With the new-and-improved revenge, has anyone done some math to show our new optimal-tps/dps rotations? Because I've found myself using a 3-ability rotation:

Revenge -> x1 -> x2

I won't bother going through my thoughts of x1 and x2, suffice to say shield slam is obviously still top banana. From what I can see simply running through the rotation on paper it seems that I lose around one in six shield slams compared to the more conventional 4-ability rotation (still with rev -> ss), and gain one revenge per 5. Sword and board would intuitively make the shield slam loss bigger, but the numbers are beyond me. Near-zero loss of shockwave and the rest is lost devastates, which seems like it might be a pretty big deal and I suspect is where this could fall apart. Unfortunately I'm having trouble taking it any further.

Can anyone shoot this down quickly, has it been investigated elsewhere or is it worth thinking about some more?

I've run some simulations on this and posted the results over at Tankspot:
Warrior Revenge bypassing Shield slam on priority?

There still has some math to be done to put this in a more straightforward formula.

Very useful, thanks janaka.

I ran your frequencies with my damage numbers (from my WoL report, 10% buff active, no Impale - I'm add-tanking in P1 so it's skewed to aoe tanking) and came to the same conclusion.

Just a little point though, did you factor in crit chance on your values? Mine come out somewhat differently. I know it's bound to, but devastate and SS are the real interesting ones. I've removed the 10% damage, by the way. My armory will show the gear I tank it in - no block gear at all, so SS should be the minimum values, excepting additional block value from str:

Your damage values

Shield Slam: 3338
Revenge: 5412
Devastate: 3178

My damage values, including crits (no impale, 10%-compensated):

Shield Slam: 3888
Revenge: 5377
Devastate: 2407

I used Wartotems spreadsheet to get those values, it does factor in crits and raidbuffs.

Your higher Slam damage most likely comes from your T10 set bonus and Shield Block, which I intentionally ignored.
Devastate does indeed seem a little low, though. *ponder*

A Question for Liar, i have check you on armory the other day and you was with full frost resi gear, i guess you was solo tanking sindragosa; in 10 man normal how many "mystical buffet" stack you can have before get one shoot according u have well gear healers and +400 resi spell

Even tho UA got nerfed, which UA spec were you using? Liar / Tyds? Others?

Yep, that one. I tried to reply to your PM but it said that you were blocking PMs so not much I can do there. :P

On a different topic, doing heroics in DPS gear in the normal Shockwave specs is not much (if at all, considering the nerf) behind in DPS anyway (~8k DPS). Plus it's quite a bit safer with an AoE stun on 17 secs CD and Shield Block on 40. The only thing I truly miss is Sweeping Strikes; it's a pretty sweet ability for AoE and gave us incentive to actually stance dance but unfortunately you can't get both SS and Shockwave in one spec until Cataclysm.

Also I rediscovered the beauty of double ArP trinkets plus a slow 1h for trash tanking. That is, unless you want to tank trash in full DPS gear anyway which is perfectly fine for most ICC trash, too. I sometimes switch from normal gear into DPS gear inbetween pulls just to see if healers actually care or notice. The result? They don't care since you are still getting heal bombed regardless of having 60k health or 40k health. Speaks volumes about WotLK healing (and Shield Block/Shockwave/shorter tank CDs), doesn't it?


On the topic of Revenge VS Shield Slam priority:

Personally I prioritize Revenge over Shield Slam nowadays. I believe Shield Slam still does a bit more threat but who really has threat problems on single targets anyway (and on multi target Revenge is obviously better due to the cleave effect)? Just go for whatever does the most damage and Intervene targets creeping up on the threat list if you really have to.

Having recently started playing again it's been really hard trying to find good tanking information out there which is sad since I figured after leaving for a few years and with how many people are playing now that all of the information would be readily available for a quick return.

