Warrior Tanks, I could use some advice

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I finally rolled a warrior so that I could tank, and I want to be a great one. I’ve read a few of the guides out there and gathered information here, but I still lose agro on mobs. So I have a few questions.

  1. How do you have your defensive stance bars set up? I’d love to see what you are working with so if you could post an imgur . com link I could copy/paste that would be awesome or tell me how you have it set up.

  2. Outside of pulling with a gun/bow and using LOS when needed, how do you usually start the battle?

  3. Do you have any macros or key binds that you couldn’t live without. (outside of the ones listed on icy veins)? One I have spread across all of my toons is an interrupt bound to my mouse wheel. I couldn’t live without that one. So quick and easy. I’m also going to replace R with something, not sure what yet.

  4. For talents, I’d still like to stay Fury/Arms for questing purposes since so many people say that protection isn’t necessary until late end dungeons.

All in all, I’m having a blast with this guy, but I want to get better and any tips you all have would be greatly appreciated.

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Bind whatever is comfortable for you. I usually go arms for the tactical mastery talent so I can swap stances and keep 25 rage. If you don’t bow/los just charge in imo.

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Are you stance dancing to get at your other abilities, like execute, charge and all that?

Easier to build rage if you can start a pull with charge, however you do have to use your gun a lot.

This is gonna get me a lot of hate, but here it goes. IF your healer is okay with it (I always ask before hand) try tanking with a 2-hander early on. I know it sounds crazy but you will build more threat with more damage and also more rage. Always okay it with your healer though, you don’t wanna be that guy. And always keep a sword and board on you to swap out in emergencies.

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Tanking dual wield is better. More rage.

Also op. Use shouts in combat if you arent. Demo and battle shout. Also make sure to get initial threat on all mobs before anyone else to win all threat ties.

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i can attest that tanking dual wield is very useful, especially if you have a shammy. lol

But for us allies sometimes it’s just better to go arms since we can’t get windfury procs.

Edit: Also OP, Swifty has a decent tanking macro and probably some others I don’t use em myself. But if you go to his twitch channel you can get any of the macros he uses, just with a command in his chat.

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Im trying my best to charge in, then switch to defensive, then use the abilities that I can. Once I get a good 2h, I may try that when the opportunity arises. But, I still like the thought of being a S&B tank.

Demo shout is usually the first thing I do after charging in. Then a sunder and or thunder clap.

I’ll go check out his twitch. I haven’t watched a video of his in a very long time, so thanks for the tip.

I appreciate all the tips everyone, but does anyone have any advice for setting up say button 1-5 while in defensive stance?

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Holding aggro at low levels is difficult. Just try your best. :slightly_smiling_face:

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2h is better until you get hit % gear if youre not gonna wear a shield. Each missed hit is no rage. Dual wield is a trap and Windfury is better with a 2h

Please dont DW tank till endgame OP (or DW anything tbh) itll feel frantic and good, but its significantly worse than 2hs or even 1h/shield because of the hit reduction. Its ridiculously significant. Dont do it, its not better until you have tons of hit.

Dont use demo shout except for the debuff and snap aoe threat on the pull if you need it, its p much useless for threat now after the bugfix. Battle shout is pretty good for aoe threat if you can hit your entire party with it, but spamming shouts exclusively is a recipe for disaster now. Youll want to be tab sundering/revenge, clap and shouts are still great for the debuffs though, youll want to put those up.

I was Arms until like 53 because Ive been dungeon spamming the entire time, and going Prot let me tank Emp at 53/Overlord Wyrmthalak in LBRS at 55 when they were red to me. If youre not ignoring level recommendations like I do, youd be fine as arms or fury almost all the way to 60.

2h is better at low levels for tanking imo, but ALWAYS carry a relevant shield and 1h because youll want to be able to swap to it when youre taking heavy damage. Id recommend for newer players to lay off on the 2h tanking around SM, but you dont need to go prot. I 2h tanked almost exclusively until Maraudon as Arms.

I recommend Arms all the way because Tac mastery and anger management are amazing tanking talents. Not being able to stance dance -> mocking blow or intercept a mob is terrible for tanking. Plus when you get Sweeping Strikes and Whirlwind you can charge -> SS -> whirlwind (with bloodrage and sh*t obvi) for incredible initial aoe threat right off the pull

I bind stances into all my stance specific abilities so I immediately stance dance when Im trying to do stuff like taunt, but my actual stance binds are easily accessible as well.

Generally Ill charge, thunder clap now that im prot (Charge -> Bloodrage -> SS -> Zerker stance -> whirlwind when im arms), then go d stance to build threat. I usually pop zerker rage too for more rage unless i need to hold it for a fear.

I like to taunt one of the mobs immediately so I can focus threat into the kill target, then i start tab revenge/sunder/shield slam or battle shout if i have pets or can hit my entire group.

It takes quite a bit of effort to hold aoe threat now, but if your dps give you a sec youll be fine. The hardest part about tanking in Classic is the herding cats aspect of it. You will be frustrated with pug dps, they will refuse to listen, and some of them will blow damage the second your charge lands and pull aggro. Be prepared to taunt immediately, or let them die if theyre a particularly obnoxious person. Its your job to build threat, but its also the DPS’s job to not pull off the tank.

Make /startattack macros for all of your abilities so youre never missing out on white swings. My warrior has a full char specific macro page and overflow into the account wide macros. Start attack macros, stance dance macros, equip shield macros, etc etc. Youll find what ones are mandatory for you as you tank more, but for me its mouseover taunt, startattacks, and stance dance macros.

Welcome to the brotherhood.

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Doesn’t taunting a mob just bring your threat to the top of the stack? So taunting a mob already attacking you does nothing? This was my understanding.

