So last night I was doing a ramps run on my fury warrior. Trying get some rep and some exp, just chilling. My groups tank was another warrior and I mean this in the nicest way possible, but he was a total bot. Just charged in and auto attacked the mob he charged, never using TC or Revenge or anything. Sometimes he would use cleave on the boss but that was pretty much it.
Tl;DR I just respec’d and bought a shield.
So, I followed the Icy-Veins talent build for leveling and looked at some rotations and stuff, even did some practice on some boars just to get my fingers used to the buttons.
Is there any random crap I gotta know before I ruin some peoples dungeons? I tanked during WotLK and at a high level during Cata, both times on a warrior, but never during TBC. I know how to watch threat and to make sure people have mana, LoS are fine, but just general things that would be helpful I guess.
Also, how can I tell when I’m being bad VS. When a DPSer is going too hard? Threat was never really an issue when I tanked before, unless some frost DK forget to tab whilst rolling their face across the keyboard.
Probably not. Just make sure to bind your skills, keep shield block up, demo shout to reduce physical damage…
When you have threat on an un CC’ed caster, and the DPSer is tunneling on the disarmed phys dmg mob that you have a sunder on, and had threat on but obviously isn’t your primary kill target, you’ll know it’s the DPSer tunneling.
You can always make a macro and bind marks, if you’re playing with people who are new and need that sort of thing.
Tanking as arms with a 2hander until you are at a level that you can get shield slam / revenge / improved tclap will be better off. Fury has too much miss chance in the dual wield penalty and prot doesn’t offer it’s well rounded toolkit until you hit the 40s.
Once you can spec into shield slam, it still won’t be as good until you get some dungeon blues, but by all means it’s doable and considerably worth swapping over from Arms, as the survivability aspects of wearing a shield and having some of the damage reduction talents that prot tree offers from the 40s onward are going to start paying dividends.
The most basic rotation I can offer is:
Shield slam
Thunderclap
Devastate/sunder armor x2
Revenge when available/proc’d
Devastate/Sunder armor x2-3
Shield slam again.
Rinse repeat.
If you are swimming in rage you can fill with heroic strikes as it is a “next attack” ability and does not use a global cooldown like the spells listed above. Furthermore, thunderclap once you get specc’d into improved thunderclap can and should be used to maintain debuff uptime. Not only is that reduced enemy attack speed valuable, but the ability has a decent thread modifier built in, and should help maintain aggro.
This is not the most optimal rotation at end game but it should suffice for the mob HP amounts you will encounter in pre-TBC content at the very least.
Hope this helps!
Edit: just realized you’re already in TBC content. Disregard the beginning of my post about speccing arms and get into that juicy prot tree my dude. It’s time!
Edit 2: tanking as fury dps spec really does not do you any favors unless you are in Naxx level gear and even then it will not serve you in the long run as practice makes perfect with regards to real warrior tanking. Any time spent in berserker stance is a nerf to your threat as a tank, while buffing damage taken by you. Whirlwind does not have a threat modifier or any built in threat of its own, bloodthirst isn’t what it was in classic so unless you have 3/3 tactical mastery it’s gonna fall behind even heroic strike in terms of threat generation. Lastly if you spec’d into improved berserker stance as fury you have even more nerfed threat gen than any prot warrior.
