Survivability Vs Threat.

The old question of whether to gear for survivability or whether to gear for threat is usually the first a new tank, or any tank entering new content, will ask. Essentially, the only answer that fits all situations is: what do you need? If you're dying a lot, survive more. If threat is a problem, work on that. What is most important for any raider is always to live. If you are dead, you cannot tank, heal, or dps. So for entering new content for the character, survivability is king. That means stamina, armor, dodge, parry, mastery. Luckily for tanks, stamina is becoming more of a threat stat as well due to Vengeance. Obviously it relies on being hit often and hard, but it will help. Only once dying is no longer a constant danger should it occur to a tank to start gearing for threat. Obviously your fellow raiders will be getting gear that noticeably improves their dps and therefore their threat, so a tank, in order to not get yelled at by his fellow raiders, must gear accordingly.

It seems a lot of tanks, warrior and non, have been having trouble with their threat. More so than before the patch, anyway. The solution to threat is part gear adjustment, part personal adjustment, and part happy joyful world where everyone waits until you have threat to dps. The last part isn't going to happen, although a good number of my guild mates imagine a world where all the "gogogogogo" people have quit WoW due to the slower pace of the dungeons, I don't see that occurring at all. People are the way they are, and slowing dungeons down will merely make them want to go even faster so as not to waste any excess time. So the burden lies upon you.

The first step is to find a 2.6 speed weapon. This is because due to the lack of "on-next-swing" attacks, the speed of our weapons no longer matter, and since a good deal of our attacks are reliant on our weapon damage (most importantly for us Rend), a slow hard-hitting weapon is perfect for us. All tank weapons in Cataclysm will be 2.6 speed, but for now, I'd recommend picking up something easy like Wrathful Gladiator's Cleaver since it no longer requires arena points. It's not strictly speaking a tank weapon, but until the expansion is released, it's a solid threat producer.

Second, make sure you are hit and expertise capped. The current expertise cap is 23, but will be 26 again at 85. Reforge if you have to. Nothing will make you lose aggro faster than a missed hit.

Third, I'd like to address a lot of people's concern with the Rend/Thunder Clap combo. It seems from reading various forums that people find it "lackluster", "awkward", or just plain terrible. I've given it a lot of thought and there always seems to be a few things in common with these complaints. A lot of them haven't taken the steps necessary to really take advantage of the ability. Many of them haven't utilized the new 2.6 weapon speed, which changes Rend's damage significantly. Several of them have terrible hit rating. Others complain that as they Charge in, then Rend, they must wait a whole GCD before they can do anything and then they lose aggro. This has a lot to do with the fact that people don't seem to realize that abilities like Cleave are off the GCD. The proper way to pull is more like Charge, Rend/Cleave, Thunder Clap. Obviously starting from dry this isn't always possible, so start out with a shout before the pull. Others complain that even charging in will pull people to the healer immediately. Personally, I think that's a problem with healer aggro having gigantic radii since the patch, but if it's a problem, take Blitz (which any 5-man spec should have) and you'll be stunning three targets as well as gaining a lot of early rage. The point is, the Rend/TC combo is a fantastic ability that gets even better the longer the fight lasts. People just need to learn how it works, rather than try it once without proper preparation and running to the forums to whine. I read one forum goer who complained that he didn't like it because his Rend was in an awkward position and he had to move his hand around oddly to get it. MOVE THE KEYBIND NUMB NUTS!

Survivability is easy and usually just a matter of gear. It will come in time and eventually be a non-issue. But until it is, it is without a doubt the most important thought in a tank's mind. With how the developers have claimed Cataclysm raiding will go, the healers will be under less duress to pop out insane numbers to save you from instant death, which means it may even be something obtainable rather fast. Threat is where the tank's resources will be focused on constantly I believe, and it will be important as you level to 85 and in these remaining few days before the expansion to cultivate good habits and practices. By abandoning Rend/TC, a lot of tanks are getting rid of our only effective method of AOE tanking, something which a lot of warriors have whined incessantly for years for. Blizzard finally gave it to us, and I love it.

On a side note, I am really really disappointed in how my all-time favorite ability Vigilance has been treated this last patch. In 4.0.3a, Blizzard removed the 3% damage reduction from it, and made the ability go from awesome to just another ability. While I will be keeping it for my raiding spec, due to how valuable constant tank taunting can be, as well as the free stacks of Vengeance, it has lost it's heart. The reason Vigilance was so amazing was not because of its 3% damage reduction, but because it had 3% damage reduction and infinite taunts and Vengeance. The combination of all three in a single buff was ridiculously awesome. With only two now, any two, it has died. It's just another ability now. Not bad, but not great either. I don't approve of the tank homogenization. I am a warrior, I don't want to be a paladin 2.0. Well, rather, I don't want paladins to be warriors 2.0.

Vengeance And Vigilance.

Back in February, I extolled the virtues of Vigilance as the best tanking ability in the game. I spoke about how to apply it to tanks, despite the marginal and wholly unimportant threat loss. Now they've changed it, and guess what? It's even better than it ever was before. Before patch 4.0.1, tanks would more often than not whine incessantly about their infinitesimal threat loss when a warrior tank rightfully applied Vigilance to them, now, all I hear is the "revolutionary idea" to put it on another tank. This idea is far from revolutionary, as I know for a fact I'm not the only tank to apply it to another before the patch. As a result of the patch, Vigilance has gone from completely amazing to mind-bogglingly awesome. Not only does it retain the 3% damage reduction, as well as the infinite Taunt refreshing (the two abilities that made it so great), but it also has forgone the lackluster threat transferring in exchange for a direct attack power increase based on Vengeance as if 20% of the damage was done to you.

What is Vengeance? Essentially, Vengeance is a stacking buff to the damage we deal, based on the damage we receive, capped by a percentage of our stamina. It's a passive ability given to every tank spec, designed to give us increasing threat gains (by way of stronger attacks) the higher tier gear we access. So moving into a higher tier of raiding, we get hit harder, so we deal more damage due to Vengeance. As we start to get gear for that level of raid, we're being hit less hard, however, we have much more stamina, further increasing our maximum Vengeance stacks to compensate. Due to this passive ability, we never have to worry about the dps getting out of hand due to our gear stacking just as well as theirs, a common problem in later Icecrown tier raiding.

So, Vengeance will work quite well for tanks all around due to being scaleable, as well as allowing us to hit surprisingly hard for a tank. The other day while in Icecrown, a warlock forgot to dismiss his pet and jumped down the hole after Blood Queen Lana'thel, and his pet ran to him, dragging the entire procession of trash along one side with him. I did my tankly duties and grabbed the mess up as well as I could, in the process taking massive damage and stacking my Vengeance to insane heights. I easily topped over ten thousand attack power, and because I was able to attack so many targets, I quickly found myself doing over eleven thousand dps! Only our resident star death knight was able to top me. This example just goes to show the amazing power held within Vengeance, which will reach even more astonishing numbers by the time we reach Cataclysm raiding, where tanks will have one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thousand health!

How does this all relate to Vigilance? Since Vigilance now gives a portion of Vengeance to you, putting it on a dps is almost pointless, unless they're not too bright and tend to pull first most of the time. Putting it on another tank, will copy 20% of that Vengeance to you, giving you a significant advantage over other tanks, especially in a single target situation. You're not stealing their threat, or their Vengeance, so they have nothing to worry about, you're merely boosting your own. This makes tank swap fights even easier, due to your already considerable attack power bonus. The only danger is in accidentally pulling before you're supposed to, which may happen on more than one occasion if one is not careful. Before these changes, I recall doing 10-11k tps, and it was a pretty big deal. After the changes I can easily reach 14-15k tps, and with other bonuses I can occasionally reach beyond 20k tps.

