Protection Warrior Tank Spec, Builds, and Talents (Legion 7.2)

Table of Contents

• +Introduction
  • 1. Class Overview
  • 2. Patch 7.2 Changes
  • 3. Patch 7.1.5 Changes
  • 4. Contents
  • 5. ChangeLog
• +Easy Mode
  • 1. The Basics
  • 2. Talent Choice
  • 3. Stat Choice
  • 4. Basic Rotation
  • 5. Active Mitigation Abilities
  • 6. Cooldown Usage
  • 7. ChangeLog
• +Spell Summary
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Main Resource
  • 3. Basic Abilities
    • 3.1. Movement
  • 4. Important Procs
  • 5. Active Mitigation
  • 6. Defensive Cooldowns
  • 7. Offensive Cooldown
  • 8. ChangeLog
• ×Builds and Talents
  • 1. Talent Choices
  • 2. Tier 1 (Level 15) Talents
  • 3. Tier 2 (Level 30) Talents
  • 4. Tier 3 (Level 45) Talents
  • 5. Tier 4 (Level 60) Talents
  • 6. Tier 5 (Level 75) Talents
  • 7. Tier 6 (Level 90) Talents
  • 8. Tier 7 (Level 100) Talents
  • 9. ChangeLog
• +Artifact Traits and Relics
  • 1. Artifact Progression
  • 2. Relic Choice
  • 3. ChangeLog
• +Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities
  • 1. Single Target Rotation
  • 2. Multiple Target Rotation
  • 3. Active Mitigation Abilities
  • 4. Cooldown Usage
  • 5. Taunting
  • 6. Mastering Your Protection Warrior
    • 6.1. Rage Generation
    • 6.2. Mastery: Critical Block
    • 6.3. Procs
    • 6.4. Active Mitigation
      • 6.4.1. Shield Block
      • 6.4.2. Ignore Pain
      • 6.4.3. Shield Block or Ignore Pain?
    • 6.5. Other Notable Abilities
      • 6.5.1. Intercept
      • 6.5.2. Heroic Leap
    • 6.6. Detailed Cooldown Usage
      • 6.6.1. Battle Cry
      • 6.6.2. Last Stand
      • 6.6.3. Shield Wall
      • 6.6.4. Demoralizing Shout
      • 6.6.5. Spell Reflection
      • 6.6.6. Berserker Rage
      • 6.6.7. Artifact Ability
      • 6.6.8. Tier 1 Talents
      • 6.6.9. Tier 3 Talents
      • 6.6.10. Tier 5 Talents
      • 6.6.11. Tier 6 Talents
      • 6.6.12. Tier 7 Talents
  • 7. ChangeLog
• +Stat Priority
  • 1. Basics
  • 2. Getting a Better Understanding
  • 3. ChangeLog
• +Gems, Enchants, and Consumables
  • 1. Gems
  • 2. Enchants
  • 3. Consumables
  • 4. ChangeLog
• +Macros and Addons
  • 1. Macros
    • 1.1. Generic Macros for Warriors
      • 1.1.1. Mouseouver Interrupt Macro
    • 1.2. Specific Macros for Protection Warriors
      • 1.2.1. Mouseover Heroic Throw Macro
      • 1.2.2. Mouseover Taunt Macro
      • 1.2.3. Intercept Macros
      • 1.2.4. Blessing of Protection/Salvation Cancelaura Macro
  • 2. Addons
    • 2.1. Generic Addons for Warriors
      • 2.1.1. ElvUI
      • 2.1.2. Boss Mods: Deadly Boss Mods or Bigwigs
      • 2.1.3. GTFO
      • 2.1.4. Parrot or Mik's Scrolling Battle Text
      • 2.1.5. Weak Auras
      • 2.1.6. TellMeWhen
      • 2.1.7. Raeli's Spell Announcer
      • 2.1.8. Recount / Skada / Details!
    • 2.2. Specific Addons for Protection Warriors
      • 2.2.1. Omen Threat Meter
  • 3. ChangeLog
• +Gear, Legendaries, and Best in Slot
  • 1. Best in Slot List
  • 2. Trinkets
    • 2.1. Non-Raid Trinkets
    • 2.2. Raid Trinkets
  • 3. Tier 19 Set Bonuses
  • 4. Legendary Items
  • 5. Loot Competition
  • 6. ChangeLog

General Information

On this page, we present the viable talent choices for Protection Warriors in World of Warcraft Legion 7.2. We detail what each of the talents do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other pages of our Protection Warrior guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

About Our Reviewer

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Treckie, one of the best tanks in the world, who raids in Prime. You can watch his stream on Twitch and you can follow him on Twitter.

