[6.0 Guide] Protection - "We still have heroic strike, don't be jealous"

[Jjmackey]

Any tips for mythic brackenspore/tectus? Gonna tank them in a few days, and i'm kinda nervous about the tank dmg. My ilvl is only 663, due to a couple of low ilvl pieces (630 shield still, and 2 640 crafteds).

So talent choices, cooldown usage help etc would be greatly appreciated.

I'm a big fan of Ravager for both fights (all fights really) for the level 100 talent. If you're going for survival, I'm a fan of HR for the level 45 talent (the other two are good for damage, but taking a global for Execute can hurt defensively (minor though) - similar concept for US and keeping your stacks from falling, as you need to use Devastate often and you may need to prioritize it over a Revenge proc, which is a direct survivability loss)

The big add on Brackenspore hits for a ton when it has 5+ stacks, and Ravager can act as a good way to help out with his damage. If at all possible, pool rage for Necrotic Breath so that you can use a Shield Barrier or two to help absorb the damage when you can't be healed (if you have Paladins in the raid, make one of them spec Purity and use it every time a tank gets Necrotic Breath). If you've got the Fungal Flesh Eater during Infesting Spores you'll likely need to use a CD and/or call for an external (especially at your gear level).

As far as Tectus goes, I tank Tectus and then pick up his Shards when he splits into two; the damage isn't too bad, you might need to Shield Wall when you've got both Shards and the Tectus-respawn on you. Other than that, it's all about just making sure you position the boss properly and stay out of Crystalline Barrage and Fractures, but that's more about general fight tactics and not specifically ProtWar. I run Dragon Roar because I could use it for a big hit on progression the first couple weeks of Highmaul so that I had a good ability to use on Tectus and his Shards to get them down in time for the upheavals, but I know a lot of people go with Bladestorm at this point for big AoE in the last phase. Once you guys get to the last phase, just make sure you call externals. Oh, and it's generally easier for healers to bomb heals on one tank who picks up all of the Motes (same with Shards), so maybe coordinate that with your cotank(s). Communicate with your healers on this one, as your dedicated healer may get Crystalline Barrage and run away, so you'll need to know when to use a CD to get yourself through to when they come back.

Hope that helps a bit!

[Deleted]

Looking at trinkets atm, dps ones in particular. Trying to figure out what I want to use for whoring dps on farm and I saw eddy's simcraft result a couple pages back, is that list still functional? So that trinks rank EAE>TBH>BoIS? And does anything change in case we do a AE fight vs ST? Talents and playstyle aside here, this is a pure gear question. I'm currently using EAE HC and Pol's M but I wanna squeeze more dips.

[EricN]

Looking at trinkets atm, dps ones in particular. Trying to figure out what I want to use for whoring dps on farm and I saw eddy's simcraft result a couple pages back, is that list still functional? So that trinks rank EAE>TBH>BoIS? And does anything change in case we do a AE fight vs ST? Talents and playstyle aside here, this is a pure gear question. I'm currently using EAE HC and Pol's M but I wanna squeeze more dips.

Overall, i'm using EAE and TBH. the rank listings seem to be on par. Seeing as the only difference in cleave play and st play is spamming heroic strike and the occasional TC. I can't think of a reason the rankings would change in almost any situation that deals with at most 3 targets.

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Any tips for mythic brackenspore/tectus? Gonna tank them in a few days, and i'm kinda nervous about the tank dmg. My ilvl is only 663, due to a couple of low ilvl pieces (630 shield still, and 2 640 crafteds).

So talent choices, cooldown usage help etc would be greatly appreciated.

JJ pretty much summed it up. One piece of advice i could give you is that the big and small adds ARE stunnable. This means if you are tanking the add, and tectus splits into two, and you are looking to face them towards the range or melee, you can shockwave, and it will continue on with it's "rotation" as if it casted it. Buys you several more seconds to position to not flechette the group, as well as charge the group. JJ's recommendation for DR is the highest DPS, but shockwave has surprising uses during this fight. Coordinate with your tank where your add is going when he splits, as you dont want to flechette the group. Finally, make sure to have the hunters MD the add to you, as well as have your DK grip. The add can spawn in the wall, so have some ranged call it out as you sometimes cant find the nameplate.