There is only one downside I foresee happening as we enter into Cataclysm, which I was hoping to avoid after the single-mindedness of Wrath's tanking community. That is, with Vengeance capping with your maximum stamina, I can see a lot of tanks heading into the expansion with the idea to stack stamina derpa-derpa. Unfortunately, the way the ability is set up at the moment, there is very little reason not to. In Wrath, I resisted the fad to stack stamina at the expense of other stats like armor, because a healthy balance of stats is always better. Sadly, stamina has now become king and armor has been nerfed to a shadow of its former glory, making single stat stacking a very appealing idea. As I go into the expansion, I will be maintaining that a balance of stats like mastery as well as stamina and armor will be the ideal way to go as a tank. I guess the only way to find out will be to play the game and see.

Thanks for reading, and tune in next entry for: Survivability Vs Threat.

Hit Rating, Expertise, And You.

When I initially intended to write this entry, hit rating and expertise, while nice, were pretty low on the tank's list of important stat requirements. Most of a tank's attention was toward survival and threat was usually a minor issue. The whole entry was going to be about why not to worry about hit, as so many tanks seemed to do, and to accept it when it was on gear, but to never gear with it in mind. But now that patch 4.0.1 has dropped, the World of Warcraft is a different place, and suddenly hit and expertise are back in a big way.

Threat in all it's forms has changed, and with it so must we. Our AOE capabilities have remained mostly the same, but unfortunately, no one else's has. I personally have found paladins, mages, and death knights to be more troublesome than they used to be, sometimes even in single target situations. My first random when the patch dropped was pretty pathetic. I had thought with the normalization of rage, I perhaps wouldn't need the rage talents. Boy was I wrong. I was completely rage starved the entire run. So I changed my talents to receive more rage when I charged or blocked, and as a whole my starter problems were alleviated. Still though, at times the dps would catch up to me, and I realized I needed more hit rating and expertise. If you can't hit, you can't deal threat. Before, a simple Revenge was sufficient enough threat to overcome most problems, and missing often was rarely a problem, before long, I had so much threat as to be boring. I would throw in random abilities just to mix it up. Now that threat is designed to be something tanks are supposed to work on the entire fight, suddenly hit became so much more important. Not to mention, the basic design philosophy for warrior tanks has changed. I'll illustrate that philosophy below.

Essentially, warrior tanks have now become all about their shield and mitigating damage, rather than avoiding it completely. I've heard of a lot of tanks gemming for dodge and parry, and reforging for them as well. That would be a mistake, since when we avoid an attack, we get a grand total of zero rage from it. With the normalization of rage, we want as much rage as we can possibly get, and avoidance will simply hurt that. No rage means no threat. No threat means everyone dies.

Our mastery stat is Critical Block, which means the more mastery we stack, the more we block. Mastery is designed to be a stackable and desirable stat from 80-85, so we can see how our design is being pushed toward block. Now a lot of tanks may reject that logic right offhand because block has been a fantastically sucky stat for the last several years. However in patch 4.0.1 it's received a massive overhaul, and now mitigates a flat 30% of the incoming damage one receives, with 60% being reduced with a critical block. This is what warrior tanks are all about now. In Cataclysm, our health pools will be ridiculous, 150,000+ and that's just to start the expansion, and enemies will be hitting less hard then they currently do (relatively). What does that mean? Less spike damage, and therefore, less reliance on dodge and avoidance as a whole. Mitigation of the incoming damage will be how to survive, and the best way to get rage in this world will be through one of the best new talents we have available. Shield Specialization. We stack block, we live longer, we get Shield Specialization, we get massive rage the more we block. Block block block. Mastery mastery mastery. It may seem like we take more damage now, and for a time, we will. Because Wrath of the Lich King raiding isn't built around the idea of tanking like that. Entering Cataclysm will be where the changes really start to gel.

Leave avoidance to the bears, leave parry to the death knights, and revel in the glory of your shield! Remember the best reason to be a warrior, an unstoppable fighting machine that brings the battle to the enemy, charging in and shouting, not dealing with sissy dodges when a simple block will do. Bask in the rage that blocking will pour upon you. With that rage, pummel your enemies in the face and for crying out loud don't miss!

The first problem you must fix is to never waste the rage you have, and to get more expertise and hit. Expertise first, as it's still better than hit. Reforge your armor to mastery, and dump all that dodge and parry, with the Icecrown debuff gone, you won't miss it anyway. With the loss of Damage Shield I even put Titanium Shield Spike back on my shield to further aid my threat gain on trash. These simple changes made sure I was always on top of my threat, and never lacking for rage.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Vengeance And Vigilance.

Less Talents Means More Variety.

At the time of this writing, this is the most current beta build of warrior talents. Notice anything? Everything's changed. There were twenty-seven talents in the protection tree, now there are twenty. Even with just seven less talents, the whole tree looks a lot less cluttered. We effectively have our actual available talents roughly halved, so the changes about even out. However, a lot of people are complaining about not being able to dive into another tree until their 31-point talent is picked. A lot of people will complain about anything. The reason behind this is two-fold. Most importantly, mastery bonuses. Blizzard doesn't want people double dipping into both trees to receive large mastery bonuses before they are supposed to, part of why you can only get into the second tier of your secondary spec. The other reason is to not confuse new players, who are often overwhelmed by the talents and may make poor choices speccing into all three trees as they level. Sticking with a single tree helps a player create a cohesive character that can stand on its own without the need for outside sources to learn. In effect, this means players not involved in theorycrafting or min-maxing their characters will still be able to find a viable spec. Sure dps roles will always find a way to create the most "ideal" spec, but healers and tanks really are free to experiment. Once a base tree is put together, one is able to mess around with their remaining talents as they see fit, more so than in previous builds. In effect, Blizzard is preventing players from building crappy specs. This basically means any spec chosen will most likely be viable for it's intended purpose.

Ghostcrawler himself has stated that some talents won't be strictly required to hold threat. From the sound of it, Blood and Thunder, Thunderstruck, and even Vengeance the deep protection Mastery bonus will in a way combine to create easier AoE tanking situations. I feel that no one ability is good enough on it's own, however I also believe not having every ability won't hinder a tank's job. Or, if a tank needs, he can take a couple and use the rest in survivability talents, or even threat talents. The ability to do so much more with so much less has really shone through in these recent builds, and I couldn't be more excited. If you have alts, take a look at their specs as well, you'll see you'll easily be able to pick up most of the things you need, with free talents for things like utility, survivability, or just plain fun. Even newer players will be able to enjoy a viable spec that's competitive, but different, from more experienced players. More variety in choices means not everyone will have the same cookie cutter spec, something for which I am grateful for and quite happy to see.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Hit Rating, Expertise, And You.

The Art Of Pulling And Holding Aggro.

Okay so there's some baddies in front of you. Oh man that one looks like it has blood dripping from it's fangs. It is Scary Time™. You are a brand new tank, or maybe a not so brand new tank who is timid and meek after weeks of abuse at the hands of crazy dps who are waiting for you to get aggro in the first millisecond of the pull. You Charge in, and you can already see a bolt whizzing past your head to attack before you've even made it there. What do you do?

DON'T PANIC.