Or do you generate extra threat against a taunted target?

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Taunt does two things- it forces the mob to attack you for 3 seconds regardless of other players threat and also makes your threat match the highest person on the threat table. so that 3 seconds of guaranteed aggro is pretty damn useful. Taunting a mob that is already attacking you guarantees that he will continue attacking you for 3 seconds, which is super useful off the pull when you havent had time to build a ton of threat.

Plus the threat you get from it allows for some pretty neat tricks like letting a rogue go HAM to build a ton of threat, you taunt to get his threat, then he vanishes and youve got an absurd amount of threat. Works with threat drop classes and is a useful trick sometimes

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So why does the tooltip for Taunt, and also the Bear equivalent, say “but has no effect if the target is already attacking you”?

Your explantion WOULD have an effect, while the game says it doesn’t.

/confused

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Definitely take tactical mastery so you can charge and swap to d stance during the charge but still maintain some rage.

I open a lot with shield block and demo shout if I’m not dual wielding. This should make the first hits more manageable for the healer but will proc revenge right away which is our best aggro building ability. Unless shield block and revenge are already on CD the 15 rage you would spend on a sunder is better spent on shield block (10) and revenge (5). You will take less damage and build more threat.

Past that try not to taunt unless you actually lost aggro and preferably have rage to fire off a sunder or block/revenge combo.

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Your post is tremendously helpful, thank you for taking the time to write all that out.

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I’d be willing to try this, as long as the dps isn’t taking too much damage, and taking away Mana to be used on the tank.

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It’s still unclear if/when they are going to fix battle shout threat. It did a lot more threat in vanilla. They claimed they were going to fix it when they nerfed demo shout threat, which was bugged to give a multiplier based on the number of mobs affected, but from what I’ve heard from some warriors, demo shout seems to be nerfed but battle shout didn’t seem to be fixed yet.

It has only been mentioned in the bug report forum here: Demoralizing shout is bugged and it is why we have this AoE meta - #64 by Aggrend-1483

so it’s not clear if all hotfixes involving these abilities are live or not yet, but they claim that they want the abilities to work just as they did in 1.12. Once that happens, you then would actually generate a lot of threat with battle shout. To the point that if you’re hitting enough targets with battle shout, every mob that has you on their threat table would essentially be hit with more threat than if you had sundered them, but it happens to every single one in one cast. It will be less threat than the bugged (and I think now fixed but I don’t have a warrior myself to test it on) demo shout if it hit enough targets, but still better AoE threat than anything else you have.

I don’t believe it’s working/fixed yet though.

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But as someone pointed out to them a few days ago and heard nothing back, the patch notes for the BC release (2.0.1) said it was fixed THEN, implying it WASN’T fixed at this stage of the game.

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Right but battle shout is actually bugged and not working as it did in 1.12 in that it is currently less effective than it should be.

The demo shout fix was a bugfix/nerf to bring it down to what it actually was in 1.12.

The battle shout being fixed would actually be a significant buff to its threat compared to what it is/was doing in classic vs. actual 1.12 vanilla.

At least that’s what I’ve read, again, I don’t have a warrior alt yet.

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If you’re Fury without Tactical Mastery, you can still Charge in for rage to Cleave, Demo Shout, or Thunder Clap on pull.

If you’re Arms with Tactical Mastery, you can Charge and immediately switch to Defensive Stance before unloading your rage.

Once you get higher level, Enrage is useful in Fury for more damage/threat, but Sweeping Strikes is incredible for 2h tanking. While dual wield tanking is generally superior by a great margin, this operates under the idea that you’re not hitting mobs higher level than you. In that case, 2h tanking becomes better due to the hit tables being more in your favor.

Once you reach 30+ and get Berserker Stance, and Berserker Rage, you can make use of 2h tanking with Sweeping Strikes a lot easier. I plowed through SM Library for a good while doing that. The standard pull setup is: Berserker Rage -> Charge -> Sweeping Strikes (Bloodrage where you want) -> Cleave (or go to Berserker Stance and Whirlwind at 36+).

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Is SS still worth using if you’re not fighting at least 5 mobs for it to affect WW hitting an extra target? I know it affects all weapon swings not just WW but it’s 30 rage which still feels like a lot.

I’ve seen a lot of people recommend this, but I still haven’t felt compelled to use a lot of macros yet at 34. I have my stances bound to Z (Battle), X (Zerker), and C (Defense) and similar abilities share the same bind on the bar. E.g. Mocking Blow is Battle only and Disarm is defense only. They have the same cooldown so I bind them to the same key (shift+3 in my case) on the same bar slot.

I also have Taunt as 5 in defense stance, which shares the same slot as Berserker Rage in zerker stance and Tclap in battle and I like that for now.

Just feels like if I made a stance macro for these kinds of abilities I wouldn’t be taking advantage of the fact that each stance gets its own hotbar, but I probably will start once my bar space fills up more. Not arguing with you saying my way is better just pointing out what I do in case I’m missing something.

Also have a question pertaining to sunder spreading. I usually don’t stack sunder more than 3 on trash because it doesn’t feel necessary threat wise. However, on the pull is it better to get a couple sunders on the kill target first before spreading, or should I be getting 1 sunder on everything ASAP while holding aggro on kill target with Revenge?

I flip flop between both ways but I’d like to know for sure so I feel more consistent.

Thanks for the good info in this thread so far.

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Charge whenever it’s safe to do so. Get very good at determining when it’s safe to do so.

It isn’t. Defiance is helpful, but not mandatory for most of the game. Around 55 you can respec for the essential 15 in prot, and if you aren’t a raid MT that’s all you’ll ever need.

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