Protection Warrior Leveling Guide from 1 to 90 — Midnight Season 1
On this page, you will find our Level by Level Protection Warrior leveling guide for Midnight. Make sure to use the slider to make the guide adapt to your level. For more general leveling information, please refer to our Warrior leveling guide.
Best Protection Warrior Leveling Playstyle
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. This, in turn, leads to you learning the class a lot better, preparing you for the end-game content.
For more information about leveling, check out the two pages below.
Gear Options
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.
Alternatively, you can purchase Heirloom items. These scale with your level, meaning you will not need to replace your gear while leveling. If you choose this option, prioritize items that have Haste.
Useful Leveling Consumables for Midnight
At the start of every new expansion, the one thing in everyone's mind would be how to reach the maximum level. For Midnight, the max level is 90. There are various items to boost your leveling speed and efficiency, allowing you to make the best out of your playtime.
Gunshoes — Massive movement speed boost that works when
Mounts do not, and much faster than ground mounts.
Goblin Glider Kit — Lets you glide off of ledges and cover vast
distances quickly.
Fried Bonefish — Gives you a speed buff when you kill
enemies.
Light-Step Hoofplates — Do not forget this Mount Equipment to
make your mounts faster on the ground.
Level-by-Level Rotation and Talents
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.
If you are just starting your journey into Midnight, we have a Level 80 import string for you. You can follow the point-by-point allocation of the below tree once you start gaining levels in Midnight.
Rotation/Ability Priority to Level Up as a Protection Warrior
Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!
Starting at Level 1, you only have one active ability:
Slam.
- Cast
Charge to initiate combat
whenever possible.
Victory Rush activates whenever an
enemy is killed. Use it to heal yourself.- Use
Impending Victory to heal yourself
when needed. - Cast
Avatar to generate a bit of Rage
and greatly increase your damage. - Cast
Demoralizing Shout to reduce the
damage you take, and increase the damage you deal (when using the
Booming Voice talent). - Cast
Shield Charge. - Cast
Shield Slam to deal a lot of damage. - Cast
Shield Slam to generate Rage and
deal damage. - Cast
Thunder Clap to generate Rage
and deal AoE damage. - Cast
Execute when enemies are
below 20% health. - Be sure to keep
Battle Shout up on yourself and your
allies at all times. - Spend Rage on
Whirlwind to damage
multiple targets if you do not need to spend it on your active mitigation to
survive. - Spend Rage on
Revenge to damage
multiple targets if you do not need to spend it on your active mitigation to
survive. - 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.
Once you hit level 71, you will gain access to Warrior Protections two Hero Talent options: Mountain Thane and Colossus. Which one to use 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.
War Mode Talents to Level Up as a Protection Warrior
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!
General PvP Talent
Morale Killer significantly reduces
the cooldown of
Demoralizing Shout, allowing for more damage
reduction and damage output in conjunction with
Booming Voice.
Protection Warrior PvP Talents
Dragon Charge improves mobility and
inflicts moderate damage to targets along your path.
Sword and Board provides a near-constant increase to Shield Slam and Devastate damage through more frequent
critical strikes.
Changelog
- 16 Mar. 2026: Updated and reviewed for Midnight Season 1 launch.
- 26 Feb. 2026: Updated for Midnight.
- 10 Feb. 2026: Updated for Patch 12.0.1.
- 23 Jan. 2026: Modified talents slightly to get earlier access to offensive abilities.
- 19 Jan. 2026: Reviewed and updated for Midnight Pre-Patch.
- 30 Nov. 2025: Reviewed and updated for Patch 11.2.7.
- 05 Oct. 2025: Reviewed for Patch 11.2.5.
- 04 Aug. 2025: Updated for Patch 11.2.
- 15 Jun. 2025: Reviewed for Patch 11.1.7.
- 21 Apr. 2025: Reviewed for Patch 11.1.5.
- 24 Feb. 2025: Updated for Patch 11.1.
- 15 Dec. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 11.0.7.
- 21 Oct. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 11.0.5.
- 09 Sep. 2024: Resolved issue with Talents and Rotations having a mis-match.
- 21 Aug. 2024: Updated for The War Within.
- 23 Jul. 2024: Updated for The War Within Pre-Patch.
- 10 May 2024: Replaced Battering Ram with Enduring Alacrity.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Reviewed for Season 4.
- 18 Mar. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.6.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.5.
- 23 Nov. 2023: Updated Rotation priority.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.2
- 04 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7
- 10 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
- 01 May 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Swapped Thunderlord for Battering Ram and reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 21 Dec. 2022: Updated talent calculator pick order.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Warrior Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Mwahi, a Protection Warrior theorycrafter and moderator of the Skyhold Warrior Discord.
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