moodle

BTW The Sun Eater(from Heroic Mech) is the best mitigation weapon that I have seen.

You lose 7 agil and 9 stam but you gain 1 def point and 18 dodge.

You also gain about 11dps which would help out your threat issues if your using HS efficiently.

 

Zanthor

I've found that my best threat gen comes as many above have mentioned, stick with shield slam/revenge if they are up, sunder x 5 when you can and devastate after that.

I sit right around 40% dodge/parry combined in my tanking gear, this can lead to very streaky rage generation at the start of most fights... one thing I've found in karazhan is that most trash doesn't require that much evasion. I swap out two or three big dodge pieces for some +hit gear with similar stam/armor on it (Namely my cloak/neck and a ring) goes a long ways to giving me enough rage at the start of the fight, and on trash doesn't matter at all... I also ensure that I always have shield block up for revenge, and spam heroic strike if the rage is there for it.

 

Raydin

It was mentioned in a previous post, but I'd like to reiterate that swapping gear out for different situations can make a huge difference in threat generation. I use Wardrobe to switch between two different sets of tank gear. One prioritizes shield block value, parry, and + hit, the other stacks stamina and dodge rating. The first set I can use for most of Karazhan, the second is for Nightbane/Prince and Gruul's. I used to be a huge fan of parry, but it takes so much +rating to get a decent percentage that you can only bother to beef that up when mitigation isn't a concern. Play with different items in different slots, and see what works for you.

 

stampy

starting from the full rage-rich situation where you can shield slam every cooldown, keep shield block up, spam a sunder/devastate every global cooldown, and heroic strike every swing:

the first to go needs to be heroic strike. heroic strike sucks down rage like nobodys business, and is by far your lowest threat per rage ability.

next up is actually shield block... dont use shield block to proc revenge! 15 rage per 4 seconds is a LOT. shield block is for mitigation... if you are fighting a mob who isnt 73 (eg, not a full 15% crushing blow chance, and smaller crushes to boot), shield block is a luxury. unless of course they really hit like trains... in which case, youve probably got plenty of rage anyways. if you are staying over 50% and your healers arent sucking wind on mana without shield block, its a waste of rage. mobs need to earn shield block... dont pander to the weak ones. youre a warrior, damnit.

if you cant pop revenge reasonably often without using shield block, take a look at your gear. see where you can amplify your defense, block rating, and parry rating (ouch! parry rating hurts the item budget); even if its just on a trash-fighting kit. even with pretty nominal levels, you should be blocking and parrying plenty... unless perhaps youve totally whored yourself out for dodge.

next up, get rid of the sunder/devastates. it can feel strange to let a global cooldown pass you by, but at that point you are looking to max out threat per abilities. dont sunder/devastate if it means you arent going to have the rage for shield slam when it comes up.

finally, use dirty tricks. if the mob isnt taunt and stun immune, let some dps overnuke and get a bunch of aggro while you just autoattack and save rage.... drop a conc blow on it and let the dps continue to nuke the crap out of it. just before the concussion blow wears off, taunt/shield slam/revenge... youve just stolen all your #1 dpser's threat for free, thrown a couple thousand aggro on top, and opened up the 10%/30% margin by getting the top threat as high as possible instead of just keeping pace. if you were smart enough to roll tauren, a war stomp before the conc can make this unstoppable.

most importantly, know your raid.
know when youre low on aggro, and you need to sacrifice mitigation and debuffs (demo shout, sunders) to max out your aggro.
know when you have aggro locked down, and use abilities that do more damage (shield slam yes, revenge no) and keep you safer (shiled block, clap, demo shout) to preserve raid mana and keep moving fast.
know when {shadow priest/warlock/silly druid dpsing in bear} is going to pull aggro no matter what you do, and let them... let them steal aggro while you save up rage, then steal their aggro back for free with a well timed taunt.
if your raid is playing sloppy, know who you need to save, know who is expendable, and know who can save themselves if theyd only pay attention.
dont ever taunt off a hunter.
intervene with a targettarget macro can save a life while crowd control is being refreshed, without breaking the sheep/shackle/trap if youre late... if you changed targets to use it, autoattack is already off.
dont ever, ever, ever use abilities on a tauntable mob when youre just going to have to taunt it soon anyways.

anyone who thinks a set ability rotation or a certain set of stat priorities is best will never be as good a tank as they could be. anyone who doesnt have disarm on their bar or hasnt stunned an off mob while building initial threat on the focus isnt being creative enough to be a really great tank.

to be honest, im scared that eventually druid's scaling threat is going to scale past where we can even pretend to keep pace with our mostly static abilities. but, at least we have enough toys to keep it interesting. always be active, always be adaptable, always look for a better way. itll keep your tanking effective, and it will keep it from getting boring.

