Edgewalker

Onslaught Legguards
Binds when picked up
Legs Plate
1597 Armor
+24 Agility
+78 Stamina
Red Socket
Socket Bonus: +3 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Classes: Warrior
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases defense rating by 40 (17 @ L70).
Equip: Increases your parry rating by 41 (1.73% @ L70).
Equip: Increases the block value of your shield by 42.


Praetorian's Legguards
Binds when picked up
Legs Plate
1544 Armor
+75 Stamina
Yellow Socket
Yellow Socket
Red Socket
Socket Bonus: +6 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 35 (1.85% @ L70).
Equip: Increases your parry rating by 43 (1.82% @ L70).
Equip: Improves hit rating by 18 (1.14% @ L70).


Onslaught Vs. Praetorian's (Assuming +15 Stamina in every socket)

-27 Stamina (~300 life w/kings and vitality)
-.37 DOdge (Factoring Agility and Defense, the dodge rating difference becomes much lower)
+.6 Parry
+.73 Crit (From Agility)
+155 Armor
+.68% Chance to be missed
+.68% Chance to Block
+.42 block value


Overall you get 125 armor, .91% avoidance, .73% crit, and 42 block value (not to mention set bonuses and looks ^^) at the cost of 27 stamina and 1.15% hit rating. Praetorian's could be considered better as you are just reaching Akama, or for an offtank, but for a MT with hit capped in other slots Onslaught are a definite giant mitigation and agro upgrade.

 

◊ Malan

Quigon, in your LaTeX code you can throw a \text { } around your variables so that they look more like normal font.

 

• Nite_Moogle

Sweet Christmas you were not lying about the size. Thank you so much for posting this.

Typos & etc:
Section IV:
Hit = Haste here.

IV b
Everything that is 4.4% should be 5.6% -- the math is inverted on this section.

This should reuse the wording from the first mention of expertise.

 

Tauftamir

Quigon - you seem to have the Tier 5 Destroyer token almost exclusively in the gear listing instead of the Tier 6 Onslaught token?

Is this an oversight?

For example, the [Onslaught Legguards] should be a superior choice to [Destroyer Legguards] in your maximum threat setup, unless you are specifically looking to make use of the Tier 5 Bonuses.

Personally I find that wearing gear a Tier below the current standard isn't necessary even in a situation where you want to produce maximum threat, and having a list of items as an alternative in the same manner as you have a range of choices for max-mitigation would be the most prudent.

Off topic - this thread has been an excellent read. Great work.

 

◊ Malan

Also, Prat does not change the unit nameplates, you are thinking of the mod Aloft available at wowace.

 

Kedjim

Thank you for taking the time to write all of this stuff out. My little Prot warrior to-be appreciates it. I read some things in here that I've not seen detailed elsewhere.


Just a couple of nitpicks to help you polish it:

The Weapon based racials give 5 Expertise (for a total of 1.25% dodge/parry reduction), not expertise rating. In Section IV, you have the human ones listed correctly, but the orc one says "expertise rating."


Section XIV: Master Healthstones only have a 2 minute cooldown (even better!), though using a Nightmare Seed might place them on the 3 minute cooldown, I'm not entirely sure how that works.

 

◊ Quigon

Thanks for all the suggestions so far, I will implement each when I get home this afternoon. I know there were a few editing issues - I put this together over the last 24 hours.

 

Nyfe

Excellent job, thanks a lot for putting this together.

 

Dralmoo

This is fantastic, thanks for posting.

 

Edgewalker

Not answering for him, but in general, the agro gain per set piece (helm is the exception) is greater on Tier 5 than Tier 6. Throwing in the 2 piece and 4 piece bonuses, with the mitigation downgrade (which is absolutely needed at the higher end of gear for some bosses) for more rage production, and T5 becomes a great alternate set to max agro on fights like Najentus or ROS or Winterchill. In no way though would I see anyone using T5 for Illidan/Shahraz etc. when they have the current highest Tier equivalent. Think of it as using DPS gear to tank in heroics when you are grouped with arcane mages and rogues with both warglaives simply so you have rage to keep up with their DPS.

