This is the new Mists of Pandaria PvE Protection Warrior thread. I will try to maintain a collection of the findings in the first post, but discussion is highly encouraged, as well as pointing out mistakes. Still, the usual EJ forum rules apply, so don't ask questions that have been answered by the FAQ, etc.

updated for 5.2

Before MoP, tanks could only excel at holding aggro and picking up adds as they had very few options to actively decrease the damage taken. Fortunately, this was changed. By using the right buttons, we can now decrease our damage taken, similar to how a damage dealer can increase his damage done: Frequent usage of Shield Slam/Revenge gives us rage, which can be used for Shield Block/Shield Barrier which decrease the damage taken. Additionally, this makes hit and expertise interesting stats.

Rotation
0. Keep Weakened Blows up (using Thunderclap every 30 seconds)
1. Shield Slam
2. Revenge
3. Shout
4. Devastate
5*. Spend Rage on Shield Block/Shield Barrier (or Heroic Strike/Cleave if your only get very moderate damage)
6*. Use defensive cooldowns against spike damage.

Core Abilities
Shield Slam (SS) can be used every 6 seconds. It hits hard, is for free, and generates a lot of rage.

Revenge can be used every 9 seconds. It cleaves up to three targets, is free, and generates some rage. CD will be reset by dodging or parrying.

Devastate has no CD. It applies the sunder armor effect, is for free and has a chance to reset SS.

Thunderclap has a 6 second CD. It applies the weakened blows debuff, hits all target in melee range, and applies a dot.

Shield Block has a 9 second CD, lasts 6 seconds, and has two charges. It costs 60 rage and increases the chance to block by 100%.

Shield Barrier lasts 6 seconds. It costs 20-60 rage and provides an absorb shield on you depending on your attack power. (or stamina if your AP is rather low)

Three Roll Attack Table
With MoP, the attack table system got changed to a three roll for tanks:

1. MISS or DODGE or PARRY or HIT. (modified by dodge / parry of the player)
2. if HIT: BLOCK or HIT. (modified by block rating (deprecated) and mastery)
3. if BLOCK: CRITICAL BLOCK or BLOCK. (modified by mastery)

A missed, parried, or dodged attack deals 0 damage. A blocked attack deals 70% damage. A critically blocked attack deals 40% damage.

Critical blocks also give rage and increase our damage done.

Absorb effects are applied after all the three rolls.

Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier
Shield Block seems to be designed for melee heavy fights and Shield Barrier for more magic damage heavy fights. Yet, they turn out a little bit different.

Theck's and my own work (based on simcraft) both show that Shield Barrier reduces melee damage taken ~10% more than Shield Block if you are getting hit very regularly, i.e., your vengeance level is on par with the incoming damage. However, if you are just started tanking the boss, or he does a very strong melee attack only once in a while, shield block will be your choice directly before the attack. This spread between the abilities will continue to grow with better gear as Shield Barrier gets better with more avoidance whereas Shield Block gets worse. Blizzard nerfed Shield Barrier in 5.2 (by 10%) to put them on equal footing on entry level gear, but better gear shows the lead of Shield Barrier again.

Apart from the total amount of damage taken, the spikiness is another major factor. Shield Block will smoothen it out every 6 of 9 seconds, but leave us "naked" the other 3. Shield Barrier will reduce damage to (up to) 0 damage while it is up. Thus, as Theck pointed out, using 60 rage shield barriers will give a spikier damage income. However, we can also use shield barrier for only 20-60 rage and thus flatten the incoming damage. Using this, they seem to be rather similar.

Lastly, with high vengeance stacks we are doing considerable damage. Especially when using Glyph of Heavy Repercussions, using Shield Block gives you ~10% more dps due to more critical blocks,i.e., more rage and higher enrage uptime, making it a viable choice if damage done is of more concern than damage taken.

Conclusively: It depends :-) Start of the fight or seldom melee spike damage, use Shield Block before the spike.
Heavy magic damage or just regular damage, use shield barrier. Moderate damage: use Shield Block for more damage done.

And do not forget, we can also gather rage and use both.