 

• Darkmyst

You can do it with 2 different macros + manually keeping HS lite when rage was aplenty. It's hard to integrate HS into these macros because you either never get to it (putting it at the end) or you have to lengthen the reset time (meaning you won't be getting the maximum number of Shield Block/Revenge cycles in).

/castsequence reset=5/shift Shield Block, Revenge, Shield Slam, Sunder Armor

/castsequence reset=5/shift Shield Block, Revenge, Shield Slam, Devastate


Use the first one until 5 sunders are up and then use the second macro after that.

The reset=5/shift means that the macro will reset to the first ability every 5 seconds - the cool down on SB/revenge - since you never want to miss a SB/Revenge cycle if you are looking to maximize TPS. Or you can manually reset the timer by holding down <SHIFT> when hitting your macro key.

Edit: And no these aren't perfect. There is no guareentee that you will have Revenge light in the GC time after the initial SB. But you can lengthen the reset timer to what works for you. To that end you could use the following variation that takes the reset timer out and only has a manual reset set ability. In this case, unless you reset the macro it will cycle thourhg abilities - skipping ones on cooldown - until it gets to the last one and the resets back to the first one. But you may still end upwith less than optimal ability sequences in some situations. You could end up with SB, SS, Sunder, Sunder, SB, SS, Sunder from the macro below if you get unlucky and revenge isn't lit the next time you hit the macro after it fires SB.

/castsequence reset=shift Shield Block, Revenge, Shield Slam, Sunder Armor

 

• Sirloin

Once you have a good game-plan of what to use when in high-rage and low-rage situations, then take a look at your UI and keybindings; there are a lot of extra threat-performance that can be gained or lost from the quality of your setup.

Warrior main tanks have a flurry of different abilities that need to be used in careful sequence to maximize threat and mitigation, so here are some tips.

1. Key bindings: Physically separate your globals from your non-globals to avoid a setup that would every require the same finger to press two buttons simultaneously. Example: I have my important abilities mapped to the keys right around WASD, so my main keys are Q and E. I'm going to set Ring Finger for Heroic Strike and Index Finger for globals: I put heroic strike on Q and then the most common GCDs on E and the surrounding keys: 3,4 and R This ensures that no single finger ever needs to hit two buttons at once. In this setup, the "2" key works very well for Shield Block. If you use CTRL or SHIFT to supplement these (which I do) make sure these bindings are used for things you don't do often (like disarm) because you never want to weave ctrl/shift into a standard rotation. Any ability you use more than once every 10 sec should NOT need a modifier key.

2. Unit frames. Pick a good UI that puts the information you need where you want to see it. Whether its a HUD, or Perl, or AGUF, find something that puts the important stuff front and center. Less time spent scanning the screen means more time spent focusing on rage and cooldowns

3. Get your cooldowns nice and visible. This goes along with #2. Warriors have tons of short-duration cooldowns to keep track of. Other than the global, you've got Shield Block, Shield Slam, Revenge, Disarm, ZRage, Taunt, not to mention your buffs/debuffs like CShout/Dshout/Tclap. This is a lot of keep track of, and the default UI does a terrible job. Personally, I make an extra block of buttons (I use Trinity) that appear in defensive stance and put them right near the middle of the screen. I make these buttons BIG (like 1" square) and only include my important short cooldowns, along with a numeric counter. So now I have these huge buttons that I can watch for the Global Cooldown, and to see my Shield Block, Revenge, and Shield Slam timers, along with longer stuff like Disarm and ZRage.

My Steam Profile (Aether) Cherish the difference between 58° and 59°.

