Shay Shays Retarded Prot War Guide, part 1

I generally don't like to cream my own Twinkie, but I've gotten a lot of feed back that I seem to be a pretty good prot war. I don't claim to know absolutely everything, but I know enough. So since there is a lot to take in, I'm going to split this up into several installments.

1) Spec
First of all, you need to identify what you are going to be doing. The three areas are questing/grinding, 5-mans (heroics/regular instances) and raid Main Tanking. If you are an off-tank, i would recommend a spec either like the main tank so you can be an equivalent tank, or a questing/grinding spec you can contribute dps for those long stretches where you aren't needed. I should also mention at this point, that I don't really like any of the prot spec's on wowwiki right now, but you might. So check the out. Here are some things to bare in mind when determining your spec.
- Your own gear level (Mitigation mainly)
- Your own ability to generate threat (ill cover tips later)
- The situation you plan to use your prot spec

- Questing/Grinding
Make sure to dump points into Cruelty and Armored to the teeth. Everyone likes more crits and attack power for chewing through mobs. I'd also recommend Improved Heroic Strike. That combined with the offensive ability rage reduction talents from prot give you cheap attacks that are fairly powerful. I find that a high damage build like this can still be very viable for tanking, still getting a decent amount of avoidance/mitigation.

- 5-mans/heroics
AOE tanking gets used a lot in these types of instances, so points in improved Thunderclap and Incite are highly recommended. Of course just about any build should have imp Tclap, because otherwise you just take an extra 10% damage when you don't need to be. There are glyphs to reduce rage cost of Tclap and Cleave, plus another one to cause sunder armor (also the one applied by devastate) to hit an additional target. Spamming tclap, cleave and devastate on your main target can easily hold aggro on several mobs, and Shockwave just finishes off your AOE tanking abilities. It should be noted that heroics can often do a lot of damage, so if your gear isnt amazing, you may want to focus more on a damage mitigation build and use some CC, before charging balls first into 10 mobs and hoping your healer doesn't suck.

- Raid Tanking
Warriors specialize at being meele tanks, and most bosses endgame dont have much in the way of spells that can be spell reflected. That in mind, you probably want to go for the most mitigation you possibly can. Test out some stuff and if you are having threat pulled off you, maybe dump some points into things like improved heroic strike, or improved sunder. These can often be skipped though if you like. A nice thing about a build for raid tanking is you can get down to improved demo shout and get Armored to the Teeth and Cruelty along the way, giving you a nice balance of damage/threat output, with the added bonus of imp demo shout. I have not done a lot of endgame WotLK raid tanking so I cant verify specifics of pure mitigation builds, but if you know what you are doing, most of the time you can fudge the figures a little and it will still work fine.

For all specs, remember what it is you plan to do. if you are going to be a meele tank, dont get magic mitigation (unless you have points to dump). If you are having trouble putting out enough threat, get more talents to up your threat output. Honestly, spec is probably the least of your worries about tanking. If you don't know what you are doing, it doesn't matter how finely tuned your build is, you are still going to get people killed. You should bare these tips in mind, but learn the specifics of tanking and then reverse engineer your build based on what you like to do.

Next up... Threat Generation and damage mitigation!