Protection Warrior Tank Guide — The War Within (11.1.7)

Protection Warriors excel in fights with high amounts of physical damage or where mobility is needed. Much of the damage they take is mitigated through blocking, making their damage intake smooth and predictable. Additionally, they provide a healthy amount of utility, whether it be crowd control or raid buffs. They are a formidable, fast paced, all around tank making them a worthy choice in both raids and dungeons.

Note that this guide focuses on aspects that are specific to Protection Warriors and general tanking strategies are beyond its scope. If you wish to know more about the tanking role and what you can do to improve, we recommend that you read our tanking guide.

Strengths

• Excels in situations with high amounts of physical/blockable damage.
• Smooth damage intake thanks to various defensives and high armor values.
• Has high mobility with Charge, Intervene, and Heroic Leap.
• Decent raid and dungeon utility in Rallying Cry, Battle Shout, Shockwave, Spell Reflection, and Intimidating Shout.
• Can specialize for heavy AoE damage, single target damage or go for a fully defensive build with talents.
• Strong single target execute phase with Execute.

Weaknesses

• Strong single-target DPS.
• Strong AoE DPS
• More unforgiving of mistakes or improper play compared to other tanks.
• Weaker self-sustain compared to some other tank specs. This is only an issue in certain niche situations.
• Has some difficulty against bleeds, damage over time abilities and non-blockable damage.
• Shield Block, Spell Block and Spell Reflection can be very inconsistent.

Before jumping straight into leveling, take a look at our Addons page. Setting up your User Interface with suitable addons will help you improve significantly! Setting up your interface early will also help you to get used to where things are on your screen, so once you hit the end-game content, you can focus on learning fight mechanics and worry less about staring at your UI.

Leveling as a tank can seem like a daunting task, but it is actually very easy. You can pull a lot of enemies at once and still survive because of your various defensive abilities! To get a better understanding of leveling as a Protection Warrior, you can look into the leveling guide below.

As a tank, your main job is to stay alive while keeping the enemies off of your squishier raid/party members. To do so, you will try to generate as much Rage as possible and then use it, depending on the situation, on either defensives, like Shield Block, or offensive abilities, like Revenge. You can learn about the various spells you will have at your disposal by reading the Spell Summary page.

To just get a quick idea of how the class works, you can look into the Easy Mode guide linked below. This page will briefly go over the main things that you need to know in order to play the class.

If you want to go more in-depth about Protection Warrior and understand exactly what makes it work, you can start by looking at our Talents page. This will go over all the main things you need to know about the talents and when to choose them.

Protection Warrior's whole playstyle is based on generating and spending Rage. This means that you will have abilities that generate Rage, such as Shield Slam, and abilities that will use that Rage, for example, Ignore Pain. In case you are already familiar with the abilities and talents of Protection Warriors and are just looking for information regarding the rotation and various interactions the spells have with each other, you can look into our Rotation guide below. This will go over everything you need to know about when to press what button!

There are a lot of different things when looking at gear, and it can be overwhelming at the start. To begin with, you can take a look at our Best in Slot guide, which is linked below. This will go over the best gear you can get from various content, like Mythic+ and Raids.

In order to understand why a piece of gear is considered best in slot, we have to understand what the various Stats on the gear are providing us. Some stats can be more valuable than others, and your stat priority can also change depending on the content you are doing. To get a better understanding of what all the stats are providing Protection Warriors, you can take a look at our Stats page.

To get even more out of our gear, we can put enchants on specific pieces, and if we are lucky, the gear will also have gem sockets. Choosing the right Gems and Enchants for your gear will be an important step for a well-optimized character. In order to know what to put on your gear, you can look into our Enchanting & Gemming guide below.