Here we are on Wednesday, which I have aptly dubbed "Warrior Wednesday", where I'll talk about our ever-so generic class of the big shields, big weapons, and heavy armor. This week, I'll be talking about what sort of things you, the player, should be worrying about as a Protection Warrior tank.
In order to tank effectively, an effective balance between mitigation (dodge, parry, block), threat (shield block value, strength, hit, expertise), and required stats (defense) must be found, as well as having a decent amount of playability (basically, not being completely oblivious and knowing the difference between Thunder Clap and Shield Slam).
Here's the breakdown of warrior tanking stats, from which certain numbers are generously provided by this thread on the wowhead forums:
1. YOU MUST BE DEFENSE CAPPED. PERIOD. This means having 540 defense coming from your gear, gems, and enchants. It's not really hard to achieve once you reach some heroic gear and 10 man raids, but having 5.6% reduced chance for an enemy to crit is essential for raid content, which is 540 defense. For heroics, no enemy reaches higher than level 82. While raid bosses are technically level ??, they are considered "Level 83". Therefore, only 535 defense is required to tank a heroic dungeon. Taking a crit is unacceptable in any dungeon as a tank, let alone a raid, because it is basically double damage on yourself and it really stresses out the healer(s).
2. After being defense capped, you can start focusing on other tanking stats. First of all, you want STAMINA. Stamina gives you health, and health keeps you alive. The more health you have, the longer you can survive, and the easier time healers will have with keeping you alive. Of course, this is where balancing out stats comes into play. You don't want to just put a whole bunch of stamina into your gear and be an impenetrable wall. Lots of stamina won't help you when you can't keep aggro on the boss by not putting out enough threat.
3. Warriors gain rage by giving damage as well as taking it, but they don't want to be taking so much damage that healers can't keep them alive. Mitigation stats come into play here, and they are known as dodge, parry, and block.
- Dodge rating allows you to make the enemy's attacks miss you, meaning you take no damage. This stat is most important out of the mitigation stats.
- Parry rating allows you to essentially cancel out the enemy's attack, and in return your next attack will be slightly faster. Important, but not as important and easy to find on gear as dodge rating.
-Block rating allows you to partially negate some damage from an enemy's attack, which the amount of damage blocked is calculated by Shield Block Value. You don't want to get hit in the first place, so this is the least important stat to worry about. Shield Block Value by itself is helpful though as it will help you gain threat through more damage from your Shield Slam (see above tooltip).
These three kinds of stats, in my opinion, are about on par with stacking importance with the following as well, but most tanks go for these first:
4. Hit and Expertise are what determine how often your attacks hit the boss and how often the boss dodges and parries your attacks. For a protection warrior, 263 hit rating (translates to 8.00%) is required for none of your attacks to miss. This is considerably more difficult than getting defense capped, so most tanks will only go to 7% and then use the Draenei racial to get them their extra 1%. Expertise is slightly more important than crit, but considerably easier to reach the cap of 6.5%, or 214 rating. This number will be lower for warrior tanks though, because, like the above wowhead.com thread mentions, all good tanks take this talent, lowering our cap to 164. Humans, Dwarves, and Orcs also have Sword and Mace, Mace, and Axe specializations respectfully, which gives them an even lower number to reach. More details can be found in the wowhead link at the top.
Having a high amount of survivability from your mitigation stats and stamina as well as having a great amount of other components that raise your threat generation will allow you to keep a boss distracted while giving your healers an easy enough time keeping you alive, allowing for a successful raid.
Next week, I talk about the other side of the Warrior coin, our DPS tree stats. Until next time, my heavily armored peers!
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