After making my first post in this series about tank gemming nearly two months ago entitled, “Tank Gemming in Wrath, my experiences“, I’ve decided it’s time for a little follow-up.

It all started when I got a whisper from a level one Tauren Warrior while I was getting ready for a three-drake Sartharion attempt.  This person was a tank from another server who is a reader of this blog and wanted to chat with me for a bit about tank gemming.  We finally met up a couple of days later on AIM and had a nice little discussion about that infamous yellow socket and he brought up an excellent point.

If you remember my first post I said that you should use +8 Defense +12 Stamina gems in yellow sockets since defense is so good for avoidance and mitigation.  This is well and good if you’re still looking for a little extra survivability when you’re first hitting T7 raid content in this wonderful expansion.

But…

What if you’re like some of us that are all epic’d out and have nearly all of the best-in-slot items?  Pick up some of these: Accurate Monarch Topaz.  That’s right, I just suggested a Hit and Expertise gem.  Why is this, you ask?  Well, just like how at the moment the cookie-cutter spec is all about damage and threat versus mitigation and Effective Health, why not gem that way too?  If you’re at the gear-level where I’m suggesting you do something like this you have almost all, if not all, of the raid content in this expansion on farm so why not do more damage and get through it faster?

I was looking through my WWS parses for Patchwerk and noticed that even with 158 hit raiting and 41 expertise, I have a 3.3% parry rate on Revenge, 3.8% miss rate on Heroic Strike, 3.3% parry on Shield Slam and a whopping 7% parry rate on Devastate.  That’s a lot of threat and damage that I could have added back into the mix at the loss of a tiny bit of stamina and a tiny bit of defense raiting.

Now, of course, I’m not saying that adding a couple of gems will complete negate all of those misses and parries but the added expertise and hit will certainly help.  If you’re like me you have one (maybe two) yellow slots in all of your gear so this won’t break your bank if you follow this advice, but you just might find yourself doing a little more damage and making a little more threat then your fellow tanks.

The Bottom Line

Remember: the more damage you do, the more threat you put out and the faster a boss dies. It would behoove you to do all that you can to assist your raid in downing your content.

As an aside, while we are on the subject of Hit and Expertise, check out Vene’s post “Expertise is always better than Hit“.  It’s an excellent read and I highly recommend it.

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Since the expansion has come out there has been little to no discussion about the speed of tanking weapons other then between some of tanks in my guild and myself.  In the Burning Crusade your choice was a fast weapon or nothing else; no slow one-handed weapons with tanking stats dropped.  In Wrath of the Lich King we have a multitude of slow tanking weapon choices: there is the Crescent of Brooding Fury or the Infantry Assault Blade or even Broken Promise, all of which are 2.5 or 2.6 speed which has been completely unheard of in the days of TBC.

I’ve done a little math and some theorycrafting, and here are my findings.

• Heroic Strike’s bonus damage does not scale with weapon speed. While your white swing will hit harder, do more damage and thus threat, the extra damage from Heroic Strike Rank 13 is still only 495.  Doing a little math here means that an average Heroic Strike with Broken Promise is roughly 1034* and with Slayer of the Lifeless is around 785*, which is a different of about 24%.  Seems like Broken Promise is the winner until you factor in that Heroic Strike eats up your next white swing, making it so that Slayer of the Lifeless hits 40% more often and therefore 40% more Heroic Strikes.
• The faster the weapon, the more you get out of Judgement of Light. The amount of healing received from Judgement of Light is the same whether you use a 3.8 speed two-hander or dual-wield 1.5 speed daggers; JoL procs on hits.  It is safe to assume then that the faster your weapon the more often you will be proccing JoL.  More healing is good.
• Heroic Strike is still a rage dump. If you have over 40 rage, which in Wrath is often, use Heroic Strike.  With a slower weapon you run the risk of your HS swing coming slower then incoming damage and incoming rage.  Remember that any rage over 100 is wasted damage and threat!
• What about bigger Devastates? Devastate is a waste of a global cooldown if you’re trying to put out maximum damage (remember damage = threat) unless you are refreshing Sunders. Otherwise, use Concussion Blow or Shockwave.  If those are on cooldown, use Devastate to try to get some Sword and Board procs.

