I am almost 100% certain MS,BT and SS share cooldown with each other.

Actually, it's not. There's sufficient evidence to suggest that any "instant" attack is a two-roll system - including a warrior's instant attacks.

See also: Melee Combat Mechanics



I've actually been passing on our collar of the pit lord drops. That neck really seems like a feral piece to me, so both of our bears have gotten it. They have much fewer options for expertise gear, and that really is the focus of that neck. The only good reason for me to take that neck is for stamina fights and to give me some weapon flexibility (items like the blade of savagery suddenly become an option when you are expertise capped).

I'm also inclined to use Felstrength legplates as a utility piece over Praetorian legguards. The gem slot color combination is better for Sunwell and it has over 1% more avoidance.

For all you warriors who want to be the best that you can be. This is an excellent starting guide.
I was in the process of finishing up my prot war when I came across this guide.

Few things I would like to add. Warriors if you are just starting out and wanting to do heroics.
Get your defense above 490! Never should you have defense below this. So you are uncrittable.

Then stack your stamina. If you have to take items like the gladiators plate shoulders from pvp. DO SO!
You can stick 2 sta gems in it, plus enhance it with a shoulder aldor / scryer chant.. then you know what?
It's almost as good ( in sta terms ) as some epics shoulders you'll find later down the road.

Now obviously, if you haven't figured it out. Take the tanking loot! If you don't know whether it's an upgrade here is an easy way to decide. Ask yourself these questions.

1) Will this armor help in my overall avoidance, my overall stamina, my overall TPS.
2) If any of those questions is Yes., Take the darned loot and figure out different configurations that will allow for versatility.

The reasons I urge you to stack your stamina, and stay around 490 defense, is that a really good healer will regenerate enough mana back by the time you actually need more heals. Plus, don't you want to be able to take the biggest hit possible and still live? I have found that using these few simple steps will allow for your gear to be complimentary enough to do just about anything.

Other than gear, stick with this guide's TPS charts because that is exactly my rotation for around 1k tps in raids.
A good warrior will listen to this guide, and eventually the raid will have to catch you in TPS which is great for dpsers.


Pryd from Silvermoon

If you ever have questions in game, and you are on my server. Check my armory, holler at me, mail me questions.
I'm one of the best tanks I know, ( not becuz of the guide ) but the damn guide is 100% right and it helped me become an even better tank. For those that made this guide possible, Thank you for your hard work and insight.

Actually, if you're just tanking heroics, less than 490 defense is fine, and if you have resilience on your gear (i.e. the much espoused Gladiator Shoulders) you can run with even less than 475. It's fairly rare you find level 73 mobs in Heroics, and most trash pulls are 70-71.

That's not entirely true. Being *able* to do so, sure, but at a fairly hefty cost for giving up the latter talents in the tree. Sure, when deep protection consisted of general hamfistedness like Shield Discipline, it was most definitely possible to tank with a 31/5/15 spec even at the highest tier. You still gave up a bit to do it, but it wasn't entirely out of the question. But the very second they added Shield Slam it became instantly better to spec deep prot than anything else, even if only for its place in the threat lineup at the time adding a much needed rage sink -- not to mention the very high threat associated with it.

That is a false statement.

Sheild Slam was a big joke for a long time.
BWL patch 1.6 'New Talent: Shield Slam - Slam the target with your shield, causing damage and has a 50% chance to dispel 1 magic effect on the target. Also causes a moderate amount of threat.'
ZG patch 1.7 'Shield Slam - Threat caused increased.'
Naxx patch 1.11 'Shield Slam: This ability has received a redesign. It now costs 20 rage to use and the damage it does is modified by your shield block value. However, the base damage has been reduced. It generates more threat per rage and more damage per rage than it did previously.'

It takes a lot of time for developers to move things around, but also they need realistic tank feedback, with real facts not personal preferences.

Same as Devastate was a joke in first patches, but it became improved much faster, to the point where it worked as Mutilate/Stormstrike does, which is too powerfull.

As a last note, 31/5/15 was not the favored hybrid MT build. x/31+/15+ fury builds worked best for PvE. Everything was done to maximize PvE tanking experience, no MT at that time even thought about respeccing 2-3 times/week to play some pvp, or get a more pvp hybrid build.
I'm unable to find a talent tree for 1.6 version, and it would prove much more than my words.
The strength of fury-prot hybrid builds was that for 15-20points in prot, you get 5 Shield spec, 1-3 improved shield, 5 Toughness, 5 Anticipation, Last stand. Only thing to miss was 1h spec, but at that time most threat came from innate value of skills, not from damage. Fury gave Deathwish, Flurry and Bloodthirst.

