Posts with tag protection

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

So maybe you don't tank or perhaps have never tanked. Maybe you're new to the game, maybe you just haven't tried it out yet, maybe you used to tank but then stopped for whatever reason and aren't feeling comfortable picking it back up. Whatever your situation, the tanking game in World of Warcraft is available to you as a warrior.

A lot of guides tend to focus on gearing and speccing your warrior to tank, glossing over what you actually do as a tank. What buttons are you hitting and when? Sometimes that's because it seems self evident, or because specific fights call for specific things. This guide is written from an absolutely basic perspective: It will tell you what to do and when to do it, assuming you've no experience at all as a tank. Therefore, this caveat: No guide can make up for practical experience, and you may well learn different ways to perform the role that conflict with this. And that's fine. Learning the role through doing will help teach you what's suited to you; this is just intended to get you started out on that road.

This guide also assumes you are level 85. At least for the first 60 or so levels, you have few enough abilities that there's really no confusion and if you level as a prot warrior, you'll pick this up anyway. This is intended for DPS warriors and PvPers who have never tanked but would like to, as well as old hands who haven't tanked in a while.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

We are about to live in interesting times, my friends. Last week's BlizzCon effectively promised us most, if not all, of the candy I wanted. With the full awareness that this is all subject to change, take a look at the mock-up for abilities (not talents, core abilities) that all fury warriors will get as they level from 1 to 90 in the revamped Mists of Pandaria scheme. With the announcement that Slam will be an arms-only ability, I personally suspect that Wild Strike is the replacement for Bloodsurge's Slam proc. More importantly, you'll note a few things.

One I really want to highlight at the start are the no-brainer talents that aren't talents anymore, like Flurry, Raging Blow, Bloodsurge and both Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury. You'll also note that you don't have to choose between TG and SMF. You get both at level 38. I used the fury abilities screenshot because that's the one I managed to get. If Blizzard did an arms or protection one, I didn't see it. But all three talent specializations are worth discussing, because we're heading into a future where your talent choices are no longer constrained by spec.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Having talked about Firelands for a while and then the rather esoteric concept of reforging and optimizing your gear, this week we're going to switch gears and talk about leveling in Cataclysm. Specifically, we're going to talk about leveling as protection, which quite possibly is the best leveling spec for a new player. This guide is aimed at people who are just starting the game or the class.

Leveling as protection in the post-Cataclysm landscape offers several advantages.

• Once you reach level 14 or so, you can begin queuing for instances as a tank, leading to fast experience and rewards. This makes gearing up a protection warrior fairly easy.
• If you intend to tank in the endgame, leveling as protection will allow you to learn the role as you level rather than having to pick it up all at once.
• Protection works well as a PVP spec in many brackets as you level.
• Especially as you hit Outlands and Northrend, protection offers a good combination of survivability and the ability to destroy mobs for ease of questing, even for quests that normally indicate a group. Prot warriors can often pull more mobs and solo faster than DPS warriors.
• Vengeance is a lot of fun.
• If you're playing an alt, there are now several heirlooms for tanking warriors.
• Hitting things in the face with a shield is pretty awesome -- I'm not going to lie.

Quite frankly, even if you don't intend to tank at max level, protection can be an extremely fun way to level. Let's take a beginner's-eye view.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

All right. With patch 4.2 dropping next week, it's time to discuss it in detail -- at least, what it means for warriors. What changes will it have in store for tanks (almost none) and DPS (less of it) warriors? What will happen to us in PVP (arms and fury warriors will lose burst, prot won't)? Why is our PVP set so ridiculously ugly that it makes me cringe?

We'll start by looking at what Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said about class balance. And specifically about warriors, because that's the column, you see. I could give a rat's hindquarters about the other, lesser classes. Except shamans. If you can't be a warrior, being a shaman is a good backup plan. Why not be both? Go ahead and roll six warriors and a shaman, I'll wait.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Last week, we discussed hit and expertise. Before that, we talked about tanking etiquette and how to work up to tanking. This week, we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of warrior tanking in heroics and raids. Before we do that, we should point you at the Protection 101 and Protection 101 talent guides, which will cover a lot of what we talk about here in more exhaustive detail.

Heroics and raiding are similar but have different demands on a tank. With the announcement this week of a new Call to Arms feature that will most likely result in added rewards for those of us willing to tank in the LFD system, it's a good time to familiarize yourself with the role and how to perform it to the best of your ability.

Frankly, I view tanking as something that requires more effort than DPSing. On my warrior, I find it takes less effort and less work to top DPS meters than it does to tank. This isn't necessarily because tanking requires more skill (I would argue it's no more complicated than DPSing in either spec) but rather due to a combination of added pressure, expectations and labor required to do it well and make it look like you haven't had to work hard at all. So let's talk about ways you can make it easier on yourself.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

A week or so ago, while I was planning out this series of posts about tanking in Cataclysm, our old friend (well, okay, I've never met nor spoken to him) Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) had some interesting things to say about the current state of hit and expertise for tanks. I wasn't able to immediately address them because I'd already written out what would be published, and so I had to wait until this column to talk about the history of hit and expertise for tanks in previous expansions and what the current state of the art is.

