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.

Excellent job, thanks a lot for putting this together.

This is fantastic, thanks for posting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.