[5.4] Protection Warrior

[mongoose6]

How much would gearing max avoidance devalue the T16 two set bonus?

[Deleted]

That will depend totally on raidsize, difficulty, healersetup and the fight in particular.

Ie: if you happen to use barrier a lot it actually improves it's value because the setbonus can crit and mastery won't help against nonblockable bursts. But on any super high physical damage + blockable fight (probably only in 25HC) it's somewhere between 50-75% weaker i guess? In the end you'll just have to try out what works best for you and your team, it's not like most of us will kill the harder heroic bosses in 10 pulls or less so we'll have time in between to swap gems/reforges/trinkets/talents/characters/underwear as it pleases us.

[Deleted]

New SimC 540-1 is online.

Ultimatum and “Hold the line”-Glyph are now work correctly and result in a big DPS-Boost.
But the standard APL is still broken (rage capped).

But the result is very clear.
Avoidance Gear brings a lot of fun back to Warrior Tanking.

SoO we are coming.

[Zaritte]

We went for the first four bosses tonight. I was avoidance tanking and took dramatically less damage than our paladin and did much more dps. It looks pretty good. Just make sure to use intervene as much as possible. I am at 24,100 parry/dodge. I was still running Block > Barrier. And my cloak didn't proc all night. I am pretty pleased with the changes.

On a separate note the adds on Sha of Pride weren't silenced after I interrupted them and wouldn't move. But our pali tank could silence and move them with avenger's shield. Did anyone else have trouble moving those adds?

[CollisionTD]

New SimC 540-1 is online.

Ultimatum and “Hold the line”-Glyph are now work correctly and result in a big DPS-Boost.
But the standard APL is still broken (rage capped).

But the result is very clear.
Avoidance Gear brings a lot of fun back to Warrior Tanking.

SoO we are coming.

If you're got a better APL, just post it here and I'll make it the default one.

[Frozendekay]

On a separate note the adds on Sha of Pride weren't silenced after I interrupted them and wouldn't move. But our pali tank could silence and move them with avenger's shield. Did anyone else have trouble moving those adds?

They need to actually be silenced, as in Gag Order or Strangulate (avengers shield too).

[Lintgamer]

I play at EU servers so downloaded it now and need to wait after my job to play. But i have a raid incomming and now my question is, should i gem parry/dodge or stay mastery?

[Alonzo33]

should i go dodge/parry build even if my mastery is so low ? (around 35k now and i still didnt change reforges) im +-540 ilvl switching our main for a month

[Deleted]

If you're got a better APL, just post it here and I'll make it the default one.

It’s all about this line:
actions+=/shield_barrier,if=incoming_damage_1500ms>health.max*0.3

With good gear this causes your rage is capped several times and more incoming rage is wasted.
Changing it to “actions+=/shield_barrier,if=incoming_damage_1500ms>health.max*0.2” consumes more rage and gives me better results.

Problem is. It all depends on how good your gear is.

[Deleted]

Well this is an reactive line to the damage intake, just ignore all the gear and have it bound to your rage instead/in addition.

actions+=/shield_barrier,if=incoming_damage_1500ms>health.max*0.3|rage>rage.max-20

My rage cap is down to <2% this way while sblock is still at perfect 67.24% uptime

[Valech]

So... is there a consensus now? I tried looking up several sources and a lot of them still seem to favor Mastery. I am raiding 10 man heroic. Even when I looked at top guild prot warriors they do not seem to have a common baseline in gemming. So is it Mastery or Avoidance now?

[Pippo89]

So... is there a consensus now? I tried looking up several sources and a lot of them still seem to favor Mastery. I am raiding 10 man heroic. Even when I looked at top guild prot warriors they do not seem to have a common baseline in gemming. So is it Mastery or Avoidance now?