My verdict then?  Faster weapons win out, hands down.  Even if a faster weapon were to generate a little less threat, I would take one for the bonus healing recieved from Judgement of Light.

Not to mention that Slayer wins out of Broken Promise because it looks like a sword, not a dragon’s penis.

*Note: These numbers are before buffs and stats like Strength or AP.  I’m also completely discounting the other stats on both of these swords, I am merely using them as examples for speed and damage and since they are found in rougly the same tier of raiding.

Update: It figures that after I write this long tirade, I get Broken Promise instead of Slayer of the Lifeless.  The World of Warcraft gods are cruel and evil.

Popularity: 38% [?]

With the advent of patch 3.0 and the upcoming expansion, no doubt everyone reading this is well aware that the way Warriors have been tanking has been completely turned on it’s head.  I went from putting out around 1200 to 1300 TPS on a boss to around 3000 TPS pretty quick and I’m sure most of you have seen a similar increase.  Our “oh crap” buttons are on lower cooldowns, our talents are fun and exciting, our gemming choices are actually going to be choices and our AOE abilities have been buffed to the moon.  That’s all well and good but the problem facing many is this: how do you use all of these new abilities to their maximum potential?

Single-target Rotation

There really isn’t a way to say, “do this, then this, then this” anymore since everything a tank does now is based entirely on circumstances.  I know in many ways this has always been the case but it’s never been like that more than it is now.  That said, your priorities should always be:

• Shield Slam, including Sword and Board procs. If Shield Slam is up, use it.  No excuses.  This ability does the most damage and puts out the most threat of any move in our threat arsenal.  Learn it, live it, love it, use it.  Often.
• Revenge. If Revenge is up and Shield Slam is on cooldown, use Revenge.  Revenge costs only two rage with Focused Rage talented and does a ton of damage which means tons of threat.  If you have Glyph of Revenge (and you should) you will also use Heroic Strike immediately after Revenge.  In fact, to make sure you never miss a Heroic Strike I recommend using this macro which I blatantly stole from Kadomi who stole it from someone over at Veneretio’s site, TankingTips.com:

/castsequence reset=2 Revenge, !Heroic Strike

• Devastate. If Shield Slam and Revenge are cooling down, start throwing out Devastates.  Make sure you use
• Shield Block. I don’t use this necessarily every cooldown, but it’s pretty close.  I want to make sure that I’m using it when Shield Slam is available, otherwise I’ve wasted precious seconds where I could have used another Shield Slam or a Sword and Board proc to push out even more threat.  Shield Block is especially useful to use at the beginning of a pull so that your DPS can lay into your target right away.
• Shield Bash. If you have two points in Gag Order your Shield Bash increases the damage your Shield Slam does to a target by 10%.  That’s like having the T6 4-piece set bonus with the push of a button.  Try to throw this up early in a fight to get maximum use out of it and don’t worry about it affecting your rotation because Shield Bash is off of the global cooldown now!

Multi-target Rotation

Here we are as warriors, no target limit on Thunder Clap and with our cool new ability Shockwave.  This means we can do instances in the same way that only Protection paladins used to be in the past – with absolutely no crowd control.  That isn’t to say it was impossible, I’ve done a dungeon without crowd control plenty of times and I’m sure most of you have too; the difference is that now it’s fun and it’s manageable.

• Charge. This step is actually optional and not recommended in a sitation where you could aggro further groups but man is it fun.
• Thunder Clap. You want to lay out a Thunder Clap immediately to get a handle on the mobs and to get that cooldown ticking away.
• Shockwave. Pile the mobs up in front of you and give ‘em a Shockwave to the face.
• Cleave. Cleave repeatedly, over and over until the cooldown is down for…
• Thunder Clap. At this point, you rinse and repeat until everything is dead.

Don’t forget you have other abilities you can be using during this time as well!  Use Shield Block to make Damage Shield hit harder, throw out Shield Slams and Devastates as well.  Above all else, always be doing something to maximize your threat.

Note: If you woud like to take a look at a more in-depth video about pulling, look no further than the Video Pulling Guide by Ciderhelm of TankSpot.

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