[Toroq]

I run with Shockwave on M Tectus purely to stun the adds, most notably to stun the Berserker when it starts casting its charge. If you have other people who can pay attention to their casts and got good stuns, Dragon Roar is better for DPS purposes as mentioned.

For Bracken, it's worth mentioning that he keeps meleeing during Breath. Having SB up for it and enough rage for a big (relatively speaking) Sbar makes you a lot more survivable. As JJMackey mentioned, if you're tanking the add with a few stacks during Infesting Spores, the damage from rot + melee hits + spores can easily kill you, so make sure you have some CD up for that.


On a different topic, what do people think of weapon enchants? As far as I've seen most people are still running Blackrock, with a few people such as Eddy and Sejta running Thunderlord and Bleeding Hollow, respectively. I'd imagine Thunderlord is the strongest for DPS purposes and Blackrock for survivability, but which would people say is generally the best to use?
Bleeding Hollow doesn't feel that great even if you want more mastery, since if it procs while you're not tanking, the defensive benefit is worth nil and it provides lower DPS than Thunderlord. Blackrock on the other hand often prevents 'wasted' defensive benefit due to its health restriction.

[EricN]

I run with Shockwave on M Tectus purely to stun the adds, most notably to stun the Berserker when it starts casting its charge. If you have other people who can pay attention to their casts and got good stuns, Dragon Roar is better for DPS purposes as mentioned.

For Bracken, it's worth mentioning that he keeps meleeing during Breath. Having SB up for it and enough rage for a big (relatively speaking) Sbar makes you a lot more survivable. As JJMackey mentioned, if you're tanking the add with a few stacks during Infesting Spores, the damage from rot + melee hits + spores can easily kill you, so make sure you have some CD up for that.


On a different topic, what do people think of weapon enchants? As far as I've seen most people are still running Blackrock, with a few people such as Eddy and Sejta running Thunderlord and Bleeding Hollow, respectively. I'd imagine Thunderlord is the strongest for DPS purposes and Blackrock for survivability, but which would people say is generally the best to use?
Bleeding Hollow doesn't feel that great even if you want more mastery, since if it procs while you're not tanking, the defensive benefit is worth nil and it provides lower DPS than Thunderlord. Blackrock on the other hand often prevents 'wasted' defensive benefit due to its health restriction.

Excellent insight regarding the mastery enchant. Changed my mind about it. Generally, i would say go Thunderlord - I don't spike THAT much. Thunderlord seems to be the more consistent enchant.

[Deleted]

I would not recommend the Blackrock enchant. It procs only when you are under 60%(?) and has an inner cooldown of 40sec, so you can have an uptime of like 33% if you are always under 60% life. Mark of Bleeding Hollow and Thunderlord have an uptime of like 40-50% regardless your HP. Overall it is an plus of like 230 Mastery or crit for the whole fight. So whatever you value more, take thunderlord or bleeding hollow. Blackrock is the cheap alternativ for tanks.

[EricN]

I would not recommend the Blackrock enchant. It procs only when you are under 60%(?) and has an inner cooldown of 40sec, so you can have an uptime of like 33% if you are always under 60% life. Mark of Bleeding Hollow and Thunderlord have an uptime of like 40-50% regardless your HP. Overall it is an plus of like 230 Mastery or crit for the whole fight. So whatever you value more, take thunderlord or bleeding hollow. Blackrock is the cheap alternativ for tanks.

you COULD make an argument that Blackrock has a higher chance of proccing at a certain time where you would want it to proc. I know during our pulls on Imperator, that those procs DO come in handy, especially for consistent damage input from small adds, means that my health decline is gradual, and the rate decreases around the time I should be worried about.

[Deleted]

Hmm, that is quite a good argument for blackrock. Everything has it place obv. ^^

[Toroq]

Yes, the only reason I haven't already enchanted Thunderlord is because Blackrock's proc limitation can actually work in its favor for defensive purposes, and it provides a stat that is better both defensively (against physical damage) and offensively, which makes me a bit unsure about how much I'd gain from Thunderlord.