1. Talent Choices

Level	Choices
15	? Shockwave	? Storm Bolt	? Warbringer
30	? Impending Victory	✔ Inspiring Presence	✔ Safeguard
45	✔ Renewed Fury	✔ Best Served Cold	✔ Avatar
60	? Warlord's Challenge	? Bounding Stride	? Crackling Thunder
75	✔ Devastator	✘ Never Surrender	✔ Indomitable
90	✔ Vengeance	? Into the Fray	? Booming Voice
100	✔ Anger Management	✔ Heavy Repercussions	? Ravager

Talents can be freely changed when out of combat and in a rested XP area (such as an inn or a capital city). Moreover, Tome of the Tranquil Mind and Codex of the Tranquil Mind can be used to temporarily allow players to change talents anywhere, as long as they are out of combat.

2. Tier 1 (Level 15) Talents

? Shockwave

? Storm Bolt

? Warbringer

• Shockwave is an active ability with a 40-second cooldown. It is a frontal cone attack that deals low Physical damage to enemies within 10 yards, and stuns them for 3 seconds. Its cooldown is reduced by 20 seconds if it strikes at least 3 targets.
• Storm Bolt is an active ability with a 20-yard range and a 30-second cooldown. It deals low Physical damage to the target, stunning them for 4 seconds.
• Warbringer modifies Intercept. When used against an enemy, the target is stunned for 2.5 seconds (in addition to the normal effects of Intercept), and all enemies within 5 yards of the target take damage, but only if they are stunnable (note that they do not get stunned). When used against an ally, the effects on the ally remain the same, but any enemies within 5 yards of them will take damage if they are stunnable.

In this tier, you have a choice between 3 damaging crowd-control abilities, and you should make your choice primarily on the requirements of your particular encounter.

Shockwave is a great choice for keeping multiple targets locked down, and it is especially powerful if you can hit 3+ targets in order to benefit from the cooldown reduction effect.

For stunning a single target, Storm Bolt is a great choice, whether you are trying to interrupt the target, or just to prevent it from attacking you for a few seconds.

Finally, Warbringer is going to provide the best damage increase, but it only deals damage to stunnable targets (such as adds/trash). Keep in mind also that the Warbringer stun is not affected by diminishing returns, which makes it great for adds that chain-cast even after all other interrupts no longer work. Remember that Warbringer only stuns if you Intercept an enemy, which can make it annoying to use properly, in which case Shockwave might prove to be a better option.

3. Tier 2 (Level 30) Talents

? Impending Victory

✔ Inspiring Presence

✔ Safeguard

• Impending Victory replaces Victory Rush. It is usable at any time (with a 30-second cooldown), damaging the target and healing you for 15% of your maximum health. Getting a killing blow reset its cooldown.
• Inspiring Presence is a passive aura that causes all party or raid members within 60 yards to be healed for 3% of all damage they deal. This aura does not affect you.
• Safeguard causes Intercept (when used on an ally) to transfer 30% of the damage taken by the target to you for 6 seconds.

Inspiring Presence will provide your raid with a lot of overall healing, which makes it the go-to choice in fights with high raid damage. Note that you yourself do not benefit from the heal, and that other players can only benefit from one instance of Inspiring Presence at one time, meaning that if you have multiple Protection Warriors in the raid, only one should be using this talent.

Safeguard turns Intercept into a powerful external cooldown, but you should beware of using it while you yourself are also actively tanking (since it transfer 30% of the damage the target takes to you).

The choice between these two talents depends on whether you need raid survivability or personal survivability (more precisely, for your off-tank).

Finally, Impending Victory is a talent with a number of drawbacks (it costs 10 Rage, it is on the global cooldown, it requires a target in your melee range), all of which make it unappealing for raid content. It does provide a bit of personal survivability, and the heal per Rage is higher than what you get from Ignore Pain, but still this is a weak talent outside of solo play.

4. Tier 3 (Level 45) Talents

✔ Renewed Fury

✔ Best Served Cold

✔ Avatar

• Renewed Fury causes Ignore Pain to also enrage you, increasing all damage you deal by 10% for 6 seconds.
• Best Served Cold causes Revenge to deal 5% more damage for each target it hits, up to a maximum of 5 targets.
• Avatar is an active ability with a 90-second cooldown. You deal 20% increased damage for Avatar's 20-second duration, and activating Avatar removes all roots and snares.