What you get by such builds is freedom of choices. As long as you don't want everything from all aspects of WoW in 1 build, it offered a good tanking/dps experience.

Deep fury was entirely useless to tanking, 90% of the talents that would increase your threat/damage were done so off of stats that you didn't stack or purposefully seeked out to reduce (flurry/enrage). Shield Slam was added around the same time they revamped the latter portion of the Fury tree, I think in that patch 1.6 in fact, and when Bloodthirst was entirely revisioned into the AP-based attack it is now, it became even more worthless to tanking in the fact that you have a piss poor amount of AP as a tank. 31/5/15 was the standard build in the era of Shield Discipline since you got Mortal Strike and Sword Spec. The release talents, as it were -- World of Warcraft News, Trailers, Screenshots, Previews, Reviews, Guides -- World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Vault

The point of the whole issue, though, wasn't that it was better, or more fun if you will, to run with a 31/5/15 spec than 14/5/32 or something, but rather that speccing protection sucked some hard balls for quite awhile in regards to everything. Anyway, even as late as Naxx's release I had warriors telling me they could survive just fine with 31/5/15 up to Twin Emps or early Naxx or something, and it always made me kinda chuckle inside. Sure you could, but I wouldn't want to be your DPS.

I could make the argument that deep arms didn't do much for tanking either. At least deathwish was situationally useful. You could use it to climb the threat table quickly if you weren't actively tanking (Huhu, Broodlord, green dragons) or you could use it when you got feared and zerker rage was still on cooldown (provided your healers were on the ball).

The whole point of going 31/5/15 or x/31+/15+ wasn't for threat. It was to be able to do meaningful dps when you weren't tanking (ie so you could grind, pvp, kill stuff in the raid when you weren't asked to tank, etc.) Once they fixed bloodthirst and several other talents in the fury tree, it became the best PVE dps tree - if you had the gear. If you didn't have a lot of drops out of AQ or you were more PVP focused, you usually went with the mortal strike build because it had lower gear requirements. The set gear from AQ40 had a number of hybrid stats on it that made for a pretty decent tanking/dps suit if you were fury. That's ancient history at this point though.


I think having shield slam and defiance on every warrior does ease things quite a bit for anyone who isn't tanking 25 man raid content. It's not a complete return to the days when no one spec'd deep protection, but it does ease the need for low dps 5 man groups to have their tank be full protection. I think you'll still run into some scaling issues if you try to do it late game in Lich King, as DPS usually outscales our relatively static threat generation and you won't have any of the efficiency talents to make your life easier (less damage on shield slam, everything costs 3 more rage, no rage from dodge/parry, no aoe stun/threat ability, etc.) DPS has probably scaled up to about 3x what it was pre-TBC and threat generation abilities haven't kept pace, if Lich King comes anywhere near that, you're going to need protection tree talents to hold aggro against well-geared dps. Even with AP scalars on a bunch of our abilities, I doubt it will be enough to keep pace.

I said why 31/5/15 was viewed as an acceptable tanking build pre-Shield Slam (aka pre-BWL) -- you kept, or even gained, all the threat from deep protection and remained useful outside of raids while only sacrificing Last Stand and an extra charge on Shield Block. Speccing into fury as a main tank was selfish, at best, and while you may have been able to do it, I still wouldn't want to be your DPS.

Either that, or much like late in Vanilla, we'll be able to keep pace too well, essentially generating an unreachable amount of threat once you cap out hit/expertise. I guarantee we still won't stack AP on our gear, especially if it nets us less threat per itemization point than any other class. Any way you slice it though, it's definitely not an ideal situation.

Maybe my memory is getting dull, but I thought crushing blows still existed way back then as well. Any time there's a potential for crushing, there's nothing "only" about the extra charge on Shield Block. Even back then, Imp Shield Block and Defiance were the two "must haves" in the tree for tanking anything important.

Well, there wasn't a whole lot of 'important' back then. You had Molten Core. Some guilds cleared Molten Core in roughly 3 hours during that time, and were sidelined basically for the rest of the week. Inside Molten Core, there wasn't a whole heck of a lot that hit hard, and the one guy who did didn't crush as far as I can recall (don't quote me on that, though). Defiance is included in the build.