As warriors, we've been grappling with hit and expertise for years now. Why, you may ask, are they suddenly less viable for tanks than they were during Wrath? Well, believe it or not, hit and expertise have become less compelling for tanks entirely because of two big quality of life changes for tanks: the removal of parry hasting and taunt miss chance.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Tanking. It's what we talked about last week, and if not for a massive burst of gut rot that hit me Thursday like a hammer wielded by the Spectre himself, we would already have talked about it more this week. Better late than never, I suppose. To give you an idea of how sick I am as I type this, I didn't want to move all day, so I'm actually writing the column from the floor of my living room using my TV as my monitor. I'm so sick and exhausted that I find this screenshot of my worgen in his prot stance and gear standing on Anduin Lothar's shoulder to be hilarious. You see, Lothar was so badass, he had a werewolf for his conscience.

Maybe you have to be extremely dehydrated to appreciate it.

Anyway, this week, we're going to talk about protection's talents, which ones are niche talents and which are more generally applicable. Not all of the talents we discuss will be in the protection tree, as we'll also look at arms and fury talents that are well suited to tanking. It would be hard to justify talking about useful tanking talents without discussing Field Dressing, for instance. I had to tank those annoying parasites on Magmaw this week, and I was very glad to have the boosted self healing from Field Dressing for my Victory Rush heals.

Holy power is the big conversation topic for paladins right now (well, that and mobility in PvP -- but that's always a topic of conversation for paladins). For those of you who have been out of the loop, Blizzard announced during its last developer chat that for the betterment of the class, paladins would be receiving a new resource called holy power. This would be used in conjunction with mana for a variety of new and existing abilities.

So after having played with holy power on the beta realms, we decided to ask our Twitter followers if they had any questions or concerns about this new system for us to look into.

Soranomaru asks:

"How fast does it accrue? How do you spend it effectively? Is it a mechanic to empower spellcasts or another ressource like mana?"

Short answers: Currently, every 3 seconds for ret, 4 seconds for prot, and 6 seconds for holy due to the abilities and talents they'd be using to earn it. Usually, three points is the most efficient. It's a secondary resource, like runic power is to runes on a death knight, and there are certain abilities that use it and other abilities that have nothing to do with it.

Long answers: Holy power is a secondary resource that you'll have along with your current mana bar. As retribution and protection, you'll be using Crusader Strike to build up your holy power points (HPP). If you're holy, you'll still have access to Crusader Strike, but you will also be using Holy Shock to build up that HPP. The most HPP you can build up at a time is three, so you'll be earning and spending fairly quickly. Some abilities give a flat rate based on how much holy power you put into it (Word of Glory), while others get much more efficient with the more points used (Templar's Verdict).

With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge -- and soon, an entire flight of black dragons.

Last night, Blizzard released the new talent tree system onto the beta realms for people to take a gander at and test out. Each class is at various stages of done-ness, with some needing pruning, others needing tuning and still others just need another iteration or two before truly being ready. Paladins fall into that last category, along with three other classes.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the beta patch notes, with bold added for emphasis:

Cataclysm Beta Patch Notes - Build 12479

While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations.

...

Paladins
* We are in the process of overhauling many paladin talents, spells and abilities. Expect updates in upcoming patches.

source

Things like more healing abilities for holy, Holy Shield moving from a maintained ability to a tanking cooldown, and three new planned but unimplemented attack abilities for retribution are all in the pipeline, as well as a shakeup of the talents we've already been provided. So, without further ado, I present a first draft of the paladin talent trees.

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The Light and How to Swing It tries to help Paladins cope with the dark times coming in Cataclysm. See the upcoming Paladin changes the expansion will bring. Wrath is coming to a close and the final showdown with the Lich King is here. With Cataclysm soon heating things up, will you be ready?

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For those of you who don't know much about tanking, we're going to talk quickly about a stat that won't exist in Cataclysm. This lowly stat is called defense rating, and it's something that tanks need quite a bit of. The nice thing is that it's on just about everything that tanks wear, which means at higher gear levels, we've got it coming out of our ears. The primary point of this stat is to reduce the critical strike ability for incoming melee hits from the standard of 6% to 0%. Druids currently don't need this stat, as they've got a talent called Survival of the Fittest, which means that bosses don't need to drop defense leather.

All in all, the stat is kinda boring, as while it does still do nice things after you reach the defense cap of 690 rating (or 540 skill), most people don't bother with it and stack stamina or other avoidance. So Blizzard decided that they're going to get rid of it.

