Because Paladins are the laziest buffers in the history of the world (read: Pally Power), make sure you equip yourself with the following macro so you don’t end up running into battle with Salvation on. I’m so glad they are getting rid of Blessing of Salvation in the expansion, you have no idea how happy that makes me.
/cast Bloodrage
/cancelaura Blessing of Salvation
/cancelaura Greater Blessing of Salvation
As an aside, I swear I’m not bitter about the last couple of raids. I swear it.
Popularity: 4% [?]
I finally got a chance last night to jump on the Beta and check out the changes to Thunder Clap. After grinding a couple of groups I figured I’d make it into a movie for you. I apologize for the poor quality and lack of music, I’m new to the video-making scene.
All of the little numbers you see are Damage Shield, Thunder Clap and Shockwave. On top of being very very impressed with those three abilities, the buff to Revenge’s damage had me hitting for 900 – 1100 non-crit. This is amazing!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Off-tanking during the Jan’alai fight in Zul’Aman can be a source of major frustration for Protection-specced Warriors. In an attempt to lower the collective blood pressure of all tanking warriors who are running into a brick wall with their faces here, let me share with you what has worked for me and my group countless times now. Fights like this make you want patch 3.0 to hurry up, doesn’t it?
The Gear
You’ll want to put on your threat gear, making sure you focus on hit rating, shield block rating and shield block value. This is a perfect time to pull out that Petrified Lichen Guard I talk about this this post, and make sure you have a Felsteel Shield Spike on it. The idea is you want the adds to smash their faces into your shield and get hit by the Shield Spike and the poison proc as much as possible while laying down copious amounts of Cleaves and Thunder Claps.
Fire resistance gear is not necessary assuming you have a priest or a paladin in your group dispelling the Flame Buffet debuff. I don’t know from experience if Blessing of Protection will drop the debuffs from you but I wouldn’t count on it since your paladins will probably be dropping the BOP on one of your AOEers when they inevitably pull aggro from you.
The Group
First and foremost: you’re going to want a patient group who don’t mind resetting the boss fight numerous times while you fall into your groove and who will work with you. Bring a Shaman for Earthbind Totem or a Hunter for Frost Trap. I suppose a Fury Warrior with Piercing Howl would work too; what you need is a class that can slow down a large group of mobs at one time.
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The Petrified Lichen Guard is one of those fantastic anomalies in the game; a low-level item with a proc so good that you should still have it in your bag even at T6-level content.
The reason for this is simple: it makes your life a lot easier as a Warrior when you’re trying to AOE tank. Since the fantastic changes such as Damage Shield and and removal of the target limitations to Thunder Clap aren’t yet in the game, this shield still has it’s place especially when you throw a Felsteel Shield Spike on it.
Places to use this shield:
- Magister’s Terrace. In the room with all of the mana worms if you slap on this baby and tell your group to wait until you’re at half health before doing anything you can watch and giggle mischievously as those Mages and Warlocks go crazy and can’t pull aggro off of you. Glorious!
- Zul’Aman. The Dragonhawks adds on Jan’alai can be frustrating as a warrior tank, no doubt about it. Use this shield along with a well-place Earthbind Totem or Frost Trap and it becomes much more manageable.
- Ata’mal Terrace. Nothing like some relaxing AOE grinding to keep you feeling refreshed. Equip this sucker when fighting the hordes of Demon Hunter Initiates and just stand there as they kill themselves. Loot and profit.
- Shattered Halls. There are some grossly exaggerated stories of how hard Shattered Halls is to tank, especially if you have a patient group and this baby on. Seriously try this out and you’ll see Shattered Halls in an entirely new light.
- Auchenai Crypts. This shield is especially useful on the large groups of mobs right before the last boss. Have your DPS burn down the big guy while you get some passive threat on the skeletons.
I’m sure I’m missing a ton of other places where you can use this shield but that’s a pretty good list and should show you the versatility of carrying the Lichen Guard around. To top off everything I’ve already said, this shield only requires Honored with Sporregar, 15 Glowcaps and level 62 to acquire! For the amount of use you’ll get out of this thing it’s basically free. Hell, the mats for the Felsteel Shield Spike will cost you more gold and time than the shield itself.
Here’s to hoping Blizzard has another shield like this one in the expansion!
Popularity: 3% [?]
If you’ve read my previous posts about the wild speculation revolving around Revenge and Thunder Clap, look no further for the rumors have been confirmed as fact!
Ghostwalker’s latest post leaves us sad at the change to Armored to the Teeth but oh so excited over the changes to Shield Slam, Revenge and, especially, Thunder Clap. Tanking in the expansion just keeps getting better and better than ever before.
Armored to the Teeth — Changed to AP, but amount reduced to 1 per 360 armor (to compensate for the loss of Blessings of Kings etc.). We implemented this talent for dps warriors and didn’t want it to feel like the ultimate Shield Block Value talent. It’s still good for Protection, just not as good. Death Knights will get the same treatment.
EDIT: I meant 2 AP : 360 per talent point. My point was that we understand 1 Str > 2 AP for warriors.
Farewell Armored to the Teeth, we barely knew you. Still great for the added AP for threat but falling way behind the golden talent it was before since it will no longer help us absorb more damage or raise our SBV.
Thunder Clap — Increase in threat generation. No target limit. Swipe gets the same treatment. With these changes, all 4 tank classes should be able to generate very respectable AE threat. Consecration is still a little higher in threat to account for Thunder Clap’s debuff.