1) Most guides don't mention professions but they actually matter now as they provide various stat boosts. Luckily this page at least mentioned the benefit of indestructible potions cause I remember back in 40 man raiding I was one of the few tanks heavily advocating the chugging of stoneshield potions.

2) Health does not trump everything else. It was true back when I raided and while I've only been back a few months it's still true now. Once your health hits a certain level where you can survive any special attacks + round of melee from the boss without dying you're better off switching your gear focus from pure health to best bang for your buck and eventually to pure mitigation / avoidance with a greater emphasis obviously on mitigation.

What I'm seeing by most tanks right now is that people are continuing to increase their health way above and beyond what is needed for the encounters to the detriment of mitigation / avoidance stats which would make them far easier to heal. This is becoming even more true with the stacking ICC buff increasing health. Most tanks now have way more health then they actually need to beat the encounters so everything should start going towards mitigation / avoidance.

Unless I'm missing something, Engineering ends up becoming the best tradeskill for tanks due to the armor increase on the glove enchants at this point in the game. To a lesser degree, but probably still #2 would be Alchemy with the buff to the Elixir's providing a smaller mitigation bonus as tanks shift away from Stoneblood flasks to focus on mitigation. This will continue to become even more true as the ICC buff increases towards Cataclysm.

It's still the exact same issue we were bringing up back in vanilla WoW although it seems more tanks nowadays understand the importance of mitigation (and more items have bonus armor on them), but there is still a large percentage of tanks in the stamina > all camp not realizing they are gimping their character out.

It's a bit different now, due to how healers function. They have enough mana and throughput to keep heal spamming you, and even if you do dodge that hit they will still be landing a heal on you as they really can't afford to heal cancel anymore with the speed that tanks can die at. As such this type of healer behaviour highly promotes stacking stamina hugely, since having more health means you'll definitely live at the times healers are a bit slow to heal (cos they're move from a shadow trap or whatever) and having more avoidance only gives you a chance of that and the majority of the time while being heal spammed doesn't help *that* much in actually keeping you alive (obviously you need a certain minimum amount of it... ).

As such, all that really matters is effective health (which is why people like armor) since everyone gets a decent amount of avoidance naturally without gemming.

There is not currently the concept of a "mana-sponge" tank like there was back in tbc with feral druids, though they are intending to bring it back for cata and then we will likely have to think more carefully between stamina or avoidance (or threat).

Engineering is quite good, but not so good vs something dealing frequent big magical hits where the armor is useless. Currently though there is only a few big hitting magical attacks (sindragosa breathes, lich king soul reaper) and overall engi comes off very strong indeed.

I highly recommend reading this Tanking Why We Do What We Do (An in depth explanation of EHP and ICC 3.3.3 tanking mechanics)), a very well written explanation by Aggathon on why EH trumps all with a spreadsheet attached.

This is probably a pretty hopeless question, but I figure if anyone would have done it it might be someone here. We're currently working on the Plague Wing, Rotface specifically, with a Protection Paladin and a Protection Warrior(me) as tanks. However, our pally can't seem to get the hang of kiting the oozes, so I wanted to ask, has anyone figured out a way for warriors to ooze tank? The best I can come up with is putting vigilance on the main tank, heroic throwing every minute, and taunting if I lose aggro, hopefully not running into diminishing returns on it, possibly charging in and shield slamming and then intervening back out as quickly as possible.

I find it quite simple, even without misdirects. Once a large ooze is combined, you can get a Shield Slam in before it "activates" and you should have some solid threat to start things off. After that I usually just Thunderclap with the minor glyph. It's enough to keep the aggro and ooze out of range. No need to complicate things.

Completely agree with you mate. Kiting the oozes as a Prot Warrior is a great example of our versatility. I've been kiting them since we first got into the Plagueworks. Another great trick is popping Shield Wall when the ooze spawns and just beat the hell out of it for some healthy threat. Use Last Stand on the 2nd one, and then rotate CDs so even if you get hit you're fine.

