All nice and shiny?

Good. Go and store that back into your bank. You’ll want it to be nice and clean the next time you feel the urge to take a vacation.

Here’s the thing though. You can’t just come off of a blood crazed high like that and expect to jump right back into tanking as if nothing happened. Every addict knows that you don’t just dive cold turkey into what’s been eating you in the first place. So instead, we’re going to have to slide back into the raid tanking role slowly by exploring the hybrid, the Protection PvP.

Protection PvP is a completely different animal from protection in PvE and arms in PvP. There’s much less emphasis on burst damage and a huge amount more placed on control.

For starters, when it comes to gearing, you basically have two options. You can slap on your full PvE tanking gear and rely on the defense to protect you from melee and the massive HP pool to protect you from the caster burst. The second option is to mix together your PvP gear and your PvE tanking gear for a mishmash of resilience and more damage. You’d have lower HP in the second set but it’d be balanced by the fact that you had more resilience to help mitigate the damage.

However you choose to gear up, once you’re ready to hit the arenas and BGs, there’s a load of fun to be had. You have to remember that the protection warrior is THE most mobile class in the game on the battlefield. Now bring that to the table when it comes to manoeuvring around a very quickly changing battlefield and you’ll soon see why prot warriors are so annoying in a PvP setting. With the built in survivability of being a tanking spec and geared that way as well, the incredible mobility as well as the utility of their various protection talents and spells, the protection warrior is, if not a sight to be feared, at least it’ll be something that provokes a wicked amount of annoyance.

The pillar that the protection warrior stands on in PvP is the ridiculous amount of control that he brings to the table. Between multiple stuns, silences and defensive options for saving oneself as well as your teammate, you can be an invaluable member of the team provided that there’s someone around to heal and someone around to blow people up.

You don’t bring too much damage to the table and with your easy access to Devastate, you’re much better off bringing along a physical DPS as a partner along with a healer if you go that route.

The healer heals, the DPS kills and you provide all of the timed control necessary to make it happen. Coordinate with your partners. Save your control for when your DPS has their cooldowns up ready to use. Use them to save your teammates when the enemy team blows their own trying to finish your team off.

You have the amazing ability to almost completely shut down the enemy team or to save your own with nothing but the abilities sitting in your spellbook so get out there and use them!

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But maybe you’re not ready to tank again quite yet.

Maybe you’re still craving more, I’m sure you’re itching to introduce yourself to other living, breathing digital people who’ll soon be left on the ground in little pieces in your aftermath.

So let’s take a look at the life of an Arms PvP warrior and take an extended break. Don’t worry, your raid will be there when you return.

While there are some variations in the spec based on preference, THIS is the basic spec that you’ll use. A few of the variations comes from whether or not you prefer to have Improved Hamstring in arms or Blood Craze in fury but other than that, they all play basically the same.

To compete without getting completely blown up in arenas, you’re going to want to gather together enough PvP gear to hit the 1k resilience mark while keeping your other stats as high as possible. Remember, just like with Fury, it’s not about stacking one stat or the other but about keeping a balanced mix. You’ll want that armor pen and the strength to be as high as possible with the crit rating taking a backseat.

There’s a shift in mentality to take into consideration too. With fury, the goal was to have as high sustained DPS as possible. In a PvP setting, burst is the way to go. Now what I mean by burst isn’t necessarily crit. In PvP, as your victims try hilariously to run away from you, you don’t have constant uptime to smash in their face. So you have to capitalize the brief moments you DO have to do as much of the face smashing as possible.

There are a couple of ways to achieve this goal.

The main one is something that you control in which you try to line up as many attacks as possible. You can try to keep Rend applied on your targets before you try to burn them down as this will save you a precious GCD while their in range. You can wait half a second for your Overpower to light up again before hitting them with Overpower and Mortal Strike in quick succession for a nice two hit combo. You can even line up a big one the next time you see your Improved Hamstring (if you took it) proc on an enemy by hitting them with an Overpower/Mortal Strike and following that up with a Bladestorm while they’re still stationary. By the time the storm ends, your Overpower will most likely be ready again with Mortal Strike following shortly after. That makes for a pretty hefty amount of damage that most classes won’t live through without some immediate assistance.