Avatar is generally the best choice in this tier. It is an active DPS cooldown, which also has the benefit of removing snares and roots, utility that is certainly welcome. It pairs well with other abilities like Battle Cry, Booming Voice, and Ravager, being able to produce great burst DPS for AoE burst phases or packs.

Renewed Fury has the advantage of being a passive proc; it is a fair choice, competitive with Avatar for damage output, but it does not fare very well when the damage intake is high as well. Over the course of a fight, it should do more damage than Avatar, but Avatar is a better choice for burst phases/pulls.

Best Served Cold is generally the better option for AoE, being better when there are constantly multiple targets to get hit, but compared to Renewed Fury (which increases the damage of all abilities), Best Served Cold only affects Revenge.

5. Tier 4 (Level 60) Talents

? Warlord's Challenge

? Bounding Stride

? Crackling Thunder

• Warlord's Challenge reduces the cooldown of Berserker Rage by 15 seconds, and while Berserker Rage is active, it removes the cooldown of Taunt and causes enemies you taunt move 50% faster towards you.
• Bounding Stride passively reduces the cooldown of Heroic Leap by 15 seconds, and also causes Heroic Leap to grant you a 70% movement speed increase for 3 seconds.
• Crackling Thunder increases the radius of Thunder Clap by 50%.

The talents in this tier are mostly situational, so you should make your choice based on the requirements of the fight and on your playstyle and preference.

Crackling Thunder is a solid go-to talent for dungeons, since the extra range on Thunder Clap increases ease-of-play and also makes it easier to pick up stray adds. Since Thunder Clap will be used in your rotation, and do quite a bit of damage, it is important to make sure it hits all relevant targets, although it will often be able to do this even without this talent, which can sometimes make it redundant.

Bounding Stride is great for on-demand movement, and it is generally a nice quality of life improvement for solo content.

Finally, Warlord's Challenge is useful in case you need to pick up several adds spawning at the same time in different locations, or even when some bosses need to be moved from one place to another, in which case increasing their movement speed can be beneficial. You can even use this to increase your threat against a target, but beware of diminishing returns that may render the target immune to Taunt.

6. Tier 5 (Level 75) Talents

✔ Devastator

✘ Never Surrender

✔ Indomitable

• Devastator passively causes your auto attacks to deal additional damage, generate 5 Rage, and have a 30% chance to reset the remaining cooldown of Shield Slam.
• Never Surrender causes Ignore Pain to ignore up to 100% more damage, depending how much health you are missing (the more health you are missing, the more damage is ignored).
• Indomitable passively increases your maximum health by 25%, and also causes Ignore Pain to ignore 25% more damage.

The best talent choice in this tier depends on how the encounter will be played out, but we feel that Indomitable is a great default choice. Since playing with Devastator can be complicated, we recommend using Indomitable until you can manage to play with Devastator correctly. Once you can play Devastator proficiently, it can compete with Indomitable and even be the better option.

Indomitable will give you a permanent 25% boost to your health, and also make every single Ignore Pain you use about 25% stronger as well. This makes Indomitable a strong choice for most raid encounters, since you get a considerable amount of Rage from taking damage. Once the damage intake becomes too high, while it should not outperform Devastator in Rage generation, due to high damage intake and high health, Indomitable might be a lot safer to use.

Devastator removes Devastate from your rotation and makes it passively integrated in your auto attacks, so now your auto attacks have a chance to proc Shield Slam, which frees up a global cooldowns for you. However, to play properly also means you should be paying attention to your swing timer, and sometimes NOT use any abilities if you are just about to hit (since both your auto attack and the ability you are about to use could proc Shield Slam, and you do not want to "waste" the ability). Since you lose the ability to cast Devastate, you will end up relying on Thunder Clap and Revenge to reset Shield Slam, and this means that it is essential to run Vengeance together with Devastator, since if you do not, you will waste a lot more Rage casting Revenge. You can read more about this here.

It is difficult to obtain much effectiveness out of Never Surrender. It is technically better with stronger Ignore Pains if you constantly use it at sub 50% health, however that requires you to rather safely be able to sit around 50% health, which is not an ideal situation. It only has fringe uses.

Read more about how to utilise Ignore Pain to its full potential here.