However, on the topic of Imperator, I'm fairly certain that the arcane adds (Remnants, Aberrations and Anomalies) all deal arcane damage with their melee swings, which Blackrock wouldn't help against.

[Deleted]

That is correct, aswell bleeding hollow would not help either but thunderlord does through higher parry rating, but not sure if its worth mentioning.

[Toroq]

Bleeding Hollow would help; their melee hits are blockable, they just don't deal physical damage.

[EricN]

Yes, the only reason I haven't already enchanted Thunderlord is because Blackrock's proc limitation can actually work in its favor for defensive purposes, and it provides a stat that is better both defensively (against physical damage) and offensively, which makes me a bit unsure about how much I'd gain from Thunderlord.

However, on the topic of Imperator, I'm fairly certain that the arcane adds (Remnants, Aberrations and Anomalies) all deal arcane damage with their melee swings, which Blackrock wouldn't help against.

*facepalm* I've had 2 weeks on this boss, almost killed him, and i JUST figure this out. I would say though, the Blackrock/Bladestorm combos are insane. averaging 50k dps on the fight.

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Bleeding Hollow would help; their melee hits are blockable, they just don't deal physical damage.

Adding to this idea, can anyone run some numbers? I would think barrier would actually be useful on this fight, since their swings are magic - and you can still not block with sblock up.

[Toroq]

I said you can block them. In fact I just checked our (shitty) Imperator logs to make sure I wasn't talking shit, and the arcane melee hits are indeed being blocked.

Their melee swings are still melee swings, the damage type does not dictate whether it's blockable or not. However, since Armor and BA only reduce physical damage, Blackrock does nothing to reduce the damage from their attacks. SB is still good, but you might want to revalue Mark of Blackrock depending on your job on Imperator.

[Vongimi]

So I'm having a weird time with tanking here, new to warrior tanking (and well tanking in general). While I do just fine generally, I had a question about stat weights. Generally I have followed the simple Armor > Mastery > Crit > Versatility defensive stats, but I imported my character into Simcraft and got something much different... It had crit WAY above mastery which I thought was odd. Sometimes being at a certain gear level will temporarily put a stat above another in Simcraft, so I wasn't so surprised to see crit above mastery as I was how far it was ahead.

+

Whats going on here? Is crit really that good for me? I used the default Simcraft settings, just swapped role from "attack" to "tank".

Also, while we are at it, why is there such a difference between Bonus Armor and Armor? Isn't one point of bonus armor exactly the same as armor? The only difference I know is the 1 AP you get from each point of bonus armor.

BNET: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ongimii/simple

[Deleted]

In Simcraft you are tanking a boss all the time.
Mastery is undervalued in such scenarios (crit blocks).
Furthermore melee hits from bosses are quite low in SimCraft which undervalued Mastery even more.

SimCraft is tricky as a tank.

[Deleted]

Avatar now lasts 20 seconds with a 1.5-minute cooldown (up from lasting 24 seconds with a 3-minute cooldown).

Whatdo u think about it ? Avatar > Bloodbath as prot ?

[Toroq]

I tried to compare Bloodbath and Avatar for a bit and ended up writing a needlessly long post with no clear conclusion. I'm gonna post it anyway for the sake of discussion.

6.1 Avatar would have a 22,22%(repeating, of course) uptime of 20% more damage, compared to BB's 20% uptime of 30% more damage.
Overall Avatar would provide then provide 0,2*0,2222 = 0,04444 = 4,444% more damage.
And Bloodbath is 0,3*0,2 = 0,06 = 6% more damage.
This is, of course, in a complete vacuum where the timing of the damage increases, fight duration, or boss mechanics don't matter.

In reality, however, the duration of fights is always a factor, and a single use of Avatar beats a single use of BB, albeit not by much.
Eg. let's say you're doing a constant 30k DPS.
A single use of Avatar gives you 30 000 * 20 * 1,2 = 720 000 damage done
A single use of Bloodbath over the same duration gives you (30 000 * 12 * 1,3) + (30 000 * 8) = 708 000
So a single use of avatar is 720 / 708 = 0,0169 = ~1,7% more damage than Bloodbath over the same duration.
Again, this completely disregards any kind of fluctuation in DPS. For example, a proc from the Imperator trinket would last for a full BB use, but only for half of Avatar.