Keep in mind too that in an arena, the name of the game is team play. Learn to rely on your partner and be someone that your partner can rely on. Don’t go chasing an enemy halfway across the map while they nuke your partner to glass and don’t be afraid to call for assistance catching an enemy or CCing a healer before you unleash your combo.

The more you and your partner or partners work together and trust each other, the more of a leg up that you’ll have on your unorganized opposition.

Now go take another week off from tanking and see how the face smashing side of life lives.

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Hey you.

Yeah you, the one sitting there all bored with your weapon on the ground and your shield on your back.

You don’t look like you’re having a good time at all. Yeah, yeah, I know that you’re fine tanking and you’re perfectly willing to help out your guildies and tank runs for them and all but you’re bored.

No, don’t try to deny it. You’re speaking to a fellow tank here remember? Here in the tanking brotherhood we don’t lie to each other. We share each others burdens and try to make life bearable again so here I am, your ever faithful servant with a little series of articles to try keep you amused.

Here in this first article, we’ll deal with the most likely path you’ll take when you need a vacation from tanking those bosses and that is, of course, fury.

There’s something you want to consider first. If you’re just switching to fury for fun in bgs and dungeons for a bit, then it doesn’t really matter as you can just do whatever you want and still be pretty successful.

If you’re trying this in a raid setting though, you’re really going to want to build up a half decent set of gear first before you give it a try to keep from making a bad showing for yourself.

In order of importance, you’re going to want to climb up to about 164 hit rating and 214 expertise rating. What these will do is ensure that you don’t miss the boss when you try to hit them. Now it’s important to realize that I said about that much hit and expertise. While hitting these hit and expertise caps are very important to your damage, as a protection warrior on a fury vacation, it’s not worth stressing over min maxing your damage to that degree so that you land on the caps exactly.

Just get to roughly that hit rating and that expertise and you’ll be alright.

The second thing you want to do in terms of stats is a bit tricky. You’ll want to get an even mix of strength, crit and armor penetration. The problem with stacking one of these to the exclusion of all else is that without a balance, you do some pretty horrible damage.

Sure, you can get up to 100% armor penetration first before you add on any crit or strength but you’ll still hit like a wet noodle. Ditto the other way around.

A balanced mix is what you want.

So build up that strength and crit and place a slightly higher emphasis on building up the armor penetration and you’ll be fine.

The cookie cutter spec can be found right here and there’s typically very little room for variation: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LG0GzfhZhxe0V0u0eRVkAo:MGooMz .

And as for the battle itself, here’s all you really need to know.

Priority 1) Stand behind the boss while attacking and make sure that you do your best to avoid any and all aoe damage.

Priority 2) Keep Heroic Strike queued up as much as possible (rage providing)

Priority 3) Bloodthirst > Whirlwind > Slam > Execute.

The spell priority does have some minor variations depending on how your cooldowns are running and whatnot but for a brief vacation from tanking, that’s all you really need to know.

So get out there and smash in some faces!

I’ll be back next week with a look at the pvp side of life.

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Something unexpected will happen in a raid and they’ll drop dead. Immediately afterward, someone will always ask the question.

“Are your cooldowns still up?” And of course, the tank replies in the affirmative which means that the death and the subsequent wipe could have been avoided.

Do you know why this happens the way it does? It’s primarily because a lot of tanks out there don’t LIKE to use their cooldowns.

Yeah I said it. I’ll say it twice if it’ll get through to you guys. Most tanks, do NOT use their cooldowns properly.

See the thing is, a lot of tanks develop a certain mentality in the course of their lives. They have this packrat mentality when it comes to cooldowns where they always try to save it for a “rainy” day. They always think that even if their health drops down to under 10%, there’ll always be a situation right around the corner where they’ll NEED their cooldowns and THAT’S what they’ve been saving it for.

It’s important to understand that without using the cooldown that first time, that second situation will never come up. Your cooldowns should be used the instant you first get the feeling that you’ll need them. Whenever you see your health drop low, whenever you think your healer might not be paying attention, whenever you think that there’s even a chance that you’re about to eat dirt, pop that cooldown and revel in the fact that while you may not have needed it, you can be certain that you just prevented a potential death.

