Hold the Line; An Endgame Tanking Reference

By: Patrick O'Callahan / Ciderhelm

TANKING

3.1 Attack Power, Crits, and Steady/Irregular DPS

There are two primary avenues of warrior damage: Irregular damage, revolving around critical strikes, burst damage, and spiked damage; and Steady damage, based on slowly driving your enemy to a certain doom. While irregular damage is the bread and butter of a Arms or Fury warrior and can be effectively combined with high attack power, it is next to useless to rely on for tanking.

Attack Power (STEADY)
Each Strength point gives an additional 2 attack power; to simplify, each Strength point gives you an additional 0.142 dps. This is the single most steady form of DPS, as the additional damage will be constant.

The Silithid Claw has a damage range of 64-120 damage- the first 20 seconds of a fight could realistically all be strikes for under 90 damage. This is your unmodified "white" damage. Adding significant attack power to this changes the ballgame entirely; with 1044 attack power (battle shout buffed), an additional 74.6dps boosts this up. Instead of 64-120 damage, the damage range on this weapon is 110-166. Raid buffed, this damage range increases more dramatically.

Attack Power is reliable; it is steady. It may not provide the glorious numbers or prolonged DPS that burst damage does, but it removes any short term chance play and you will never gamble with your raid. For this reason, Attack Power and Strength are a pillar of your character.

Heroic Strike (STEADY)
Heroic Strike is one of the gems in the tanking arena; often overlooked and forgotten about for characters leveling to 60, it quickly becomes the basis of tanking DPS.

First, as far as additional damage goes, the modifier is simple. Using my DPS example from the previous section we can modify the 110-166 damage one step further; with Heroic Strike rank 9 (157 additional damage), this damage range becomes 267-323.

Now take notice of how Heroic Strike changed those numbers- more than doubled my damage spectrum, even with attack power factored in. This weapon, like all Aggro weapons being utilized by a tank, has become a Heroic Strike delivery system. Note that this additional damage is not balanced by weapon speed; a much faster weapon really will bring far more of these high damage attacks to bear.

Next, look at the ability. It is not a normal ability; specifically, it is a NEXT MELEE ability. What this means is that the attack is applied to your weapon much the same way a weightstone or poison is applied to a weapon. This is important because it does not use any global cooldowns -- all other abilities remain available to you while Heroic Strike is applied. This includes Shield Bash, a utility skill necessary for fights like Skeram and Yauj.

There is still more. Heroic Strike causes considerable additional threat on top of everything else. This makes quickly striking a mob with this ability applied to your weapon an incredibly good tanking maneuver that you can build your character around.

Yet, for all of this, Heroic Strike and Aggro weapons are not without their due consequence. To effectively use Heroic Strike, you need to have rage. Lots of it. Every attack you do now will suck rage away from you and you will be stunted from rage gain by your own action. Yet, you still want to use rage on other abilities like Revenge...

There is only one good solution: get used to the ebb and flow of the battle and consciously choose to take more damage from the mob you are fighting at specific times. How do you do this? It's up to you. Stop using Shield Block. Stop placing demo shouts up. Spec for Deathwish (21/30 fury/protection) and you get the additional damage and 30 second fear immunity.

Or just take your shield off for for a couple seconds when your healers aren't looking.

A Note on Cleave
All of the dynamics that apply to Heroic Strike apply on a lesser level to Cleave; the same modifiers come into play except for the innate threat generation. This is useful in very specific encounters.

Raid Buffing for DPS (STEADY)
There are plenty of great buffs that are tough to snag on a populated server such as ours. It's very hard to get an Onyxia or Nefarian head buff, despite how much we'd all like free Attack Power. Instead, there are small things you can do to increase your aggro DPS as well as benefit the entire raid.

Dense Weightstone, lvl 35
Applying this to your weapon every 30 minutes will increase damage by 8. This is best used on high speed aggro weapons.

Gift of Arthas, lvl 38
You may have missed this beauty on the grind to 60. Pick it back up. This gives you a buff to Shadow resistance which helps in the better half of Blackwing Lair, it also places an infectious disease on the target which increases damage taken by 8. Not only will your own dps go up but every rogue and warrior in your raid will see an increase in DPS. This is best used with high speed aggro weapons.

Hemorrhage (Subtlety Build, Rogues)
This is similar to Gift of Arthas. The debuff will cause your attacks to do an additional 7 damage to that target. This must be constantly applied, as it runs out of charges in the span of seconds. This is best utilized by high speed aggro weapons.

Critical Strikes (IRREGULAR)
Per my belief, Aggro encounters go hand in hand with Steady DPS. Conversely, Mitigation encounters go with Irregular dps - the most notable of which are critical strikes.

Crit is the byproduct of the mitigation attribute Agility. Many of the top mitigation items carry Agility, not Strength in their tag. Master Dragonslayer's Medallion and Archimtiros' Ring of Reckoning. It isn't coincidence that warrior crit percentage is based on the same attribute that gives us dodge and armor.

In prolonged encounters, you are unlikely to lose aggro. Generally these are endurance based fights meant to test a coordinated movement of events. Chromaggus, for instance, or Majordomo, the tanks will have time to build up aggro. It is because of this fact that warriors do not need immediate base DPS and do not need to build around it.

This is where crit damage really shines. You will, in the long run, build more solidified aggro with crits than you can in aggro fights, ironic as that is. This is because you are going to have several critical strikes with a higher damage weapon over the course of the downtime; these crits are enhanced by the use of a Mitigation weapon, which generally are much slower and provide more burst.

Critical strikes offer another advantage. Unlike Heroic Strike, you are not completely out of rage; instead, crits are giving you substantially more rage to work with. This rage can be used to put out your full array of abilities, from Rend to Demoralizing Shout to Thunder Clap. You can also effectively keep Shield Block up.

Even 10% crit base is enough to take advantage of this in most fights.

Procs (IRREGULAR)
The general rule of thumb in tanking is to never rely on procs to hold aggro. The exception to this rule is for Mitigation encounters where you have time to wait on these abilities to pop up.

One example is the Quel'Serrar. This is probably about as bad a proc as you can get on a weapon. Not only are you relying on a proc, but your relying on a proc that gives you 13 defense -- which in turn acts like a proc, as it merely raises your chance of block/dodge/parrying attacks. However, if you have no threat of losing aggro, this weapon is good through much of the endgame.

All proc-based enchants take advantage of this, also. Crusader is the best proc-based enchant utilized in these conditions.

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