Protection Warrior in Wrath - Viable?

[Ken]

Yes they are very viable, infact just as good as a paladin. Especially since 3.0. But why not add a healer to your team as well?

Exactly!

"With 4 mages, there would no healing for the tank.
So I would need to burn things down quick enough before the tank died."
-> That tactic might work sometimes, but not often. Some bosses take quite a bit of time and healing.

[Ahheron]

I run a prot warrior, 2x ele shaman, 1 boomkin and 1 resto shammy team, and I must say that after 3.0 the warrior is a totally different animal. Shockwave, TC and Concussion Blow make AE tanking piece of cake. Ohshit buttons like Last Stand and Shield Wall add a great deal to that. And Improved Revenge (50% chance to stun) is great. Basically (in normal TBC instances) I rarely needed a heal on trash packs and survived extremely well on bosses. Even Heroics were mostly a cake with a Shockwave and CB opener when basically 1 mob died before inital stun wore off.
And of course all the other things other people above me mentioned.
Initially I chose warrior over paladin exactly because it wasn't ezmode and now it's even more fun
I didn't play beta nor have I begun to level in WOTLK (need to level my professions first), but I figure that prot will be as viable as any other tanking class in this expansion.

My 2 cents...

[puppychow]

Pre-WOTLK I had a 70 pally, 70 warr, 4 shamans, and 70 mage. I had to think long and hard on which I was going to level first. I played around with heroics and Karazhan with different team members. All my guys are decently geared; my mage is in some T6, my pally and warr both are in T5/badge, and shamans are in some T4/pvp (they hit 70 about 2 months ago).

I am leveling in WOTLK with prot pally, mage, + 3 shamans -- all level 71 at the moment. I really, really wanted to use my warrior as the tank since he has a ZA bear mount and is just cool looking, but I found I was wiping a lot more in heroics and Kara with him over my pally. Consecrate is just HUGE for multiboxers. Its not a big deal when you solo play, but when multiboxing being able to avengers shield and just spam consecrate makes it really, really easy to hold aggro. Also giving my team kings was very nice. In contrast on my warrior I would find I would easily lose aggro on extra mobs, thunderclap is on a six second cooldown and shockwave is on a 20 second, so you have to micromanage threat a lot more. I took my mage just because I wanted easy food/water and portaling around, plus hes my main.

Also you really want to a healer - a priest with CoH is good and may be as effective as 2-3 shamans. I've been running UT a few times and I don't see how you can do it without a healer. To be honest having 3 chain heals has saved my butt many times, for example the last boss does 3k dmg every 15 seconds to everyone (not avoidable) and you must have your casters stand at least 15 yards away. A shaman chain healing group and healing tank (sep buttons) or a priest CoH'ing group and healing tank is fine. A pally healer or even a druid healer imo would have a much, much harder time - wild growth is a HoT, you really want those fast heal-me-nows.

If you don't want to run any instances however no big deal, questing can be done with any 5. But if you want to run instances while leveling or at 80 you will want a healer, and imo its a lot easier with a pally tank than prot warrior. Which sucks, cuz imo prot warriors are slightly better tanks than pally tanks now, when you solo them -- more defensive abilities and funner to play -- but for multiboxing, my experience has been pally tanks are significantly better still.

[Bena]

Another vote for shockwave here.. I've been running with the usual pally/shammies setup but decided to finish leveling my war. My starting sequence when pulling is... TC (war), CL (shamies), SV (war), LB (shammies). It works great; the instant thunderclap grabs all the mobs while shammies are casting CL; as soon as CL hits the mobs, war casts SV to stun them. I can usually cast another TC to build more threat. So far never had problems with mobs going after the shammies.

For now I'm going to keep using the war with at least one of my groups. Pallies have great synergy with shammies with mana buffs, but the war has a lot of nice tools for tanking.

