Tank like a girl

Here we are, in 3.2.2, the next big content patch is on the horizon, and I have wanted to talk about the changes that 3.2 brought to prot warriors for ages. I just never got around to writing it.

What’s changed? Devastate has, that’s what. Previously basically the support ability that let you stack 5 Sunders with a threat bonus, Devastate is now almost back to the role it had in TBC. It’s made a huge comeback in our rotations when its weapon damage was increased to 60% plus an additional bonus damage of 20% per stack of Sunder Armor. This makes Devastate one of the top 3 damage abilities of a protection warrior, and is usually only surpassed by Heroic Strike and Shield Slam for me.

Wartotem over in the ever knowledgeable realms of Tankspot has created a DPS/TPS spreadsheet that does the number crunching for us.

The results:

Devastate now tops Revenge easily when it comes to both threat and DPS. It’s even better when you have the 2pc T8 or 2pc T9 bonus. Or both. It’s also stronger than Concussion Blow and Shockwave, but those 2 produce more damage than Devastate.

What does this mean for our rotation?

Priority has shifted to:

> >  > >

On bosses, Shockwave and CB will continue to provide greater DPS despite not stunning the boss. Revenge has fallen to the bottom of the priority list, but is still the ability with the best rage to threat ratio and does more damage than Dev. This makes it very valuable in low rage situations, e.g. when running heroics. In unlimited rage scenarios filling any Shield Slam cooldown time with Devastate will be more successful as far as threat is concerned.

This also means that I would not recommend the Glyph of Revenge anymore, as Glyph of Devastate is a lot better. The faster you get your Sunder stack to 5, the more threat you can frontload. This is especially important in such threat-sensitive fights as Malygos, Hodir and Twin Val’kyr where your DPS will receive big damage buffs.

I highly recommend everyone who’s remotely interested in numbers to plug their stats and talents into the spreadsheet and then have it all laid out there. Good stuff.

It’s going live today, how exciting. All raiders are probably chomping at their bits to set foot into Ulduar. Casuals will flood the Argent Tournament. Dual-specs will turn out exciting for most everyone, I assume. 3.1 is the biggest patch to date, Blizzard says.

But what’s in it for protection warriors? Let’s have a closer look. I will be listing all the stuff that seems relevant to me as a prot warrior.

• Defensive Stance: Now reduces damage caused by the warrior by 5% (previously 10%). That’s a flat increase in DPS and threat for us, so that’s a pretty awesome change.
• Soloing fury warriors get a buff, as berserker stance makes you take 5% more damage instead of 10%. Everyone in battle stance gets 10% armor penetration now. As there are more changes to armor penetration, it really seems that Blizzard is trying to make this actually useful.
• Last Stand: Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This is pretty awesome again, because it means we can fully macro Last Stand+Enraged Regeneration now and really save our butts every 3 minutes. With the Glyph of Last Stand you can push that cooldown to 2 minutes, which will probably a huge lifesaver in progression fights in Ulduar.
• Warbringer: Now also allows Intervene and Intercept to be used in any stance. Can you see us zipping around non-stop? I can. That’s some insane mobility.
• Mobility is the name of the game for Arms warriors as well now: New Talent: Juggernaut: Grants the warrior the ability to Charge while in combat. Critical strike chance of next Slam or Mortal Strike increased by 100% following Charge.
• All flasks now last 1 hour. To compensate, all flask recipes will provide 2 flasks for the same material cost. This is actually great for me as casual raider. We raid for 3 hours per raid day, which means I am no longer wasting away an hour of flask time while fishing.
• Increased the health granted by the Flask of Stoneblood. I still think it’s a terrible flask compared to the TBC tank flask. An avoidance or threat stat along with the health wouldn’t have hurt.
• Added new recipes for epic gear, found rarely on Ulduar bosses. These recipes are unbound and can be traded. Those blacksmithing plans are pretty amazing, item level 226, and as they only drop in Ulduar 25, prices on the AH will be astronomical, once raiding guilds have handed them out to all guild blacksmiths.
• A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man ‘O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food. Less time spent eating means more time to do stuff, so I approve. It does prove that fishing and cooking always go together. *flexes her new fishing 450*
• New glyphs for tanks:
  • Glyph of Barbaric Insults: Increases threat on Mocking Blow by 100%.
  • Glyph of Enraged Regeneration: Your Enraged Regeneration ability heals for an additional 10% of your health over its duration.
  • Glyph of Last Stand: Now reduces the cooldown of Last Stand by 60 seconds. The penalty on maximum health gained has been removed.
  • Glyph of Shield Wall: Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.
  • Glyph of Shockwave: Reduces the cooldown on Shockwave by 3 seconds.
  • Glyph of Spell Reflection: Reduces the cooldown on Spell Reflection by 1 second.
  • Glyph of Vigilance: Your Vigilance ability transfers an additional 5% of your target’s threat to you.

