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

[Charble]

Yeah see, we tried that originally but the guards and the engineers kept spawning on top of each other and we've only really got traps for CC, along with a Mage but our Hunters pets break the CC with Beast Cleave I think?

I'd like to try the tactic of having a dedicated guard tank with the boss on one of the sides for DoTs cleave but I'm not 100% convinced our Hunters are misdirecting correctly.

The reasoning for him being in the center is it reduces the chance of awful Ruptures, and less AoE damage on the raid.

[Tummyrubs]

I've been thinking about this over the weekend and i genuinely don't get how 3 tanking is safer than 2 tanking. At this point in the tier do the gains from 3 tanking furnace really outweigh those of having an extra dps for p2-3? I completely get 3 tanking for lets say the top 150-200. But i feel we're at a point that the gear we should have compensates for that third tank. Eddy survived with lets say 6+ guards. That damage just seems like it would be miles more deadly than 3 guards, an operator and felspar? Operator comes free, pop a cd for deafening roar and continue as you were. I'm in no way the tank Eddy is and its because of that notion that 3 tanking seems a more daunting task than 2 tanking. All the danger of p1 with 3 tanks is placed on your guard tank and assigned healer(s) while the rest of the healers, relatively speaking, do what? If you have an eddy, phys, warriorsari, or grafarion then have at it. But for those a notch or two below that echelon I genuinely don't see the gains. I'm not considering p3 as part of the equation b/c if you can get there with everyone alive, control melts and gimmie my loots. I'm also not considering engineers b/c they're only dangerous when they get the damage increase from being mc'd and those particular engineers shouldn't live long enough to be threatening.

[Deleted]

I've been thinking about this over the weekend and i genuinely don't get how 3 tanking is safer than 2 tanking. At this point in the tier do the gains from 3 tanking furnace really outweigh those of having an extra dps for p2-3? I completely get 3 tanking for lets say the top 150-200. But i feel we're at a point that the gear we should have compensates for that third tank. Eddy survived with lets say 6+ guards. That damage just seems like it would be miles more deadly than 3 guards, an operator and felspar? Operator comes free, pop a cd for deafening roar and continue as you were. I'm in no way the tank Eddy is and its because of that notion that 3 tanking seems a more daunting task than 2 tanking. All the danger of p1 with 3 tanks is placed on your guard tank and assigned healer(s) while the rest of the healers, relatively speaking, do what? If you have an eddy, phys, warriorsari, or grafarion then have at it. But for those a notch or two below that echelon I genuinely don't see the gains. I'm not considering p3 as part of the equation b/c if you can get there with everyone alive, control melts and gimmie my loots. I'm also not considering engineers b/c they're only dangerous when they get the damage increase from being mc'd and those particular engineers shouldn't live long enough to be threatening.

Well, the main thing is it makes p1 far easier. It's easier to dps the correct targets when there's not a sea of guards milling about on top of them. It's easier to interrupt the engineers when there's not a load of nameplates filling your screen. It's easier to kill things in a timely fashion when they don't get 3 damage reduction shields thrown on top of them when getting low on hp... etc.. Also 3 tanks makes p3 a joke too since the only real danger if you go into p3 cleanly is that a tank may die if you are 2 tanking it. It's not like you can actually hit the soft enrage (running out of room) if the entry to p3 was good.

By swapping to 2 tanks, you make p1 far messier, p3 a little harder, and you gain 15k dps maybe on the elementalists for p2? Overall not that great a gain.

[Tummyrubs]

Fair enough. I wasn't considering the effective dps still won't be enough in most cases to make you need one slag per primal. Also w/ p3 not being a true threat the extra dps isn't necessary there. I can see the third tank aiding in making the sides less of a cluster and getting out of p1 sub 30 heat. Appreciate the perspective as I wasn't seeing it.

[Starriol]

To add to Willowywicca's explanation, there are also often a few (2-4 in my experience) guards up when p3 starts. Having that third tank gives the raid time to kill off the guards by the time the guard tank needs to tank the boss. Although having 6ish guards seems rather iffy at first, you can get used to it fairly quickly. Our toolset is fairly decent at dealing with packs of guards and you can make use of externals as needed as well. Ravager and Shockwave work together really well to give you breathing room.

[Tummyrubs]

I used felspar for the first 2 elementalists to bait shields out of the guards in the middle of nowhere and then brought them back in to be cleaved down. Once felspar was dead i used a low hp guard to bait out the new guards shield, killed the low hp guard then brought the new one in to get it low for the rest of the fight. Being able to bring them in for incidental cleave i never had more than two guards alive. Only one kill but during our wipes once the initial cleanup was over i never had over 2 guards alive. Just throwing that out there for people to try.

[Deleted]

I would argue the messiness of phase 1 by only using 2 tanks. Having all those shield guards makes it far more healing intensive and having potentially more to aoe going into phase 2. Using a 3rd tank at phase 2 really makes no difference as you would only ever use 2 for that part, the 3rd will just be hitting the elementalist.

