We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Protection Warrior in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Protection Warrior!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Warrior Tier Set
About the Author
This guide was written by Llarold! I’ve been tanking since Vanilla. During Mists of Pandaria, I saw an opportunity to begin writing guides, and I took it with the hopes of making myself a better tank and making the community into better tanks with me. I hope it’s working!
I am active in all of the tank class Discords but primarily contribute to theorycrafting discussions in Peak of Serenity and Skyhold (Monk and Warrior). I’m active on Twitter, where I mostly talk WoW (and basketball), and I’m half of the team responsible for the YouTube channel WoW at Night, which focuses primarily on tank guides and previews.
Why You Should Play Protection Warrior in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Protection Warriors were the most dominant tank in the game at the start of Dragonflight. They were the undeniable tankiest tanks in the game (Paladins and Monks have become more competitive recently). They don’t have many weaknesses. They are easy to play well, but don’t sacrifice strength to gain that simplicity.
Vault of the Incarnates had numerous boss encounters (Dathea, Broodkeeper Diurna, and Raszageth) that were perfectly suited for Protection Warriors’ toolkits. The ability of Charge and Heroic Leap to cancel many of the otherwise-dangerous knockback effects throughout the raid was a huge advantage for Warriors. This, along with their excellent damage mitigation and good defensive cooldown toolkits made them top-tier tanks in raid early, when it matters most.
In Mythic+, the mobility toolkit isn’t as useful, but it can still be convenient. Instead, Spell Reflection rockets up in value, allowing Warriors to consistently convert incoming spell damage into damage dealt. That’s powerful, and it has allowed Warriors to remove several extremely dangerous mechanics from Mythic+ bosses and trash pulls throughout Season 1 of Dragonflight. Beyond Spell Reflection, Protection Warriors are just very strong tanks in Mythic+. They have good, consistently high AoE damage, which makes holding threat easy, they have lots of crowd control, they have good group utility, and they’re exceedingly tanky.
Protection Warrior is a top-tier tank in all facets of the game.
In Aberrus and Mythic+ Season 2 of Dragonflight, Protection Warriors should perform just as well as they have in Vault of the Incarnates and Season 1. The fights and dungeons will be different, but Protection Warrior is still the same. It still excels in all the same situations. It largely plays the same. It’s very strong, but also very simple. That’s good!
Here is a table summarizing why you should (and shouldn’t) play Protection Warrior in Dragonflight:
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Protection Warrior in Dragonflight Season 2
Protection Warrior Utility for Dragonflight
Let’s start with group utility.
Protection Warrior Group Utility
Battle Shout is a fantastic group buff that’s useful for all attack power-based classes. It offers a 5% boost to classes like Rogues, Windwalker Monks, Hunters, Death Knights, etc., regardless of whether their damage is primarily physical, magic, or an even mix of both. This makes it, on average, a slightly more powerful group buff than the debuffs provided by Monks and Demon Hunters.
Rallying Cry is an excellent group defensive cooldown. One of the best, especially when combined with Inspiring Presence.
Protection Warriors have tons of CC tools. Intimidating Shout, Storm Bolt, and Shockwave are all very helpful in Mythic+ groups, and can be helpful on some add fights in raids, as well.
Protection Warriors Are Legitimately Good at Everything
Here’s an alphabetized list of things that are good about Protection Warrior:
Spell Reflection is still insanely powerful!
Spell Reflection is a uniquely useful defensive cooldown that can deal tons of damage and remove entire debuffs from encounters. At its worst, it’s a modest defensive cooldown that’s available often, and is still pretty good. At its best, it can radically reduce the difficulty of challenging fights. It can be a genuinely game-changing skill against many caster enemies. It’s insane that Blizzard has let it remain this powerful for this long, but they are, and it is.
Damage Output
Protection Warrior deals good damage in all situations. It has good AoE and single-target damage tools, its offensive cooldowns are simple and synergize nicely, and it all flows very easily. It’s a great class.
Cooldowns
Protection Warrior has a simple, but powerful collection of defensive cooldowns. Their offensive cooldown toolkit is actually fairly long, but again, it’s strong. Most of your defensive cooldowns are available very often on a Protection Warrior, which makes dealing with boss mechanics in both raids and Mythic+ dungeons much easier than on other tanks with significantly longer-cooldown defensive skills.
Shield Block = Tankiness
Maintaining 100% uptime on Shield Block is apparently the intended design for Protection Warriors throughout Dragonflight. It seems overpowered, and maybe it is, but this is a good design choice on Blizzard’s part. Warrior feels incredibly stable because of their Shield Block uptime, and that makes Warrior a competitive defensive choice in literally all tanking situations.
The days when Warrior could not maintain 100% Shield Block uptime are just an awful memory.
The 10.1 Tier Set is Good Now
When they were first unveiled, the 2-piece and 4-piece bonuses for Protection Warrior’s Patch 10.1 Tier Set bonuses were deeply disappointing. The design was fine, but the tuning was bad.
