Protection Warrior Best Legendaries in Shadowlands — Dragonflight 10.2.5
Legendary Powers are targetable, unique effects that you can imbue certain base items with through the Runecarving system. In Shadowlands, these enable you to customize your Protection Warrior, drastically improving your performance, and are arguably the most important aspect of your gear.
The purpose of this page is to help you pick the right legendary powers (and item slots for them) for your character, depending on the content you are interested in.
Legendaries in Shadowlands
Legendary powers are extremely influential in some way or another for all the classes, and obtaining them should definitely be in your top priorities. While being powerful, they are not that easy to get and require some effort. To get a better understanding of how to actually obtain the legendaries, look into the guide below that thoroughly explains it.
Best Overall Legendary Powers as Protection Warrior
Legendary Powers are there to enhance our powers. Unfortunately, we only have a few that actually do that, with the rest lagging behind.
Focus | Legendary | Slots | Source |
---|---|---|---|
Raiding | The Wall | Shoulder or Back | Raiding, Castle Nathria |
Mythic+ | Reprisal | Legs or Feet | Torghast The Upper Reaches, Layer 3+ |
Torghast | Reprisal | Legs or Feet | Torghast The Upper Reaches, Layer 3+ |
Unity | Cloak or Wrists | Finish Chapter 7 of the Zereth Mortis quest line |
Reprisal and The Wall are our best legendaries, which are suitable in the majority of situations and should be crafted first. These two are also alternatives to each other in Raiding and Mythic+. All of the other legendaries are either weak or very situational.
Double Legendaries
Unity is a new item introduced in Patch 9.2, which allows us to use two Legendaries together. The only restriction to this is that one of the Legendaries has to be your current Covenant-specific one. This will allow us to use various combinations of Legendaries that fit different situations. Below you can read all about our Covenant-specific Legendary powers.
- Kyrian — Elysian Might has potential uses in AoE content like Mythic+, especially when paired together with Forgelite Prime Mikanikos's Effusive Anima Accelerator. It can also be extremely useful in PvP content where you can lock down a target for extended periods of time.
- Necrolord — Glory can be extremely powerful if utilized correctly. It buffs 3 of your nearest allies with a big Mastery buff providing a lot of extra overall damage for your group. We can also extend the Mastery buff on ourselves for 50+ seconds but this does require you to always be hitting the target and some luck as far as Shield Slam resets go. In general when playing in a very organized group this Legendary gains a lot of value, but if this criteria is not met it loses a big portion of its strength.
- Night Fae — Nature's Fury just doubles down on the strengths of the already-powerful Ancient Aftershock. This makes it even better in Mythic+ scenarios by increasing the damage output and the knockdown duration of the ability.
- Venthyr — Sinful Surge makes Condemn increase the duration of Avatar by 2.5 seconds. While on paper it seems strong, the reality is that you can only use this during the 100-80% and 20-0% phases of boss health, making it lose value drastically. These phases of bosses are also frequently really heavy on damage intake, meaning you can not reliably put all your Rage into Condemn, but instead need to use defensives like Shield Block.
Best Raiding Legendaries for Protection Warrior
Generally the best Legendaries for Raiding are the ones that provide us with both defensive and offensive benefits. While our main goal is to stay alive this is often achieved just by properly playing the class. We should also focus on our damage output as this part is often overlooked.
- The Wall is a strong choice both offensively and defensively. It provides you with extra casts of Shield Wall and also a lot of extra Rage via Shield Slam. On top of that it also does not require any additional effort to get the most out of it as long as you prioritize your abilities correctly. When paired together with Stalwart Guardian and Anger Management you can expect to see Shield Wall roughly on a 1.5 minute cooldown which is a huge reduction from the baseline 4 minutes.
- Reprisal is another solid choice but this is a lot more situational as it requires movement and mainly provides defensive value against Physical, blockable attacks. If the encounter allows for such movement that you can utilize Charge as often as possible without any unnecessary boss movement then this can be an excellent choice.