Stats
Parry and Dodge rating both increase your chance to not take damage at all. They also allow for more revenge usage. As dodge is having stronger diminishing returns than parry for warriors, parry should be favored. The optimal ratio is between 2:1 and 3:1 depending on your avoidance stats.

Hit (up to 7.5%) and expertise (up to 15%) rating allow us to hit more often with our abilites, giving us more rage for Shield Block/Barrier, thus in turn reducing our damage taken.

Mastery rating increase our chance to block and our chance to critically block. The latter gives more rage and increases damage done via enrage.

Blizzard made a really good job at balancing the secondary stats: They all somehow reduce our damage taken and increase our damage done. Both simulationcraft and Theck's simulation show that they are all close together regarding damage taken with Hit/Expertise/Mastery being a little bit better. The value of mastery drops to the parry/dodge region if you are not using Shield Block.

This gives us the following priority:

1. hit (up to 7.5%, 2550)
2. expertise (up to 15%, 5100)
3. mastery (if you use SBlock frequently)
4. parry
5. dodge
6. mastery (if you use SBlock rarely)

The benefit of stamina is (once again) a debate on its own:

+ It increases effective health
+ It decreases *relative* damage taken more than secondary stats.
+ Less spiky damage income
- does not decrease damage taken at all.
- more healing needed (although higher health pools might enable more efficient healing)

So it depends on how hard bosses are hitting and how your healers can manage their mana:

If you are having more than enough stamina or your healers are running low on mana, you should favor secondary stats either by resocketing or at least switching trinkets.

If your healers are not always dry empty, I'd suggest to stack stamina.

Since MoP, the benefit of strength got greatly increased, it gives almost as much parry % (952 for 1%) as parry_rating (885 for 1%) does. This means that some of the DD-gear (hit/exp/strength) can turn out great. This also applies to trinkets, e.g., lessons of the darkmaster has EXP/STR on it and isn't too bad if you go for avoidance. However, socketing for strength shouldn't be done as secondary stats have double the amount on gems that primary stats. Lastly, strength increases our dps quite significantly and it sligthly increases Shield Barrier (as the non-buffed AP Bonus is ignored for Shield Barrier calculation).


Gear
With secondary stats being rather close, you only need to make sure that you do not pick too many dodge items. There are also some interesting hit/parry items which have reduced strength but increased secondary stats. But, if you take too many of them you will start reforging hit away and lose out opportunities to reforge parry.

Trinkets are looking interesting this time:

Raid: 502 / 522 / 535
dodge + mastery proc
Stamina + Absorb on Use
Exp + Self Heal proc on <35%
Mastery + Self Heal on Use

Valor: 522
Exp + Str Proc
Mastery + Dodge on Use

All trinkets are good at what they do apart from the Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire which is not proccing enough for warriors.

If you like reliability, I would suggest Soul Barrier + Jikuns Rising Winds.

Set Bonus:
The 2pc basically fakes a "kill" every ~30 seconds and gives us free VR or IVs. If we take a look at a SBar only warrior, he has the following HPS (from heals or absorbs)

0pc + IV: 26873 HPS
2pc + IV: 39691.8 HPS
2pc + VR: 35742.2 HPS

The 4pc is a ~6% rage increase which isn't too shabby and more importantly gives you this rage on demand.

Some overview for possible interesting gear. The usual warning about scalefactors only being applicable for a specific gearset (here it is a T15H set) still holds, but it should give a good first impression:

Using only Shield Barrier: Wowhead

Using Shield Bock on CD and Shield Barrier for extra rage: Wowhead

The scalefactors where generated using SimulationCraft (see my sig for pointers).

Enchants
River's song gives you up to two stacks of 1650 dodge rating for 7 secs. 4 (real) PPM
Dancing steel gives you 1450 strength for 12 secs. 2 (real) PPM

If you run the numbers, then River's song comes out slightly ahead of Dancing Steel in terms of damage taken, but it does not increase the dps (contrary to dancing steel), so it's up to you.

Consumables
Mountain potion reduces melee damage taken by ~5%. Mogu Power potion increases parry by less than 4%, but also gives a decent damage increase.

