Protection Warrior Leveling Guide from 1 to 80 — The War Within (11.1.5)

Thanks to being a tank specialization, Protection Warrior can do big pulls while questing and survive them without issues. Running around and tagging as many enemies as possible before grouping them up and killing them will lead to fast quest completions.

As a tank, you should also queue for Dungeons between questing. Completing dungeons gives a hefty amount of experience, and as a tank you will have quicker queue times than DPS specializations. Enemies you fight in dungeons are generally stronger, granting more experience, and they also use more abilities than the mobs you meet while questing. This means that while inside a dungeon, you need to pay more attention and use your abilities in a more thoughtful way than you would otherwise, which in turn leads to you learning to play the class a lot better, preparing you for the end-game content.

While leveling up you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level. The only exception to this rule is if you have a Ring or Necklace with a slightly lower item level but 2 secondary stats on it instead of 1.

There are very few baseline abilities that you unlock. Most of them come in the form of Talents.

Talents are something that will give you options to optimize your character and change how some of the abilities work.

There are a multitude of possible ways to use your Talent points, and the tree below is just one of many. This tree will provide you with enough crowd control, single target, and AoE damage, together with all the survivability you need in order to get started.

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Once you hit level 71, you will gain access to Warrior Protections two Hero Talent options: Mountain Thane and Colossus. Which one to use for leveling is totally up to you; both of them do perfectly fine while leveling and picking one or the other will not give you any significant advantage.

Starting at Level 1, you only have one active ability: Slam.

1. Cast Charge to initiate combat whenever possible.
2. Victory Rush activates whenever an enemy is killed. Use it to heal yourself.
3. Use Impending Victory to heal yourself when needed.
4. Cast Avatar to generate a bit of Rage and greatly increase your damage.
5. Cast Demoralizing Shout to reduce the damage you take, and increase the damage you deal (when using the Booming Voice talent).
6. Cast Shield Charge.
7. Cast Champion's Spear.
8. Cast Ravager.
9. Cast Shield Slam to deal a lot of damage.
10. Cast Shield Slam to generate Rage and deal damage.
11. Cast Thunder Clap to generate Rage and deal damage, particularly during Avatar with Unstoppable Force talented.
12. Cast Execute when enemies are below 20% health.
13. Spend Rage on Whirlwind to damage multiple targets if you do not need to spend it on your active mitigation to survive.
14. Spend Rage on Revenge to damage multiple targets if you do not need to spend it on your active mitigation to survive.
15. Cast Slam as your filler spell.

Active Mitigation

• Cast Shield Block as much as possible when tanking something and taking heavy physical damage.
• Further smooth out your damage intake by spending Rage on Ignore Pain.

The following PvP talents are recommended for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content. You may find that different PvP talents work better for you, depending on your playstyle. Experimentation is encouraged!

Morale Killer significantly reduces the cooldown of Demoralizing Shout, allowing for more damage reduction and damage output in conjunction with Booming Voice.

1. Dragon Charge improves mobility and inflicts moderate damage to targets along your path.
2. Sword and Board provides a near-constant increase to Shield Slam and Devastate damage through more frequent critical strikes.