7. Tier 6 (Level 90) Talents

✔ Vengeance

? Into the Fray

? Booming Voice

• Vengeance causes Ignore Pain to reduce the cost of your next Revenge (used within 15 seconds) by 35%, and also causes Revenge to reduce the cost of your next Ignore Pain (also within 15 seconds) by 35%.
• Into the Fray passively grants you 3% Haste for each enemy within 15 yards, up to a maximum of 5 enemies.
• Booming Voice causes Demoralizing Shout to also generate 60 Rage, and increase your damage to targets affected by it by 25%.

Vengeance provides a powerful boost to both damage and survivability, through a large discount on Rage spent on Ignore Pain. It requires you to effectively weave Revenge and Ignore Pain; depending on your dodges/parries, you can get quite a bit of Rage reduction on a lot of your Ignore Pains.

If you are consistently facing multiple enemies, then Into the Fray can end up providing a sizable increase in Haste, increasing both damage output and survivability. However, it is quite weak (especially compared to Vengeance, against a single target) if you cannot get the full benefit from having 5 adds nearby. It is an easy-to-use talent for learning the Protection specialisation, especially for dungeons, but it will not provide much of an advantage against bosses.

Finally, Booming Voice can provide some burst damage or emergency survivability through the 60 Rage that it generates, and it can be coupled with Avatar. This makes it great for Mythic+ (either bosses or for big trash pulls), but in a raid setting it does not do very well.

8. Tier 7 (Level 100) Talents

✔ Anger Management

✔ Heavy Repercussions

? Ravager

• Anger Management causes every 10 Rage you spend to reduce the remaining cooldown of Battle Cry, Last Stand, Shield Wall, and Demoralizing Shout by 1 second.
• Heavy Repercussions causes Shield Slam to extend the duration of Shield Block (assuming it is active when Shield Slam is used) by 1 second, and causes Shield Block to increase the damage of Shield Slam by 30%.
• Ravager is an active ability with a 1-minute cooldown. You throw your weapon at the targeted location, where it will spin in place for 7 seconds, dealing damage to all enemies within 8 yards every second. Moreover, using Ravager increases your Parry chance by 35% for 12 seconds.

All the talents in this tier improve your survivability, but the choice will depend on several factors, most importantly the type of encounter you are progressing on.

Heavy Repercussions is the best choice for fights in which the main damage intake can be blocked. Using Using this talent and having a lot of Haste can lead you to potentially having 100% Shield Block uptime, which is very strong. Heavy Repercussions also boosts Shield Slam damage by 30%, which makes it a great talent both defensively and offensively.

Anger Management is an excellent choice for encounters in which the cooldowns of your main defensive abilities are too long for the frequency of dangerous abilities, although this is generally a pretty rare situation. If you are not using Heavy Repercussions, then you lose out on Shield Block uptime, which means that Anger Management is better for fights where there is not that much blockable damage anyway, and for which instead you need heavy cooldowns more often.

Finally, Ravager can work when you need burst AoE damage coupled with other cooldowns such as Avatar, and the Parry chance it grants makes it a good choice for AoE tanking, allowing you to proc cost-free Revenges.

9. ChangeLog

• 25 May 2017: Changed Into the Fray and Ravager to situational talents instead of recommended.
• 27 Mar. 2017: Updated tier 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 talent sections.
• 19 Feb. 2017: Updated Warbringer description to further clarify things, and made a slight edit to the tier 5 talent discussion.
• 11 Jan. 2017: Updated Warbringer description to account for correct Patch 7.1.5 change (following a patch note confusion).
• 10 Jan. 2017: Updated talent descriptions to account for Patch 7.1.5 (including removing Ultimatum and adding new talent), and changed the discussion for most of the tiers.
• 25 Oct. 2016: Inspiring Presence is now only applied to party and raid members.
• 22 Oct. 2016: Made updates and improvements to tier 2, 3, 5, and 6 talent discussions.
• 24 Sep. 2016: Updated the Vengeance Rage cost reduction to account for a recent hotfix.
• 20 Sep. 2016: Updated the Vengeance discussion, and also made a small tweak to the tier 3 talent discussion.
• 29 Aug. 2016: Updated for Legion's launch.
• 21 Jul. 2016: Removed a mention that Warbringer only works if Intercept is used against an enemy, and updated the talent discussion accordingly.
• 20 Jul. 2016: Changed our opinion of Ultimatum to say that it is a good choice against a single target when used together with Vengeance and Heavy Repercussions.
• 19 Jul. 2016: Revamped tier 5 talent discussion.
• 19 Jul. 2016: Updated for the Legion pre-patch.