Talents & Glyphs
Both are rather situational and you can basically pick anything you like for an encounter.

Single-target dps: Heavy Repercussions (only with frequent SBlock usage) > Incite > Hold the Line
Glyph of Victory Rush gives a considerable heal increase if used with the 2pc bonus.

Please take a look at the boss specific suggestions in the next posts.

Off-Tanking and DPS
First of all, apart from gearing for hit/expertise we can't really do much about our dps as our rotation isn't too hard to execute. It is primarily determined by the attack power from vengeance and lets us do anything from 20k (0 AP) to ~120k dps (Sha of Fear 25 man heroic). You can opt to use heroic strike / execute instead of shield barrier / block in times of low tank damage. But in my opinion, if you can do this quite often, your raid should switch one healer with a dps, as healing doesn't seem to be a problem.

Secondly, raid encounters often enforce a tank switch using a debuff mechanic and leave the other tank confronted with the job of doing damage. For the first couple of seconds after a switch, you still benefit from vengeance and can do some serious damage. Afterwards expect 30-35k single-target dps even in good gear. As long as the main tank can sustain aggro you should still stick to defensive stance as it gives slightly more rage (and thus damage) than battle stance. However, you are not loosing much (< 5%) if you go for battle stance.

As an off-tank you should not use Heavy Repercussions / Hold the line. Incite is pretty good.


Change History
08.03.13 Version 1.5 updated for 5.2
22.11.12 Version 1.4.1 mastery is worst stat when only using SBar
04.11.12 Version 1.4 added some ideas for off-tanking and dps
25.10.12 Version 1.3 updated boss guides, updated weapon enchant section.
17.10.12 Version 1.2 update strength section (using the MoP Str-to-Parry conversion), added wowhead loot links based on a T14H gear set using simcraft.
16.10.12 Version 1.1 clarified stamina benefit. added optimal parry/dodge ratio.
15.10.12 Version 1.0


TLDR:
pick glyphs and talents situationally.
hit rating 2550, expertise~parry~mastery, stay away from dodge. (haste/crit are useless)
socket stamina / stamina plus mastery / stamina plus expertise
Hit buttons that light up.
Use Shield Block if your vengeance is not yet where it should be. Use Shield Barrier otherwise.

Contributors: theck, squishye, krennick, malevolencia

placeholder for T15 Boss information.

placeholder for T16 Boss information.

placeholder for T17 ? Boss information.

Good overview.

I disagree slightly with some of the conclusions about stamina - there is such a thing as health sufficiency after which stamina is of limited value. And since you likely reach sufficiency with one or two stamina trinkets and regemming and reforging is not something you can do on the fly I would recommend gemming, enchanting and reforging for secondary stats.

Also, do not disregard strength so quickly. Every 100 points of strength are worth something like 93/94 points of parry rating. That means the blue 463 plate pieces that are designed for tanking are worse for tanking than the balanced pieces that happen not to have haste or crit - a loss of of effective secondary stats.

Like helm: 216 str vs 174 secondaries. Well 216 str is approximately 200 parry rating, so you would lose 26 points in secondary tanking stats by going to the item that is designed for tanking. This is napkin-math style off the top of my head (and using a higher str piece which in this case has haste or crit - but for some slots pieces do exist without haste or crit), but the times I've checked it with actual pieces it's been the same way. I am not sure it's still true for the 489 epics but this message is certainly true - don't dismiss strength.

Just reading over this, I don't mean to sound nitpicky, but do you honestly recommend 15% Expertise in tank gear? Seems a little overkill don't you think? At least until maybe Heroic T14 at the earliest if we wanna still be able to have some avoidance and mastery. >_>;

Also, on the note of Talents specifically centric to Protection; what's your opinion on the final tier? Avatar seems like a decent survival cooldown due to the boost in rage generation, and it's also very nice for damage. Bloodbath is the choice for pure DPS and Storm Bolt hits like a truck.

