[5.4] Protection Warrior

[Gliff]

Hi what do u think about this trinket for Riposte build ? (can't post links..)

That and the Stam/CD reduction will probably be my go-to trinkets. The AOE reduction trinket is really nice but situational and the amplify trinket is really only good for mastery builds (I Still would never take it over a DPS that it is BIS for). I can't really think of when I would use the stam/crit trinket over the previously mentioned trinkets.

[Deleted]

Its an extremely reliable self heal so it will end up doing quite a lot, probably around 25k HPS or something during progress HC fights given that it can crit as well and due to the steady nature of it you can think of it as a hot in a way or as 25k incoming DPS less that your healers don't have to worry about

The amplify trinkets are extremely strong however and depending on the fight I would probably always stick to an AMP one + either the CD reduction one or the life leech one

[Senen]

Wait, aren't you heal for 2.65% of the damage you deal?
If you're healing for 25k HPS wouldn't that mean you're dealing ~1.000k dps?

[Deleted]

Wait, aren't you heal for 2.65% of the damage you deal?
If you're healing for 25k HPS wouldn't that mean you're dealing ~1.000k dps?

It can crit, with a crit rate of ~40% you're looking at a little less dps than that. Still a lot but since Eddy runs in 25 man aswell as him beeing a DPS machine that number might be obtanable.

[Gliff]

I'd say that isn't the norm though. When I tested on ptr it wasn't that high but I may have tested it when I was testing my mastery build I can't remember.

[mongoose6]

What do you people think about the shitty Animus dodge trinket now that avoidance has gained some value?

I had to dig through my bags for this sucker. I was using it with my avoidance build and I personally really liked it. The proc stacked quite a bit and only activated when I was actively tanking.


Question for anyone going full crit. I tried this last night on a little ToT run and didn't care for it one bit. I am, however, simply reforging/regemming my standard tank gear. Do you need to go full out with dps pieces to make the crit build viable?

[Deleted]

Boss drop Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...nc&usp=sharing

As the edit says above, I merged all three into the one link above for convenience.

I made one aswell. Maybe someone can check back on it:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...nc&usp=sharing

Sth is wrong with out leg drops.

[Sal the Shieldhog]

I am of the opinion that it really doesnt matter. The difference between max parry and balance is only like .08% avoidance. Even if it was more like 1%, the tradeoff for getting more parries(glyph damage) is worth it to me.

I'm gonna agree with Gliff on this one. It's such a small increase, it shouldn't really matter.

As for myself, grabbed the helm off Norushen and Sha of Pride's shield. Both were major upgrades (from 530's), and both have dodge/parry on them. After gemming and enchanting, I had like a 2-3% avoidance increase and like 850 more crit from Riposte than before (was using Horridon's helm and the shield from Lei Shen before). It's awesome.

[Nobleshield]

Considering dusting off the old Prot Warr for off nights at least (and maybe Flex at some point), and haven't been following many of the changes since switching to Paladin. I didn't notice an actual 5.4 guide outlining any changes to stat priority or gearing, so do we still want to cap Hit and Expertise, and then go Mastery > Parry = Dodge or do we actually want Crit now for the extra things they've given us? Can I get a quick summary of how things are done now?

[Gliff]

I made one aswell. Maybe someone can check back on it:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...nc&usp=sharing

Sth is wrong with out leg drops.

You just had to one-up me didnt you!!!!

Maybe add the trinket use/proc for some more info.

- - - Updated - - -

Considering dusting off the old Prot Warr for off nights at least (and maybe Flex at some point), and haven't been following many of the changes since switching to Paladin. I didn't notice an actual 5.4 guide outlining any changes to stat priority or gearing, so do we still want to cap Hit and Expertise, and then go Mastery > Parry = Dodge or do we actually want Crit now for the extra things they've given us? Can I get a quick summary of how things are done now?

I'm gonna refer you to the post I am going to quote below. I would only add that, while there are differing opinions when it comes to raw crit stacking, in my experience it should only be used when in a situation where you are a pure offtank and literally will not be tanking anything for the majority of the fight or you outgear the content by enough.

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!!!).

[Nobleshield]

I'm gonna refer you to the post I am going to quote below. I would only add that, while there are differing opinions when it comes to raw crit stacking, in my experience it should only be used when in a situation where you are a pure offtank and literally will not be tanking anything for the majority of the fight or you outgear the content by enough.

Just what I needed, thanks Now to just look into training myself to remember the 35+ keybinds that I'm going to need lol

[Deleted]

I'm interested on the life steal trinket too, but I see a lot of overhealing coming while using it considering our 2pc. Will try, but might as well go for DPS trinkets. Luckily worldoflogs is functional again, so if someone grabs 2pc+trinket... Would be nice to see it on action.