[Sembiance]

Pre-WOTLK I had a 70 pally, 70 warr, 4 shamans, and 70 mage. I had to think long and hard on which I was going to level first. I played around with heroics and Karazhan with different team members. All my guys are decently geared; my mage is in some T6, my pally and warr both are in T5/badge, and shamans are in some T4/pvp (they hit 70 about 2 months ago).

I am leveling in WOTLK with prot pally, mage, + 3 shamans -- all level 71 at the moment. I really, really wanted to use my warrior as the tank since he has a ZA bear mount and is just cool looking, but I found I was wiping a lot more in heroics and Kara with him over my pally. Consecrate is just HUGE for multiboxers. Its not a big deal when you solo play, but when multiboxing being able to avengers shield and just spam consecrate makes it really, really easy to hold aggro. Also giving my team kings was very nice. In contrast on my warrior I would find I would easily lose aggro on extra mobs, thunderclap is on a six second cooldown and shockwave is on a 20 second, so you have to micromanage threat a lot more. I took my mage just because I wanted easy food/water and portaling around, plus hes my main.

Also you really want to a healer - a priest with CoH is good and may be as effective as 2-3 shamans. I've been running UT a few times and I don't see how you can do it without a healer. To be honest having 3 chain heals has saved my butt many times, for example the last boss does 3k dmg every 15 seconds to everyone (not avoidable) and you must have your casters stand at least 15 yards away. A shaman chain healing group and healing tank (sep buttons) or a priest CoH'ing group and healing tank is fine. A pally healer or even a druid healer imo would have a much, much harder time - wild growth is a HoT, you really want those fast heal-me-nows.

If you don't want to run any instances however no big deal, questing can be done with any 5. But if you want to run instances while leveling or at 80 you will want a healer, and imo its a lot easier with a pally tank than prot warrior. Which sucks, cuz imo prot warriors are slightly better tanks than pally tanks now, when you solo them -- more defensive abilities and funner to play -- but for multiboxing, my experience has been pally tanks are significantly better still.

Ok, everyone, you have all convinced me that a healer is important. So I will certainly be having 1x Priest, 3x Mage.

As far as tanking, that will be my 'main' in terms of who I'll be controlling with my mouse/keyboard on my main screen.
So I think maybe I'll try out both, just like you did. Since I'm raising both a pally and a warrior, I'll try them out to see which I like better.

The pally buffs would be nice, and you make it sounds like Pally is clearly the better choice.
But somehow I feel like I should run with the Prot Warrior, I dunno, just to be different

[Bigfish]

The reasons everyone was so gung ho for Warrior tanks was because they couldn't effectively AoE tank. With the changes to thunderclap scaling with AP, and being able to hit unlimited targets Warriors are now viable AoE tanks. It is really going to come down to your personal preference IMO. Buff wise, warriors don't bring much to the group. Pallies have blessings and Druids have Gift of the Wild / Thorns.

They finally fixed that? I said they needed to do that 2 years ago. Not that I particalarly cared at the time as I didn't have a warrior then, but damn.

[Bigfish]

Ok, everyone, you have all convinced me that a healer is important. So I will certainly be having 1x Priest, 3x Mage.

As far as tanking, that will be my 'main' in terms of who I'll be controlling with my mouse/keyboard on my main screen.
So I think maybe I'll try out both, just like you did. Since I'm raising both a pally and a warrior, I'll try them out to see which I like better.

The pally buffs would be nice, and you make it sounds like Pally is clearly the better choice.
But somehow I feel like I should run with the Prot Warrior, I dunno, just to be different

A healer is defenitely important, and they can still put out acceptable dps when needed. As for the warrior thing, I'd say go with that. At this point, they are going to be easier to gear end game and will get more from their equipment than a pally tank, since the whole Plate armor ideal has switched to Strength/Stamina/avoidance for pally and warrior tanks alike.

Personally, I'm interested in how well they can function as a multibox tank, and I haven't seen many write-ups on how they perform.

Just my 2c though.