That's the first step to tanking and playing the game in general. Panicking will cause you to do the wrong thing or make things worse. Essentially I'm going to break down the essentials of both pulling and holding aggro, and talk about how, for warriors in particular, it is more of an art form that one learns and hones over time, rather than a clinical, dead process like paladin tanking. Warrior tanking is generally considered to be the hardest but most interesting form of tanking, and for good reason, some of which we'll get into as we go along. So without further ado, let's start.

Pulling

There are many ways to pull, some better than others. Different situations call for different forms. I'll break them down so they're easier to read here.

Facepull: Generally considered the worst way to pull something, usually utilized by overzealous dps or healers on auto-walk. Basically it's when someone walks too close to the mobs and they come and make him very dead. The total threat caused by this pull can be offset by a heal or a stiff breeze.

Throw or Shoot Pull: Another pretty bad way to pull. Shooting one's gun or bow or throwing a sharp stick at the enemy will bring them to you, just pray no one looks at the mobs funny on their way to you or else they'll turn on them instead. Still, it is slightly better than the Facepull.

Charge/Thunderclap: This is currently the best way to pull a group of mobs, Charge in to the spell caster, wait half a second for the melee mobs to get within range, and Thunder Clap them all to you. What you do afterward will be covered in the Holding Aggro segment.

Single Target Combo: This is a method I've developed for pulling bosses, I find it avoids the odd positioning issues that Charge tends to create on unstunnable bosses, it also avoids Charging out of range of healers. As you run in, Heroic Throw the boss, and then immediately Taunt and pop Bloodrage at the same time. Based on how close the boss is at this time and how close behind you your healers are, you may choose to also Charge in. All these things combined will create the highest amount of threat on a boss in the shortest amount of time, and Bloodrage will give you a lot of initial rage. In fact, I use Bloodrage all the time, and I encourage you to as well.

Pulls can as a whole be a mixture of any of the above methods, but the last two are the most effective for early aggro. Now I will get into general aggro holding.

Holding Aggro

Unlike paladin tanks, warriors do not have a set rotation to maintain threat. Currently our AoE threat is generally reliant on our ability to critically hit with abilities like Thunderclap and Devastate, thus applying bleed effects on our targets via the Deep Wounds talent. This is not an effective method of tanking, as it relies on critical hits, something tanks don't exactly swim in, and also it only applies bleed effect threat, which is minuscule. However it does help, and until we are given more effective methods (or rather, the other classes overpowered methods are nerfed), we generally use other methods to augment our aggro. For example, in the first few seconds of a pull, after the initial Charge and Thunderclap application, there are two options to decide between: Shockwave, or Shield Block. I more often than not will hit Shockwave and once the stun is ending I pop Shield Block. Shield Block may seem like a purely defensive ability, but most warrior tanks will be specced into Damage Shield, which combined with Shield Block will cause more effective damage overall. Also, this ability can critically hit, thus proccing Deep Wounds. While these abilities are good starters, if you've got dps hitting something that you aren't targeting, no amount of Thunderclaps and Damage Shields will help you. You must react and respond to the moment, the greatest strength of the Warrior tank.

Glyphing is an integral part of AoE tanking for a warrior, as we have several glyphs that enable us to strike more mobs than before. I would personally recommend the glyphs of Sunder Armor, Blocking, and Cleaving, for their multiple target capabilities. Being aware of the threat on every mob you're facing is important, and unfortunately, add-ons such as Omen can only show threat on a single mob at once. Which is where ThreatPlates comes in. I mentioned this add-on before so I won't go into it, suffice to say it helps me tank fifty mobs at once more effectively than I did before I got it. Also keep in mind that one must be checking up on every mob's threat constantly by either clicking or tab-targetting to better know which mob to focus on.

General Tanking Tips

• Keep in mind accidental overpulls are manageable by more than Thunderclap by abilities such as Shockwave, Challenging Shout, or even Demoralizing Shout.

• Remember that due to Armored to the Teeth, armor is effectively a threat and mitigation stat, and I could not recommend stacking it more. Its great and provides you with more effective attack power than you'll need. I stack it at the cost of dull stamina trinkets.

• When moving into a group with a caster, take Gag Order, and Heroic Throw the caster so he will run into melee range of you. After that, or if there is more than one caster in a group, pop Spell Reflection as often as you can to get aggro on something that may not be in your group, or doesn't kite well.

• If you overgear content, pop cooldowns whenever you make large pulls. The healer may not be as geared as you, and what are you saving them for anyway?

• If your dps are out-threatening you, run far ahead of them. Charge often, keep moving, and generally be annoying. The earlier you hit your targets, the more time you have to build threat. Kiting them to the next mob pack will make you seem like you're moving fast and getting the tedium of heroic grinding out of the way, but what you are in actuality doing is making high threat abilities like Volley and Seed of Corruption do less damage, and therefore less threat.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Less Talents Means More Variety.

Good Riddance, Twenty-Five Mans.

(I know this is old news, it's taken me a while to get back into writing after my hiatus. I'll be writing more soon.)
The changes coming to Cataclysm raiding has been toted as the end of 25-man raiding. Personally, I don't think they'll end, but if they did, I couldn't be happier. See, I'm a 10-man raider by choice. Occasionally I'll do a 25-man for kicks or because a friend needs me, but as far as I'm concerned, there couldn't be a bigger waste of my time than 25-man raids.

Large raids are like herding cats. People not listening to orders, people going afk or running back to town because they forgot to repair, people never paying attention because they feel like it's everyone else's job to kill the add. There is far more time wasted in a large raid than a small one, and far easier for people to get lost in the bustle and get carried through. If a person dies in a 25-man, no one cares. If one dies in a 10-man, the whole raid must rise to the occasion without that person. People always complain that the raids don't feel as epic as they used to when they took forty people, and losing 25-mans will make things feel even less so. To me, the level of epic doesn't come from how many idiots you can cram into a room, but from the level of difficulty that downing a boss with less teammates brings with it. Sure 25-man bosses have more hit points, but when there's three times as many dps, losing one doesn't really make anyone tense up. Not only are 25-mans currently easier than 10-mans, they are also less social. The large number of people makes it necessary to keep Ventrilo clear and no one talks or gets to know each other. There is less of a sense of camaraderie, and to me, they generally feel like a soulless venture. Twenty-five people in a raid isn't you and your buddies, it's a mob.

This could just be me being a big grouch, since I've long hated 25-mans, and never made a secret about it. I am glad I won't have to deal with people who brag all day and night about their sweet 25-man loot and try to make me feel inferior in my 10-man gear, despite the fact that skill, not gear is what determines a good tank. I've all but completely stopped gearing myself. Not because there's nothing left for me to get, but because I know I possess more than the minimum requirement of gear and skill to beat every boss in the game. I don't want to run TOC-25 over and over every week in hopes that a "best in slot" item will drop. I want to beat bosses in ICC-10 with my friends because it's fun.

Speaking of "best in slot", I personally don't believe in them and dislike their very existence. They propel people into an unhealthy mindset that some piece of gear is something they have to have, or that having that piece will magically make them better players. I refuse to listen to fellow raiders who proclaim a piece of gear as "best in slot". I feel that player's obsession with gear is not what the developers had in mind. Blizzard wants the game to be above all else fun and accessible, which is why raiding was so easy to get into during Wrath of the Lich King. It is also why the first raid they announce for Cataclysm they say will be doable in quest blues. Becoming an over powered beast is not what WoW is about, and I feel the removal of the incentive to do 25-mans will prevent players from becoming so overpowered that the game's fun is removed and the game will no longer be simply about acquiring gear.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: The Art Of Pulling And Holding Aggro.