The problem’s deeper than just a single situation which is something that can be overlooked. The problem that most tanks don’t understand is that without constant and systematic usage of these cooldowns, you won’t have the proper instinct and muscle memory to hit them the second you do really need them.

If you’re one of those tanks that try to save all of your cooldowns for the ”real” emergency, do everyone a favor and start using them now. Put those cooldowns on an easy to see, easy to reach keybinding and hit it anytime you think you might be in trouble.

Do this for about a week and then see how much of a difference that all of that practice and muscle memory makes in the course of an actual raid. You’ll notice a very real difference in your reaction time and more importantly, in the sheer frequency of your usage.

You’ll find yourself using it more in the first moments of a fight where the healers might be caught napping and might not be quite ready to heal you. You’ll find yourself finally hitting that cooldown on time during a boss fight instead of fruitlessly smashing the key after you’re already dead. Heck, you’ll even find yourself using it more often on trash pulls and that’s perfectly okay.

Once you get into the habit of using those cooldowns the instant you need them instead of saving them for a rainy day, you will find many situations where the use of the cooldown saved your life where  you would have otherwise died and you’ll be a better tank for it.

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The main tank is the hero, for sure, hanging onto the biggest, scariest mob while the rest of the raid does their thing and where’s the off-tank in this whole thing?

He’s up there if you actually take the time to look for him. He’s up there standing right next to the main tank, not really taking much of the hits, largely feeling pretty useless unless the main tank happens to bite the bullet and then he’s got his five minutes in the sun to shine.

That’s the way that it used to be.

The role that the off-tank used to have in our raids were largely very small ones. The off-tank is the one that grabbed a lesser add or two when the fight started and then their job was done inside thirty seconds, leaving nothing for them to do until the boss died.

This mentality, while it was no longer true, has been held as truth by popular perception.

Try thinking back to Naxxramas, Ulduar and ToC. How many fights can you remember had the off-tank play a minor role in the fight and then do absolutely nothing for the majority of the fight? There were a lot of them and it completely cemented the concept that the off-tank was exactly that, the OFF-tank. As in, the tank that you turn to when your Main Tank (notice the capitals?) is out of commission or busy.

It also becomes apparent once you really stop to consider the matter that this lamentable situation that I’ve outlined for you as to the inferiority of the off-tank simply doesn’t apply anymore. A lot of the fights in ICC require the two tanks to taunt off of each other or even fulfill roles that are as important or more than simply hanging onto the boss.

A fight like Rotface comes to mind where the main tank just has to stand in one spot pretty much and hold threat while the “off-tank” has to kite around a big, dangerous, potentially raid wiping mob and where one slip up on his part will kill the attempt.

To be sure, there are a decent number of fights where the role of the off-tank is as small as it used to be. Something like Marrowgar or Lady Deathwhisper where the only job that the off-tank has it to stand next to the main tank for the duration of the fight.

It’s all really just a matter of perspective. While there are occasions where the off-tank fills a smaller role than the main tank, it’s balanced well with occasions in ICC where the they share roles, where they share the same hits from the boss, where they both hold potential raid wipes in the reach of their keyboards and share the responsibility of not dropping the ball.

We’ve come a long way from the days where the off-tank was the worse of the two so if you’re stuck in the off-tank’s role now, bear the title with pride and know that you’re just as important as the main…even if nobody in your raid chooses to acknowledge that salient fact.

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LordSnow was sucked into World of Warcraft during his early years in university and hasn’t looked back since. Initially beginning his WoW career as a face melting, warlocky force of doom, he eventually got suckered into switching to his warrior as a main to support the tanking needs of his current guild.

Since then, he plays around on his warrior, longing for the simple days of being a simple warlock with simple desires.

Want of variety has led him to playing various classes up to the level cap, getting a feel for them all and giving him a more well rounded view of the game in general and tanking in specific as he saw the various ways that classes interacted with each other when he was on different tanks.

While he currently spends most of his time on his warrior which has migrated to the Fury route, he still ends up spending a decent chunk of his playtime tanking and saving lives.

Welcome aboard!

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Taking a look at it, we can see that what it adds to the Intervene ability is a simple scaling damage reduction of 30% for the next 6 seconds. It seems a good talent on paper but the fact that it’s attached out our Intervene ability is what makes a lot of tanks hesitant to pick it up on the way down the tree.

