and 15% parry, a player would need 26 expertise (about 102 expertise rating - 101.92 exactly) to negate a boss' dodge chance, and 60 expertise (roughly 236 expertise rating) to prevent parries.

C) Boss Avoidance

I don’t know a lot about this, but the table of a Boss is as follows:

Miss: 9.0%
Dodge: 5.6%
Parry: 14.0%
Glancing Blow: 25%

VIII. Threat

Threat is a measure of an NPC's aggression towards a player. Each NPC has a threat table, and the character at the top of the list is usually the target of its aggression. In-game, this is known as having Aggro from that particular NPC. The NPC will attack that character if possible, unless another character manages to change the NPC's target.

To aggro a target, melee classes must have 110% of the tanks threat, while ranged must have 130%, this gives you a small buffer zone in which once you over take your tanks aggro, to vanish, invis, FD, or whatever else.

A) Threat/Abilities

Battle Shout +69 (rank - divided amongst targets
Cleave +130 (rank 6) - divided amongst targets
Commanding Shout +68 - divided amongst targets
Demoralizing Shout +56 (rank 7) - divided amongst targets
Devastate +106 + [14 * Sunder Count]
Also applies Sunder Armor threat when increasing the debuff stack
Disarm +104
Hamstring +181 (rank 4)
Heroic Strike +196 (rank 10)
Revenge +201 (rank
Improved Revenge (Stun) +25
Shield Bash +230 (rank 4)
Improved Shield Bash +??
Shield Slam +307 (rank 6)
Sunder Armor +301 (rank 6)
Taunt Sets threat equal to NPC's primary target (Section VII e.)
Thunder Clap Base threat is 1.75x damage done

B) Taunt

Taunt is an interesting mechanic. Taunt causes the effected mob to attack you for 3 seconds. If you lose aggro during this time, the mob will not switch targets. Taunt also brings you to the top of the threat table. You basically inherit the threat of whoever was at the top before you taunted.

IX. Skills & Rotations

This section is taken from Elitist Jerks, simply because they said it best.

Here is how these abilities break down in terms of threat per second:
Shield slam > Revenge > Heroic Strike > Devastate

In terms of threat per rage:
Revenge > Shield slam > Devastate > Heroic Strike

In all situations, if you have the rage to use revenge or shield slam before devastate, then you should.

The reason you simply cannot spam shield slam and revenge is that each have cooldowns.
Revenge has a 5 second cooldown.
Shield slam has a 6 second cooldown.
Devastate has a 1.5 second global cooldown.

Warriors have a 1.5 second global cooldown on their yellow-attack abilities (ignoring next-attack abilities such as heroic strike).

Therefore, in unlimited rage situations, you can only hit shield slam 1 out of every 6 seconds. Ideally you would want to hit it every 1.5 seconds for 4 shield slams every 6 seconds, but the cooldown prevents this from happening.

The goal therefore is to come up with rotations that last roughly 6 seconds in length. The problem is that in addition to the global cooldown, players have a latency that adds to their rotation. For instance, if you have a 250 ms latency, and you use 4 abilities, your rotation will be extended by 250ms * 4 or 1.0 seconds.

The 3 ability rotation:

Players with higher latency may want to consider using a 3 ability rotation:
Shield slam -> Revenge -> Devastate -> repeat

The total time for this rotation is .
Solving for latency here gives 500 ms. If you latency is over 500 ms, you will improve your TPS by shifting to the above 3 cycle rotation.

The 4 ability rotation:

Players with normal latency should use the 4 ability rotation under ideal circumstances:
Shield slam -> Revenge -> Devastate -> Devastate -> repeat

The total time for this rotation is .
If you have a 100 ms ping, this rotation will take you 6.4 seconds. There is some time lost, but it is better than 1.2 seconds of completely wasted time using a 3 cycle rotation for the same latency. Your latency is fixed, and rotations will not make that go away unless you go over 6 seconds early.

Also, because this is unlimited rage, you should be spamming heroic strike so that it is used on every single swing. In fact if you press heroic strike fast enough, you can even heroic strike on your windfury procs! This is not a joke: if you are a tanking warrior, sit in an ergonomic position so that you do not develop carpel tunnel syndrome due to button spamming.

X. Talents

Mitigation Spec: Thanks to Elitist Jerks

Arms (8 points)
5/5 Deflection
3/3 Improved Thunder Clap

Fury (10 points)
5/5 Cruelty
5/5 Improved Demoralizing Shout

Protection (43 points)
5/5 Anticipation
5/5 Shield Specialization
5/5 Toughness
1/1 Last Stand
1/1 Improved Shield Block
3/3 Defiance
3/3 Improved Sunder Armor
2/2 Improved Taunt
1/2 Improved Shield Wall
1/1 Concussion Blow
3/3 Shield Mastery
3/3 Improved Defensive Stance
1/1 Shield Slam
3/3 Focused Rage
5/5 Vitality
1/1 Devastate

A common spec among Protection Warriors:

Arms (9 points)
1/3 Improved Heroic Strike
5/5 Deflection
3/3 Improved Thunder Clap

Fury (5 points)
5/5 Cruelty

Protection (47 points)
5/5 Anticipation
5/5 Shield Specialization
5/5 Toughness
1/1 Last Stand
1/1 Improved Shield Block
3/3 Defiance
3/3 Improved Sunder Armor
2/2 Improved Shield Wall
1/1 Concussion Blow
3/3 Shield Mastery
5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization
3/3 Improved Defensive Stance
1/1 Shield Slam
3/3 Focused Rage
5/5 Vitality
1/1 Devastate

