5x Prot Warriors PVE

Since WotLK my solo main for raiding has been a prot warrior. Recently I started thinking about the viability of non standard group compositions, 1 tank + 4 healers, 3 dps + 2 healers, and now 5 tanks. I've done the 5x shamans and am currently working on a 5 different class mixed group. But I'd like to hear thoughts on 5x prot warriors before I put alot of time into leveling them.

Imagine this for instance trash: Set a target for each of the warriors and charge in and solo an elite each. Thunderclaps and cleaves can be used for a slight aoe dps increase without pulling mobs off their designated tanks. This should work for most groups as I can easily solo a single elite on my warrior. Some groups may need a little more strategy if a specific mob has a cc. It could be targeted by the 'main' and kept locked down.

Problem: What do you do when one of the mobs goes down? Most likely the toon who killed it will be too close to charge a mob still alive and maybe even facing the wrong way. After a charge you can have all toons refollow and down 1 mob at a time but then they will most likely be facing away from their trash and lose all their defense and tanking abilities. I can't figure this part out other than letting the tanks each down their mob even if the others are just standing around a bit waiting. Maybe it wont be much of a difference from the first mob dying til the last and this wont be much of a problem.

Bosses: Everyone charges in and 'main' takes aggro. Immediatly shield wall(-60% damage), shield block(100% block + double block amount), and enraged rengeneration(30% hp regened). After 15 seconds these will be dropped and tank should be near full life still. Now toon2 taunts and repeats. 75 seconds in toon1 will have to taunt and take aggro without shield wall. When he drops below half health toon2 will take aggro and repeat. With good timing most bosses should be down before a toon dies.

Problems: Bosses that have melee ranged AOE may be a problem. Bosses that are immune to taunt WILL be a problem.

Blue geared prot warriors do about 1000 dps when they don't have aggro and a little more when they do. So I estimate 5000 dps to bosses which is just slightly under what a 1 tank + 3 dps group does ungeared.
Alternate group setup: 4x prot warriors + resto druid(good rolling HoTs + AoE heals)

So what do you all think? Any problems I haven't thought of and any solutions to the ones I have thought of? Do you think 5x warriors would be able to survive or would the sub of a resto druid be worthwhile?

To solve the problem you mentioned about what to do once the warr has killed his mob, you could have a different follow key bound to each warr so when he has dinished his mob he can /follow and /assist another warrior. I do think that a resto druid would bring a lot to this composition but it would completely change the feel of the group as you really wouldnt actually need 4 prots anymore, could have 1 prot and 3 fury.

There are some heroic fights that require a lot of dps. The timed spawn portals in violet hold and the first boss in Azjol Nerub come to mind. I doubt that 4 protection warriors can provide the dps to clear the waves of these timed encounters quickly enough. However, when 3.1 and dual speccing go live it should be possible to make one char a scribe and respecc where needed.

Sounds like you have far more experience with warrior than I have (nothing post level 25).
It might be worth having a healer handy at some point, but I love the idea of non conformist groups. You could always add a healer later.

One thought that occurred to me - I dont know if you are a die hard horde or alliance, but you could make use of the night elfs shadowmeld ability to drop aggro on your tank if the boss is taunt immune, normally you wouldn't want to do this but this seems like it could be made for your setup (I think night elfs can be warriors).

Picking up the warriors that have finished their mob early sounds quite tricky, and I dont know enought about intervenes etc to give any advice.
If your main is fighting perhaps he could drag the mob over to one of the ones who have finished and have them assist him - but that would require separate macros on each warrior to do that.

Other problems might be slight movements on the Alts target requiring individual repositioning.

prot warriors don't have very high DPS so this isn't that great an idea. Sure, you may take forever to die, but if you can't kill the boss, whats the point? When you aren't tanking you aren't taking direct physical melee damage so all the avoidance & mitigation doesn't do much. You will also have rage issues on bosses who don't AOE much.