Why put Vigilance on a tank? I would advise you to place Vigilance on the healers, they are the only ones drawing aggro from the Ooze. Have a threat meter addon to watch wich healer is generating more aggro and cast Vigilance on him, you can do this easily with mouseover macros. Then all you have to do is Shockwave, Thunderclap, Heroic Throw when possible and you'll do just fine, no need to Taunt.


I would have to disagree with you on that one, with the mentioned above, you don't need to melee the Ooze, and you can save you CDs for when you need to do a change of direction. I try to avoid the pools and walk the longest way around, but sometimes you just end up at them. That's when I turn around and run the other way, I use either Shield Wall or Last Stand (only one at each turn) in case I get slopy turning and the Ooze manages to hit me (you should try this always facing the Ooze, becouse you can dodge/parry/block it's attack, it can even miss).

(I think this is going a little bit off-topic, I apologize)

I definitely disagree with changing directions and getting meleed. Why make it sloppy when it doesn't have to be? The slime damage is very minimal, the only trouble I could forsee is on heroic difficulty where the slime slows you by a ton, but even then you can skate around the inside edge/call for BoF without causing too many problems.

There's nothing wrong with it so long as you remember to change the targets when it's not needed. The threat threshold does get pretty close as gear increases. During phase 1 of LK I don't recommend viging the MT if you are running with a Safeguard spec. The bigger the difference between the Tank and DPS on threat the better. I definitely recommend viging the MT during Phase 3 for spirits, however, that's a lot of fun and does help out. Even more so if there are a few DPS dead from a sloppy attempt.

I've done a few times, and found that a heroic throw when it spawns and shockwaves (you shouldn't get hit if you stand at absolute max range) was enough treath to keep aggro from a holy pala with righteous fury active and vig on that paladin.

Although, I did have severe issues when we happend to get 2 big ones in the middle of the fight. Doing a shield slam before it gets "active" and saving the heroic throw incase you should get a double spawn at some point seems to be a viable way to go. And this is on heroic, I've never tried on normal.

Intervene through slimes = win

On LK I don't use the taunt glyph because I want to maximize my survivability, and I certainly don't have 17% hit since you need to be spell hit capped to make taunt never hit capped. Using vig on the MT when tanking ghouls didn't pose any problems for me, and even less on hc since the dps is moving a bit. I've made a macro to apply and remove vig from the tank, and I always apply it right before the soul reaper hits incase my taunt miss, as well as right before I soak vile spirits in the last phase. Tried this with both a pala and druid tank, and they had more than enough threat for me to safely use safeguard if it's needed

I'm having a tiny threat issue myself though, when I'm MTing in P1 with the spec I'm using. If you're using 2 warrios, and both using a survivability focused spec, this might pose a threat problem. Or just MTing as a warrior in P1, and then having the other tank MT in the last phase while you're using safeguard. This is what my guild usualy plans to do, but I never intervene anyways as the palas AD never procs, and we're using safeguard as a "oh shit" if AD should proc.

Is there any way to macro cleave so it changes target Automatically when fighting packs of mobs, instead of spamming tab?

Would be really appreciated, thanks.

/targetenemy used to have the same functionality as tabbing & I don't remember seeing that it was broken by any patches. The following should work for you:

/targetenemy
/cast Cleave

However, I'd personally recommend using an addon like Tidy Plates instead that puts your threat % for each mob in their nameplate and then click the plates to change to the lowest threat target after each cleave instead. It's not automated but you'll ultimately have much better control over all the mobs in the group rather than relying on randomness.

The alternative I use is to macro revenge and devestate to target whatever I have my mouse over:

#showtooltip
/startattack
/use [target=mouseover, harm, nodead] [harm, nodead] [target=targettarget, harm, nodead] [] Revenge
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

There may be room for optimization, as I just copied it straight off wowwiki. I don't think it will work on cleave specifically though, as it replaces the next white swing. Still, it does the job.