The WotLK Warrior Tank: Prevent, react, control
We all know that with WotLK the tanking role will not be a granted warrior spot anymore. Not only have all tanking classes been equalized to an extent where there’s not enough reason to “prefer a class” over “prefer a player”, but there’s also another tanking class added to the game, the Death Knight. So what is our main advantage now?
Short answer: Crowd Control and mobility. If you have tanked a lot recently you have probably realized one thing about the new protection warrior: We are in-fight crowd control monsters. There are a lot of interesting abilities to ease the pain any approached enemy will do to the group and you should learn to use all of them as often as possible.
- Concussion Blow, 30sec CD – takes out any mob for 5 seconds
- Shockwave, 20sec CD – takes out all mobs for 4 seconds
- Disarm, 1min CD – disarm enemy for 10 seconds
- Shield Bash, 12sec CD – interrupt a cast and prevent casts of the same kind for 6 seconds
- Intervene, 30sec CD – reduce party member’s threat and move there
- Charge, 15sec CD – move to the mob and stun for 1 second
- Thunderclap, 6sec CD – attack speed -10% (20% skilled) for 30 seconds
- Demoralizing Shout, reduce attack power by 410 for 30 seconds
- Taunt, 8sec CD – permanently catch a runner
- Mocking Blow, 1min CD – forces a mob onto you for 6 seconds
- Spell Reflection, 10sec CD – reflects the next spell (on 5 party members skilled)
- Challenging Shout, 3min CD – taunt all mobs
Now, how to use all that stuff?
With a combination of Concussion Blow, Shockwave, Spell Reflection, Charge and Shield Bash you can keep two casters busy. If you click fast enough and have your fingers under control, they shouldn’t get a single cast through – thanks to Charge and Spell Reflection not even if you couldn’t LOS both onto you.
Disarm, Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout are your primary damage reduction skills. A melee mob with all three applied won’t hit very hard anymore and your DPS should have plenty of time to kill that guy off.
If you have a good feeling of a mob being about to die don’t bother tanking it all trough. If your threat isn’t sufficient, throw out a Mocking Blow and Charge/Tab to your next friend. Should the doomed one survive longer than those 6 seconds, just taunt him back to you.
Intervene and Charge are a great combo to regain threat on a runner if the rare case happens that all your taunt-like abilities are on cooldown: Intervene, reducing the threat of your party member by 10%, then charge back to the mob for some extra rage for that “stay with me”-shield slam he’s about to face.
Keeping up Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout, plus using Shockwave and Concussion Blow whenever appropriate (which usually means: as long as there’s something bashing you) will raise your survivability significantly. Let’s do some quick & dirty math: 30 seconds should grant you 2 Shockwaves (8secs stun) and 1 concussion blow (5secs stun) – that’s a total of 13/30 seconds stun, thus roughly 40% avoided damage on a single target (still 8secs, thus ~25%, on multiple targets). Add to this the additional mitigation from TC, Demo Shout, probably a disarm in the mix, and the numbers start to really look awesome.
Not to mention that TC and SW both do a significant amount of damage on 2+ enemies, Concussion and Mocking blow now also hit decent on their targets and each single of those abilities will grant you more overall threat. Oh, and let’s not forget about sunder armor, which – with the 10% armor buff – has become an even more important debuff on boss fights.
Conclusion
We are not struggling with keeping aggro anymore. Those days are gone since patchday. Now it’s time to get used to proactive tanking, squeezing the last tiny bit of awesomeness out of our skill tree and making the point for us still being one of the best tanks out there – not because we can “take more”, but because we can prevent, react and control.