Mastery:
+ very smooth physical damage intake
+ almost no physical spikes, except for unblockable attacks for which we got Barrier
+ even more Mastery in 5.4; resulting in many crit blocks which in turn give 10 rage
- damage done increases, thank to Riposte, but not as much

Parry/Dodge:
+ overall smooth damage intake
- compared to the mastery build more spikes
+ damage done increases significantly
+ thanks to the highly increased crit chance due to Riposte, more Shield Slams and Devastates will crit = 10 rage each time you crit (not sure about this 3sec internal trigger cooldown someone pointed out in page 1)
+ you can spam Revenge thanks to the cooldown reset each time you dodge or parry an attack!
Revenge generates 20 rage now iirc (sorry, can only play after work :P)
coupled with the Hold the Line glyph, this should also be pretty fun.

Besides that, Dodge and Parry should help pretty well against, for example:
Nazgrim's Sunder, He's Poison attacks.
If the Panda does not hit you, he does not apply poison. Not sure aboit the void zone proccing though.

I'll try Dodge/Parry first. Would be very refreshing if this works out well. It's been so many contents with either full mastery or full stamina.
And I'm really looking forward to the crit the hell out of my opponents as a tank!

Edit: So in the end, I think it's up to your personal preference. One way gemming is boring (like the pallys 320 haste in everything!!!).

[Lintgamer]

Thanks for this Pippo

[Deleted]

actions+=/shield_barrier,if=incoming_damage_1500ms>health.max*0.3|rage>rage.max-20

Yes, this looks much better.
Minimizing rage capped time.

[Gliff]

We cleared 12/14 on our first raid but we out geared bosses so much that we 1 shot like 10 of the 12. I can't really get a great grasp on how well avoidance will be in 25 man raiding from that first night. It seemed to go well and my damage was through the roof compared to last patch. So far so good.

Funny story, we have so much health because we outgear normals so much that Thok never went into P2 because it requires atleast 10 people to be under 50% health. Well it never happened so it was literally a tank and spank with an AOE hitting for like 30% of our health every like 10 seconds. They also nerfed his damage so tanking was a breeze compared to PTR testing.

Good luck with your progression guys. I'm always open to answering questions provided it isnt something you can find in 2 minutes of searching.

[farmergregor]

I used an all out parry/dodge build last night (8/14N), and absolutely loved it. Riposte + dodge/crit elixirs put me at 45% crit buffed, and my damage was more or less on par with my monk co-tank (she would destroy me on damage in ToT).

The greatest thing besides the extra crit is the amount of rage generation. I was able to use shield block on cooldown and use a 60 rage barrier approximately every 10-15 seconds. The amount of revenge procs was new to me. It felt like I was filling with revenge instead of devastate.

Damage wasn't a problem last night. If I were to take a string of bad hits (rare), I could just pop a barrier because of the amount of rage generation.

Things I should disclose:
-I have not tested a mastery build, so I cannot compare.
-These were of course tested on normal modes (very very easy normal modes at that), so heroics could change my outlook on the build (doubt it though).

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Sillytickles <Illest> - Kil'jaeden-US

[Tehpounderer]

One thing to add that hasn't been mentioned. I dropped Unending Rage and took Resonating Power and used Thunder Clap as part of my normal rotation (even single target). My pally tank buddy had no hope of keeping threat on trash packs, and at one moment I remember, on Norushen, Thunderclap hit the boss and three adds that were within range... all crits for over 400k each, 1.6m damage with one GCD on an 8 second cooldown. For the night, TC average crit was 253k and accounted for 13% of my damage with Deep Wounds being another 14%. It hits harder than Revenge with Hold The Line and as an added bonus, cannot be blocked by the boss.

- - - Updated - - -

Looking over the logs more from last night, are others seeing what I am seeing and that is that most abilities other than melee are not able to be dodged, parried or blocked? Even the physical ones? There are a few exceptions, but I'm seeing a LOT of abilities with only hit/absorb in their table.

[mongoose6]

I geared full avoidance last night and omg. So much rage! The spikier damage intake is completely offset by all of the extra shield absorbs. I was at rage cap far too often at the beginning of the night simply because I wasnt used to have that much rage. I'm very VERY happy right now. This was 10M btw.

[Deleted]

Mmmeeeehhhhhh I just don't like the idea of having Crit or Haste as a tank. Leave that for DPS guys.

[Drakond]

I think there was a pretty broad consensus that avoidance would be the way to go for 10s and probably normal 25s. To me, the real test will be to see how it holds up in 25 heroics.