Tanking 5-man heroics for Badges of Triumph

[Soulbender]

The thing is, most 'new' warriors tend to only focus on maximizing their HP pools (stamina), whilst remaining def capped but at the expense of everything else.

This. A good tank needs avoidance (althought on heroics a big hp pool can replace it, but that won't work in ulduar, where bosses hit like trucks), and dps to make threat. And there are also rotations for tanks.

I understand the concept that any dps could make any tank look bad by never giving him a chance to build threat

it's important to "focus" the tank target and nuking only that one (or skull if he marked it). if you aoe like mad or just grab the nearest target, you gonna get it. That said, our MTs are aggro magnets, we're running heroics in less than 20 minutes without any issues atm

[saulverde]

A good tank needs avoidance (althought on heroics a big hp pool can replace it, but that won't work in ulduar, where bosses hit like trucks).

I would say it becomes more viable the harder the boss hits. For slow big hits you need to have the stam to survive an unlucky string, for quicker less damaging strikes avoidance rules the day.

[Kencaid]

warriors are my favourite single target tanks, but are not great heroic tanks.

And tank TPS is hugely variant on player ability and warriors tend to have higher skill caps compared to other classes, ESPECIALLY when it comes to aoe tanking which is a major part of heroics.

The whole TPS issue I feel can be applied to any class (worse for warriors regarding AOE dmg) as for some of my friends I can literally charge -> sweeping strikes -> bladestorm and not pull aggro (though i finish at 90% threat . The same can be said for many pug dpsers, I have run heroics with lots of ppl in ulduar-25man gear and I can beat them by 100-500dps, which is a little drastic considering I have only badge and heroic gear (I have also out dps'd them in raids as well, so its not just heroics).

We actually kicked a guildie from a ulduar raid yesterday b/c he was only puttint out 2-2.7k dps. He was also a arms warrior with the same gear level as myself, except I was hitting 4-5k.

[XtreO]

The other tanks are just easier to play from a TPS standpoint. This is especially true at mid-levels of gear. Warrior tanks rely on their gear much more than any of the other tanking classes when it comes to TPS. I mean, like a lot, lot more. I thought the differences between warr tanks and the others were much more shallow, but after seeing a friend of mine - a newly 80 DK tank keep aggro from 3k DPS in ToC normal with his 20.5k hp unbuffed (IE extremely bad gear), I realised how fucked up it is.

He is by no means an exceptional player, rather the kind that fucks up on Maly p3 because he forgets to use shield when targeted. Or fails at dancing on Heigan. Now the last part here I know 4/5s at least in this forum constantly die on, and yes, I did just call you a bad player. Now someone will probably tell me it's a narrow aspect of the game and blah blah balh. Whatever.

Point being, at mid levels of gear, the gear between normal instance gear and a slight number of HC epics and full raid gear, is pretty much void of any kind of TPS stats, because you'll be struggling with the transition between HC and raids. The new lowtier raid gear got little defense rating, which forces you in some circumstances to gem for it. When entering raids you will also need much more avoidance and HP than in HCs, something midlevel gear tanks strive to aquire. This as a consequense leads to sacrificing TPS stats like expertise and hit. They could gem for it, but nay, the slots will be taken up with avoidance, def and stam. Also the fact that little midtier gear got usefull TPS stats.

As most tanks these days got midlevel gear, the previously mentioned is the reason behind the low TPS of many warr tanks. And of course too often a bad rotation.

I assume also you spesifically have been running ToC HC with mediocre warr tanks. ToC requires either a great healer or a great tank, as well as good DPS. If you got an ok healer, great tank and ok DPS you should too be fine. But once all of the roles' fullfilment in the group turns to ok, you are fucked. One at least needs to be great, or at least all of them good. I've run ToC a lot on both my warr tank and priest healer. If I got an ok healer and ok DPS, we do fine when I am on my tank. My priest however is not great, but merely ok. If either tank or DPS falls down to ok too, we'll probably wipe because the DPS is too low or the tank is taking too much damage.