 

rayijin

Some item errors?

It seems you confused the block rating on it with defense - in other words, this item has 0% avoidance and is not useful for a max mitigation set.

Also, the shield choice for a "threat" set is baffling to me. As I understand it, [Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart] is the best TPS shield, due to its hit. I also would venture a guess that the additional stamina and defense on it outweighs the armor mitigation and block value of the [Vengeful Gladiator's Shield Wall]. Or you could socket it for even more hit.

Item theorycrafting: You made the same mistake I did in my initial item theorycrafting: Do not neglect 30% more shield block value from talents, as well as 10% more armor. For instance, a ring with 44 block value * 1.3 = 57 effective block value. Small perhaps, but notable. A ring with 400 armor really has 440 effective armor, and it goes even higher if you factor in inspiration.

Final note: I value hit and expertise most for a maximum threat set, especially for trash tanking. I have a DST and while the sustained TPS output is good, consistent "snap" threat at the start of a pull or fight is typically the most important.

 

Healranktwo

Amazing guide Quigon. It's about time someone compiled everything into a nice little post! Some comments though...

Being a psycho about threat, I do think a 12/5/44 talent build is better for threat. You can stand to lose IDS (and the 1 point in UBW) and get Imp Tclap/Anger management. Of course with either way, there's pro and cons, and either side can be argued for really. I also made a mock-set of the threat set you posted, and I do think 4 piece tier 6 is still the way to go. Timing shield slams with 2 piece t5 (very possible, since I did this for a while =P) is kinda impractical for the most part, so it really comes down to the 4 piece t5 bonus vs the 4 piece t6 bonus. I'm sure the 4 piece t5 bonus comes out on top, but a t6 threat set has the added value of more health/avoidance/bigger shield slams. There is also the factor of how much TPS you would actually need to output before anymore is useless of course.

Negivacat - Character - World of Warcraft - WoWDigger - check out the TPS set vs Default set - TPS set being the t5 threat set and default being the t6 one.

I'm surprised you ranked the Phoenix-Wing Cloak ahead of Slikk's. 6 defense rating/2 dodge rating vs 238 armor seems like a no brainer to me for mitigation. It seems like you like stam more than armor from the guide (though you did an amazing coverage on what armor does for a tank). While I agree stam is good, I do think that - like all things - stam isn't better in certain cases like 10 stam vs 240 armor on gloves. You're right though, everyone has a different opinion on what they need as a tank.

One last thing

Though everyone should know what hit rating does, the way you worded this sounds like hit only works for taunts =P

Great guide otherwise, thanks for taking the time to post this up.

 

Gijfegox

Very nice guide indeed, but a section with something like "Macros - How to set up your key bindings" would be nice. I've allways wondered how "good" tanks set up their key bindings and what macros they actually use, in regards to end-game raiding ofcause.

 

rayijin

Actually, when talking about a "surviving a worst case scenario" situation, stamina and armor have a direct equivalence, dependant on your current gear and the a boss hitting for purely or primarily physical damage. This can be calculated out and has nothing to do with an opinion.

For a tauren warrior with 18k armor and 21.5k health (raid buffed), 1 stamina = 16.91 armor in terms of increasing Time to Live. Hence, for said warrior a 240 armor patch is far and away clearly superior to 10 stamina in terms of both mitigation/saving healer mana and surviving the "big hits" or TTL.

The only time 10 stamina would be better is a fight in which heavy magical damage is part of the "tank-killing" burst.

 

Thartis

Very nice. A section to think about is how to increase others damage.
An example is on high physical attacks that are not in need of constant potion use
An old elixer of Gift of Arthas. Small tricks in understand that if haveing high High shadow
shadow priest group with instead if useing a stone I will use Shadow oil for uncontrolled threat hit.
I may just be crazy though, you are all the smart ones.

 

Ashhoof

Very helpful guide. I did see a minor wording thing in section about Crushing Blows

I think you mean "mitigation" there since you're talking about crushing blow immunity via avoidance.