Warrior Tanking In Cataclysm.

Quite a lot of changes coming to protection warriors in the new expansion. Most of them appear to be mechanics changes, with only a few brand new abilities showing up. I'll post the protection-specific and general changes here, and comment on each one individually, then wrap up with an overall perspective:

Inner Rage (Level 81): Whenever the character reaches a full 100 Rage, he or she will gain a buff that causes attacks to consume 50% more Rage and do 15% more damage for a short amount of time. This is a passive ability so it won't need to be activated by the player. The goal for this ability is to provide a benefit for hitting max Rage instead of it feeling like a penalty. However, we also don't want warriors to feel like they're supposed to pool Rage and do nothing until they hit 100, so we'll be closely monitoring how this plays out during the beta testing, and making adjustments as needed.


I can foresee this passive ability becoming a boon to protection warriors, as on bosses, we tend to sit at 100 rage most of the time, though this may change in Cataclysm. Oftentimes we can't seem to dump our rage fast enough. At the least, when we are sitting at 100 rage, we will be able to use that excessive rage and do more damage.


Heroic Leap (Level 85): This ability makes the character leap at their target and apply the Thunder Clap ability to all enemies in the area when they land. Heroic Leap will be usable in Battle Stance and shares a cooldown with Charge, but the Juggernaut and Warbringer talents will allow Heroic Leap to be used in any stance and possibly while in combat. The cooldown for this ability might be longer than the Charge ability, but it will also apply a stun effect so you can make sure the target will still be there when you land.


Some guildmates of mine have expressed concern that this ability will either replace the standard Charge and Thunderclap pull, or it will find itself never being used, based on cooldowns or power. Ghostcrawler has stated that we will be using both of them, and I tend to agree with him. Heroic Leap will have a longer cooldown, but will be more powerful than either Charge or Thunderclap combined. The way I see it, the more Charges, the more Thunderclap-like abilities we have the better. I already spend a good amount of time charging over a battlefield, why complain about another ability that lets me do that?


Heroic Strike will no longer be an "on next swing" attack, as we are removing this mechanic in Cataclysm. To keep the niche of Heroic Strike as a Rage dump, it will become an instant attack, but will cost between 10 and 30 Rage. This ability will not be usable until you have 10 Rage, but if you have more than 10, it will consume up to 30, adding additional damage for each point of Rage consumed above the base 10. Other abilities, such as Cleave, Execute, and Maul (for druids) will work similarly. The goal is to provide players with an option where if you can't afford the Rage, you don't push the button, but if you have excess Rage, you can push it a lot.


This ability is a godsend. No longer being required to spam Heroic Strike will relieve the aching joints of every protection warrior I know. I could not be more excited about this change, and will help to remind me not to use it during the first couple seconds of a fight, which I am prone to do, leading to rage starvation early on.


Battle Shout, Commanding Shout, and possibly Demoralizing Shout will work more like the death knight's Horn of Winter ability. Specifically, these shouts will cost no resources, generate rage in addition to their current effects, and be on a short cooldown.


I completely love this ability. Goodbye Bloodrage, hello shouts! I believe warriors will be shouting before every pull, and anytime we think we need rage. Like say on magic damage heavy fights where our rage generation slows to a crawl. It will remind me to shout and shout often, which during a fight I tend to forget, mostly because it's not extremely important to me. Now I have no excuse.


Sunder Armor will be reduced to three stacks instead of five, and still provide only a 4% reduction in armor per stack. We want to make this debuff easier to apply and less of a damage swing when it falls off.


While I am disappointed that our trademark move is being nerfed, I understand their thinking behind the change. Less important if it falls off, if there's no warrior to apply it, it won't be as huge a drop in dps, and just generally taking less time to reach max sunders. It fits in the design philosophy of Cataclysm.


Several talents that reduce the Rage cost of abilities will be changed to focus on increased damage for those abilities instead.


This is consistent with the other changes, including the normalization of rage, that I see being a benefit to protection as well as the other trees. Since rage will foreseeably be a resource to manage, when and where to use our abilities will become a lot more important, especially since we won't be spamming as much. The increased damage along with other changes makes me wonder if tanking is going to be more of a damage dealing role than it previously has, especially for warriors.


Critical Block Chance: As we mentioned in the stat changes preview, block rating is changing to a chance to block 30% of a melee swing's damage. Protection warriors have a chance that the block will be a critical block and block for 60% of a melee swing's damage instead. There will likely be talents available to push the amount blocked even higher.


I am in full support of the changes to block. While some tanks would build elaborate block sets presumably for heroics, I always found them to be a total waste of time. I believe all tanks really need one set of gear to do whatever tanking they do, whether fighting heroic trash or the Lich King himself. These changes to block make a nearly useless passive ability into something people can actually use, and removing the confusion between block value and block rating can only be a good thing. Critical Block Chance frees up more talents to use elsewhere.


Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.


The biggest change to all tanking in Cataclysm, and one of the most amazing changes I've seen yet. Vengeance further solidifies the idea of tanking through damage, where on bosses, effectively the more health we have, the more damage we do. Our threat scales with our gear, as it always should have, and we will be able to put out beastly numbers for damage. Probably not in comparison to the insane numbers the dps classes will be able to, but far far more than we would ever have been able to without this change.


Overall, I am really happy with the warrior changes, and excited for Cataclysm. I've heard of some people complaining or being disappointed with the changes, but I figure people will always find something to whine about. They enjoy the whining, it has nothing to do with the game. While it's too early to tell the complete picture, I see tanks being able to focus solely on survivability and not having to worry too much about their gear having threat stats on it, as their mastery will provide for them those stats. All classes seem to be getting easier to gear for, and find gear for, without as much stat balancing, which is rarely fun and never simple. I can't wait to see what else is going to change.


Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Good Riddance, Twenty-Five Mans.

Cooldowns And When To Use Them.

Cooldowns. Are you using them? You should be. All the time. Why? Why not? A lot of people who started playing before cooldowns were reduced from their excruciating half an hour timers, or even their ten minute timers often have trouble popping them except in desperate times for fear of "wasting" them. Now that is no longer the case, and most cooldowns are instead reduced to two to three minutes, with five minutes being among the highest timers for warriors. Unless a boss encounter is specifically calling for a cooldown period like Festergut, they should be used all the time. They can be used tactically or just time them for maximum efficiency. Below are the basic cooldowns that every warrior shares.

Shield Wall: A powerful cooldown that is the subject of much discussion over whether to reduce it's time (and effectiveness) to 40% damage reduction every two minutes by speccing into Improved Disciplines and glyphing into Glyph of Shield Wall. As far as I'm concerned, the discussion is over. Heck yes we want that! But what about all that potential damage reduction you're missing out on? Well how much more are we losing by being able to use it only once every five minutes? A whole ton more. With a two minute cooldown, we are talking being able to use it two or three times a fight. If the fight is long and drawn out to say nine or ten minutes, that's five times as opposed to two times you could be using it. If you're not speccing into it, you should be. I'll explain specifically why later on.

Last Stand: A great ability that gets better the more you stack health. Can be made even better with Glyph of Last Stand. Like most tank cooldowns it buys time for healers to catch up, or it can come at a time when you know the enemy might hit harder. A smart tank who can time well for enrages or when healers may be overwhelmed won't need to have insane health pools to handle it if they know when to pop this glorious ability.