Phase 3 is by far the easiest phase anyway and having an extra tank will only make a difference in terms of their CD's. You will have lower DPS on the boss or lower healing depending on what you swap out to get that 3rd tank in. You are only gaining tank survivability because of that extra set of CD's which can easily be made up for by proper external CD planning and usage

[Starriol]

I suppose, then, the benefit of three tanks really depends on how well a given group can cleave. As long as guards are never building up excessively, then the benefit of the third tank is entirely negated. I was really seeing that guards weren't getting cleaved down effectively when I was trying to keep guards in range, but at the same time, having the third tank made cleaving the guards not at all a priority. I'd really like to try the two tanking at some point to see how it goes.

You certainly have a point about phase 3. It may be individually "harder" on the two tanks because they have to be actually doing things more often, but wouldn't actually add to the overall difficulty.

[Braglol]

If your main tank comp is dk-less, the gain of having a dps dk go blood for the third tank is pretty large, they are incredibly strong(unkillable) in the last phase and the damage they bring is good enough as well. Especially since you can 2 every elementalist if you want. We found it much easier to three tank and we were still able to kill the first elementalist in one go.

[Deliverer]

Haven't seen anyone talking about the set bonuses and class trinket coming in 6.2 for prot ofc... What do you guys think about them? And what do you think about the recent change to set bonuses?

[Starriol]

Previous set bonuses: excited. It's a bandaid, but perhaps just the needed bandaid. Was excited to be able to go back to my prot warrior from my brewmaster and not feel like I'm shortchanging my guild.

Current ones: is this April Fool's again? Last Stand is not a great CD to begin with and only buffing Shield Barrier while Last Stand is up is incredibly lackluster. I was looking forward to having the interesting interplay between the two methods of reducing magic damage taken (need to stack Shield Block and Barrier in preparation, importance of using Block first), but they took that away. Stacking the two magic reductions would have made warriors pretty great at soaking large magic hits. Now we'll be okay once every 1.5 minutes. Perhaps people will take Anger Management to push the uptime of Last Stand. Overall, I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

[Braglol]

Awful tier bonuses, thanks blizzard, I guess last stand isnt always useless now? (this is in all caps)

But 2-piece is free at least, since helm and legs are Crit Mastery

[Beastyn]

I'm disappointed with the new set bonuses as well.

[Deleted]

"Warriors now have a 1.5 minute cd guard and have to burn one of their 3 cds to get it" Thanks Blizzard it's awesome

[Emancptr]

The prior set bonuses was brokenly overpowered. There was very little chance of the prior set bonuses making it to live, and to think they would was foolish.

The newest iteration is situationally strong. As Brag said, you essentially get the 2-piece for free because of good itemization. Then you decide if you need the "guard" level shield barrier for specific fights. Importantly, the bonuses still address Prot's weaker aspects. Namely, cooldowns and dealing with magic damage. I see the new tier bonuses as being much stronger than the current 4 piece, which only helps mitigate damage that warriors are already incredibly strong against.

[Jetjaguar]

Was getting ~300k Sbar during last stand on a mythic dummy so this set bonus definitely makes you unkillable when you have last stand up as you have effectively a 900k cushion before you get put in the dumpster. Was also using the Arch trinket which was giving 22% armor per Sbar

[Deleted]

The prior set bonuses was brokenly overpowered. There was very little chance of the prior set bonuses making it to live, and to think they would was foolish.

The newest iteration is situationally strong. As Brag said, you essentially get the 2-piece for free because of good itemization. Then you decide if you need the "guard" level shield barrier for specific fights. Importantly, the bonuses still address Prot's weaker aspects. Namely, cooldowns and dealing with magic damage. I see the new tier bonuses as being much stronger than the current 4 piece, which only helps mitigate damage that warriors are already incredibly strong against.

How exactly was the previous one overpowered? It complimented using Shield Barrier. I see 180k Shield Barriers on Blast Furnace, so with this 4 set I'll now have 540k Shield Barriers?
The old one made sense, 20% magical damage reduction on top of an absorb that likely wouldn't absorb a full magic hit from a boss - plus it disappeared as soon as Sbar did.


If I wanted Guard, I'd play a fucking Monk -.-

[jayg2772]

Pretty lame to completely change it instead of tuning it we will most likely be on the heals of dks and monks again because of there absorb being through the roof plus self heals.
next they will change it to Your Shield Slam and Revenge have a 1% chance to activate Victory Rush or Impending Victory as if you had killed your target.

[Deleted]

Where did you guys see the itemization?

[Deliverer]

I didn't like it at first i was rly looking forward to the other set bonuses.. After thinking a bit about it I think this one is probably better last stand last 20 seconds which is pretty long duration, that means during those 20 seconds you will be able to use 600k barriers and after that you need to wait 1 min and 10 seconds that you can reduce with anger management. You still will have 26% magical reduction from shield blocks due to trinket which is far more consistent because shield block will just be up all it's duration while shield barrier will just disappear in half an hit and on top of that shiled barrier will increase armor by 26% which is like what 10% physical damage reduction ? This change actually makes last stand a rly powerful cd compared to what we have now.