Taking a look at Intervene, we find an ability that’s also sadly underused. Most tanks only use it for the defensive portion, to intercept one hit directed towards a fellow party member. The best part of the ability, and most often useful, by far is the 10% reduction in threat it provides.

Sadly, this isn’t an ability that you’re free to use as the main tank, namely because you always tend to be busy.

However, as an offtank, the Intervene ability, especially tacked on with the Safeguard talent can become invaluable.

Looking at it in context, it’s a life-saving cooldown that’s almost as good as a discipline priest’s Pain Suppression talent, can be cast on just about anyone, so it’s not a self only skill and on top of all that, you can use it every thirty seconds.

Did you miss that? I’ll repeat it.

As a protection warrior, you have a thirty second Pain Suppression.

How could you pass up something like that for just two talent points?

For a solid example of an effective use of it, take this anecdote:

My guild has taken to using a paladin main tank during the latter half of our ICC trip, relegating our previous tank, a warrior, into the role of the offtank in most encounters. This enhanced his role significantly in our encounters as it freed him to use all of his abilities to the utmost. Careless DPS that regularly found themselves calling for Salv from our absent-minded paladins found their threat issues largely taken care of as he pre-emptively Intervened them as he found their threat rising to uncomfortable levels.

On many of our attempts on Professor, many green slime targets would simply get Intervened and then everyone would be saved the hassle of bunching up on them, freeing up the DPS and the healers to have more time burning it down, often preventing it from selecting a second target.

Attempts against Deathbringer will occasionally find him intervening and eating a hit from the blood beast on the odd occasion where they’re not killed fast enough, saving the life of a raid member.

Finally, while learning how to deal with the Lich King, we’ve found that simply between the paladin’s Arden Defender and a well timed Intervene, we could keep the Soul Reaper under control, leaving all of the other life-saving cooldowns free to help the raid in case of bad Infest positioning or some extra hits from the Raging Spirits.

There are a countless number of ways to use Intervene without the talent. Throw the damage reduction of the talent into the fray and the ways that Intervene can be used becomes innumerable.

The only thing to really keep an eye out for if you’re going to use it on a tank is to make sure that they have a very strong threat lead or you’ll end up causing more problems than you’re hoping to solve.

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We come at last to the death knight, the red-headed stepchild of the tanking family that nobody really likes but everyone has to put up with because despite all of their flaws, they’re still part of the family.

During the course of Wrath, death knights have enjoyed an interesting spot in the tanking family. While, largely speaking, they haven’t been exactly the most popular tanks to roam around during the expansion, they’ve had a very cozy niche spot in the world of tanking archetypes.

They were built more as AOE tanks like the paladins but not quite as good. They had a great potential for mitigation like the bears but again, not quite as good and they had a decently sized toolset for a variety of tanking situations like warriors but…not quite as varied. They were a perfect jack of all trades type tank.

Their talents trees accented this customizable factor. They could be built to mitigate magical damage or to enhance the raid’s magical damage with the Unholy tree. They could build for stronger snap AOE threat and enhance the raid’s physical damage with the Frost tree and finally, the Blood tree makes them an excellent makeshift bear tank with the stronger mitigation and self healing.

With the coming expansion, death knights are getting bigger and more changes than any other tanking class. While currently, death knights are capable of tanking with any of their three classes, Blizzard is moving towards making death knights more in line with the other tanks by giving them one dedicated tanking tree. This serves the function of allowing them to concentrate their tanking talents into a single area rather than to spread them out across three separate trees, making it hard for a devoted tank to pick them all up.

With the shift to making Blood the dedicated tanking tree, it makes it a lot easier for a death knight in Cataclysm to BE the dedicated tank, though it comes at a cost to versatility. If you’re playing a death knight tank right now, chances are good that when the expansion hits, there are going to be a lot of talents that you rely on now to do your job that won’t be there anymore, or will be placed out of reach. It’s going to be a lot harder for you to tank outside of the blood tree than it is now. While I’m sure that it will be possible, it’s likely not going to be something that’s going to be common or all that popular from the looks of it now. More than likely, it’ll turn into the tanking situation now, where while you can tank as a fury warrior or a druid specced as a cat, it’s not really recommended.

