Newish prot warrior, what can I do better?

[ralwn 1]

Logs are for first 8 bosses (was on monk tank for furnace)

Warcraftlogs

AMR logs

 

Armory link (my multistrike is too high but nothing I can do about that. I don't have much choice in gear atm)

 

I play monk / dk / druid tanks and this was my first week tanking H BRF on the warrior. What am I doing wrong? What can I do better? Any replies are very much appreciated.

 

Gruul: My overwhelming blows didn't reset. I believe I used lots of shield barriers because I was being yo-yo'd down to 20-30% every few seconds from the overwhelming blows. What should I have done differently? (This group's method was taunting into the soak group with tank swaps after every 2 inferno slices)

 

Maidens: I had Sorka + both boats. Felt like she was trucking me, were my shield blocks not used at correct intervals?

 

Hans / Frans: Does demo shout not work for crippling suplex? I went into one with just demo shout and shield barrier and left it at 5-10% hp 

Edited May 17, 2015 by ralwn

[Vespasian 1]

I can't help you with Maidens since I don't have much exp for it, but I have some tips for gruul and hans/franz.

 

Gruul: We use a very similar tactic, but you tankswap the boss after every 3 inferno slices. This allows time for overwhelming blows to actually fall off, and the only thing you have to do differently is pop a decent CD or get an external like PS for the 3rd slice.

 

Hans&Franz: Demo shout does work on the suplex, but it's quite weak, we tend to stack CDs for it, my group has two bear tanks, who pop all their CDs since theyre usually up for the next one, but if your comp has disc priests / BM hunters / Paladins / Rdruids or anything else with a decent external DR then you should set up a system to use them. (Vigilance is excellent for this on the other tank). Most suplexes we see tend to hit for very little after CD's are used and our disc throws a big shield up. Your mileage may vary based on comp but just a demo shout and Sbarr probably isn't enough.

[Furiacki 1]

Gruul: swap at 3 stacks of slice as the above poster said.  Pool your rage to 120 just before each slice and use the following rotations for soaks:

1. Shield Block/Shield Barrier (the initial physical damage is blockable)

2. Same as 1 + Demo

3. Same as 1 + Shield Wall.

 

You should (almost) always prioritize block over barrier.  An exception as an example would be the Suplex you mention on H&F.  Pool your rage and use a barrier if it seems the external/personal CDs are not enough.  On the external CD note, your H & F kill had ONE defensive cast on you (PS).  With two resto druids each can IB a tank every single suplex, you can demo every one, and shield wall every other I believe (though not terribly necessary).  

 

Looking over your IM kill it appears you need to use your AM a lot more.  You had 25% uptime on block and very few barriers cast.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/4BZa6x1PwAm2drFH#fight=26&type=auras&source=12

You also used Heroic Strike 115 with only 9 ultimatum procs.  Prot warriors do not spam HS anymore, but rather ONLY use with ultimatum procs (unless taking zero damage). Unyielding strikes as a talent is a small mitigation loss when managed perfectly, and a significant one when played poorly and does not offer too much of a damage bump over the other two talents. 

 

In a similar length kill I had 15% higher block uptime and cast it 15-20% more.  I also used all my excess rage on barrier instead of HS and I 56 casts vs your 17.  That is a ton of damage on a fight where you are always tanking something.

 

I did not review details of any other fights, but in summation: Drop unyielding strikes (I prefer sudden death) and focus on block effective uptime (when you are taking physical damage). Cast barrier to prevent rage capping unless you aren't taking ANY damage then HS to prevent cap.  HS's damage is really weak anyways (6.9k average each for you) which is why unyielding strikes isn't all that great even when played perfectly.  Get your external CDs assigned before the pull, warriors are extremely dependent on them, far more so than any other tank class currently.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Furiacki

[Estarriol 167]

Starting with the Gruul logs you linked:

 

In a 4.5 minute fight, you had 2 Bloodbath uses, no Dragon Roar, no Ravager. You probably specced into Gladiator's Resolve, which is arguably the worst choice for this fight. Overwhelming Blows can be parried, giving you significant damage reduction while you're tanking and very nearly equal smoothness to Gladiator's Resolve. You'll get way more benefit from proper usage of Ravager than you will Gladiator's Resolve in nearly every fight.

 

I can see from your armory that you're specced into Juggernaut, which is almost always less useful than Double Time. In excessively rare situations, you will get an insignificant amount of extra rage from Juggernaut. In many situations, you will get more mobility (and therefore flexibility) from Double Time.

