You tank in Defensive Stance with a one-hander and a shield. Every boss swing that reaches you pays Rage by its size. In Forever the shield pays more: Shield Specialization adds 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 1,321.7 TPS, 2nd 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 81.7 % of a three-minute fight.
• Rage from every swing. A landed hit pays Rage by its size, a block pays 5 more, and a dodge or parry pays 5 with Master of Defense.

• Ahead of the Paladin. The Threat build places 2nd of 3 on every fight: behind the Feral bear, ahead of the Protection Paladin.

Weaknesses

• Shield Slam hits one boss. Against three bosses its share of your threat drops, from 16.2 % to 13.3 %, and Fury/Prot draws level with this build on one minute. Cleave reaches two targets and Thunder Clap is the only button that reaches all three.

• Avoidance costs rage. A dodged or parried swing pays no damage Rage, so on one boss defense and dodge weigh below zero for this build: -0.99 Strength a point of defense.

• Shield Block runs out on three bosses. Three swing timers eat its two blocks in about a second: it is up 32.1 % 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. It faces you, so it parries and blocks some of your attacks, and each parry hurries its next swing. 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. Shield Slam uses Season of Discovery's value, twice Classic's, which fits its Forever tooltip's "very high amount of threat" but has no measured number. The other three use Classic's values or a level-20 beta reading. The order of the tanks could change once someone measures them at 60.

On every fight

Threat per second rises by about half on three bosses, because Cleave and Thunder Clap hit more than one, and the build keeps its place behind the bear. Pick a fight in the table to see the guide for it.

Races

For the Horde, Undead leads on a one-minute single-boss fight. Undead win every fight with Touch of the Grave: 5 % of your hits drain 5 % of your maximum health from the boss. Orcs come second on one and three minutes, through Blood Fury and Axe Specialization's 1 % crit on the Flurry Axe they swing. For the Alliance, Night Elf leads. Night Elves take the one-minute fights, where Elune's Light (10 % crit for 15 seconds) covers a quarter of the fight. On the longer fights the Alliance races sit within 1 % of each other, so pick any.

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's armor reduction doesn't stack with a rogue's Expose Armor, which the raid already has, though Forever lets you cast it for its threat.

Changes

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