[5.4] Protection Warrior

[Tighe]

We've had 3 HWF maces from immersius drop and it took 16 kills with rolls on each kill for me to get the boots (at least when they dropped they were HWF too)

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My raid is going to start 25H Malkorok on Monday. I've got a few questions. Is it possible for me to solo soak the blood rage or am I dreaming? I've recently started going a little more for DPS as my healers seem to be having no issues keeping me up but I hear that Malk is a very damage heavy fight and I might need to respec back into a more survival based build. I've stolen Gliff's idea about the IJ trinket and Thoks trinket and I'm starting to catch our DK on self heals which is funny.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/frostmourne/Atighe/advanced

I'm suffering from a lack of VP at the moment which is why all my gear is 2/4 instead of fully upgraded.

Any comments would be appreciated.

My plan at the moment is to keep as much of the DPS as possible but if i need to I can swap the enchants on my rings back to stam and reforge some of the crit back into dodge.

If there are any tips about how to tank this as a war I would love to hear them.

If we are able to down Malk we are moving onto Spoils after so any further advice about that would be appreciated.

I've had a look at the written guides on the forums by vengeance king but they aren't written by a warrior and they are for 10man. I'll look around more over the next day but this seems to be the place to get the really good insight into how to survive the fights as a warrior.

[Khorm]

There aren't any stats available to give you more survival against Blood Rage; except maybe crit to give you more rage as you won't have Riposte up unless you take a couple of stacks before the last slam, but even that won't last the whole BR.

Use Rook's trinket with Thoks, IJ won't help you here.

Wait for at least the first hit then use Barrier, don't use a vengeanceless Barrier.

You should only be getting 1 BR so glyph Shield Wall over Unending Rage to give yourself an extra 20%.

Have your externals set up before the fight. You can either use all your own CD's in 1 go and have all externals as 1 group or have your own and externals in group 1 and 2.

[Tighe]

Is there any advantage to it or are we better off doing this with two tanks in his bloodrage? This is still progression for our raid team and I don't really want to propose a strat that is going to put our raid in danger of wiping.

[suprep]

Your gear is fine, if you really want you can equip 4pc and use demo shout for infinite barrier spam. Just coordinate CDs and you should be good. Remember rook's too, makes it a joke.

[Deleted]

There's no point in having several people standing inside bloodrage, that's just additional targets that require healing. It's way easier to coordinate cooldowns/healing on a single person.

Last Stand is up for the whole phase, use shieldwall, demo banner and rook trinket right of the bat (you can also glyph SW, with 4/4 upgrades it's rather unlikely that you'll have to deal with two bloodrage phases like ever) and demo during the last 10 seconds. By that time you'll have enough vengeance so barrier will keep you alive. Some externals like sacrifice, vigilance etc are of course welcome. IIRC i always had at two externals up because i was a chicken during progression

On gear drops: i got everything from coining during 10m progression, not seeing a sole drop of item x over almost eight months is rather unlikely if you keep swapping the raid opener (might be myth, but works for us just fine). After swapping to 25m it became way easier to be honest, currently it's only about what hasn't dropped often enough in warforged and most people already completed their third and druids even their fourth heroic gear.

[Tighe]

Thanks for the advice guys. I'm going to make a Malk macro to drop all that at the start of blood rage. Now all I need to do is convince my RL that you don't have to be a bear or a pally to solo soak this thing. It really annoys me the way people insist that bears are the best tanks for everything and Pallys are the only ones that can cheese stuff when I see my shield barrier proc for 450 - 600K when I'm not even cheesing fights to get extra vengeance. When you solo soak it do you have to ensure that you don't have any stacks of fatal strike? If that's the case do you still switch on 12 stacks and is the tank that start the fight the one that soaks the blood rage or does the second one soak it? I don't want to mess this up and confirm (erroneously) that Wars are not as good as the other tanks because of some mechanic mistake that can be avoided.

One other question and it's a little unrelated to the topic above; can a DK swap between presences during a fight like we switch stances or is the change like the change of spec? My cotank and I have a good system where we do one week on (basically as MT) and the next week off (OT) and on my week off I sit in battle stance when i'm not on the boss (for trash on galakras and Garrosh trash) and I Bladestorm and thunderclap a couple of seconds later so that I don't strip mobs off of him. Our RL has been complaining that our DPS drops too much and we have to try to share the vengeance to keep our DPS a little higher. If he could go all out in frost presence he would maintain better DPS as he wouldn't be holding back.

[Deleted]

If you soak, you have to pull. About the second thing, I start to forget details, but I'm kinda sure that switching presences amd stances makes you drop your vengeance, leading to terrible dps. Don't do it.