So if i'm reading this right its selfish to make a fury hybrid tank that can dps well in raids and in the normal world, but not selfish to make an arms hybrid tank in order to pvp when outside the raid?

That's some hefty bias.

Which tree you specced into mainly as a hybrid tank is largely irrelevant as the main point was that the lower tiers of protection just weren't worth speccing into until very late in the vanilla raid game.

Actually the old incarnation of Deathwish reduced your resistances as its main drawback so it was extremely useful in any encounter with fear, such as nef/onyxia, as you had guaranteed fear break for a ridiculous amount of time for very little penalty. It was the tanks use of DW on bosses that had it nerfed to its current state. Staying hybrid after that and the shield slam changes was needlessly selfish, but up to that point it was perfectly viable.

ACTUALLY, from the patch 1.6 notes here,

It was a fear preventer rather than a fear break, and I'm pretty sure it did increase all damage taken by 20%, it was just worded all fucked up.

I'm sure it did not increase damage taken by a fixed percentage but decreased resistances and maybe armor? I think there was something more than resistances but i'm absolutely sure it was not a % damage taken increase.
At least not in the tooltip. And to word a % increase in dmage taken as "decreases resistances" would not just be "worded all fucked up" but seriously wrong.

I honestly don't remember what the tooltip on Deathwish said way back then or exactly what it did, but Blizzard doesn't have a track record of accuracy in their tooltips. Windfury Weapon imbue is a classic example--the skill has undergone massive changes since pre-BC, with no change to the tooltip. There is absolutely no in-game indication for a shaman who doesn't do his or her research or own personal testing to know that it has an innate cooldown, or that the listed proc rate (20%) is false for DW (36%). Just an example.

Most tanks, to my recollection, were MS/prot hybrid back in the day. I am going to side with James on most of his opinions on the topic.

As far as getting imp shield block. I didn't know what the combat table was back then, and had no idea that shield block pushed crushes off the table. And I would venture to guess that a lot of other people didn't either. I swapped to DPS in BWL, and didn't do a whole lot of research and discussion in tanking back then, but I do remember when most of the discussions about shield block pushing off crushings came up, and it was when people were working on the Twin Emps.

There is a ProtWarr model for Rawr in version b14.1.

I write from the perspective of a Mid T5 druid tank that's in the process of re-rolling warrior.

In early content, they often are. In the beginning encounters such as Maulgar and Lurker, Armour plays a large role in your mitigation and druids are simply easier to heal because most of their gear is front-loaded (T4 content + a few trash drops in SSC will basically make you T6 ready as a druid tank).

But in the end, what it comes down to is versatility. Bears are great for physical damage bosses and trash, and because there's a lot of those things, druids do relatively well, but outside of physical damage, we’ve got bupkis.

It’s basically everything you mentioned, all rolled into one. The fact is, warriors are simply designed to be tanks. Itemization, Skills, Talents and Abilities, Emergency Buttons and the way most bosses are designed generally fit warrior tanks, barring exceptional fights.

Once you get to the upper tiers, Warrior Total Mitigation essentially matches that of a druid on physical attacks, and beats it if the boss crushes or uses spell damage, as every attack a druid takes past 85% avoidance will be a crush, whereas every attack on a warrior will be a normal hit, reduced by block value. Add in all the other factors, and you find warriors to simply be better all around tanks.

It becomes pretty obvious pretty quick as you start tanking with a druid in the later raids, or at least it did to me.

Just to add to what Merple is saying, warriors start getting more armor as you progress through the tiers of gear, so a lot of the druid's armor mitigation advantage starts to disappear. They're capped, so they start adding threat/dps items to their gear set, but we're not, so we start to close the gap in mitigation. Usually what you see is more dps and threat from a druid, but there isn't a huge difference in mitigation. (edit: also you need to factor in the "effective armor" benefit of defensive stance or righteous fury when comparing druids, warriors, and paladins)

Most warriors will be chain-chugging ironshields on progression fights. Druids really don't have a consumable buff like that and taking consumables is dangerous for them in most encounters.

You also have buffs like inspiration and ancestral healing that benefit a warrior and do nothing for a druid (in most encounters), and those start to proc a lot more in the higher level tiers as the healers get more crit (particularly the shaman, since a standard tactic is to bounce chainheals off the tank to top off your melee dps).