Most heroic end bosses have gimmicks like dropping aggro, healing themselves, massive AoE magic damage, casting diseases/curses/poisons, etc that make me think a team that has no "heal someone else" ability will have a crazy hard time. In heroic mode, frenzied regeneration just isn't enough to keep tanks up from boss hits -- for example Trollgore hits 5/5 T7.5 geared prot tanks for 10k a swing, every few seconds. You'll survive maybe 20 seconds w/ shield wall etc before you die. Remember as well shield wall getting nerfed in 3.1.

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Originally Posted by 'puppychow',index.php?page=Thread&postID=184775#po st184775

prot warriors don't have very high DPS so this isn't that great an idea. Sure, you may take forever to die, but if you can't kill the boss, whats the point? When you aren't tanking you aren't taking direct physical melee damage so all the avoidance & mitigation doesn't do much. You will also have rage issues on bosses who don't AOE much.

Most heroic end bosses have gimmicks like dropping aggro, healing themselves, massive AoE magic damage, casting diseases/curses/poisons, etc that make me think a team that has no "heal someone else" ability will have a crazy hard time. In heroic mode, frenzied regeneration just isn't enough to keep tanks up from boss hits -- for example Trollgore hits 5/5 T7.5 geared prot tanks for 10k a swing, every few seconds. You'll survive maybe 20 seconds w/ shield wall etc before you die. Remember as well shield wall getting nerfed in 3.1.

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A geared prot war can do 1200 dps without aggro getting limited rage. Take this times 5 and it is similar to a 3 dps group. Most damage comes from sword and board procs which are zero rage shield slams so rage shouldn't be much of an issue. Debuffs could be an issue but some of those can be taken care with the cheap pots that remove them.

The only shield wall change I've seen is: Glyph of Shield Wall *new* -- Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 2
min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.

My trollgore kills have taken between 50-65 seconds. He could be tanked by 4 warriors with the main killing the adds before they get to him. His hits start out around 4k and after a minute with his stacking buff are closer to 8k. But with shield wall up these are only 1.6k and 3.2k a hit. Add in double shield block amount and enraged regen and the tank will be at near 100% at the end of his 15 sec tanking period. I think he would actually be one of the easier fights.

Taunts are now on some sort of diminishing returns which keeps you from ping ponging them back and forth. I am not sure how strict it is or if it wont be an issue for you but wanted to point it out to you before you invested a lot of time in something that might not work.

"Taunts: All player or pet-generated taunts now have a shared diminish category. "

This works better with DKs. At least they can self and group heal. I would bet this warrior group with a healer might be pretty cool. However, you would want to switch back to the warrior for pvp instead of a healer. I know I hate that everyone goes after my druid on my DK team. He might as well not exist as he only gets 1 or 2 heals off before death.

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Originally Posted by 'Redbeard',index.php?page=Thread&postID=185026#pos t185026

Taunts are now on some sort of diminishing returns which keeps you from ping ponging them back and forth. I am not sure how strict it is or if it wont be an issue for you but wanted to point it out to you before you invested a lot of time in something that might not work.

"Taunts: All player or pet-generated taunts now have a shared diminish category. "

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Wow, thanks for the info. This could completely ruin this idea for me. I found a little more info about it.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...54&pageNo=2#22

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This was an Ulduar issue. Previously, many bosses
were taunt immune and taunt had a short range. With both of those
changes, it was possible to ping pong bosses between multiple tanks in
order to avoid anyone taking much damage. This goes beyond clever use
of an ability by players (and isn't *that* clever since it has been
around forever) and into an exploit that trivializes encounters. With
this change, you should be able to taunt when you need to but not keep
the boss confused and ineffective.



The diminishing returns do not actually work on the current PTR build despite the patch notes, but will be implemented soon.

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I sense more bliz fails with this change. Seems like they havent thought it through very well with things like army of darkness and bosses like four horsemen where you have to taunt over and over. Hope they don't implement it without testing.

Itall of course depends on the timers used for determining the diminishing returns.