Prot Warrior Gladiator Videos - PvP Patch 4.0.1

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

Blog Azeroth Interview

Thank you to Blog Azeroth for the resource spotlight Rilandune wrote on their site about JMTC. You'll find an interview with me as well as a quick write up about the great community here.

November Carnival

Before reading about my prot pvp adventures please send me a link to a post which fits the criteria for next month's carnival: "Mistakes you've learned from on the auction house."

What I'm Selling Post 4.0.1

I sent out a newsletter to my mailing list detailing the top 10 items I'm selling since 4.0.1 was released. I realize that quite a few of you were interested in this information so I'll also be re-releasing it Monday on the blog.

Protection PvP

Ok well prot pvp is back ladies and gentleman. It's not as strong as it once was but it's not quite dead yet. Arms warriors with the best gear in the game I'd say are of equal value to a prot warrior in my current gear setup (some bis from last season). Now if I had the best dps gear in the game... drool... I'd be unstoppable.

Enough about me, let's talk about you and more importantly how you can learn from me. That's why you come here after all right? You don't want gold tips, you want bone crunching pvp knowledge so you can mercilessly drive your foes into the ground two at a time.

Resilience is Finally the Best Stat for Prot Pvp


Due to vengeance, healing (more on this later) and the insane amount of damage reduction from resilience, this once inferior and ignored statistic is finally #1 on a prot warrior's list when gearing. Resilience is supposedly stopping as much as 60% of oncoming damage on live and this makes prot warriors extremely difficult to kill. I spent honor replacing all my 264 pve gear with resilience (still have boots, gloves and legs but not going to sweat it) and I love it. Although my damage went down a small amount, the benefits of supposedly 36% less oncoming damage is just insane. I say supposedly because a blue poster said that the tooltip is inaccurate but not too far off the actual value for the time being. If vengeance is accumulated despite resilience (full hit before damage reduction) then resilience is even better for prot pvp. However, I have not done testing to see if this is the case. If anyone has data on this please let me know.

Shield Slam is Back
You need enrage from a block, parry or dodge (only 20% chance now of happening), full sunders and shield block up to maximize your shield slam damage. Switch to zerker stance and use battle shout to get extra rage (if you do this you will not get four slams in with max damage but the three you do get in will do additional damage). Then you should spam devastate until a free shield slam appears or until the cooldown is up and push slam again. If you're lucky you could manage to get three shield slams into an opponent for maximum damage. Since these slams can reach upwards of 10k on full resilience targets this combo is your kill move. Get your sunders up, wait for enrage and then press shield block to set it up. The rest is up to sheer luck whether you get the extra slam in during the 10 second window. It's possible to get four in but you'll be able to count on one hand the number of times this happens and you'll need very good timing/reflexes to pull it off. Also, if you don't use abilities like conc blow or heroic throw during the combo then odds are your opponent or his teammate will heal through the damage. Since slam is your big combo now you'll want to bring back good old recklessness for clutch burst kills as well.

I'm happy to see the burst style of slam is back in place. I got gladiator with this style of play and did very well with the attack power devastate/armor pen build as well. I enjoyed being reminded of the good old days when I first learned prot pvp as a shield slam setup warrior. The reason devastate spam build worked better in arenas is because it was continuous damage so our opponents never knew when to pop cooldowns to defend themselves. With shield slam burst you see shield block on the warrior and you know it's time to run, otherwise you know that very little damage is incoming. Had I gone for gladiator in season 7-8 it would have been easier with the devastate build but I chose not to.

Conc Blow, Shockwave, Rend and Blood and Thunder
Conc blow and shockwave are for stunning only now, don't waste these doing damage. Don't bother wasting global cooldowns on stacking the shockwave buff from thunder claps either, the amount of damage you do with the shockwave is hardly worth three globals setting up. In arenas having blood and thunder and stacking the shockwave buff will be worth your while but in chaotic battleground pvp where you don't always necessarily have healers or long fights this isn't worth it. Rend for long fights, otherwise go for slam setup. If you have a healer and are in the fight for a long time then rending, blood and thunder and shockwaving are good options for continuous damage since your vengeance buff will make these decent attacks. Keep in mind however that if you have 40k health you will need to take about 100k damage before your vengeance buff reaches full capacity. Odds are you'll be dead by then or out of combat and losing the buff.