 

stampy

by the way... a reset=5 timer in castsequences does NOT reset the sequence 5 seconds after the first ability. it resets it 5 seconds after the last succesful action in the sequence is performed. so... this will cast those 4 abilities, in the exact order they are listed, hanging for any cooldowns in between.

this will hang between shield block and revenge, when revenge is not yet active. if someone stuns your target, this may hang for up to 5 seconds, and you will almost definitely lose aggro, as well as expose yourself to crushing blows. as useless as tanking this way is, its the closest this macro ever comes to working as intended.

after the sunder armor, you will usually find yourself wasting at least one GCD. this will vary by the interplay of the differing revenge and shield slam cooldowns.

if you are lucky enough to have revenge active every time it comes up on the macro, you are separating every shield block cast by a shield slam. this means that best case, you are leaving yourself open to crushing blows 20% of the time.

noise patterns will develop between the cooldowns, meaning that you will frequently have 2 global cooldowns go by completely wasted.

you have failed at tanking. if you have taken down any real mobs using this macro, congratulate your healers for saving you when you should be dead, and laugh at your dps for not being able to pull aggro off of this awful awful rotation.

one button tanking sucked pretty bad before 2.0. after 2.0 its astonishingly pathetic. if you want to mash one button to tank, please roll a druid (no offense to druids, im sure you guys would love some more abilities were blizzard to give em to ya).

on behalf of good warriors everywhere, you are hereby fired. i weep for your raids.

(edit)
actually, with the shift-modifier reset, i suppose i have to assume you get shield block back up whenever its necessary. but any miss or dodge after the shield block goes off means youre standing around doing nothing waiting for mob to take a swing and activate revenge. and if revenge is up immediately, youre going to be standing around waiting for shield slam to be ready. regardless, you can easily be cranking out 15% more threat by actually playing the game instead of watching TV and mashing a button.

 

zork

in raid situations and with the latest rage buffs a tanks runs on 100rage very fast and it is not easy to get rid of this in a optimal way.

what you have to understand ist that there are 3 kinds of specials that will soak rage that can be casted at once.

- sunder, revenge, shield slam, devastate
- shield block
- heroic

heroic is on the next swing timer, while block has no global cooldown. the other abilities are on 1.5sec global cooldown.

if you have excessive rage you need to do your best to keep all this 3 things running. using macros helps but using optimal keybindings is key imo. you need to be aware when a ability is ready, how much rage you have and what to do now.

BLOG [ZIB] _ GUILD [TDMOG] _ INTERFACE [ROTHUI] _ CHAR [ROTHAR]

 

Ayaro

Something people fail to mention is that shield block costs rage, The single most important thing you should do as a tank is manage your rage bar effectively and not just spam ability's in a pre determined fashion as it's not always the best most effective way.

For most trash in karazhan swap gear around a little, Stick some +hit/+crit gear in, Tanking with a feral druid? take a agility pot and stick a stone on your weapon and your looking at 23% or more crit with raid buffs in full tank gear.

 

Mem

Some short questions since I am in a pretty similar situation as the OP - I rerolled and hit 70 like 10 days ago.

1. How big is the difference between a prot and a non prot spec in terms of TPS? I often see pretty huge figures I can only dream about (granted, running only normal mode instances seldomly fill your rage bar in a sufficient way )
2. I am sitting at about 52 % amor mitigation, 480 Defense, 11,7 k HP and a little bit of additional block/dodge (though my emphasis is clearly on stacking HP). Presuming I respec to Prot, is this sufficient to tank Heroics as well as to MT a new Kara group? (Armory will show my farm stuff unfortunately, otherwise I would have linked my profile there).

 

Punscho

1: Just with the defiance talent you deal 15% more threat, and shield slam is the best aggro skill available. The difference is rather big if you dress up for mitigation.

2: Heroics isn't that hard to tank, bring cc so you just have to tank one mob at a time, or maybe 2. Some mobs do hit for ridiculous amounts but they are getting nerfed next patch. For just heroics I used a 11/11/39 spec for control and rage efficiency. You get cheap skills, piercing howl and imp demo shout. Your gear should probably be alright for Karazhan, it's not really hard.

 

Huthuthike

1. I don't honestly know, since I haven't tanked as non-prot since 2.0 came out, but I would say you gain about 40-50% more threat from being prot spec. I really do not think it is viable to MT as a non-prot warrior past curator or so. Nightbane, and Prince are going to present major issues for your aggro gen, and that's not to speak for their burst damage, and the mitigation you lose from not being prot.

2. You stats are good enough to MT all of kara except Nightbane and Prince. You can tank those two with consumables though. I'm assuming you will cross the 490 def mark with anticipation? Otherwise forgot what I just said. I really can't speak for heroics as I don't run those too often.

 

Mem

Thanks a lot for the quick responses. I will cross 490 def indeed with Anticipation, else I wouldn't think about tanking Kara anyways As I said, I will respec once we walk into these instances since I only went to a non prot spec for repgrinds and questing for cash.
Also I don't anticipate seeing the Prince or even Nightbane for at least 3-4 weeks (and if I'm proven wrong, Titans and armor pots will probably help to bridge the gap I guess).