[Mahirn]

Everything requires understanding of the class to be good at. To effectively tank heroics all you need is knowledge of your skills, the encounters, and a little thought on who you brought with you to the instance. Knowing the encounters will let you focus more on which dps is targeting which mob. AOE pulls are so simple if you just stay aware. Thunderclap to shockwave, then pay attention to what is going down the fastest. Cycling abilities, taunting. There shouldn't be an excuse for losing aggro if you're playing correctly.

[Devro]

Coming from an ex-Prot Warrior (main spec) and a current Fury Warrior, I can say that you're just having bad luck. The first thing to check is the player's gear. If you don't see 85% or above in at least heroic epic tanking gear, the chances are, the player has not been level 80 for long enough and consequently does not have very much experience tanking groups or the player is an offspec tank and doesn't have much experience tanking anyways.

In both cases, avoid these people if you can. If you're the leader, kindly tell them that you don't think they are adequate for the job and that you need to replace them. Any main-spec Protection warrior that does not raid should have almost all ilvl 200 epics or better. Hell, in most cases, the tank should have at least 1 piece, if not both pieces of Conqueror Siegebreaker armor that is available from Conquest badges, plus Heroic and regular ToC (5 man) gear (heck, I've gotten enough Conquest badges already to get all four of the DPS and Tanking T8.5 token pieces).

What makes Prot Warriors so difficult compared to DK and Paladin tanks is that their AoE threat is much worse compared to the other two. Sure, Thunderclap is much better than it was before (I've been a raiding Prot Warrrior from retail until WOTLK) and Shockwave has been added, but it is no match to Consecration and Death and Decay. This lack of AoE versatility make it harder for the 'noobies' to as effective at Prot Warrior tanking.

[Astray]

Warrior-Tanks biggest weaknesses are the first 5 seconds and semidirected burst damage.
Against single targets or after some seconds, threat is quite safe, so the situations where warrior tanks loose aggro are almost always similar.

-Sweeping strikes -> his cleave got mob 2 and 3, my sweepings hit mob 4 -> aggro
-Bladestorm at the beginning -> he missed 2 times in a row -> well~ ouch!

Second thing i noticed:
very few warrior tanks use the Cleave-Glyph, which is extraordinary valuable in heroics, especially when the warrior is worse euipped than his damaging group members.
Thunderclap alone can't hold aggro against Whirlwind, DivineStorm, Bladestorm and other "heavy hit against 4 targets" abilitys.

The golden rule of behavior when a warrior is tanking:
Just give him 4 seconds. Charge, Thunderclap, Shockwave.
Worst thing you can do is pull aggro after charge, pull the mobs out of shockwaves area and steal his rage by getting the mobs attacks.

(God, how i hate people who do that -.- )

[Rhinox]

Very few warriors use the cleave glyph because it's useless when raiding. And our biggest weakness is just aoe threat. We can easily frontload a bunch with a shockwave and tclap off the bat but after that we've got to single target threat each individual mob if we hope to keep it off the group, and if it's a large aoe pack then good fucking luck keeping it off everyone.

Most tanks are warriors, so it only makes sense you find more bad warrior tanks than say druids, paladins or dks.

[Mikah]

Most warrior tanks are simply fury warriors who decided to tank because its the easiest way to find a group. And playing a warrior tank is actually somewhat difficult vs DKs bears and pallys.

This.

Most likely it's not about gear, gems, enchants or being "hit capped/expertise capped".

Any warrior with a decent starting gear set (heroics/crafted epics) should be fine to tank any heroics.

Seeing that the LFG thingy is filled with DPSers, no wonders that any classes able to tank will try to go.

When I join the LFG on my DK as tank, I get invited within seconds. And sometimes for instances I didn't even signed up!

[payce]

Knowing when and on what mob to use certain cooldowns is key.

Sunder a mob, switch.
Shieldslam a mob, switch.
Revenge a mob, switch.

Cleave constantly. TC on cooldown. Constantly chain pull. Never waste a GCD. Always shield bash/spell reflect. Intervene if taunt isn't available, in fact do it whenever - people will fucking think you're pro. Shattering throw on bloodlusts. Battleshout doesn't hurt. Always burn access rage on cleaves/heroic strikes. Throw out demo shouts when you're feeling bored.

