If I have a solid sword + shield, when do I have to switch to Prot in order to tank? I’m fine with tanking dungeons when leveling, but I don’t want to pay the respect fees.
Just curious what dungeons I can tank up to without being Prot.
back in vanilla i lvld as a DW Fury warrior. then when i went to do dungeons slapped on a shield and went to defense stance when i needed to use abilities requiring that stance.
If u have decent enough gear u can tank just fine as any spec, hell i often offtank zg and mc for my giuld and im fury arms
just be sure to have stuff like tact mastery and a few macros to switch between stances to aoe
At this point, never. There’s a window where deep prot is good:
When the healers can’t heal you through a boss as fury*, and the dps are also not outgearing you. We’ve passed both of those points: a pre-raid geared tank is going to need to do DW tanking just to even hope to keep threat, and the healers are similarly prepared.
Neither of these factors are in play for an up and coming tank. Tell you guild you’d like to tank, but will play fury until you’re geared enough to keep threat.
*Yes, I know the tree istelf doesn’t have mitigation, but what people gloss over is how the gear interacts with the tree. Since deep prot threat is based on largely static multipliers, which is why it doesn’t scale and loses effectiveness as dps gear up, you can wear a full mitigation set and keep your threat at a much higher level than that same set would for a fury tank.
Okay, but say you are specced into Arms, have tactical mastery, and know how to stance dance. Can I get by tanking up until 60 just for leveling purposes? At 60 I could then re-evaluate what I want to do in terms of tanking or not.
The problem is, leveling as Prot is absolutely horrendous unless strictly dungeon grinding.
You never have to be prot. I did it a little bit early on when I was fresh 60, but it’s never really necessary and I’ve never bothered respeccing back to it, but if I do run a dungeon I’m probably tanking it. I just throw on my tank gear and sunder spam. You really only need to have a prot warrior in a raid, and then the OTs can be fury prot.
In fact if you actually get yourself too geared you will find yourself rage starved on easy content like dungeons and not hold threat. Old school tanking requires a balancing act of making sure you’re not getting trucked, but also not so geared to the teeth that you can’t generate rage because threat isn’t modified for you like it is in retail.
Yes, it’s what most people do. You never have to be prot for any dungeon content. I will say it’s nice to start out with when your gear isn’t good and your TPS won’t be great either, but it’s not necessary like retail where if you’re not a tank spec the best you can hope for is to pop a defensive and maybe tank the boss for 10 seconds while the MT gets rezzed.
10characters