Enraged Regeneration: A mediocre ability on its own, but a great life-saving tool when combined with Last Stand. The ability goes off the highest number of hit points you had when you popped it, so rocking into the 80k hit points after Last Stand will heal you for over 24k over ten seconds. Purely amazing, and will make your healers breath a little easier for the duration.

Shield Block: I hesitate to call it a cooldown, but this ability should be used every time it's available without question. Is block an amazing stat against bosses? Not really, but does it help? You bet. I mechanically hit this thing non-stop the entire raid session, on trash, on bosses, whenever. Always. Practice keeping it up at all times. If you are rocking the Deep Wounds build, it will provide extra threat on area of effect pulls.

That covers warrior-specific abilities, now we'll take a look at other cooldowns available to you.

Stoneform: Are you a dwarf tank? Is Stoneform on your bar? If not, fix it now. For the longest time I forgot I had this ability, since I never used it at a lower level and after a while the rather lackluster dwarven racials made me forget I even had racials. But this ability is neat for it's poison removing effects, and amazing for it's armor boosting effects.   Overall, I'd say it's probably the best tanking racial I've seen so far. The tauren health boost and the elven extra dodge come in handy, but I always prefer an ability I can consciously use over a passive buff.

Indestructible Potion: Best potions in the game for tanks. Healing potions are great, but a straight damage reduction potion will prevent in the time it's up far more damage than any healing potion could heal. Ideally one takes one right before pulling, and again during the fight for maximum effectiveness.

Trinkets: Obviously these are going to vary based on what you have, and I always prefer trinkets with a use effect if it's any good, and a passive effect if it's great. They can range from the mediocre, to the fantastic. If I didn't raid Icecrown with the frequency I did, I would definitely wear the fantastic over the mediocre trinket for it's use effect. Of course, one shouldn't pick a trinket merely for it's use effect, at times a trinket's passive abilities far exceed it's use effects.

Now that we've covered what cooldowns are available to a tank, we can cover the ideal time to use them. Obviously on some fights such as Festergut, there is a specific time to use them, but do you pop all of them at once at that time? Cause you can make your cooldowns stretch much further if you use them one at a time. Or even tier them so that they overlap. What I do is start with Shield Wall, wait several seconds then use Last Stand with Enraged Regeneration, wait a few more seconds, then pop Stone Form and a trinket. This method of stretching out my cooldowns allows me to be protected for a much longer period of time, so I'm able to survive a prolonged beating. Using all of one's cooldowns at once makes one really really unkillable for about ten seconds. But what about after that?

On a boss that has no specific time to use cooldowns, why not pop them all the time? When I tank and spank, since most of my cooldowns are reset in two minutes I use them about every thirty seconds, just to provide a moment of relief for a healer. On Marrowgar, I try to use one just as I pick him up after a Bone Storm, to give the healers a bit of time to get situated. Making a tank swap on Putricide? Pop one. In fact, at least one cooldown should be used on every fight with a tank swap. Cooldowns should always be used to relieve stress from the healers. You may not be anywhere near dying, but to save you, a healer might have to let a dps die. Regular cooldowns that let healers catch up will save raids, even if it seems like your health is fine. I pop a cooldown any time I see a healer has to run or perform a mechanic that prevents him from healing. Your cooldowns aren't for you, they're for the healers. Watch them, pay attention, and use them tactfully.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Warrior Tanking In Cataclysm.

Keeping Up Raid Morale.

You're the tank, that means morale is your job! Oh sure, it's not only your job, but as the tank, you occupy a certain level of authority and leadership that others will follow if you lead them. The raid leader may be too busy analyzing the last wipe or telling people where they can improve to deal with the morale of the raid. As the tank, our job is not always easy, but let's face it, after a certain level of gear and progression, it's easy quite often. It does not take a lot of effort to stand there and fall asleep tank Blood Queen Lana'thel. So we have no right to criticize dps or blame healers for failures. We have our job, they have theirs. It doesn't matter if we did it just last night on our mage and never had any problems, we're not them, they're not us, it's irrelevant. More than that, it's detrimental to the raid.

If there is criticism to be made, it is the responsibility of the raid leader and only the raid leader to make it. If you're the raid leader, fine. If not, the only things coming out of your mouth should be encouraging and morale building. No one likes a raid that is turning on itself, and no raid will suffer repeated wipes if the members are finger-pointing. Don't do it. It is a known fact that people crave praise, and Warcraft players crave it doubly-so from their peers. It's evident in the way they constantly post their damage per second, brag about the new item they got, or tell the story of the time they saved the raid. Most players, in an anonymous medium like Warcraft, will eventually succumb to bullying. That is, informing other players how bad they are (compared to their leet skills) or whispering among each other about the bad player. No one likes a bully, and if you're being one you know it and should stop. Pointing out the mistake a player made will never encourage that player to be better, nor will it strengthen the team once he finally leaves. It does not better the raid team to stroke their e-peen by harming another, and it impresses no one. Replacing him with a new member who may be better still does not improve the raid. It will only make the rest of the team afraid of whomever is doing the bullying and the stress will cause more wipes, more problems, until the raid and maybe the entire guild falls apart. Because what every single fight in Warcraft is about is teamwork.

Teamwork, coordination, and unity. This spells success. Gear should only be seen as a buffer for mistakes. The better your gear, the more effective you are at correcting a mistake or cleaning up a mess. Lower gear is not a crutch, and in fact I see it as an excuse to perform better and practice an encounter with better efficiency. A high enough level of coordination and brotherhood among the raid will overcome any gear deficiencies.

As a tank, I find myself bored past the first two fights in Icecrown, where the tank's job is sadly relegated to standing around hitting the boss while watching everyone else scurry around. Occasionally a tank swap is in order, then back to watching the raid. What should the tank be doing during this down time? Uplifting the team! I always make it a point to encourage people I notice doing their jobs exceedingly well, or who make a last second save. People want to be noticed, and want their peers to see that they are doing their job not only well, but fantastically. If someone makes a mistake, trust me, they are usually very aware of it. There is no need to attack him. Instead what you can do is compliment the people doing well, which will encourage the others to perform better, in hopes that they too get noticed and uplifted. Some examples:

The other day I recall fighting the Blood Princes, and I started watching a kinetic bomb slowly falling that no one had caught yet. I made sure to call it out in case no one had seen it, and from clear across the other side of the room I see a mage blink, run in and blast it right before it landed, saving us all at the last second. Should the bomb have been anywhere near the ground? Of course not, ideally, it should have been hit ages ago. Pointing that out helps nothing. I don't know if the other dps were occupied with bigger problems, so instead I told the mage "nice save!" in vent, and guaranteed he felt like a hero.

A long time ago I died to an enraged Icehowl, and the bear off-tank picked him up in a split second and managed to pop his cooldowns in order to survive, saving the raid from certain death. I made sure to point out what a great job he did under pressure, and to this day that tank loves to raid with me on any of his toons. Because he knows he will get noticed, and will feel great.

Why make people feel bad when you can make them feel great to raid with you? The more you uplift and notice the small things people do, the more appreciated people will feel, the more they will want to raid with you, the more you will succeed in raids. Morale is your job as a tank, as a dps, as a healer. It is everyone's responsibility to make sure people are not discouraged after hours of wipes. Crack a joke, notice how much closer the raid got to downing the boss, keep it light and always remember that stress will only make everything worse.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Cooldowns And When To Use Them.

Add-Ons, Mods, User-Interfaces And You.