  The best of the new glyphs all enhance our survival abilities and will certainly be worth a consideration for progression tanks.

• Damage Shield: Fixed a bug which caused this ability to benefit from Recklessness. Aw, dang.
• Improved Revenge: This talent will now increase the damage done by Revenge by the proper amount. I am hoping this means it will do more damage now, not that it did too much in the past. Anyone know?
• Last but not least, the two most amazing and useful changes ever: Loot from clams now stacks correctly! Changed the icon for Succulent Clam Meat so it doesn’t look quite as disgusting. Now 100% more succulent! Thank you Blizzard, clam lovers across the world bow to you. >.>

And now a quick look at my dual specs. I am a dedicated tank, and while DPS possibilities are huge for warriors now, I will be going with two different tank specs. My first spec is going to be my current Deep Wounds build. I love the TPS I can do with this build. As possible second spec I am contemplating this build. It goes down to Commanding Presence in the fury tree, for more health with CS. Also picks up Piercing Howl which should be a boost for add tanks. I’d also pick up Imp Demo Shout and Imp Spell Reflect, and go with the survival glyph, to be optimal for boss fights.

How about you? Now’s the perfect time to share warrior builds!

This is information for patch 3.1 and not completely accurate anymore.

It’s day 2 of the 31DBBB challenge, and today’s task is to write a list post. I am going all out here and think big, so I shall try to come up with 10 things all protection warriors should know, if you ask me. Most items are old hats and just recycle known concepts, but my goal is to deliver concise information in one list. Credit goes to the many posters at Tankspot, Veneretio, Durnic, and commenters over in this little blog.

1. Build threat based on priorities – Do not make the mistake of using a set rotation. For ideal TPS, choose your next ability based on its priority: Shield Slam > Revenge > Concussion Blow > Shockwave > Devastate. However, keep in mind you want 5 sunders on bosses. Confused? This flowchart hopefully makes more sense.
2. Use your selfheal – In tricky situations when your health dips low, use your selfheal. What heal? Enraged Regeneration. Before you use it, make sure that you also use all health increasing effects first: Commanding Shout, trinkets like Repelling Charge, Last Stand. The higher your max-health, the more health will be returned. If you need numbers, Last Stand and Enraged Regeneration will restore 39% of your health in 10 seconds. Hot!
3. Defense is our best avoidance stat – If you are building an avoidance set, don’t be shy with going well beyond 540.
4. Parry is our weakest avoidance stat – Don’t bother with gemming for it. Parry will come naturally with gear, but dodge and defense are superior.
5. Expertise is our strongest threat stat – If you are building a threat set, expertise will provide you with more threat than hit in most cases, plus it will add additional survivability once you have reached the parry cap.
6. Intervene for fun and profit – With the advent of Warbringer, there are many fun options for this overlooked ability.
7. Devastate is for support – The old role of Devastate was to be used as main ability of any protection warrior. Devastate spam was the preferred method of prot warrior DPS (if you can call it that). In WotLK Devastate threat is inferior to most of our abilities, plus it does subpar damage. Use it to provide a full sunder debuff for your physical DPS and once that is up only to get S&B procs.
8. Faster weapons are better for tanking than slow ones – Faster weapons allow for more Heroic Strikes, which in high-rage situations should be used every swing. More Heroic Strikes = more DPS you contribute + additional threat. Slower weapons have higher Devastate damage, but that is insignificant compared to our other stronger abilities (Concussion Blow, Shockwave, etc.)
9. The pull matters – Be smart about pulling. You don’t need to blindly charge into every group, even if you can. Use Heroic Throw to pull casters. Use of line of sight is still appropriate. Cluster your groups. Bring all ranged mobs into your melee range using your various abilities. Do not Shockwave until you have a cluster all nicely lined up. A good place to test basic clustering involving large pulls is dead-side Stratholme. Heroic Throw one Guardian, charge the other, Shield Bash, move towards the other. Clustered? Shockwave. Excellent for practice.
10. Do not leave the house without glyphs – Apply glyphs based on what content you run. Heroics are trash-heavy, so you would use other glyphs than a raider does. Inform yourself about what glyphs are relevant, e.g. here or here. In case of the latter post, make sure to read the comments for different perspectives, and a perfect proof that you should base your glyphs on the content you run, and not generalize. I learn from mistakes.
    
