Wrath Protection Warrior Impressions

Remember hitting level 70 back in TBC? I do, very well in fact.  During my trek to max level I basically tanked most of the normal and a handful of Heroic dungeons and that was it.  This is not to say I lack tanking experience, as you will see from my short bio on the team page I’m very experienced in the tanking roll within MMORPG’s.  Yeah I did level almost entirely as Prot spec even back then, since at the time I was playing with Kirioth on his rogue. (makes sense, tank and a DPS machine we kinda thought).

So I hit the 70 and start to tank instances to get the gear needed for Heroic Dungeon runs…

…All is going fine, tanking the standard dungeons seemed to be fairly easy, although the lack of pure AOE tanking ability made the task highly intensive when having to control aggro on groups of 4+ mobs.  If people pulled aggro, which they do almost all the time in PUGS (pick up groups or none guild groups basically) I could snap the aggro back in time easily before the corpsed it.  But this did get very old, very fast people would be pulling aggro all the time, ignoring the marks and all that jazz.

Then we move onto Heroic dungeons, dear God.

The same crap with people attacking the wrong targets translated over to Heroic dungeons.  With them being Heroic this kinda meant people not designed to take damage would last a matter of seconds upon pulling aggro, which they would do all the time.

First one we attempted, Hellfire Ramparts. Never made it past the first groups of mobs which is a dire performance in anyone’s eyes.  Players left the group after pulling aggro and getting killed etc, blame the tanks and healers situation.  This pattern continued over most dungeons, but Magisters Terrace proved to be quite different indeed.  You know why that was? Simply because we would take so much CC (crowd control) in to lock down the adds I’d only be tanking 1 or 2 mobs max at any given time hehe.

Grimhammer was basically put on hold then, but I did use him to tank bosses in Karazhan along with Zul’Aman.  When I started to play my Holy Paladin within dungeons I was totally amazed at the ease Prot Paladins would hold AOE aggro, it was to easy.  For want of a better word it was the easy mode tank.  PUGS had to work as a unit for a Warrior tank to function given the lack of AOE control, yet with Paladins the group could go nuts and basically do whatever, aggro was going to be held no matter the question.

On to Wrath..

I had to come to a decision which class to play, I chose good old Grimhammer over my Paladin and Warlock.  The changes in store for Prot Warriors were awesome, I’d read up on the class beta forums and everywhere else.  I was waiting to be impressed.

Impressed I damn well was!

First dungeon, Nexus.  Forget marking I’ll just try and hold everything on me, hay I have to try this new aoe tanking ability out!  Shockwave, unlimited target Thunderclap, multi target Sunder Armor (via glyphs), massively increased overall DPS.  Mad Shield Slam damage along with Revenge. All of this =

I simply never lost agrro.  The groups we ran this dungeon with were hardly the best, people were attacking targets all over the place, even when they were marked.  It made no difference it was really up to me if i really wanted to hold aggro on everything.  I bloody loved it, no longer did i have to completely depend on DPS classes with brains i could accommodate the trigger happy nutters to.

This is my current talent build and I’m loving it something sexual.

In my next few class related posts I’ll speak in more detail about talent builds along with how effective they actually are for pure solo play, so stay tuned.