It's my general philosophy in user-interfaces that one wants them to be as simple as possible, with very little clutter hogging screen space. When I see a UI like the one above, I can only conclude that the user was drunk when they designed their set-up, or else they have tunnel-vision, and therefore shouldn't be playing at all. At times I wonder if the reason raid awareness is low is because of poor UI design, and people are simply oblivious to the fact they are standing in fire. A simple rearrangement would save many a wiped raid.

I use a number of add-ons to affect my game, about thirty was my most recent count, though I am constantly deleting and changing the ones I use. However only twelve of them are on my screen at most and that truly are a part of my user-interface. These chosen twelve are all I need to give me all the information I require in almost any situation, while still keeping out of my way and giving me the largest possible viewport in which to see the game. I'll show a screen shot of my UI in battle with the add-ons labeled, then show another outside of battle. Take note that whenever possible, I made bars take on the default Blizzard bar style, and I made fonts into Fritz Quadrata TT, which is the default font that Blizzard uses. This is in an attempt to unify all the mods into a single style to better fit into the game, and not look completely out of place.

Bartender: This is simply a mod to be able to move and custom design all your myriad of abilities and buttons. It's total available number of buttons is much more than Warcraft's default UI allows, so if you're finding putting all your abilities on the few bars you have is becoming a problem, Bartender is a fantastic upgrade. As you can see in my picture, I have faded out the non-essential abilities to be almost transparent except when moused-over, where they will pop up to full alpha again. The alpha setting on all your mods will be a life-saver, and I have reduced almost all my mods to be completely invisible when not in use. You will also notice I have no bag bar anywhere, as I have keybound them all to open with Shift+B. Key binding unimportant utilities will allow for quite a number of actions to no longer require space on-screen, but still remain functional.

Btex: This is the simple dark underlay that binds the entire UI into a single cohesive whole. Without it, the bottom portion of my screen looks very messy and simply not put-together. It doesn't look intentional. There are several skins available in Btex's default package, but also you can download more, or even custom create your own unique skin. The size of the skin is changeable to fit any screen or UI size, and it even comes with a grid overlay to perfectly center your add-ons.

Elkano's Buff Bars: This mod is extremely customizable and can be made to track any buff and debuff you like or even just specific ones. Currently I have it to just check for specific buffs that I look for in a raid as a tank, Gift of the Wild, Greater Blessing of Kings to name a few. That way I have a specific check list of buffs to look for, and if I'm missing one, I immediately know. Cutting down the list of tracking buffs and debuffs makes it take up much less room on your screen, as well as keeps your mind focused on the few buffs that do matter, instead of having to search for it in the mess of infinite buffs. A mage will not care if he has Battle Shout, and so it should not be taking up his space with useless information.

Grid: This is simply the best raid frames mod available. As a tank, you have two concerns in regards to what is happening to your teammates. Who has aggro, and who is dead. This will provide you with both, and much much more. I have mine customized to be very small, so that when I enter Wintergrasp or Alterac Valley, I have enough space for all forty people in my raid without it overlapping my bars, or having to move it. That's just my personal choice. I have the mod set to have a red box around whomever is being attacked in my raid, which instantly provides me with the knowledge of who has aggro, in the event it is not me. It also shows who is low on health, who is being healed, who is low on mana, who is poisoned, cursed, etc. Every scrap of information I could need in a small box that won't eat up space.

Mik Scrolling Battle Text: There are several combat text add-ons out there, even a built-in one, but none of them have the utility and customizability of MSBT. Every scrap of damage coming in and going out is revealed in totally changeable units. Need to know when an ability procs? MSBT does that. Need to cut down on screen clutter from dots and hots? MSBT does that. Every box has its own set information that you can locate anywhere and even change direction. I prefer having incoming damage on the right going down and outgoing damage on the left going up. It provides a small revolving wheel around me that is easily identifiable based on direction. One word of advice, the boxes are set on "jiggle" by default. Turn that off for the sake of keeping all the blood in your eyes.

Omen: The quintessential threat meter. This should be a required mod for everyone in the raid, regardless of position, though tanks will make the most use out of it. Simply put, it will show you your threat on your current target. It's default setting is on a canvas-colored box that frankly is not appealing to the eye, so in an effort to keep a unified look, I made the add-on completely invisible by turning the alpha down to zero and locking it in position, so that only the bars appear when in combat, and are gone when not. Skada is a common replacement for Omen as well as Recount, however one should note that Skada works on a different threat scale than Omen does. Omen uses the tank's threat as the 100% marker, and will take 110% of the tank's threat for a melee class to pull aggro, and 130% of the tank's threat for a ranged class to pull. So even if it seems a class is above the tank on threat, it may not even be close. This is easily verified if you are a ranged with 110% aggro, and move into melee range, you will notice you gain aggro suddenly when before you did not. Another good reason ranged should always remain at range. Skada on the other hand uses 100% threat as the pull amount, so whomever reaches 100% threat is the one with aggro. It is important to know how each add-on works.

Prat: This is simply a chat mod to change the size and functionality of the chat window. The in-game chat is static and can only get to a certain size, this will allow it to not only fit any size you want, but also choose the location of the text box and remove the scroll arrows.

Recount: The best known and most commonly used damage meter, it is primarily used for dps classes to brag to each other and start fights within the raid. However, to a tank, it has many other uses. Besides merely showing your own dps, which should be inconsequential, it will show the reasons for each members death, who is healing the most, if you are being parried, etc. It's a complete combat log without having to read through the in-game's rather terrible combat log.

Sexy Map: I use this add-on primarily to make the map-tied add-on buttons invisible and to make the map smaller and only show relevant information. I use a simple square to take up less space, and I turn off the name of the zone I'm in cause I already know the zone I'm in. I'm in it. Sexy Map can be as elaborate and fancy as you want it to be, but for my uses, simple and out of the way is all I need.

Tidy Plates/Threat Plates: One of the best tanking add-ons I've ever used. This is actually Tidy Plates the main mod, and Threat Plates is a plug-in for it. I use Threat Plates even when I'm not tanking, however, as it looks good and relays the information I need no matter what character. What it does is green border the nameplates of the mobs you have aggro on, and red border what you don't have aggro on. All well and good, that's what the in-game aggro meter does. Except the less aggro you have on a mob, the bigger the nameplate gets! You can make the loose mob's nameplate absolutely huge, which makes it much easier to find and click on in an army of mobs that your overzealous dps is aoe-ing like mad. This has made my click and taunting time go down significantly, and rarely will a mob even have time to turn around before it's back on me. This is the one and only mod I've ever found to show your relative threat on a mob that's not your target. Infinitely useful to a tank, and the nameplates will reverse if you switch to a dps mode, turning big when you don't want to attack and small when it's safe.

Titan Panel: A handy mod that clumps a bunch of handy information at the top of the screen. It has several plug-ins that interact with it, and best of all, will only appear if you mouse over it. Otherwise, it's completely hidden. Great for information you might need but don't need all the time.

X-Perl Unit Frames: I think every player should use some form of unit frames. X-Perl is just my preferred one. The in-game frames are unwieldy and overly fancy, and hence I stumbled across this wonderful add-on. I keep my frame, my target, and my target's target at the bottom of the screen, so that I don't have to keep looking from the top of the screen to the bottom for all my information, it's all located right at the bottom. It also has tons of settings to change every little thing about your UI you can imagine. You can turn off your party view when in a raid, you can track aggro, you can show not only your party member's pets frames but their targets as well. That information may not be relevant, but it's available. I turn off the raid frames they use, as I prefer Grid, and you can set the size of your debuffs to be smaller than your buffs to be easier to spot, and each individual frame has it's own settings. It really is a fantastic add-on.