- Glory is the more supportive Legendary choice. Its main strength comes from granting additional Mastery to your allies therefore increasing your group's overall damage by a significant margin. It is especially useful in dedicated burst phases.
- Signet of Tormented Kings is also worth noting as a more offensive option for Raiding. While the randomness of the ability that will be cast when using Avatar can be dissuading it is still worth a mention. It is only working with Avatar right now and not with Ravager.
Best Mythic+ / Torghast Legendaries as Protection Warrior
- Reprisal should be the default Mythic+ option as it increases our Shield Block uptime by a significant amount. In addition, it also grants us a lot of quality-of-life improvements when charging into a new pack. Providing us Shield Block every time we Charge into a new pack takes care of the defensive part, but it also grants us a free Revenge and an additional 40 Rage. Having all of these benefits at the start of nearly every new pack is a huge deal. To get the maximum benefit out of this Legendary you should be looking to use Intervene as much as possible on one of the players in melee-range. To go even further you can also use Heroic Leap mid-combat and Charge back in right after, but this requires some thinking ahead so you do not end up reducing your group's overall damage. For more in-depth information on how to use Reprisal in Mythic+, take a look at the Mythic+ page.
- The Wall is a solid alternative to Reprisal. It provides you with consistent extra Rage from Shield Slam and also lowers the cooldown of Shield Wall by a significant amount. Shield Wall also has the advantage of not having to be in range of your enemies in order to get the damage reduction from it.
- Elysian Might / Nature's Fury / Seismic Reverberation are all great Mythic+ Legendaries for pure damage output. Seismic Reverberation will deal the most damage out of the 3 but it does require you to put more Rage into Revenge and it provides no additional value outside of damage. Elysian Might also roots the enemies for a longer duration so you can kite as necessary and Nature's Fury increases the duration of the knockdown from Ancient Aftershock. Before using any of these 3 Legendaries you should think about whether or not you can equip them without putting yourself in danger of dying due to losing out on Reprisal or The Wall.
For Torghast, it is also worth mentioning Stable Phantasma Lure. It is a Legendary that increases your Phantasma earned. While you should be getting enough of it over the course of the floors, you might want to use it if you feel like you do not have enough once you get to the Vendor.
Other Legendary Powers for Protection Warrior
These are the powers that might find some use in certain scenarios but in general are still lagging behind the best ones.
- Thunderlord will provide a significant uptime increase for Demoralizing Shout. Its strength comes in AoE situations like Mythic+ where you can consistently hit 2+ enemies with Thunder Clap. Unfortunately, it becomes very lacklustre in single-target situations.
- Misshapen Mirror can be useful in some niche situations where you need either the extra damage reduction provided by Spell Reflection or there are multiple abilities to reflect.
- When using Unbreakable Will, you should think about Shield Wall as a group cooldown rather than your own personal defensive. This means that you will be playing with 1 fewer defensive abilities, hindering your survivability. This in general is not worth using, as the long cooldown of Shield Wall means you will only get a cast or two off in a typical encounter. It only provides the group with a 25% Damage Reduction instead of the full 50%, so it is just not worth it.
Lackluster Legendary Powers for Protection Warrior
The following legendaries are severely behind the other ones mentioned above and should not be used for any serious content.
- Leaper could potentially be used for clearing old content, like Raids where you can not always mount up. Use it together with Bounding Stride to reduce the cooldown of Heroic Leap even more.
- Signet of Tormented Kings makes you cast an extra offensive ability every time you use Avatar, which might sound promising, but the reduced effectiveness of these abilities makes it a really weak choice that should only be used for "fun". More importantly, you do not want to Bladestorm randomly when casting Avatar while tanking enemies.
Changelog
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Warrior Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Mwahi, a Protection Warrior theorycrafter and moderator of the Skyhold Warrior Discord.
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