Not sure how friendly you guys are to people asking questions about specs and what not, but I'm bored at work and figured it would hurt to ask. Was just curious about what spec and weapon choice your main tanks use for the higher end bosses in BWL and Rag. I know most say Quel is the best but are there any others like deathbringer or viskag that would be just as good? I also hear most people use a 31/5/15 build to tank Rag but is protection spec of 5/5/41 better for a guild taking on Rag for the first time? Thanks for any advice, or if you just make fun of me, thanks for the amusement of being ragged on, that is, if you do it well.

Our warriors use a variety of specs. We have some protection, some arms/fury, and some fury/whatever.

For ragnaros, your spec means very little, as most of his attacks are fire based. It's really all about your gear and positioning.

For weapons, we have a few warriors with quelserrar, and a couple with deathbringers. Swords generally go to rogues, though we have one or two with brutality blades. For those like me without an epic one hander, it's all about the good ol' timeworn mace.

yeah I'm sure he cares about WARRIOR specs Beef :rolleyes:

what

paladins

Defiance will make you an objectively superior tank in any situation where holding aggro is important, and with the untauntable bosses in BWL, those situations arise frequently. Fortunately, that's a standard part of the cookie-cutter 5/31/15 spec, so it leaves you with a lot of flexibility.

Before Shield Discipline was removed, I'd say that a heavy prot tank was clearly better at holding aggro and mitigating damage, but now with Shield Slam in its place, the picture is far more blurred. There are many viable specs, and player skill and gear probably matter more than talent spec.

CARLETON SPEC LOL

29/0/22

Weapon optional ^____^

:P

Also

My warrior is 35 arms 11 protection (up through last stand) and 5 fury. 35 arms gets me all my pvp goodies including improved hamstring and sword spec (human warrior +5 swords) I have more trouble holding agro in UBRS than MC because of rage generation, but as it has been said, there are untauntable mobs in BWL that us arms warriors have to work around. All in all, however, threat is capped, you can't keep your mt safe from losing agro by having him solo onyxia for the first 5% as you all well know. Knowing how to shield block + revenge is far more important than which weapon you use. Sunder armor keeps building hate after its capped in my experience so make sure that is always up and just swing away.

Concerate gets more hate than the super slam

I'm fairly certain this is false.

First off, Onyxia has a powerful deaggro that she does to the MT, which is skewing your results.

Second, I think that rather than threat being "capped," it decays at a certain rate. Someone who did 5000 damage a minute ago and has idled since then will have less threat than someone who did 5000 damage a second ago and idled for a minute before that.

I recently heard someone claim that Defiance only affected regular attacks, not special attacks such as sunder/revenge/shield bash/etc. While I've never done any empirical testing, I've always assumed it affected everything since otherwise it would be useless (autoattack only accounts for a tiny amount of a warrior's threat generation).

Can anyone confirm/deny this?

I think if a talent like that only included autoattack it would be a bug especially considering all of the addition rage givin by other protection talents. Is seams pretty obvious that blizzard wants to give plenty of rage to warriors get and keep agro. And they seam to be adding more bosses that can't be taunted to encourage warriors to explore other avenues of hate.

Avenues of Hate.. I like the ring of that.

Defiance definitely helps more than it would if it were just +15% to autoattack hate.

When your guild gets to Vaelastrasz, he provides ideal conditions for running aggro tests, though maybe it's not the best time in the world to be experimenting. Your tanks all have incredible rage (20/tick plus they're taking stupid amounts of damage) regardless whether or not they're tanking. So you can have a bunch of warriors with different specs and approaches to tanking fight for aggro, and the pecking order that results will be quite insightful.

Didn't you like yell at me not two days ago when I thought that aggro decayed?

Seconded.

I also have a question about your tanks gear, but I didnt want to start a new topic just to ask it. As for armor in MC, Onyx, and BWL do your tanks try to bust out the Stamina, Fire Resist, or Defense? We experimented lately with our tanks as we werent 100% satisfied with out MT's performance, and our MT now has gone pretty much all out +defense it seems to be working but i dont pay all that much attention. Would you guys suggest +def for MTs?

This is an impossible question and one asked all the time. You really need to tweak your equipment for the encounter and more particularly the attacks of the mob you are tanking. That said, you should have a variety of gear to achieve good levels of stamina, armor, defense and various resists. Many occasions in BWL you will want to combine a couple of these attributes and have respectable levels in both. Remember, you want to minimize the burst damage on your tanks - look for the sources of this burst damage and equip accordingly.

Yup. That can't be stressed enough. As a healer, I can say with 100% certainty that you want your tanks to do whatever is humanly possible to minimize burst damage.

At anytime we can keep a tank up if he's taking consistent damage. But when he gets smacked for a quick 5k, things can get ugly in a hurry.

The only thing i have to argue against this is take a warrior and a mage to a place with lower level elites (40-50ish) and have the warrior use sunder armor/revenge to get the mob to exactly 49% health. Then stop attacking, and let the mage do his worst. The mob SHOULD theoretically stay on the warrior, but it most certainly won't. This indicated to me that threat is capped, unless there is something else at work. The nurfed warriors have been saying this for months.

I was surprised when the testing done came out and said that there was no aggro decay or anything of that nature. I think it's instead possibly that there's some sort of multiplier: the more damage done by a single attack the higher the marginal hate per point of damage. For example, I'm pretty sure that a crit generates more hate than just 2xnormal damage. This could explain why a warriors 10 hits for 50 damage a pop would generate less threat than a mage's 1 500pt frostbolt. You could test it the same way as Anglakel's theory; have the mage do 1 test using rank 1 whatever, and another using the highest rank.