Blizzard doubled the numbers, which helped, but the set still wasn’t very good.
Blizzard has recently doubled the numbers a second time. It’s good now.
Behold, the tier set:
The 2-piece adds a good single-target damage increase, and cuts the cooldown of Last Stand by about 40% on average (from 2 minutes to ~70 seconds if using Bolster, from 3 minutes to ~100 seconds if not). This is a good bonus. It makes Bolster a significantly more powerful talent, and makes using Into the Fray over Heavy Repercussions worth doing in the vast majority of situations, which is a direct power increase.
The 4-piece synergizes with the 2-piece and the talents it already favors by adding even more value onto each Last Stand cast. It adds a lot of AoE damage value (the damage was tripled with the most recent change!), and a small, but consistent source of extra damage reduction. 5% is the lowest noticeable damage reduction bonus you can give to players, and that number does seem like it should be a little higher, but even so, the damage is good, the 20-second duration is good. You can have around 25-30% uptime on this bonus. That is really good.
The tier set is good now. Blizzard had to buff it by 400%, but that did the trick.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Protection Warrior in Dragonflight Season 2
This is a hard section to write, because Protection Warrior is extremely strong. It’s a great tank. It has useful group utility, it’s tanky in virtually all situations, and it’s good at pretty much everything. It has no substantial weaknesses.
So why wouldn’t you play one?
Here are some reasons:
Protection Paladin is Overpowered
Anything you can do, they can do better. They can do anything better than you.
This isn’t quite true, Pally doesn’t have Spell Reflection, Charge, or Heroic Leap, but otherwise, they can do almost everything a Protection Warrior does, just a little better.
Warrior has amazing offensive and defensive cooldowns with tons of cooldown reduction. So does Paladin. Warrior has Spell Reflection and Spell Block as major defensive cooldowns, and Battle Shout and Rallying Cry as group utility. Paladin has Divine Shield, Lay on Hands, spot healing with Word of Glory, as well as Blessings of Spellwarding, Protection, and Sacrifice as defensive cooldowns and group utility.
Protection Warrior has good crowd control for Mythic+ groups in the form of multiple stuns and an AoE fear.
Protection Paladin can single-handedly carry interrupts thanks to Avenger’s Shield and Divine Toll, to the point that you can assemble virtually any group composition around them.
Does Paladin compensate for all their amazing utility by being less tanky? It used to! Not anymore! Warrior may block more damage than Paladin, but Paladin is every bit as good as Warrior at mitigating damage when it matters, and it has a very comparable (i.e., slightly stronger) defensive cooldown toolkit. And just to add insult to injury: Protection Warrior’s greatest defensive weakness: damage over time, is one of Paladin’s greatest defensive strengths thanks to Mastery: Divine Bulwark.
Simplicity
Protection Warrior is simple. This is an advantage it holds over Paladin, Monk, and Death Knight. Getting good at Warrior is easier than most other tanks.
It’s not the simplest tank (Druid), and it’s definitely not a training-wheel class that you learn to play with a plan of switching to something stronger (Druid again). It’s legit, but it is simple. There’s just not as much to manage compared to other tanks. That makes it easier to learn, but potentially less engaging in the long-term.
Fatigue
Protection Warrior was extremely popular during the start of Dragonflight. Of course it was – it was the best tank in the game! It received a couple of small nerfs, but remained extremely popular. Rightly so, it was still the best tank in the game, even after the nerfs – plus all the players who mained it from the start of the expansion had already invested time and effort into gearing their Warriors, so of course they’re going to keep playing them.
The start of a new raid tier and Mythic+ season represents a chance to reset, and while Warrior is still very competitive, sometimes you don’t want to keep playing the same thing you’ve played for the last 6 months.
Sometimes you want to change things up a bit. Sustained excellence can get boring after a while.
Is getting bored a good reason to play something else? Sure!
Windfury Totem Drama
Protection Warrior is one of the five best specs in the game to give Windfury Totem, just in terms of damage output alone. Only Frost DK, Assassination and Subtlety Rogue, and Arms Warrior are ahead of Protection Warrior in terms of how much damage they gain from Windfury Totem. Protection Warrior also gets defensive value through Shield Slam resets interacting with their Tier Set bonuses, so there is really no excuse to not give Protection Warrior Windfury Totem at all times in raids, and any time there is an Enhancement Shaman in your Mythic+ groups. It feels great. We love Enhancement Shaman, they are our friends.
This can cause arguments. It shouldn’t. The people arguing against putting Protection Warrior in the Windfury Totem group in raids, and the Enhancement Shaman in Mythic+ groups who aren’t adjusting their talents to provide it are wrong. They’re fools, but they exist, and fighting with fools can be frustrating.
Other tanks don’t have to worry about this. It’s good for the steadily-shrinking group of players still playing Bear Druids at a high level, but for the other 4 tank classes, it’s just not a big deal either way.
For more information on playing Protection Warrior, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Protection Warrior Guide