I love tanking and knowing that I set the pace of how slow/fast a heroic/raid goes.

[FFLover]

Cleave glyph isnt useless during raiding,i am wearing it with glyph of blocking and of revenge and it was best combination for me for holding aggro.Even in ulduar there is a lot of trash to be aoed and in heroics is complete blessing.I usually change that glyph however on General Vezax,when we are going for 10man hardmode.
Two weeks ago,my friend borrowed me his account because he went to Croatia,so i can complete him heroic daily for triumphs.His toon is feral druid,almost full 226 gear,so i went some heroics with him.On my warrior i usually stack stamina (yeah,hp noob i am ),36,6 k hp unbuffed,and this druid stacked stamina even more,42,5k hp unbuffed,so it is probably fair comparsion.To be honest,with druid i had much bigger problem with aoe threat,because damn swipe does not do enough aggro to hold off aoe of some better dpses.With warrior shockwave and thunderclap i do not have these problems.You can say i was not skilled with feral tank,but i have druid alt with whom i tanked whole tbc and wolk until half of ulduar.
TLR Warrior aoe threat is not so bad,but warrior really is hardest tanking class,so it is not complete surprise that normal pug players(Warriors with titansteel items,no guild,weird name)fail at it.I suggest you find a paladin tank,you cannot go wrong with that

[Xianth]

Warrior-Tanks biggest weaknesses are the first 5 seconds and semidirected burst damage.
Against single targets or after some seconds, threat is quite safe, so the situations where warrior tanks loose aggro are almost always similar.

-Sweeping strikes -> his cleave got mob 2 and 3, my sweepings hit mob 4 -> aggro
-Bladestorm at the beginning -> he missed 2 times in a row -> well~ ouch!

Second thing i noticed:
very few warrior tanks use the Cleave-Glyph, which is extraordinary valuable in heroics, especially when the warrior is worse euipped than his damaging group members.
Thunderclap alone can't hold aggro against Whirlwind, DivineStorm, Bladestorm and other "heavy hit against 4 targets" abilitys.

The golden rule of behavior when a warrior is tanking:
Just give him 4 seconds. Charge, Thunderclap, Shockwave.
Worst thing you can do is pull aggro after charge, pull the mobs out of shockwaves area and steal his rage by getting the mobs attacks.

(God, how i hate people who do that -.- )

Glyph of cleave is a great glyph and i used it when i dinged 80 for heroics and naxx, but sadly if you are raiding hard modes and extra cleave target isnt anywhere near as important as a 2 min SW and LS. Of course, i'd recommend the cleave glyph to any tank who is gearing up in heroics and other situations where you are multi mob tanking regularly although i'd prefer it if it was baked into a talent somewhere in the prot tree :P.

[sword44]

I see a large variety of answers here so I'm going to go ahead and give my two cents as well.

I rolled my warrior to tank in vanilla wow and have been doing it as mainspec since that time and I've learned a lot of intricacies of warrior tanking over that time. I can honestly say that a big part of the problem is warrior AoE tanking generating less threat than other classes...well, except druids, I don't have much experience tanking alongside them.

I've raided alongside lesser geared to equally geared pallys and dks and in large AoE packs I'll generally hold 1-2 mobs max despite my best efforts to do better especially when often being the better geared tank. Usually this leads to me accepting the role of main target tank and I simply focus more on that to allow our dps to burn it quicker as my single target threat is comparable to the other classes.

Now to move this to the heroic plane rather than the raiding plane, where you're the only tank and you need to hold everything it really comes down to much more than simply a matter of stam/threat stats and knowing your rotation but it really involves everything from stats to rotation to glyphs and even knowing the capabilities of the other classes that comprise the group.

At lower gear levels when doing heroics I used the the glyphs for Sunder Armor and Cleave to get the most AoE threat I could, but it still requires a lot of tab targetting to spam off devastates to keep threat over a full on AoE assault. As my gear has progressed I've gone away from using glyphs to supplement my AoE threat but there are still a lot of things to consider.