Warriors have more levers to increase their threat or mitigation. Defense rating does more for us, although agility does less (we stack dodge instead of agi). Parry helps our threat generation a bit. Expertise is on a number of plate pieces and weapons, and on very few items a druid can use. Druid's have a much harder time getting expertise capped and usually have to use sub-optimal pieces to do it (I don't think this is a huge deal, since most of the serious endgame bosses don't crush - the main exception being the twins in Sunwell. It does help threat quite a bit, however). We can use weapon buffs like windfury or sharpening stones, druids are limited to the sunwell weapon oil and it only works in one zone.

Thunderclap is a pretty big deal, you don't need another warrior to reduce physical damage taken by 20% and reduce the chance of getting a crush. There's a number of encounters where you're all alone for a period of time and being able to provide your own debuffs is a pretty big deal. Our demo shout has a bigger reduction to AP than demo roar (and again, we don't need an offtank to provide it). We provide a bigger boost to raid dps with sunder than a druid does with mangle and faerie fire.

Shieldblock's mitigation value, emergency buttons, less magic damage, and gimmick abilities (zerker rage, spell reflect, intervene) also factor into the equation, but things like crushing blows really don't matter too much anymore.

The other thing is that a druid brings a ton of flexibility to the raid. They can't safely battle rez or innervate someone if they're actively tanking. They're really well suited to the offtank role with the amount of "other" abilities they get, their ability to generate threat without getting hit, and the dual-use they get out of stats like agility. They can shift roles in a fight much easier than a prot warrior can.

Druids can use weightstones on their weapons, though I don't know if they're better than the Sunwell Oil.



The other things you point out in your post - mainly Sunder vs FF/Mangle, Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout - are irrelevant to bring up if you're comparing tanks on *most fights* because any raid worth anything will have a Warrior put up Sunders (or a Rogue put up imp. EW) and a Druid put up FF/Mangle. Same goes with Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout: they'll be put up in their improved states in any semi-serious raid (not always 5/5 demo, sometimes 2/5).

Protection Paladin will need a Feral Druid to put up FF/Mangle and a Warrior (either Prot Off-tank or DPS) to put up Thunderclap and Demo Shout.
Feral Druid will need a Warrior to put up Thunderclap and Demo Shout. If possible he'll have another Druid (preferably Moonkin) put up FF for a TPS increase.
Protection Warrior will need a Feral Druid to put up FF/Mangle. He'll preferably have another Warrior put up Thunderclap and Demo Shout for a TPS increase.

What it comes down to is that it'll be more beneficial for the raid to have someone other than the MT (regardless of class) put up Sunder, Thunderclap, Demo Shout, Mangle and FF; Mangle is easily put up by a Feral MT and Sunder is easily put up by a Warrior MT.


On fights where it's not feasible to have the appropriate debuffs put up, an intelligent raid leader will *try* to match DPS Warriors with Ferals and Prot Paladins to give them the much needed Warrior debuffs.

Well I think that’s irrelevant regardless because the question posed was Druid tank vs Warrior tank. Sure you can take into account raid utility but as a stand alone MT which is better was the question. Take into account 5 mans and 10 mans as well. 5 sunders is more effective than FF/mangle from a pure AR standpoint not to mention TC, Commanding shout and Demo shout. Druids may be able to generate more threat and their stats scale with Agility better but i think, from personal experience and by looking at the math, Druids are better at the OT than MT position.

If you take the Stand alone tank (Warrior, Druid or Paladin) and look at them as far as abilities for themselves, they all shine in different places. Sure any of them an MT or OT but they all have a certain niche and adding them into a raid of 25 people with the *correct* setup will make them all that better at their job. Taking into account Raid Debuffs from other classes is irrelevant in this comparison. Saying that a rogue putting up imp EW is better than, or can replace, sunders on a target is like comparing apples to oranges in this example. Which is better, the Sunders of a warrior tank or FF/mangle of Druid tanks. The math says Sunders

Debuffs are such a small part of why a warrior makes a better tank that it's really not worth discussion.

Effective Scaling
Total Mitigation
Emergency Buttons
Consumables
Applicable Buffs
Damage Reduction through talents/stances

All of these things point to Warriors being a better choice for the guy standing in front of Giant Incarnation of Evil (TM) than either a druid or a paladin.

Will this change with the expansion? I hope not. The tanking niches that are currently available work quite well, and I'd be disappointed if Blizzard deviated from this too much.