At the end of the day, it’s a little fitting that it’s the death knights that are hit with the biggest changes when new expansion will hit. Because warriors, druids and paladins have been around a lot longer, they’ve had a lot more time under Blizzard’s iterative design to be polished and have their mechanics tweaked. This expansion will likely be only the first of many major changes that death knights go through during the course of their tanking career, but rest assured, the class that comes out of the other end will be stronger and a lot better for it.

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Without hope of competition, paladins are undeniably the strongest tank in the current expansion so if you’re already playing one or already in the process of levelling one up, you’re in luck as you’ll have at least a couple months more of riding the gravy train.

Paladins are blessed with arguably the strongest AOE threat generation as well as very decent single target threat. On top of that, they have the extra mitigation that the block value provides as opposed to those poor bears and death knights. Survivability is unparalleled with the current iteration of the Ardent Defender talent so if you have a little paladin running around in Northrend right now, enjoy it while it lasts because along with all of the other huge changes coming around with the Cataclysm expansion, that talent is on the chopping block for big changes.

The current iteration of the Ardent Defender talent in the Cataclysm beta is one more in line with the cooldowns that the other tanks enjoy today. It essentially removes the purely passive benefit of the talent, making it something that you actually have to think about whether or not you want to pop it right then and there.

From the perspective of prot paladins in game at the moment, it’s going to be a pretty big hit to survivability. While it remains a pretty powerful cooldown all on its own, the simple fact is that human reaction times don’t hold a candle to the instantaneous response of a computer program. While people can have some excellent reaction times, you’ll never really know if that time you used a cooldown is a time that it saved your life or not.

The automatic nature of Ardent Defender makes it obvious if the talent really saved your life or not. When the expansion patch hits, that change is going to require a major adjustment to how prot paladins play but the essential core of the class will remain as it is today; a class that excels in the majority of boss encounters today. Playing a paladin will give you control of a class that’s probably the closest to the “classic” style of tanking that warriors brought to the scene back in vanilla WoW.

There are some cons to the life of a paladin tank of course. The primary problem is that the majority of your tanking rotation comes from casting spells instead of simple physical attacks like warriors, druids and death knights. This makes paladins doubly vulnerable to enemies that silence regularly whereas their other counterparts would breeze past it. While this is only a slight problem in terms of threat generation, it can make a huge difference when it comes to timing your survival skills. An improperly timed silence lined up with a devastating attack could render the paladin unable to react or throw up a defensive cooldown to save themselves.

Paladins are a fun class to play. If all you’ve played before were the other varieties of tanking classes, a paladin can be a fun change of pace. There’s a bonus to variety of play style due to the fact that paladins have three specs to try out. Due to spellcasting, they’re a little more vulnerable to anti caster mechanics during fights but that’s a very small price to pay for such a versatile and powerful tanking class.

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So by now you’ve realized that your protection Paladin has about 6-7k mana unbuffed at level 80, and all of your abilities for tanking but the average melee swing, require mana. So let’s go over a way to keep your mana pool alive and full so your not having to sit for mana after each pull.

With this discussion I will go over some basic talent tree specc’ing for your mana regen, as well as your Paladin’s Seals and Judgements.

Lets touch basics first, your talent tree. If you tab over to the Protection tree on the 1st column 7th Tier down you will have the passive talent called, Spiritual Attunement

Having 2/2 on this passive is highly recommended for your Protection Paladin because instead of just giving you equal to 5% mana back for the amount healed, having 2/2 will increase that by another 5%, giving you equal to 10% of the amount healed. It may not mean much of a difference. But for tanking with a Paladin you need your mana!

The next ability your Paladin has to regen mana is your Judgement of Wisdom, this is a must have when it comes to your 9696 Rotation as explained in my previous tanking guide. This will help you keep your mana up during some of those weaker mob pulls.

Last, but not least is the type of Seal your using during pulls.  Now, depending on the size the pull, keep this in mind, Seal of Wisdom for single target pulls, and one of your other Seals for bigger pulls, like Seal of Vengeance.

I hope this gives you a better understanding on how to preserve that 7k manapool.

Good luck and Tank Hard!

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