Talents should be situationally chosen, as stated in the OP. Personally, I tend to prefer Avatar for pulling single-target boss encounters, if only to generate rage for initial shield blocks/barriers faster. It also comes in handy in just about every situation for the same reason. I like to use it on a tank swap, too, for generating a spot of extra threat.
I have not personally found a use for Bloodbath yet but I imagine it would come in handy in a fight that required kiting.
I have also gotten the most use out of Stormbolt when on add duty.

But obviously, YMMV.

Boss hitting a tank hard:

Gear + 1000 mastery: max hit for 50.3% HP, average hit 14.1% hp.
Gear + 2000 mastery: max hit for 50.3% HP, average hit 13.9% hp.
Gear + 1500 stamina: max hit for 47.7% HP, average hit 13.7% hp.

This means that not only the trinket slot (1000 mastery vs 1500 stamina) goes to stamina, but you also would like to socket stamina (2000 mastery vs 1500 stamina) if you are going to minimize *relative* damage taken.

Oh, quick macro for Dodge/Parry ratios that Waniou has in his Diminishing Returns thread on the WoW Forums:

Always be aware that I may be full of bullshit - my facts and data are interspersed with opinion. In the matter of strength I feel I'm on pretty solid ground tho.

At level 90 I used some +parry and +str food and judged how much more parry % (after diminishing returns) I got out of it as seen on my character sheet. Without concerning myself with exact numbers I concluded that 100 str was equal to about 95 parry rating. Then a day or two after I read some tank threads somewhere (here or tankspot most likely) where someone said that 1 str was worth 0.94 parry and someone else corrected him saying that according to the formulas (which I happily admit not knowing) it is more like 0.93 (with some nitpicky additional digits thrown in for fun and games)

And to revisit the stamina point - I'm not denying that higher stamina is less relative damage taken. This is only important if you are concerned about your health % at any given point. This is only really a critical bit if death (the magical 0%) is likely to occur. Higher stamina is also higher absolute damage taken - and when healer mana economy is taken into account that can be quite important.

If a fight goes thus that the tank rarely goes below half health as long as the healers have mana - the tank could arguably swap ALL stamina to hit/expertise/dodge/parry and become less of a drain on healer mana. It's true that it's death that we need to worry about - and the worst case scenario. But if the worst case scenario doesn't even get close to killing the tank, stamina is not necessary to stack. It is in fact worthless.

Edit: I did not "judge" - I calculated how much parry I got out of every point of str and parry rating and used that to judge the two stats against each other while ignoring diminishing returns.

Think that's the old model of str where it gave ~25% parry rating (plus some bonuses). Testing it now ingame by swapping between a str ring with parry and a str ring without, and then removing the ring slot entirely, I find that str is very close to parry now, about 95% rating from str as already stated.

For basic boss tips:

Stone Guard, never use shield block, shield barrier 100% as the dot is not blockable and does like 70%+ of the boss' dps

Feng, here the magic damage is high, but personally (on heroic) I found the damage intake smoother with using shield block nonetheless. I will admit I died both ways to some of his burst, but I did seem to die less often using shield block. Stacking some more stamina on this one is probably good for surviving the burst..

Gara'jal, it is possible to have shield block up for every single shadowy attack (assuming tanks rotate every ~minute when banished) and important that you do so. He uses it reliably, so whenever the timer is below 6seconds to the next shadowy attack it is safe to activate shield block. You should activate it as early as possible for each shadowy attack (as due to the 9sec cd, your usages will get later and later as the fight progresses). This assumes you have enough hit/exp to maintain rage generation ofc.

Spirit Kings, nothing really special. Melee dmg mainly so block > barrier for smoothing damage on the tank.

Elegon, try to have a big barrier (60 rage) ready for the breathes and adds exploding.

Will of the Emperor, shield block all the way. You should be able to pool rage and block-charges while doing the dance, and then have near 100% uptime on block when the boss is actually meleeing you.

Safeguard is imo the best talent from that tier for any boss with 2 tanks rotating, mass reflect rarely works on anything (Lei Shi? only, in beta, anyway..) and vigilance is just worse due to the much longer cd for not much dmg reduction gain.