You read that right: the target limit has been removed from Thunder Clap. I can almost hear the rejoicing of all tanking warriors around the globe. My macro for Challenging Shout that screams “I’M A PALADIN!” seems so ironic now.
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We were doing very well in Zul’Aman today trying to get our guild’s first bear mount (which we missed by about a minute I should add but that’s a different story) and after the timed event we went to Zul’Jin where I put on my DPS gear to break up the monotony that sometimes comes with tanking for months and months on end.
It was all going so very well during Phase One where he’s in the troll form when suddenly I was so rudely reminded of the primary reason I don’t like DPSing, and that would be the view…
Popularity: 3% [?]
I said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a good day to be a Protection-specced Warrior. Blizzard is giving us so much love that I hardly even notice the nerf to Vigilance.
This was a post about the Glyph of Resonating Power which in past builds was going to double the amount of targets Thunder Clap would hit from four to eight and I was excited but this is something else:
It’s not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that’s another topic.
Ghostcrawler here is telling us that it’s been changed to increase the radius of Thunder Clap and seems to be eluding to the fact that they are going to be removing the target limit from Thunder Clap. This is amazing news!
This next post is about the fact that no one seems to be using Revenge anymore in tanking rotations on the Beta servers. Apparently Devastate procs Sword and Board so much (and Revenge’s damage hasn’t been buff enough) that Revenge, previously our best threat-to-rage ability, is sitting around not being used. Blizzard solution:
We will probably add Revenge to S+B to make sure it gets used more (and might buff it’s AP coefficient a tad).
Revenge possibly proccing Sword and Board for even more Shield Slams!? Finally we’re going to be bashing stuff with our shield continually. I love it!
All of these changes are really making me excited to stay Protection-specced in the expansion.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Note: This post will be obsolete come the next beta build. Armored to the Teeth has been changed from Strength to Attack Power, making a decent threat talent but no longer giving any of the previous survivability bonuses.
With all of the changes coming out in 3.0 and the expansion, it’s a great time to be a protection warrior. We’ve gotten a lot of buffs, tons of our old problems are being solved and we’re getting some neat tricks to use.
Recently we’ve seen the addition of Armored to the Teeth which is a talent that all warriors, regardless of spec, are now drooling over. With 3/3 points in the talent, we’ll be getting three points of strength for every 400 points of armor. Since strength is going to be on all of our gear and nearly every single tanking ability will scale with attack power, this could mean huge gains for us protection-specced warriors!
If you look at my armory page you’ll notice I have 18,415 armor unbuffed. If you take 18,415 and divide by 400 you get 46 (rounded down), multiply that by three and you get 138 added strength! That’s more damage absorbed during a block, more attack power which means more threat and more damage output. Keep in mind this is only looking level 70 T5/T6 gear levels, T8 and T9 are going to get down-right ridiculous.
If we look at the armor difference between the Tankatronic Goggles and the new level 450 Engineering goggles, the Armored Titanium Goggles, you’ll see that there is a 71% armor increase between the two. Now, if we assume that this is the normal armor increase from level 70 gear to level 80 gear then we’ll see an approximate 236 stength assuming the warrior is in gear equivalent to what I’m wearing now.
Those are huge increases, it means great things and for a measly three talent points? Yes, please.
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Short answer: Because I was bored DPSing, our guild needed another tank and Polgera wanted me to level a character with her.
Long answer: When I started playing on Uldum I leveled up a Troll Hunter to 70, got him prepped for Karazhan and not long after Starfish Lovesong started making some serious headway there when the majority of us hadn’t done any raiding in the past. It was new and exciting, I was topping the DPS meters (althought Plastered and Sechymonkey made it hard enough to keep that title) and everyone was having a great time.
At the time Starfish Lovesong was a small guild and we didn’t have the numbers to move up into the realm of 25-man content. We did a number of Gruul and Magtheridon runs with other small guilds but it quickly became clear that our main tank was getting burnt out doing the same content over and over. Around this time I was getting bored raiding as a hunter because spamming a macro over and over just wasn’t that exciting to me anymore, I wanted to be more involved so I stepped up and rolled a new warrior.
The rest is history, really. I love being a tank because of it’s dynamic between everyone: the DPS, the other tanks and especially the healers. I love having to make split-second decisions on what abilities to use in what situations, it’s frightening and exciting the fact that 24 other people have put their virtual lives in my hands.
It sure as shit beats spamming “~” over and over until a boss dies. 
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I am frequently asked what I feel are “must have” tanking addons but it isn’t quite that simple. I use a number of addons during a raid or a five-man and they are pretty much broken down into two catagories: tanking and raid leading and some of the mods crossover between the two.
Without further adieu, here’s my list:
Eavesdrop – Eavesdrop is a combat log “replacement”, if you will. It is absolutely fantastic for seeing incoming damage, incoming heals and outgoing damage in a very simple and easy-to-read format. Gives you a nice little summary after a fight has completed and it stores information for a long time so you can go back and see why you died. Was it a series of crushing blows? Didn’t get heals? Someone step in Flame Wreath? Remember that you can shift-click on a line and paste it into raid chat. I cannot recommend this addon enough.
Omen – You all saw this one coming but I have to write it up anyway. Omen is a threat meter so you can see just how quickly the DPS is catching up and it’s perfect for fights like Void Reaver or Bloodboil where you need to know exactly where everyone’s threat is at the time. Do not log into WoW without this addon.
Popularity: 30% [?]