Newbie Prot Warrior Stuff

[Katojan]

How's it going? I recently started playing my warrior as Prot, and I'm still pretty new to it (effectively, I haven't tried it since the pre-AM days, and even then it was only casually). I feel like I'm doing alright as far as the basics go - I can hold aggro just fine, and I'm pretty okay at positioning. Definitely not world ranked tanking material, but hey, one step at a time, right?

Having said that I do have a question or two regarding some areas that I feel like I could be doing much better on, namely regarding how and when to use Shield Block and Shield Barrier properly (beyond using the former when I'm expecting a big melee hit, or I'm taking steady physical damage, and the latter when magic damage becomes a real threat), and how to spend my rage.

Having played DPS for several years, it's been drilled into my head that unused rage is wasted rage, and that rage capping is generally bad. But from what I can tell, it seems like you kind of have to pool rage as a Prot warrior. I often find myself either rage capped, or too low on rage.

I also feel like I'm not using Shield Block in particular in the most efficient way. I've been trying to aim for maximum uptime, and that generally works, but I've found myself in some really awkward situations where I would need it, but don't have it available. Again, some sources say to aim for high uptime, and others say to use it based on situation, so I'm left scratching my head.

If anyone with more experience can give me some pointers on what I'm doing wrong, that'd be much appreciated. Like I said, I'm fairly new to this, and I'm interested in digging into some more advanced topics.

[Deleted]

Warrior's surviability, especially for mitigating magical dmg, has been buffed greatly with the current T18 4set + class trinket. Before that you need to aim for a good SBl uptime and use the rest of your rage into your SBa. You also need to check what kind of incoming abilities you are facing. As a prot warrior you allways had some little issues to mitigate magical dmg properly. In T17 prot warrior was mostly assigned to use external CDs compared to any other tanking classes.

[Deleted]

Hi there. So, you seem to know the basics pretty well..
About the excess rage it depends on how sure you are that you'll survive the next.. say.. 10 seconds. Pooling rage is not a bad thing as Prot since then you have it when you need it. But... if you're surviving you can dump rage into heroic strikes right when your shield slam or revenge comes off cooldown. Needs some practice though and I wouldn't recommend it if you're having trouble staying alive.

About SBl. It's basically good to have a high uptime while actively tanking as you've said. The advanced thing here would be to watch the boss's melee swings. If you press SBl just before the boss hits, you often gain a second or so. (care for resetted swing timers) Also take note of casts since the boss won't melee you during that time. Once you know the boss fight a bit you should know when the extended periods of melee swings are occuring and use your SBl for that.
Another thing you can do is take one swing with Barrier which will give you about 3 seconds... but keep in mind that this is an inefficient rage use.
Also gap the SBl downtime with Demo Shout if you don't need it for a certain mechanic.

This was written for tanking a single boss. If you have more bosses/adds it's important to gap your downtime. Also due to Revenge resetting more often you gain more rage for Barriers, so gap SBl downtime with barriers but keep some rage for your next SBl. Ravager is a cool talent for this purpose.

So... have fun getting hit

[Valech]

I think you´ll be a great tank since you have the basics covered pretty well. I am sure to have pugged with other warrior tanks for heroic content, who had less clue then you.

Anyway, Rage and AM is an issue of planning. If you are dedicated to tanking, you will get a feeling for almost every boss rregarding their hits. You will remember when you felt like overdoing it with your block and you will remember when you feel like you need one. You will change your playstyle according to those experiences in the next try.
Generally it is how you describe it: Against a Boss with pure physical hits (Butcher) or a boss with mixed attacks (Kromog) you want to maximize your shieldblock uptime. Bosses, who do favor Shieldbarrier are rare (one of the few examples might be Dia Darkwhisper, but even she has a melee phase).

Rule of thumb is: Always prevent yourself from ragecapping.
There are two situations, in which you as a tank can be: (I) actively tanking (adds or boss or both) or (II) not actively tanking (waiting for your turn again).

(I) The easier of both in terms of rage management is the latter: If you tank nothing and no heavy aoe is going on and your next rage generator would push you beyond the 120, you use a heroic strike. Dont spam away your whole rage. Since heroic strike is off gcd, you can simply wait until your next generator would push you over the cap again. That will never leave you with an empty rage bar if you suddenly have to taunt something (an unplanned add, the other tank dies, other tank messed up and needs to be taunted). Also you want 120 rage shortly before you taunt, so that you dont have to begin with an empty bar.
A mistake many beginners make is to use their heroic strike at inappropriate moments. To emphasize on this, notice, that the ONLY moment you want to use heroic strike REGARDLESS of an ultimatum procc is to PREVENT RAGECAPPING IF NOT TANKING.

(II) The slightly more complicated case is, if you are actively tanking. You will never use heroic strike outside of ultimatum proccs. I will try to squeeze it into one compact sentence: In fights with only or mainly physical and blockable damage, use shieldbarrier, regardless of your rage, whenever you are positive, that you will have 60 rage at the next situation, in which you want a shieldblock.
To delve a bit deeper into that sentence, and to explain how this "next situation" can look like, I want to look at the two situations you can be in:

1) You have no charges of shieldblock (or in other words: you are not saving a charge of shieldblock for anything):
If you are just using your shieldblock on cooldown, which is fine for most bosses, your only means of preventing damage between shieldblocks are shieldbarriers. As long as you can guarantee, a) that you have 60 rage the moment your shieldblock comes off its cooldown, go and spam those juicy shieldbarriers. Note, that 60 rage barriers are to prefered. But since you can have gaps of 12 seconds between Shieldblocks, you have plenty of time to calculate how often you can pool a 60 rage barrier until you have to pool for the next block instead.

2) You have one charge of shieldblock (or in toher words: you are saving shieldblock for something)
It happens rarely, but some bosses require you to sit on a stack of shieldblock. Good examples are Killrogg (shredd armor) and Mannoroth (heavy glaive thingy). Since you NEVER wanna reach 2 charges of shieldblock (in other words: If non of your shieldblock charges is reloading while you actively tank, you are doing something wrong), your ragemanagement is slightly more complicated. The use of shieldbarrier has, so to say, one more condition: Use shieldbarrier only if you can guarantee, a) that you have 60 rage at the moment you need a shieldblock for a special ability (like the mentioned shred armor), b) that you have 60 rage shortly before the second charge of shieldblock has refreshed (to prevent charge-capping) and c) lastly and most difficult to plan, to have enough rage to cast shieldblock before the second charge refreshes AND 60 more rage if the ability, for which you saved one charge, occurs shortly after the first block expires. (c) is best explained by an example: Let´s say I save block for shred armor. So when shred armor is cast, I NEED 60 rage. Thing is, that my second charge of shieldblock is done in 1 second. The next shred armor will occur in roughly 8 seconds. That means, if I re-cast my shieldblock now (to prevent it from being at 2 stacks) it will expire 1-2 seconds before shred armor and thus, I need 60 rage more, to immediatly re-cast shieldblock again or cast it during the first shieldblock to increase the duration. In other words: There is no room for shieldbarriers, since I will need all my rage to ensure not charge-capping (if you can call it that way) and still being able to mitigate shred armor. As you can imagine, (c) is both a rare occurance and of course absolute minmaxing. You could as well simply sit on 2 stacks of shieldblock for 3 or 4 seconds and then cast it instead of going through all the hassle.

Again, being at two charges of shieldblock during active tanking should never happen and thus is not a case to be looked at.



Now I know that I might have made it a bit more complicated then necessairy but in case you were looking for a precise answer, there you go. Feel free to ask.