CC will be our main problem in terms of heroics since my core team is pretty hybrid heavy (moonkin, shaman, holy priest, me and x - all of them being rerollers )

 

Frag

I'm unconvinced that threat is an issue for nightbane or prince.

First let's examine Nightbane:

This fight is anything but a DPS race, people are in no real rush to kill him, outside the landings the ground phases are extremely stable. As the tank, you are probably the only person avoiding fear (stance dance or fear ward) giving you more time actually doing stuff to the boss, which helps you stay ahead. Finally, on the landings temselves - well no one should be doing anything, and you should be able to burst enough threat to lock him on landing regardless of spec.

Next let's examine Prince:

Prince only has a single special threat mechanic of note - he randomly enfeebles people who aren't at the top of his threat list, so the tank needs to be #1 on threat at all times. Now I'm confident a tank even without prot should be able to out-threat healers at Prince. So the only issue should be DPSers pulling ahead of the tank. Fortunately the Prince fight only becomes a DPS race for the last 30% of his life. Thus you simply need to have your DPS hold back and let the tank build enough of a threat buffer beforehand so that they can burst heavily for the last 30% (ideally they'd build the buffer in phase 1, so they can push through phase 2 at a reasonable pace, and go all out in phase 3.)

 

Dots

A lot of tanks only SB+HS on Nightbane when his fear cooldown is up, so you have your global cooldown ready for zerker rage. This really cuts into your threat gen. Not a big issue with Fear Ward I guess.

 

Ganelon

Sorry about the slightly off-topic question.

If rage was not a concern at all, what would be the highest threat cycle a warrior could use?

 

• Sirloin

Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Devastate, Repeat. Heroic Strike every swing. Shield Block every cooldown.

My Steam Profile (Aether) Cherish the difference between 58° and 59°.

 

• Arawethion

What ever happened to Shield Bash? I always used to tell tanks that it was one of the high threat-per-rage skill that should be used when it was up. Did that change at some point?

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

Ganelon

I take it that everything in there except for HS and Shield Block is affected by the global cooldown.

Also, everything except Shield Block benefits from Focused Rage?

 

Twid

You are correct in that Shield Bash is decent threat per rage. It is not however very high threat per second. It is lower TPS than Sunder. It's good for low threat situations. I like to Bloodrage + Shield Block, then shield bash Nightbane as he's landing at the start of the fight, because I am low on rage, but need to do something. Not hitting Shield Block at the start of the fight has led to some relatively quick wipes.

On some mobs you can use Shield Bash to daze the target, allowing Heroic Strike to deal more damage, and thus more threat, however from what I've observed, only a few trash mobs in Karazhan have not been immune to the daze once you get into a raid environment.

 

thebuddha

I was looking for a list of abilities with their respective threat values but I couldn't seem to find it.

Does anyone have said list?

 

Fellwraith

If you don't have shield slam, that means you are forced to rely on sunder for that cooldown and the threat differential between the two is significant. The value of defiance should be pretty self-evident.

I created a quick and dirty threat generation table back when I switched over to my warrior from playing my rogue. I had some free time before the easter holiday so I started making it a bit more user friendly after reading 158,984 posts on tanking AP, Devastate vs Sunder, etc.

It's still a work in process and I'm sure there's a few errors in it (formula or logic); however, I think most of the base formulas and mechanics are correct. The staple warrior tanking abilities are in there, but I haven't played around with shield bash + HS or a few other variables where I'm not clear on the mechanics. I also haven't put in a lot of the dps talents since the only people who really care about TPS are usually prot specs. The yellow fields are what you key in from your profile, the fields in white are all formula's driven off your assumptions. Feel free to play around with it and point out any errors you see.

Attached Files

TPS Worksheet.xls (40.5 KB, 92 views)

 

Twid

Nice job on the spreadsheet. If the devastate calculations are correct, it doesn't take too much in the way of AP for it to be better than sunder using a King's Defender. I'd be curious if one of the math majors could take a look at it though to double check it.

 

Schnappi

On Nightbane I use a "careful cycle" when his timer is up. I only use Shield Slam and Revenge. The removal of devastate makes me much calmer and less spammy on the buttons. That way I never find myself accidently spamming a gcd when the ground starts shaking. Make sure that DPS knows to chill out on ground phases.

 

Punscho

Fellwraith: When calculating your mainhand swing glancing damage you multiply it with the glancing penalty instead of 100%-penalty. So your white damage and windfury damage should be higher. I'm cross-checking it against my sheet