 

Furiacki went over the issues with Unyielding Strikes, but I want to expand upon that. Unyielding Strikes does better DPS than Sudden Death and Heavy Repercussions if you start spamming Heroic Strikes at 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 stacks of Unyielding Strikes. Even if you begin spamming HS at 4 stacks every time, you're sacrificing 45 rage per cycle of US. If you start spamming at 5 or 6 stacks of US, then you get less damage than using Sudden Death or Heavy Repercussions. Thus, in order to outperform SD or HR, you have to have very good play and also sacrifice a large amount of survivability. US simply isn't worth the loss of survivability and is nearly always a loss of damage over the other two options. Since HR has a fairly hefty loss of survivability due to the fact that is disallows you to ideally plan your Shield Block timings and also requires nearly optimal play, Sudden Death is typically the best choice. It has a very small survivability loss, but it is incredibly small. If you only use it in GCDs where you'd typically use Devastate, you're only giving up the opportunity to proc Enrage for 10 rage. In other words, in your gear, if you have 20 SD procs, you will be giving up roughly 28 over the course of a fight. If you have a fight long enough for 20 SD procs, you'll probably generate around 2000 rage.

 

Looking at your Shield Block uptime, 20% is too low. I'll check later to see if your SBlks are lining up properly with your Inferno Strikes, but I can say confidently that your SBlk uptime is too low for you to be both tanking Gruul and taking Inferno Strikes while not tanking Gruul.

 

I see 18 uses of Shield Barrier with an average size of 55.2k. In 685 gear, I would expect to see closer to 100k average size. You also had 25% overhealing, which means 25% over your SBars went unused. Overhealing in SBars is equivalent to rage waste and indicates that you used an SBar when it was unecessary and could have put that rage into damage with no survivability loss. The fact that your average size is so low means that you either used SBar at less than 60 rage or when you were not actively tanking. Given your overhealing, I would expect the latter. It looks like you were using Sbars to soak the DoT from Inferno Slice. The DoT is so minor that standing in ground-based HoTs will deal with it for you, so you might as well get the extra damage in. You're wasting rage with those SBars that you're using to soak the DoT and it take your healers no extra effort to deal with the 23k ticks from the DoT.

 

Now I'll look at your Events to see if you're using your abilities properly to deal with Inferno Strike (the physical portion of Inferno Slice) and Overwhelming Blows. To reiterate the importance of dealing with Overwhelming Blows, you took 3.91 million damage from it, compared to 1.15m melee damage and 852k Inferno Strike damage.

 

At 15s, you took an Inferno Strike with no Shield Block or CD at all. You should have had at least Shield Block.

 

At 34s, you took Strike with SBlk up. I would have recommended using SBlk and Demo Shout for this one.

 

At 39s, you take your first melee. You should have had a SBlk up for the taunt since you had a charge free.

 

You used SBlk at 40s, it fades at 46s and you do not use another one until 1:02, despite the fact that you have charges available and are still tanking. You use Demo Shout in this time period to offset the damage, which better use of SBlk could have done.

 

At 1:25, you take a Strike with neither SBlk nor a CD up. You had a SBlk charge, Shield Wall, and Last Stand available. This Strike was blacked, but not via SBlk. You got lucky, in other words.

 

At 1:42, you take a Strike with Shield Wall up, but again no SBlk.

 

At this point, you start tanking again, but Gruul goes into his Rampage.

 

You start taking melee hits again at 2:23 and use a Shield Block until 2:25. You could have had 18 consecutive seconds of Shield Block to cover you since the Rampage gives plenty of time for your charges to come back up. Your first SBlk fades at 2:31 and you do not use another one until 2:36, so you had five seconds of unnecessary damage taken in this time period. At 2:42, that charge fades and you use nothing (no CDs, no SBlk) until 2:50 where you used Last Stand as an "oh, shit" CD, which was only necessary due to not using Shield Block properly. At 2:55, you stop actively tanking the boss.

 

I'd like to expand upon this section since I think it can serve as a fairly ideal learning situation. Your active tanking period lasts 32s total at this time. With ideal play and no 2set procs, you would have covered the first 18s with Shield Block (1 Sblk gives 6s, second charge gives 6s, both charges on CD until 12s later when you use your 3rd SBlk, for a total of 18 continuous seconds of SBlk). So that's your first 18s, then you'll have a 6s window where your SBlk has faded and your next charge is on CD, then you use that charge for 6 more seconds of uptime. This brings you to 30s in with 24s of uptime on SBlk. The remaining 2s are during a recharge. So you could have had only 8 seconds of vulnerability in this time period and a 75% effective uptime on Shield Block. Instead, you missed the first two seconds of your tanking period, then covered yourself for 6 seconds, then let yourself be vulnerable for 5 seconds, covered for 6, then vulnerable for 8 seconds until you used Last Stand as a panic button. This gave you a total of 37.5% uptime on Shield Block. So with more ideal play, you wouldn't have needed the panic Last Stand or SBars to keep yourself stable enough.