There really isn't a rotation for AoE tanking as a warrior other than spamming Thunder Clap and Shockwave whenever possible so it really comes down to knowing the group makeup at this point. Understanding which person in the group is going to be pushing the AoE threat barrier to know who to put Vigilance on is key. In most cases I'll tag an Arms warrior over say a mage...I know seems kinda counter-intuitive due to mages being able to hit all mobs vs the arms warrior hitting only a few but the warrior will generally pull aggro faster than the mage due to Bladestorm.

Then we get back to the all important tab targetting. You have to be quick to see which mobs need extra attention as you're tabbing through and which can wait til your next round for the extra threat, and having both true AoE (mages, locks etc) and more single target oriented DPS (fury wars, rets) complicates matters some because you need to maintain higher threat on the focus target for the singlers while also maintaining high enough threat for the AoE'ers and in most cases thunderclap and shockwave aren't going to be enough for the AoE'ers.

Also, at all times you need to be vigilant of the random mob that inevitably will break free and be ready to taunt/threat-spam it.

All said and done, I would wager the biggest discrepancy between a good warrior tank and a bad warrior tank is simply experience. There's a lot to know and a lot of little things to figure out before you can excel at warrior AoE tanking. It truly is one of the harder jobs in the game from what I've experienced but it's also a lot of fun if you ask me.

[krúgor]

aoe tanking as a warrior is easy imo(been playing prot warr for 2 years) it depends on your dps, if they dont attack your target most likely they will get aggro, i always to dps to set focus on me, about a week or 2 ago i was solo tanking 25naxx trash, stupid pally tank being master looter

[Iniquity]

Most warrior tanks are simply fury warriors who decided to tank because its the easiest way to find a group. And playing a warrior tank is actually somewhat difficult vs DKs bears and pallys.

Hehe actually, I disagree heavily on that.
I myself have 3 of those classes. Quit the bs talk about it being harder to tank as a warrior.

Usually play feral dps, and my paladin and warrior are both tanks. However i've tanked enough on my druid to have a valid experience out of raidtanking / heroic.

I will probably get alot alot alot of flame for this but personally, I think druid is the easiest class to tank with. Not saying it's better than others, it's just easier.

But in all fairness, no tank is hard to play. However both paladin and warrior are equally easy to tank with.
Quit the "harder than any other tank" bs. It's all bs. It just isn't harder to tank as a warrior than other classes.
Only no-skilled newbie warriors would claim it is.
Doesn't matter if paladins threat have been somewhat overtuned. Doesn't matter at all, it's still NOT harder to tank as a warrior. Never have I noticed my warrior tank to be inferior in any way. Threat have never been an issue. And even if it have been / is alittle bit lower than other tanks, it doesn't make it a problem nor does it make warriors harder to play.

[Murrey]

But in all fairness, no tank is hard to play. However both paladin and warrior are equally easy to tank with.
Quit the "harder than any other tank" bs. It's all bs. It just isn't harder to tank as a warrior than other classes.
Only no-skilled newbie warriors would claim it is.
Doesn't matter if paladins threat have been somewhat overtuned. Doesn't matter at all, it's still NOT harder to tank as a warrior. Never have I noticed my warrior tank to be inferior in any way. Threat have never been an issue. And even if it have been / is alittle bit lower than other tanks, it doesn't make it a problem nor does it make warriors harder to play.

AoE-Threat wasn't an issue for me either till dps got 226+ gear. Nowadays I often have to taunt a mob back to me that wasn't hit by cleave. I usually run with a Deep-Wounds build, ~22 Expertise, ~200 Hit. Sure I could go for more TPS gear or glyph for tps, but I don't have the luxury of multiple gear sets. I find it kinda hard to believe that a warrior never has threat issues on aoe-packs, or are you talking about undergeared dps / pre t8 raids?

If you define tank-complexity by the number of different skills they have to use to hold aggro against good DPSer then warriors could be on the first spot. I am honestly not sure though, cause I don't have endgame experience with the other tank classes. I would be surprised however If all four tanking classes would be roughtly equal in that category.

[Deleted]

Hehe actually, I disagree heavily on that.
I myself have 3 of those classes. Quit the bs talk about it being harder to tank as a warrior.