About the crit vs avoidance thingy, I find that 20 secs of riposte it's more than enough to make the following relationship: You have riposte up, you have vengeance. You don't have, you don't have vengeance. The only one that seemed to keep your vengeance up through massive aoe when you were not tanking something was Thok. And you can taunt and intervene freely there. The rest of them... If you taunt+intervene to recover your vengeance, you will recover your riposte. If you can't intervene nor taunt (debuffs like the one from the sha, o very fast reapplying ones), you won't get riposte but you won't have vengeance either, so not having crit there makes little difference. The trade-off damage / mitigation doesn't seem too good.

[Slootbag]

Unfortunately the benefit of crit to damage smoothing/reduction is next to nothing (about 1/10th the value of mastery or about 1/7 the value of of parry/dodge using the TMI metric in an up-to-date Simcraft), so going highly into crit will still only be a viable option when overgearing content.

Just to be clear (to everyone really) my argument here isn't for a build where you stack crit right after hit/exp caps, which would be Hit = Exp > Crit, which is something I wouldn't advocate, unless there's not a single blockable mechanic in the fight, and even then.
I'm referring to a situation where Mastery is the priority stat (since I'm always in support of smoothing/mitigation), and the question then becomes what would I/we go with after. And for me, that's Hit = Exp > Mastery > Crit > D+P

Also just a note about the TMI/SimC point since this is always brought up in these situations, and this is often where I clash with these arguments. I always respect math and sim crafting. But at the end of they day it is a guide, not a bible, to be taken with a grain of salt. A lot of people treat it (unfortunately) as the correct way and only way to do things, and whatever a Sim says must be the way to go, I'm not accusing you for that, I'm just making a general observation. I (like I'm sure many others here have) have seen this fail time and time again. Nothing can ever replicate a true raiding environment with every single mechanic and adapt it to a player's personal skill, or to a raid's needs. So while I totally believe numerically Crit shows to be crappy vs other stats for things like TDR, in practice, it does have far more benefits.

How can you get rage from crit blocks and not activate Riposte from avoiding? As long as you are tanking you will have Riposte active. If you are not tanking you will not crit-block either.
Additionally when you are not using Barrier > Shield Block mastery becomes nearly worthless.

Since you are talking of DPS so much. Try shield block + SS even while not tanking.

I might be missing the point of your post, or maybe you missed mine. I'm aware you can't crit block during an off-tanking period, but you can still crit, and when you're offtanking during a period of more than 20s, you riposte will fall unless you have a lucky safeguard, or you vengeance swap and hope for an avoid in the first few couple of swings. However, crit won't go away if you build into that, riposte will.
Yes you're right, any unblockable damage or prioritizing Barrier > Block makes Mastery worthless, but I haven't really seen a Lei Shi fight this tier at all where Mastery is not useful, at least with current boss strategies. That may change for some guilds.
And yes often you do block + SS for single target, I'm aware again, and that higher chance to crit with the shield block will also be more beneficial.

I have more of an issue with the people who will sit here and say people who dont do "X" are idiots because "X" is the only viable strat.

I couldn't agree more with you.

I dont think i ever had a 20 second period where I was not tanking something and we used a 3 tank strat so it would be even more tru in a 2 tank strat.

Maybe what I wrote there was in a bit of an exaggerated fashion, but we've done 5 Norushen kills with 2-tank strats now on 25. Every time I've definitely had times where you sit and wait with no Riposte. Albeit I agree it's not for a long time at all, so it isn't as significant as it may have sounded. Maybe it's just our strat or we kill the add downstairs too fast. But you're right, it's not a big deal on that fight and it's a matter of splitting hairs. That's why I added the disclaimer at the end, all in all different guilds have different strats, so things can always vary slightly in favor or in opposition to riposte uptime based on what I wrote.

I just finished normal Garrosh tonight and IDK if it was just crazy lucky RNG but I proced riposte literally 90% of the time that I intervened. In P1 I let our Monk tank basically take everything since his AOE damage is still significantly higher then mine but I made sure to taunt one of the adds to keep up Riposte. In P2 I had probably a 95% uptime on riposte either from intervene or just regular tank swap since the debuff is so short.

First, gratz! Second, I think again strategy might differ here, at least from a P2 perspective where you get Riposte all the time (you probably swap a lot more than we did, at least on PTR). Also considering a let's say 45-50% avoidance (which is generous), 90% riposte proccing form safeguard does indeed seem pretty good RnG to me!

I hope you were not taking that personally because I still stand by that. The 10% avoidance is not worth the extra crit and from my experience (very limited testing with crit build on PTR) the extra rage generation was extremely minimal on a crit build. The only time it is significantly higher would be in a situation like the Garrosh transitions where there is nothing to tank. In that situation the extras damage reduction, while useful, is not nearly as valuable as a time where you are actually tanking something.