 

At 3:14, you take your next Strike with no SBlk or CD at all.

 

At 3:29, you take a Strike with both SBlk AND Demo Shout. Hallelujah.

 

You start taking melees at 3:36, with no SBlk until 3:44. SBlk fades at 3:50 and you do not SBlk again until 4:02. You do use Shield Wall in this time period, but you could have had both. There was no reason to pick one or the other. This tanking period was 26 seconds. Using the math from before, you could have covered 20s of that period with ideal play. You covered 6s. I'm not counting the SBlk at 4:02 because you took no more melees (or Overwhelming Blows) at that point, rendering it moot. So you could have had 76.9% uptime and had only 23.07% uptime instead.

 

The last point I'll make is about rage. You generated 1755 over the course of the fight and wasted 56 (3.19%). This actually isn't bad, but zero rage waste is better. Your goal should always be to make sure you're never capping your rage.

 

Overall, in any situation where you have a tank swap mechanic like this, as long as there are more than 24s between swaps, you should always have a full 18s of SBlk uptime when you taunt back, minimum. After that, there should only be 6s intervals between blocks. You should always plan your SBlks around mechanics as needed, but you need to make sure you have maximum uptime on SBlk otherwise. SBar should fill in those 6s gaps, but make sure you will have 60 rage for SBlk when it comes back up. You're also not using your CDs as often as you could be. At minimum, I'd expect your second Strike of each set to always have a CD.

[Estarriol 167]

Also, a note on Hans and Franz, since the Crippling Suplex takes approximately 14 eons between when they pick you up to when they smash you, your Shield Barrier for the Suplex will be tiny. So tiny that it will be near baseline (probably around 40k in your gear). You should still definitely use SBar for the Suplex, but you'll also need hefty CDs. Use Shield Wall AND Demo Shout AND SBar for every Suplex. Use Last stand as needed during the plates and stampers phases.

 

Also, not going to go into deep detail for Maidens, but I would expect almost 50% uptime on SBlk for that fight since you're tanking full time. You had 25%.

[ralwn 1]

Thanks a bunch guys. Perfect timing on all of your posts. I'll work to get that stuff fixed for tomorrow's raid.

 

I should have better specified my spec. I used Anger Management most of the time with glad stance thrown in there at some points. Depends on how comfortable I was with my CD management for a fight or not. Didn't even realize ravager had a mitigaton component... I always figured it was just the equivalent of a monk's chi explosion.

 

Unyielding Strikes was an unfortunate holdover from my days as glad and never got around to replacing it because I couldn't find a place for execute on my bars. I'll fix that!

Edited May 19, 2015 by ralwn

[ralwn 1]

I see 18 uses of Shield Barrier with an average size of 55.2k. In 685 gear, I would expect to see closer to 100k average size. You also had 25% overhealing, which means 25% over your SBars went unused. Overhealing in SBars is equivalent to rage waste and indicates that you used an SBar when it was unecessary and could have put that rage into damage with no survivability loss. The fact that your average size is so low means that you either used SBar at less than 60 rage or when you were not actively tanking. Given your overhealing, I would expect the latter. It looks like you were using Sbars to soak the DoT from Inferno Slice. The DoT is so minor that standing in ground-based HoTs will deal with it for you, so you might as well get the extra damage in. You're wasting rage with those SBars that you're using to soak the DoT and it take your healers no extra effort to deal with the 23k ticks from the DoT.

I wasn't purposely using barrier to soak the dot. The numbers were low because I was taunting into the raid for the inferno slices with no resolve (I personally prefer running the slice into a stack group myself for this reason)

 

Was also prioritizing barrier over block when soaking slices. I'll reverse that order.

 

Really liking these metrics you guys are providing for judging performance. Doing my best to soak it in, thanks!

Edited May 19, 2015 by ralwn

[Estarriol 167]

I wasn't purposely using barrier to soak the dot. The numbers were low because I was taunting into the raid for the inferno slices with no resolve (I personally prefer running the slice into a stack group myself for this reason)

 

Well, that wouldn't have left you with overhealing, though. Overhealing on your SBars means that your SBar wasn't fully used and expired, which you can see in the logs that you had several hundred thousand damage left over after absorbs were taken into account during your Inferno Slices.

[ralwn 1]

I'll need to get a weakauras to show me my current barrier strength or something.

Edited May 19, 2015 by ralwn

[Estarriol 167]

I'll try to remember to throw you my WA when I get home, but that one actually tallies all absorbs currently on me. For current SBar remaining and for SBar size estimate, I use protwarbar.