Usually play feral dps, and my paladin and warrior are both tanks. However i've tanked enough on my druid to have a valid experience out of raidtanking / heroic.

I will probably get alot alot alot of flame for this but personally, I think druid is the easiest class to tank with. Not saying it's better than others, it's just easier.

But in all fairness, no tank is hard to play. However both paladin and warrior are equally easy to tank with.
Quit the "harder than any other tank" bs. It's all bs. It just isn't harder to tank as a warrior than other classes.
Only no-skilled newbie warriors would claim it is.
Doesn't matter if paladins threat have been somewhat overtuned. Doesn't matter at all, it's still NOT harder to tank as a warrior. Never have I noticed my warrior tank to be inferior in any way. Threat have never been an issue. And even if it have been / is alittle bit lower than other tanks, it doesn't make it a problem nor does it make warriors harder to play.

Warrior tanking is not harder than tanking as a DK, paladin, or druid, you're right about that.

But what warrior tanking needs more than any other non healing role in WoW is attention. You've got the ragebar, and while druids have that too theirs isn't even nearly as unstable (warriors are also 90% dependant on incoming damage for rage). You've got Sword and Board, and partially complex priority system which is caused by abilities having vastly diffrent cooldowns, but I imagine everyone sits with that, 'cept druids.

I understand it can be rather shit being told that your main class requires less attention to play than another, but sadly that's the case sometimes. Warrior tanks simply have more shit going on in combat and more things to consider than any other tank.

[Roberek]

Will try to make this not much of a flamefest as possible, but I can see if some people will percieve it as that. Please dont, I am just wondering of the influx of what seems to be bad warrior tanks in the game today.

With the new Triumph badge grind I have begun running the 5 man daily heroics, boring as it may be. I try to grab a guild tank, but when not possible I pug them, which is in general not a problem on my server as it has a great deal of wellgeared ppl.(EU-Silvermoon)

I have however noticed the extreme difference in tanks, especifically warrior tanks. I would go as far as say that 50 % of the warriortanks in PuG's are really bad, I mean truly bad in regards of tps. So my initial thought was that -Ok, warrior tanks are probably struggling at the moment. But then again, when you run with one of the tanks from your friendslist, or a guildtank, they do not have that problem. Their tps is just fine

I check the speccs, and most if not all are running 15/5/51, both the good and the bad ones. So I ruled that out.

So my question is, is this a trend the warriorcommunity has noticed ? Is there an influx of bad warriors in the game lately ? I talk to the guild tanks and they say that they feel the mechanics have been simplified if anything, especially in comparison with TBC mechanics.

Multiple factors

-- DPS doesn't take heroics seriously, so they end up targeting the wrong target and pulling aggro, their own fault
-- Most heroic groups just want to chain pull, which pretty much relies on aoe tanking, and warriors are the worst at aoe tanking due to our CDs
-- Because of the way that warriors are set up, we will no perform as well as other classes TPS wise in heroic seeing as we get all of our rage from damage taken and rage starvation happens often with well geared tanks in heroics because were just dodging and parrying everything.

[Ceara]

Its funny how people run into complete polar opposite problems.

I am a Warrior tank and my biggest issue is finding DPS that can out DPS me, the tank. I usually pull 1600-1900 in a 5 man, and its amazing how many DPS can't even put out that much. Heck, I was second in my VoA the other day

[XtreO]

Its funny how people run into complete polar opposite problems.

I am a Warrior tank and my biggest issue is finding DPS that can out DPS me, the tank. I usually pull 1600-1900 in a 5 man, and its amazing how many DPS can't even put out that much. Heck, I was second in my VoA the other day

That got me thinking of a solution to the lack of TPS stats on low level raid gear.

I'd advice any warriors tanking HCs with aggro problems to get a block set. The AoE threat is supreme and you get insane shield slams. I always wear my block gear to HCs, in which I usually put out 1800-2300 DPS and often more on bosses.

THAT must be the problem with many mid-geared warr tanks, they get no expertise and hit but don't look for viable things (viable in a HC at any rate!) to get in the meantime.