Overall, the idea here is maximum efficiency with as little space used as possible. There is an option in the Warcraft settings that allow you to lower the UI size as a whole, and I've made everything as small as possible. This created so much extra room at the bottom of the screen, I advise people with larger-sized screens to use this option. It has created so much extra space I could even fit a few more mods there with a little configuring. It also allows quite a large portion of the screen to be free to watch the entire raid. Below I have a shot of my UI outside of battle, free of distractions and with all mods gone to their default invisible mode. I don't suggest copying my exact set-up unless it appeals to you, but the general philosophy of simplification and minimalism should be in any user-interface.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Keeping Up Raid Morale.

Warrior Changes 3.3.3

At the time of this writing, there are currently seven changes coming to warriors for patch 3.3.3, four of which are for protection warriors. I'm not sure what the Blizzard developers were thinking this patch, but there is certainly more AoE love for us. Perhaps they heard all the forum whining and wanted to help without turning us into paladins, and not making our AoE capabilities as dull as a druid's (see: Swipe). While I've never been one to complain about our AoE threat output, a buff in that department will never be turned down.

So, let's take a look at the relevant changes:

Revenge: Damage done by this ability (base and scaling) increased by 50%

Thunder Clap: This ability now counts as a ranged attack, granting it double damage on critical strikes instead of 150% and ranged miss chance, and still cannot be dodged or parried.

Improved Revenge: This talent can no longer trigger a stun, increases damage of your Revenge ability by 30/60% (up from 10/20%) and instead causes Revenge to strike an additional target for 50/100% of Revenge's damage.

Vitality: Now boosts Stamina by 3/6/9%, up from 2/4/6%. Strength and expertise benefits have not changed.

I've had a chance to test out the changes on the PTR and I am quite happy with all of them. The Vitality change is nice, though dull. The health it provides isn't really very noticeable and probably won't net more than a thousand hit points, but extra free health is something I'd never say no to.

The Thunder Clap change is very interesting, and I can see how changing the critical strike damage would add to extra threat, provided a critical strike happened at all. The biggest change here is changing it from a spell to a ranged attack. This is extremely valuable as it will allow for a greater chance to hit, as the ranged attack hit cap is significantly lower than the spell hit cap, thus the net change is to provide Thunder Clap with an extra hit chance. More importantly, the change will also keep the ability from becoming unusable when you become silenced, something I particularly get peeved about whenever I run something like Nexus. Now if only my paladin tank had something similar. Overall a nice change, a little help, but nothing earth-shattering. Only with extended play-testing will I be able to see it's effects.

The biggest (and in my opinion the funnest) changes are to Revenge. Not only is the base and scaled damage of Revenge going way up, but best of all it is becoming a new Cleave-like ability! I won't miss the loss of the stun one iota. A lot of warrior tanks had complained that the recent changes to Devastate had left Revenge in the cold, dropping it off the "rotation" completely. I never found this to be the case, and kept my points in Improved Revenge. Now I'm happy I did since it's coming back in such a big way. The new Revenge I tested on the PTR was a powerhouse of damage, I was able to not only gain massive threat on two targets at once, but also to contribute to dps in a meaningful way. My damage per second increased anywhere from five hundred to a thousand, depending on the mobs and situation I was in. The overall damage put Revenge way at the top by a large margin. This should also alleviate a lot of people's worry that warrior tanks are too low on the damage meters compared to other tanks. Even soloing an army of mobs at once didn't take a year. I doubt the change will affect the way I play much, I won't be taking Cleave off my bars just yet, but it will passively help every group I pull.

As a whole, this patch is looking fantastic for protection warriors, and if all these changes go through (which they may not), we will be much better off. I'm excited!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Add-Ons, Mods, User-Interfaces And You.

Stamina Trinket Tanks Are Only Fooling Themselves.

I am not a fan of stamina trinkets. I've seen a lot of PuG raids choose their MT and their OT based on health pools alone. Hit points do not a tank make. The ignorance about the mechanics of tanking is widely prevalent, but hit points seem to be the main source of contention. Don't get me wrong, health is good, we want a lot of it, I myself gem for it at the cost of all else. What I have a problem with is tanks falling into the false sense of security that stamina trinkets give. The most common are the two Brewfest trinkets. Easy to acquire, a ton of stamina, and some of the most useless wastes of two slots I've ever seen.

I think of it in terms of available space. Besides the base stamina on all tanking gear, there are three ways for a tank to expand their hit points. Gems, enchants, and trinkets. Let's break each of them down. Enchantments are easy, there are only a limited number of enchantments of any use to a tank in any particular slot. The decision of taking stamina where it's available is easily made, when compared to rather lackluster competition. Enchantments aren't really a problem for most people. The main battle comes between gems and trinkets. Any tank has only two available slots for trinkets. And even starting tanks have at least five or six (much more when in advanced gear) gem slots. Gems are static and do not change. They rely on no proc, no use effect. They are inherently boring stat raisers. Trinket slots on the other hand allow for procs, use effects, and stat raising. That combined with their scarcity makes a trinket slot many times more valuable than a gem slot.

So why waste those precious slots with something as dull as stamina? In the end, the stamina gain will only save you in a situation where any other trinket would have prevented it. I'm not saying all stamina trinkets are bad. Some of them are amazing. The Black Heart remains one of the best tank trinkets in the game. It provides stamina while not using it's limited space on more of the same. It provides the x factor needed to make a trinket worthwhile. Armor is amazing, and one of the primary reasons I still use Glyph of Indomitability. The overall damage not being taken by armor's reduction far outweighs the extra health given by stamina. I'd rather have thirty-five thousand hit points with seventy-three percent damage reduction than forty-one thousand hit points with sixty percent damage reduction. Taking less damage is always worth more than being able to take more damage. Who do you think the healers will appreciate more?

Okay, but how about magic-damage fights? I still hold the same viewpoint as Veneratio in this entry. You never die to just magic damage. If you do, something beyond something as minor as your trinkets is wrong. I'd rather be taking less damage from the enemy's melee attacks than trying to out-stam a combined magic/melee attack.

The last thing I want to touch on is please don't fool yourself into thinking because you have the most hit points you are the "better" tank. Tanking is so many more things than just being a meat shield, and a skilled tank is always in the right place at the right time, expects things to go wrong, and is the reason they don't. You don't need sixty thousand hit points to do that, just a lot of raid awareness and intelligent playing.

Tank smarter, not harder.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Warrior Changes 3.3.3

Tanks Don't Have Threat Cooldowns.

Oh, but how I wish we did. I suppose if we did, however, all tanks would just pop it every time it was up and the whole point of being a tank would be significantly reduced. Let me state right now that for most tanks in a raid setting, 99% of the time, threat is a non-issue. But this entry isn't about those 99% of the times, this entry is about the 1% where things get a little stressful. In certain situations where the enrage timer is creeping up, or in a fight like Sartharion 3D where the maximum amount of damage must be inflicted before the tank dies, the dps is pulling everything they've got, boosted by the power of Heroism/Bloodlust. It's in these desperate situations that accidents happen. The warlock or hunter (it's always one of the two, or in rare cases, a boomkin) is easily pushing 9k-10k tps, the tank has literally just pulled, and he's got to top the threat of extreme dps, with a nearly empty rage bar. Nor is the option to not blast away available. There's a strict timer, and there's no hope of beating it without this method. What does the tank do?