Not at all, I don't take it personally, everyone is entitled to their opinion as long as it's positive/constructive imo. But this is where I tend to disagree a bit, which is fine, because ultimately what builds people choose comes down to their tanking philosophy and play style. Mine has always been a mitigation/smoothing and aggressive stance across all my tanks, which obviously lends itself to a Mastery/Crit build, and not a spikier binary build through avoidance. Going avoidance would theoretically be less rage gain (even if you are actively tanking) than would mastery/crit. My reasoning is obvious, you get more (or at worst equal) crit compared to riposte, and also crit block more. Furthermore, there's not nearly a significant enough difference of parry between an avoidance build and a mastery/crit build to warrant any claims that revenge spam will produce so much rage, because revenge is there in both builds, and you only have so many GCDs (4) between revenge CDs naturally coming up.
Also, going mastery/avoidance is an option too but I don't think it is the best choice due to clash between avoidance and block mechanics (choose 1 or the other kind of thing). So you get wasted mastery as a result. I'm sure people disagree on this as well.
In my experience, and everyone's is different, I literally had more rage than I knew what to do with during normals so far, to the point where my block charges were down, and I couldn't dump barriers fast enough without overlapping, so I had to dump them into cleave/HS while tanking (what has this world come to). I was literally a rock not dropping below 90% HP ever almost, and other times not even getting my barriers eaten before re-applying from rage capping. Given, these are normals and we will see on heroics moreso, but all that excess rage already has me excited for dumping in heroics.
I still personally believe there are more advantages to crit, if for nothing else than the basic level that there are too many mechanics that aren't avoidable (riposte aside, and obviously boss dependent), and that extra rage for barrier or block just smooths or soaks damage better, let alone the dps gain.

About the crit vs avoidance thingy, I find that 20 secs of riposte it's more than enough to make the following relationship: You have riposte up, you have vengeance. You don't have, you don't have vengeance. The only one that seemed to keep your vengeance up through massive aoe when you were not tanking something was Thok. And you can taunt and intervene freely there. The rest of them... If you taunt+intervene to recover your vengeance, you will recover your riposte. If you can't intervene nor taunt (debuffs like the one from the sha, o very fast reapplying ones), you won't get riposte but you won't have vengeance either, so not having crit there makes little difference. The trade-off damage / mitigation doesn't seem too good.

Well not always, if your intervene isn't avoided, you don't get any riposte, and a quick taunt doesn't guarantee an avoid either. In fact, chances are you won't avoid on the first swing, but you will get vengeance regardless, these are exclusive separate stats.
Also avoidance isn't mitigation, so there's no trade-off for that. I'd argue a crit/mastery build beats out an avoidance build for mitigation/smoothing hands down. Avoidance is binary as we know.

Again I'll state because I really do believe there's no right or wrong option here, rather what fits each play style and tanking philosphy best honestly, barring aside any obvious choice for one build over another based on a particular encounter. Both are viable builds, do what you enjoy :P

- - - Updated - - -

Also wanted to add about the Life Steal trinket. All my testing with it on PTR rendered it quite disappointing, while it was bugged, and now apparently is fixed, don't hold your breath too much for the actual equip portion.

Let's say about 250k DPS (which is probably Heroic 25 range). As a rough estimate take 3% of take and convert it into HPS.
so 250000*0.03 = 7500 HPS, pretty meh. The plus really only comes when you are low let's say and you have a block+SS lined up that crits for 1.5mill, that's a nice 45k return as a quite small "uh-oh" heal, but isn't reliable in the least.

The passive avoidance on it seems to be what's most attractive honestly.

[Tehpounderer]

Hi warriors !
Some of you talked about Thunder Clap's big dmg, should we use it on CD even on single targets to maximise our dps ?
Should we glyph it on single targets to minimise the GCD lost, keeping the same dps gain ?

If you are going to use it on CD then use the glyph. I have been and have been quite pleased. I have had to adjust to not rage capping with the loss of the rage glyph, but the other only real option is Incite and I would likely only do that if you were using Demo shout on CD and I would probably only do that if I had the 4pc (which I likely won't because we aren't exactly rage starved right now).

[archkiller]

Looks like ppl have start to whine abt us topping dps in SoO lol.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9964406468

[Deleted]

The animus trinket is still fairly 'meh' and I wouldn't go for it over a stam one tbh

[Warriorsarri]

The Animus trinket is really only good if you are AoE tanking, and you have a lot of fast hits against you. There is only three fights this tier where it can be useful.'
Immerseus: If you keep all/most of the small adds alive for the tank to handle.
Sha of Pride: Same as above.
Nazgrim: If you keep the adds that are up at the pull alive.

The general theme here is that unless you design your strat around you having the trinket, and keeping adds alive, it's quite frankly crap. (But it is OP if you can get high uptime of the proc, 200%+mastery is nothing to shun.)

[Deleted]

It can be op but then you are keeping the adds alive so it kind of negates the entire point of having the damage reduction in the first place...?
For the most part a boss simply wont melee swing enough to make the uptime on the proc any good at all, sure take it as a stat stick if you want but its really nothing terribly impressive imho... you would be much better off with something else

[Tofifi]

So any thoughts on if the DPS cloak is any good for us? I haven't tried it myself in a raid yet. I've heared from other tanks (but not warriors) that it's pretty nice for fights with adds atleast.

[Gliff]

From my testing its really good on cleave fights but It all depends on how rough the tank damage is though.

I'm not sure if Im gonna use it on Immersius.