And lastly, my personal spec:

Arms (12 points)
3/3 Improved Heroic Strike
5/5 Deflection
3/3 Improved Thunder Clap
1/1 Anger Management

Fury (0 points)
None

Protection (49 points)
5/5 Anticipation
5/5 Shield Specialization
5/5 Toughness
1/1 Last Stand
1/1 Improved Shield Block
3/3 Defiance
3/3 Improved Sunder Armor
2/2 Improved Taunt
2/2 Improved Shield Wall
1/1 Concussion Blow
3/3 Shield Mastery
5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization
3/3 Improved Defensive Stance
1/1 Shield Slam
3/3 Focused Rage
5/5 Vitality
1/1 Devastate


XI. Gems

Meta: Eternal Earthstorm Diamond +12 defence rating, 10% block value
Meta: Powerful Earthstorm Diamond +18 sta, +5% chance to resist stuns

Blue: HP

Solid Empyrean Sapphire +15 Stamina

Red: Avoidance

Subtle Crimson Spinal +10 Dodge Rating
Flashing Crimson Spinal +10 Parry Rating

Yellow: Nothing really worth it

Enduing Seaspray Emerald +5 Defence Rating +7 Stamina


XII. Consumables

A) Potions

You really only have two options. Super Healing Potions, which heal you for 1500 to 2500 HP, or Ironshield Potions, which increases your armour by 2500 for 2 minutes. I would personally recommend the Ironshield Potions. The increase in physical mitigation is much more beneficial then a potion which likely wont save you anyways.

B) Flasks vs. Elixirs

Again, there is really only two options. Flask of Fortification, which increases your health by 500, and defence rating by 10, or Elixier of Elixir of Major Fortitude, which increases your health by 250, and Elixir of Mastery, which increases all stats by 15. It is a matter of preference between 500hp and 10 defence rating, and 400 HP and 15 Agi/Str basically. When progression, I would opt for the Flask, simply because it persists through death.

C) Food

Your only real option is Spicy Crawdad which increases your Stamina by 30.

D) Scrolls

Figured I would put this in for completness. Scroll of Strength V increases your strength by 20 for 30 minutes. Adds a little bit of block. Scroll of Agility V increases your agility by 20 for 30 minutes. Adds a little dodge.

E) Other

The only other thing I find useful is Nightmare Seeds which are like a mini Last Stand. These seeds increase your HP by 2000 for 30 seconds.

XIII. Class Buffs
Thanks to Elitist Jerks

Commanding Shout (Improved) - +1080 HP (+1350 HP)
Blessing of Might (Improved) – 220 AP (264 AP)
Blessing of Kings – 10% to all stats
Blessing of Sanctuary -
Mark of the Wild (Improved) – 19, Sta, 19 Str, 19 Agi, resists
Prayer of Fortitude (Improved) – +77 STA (+102.7 STA)

XIV. Class Auras & Totems
Thanks to Elitist Jerks

Windfury totem – 2% chance of granting the attacker 1 extra attack with 445 extra attack power.
Grace of Air totem (Enhancing Totem) – 77 AGI (89 AGI)
Strength of Earth totem (Enhancing Totem) – 86 STR (100 STR)
Leader of the Pack (Improved) - +5% critical strike (+4% heal on crit, aggro!)
Faerie Fire (Improved) – 610 armor penetration (3% to hit)
Trueshot Aura – 125 AP
Improved Hunter’s Mark – Up to 110 AP
Ferocious Inspiration – Up to a 3% increase in damage
Improved Sanctity Aura – 2% damage increase
Improved Seal of the Crusader – 3% critical strike
Devotion Aura (Improved) – 861 armour (1205 armour)
Blood pact (Improved) – 66 STA (91 STA)

XV. Thanks

MMOwned
Elitist Jerks
Wowiki
Blizzard

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helped some of you. Afterall, tanks are key, and there isnt enough good ones.

[Krazzee]

You are a sexy beast. +rep.

[EliMob441]

my eyes are bleeding from reading this info, rep for sure

[xkillerb]

Great guide, anyone looking to tank should read this. + rep to you...

[Amedis]

Thanks alot guys. There is still a few things missing, and a few things I need to look into more. Ill either add them later, or repost in a few weeks once their added.

[bmewhy]

llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

[benternet]

great guide man, it definitely covers all the basics.
I guess this would be a good place to post some of my favorite resources.

elitistjerks[dotcom]/f31/t18771-protection_warrior_guide/

it's really the "holy bible" as far as I know for tanking. It brings up the math and what-not that I struggle to wrap my head around, but breaks it down "barney style" too. If you're really interested in the in depth ins and outs of the class/spec it's a great resource. Also, I guess this would be a good place to post

[dubyadubyadubya].tankingtips[dotcom]/tanking-formulas

It will convert agility into armor/crit/dodge how much parry/dodge reduction you get from expertise and a handful of others.


>bah, I'm a long time listener, first time caller so I couldn't turn the urls into links<

[frutmestoofvlees]

Nice guide . +rep

[Odd]

Man ty!!!
+rep

[Amedis]

Updated: Expertise & Hit info.

And Thanks to you all.

[Come Undone]

Very nice, let's hope the "not enough tanks" learn something from this excellent post.
Perhaps it's the dedication that seperates them. But if it's knowledge you fill them.

[Amedis]

Updated armor info