You tank in Defensive Stance with a one-hander and a shield, and in Forever the shield is also your rage bar. Shield Specialization pays 5 Rage for every blocked swing, and Shield Block now holds two blocks over 7 seconds.

Keep Shield Block up and the blocks pay for the rest: Revenge, which every block also unlocks, Shield Slam and Heroic Strike.

The Threat build is this guide's default. On a one-minute single-boss fight it makes 1,261.3 TPS, 1st of 3 threat tanks. The switch at the top of the page gives the other three builds.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• Crushing blows mostly vanish. A level-63 boss crushes on 15 % of its single roll, for 150 % damage. With Shield Block's 75 % added to your block, dodge and parry, the roll runs out before it reaches crushes, and Shield Block is up 88.2 % of a three-minute fight.
• Rage from avoidance. Blocks pay 5 Rage, and dodges and parries 5 more with Master of Defense.

• One boss. The Threat build out-threatens the Protection Paladin and the Feral bear on all three single-boss fights.

Weaknesses

• Three bosses. The Threat build falls to 3rd of 3 there. Cleave reaches two targets and Thunder Clap is the only button that reaches all three.

• More health, less rage. Our engine divides the rage from each hit you take by your maximum health, so Stamina has a negative weight here (-0.10 Strength a point) and Flask of the Titans costs threat. Blizzard removed that divisor on 8 October, so in game you will get more rage from hits than these numbers assume.

• Shield Block runs out on three bosses. Three swing timers eat its two blocks in about a second: it is up 35.9 % there.

How tanks are measured

The boss swings every 2 seconds for 3,000 base damage plus a share of its attack power, with crushing blows, and a healing model heals you 2,000 a second on one boss. Each build has its own score:

• Threat and Fury/Prot: threat per second.
• Mitigation: Survival, the boss's normal hits you take from full health, adjusted for how hard its average swing lands. Health and armor count in full, avoidance and blocks at half.
• Balanced: threat per health bar, the threat you make while the boss works through your Survival.

Every build must survive at least 4 normal hits from full, so no search can strip a tank to damage gear. On one boss your chance of death is 0.0 %. On three bosses the model keeps you topped up, so holding three bosses is the test.

The sim has no other tanks or taunts, so threat per second is your own threat, not proof that you hold the boss. The flat threat on Shield Slam, Revenge, Heroic Strike and Cleave isn't in Forever's game data: our engine uses Classic's values or a level-20 beta reading, so the order of the tanks could change once someone measures them at 60.

On every fight

Threat per second rises on three bosses, because Cleave and Thunder Clap hit more than one, but the other tanks gain more. Pick a fight in the table to see the guide for it.

Races

For the Horde, Orc leads on a one-minute single-boss fight. Undead win most fights with Touch of the Grave: 5 % of your hits drain 5 % of your maximum health from the boss. Orcs win the one-minute boss through Blood Fury and Axe Specialization's 1 % crit on Annihilator. For the Alliance, Night Elf leads: Humans on the longer single-boss fights, for Sword Specialization's 2 % crit on Ironwood Blade, and Night Elves on one minute, where Elune's Light (10 % crit for 15 seconds) covers a quarter of the fight.

What a Warrior brings to the raid

Battle Shout is the buff the table can price. Thunder Clap and Demoralizing Shout weaken the boss instead, which no damage number shows, and the benchmark raid has both up from the pull. Sunder Armor doesn't stack with a rogue's Expose Armor, which the raid already has.

Changes

Here is how the build has scored on this fight through each simulator or game-data update; the Updates page lists what changed.