[Khorm]

One other question and it's a little unrelated to the topic above; can a DK swap between presences during a fight like we switch stances or is the change like the change of spec? My cotank and I have a good system where we do one week on (basically as MT) and the next week off (OT) and on my week off I sit in battle stance when i'm not on the boss (for trash on galakras and Garrosh trash) and I Bladestorm and thunderclap a couple of seconds later so that I don't strip mobs off of him. Our RL has been complaining that our DPS drops too much and we have to try to share the vengeance to keep our DPS a little higher. If he could go all out in frost presence he would maintain better DPS as he wouldn't be holding back.

Just go AFK if you want to do that.

[Deleted]

Uhm just have one of your tanks respecc for trash to dps, a tank without vengeance sucks (and you won't have ANY vengeance either in frostpresence or battlestance, the buff is just stripped off). We just did that every other week so nobody falls asleep, being the offtank for trash is just worthless as Khorm pointed out.

Monks are far superior for soaking bloodrage due to how their active mitigation and cooldown works (imagine you'd have dispersion at your disposal!!!), but thanks to enough externals everyone can do it. If you have another tank(ing class) that feels more comfortable with the job just let him do it, no shame in that.

[Deleted]

What addon is best to show your SBarrier absorb amounts? Can you use tellmewhen to show it?

[Warriorsarri]

I personally use Weak Auras to track it.

http://pastebin.com/K4PAM5FE if you want it.

[trident00]

+1 for WeakAuras. I assume you could use TellMeWhen as well, but I'm not versed with it. I use the bar that is part of Clampy's WeakAura setup: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ion-Aura-Group!

[Tighe]

Just as a clarification, is it possible to solo soak Heroic Malk on 25 man? The ability is supposed to hit for over 6 million damage. I'd have to mitigate over 85% of the damage to be able to stay alive. I didn't clearly state that i'm in a 25 man raid when I said this in the first place. If it's still possible then that's cool. I can see how one's vengeance goes off the chart if you are getting hit for 6 million damage.

@trident00 - I use Slootbag's WA string It's really really good. It may have been taken from somewhere originally but I really like the look and feel of it. I can't link in chat yet but slootbag.com has a lot of useful WA strings for a tank.

[Khorm]

Just as a clarification, is it possible to solo soak Heroic Malk on 25 man? The ability is supposed to hit for over 6 million damage. I'd have to mitigate over 85% of the damage to be able to stay alive. I didn't clearly state that i'm in a 25 man raid when I said this in the first place. If it's still possible then that's cool. I can see how one's vengeance goes off the chart if you are getting hit for 6 million damage.

@trident00 - I use Slootbag's WA string It's really really good. It may have been taken from somewhere originally but I really like the look and feel of it. I can't link in chat yet but slootbag.com has a lot of useful WA strings for a tank.

Yes I soak it when I'm on my Warrior. Your armour reduces it then the DR from Defensive stance reduces it.

[Tighe]

Ok thanks I just wanted to check to ensure it was possible.

[Octa]

Yes I soak it when I'm on my Warrior. Your armour reduces it then the DR from Defensive stance reduces it.

99% sure it's not reduced by armor.

[Khorm]

99% sure it's not reduced by armor.

It's physical damage so it's reduced.

[Octa]

It's physical damage so it's reduced.

I realize it's physical damage. Armor does not reduce all physical damage, despite the tooltip when you hover over your armor.

Actually come to think of it, I'm 100% sure it's not reduced by armor. I'll have to find some sources to back that up but I'll give you some quick "proof".

If you were able to reduce blood rage by armor then tanks would be reducing it by like 65% just through armor, and you'd only need another ~20% to solo it (in 25 man, less than that in 10) and just the passive 25% DR from defensive stance would cover it; no cooldowns would be needed.

[Methyl]

Blood Rage on 25-heroic is 6,682,500 damage every second (5/100 rage) for 20 seconds. The only reason druids are strong contenders for solo soaking is they're able to reduce so much via their base armor. Even with 60-70% (about as much as you can get with diminishing returns) reduction via externals you'd be killed on the second melee swing before being topped off If armor didn't reduce the initial hit.

Your math may be a little off, but given how diminishing returns work it would be practically impossible to solo soak without armor unless you were a monk using rooks/zen med/dampen harm and a heap of externals.

[Octa]

Blood Rage on 25-heroic is 6,682,500 damage every second (5/100 rage) for 20 seconds. The only reason druids are strong contenders for solo soaking is they're able to reduce so much via their base armor. Even with 60-70% (about as much as you can get with diminishing returns) reduction via externals you'd be killed on the second melee swing before being topped off If armor didn't reduce the initial hit.

Your math may be a little off, but given how diminishing returns work it would be practically impossible to solo soak without armor unless you were a monk using rooks/zen med/dampen harm and a heap of externals.

If your armor did reduce the swing then you could literally do it with 0 externals and not even needing any vengeance barriers or shieldwall (just Shout and Last stand and you're set? I don't think so). Blood rage is not reduced by armor. Also druids are not strong contenders to do it, they are the worst tank to do it and by a pretty decent margin.