Around BlizzCon 2009, we were told that the crit reduction we formerly got from defense rating was going to be tied into things that were available to all members of each tanking class. Examples used were baking it into Bear Form for druids, Righteous Fury for paladins, Defensive Stance for warriors and Frost Presence (or rather, Blood Presence in Cataclysm) for death knights. That means that if a retribution paladin or arms warrior wanted to tank, all he'd need to do was swap to vaguely appropriate gear (or just over to a sword and shield), pop his respective abilities, and away he'd go. That's not how it appears things went down, though.

With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon an entire flight of black dragons.

First up, I'm looking for action screenshots of retribution and protection paladins. They can be any level between 1 and 80. I'll be using these for header graphics like the one above. Please send those as well as any other comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

Secondly, this is it. We're almost done. We're finishing our final installment of how to gear your new level 80 protection paladin. If you've been reading our previous weeks of this guide, you know that we talked over reputation and profession gear as well as all of the various dungeon gear you can nab. This week we're going to be taking advantage of all of that dungeon running and spending our badges with a look at all of the badges from Frost to Heroism (and yes there are exactly 7 useful items that you can trade Emblems of Triumph down to Emblems of Heroism for ... and 6 of them are epic gems).

Welcome to Pimp My Profile, the column in which the WoW.com staff turns zeroes into heroes. Don't think you're performing where you should be? Not sure how your class/spec is supposed to be gearing up? E-mail us with your Armory link, and you might be next to receive our help!

I WANT TO RAID GOOD. Please, teach me to raid gooder than I already raid.

-Derongar

While I believe that your gear is pretty solid (at first I was confused by the lower stamina but then I realized you'd logged out in arms spec but tanking gear) there are a few places that can be adjusted.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide.

Want to level your paladin as a tank? You got it! Before the Dungeon Finder tool was launched in December, finding level-appropriate instance groups was well nigh impossible. Occasional knots of newborn death knights might putter about in a favorite Burning Crusade instance to scoop up some gear. The rest of the pre-Northrend instances remained ghost towns, populated only by speed-running level 80s who were farming or running low-level buddies through some quick levels. But the Dungeon Finder has re-invigorated the instances of Azeroth, Outland and beyond. What does that mean for leveling players? If you love to play in groups and instances or if you're looking ahead to raiding and want to lay down your skill base now, you can.

You know how it goes. Blizzard nerfs Paladins, Paladins shake their heads in disbelief, then break out the pitchforks and scream bloody murder for a bit, beg Blizzard not to push through with the changes, and eventually run home and cry into My Little Pony sheets and staining pink underwear. Sure enough, when the recent PTR patch notes hinted at nerfs to the Paladin class, the pitchfork-wielding and bloody murder-screaming ensued. We're now about to enter the stage of bargaining. It's still on the PTR, after all. For those wondering what the bed-wetting ruckus is all about, Sacred Shield was nerfed to proc only once every 30 seconds (essentially proccing only once every cast of the spell unless augmented with talents), Aura Mastery was nerfed to 6 seconds down from 10, and Lay on Hands is being primed to be uncastable on one's self.

Ghostcrawler said that he didn't "want to promise (they) won't change the spell for 3.3," but that players also shouldn't "worry too much on the Lay on Hands change at this point" since it didn't make it to the latest PTR build. He explains in the forums that Paladins are no longer just a support class (as they were for quite a long time), but that all the abilities over time have contributed to making the class feel like a "one-man army" that is able to play offensively, defensively, and essentially take on more challenges without having to change stances, forms, or even specs. In a rather snippy response to a troll crying (with My Little Pony blanket in hand) in the forums, Ghostcrawler simply said, "Dear OP, Bye. Hugs, GC."

This week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors chronicles a turn. After 11 months as fury, Matthew Rossi has changed gears and transitioned his role once more. Sometimes you can go home again.

I've given fury up for dead. Not because it actually is dead. You can do good DPS with it if you have best in slot gear in every slot, which is par for the course with fury, really... I'm sure we'll see some nerfs heading into patch 3.3 to soft reset fury DPS to keep it below everyone else the same way we did going into Ulduar. But for me, it's not even the fact that you have to gear with a spreadsheet and compete with every other physical DPS class for those few drops that actually have the stats you want, it's the fact that when you do this, you get to follow the exact same stultifying rotation we've had since forever. Fury may or may not be fine, but frankly, it's gotten boring.

Bloodsurge can only make up for so much. At least with an Arms spec, while the DPS is slightly less, you get to do fun things. And so my DPS spec is now arms all the way since I have Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader gear to support it, a honking great 2h sword (and so far I'm liking the retooled sword spec) and plenty of things to swing it at. Arms is active. You're constantly using abilities, and while it's ultimately almost as predictable as fury when you get right down to it, it doesn't feel like it is. Between keeping your Rend active (letting it fall off then reapplying it for maximum Overpowers), hitting Sudden Death Executes and Slam in between MS and Overpower feels less like a clunky, hit this key then that key then this key rotation and more like you're weaving in attacks.