    Filed under : 31dbbb, glyphs, raiding, theorycraft | 19 Comments »

A couple months back, when Inscription was just a whisper in the wind, I did a post about warrior glyphs and my dream setup. Now that WotLK has been here for two months and we actually got to use those glyphs, I thought I’d revisit them. I’ll list all glyphs that could be remotely interesting to a prot warrior. Some of those glyphs are unchanged from my previous post, some are completely new.

Major glyphs:

• Glyph of Barbaric Insults: still useless to me.
• Glyph of Blocking: the glyph, IMHO. It rocks my socks. Who wouldn’t want big Shield Slams? Do not leave the house without it.
• Glyph of Cleaving: hot hot hot. They changed it from costing less range to affecting an extra target. Cleave on 3 targets is extremely nice in heroics. I recently switched to it, it’s great.
• Glyph of Devastate: actually, not bad at all. I don’t devastate a whole lot anymore at all, this could help to increase the DPS of your group by stacking more sunders. I can totally see its merit. I might ask an off-tank for my raids to have that glyph.
• Glyph of Heroic Strike: useful in low rage situations, which have become rare. Because of that, very low on my list of must-haves. Possibly useful for off-tanks with less rage than MTs.
• Glyph of Intervene: if you have to Intervene a whole lot, you’re doing it wrong.
• Glyph of Last Stand: if you have to pop Last Stand every 2 minutes, you’re doing it wrong.
• Glyph of Rapid Charge: probably awesome in PvP and for soloing, but I don’t have a lot of cooldown problems in groups.
• Glyph of Resonating Power: Reduces the rage cost of Thunderclap. See my comment about the HS glyph. Low rage situations are uncommon, so that’d be another wasted glyph slot for me.
• Glyph of Revenge: best glyph along with Glyph of Blocking. Get it now, get the macro, enjoy. Can’t imagine playing without it.
• Glyph of Sunder Armor: in the long run, Glyph of Cleaving adds more threat for me, but it’s still a good glyph. I just don’t use Devastate enough anymore to warrant its use.
• Glyph of Taunt: if you have to worry about Taunt resists, you’re doing it wrong.

Minor Glyphs:

• Glyph of Bloodrage: there are very few minor glyphs that do anything for us, so we might as well get no health hitting when popping Bloodrage.
• Glyph of Charge: increased range for Charge is <3, for me.
• Glyph of Mocking Blow: to get mileage out of it you have to use Mocking Blow a bit. I don’t. Do you?
• Glyph of Thunder Clap: increased range. Yes. Get this glyph.

The commentary in this list is very biased. What’s your set-up? I am rolling with Blocking, Revenge and Cleaving. Insert cleavage jokes now.

Bonus question: if you could create a glyph of your choice that we don’t have yet, what would it be?

Mine: Glyph of Heroic Throw. Minor Glyph. Reduces the cooldown of Heroic Throw to 10 seconds.

Do want.