 

◊ Quigon

Thank you everyone for your corrections, I should be nearly caught up.

No, the original is correct, double check what is being said there.

I will reword the title of each table to be Boss Vs Player.
This is the boss's table against you - your miss rate goes down 0.6% because the boss is attacking you.
Another way to put this, if your character sheet displayed versus level 73 opponents, everything would be reduced as such... instead it shows versus level 70 opponents.

 

◊ Quigon

I did not include Praetorian's Legguards originally because they are in-fact, less mitigation.
However, they are a well balanced item, and are available well before T6 leggings. They also provide much more HP, which some tanks may find useful. Therefore I included these as an "OR" option, but after T6 Leggings for the reasons posted at the top of this page. I did spend time debating this item initially.

 

◊ Quigon

Yes, I also want to add a section on how to DPS as a protection warrior.
I will probably enlist the help of Edgewalker for this section, as he is much better at doing DPS as a prot warrior than I am. I know the mathematical approach, but practicality always usurps theory.

As to the suggestion regarding macros. I only use 3 myself.

If any other tanks here have useful macros they would like to contribute, I would gladly add those to this guide.

 

◊ Quigon

That is not what you're giving up. In order to gain 3/3 TClap and Anger management you need to give up 3 points from protection (1 comes for free from fury).

This means giving up a point in imp taunt (1/2 usually),
and giving up 2 points in 1HWS. 4% less damage taken with your main handed weapon.

I'm not convinced that this will be made up for with TC (which you shouldn't be doing anyway in a max aggro situation), or anger management.

At the end of the day I'd think the practical use of improved taunt would overcome any potential gains, but the question is really, is 4% damage from 1HWS superior to anger management? My guess is yes, but I will leave that for another time.

As for Aggro gear:
You can tank anything in full tier 5, or full tier 6.
The point of the aggressive warrior section was to get tanks thinking about ways they can improve on their threat per second. One way to do that, is to literally become a worse tank. As your avoidance and mitigation improves, your threat generation gets worse. Tier 5 offers fantastic bonuses to threat, while retaining a lot of hit and decent tanking stats.

Now the reality is, especially with expertise changes, you can treat full tier 6 with a few ring/trinket/expertise swapouts as your "aggro set" and likely not lose aggro on bosses... trash may be another story if you're going all out with legendary pairs aplenty.

I sometimes end up tanking trash and aggro sensitive bosses in my "Avoidance" gear, and get away fine, but it is night and day when changing back into the aggro-tier 5 setup. It simply takes less work, less thought, less effort - which can be translated as assisting some tanks that have threat issues overcome them... they have a larger margin for success. Many tanks who will use this guide have significant threat problems, and that is a good set of gear to aim for in order to help on that problem.

 

stampy

I already made a failed attempt to update the dips warrior spreadsheet for protties -- everything went fine until I needed to add a column in the ability rotations for devastate, which seemed to have some horrible, horrible effects on the entirely-relative-anchored spreadsheet. I'll pack up a version with added (1h spec, focused rage, defiance for 2.3.2, etc), except for the WW/6xDev cycle that gave me such headaches.

While its obviously not a real dps spec, the dps ability of a prot warrior in good fury gear isn't as miserable as most think... though I am quite curious what the right way to gear/gem is, since the high percentage of devastate damage likely devalues hit (past 9%) and and attack power (50% scaling on devastate).

 

◊ Penguin

I've found that this macro:
/cast [target=targettarget, help] Intervene
to be really handy on Hyjal trash, when used in conjunction with Tinytip's option to show ToT on the mouse-over tooltip.


I would think that Teron would be a bad choice to parse the parry mechanic just because he turns to Incinerate and Shadow of Doom the raid so often, and when he does do those casts he's unable to dodge or parry attacks.

Edit:

You're right, it's really not that bad at all. According to Recount I was at 800dps on Kaz'rogal as pure prot. Used my fury set which has a decent amount of T6 gear and DST. Used Syphon on the MH, Rising on the OH, stayed in Battle to keep debuffs up, an just spammed Dev/HS and Overpower.

 

• Nite_Moogle