Unfortunately, not a whole lot. That seems to be the problem, there are no threat cooldowns. All cooldowns available to a tank are survival based. Which is fine, I'd rather have more survival than threat for almost every situation. What good is extra threat if you're dead? It's just in these situations that it gets difficult. I write this entry not for advice for tanks, but mostly for the problematic dps that have high levels of threat through no fault of their own. Everyone knows hunters have ridiculously high threat output. What it seems is that not every hunter knows about his Feign Death and Misdirection abilities. I'm not here to tell people how to play their classes, of course. But in an extreme burn-down situation, where threat might be slipping away from you, it might behoove the tank to ask the dps to pop their threat reducing abilities when and where they can. Again, most situations won't be a problem due to modern raiding's high level of mobility, but if they are catching up, as they run out fire, it wouldn't be too much to ask that they pop Soulshatter or Feint. It's really up to the tank to ask the dps for this favor. Sure it benefits the whole raid, but even on my mage I often forget to keep my aggro down in the tunnel-vision of being max dps. They might need a friendly reminder.

That being said, just make sure the dps you roll with are aware that there is no magic Tank Button that you push to gain infinite threat times a billion, especially in the beginning of a fight. As the tank, there is little you can do yourself to reduce their aggro, besides actually putting Vigilance on a dps for once (if you're a warrior), and making the raid aware that maybe one should pop Heroism a few seconds after the fight starts, not right as it starts.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Stamina Trinket Tanks Are Only Fooling Themselves.

Vigilance Is The Best Tanking Ability In The Game.

Ok maybe I'm a little biased because I play a warrior tank, but I'm being completely honest in my statement that Vigilance is the best tanking ability available in World of Warcraft. But not for the reasons that most people would assume. See the world I envision is a world where most tanks merely see the threat reduction aspect of the ability. Put it on an overzealous hunter or warlock and you can keep him from getting his own trigger-happy self killed (however tempting it is to just let him die). Oh that's all fine and good in a five-man heroic. But in a raid setting, Vigilance takes on a beautiful new aspect I don't think a lot of people consider. Put Vigilance on a tank.

Sounds crazy doesn't it? I know.

Hopefully I'm getting the sarcasm across.

I've actually gotten a lot of anger from fellow tanks who only see the drain to their threat and remove it. I can wholeheartedly inform you that these tanks have no idea what they are doing and they have no business being tanks. Please direct them to this entry.

Now I'll break down exactly why Vigilance is so good, to those who don't believe me. Let's focus on the 3% damage reduction first. This one is pretty much a no-brainer. Who is taking the most damage in any given raid environment and therefore would need any sort of reduction to damage they can get? The healer tank! Damage reduction is the boon of all tanks, in fact, we go through incredible lengths to get it, even passing on Tier gear to obtain more of it. There's a stat that every tank is clamoring for, especially in Icecrown that also has a reduce damage effect, it's called armor. That's right, I've done some calculations and estimated that 3% damage reduction is roughly equivalent to a four thousand armor buff! That's enough armor for any tank of any class to beg for Vigilance to be put on them. Now I don't know if Vigilance's damage reduction is against magic damage too, but if it is, it's even better.

As for the Taunt cooldown, this is the ultimate and best feature of Vigilance, it's what separates it from the rather lackluster Blessing of Sanctuary. Having a Taunt with an almost non-existent cooldown is the saving feature of a raid. Who is the one person in a raid who is constantly getting bashed in the face by giant hell-demons, and therefore creating the most opportunity for Taunt to refresh? The tank again! Putting Vigilance on a DPS will ensure that refresh never gets used, and you're wasting a lot of opportunity. The cooldown of Taunt is long. Agonizingly long. Eight seconds is really really painful to watch a mob run around freely if you're too low on the threat table for some reason. Even if you have the Tier-9 2-piece set bonus, six seconds is still hard to not have Taunt in a panic situation. A Taunt on constant refresh is a god-send in any raid environment, and to not have it on a tank (the only person reliably getting hit) is foolish.

The Taunt effect of Vigilance goes through the roof in the event there are two warrior tanks in a raid. When they Vigilance each other, not only are both tanks getting 3% damage reduction, but the Taunt refresh is nearly instantaneous for both tanks as well. This makes several raid situations much simpler for the two of them. Tank swapping, compensating for missed Taunts, fixing accidental dual-Taunting, all these and other tanking mistakes are instantly fixed for a warrior tank team. The mark of a good tank is rarely his threat output or even his hit points, but purely his ability to deal with a bad situation and save a raid from a wipe. Never having to worry about Taunt being on cooldown will make any warrior tank be a hero to his raid team. Warrior tanks, welcome the chance to raid with each other as an opportunity to show off the power of having two warrior tanks in a raid team.

Finally, let's address the issue of the threat reduction of Vigilance. The question is: what issue? Any tank should be blasting through threat so fast no one has a hope of catching up to him. But for the sake of argument, let's assume some hunter or mage isn't paying attention and inadvertently passes you on threat. What can a tank do to fix this problem? Easy, let him die. It is not your responsibility to save some fool DPS from committing suicide all he wants. Most DPS have an aggro dump, and they should be using it. If a single DPS is consistently pulling aggro, and it's causing problems for the raid, what does the raid leader do to fix the problem? He either tells the DPS to watch his threat, or he kicks him from the raid. This is not the tank's problem. Lastly, in 99.99% of all situations, a 10-15% aggro reduction for any tank is not going to be a big deal. They can handle it. It's not like the threat is disappearing into space, it's going to the warrior. Don't forget that modern raiding is very mobile and most DPS either have to switch targets at some point or move a lot, providing you with enough time to stay ahead in threat. This minute aggro reduction isn't nearly enough to cause problems. Except in a single situation I'll be addressing in the next entry.

So all considering, the damage reduction equivalent to four thousand armor and the instant cool down on Taunt, make Vigilance one of if not the most powerful tanking ability in the whole game. As long as it's applied to another tank. Two warrior tanks means it's even better. So feel free to put it on a DPS if you want, but you are seriously doing yourself and the raid a disservice by not providing the buff to a member who could really use it. I consider Vigilance to be a nerf if one feels the need to apply it to a DPS. He should be embarrassed he got Vigilanced cause it means he is incapable of controlling his threat through normal means. I call it the Vigilance of Shame. So in my mind it's a nerf if applied to a DPS, a buff if applied to a tank. As for tanks who don't think they want it on them because of the threat reduction, ask them if the tiny 10% reduction is that big a deal, and would they prefer it if you main tanked since they seem to be having problems with threat. Any tank should be ecstatic to get Vigilance on them, and the warrior who put it on would be even more happy.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Tanks Don't Have Threat Cooldowns.

EDIT 3/14/2010: Upon applying Vigilance to a fellow warrior tank and explaining the reasoning why, he proceeded to take it off and inform me that it does not stack with a discipline priest's Renewed Hope damage reduction. Unsure at the time, I did some research and can conclude that Vigilance's damage reduction does indeed stack with every single damage reduction buff available except Blessing of Sanctuary. So a paladin may not appreciate a Vigilance but every other tank should. Trying to understand the other warrior tank's point of view, I attempted to show him the advantages of the buff by demonstrating the unlimited Taunt capability of the dual-buffing. He responded he did not foresee a lot of taunting in the raid. Unable to argue with that bafflingly flawed logic, I conceded the topic and let him go unbuffed. It seems this tank only taunts when his schedule allows for it.