So for example, an extremely short fight that lasts between 1m 50s - 2m, you'd get 2 full uses of BB or 2 full uses of Ava, meaning Ava would win out in terms of damage done.
On the flipside, a fight that lasts between 4m 24s - 4m 30s, you'd get 5 full uses of BB but only 3 of Ava. (Keep in mind 5th BB becomes available at 4m but takes 24s to deal its full damage, 4th Ava comes off CD at 4m 30s)

On a fight like Mythic Butcher where Avatar would still line up perfectly with Pull and BL, Avatar would still probably be better, despite the loss of 8 sec of the duration during those windows, despite getting 4 uses out of BB in the same fight.
Disregarding fights like Butcher where the timing of the encounter favors Avatar, I'd personally still use Bloodbath.

TL;DR I think Bloodbath remains the generally better and 'safer' choice, and thus would probably stick with it, but I'm bad at calculating these things.

If any of my shitty napkin math is wrong, feel free to call me an idiot and correct me.

[Cyclonus-WOW]

Simcraft with stat weights for DTPS will favor Crit over mastery, because you take more damage relying on avoidance.

Simcraft with stat weights for TMI ( Damage Smoothing ) will favor Mastery over Crit, because you smooth the damage you take a lot more.

The harder and harder something hits you the more valuable the crit blocks become, and you'll see stamina scale way beyond everything else in similar situations.
You probably also noticed there's 0 value in DTPS or TMI for Multistrike, get the values for Multistrike from HPS+Absorbs weights or from DPS.

[Zipetor]

Simcraft with stat weights for DTPS will favor Crit over mastery, because you take more damage relying on avoidance.

Simcraft with stat weights for TMI ( Damage Smoothing ) will favor Mastery over Crit, because you smooth the damage you take a lot more.

The harder and harder something hits you the more valuable the crit blocks become, and you'll see stamina scale way beyond everything else in similar situations.
You probably also noticed there's 0 value in DTPS or TMI for Multistrike, get the values for Multistrike from HPS+Absorbs weights or from DPS.

Some of your information runs counter to my own findings - do you have any evidence to support this?
I posted simulations in this thread a while ago and found the following:
1) Crit > Mastery for DPS and DTPS on all fights.
2) Crit > Mastery for TMI in a standard TMI boss fight
3) Mastery > Crit for TMI ONLY on fights where the boss was swapped quickly (about every 18 seconds)

Multistrike of course has value to TMI because it can heal you - it's value is not great though (better than haste, but that's it). Basically the only fights where Mastery is better than Crit for defensive purposes is Imperator and possibly Koragh - Every other fight has either close to 100% combat (Kargath, Butcher, Tectus, Twins) or long swap rotations (Brackenspore).

While I'm on the topic, I see a lot of people claiming that mastery is better when fighting adds. This just makes absolutely no sense. Crit > Mastery for damage taken per second - from a pure mitigation stand point, at current gear levels and diminishing returns. The question is, does mastery provide better smoothing? Indeed the fact that blocking mitigates a portion of a lot of hits (as opposed to avoidance which mitigates all of some hits), makes this a reasonable question to ask, even if we know Crit > Mastery for DTPS (which doesn't take "smoothness" into account). However, fighting lots of adds versus one big boss with a slow swing timer (keeping total DTPS the same) can only make avoidance(Crit) look better from a smoothness stand point - taking lots of swings for little damage already does the smoothing (in the limit of continuous damage, TMI is exactly equal to DTPS).

[Charble]

@Zipetor: The basic solution I've been going by is simply gear for Crit for all fights except Imperator progression, where you would swap to Mastery.

I did a lot of work on the beta a long time back regarding Anger Management's viability as a defensive tool over Gladiator's Resolve (FYI, the answer was no, at least for this tier), but with the decrease in Avatar cooldown, I'm beginning to wonder if Anger Management coupled with Avatar will yield high DPS versus something like Ravager on single target (granted, those fights are few and far between in Foundry).