Heroic Strike and Revenge
Heroic Strike is sweet but you need to spec into it to make it worth your while. If you do this then you lose blood and thunder (based on my two optimal builds which I'm spec'd as on Markco of Onyxia). I don't mind though, fights are longer than before but not long enough to warrant the globals for rend and reapplying it. In arena I'd use it but not hopping around from target to target in pvp. I use thunderclap to reduce damage incoming and I try to use it within the time frame for each stacking shockwave buff. I'll keep a stack of three going until I want to stun someone and then let it off for maximum damage, which isn't all that much without a big stack of vengeance going for me. Ok back on topic, yes heroic strike and intervene. This is my favorite combo to use when shield block is down. Both revenge and heroic strike provide tons of damage and I can do it from devensive stance while being focused.

Execute... FINALLY USEFUL
I love it, execute is finally an amazing ability to use when someone is low on health. You can even get a glyph to allow you to heal yourself for 5% with a victory rush after executing someone, but I favor other glyphs over it. The new version is not limitted by the amount of rage you have and starts off with 60% of your attack power as the damage factor. That's huge! If you happen to be fighting in battle or even better zerker, then you're going to love executing with a full rage bar. It's hard to setup your rage so that you'll have a lot and be in something other than defensive stance when you're opponent drops to 20% health, however even a minimum rage execute is extremely powerful. I use berzerker rage and if I have it battle shout to generate a nice burst of rage (I also have the 5 rage glyph for berzerker rage) for my execute.

Healing is the New Warrior
With access at level 85 to 7.5% healing chance on hit, 20% healing on victory rush, +20% to all self heals, enraged regeneration and 10% healing on stuns warriors are suddenly quite well off in the solo category. If you choose to go the full healing route then your warrior will benefit much more from vengeance since you'll be alive to use it. A warrior getting healed this much will have multiple lives like a paladin and be capable of maybe even stacking vengeance to full in a single fight. You're taking 10% less damage anyway in defensive stance so in a theoretical stunlock from hammer of justice you would get: 12% health + maybe ~9% health and take 10% less damage. I'm not sure if vengeance takes into account defensive stance when calculating the buff but I hope it doesn't! In an arathi basin I went 1vs6 because of self heals (I have the 7.5%, enraged regen and 20% on victory rush). The random person who ran in there with me and then ran back whispered me one word: "woah."

"Woah" is the new prot warrior. Insane defenses, stacking attack power buff coupled with tons of healing, lots of interrupts and stuns... it's going to be a good expansion.

Oh did I mention you get a ridiculous 60 rage on spell reflect and it's only a 6 second cooldown? Lol who needs stance mastery when you have that?

Prot Spec in Arenas

I cannot wait to try vigiliance since it will now stack my vengeance when someone beats on my healer. I don't have this spec in bg's because fights aren't long enough, but in 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 I see this being an amazing talent... now to figure out what to give up in exchange haha. I think I will take one point out of blood craze or second wind. I may actually take 2 points out of bloodcraze to get 2/2 intervene as well. Getting 50% rage boost for attacking someone not hitting me is going to be huge as well. I think prot will actually be BETTER now in arenas than arms at dealing damage hands down thanks to these options.

Another option for getting the needed talent points for vigiliance and intervene would be to remove the points from the stacking thunderclap bonus for shockwave since shockwave really isn't doing that much damage now adays and spamming thunderclap to get the bonus isn't worth it unless you spec into blood and thunder as well. Unless rend sees a big upgrade I don't think I'll be going this route. I'd rather have the burst of heroic strike double crits. See how complicated this can get lol?

Prot Videos

These are my thoughts after only playing a few hours with prot and I'm already discovering new combos which the spec has never been capable of before.

Some videos for you to watch of myself and jhaman owning people in bg's. These are just regular old games taped and processed without editing of any kind.