WoW Protection Warrior Tank Guide

Protection Warrior stats are very important to its gameplay and making it feel fluid, reducing CD’s and the total GCD (global cooldown) of some abilities as well as empowering your defensives. It must be said, but Strength takes priority over any secondary stat as your gearing, once you’re a level of min maxing, take ilvl other secondaries, especially if the upgrade is significant.

• Haste: Haste is your most important stat in any scenario, it reduces the total cooldown time of Thunderclap, Shield Slam and Shield Block, your 2 main rage generators and your active mitigation, talents like Into the Fray do a LOT of work in the early stages of gearing and remains a solid option in endgame gameplay.
• Versatility: As noted above, Protection Warrior is great at not taking damage, Versatility decreases damage taken and increases damage and healing done, making it an all around great stat for Protection warrior to have.
• Critical Strike: Like any other game, this stat increases your critical strike chance equaling more damage done, but for protection warrior, your parry rating is a direct reflection of your Critical Strike rating(the stat, not the %, increasing your CS% will not increase your parry rating). Now warrior is a block spec and most of your mitigation will come from Blocking incoming damage, adding another source of mitigation as well as increasing your damage. Not a stat to prioritize but not one to dump either.
• Mastery: Mastery for prot increases your base block chance(good!) and your chance to critically block(also good!) but the latter does rely on RnG more than is cared for. It does also increase your attack power, more damage and bigger Ignore Pains(Great!). Due to the RnG nature of the stat it’s not as prioritized as the others but also remains a stat you don’t want to dump either, since critical block combined with Spell Block shores up a major weakness that protection warrior has had for a long time!

In season 2 we’re going to be achieving our diminishing returns more quickly than in previous expansions, since we already like to stack versatility quite a bit, critical strike is next in line, adding a decent source of damage increase and parry. For new Protection Warriors, focus on Versatility first, then add onto your crit afterwards. For the seasoned vets, you can opt for more critical strike much quicker.

Note: I will be updating this section as further testing occurs after the tuning passes has finished. New embellishments have arrived in 10.1, perhaps changing our Best in Slot embellishment items. Its best to use caution in the first couple of weeks of a new patch to wait on tuning passes before crafting some items. Be aware.

Until you reach a more than comfortable level of haste, enchant your rings with Haste and Gem Haste wherever possible.

Weapon

1. Howling Rune is a 2 hour consumable that increases your haste, best in all forms of content.
2. Frozen Devotion(Enchant) – Best for damage
3. Sophic Devotion – Best defensively since the Strength proc won’t out damage Frozen Devotion but will provide you with more defensive benefits.

Cloaks & Bracers
There are now solid Leech enchant you can acquire to be placed on those pieces of gear, with our talent build we start out with 10% base leech, and since our weakness is consistent self sustain, leech helps to shore that up, combined with the Indomitable talent, we have very consistent healing to keep us going, meaning even if we’re at 50% hp, we’re still incredibly difficult to kill.

Phials

1. Tepid Versatility is my all around go to phial of choice, while it may not be best in all scenarios, it’s a solid option in every scenario. A nice stat increase of a stat we already like to stack.
2. Eye of the Storm is a Strength increase based on the number of enemies that have hit you to a max of 5, this is a solid phial to be using in Fortified weeks of Mythic plus, but loses value on bosses(only 1 target is hitting you), unless you pull trash onto them (not always recommended or possible).
3. Glacial Fury is a damage proc phial which can see its best use in AoE pulls. Unfortunately it offers no defensive benefits but does do nice damage.

Lastly, our pants! Fierce Armor Kits replace the Shadowlands consumable into a full “enchant”, which now increases our primary stat and stamina permanently.

The new talent trees for Dragonflight offer us two trees, a spec tree and a class tree. The class tree is a more general tree which sees all three warrior specs with the same options, the spec tree is Protections and Protections alone, both of these trees are stupid strong for protection and offer a lot of flexibility in talent specializations based on encounter scenarios. Below is an all around solid build combining offensive abilities and strong defensives useful in most encounters, that being said you can tweak it as you need of course, sometimes you just don’t need 2 charges of Shield Wall, etc.

