Protection Warrior Midnight Playstyle and Rotation Guide

General Rotation

Mountain Thane and Colossus have slightly different general rotations, where Colossus only presses Thunderclap to refresh Rend or as a filler, and otherwise prioritizes Revenge.

Outside of cooldowns, your general rotation is something like this:

1. Shield Block if it’s not up or you are about to cap charges
2. Ignore Pain if you have more than 75 rage and are about to cap on rage
3. Demoralizing Shout
4. Cast Demolish (if playing Colossus)
5. Shield Charge
6. Shield Slam
7. Revenge above 50 rage (if playing Colossus)
8. Thunder Clap (Thunder Blast if playing Mountain Thane)
9. Execute if 3 targets or less (2 as Colossus)

Openers

Your opener for Single and Multi-targets as protection is the same, with a small deviation depending on Hero Talents.

Single Target:

1. Charge + Avatar + Shield Block
2. Demoralizing Shout
3. Demolish (if Colossus)
4. Shield Charge
5. Proceed to general rotation

General Playstyle

A few rules need to be adhered to when playing Protection to maximize your damage and survivability. First, use Shield Slam. The second it comes off cooldown, either naturally or via a reset from Devastator. The extra rage generated from Shield Slam with a Violent Outburst proc allows you to super feed into Anger Management.

Shield Block is also an offensive buff; it increases Shield Slam damage by 30%. That means it’s beneficial to keep it up even when not actively tanking, just for the damage boost to Shield Slam.

Surviving as a Protection Warrior

Surviving as a Protection Warrior is actually fairly straightforward. You just need to do a couple of things, and you’ll be golden.

Keep Shield Block up while you are actively tanking - Between Shield Block, blocking all melees, and Ignore Pain, providing passive damage reduction, you won’t be taking a lot of passive white damage. This will negate the largest amount of damage you take as a tank, especially in keys.

Don’t starve yourself of rage - Starving yourself of rage is one of the easiest ways to get yourself killed as a Protection Warrior. If you have no rage, you can’t Shield Block or Ignore Pain. Likewise, your cooldown reduction of Avatar and Shield Wall gets reduced, which means less rage, damage, and damage reduction overall as well.

Use your cooldowns and use them often - Because Protection has so much upfront damage reduction, one of the biggest mistakes people make when playing it is not using their big damage reduction cooldowns.

Shield Wall has a 90ish second cooldown between Anger Management and Impenetrable Wall. Having a 40% damage reduction on that short of a cooldown is incredibly strong. Use it often. The same goes for Spell Reflection and Spell Block. Use them often, but not together.

Cooldowns

A general rule of thumb that’s easy to follow for Protection Warrior offensive cooldowns is to simply use everything on cooldown. You have so much cooldown reduction that it’s not often you’ll ever hold a cooldown and should just use it immediately when it comes up for the most value.

Avatar - 1.5 minute Cooldown that causes you to deal 20% increased damage for 20 seconds, and removes all roots and snares when activated. This is your big button as a Protection Warrior. Your rage also reduces the cooldown of Avatar significantly through Anger Management, meaning you have it up quite often even after the nerf. A side note for this too - As Mountain Thane, when you Avatar, the cooldown of your Thunderclap is immediately reset and Thunderclap is empowered to Thunderblast, meaning you can clap into clap for big AoE damage.

Shield Charge - A simple short range charge with a stun component and multi-target damage on a 45 second cooldown. If you talent Champion's Bulwark, it deals 20% increased damage, makes your next revenge free, provides shield block, and additional rage. Press this on cooldown, preferably inside Demo shout or Avatar windows.

Defensives

Impending Victory - One of our only self heals. It’s only 20% of our max health, but don’t be afraid to use it, as it resets when we get the killing blow on enemies.

Spell Reflection - Honestly, this is used more for offensive purposes than defenses but, I’m putting it here anyway, as regardless of the reflect effect, it still reduces magic damage taken by 20% for 5 seconds. Once you learn how to utilize this ability effectively, it’ll almost never be used solely to mitigate damage taken.

Demoralizing Shout - A 20% damage reduction for 8 seconds that generates rage, and when you talent Booming Voice, it makes you deal 20% additional damage to enemies affected, as well as generating more rage. As previously mentioned, if you have Thunderlord talent, it drastically lowers the cooldown of this ability, making it fairly safe to use it on cooldown in most scenarios. There are times when you’ll want to hold this ability for a tank buster, but I wouldn’t wait too long.

Shield Wall - Our biggest all around defensive. A flat 40% damage reduction for 8 seconds on a 3.5 minute cooldown. You can reduce this cooldown through talents such as Honed Reflexes (5%), Anger Management (1s per 10 rage you spend), or there is a choice node giving you the option between a flat 60s cooldown off the top, and an additional charge, or additional rage generation and cooldown reduction with Shield Slam. Don’t be afraid to use this, and if you’re less comfortable on the spec I’d recommend talenting the double Shield Wall (Defender's Aegis).