The most important thing any new protection warrior needs to know and focus on is Shield Block, the power of this active mitigation is genuinely insane and best out of all the tank specs. While building up your warrior, focus on having full combat uptime on Shield Block and prioritize rage dumping into this defensive, DO NOT LET IT DROP!, under any circumstance.

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The class tree offers a lot of great utility and some of our core abilities we’ve had since the dawn of WoW.

There is some flex you choose from if you want to tweak your utility based on what you need. The nice additive of these trees to Dragonflight and how warriors was specifically made, is there are no cookie cutter builds to be made here, if you want more interrupt CD, more healing, total rage pool or damage, you can tweak it here which offers the player a good choice based on encounter profiles.

In this guide I’ll first take about staple talents you’ll almost never swap away from, then Flex talents, talents you can choose to opt away from for something different. I won’t be breaking down every talent option here, since some are self explanatory (5% movement speed…) or are simply there for pathing reasons.

Stance Dancing is back! The class tree gives protection warrior Battle Stance and Defensive stance back! The tldr, battle stance gives us 3% increase crit, defensive stance reduces incoming damage by 15% but also reduces our damage by 10%. 95% you’ll be in battle stance, only using defensive stance when you’re in trouble, or you know you just need a bigger defensive. Defensive stand is nice because it’s an on demand (3 second cooldown to swap), 15% damage reduction. Below is a macro to make swapping stances one button (incredibly useful) since protection warrior does suffer from minor button bloat.

Battle Stance Change Macro
#showtooltip /cast [stance:2]!Defensive Stance;!Battle Stance

• Impending Victory (default): This is our more consistent form of “big” healing. A 25 second(resettable if you get the killing blow on a target) 30% Max HP heal. This doesn’t sound huge, but trust, while the overall healing this ability provides isn’t going to reflect well on the meters, it comes in clutch when you desperately need attention.
• War Machine (default): Auto attacks generate more rage, killing an enemy gives you 5 rage. Not much else to be said aside from you like rage, rage is good.
• Spell Reflect (default): Probably one of the most OP abilities than protection warrior has(seriously!), a 6 second magic defensive that can reflect or deflect the spell altogether. Each spell against you has a different ID, some are reflectable, will do damage back to the enemy, some are only deflectable, won’t damage them but won’t damage you either. This requires proactive attention and some planning, but this ability comes in clutch and can deal some serious damage. Dark Claws from the Minions of Doubt in Temple of the Jade serpent are fully reflectable for example and can easily be 35-40% of my damage on that pull.
• Rallying Cry (default): This ability is very powerful for large incoming group damage, while it can be used as a personal, its best used to help your raid or party overcome large portions of incoming incoming damage, meaning you’ll mostly use it to benefit others more than yourself.
• Thunderclap + Blood & Thunder (default): We’re going to take about these two talents options together(for good reason) because Thunderclap is an integral part of your rotation. It’s one of 2 of your active use Rage Generators, the other being Shield Slam, it now automatically applies Rend(a talent in the spec tree) on up to 5 targets(which also generates more rage, to be talked about later in the spec tree). Thunderclap itself deals good damage and will consistently be in your top 5 damaging abilities, add the synergies you gain for rage gen, rend damage and the slow(20% applied to enemies), this ability is core to your functionality as a Tank. On the spec tree side of things this will also reduce the CD of Demoralizing Shout by up to 3s, which I’ll elaborate further in that section of the guide.
• Heroic Leap (default), Bounding Stride (flex) and Double Time (default): These are your big movement abilities that allow you to zip around the battle quickly and efficiently. When beginning a pull its important to open with Charge, NOT Heroic leap(i know it’s fun but it doesn’t generate rage). Since the opening Charge will provide you with your first bit of rage to get started on keeping up your active mitigation.