Protection Warrior Gearing Guide

Tier Sets

The Protection Warrior tier set for Season 4 remains the same as Season 3! It’s still very strong, so happy days for us Warrior players. The tier set does interrupt the flow of your rotation through Thunder Clap resets, but it’s ultimately positive as it provides a large amount of single target damage, on top of a very high uptime 10-15% damage reduction buff. It’s a very fun tier set to play with and to top it off, it also provides cooldown reduction to one of our major offensive cooldowns, Thunderous Roar!

• The 2-set bonus gives your Rage Spending abilities a chance to cause your next Shield Slam to consume your bleeds on a target, instantly dealing the remaining damage of your bleeds, and reducing your damage taken by 10% for 5 seconds.
• The 4-set provides us an additional 2% damage reduction for each bleed effect consumed, and when your Shield Slam consumes a bleed, the cooldown of Thunderclap is reset and the cooldown of Thunderous Roar gets reduced by 3 seconds.

One thing to note, is that for some reason Ignore pain’s average chance to proc the tier set is higher than our other Rage Spenders. This highly incentivizes you to use ignore pain as much as possible since it has a high chance to give you a large damage boost.

Antique Bullions

These are the items I recommend you buy with your Bullions in Season 4. With how many important items there are that we have access to now, with limited opportunities to get them, it can feel a little overwhelming deciding what to go for. Choosing between dps oriented items or tank specific trinkets, or Raiding vs Mythic plus, below you’ll see options for both and I’ll help guide you in the right direction.

1. Gholak, the Final Conflagration
2. Seal of Diurna’s Chosen
3. Manic Grieftorch
4. Fyrakk’s Tainted Rageheart
5. Cataclysmic Signet Brand
6. Elementium Pocket Anvil
7. Seal of Filial Duty
8. Whispering Incarnate Icon
9. Voice of the Silent Star

Protection Warrior Best in Slot Gear

The tables below aim to give you a general list of gear that is good for Protection Warrior, these lists are not a perfect replacement for simming your character.

Protection Warrior Combined Best in Slot

The gear listed below is a mixture of Raid and Mythic+ gear from Dragonflight Season 4.

Protection Warrior Best Gear from Mythic+

The gear listed below are the best options exclusively from Mythic+ for Protection Warriors in Season 4.

Protection Warrior Best Gear from Amirdrassil (Raiding)

The gear listed below are the best options you can acquire exclusively from Season 4 Awakened Raids for Protection Warriors.

Trinkets

Cataclysmic Signet Brand - S TIER

This trinket is your BIS. It builds in strength the longer you keep yourself in combat, stacking up to a total of 15 stacks, it applies a damage over time burn that scales exceptionally well. In Mythic plus you’ll need to formulate different ways to maintain this buff and keep yourself in combat as much as possible to fully optimize this trinket, whereas in raid it’s a no-brainer that takes roughly 2-3 minutes to reach full stacks.

Manic Grieftorch - S TIER

This is a very strong, pure damage trinket. It shines on single target or priority target damage which makes it a must have! However, be careful when using it as you can’t block, dodge or parry during it’s channel.

Elementium Pocket Anvil - S TIER

This trinket ramps in it’s damage, getting better the longer you manage to remain in combat and maintain the stacking buff after each use. The trinket stacks to 5 and once you leave combat begins a 15 second drop-off.

All-Totem of the Master - A TIER

This trinket is exceptional, with four different effects that can trigger. It gets better the more you parry, meaning it scales with target count, making it very good in Mythic Plus or encounters with a lot of targets hitting you.

Treemouth’s Festering Splinter - S TIER

For Protection Warrior this is definitely the best defensive trinket on the market. You get a HUGE absorb shield for 50% of your damage taken while active, which allows room for continued Ignore Pain value as that’ll be preventing an additional 25% of the damage taken. If you had to choose between this and the Fyrakk tank trinket, for defensive purposes this wins for me.

Fyrakk's Tainted Rageheart - S TIER

This trinket is both good defensively and offensively. You get a large absorb shield on as 1:30 cooldown, alongside a sizable damage proc every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. It’ll be more valuable in Mythic+ but the damage it provides on damage amplification bosses such as Gnarlroot and Smolderon isn’t something to be overlooked, as well as the safety net of the absorb it’s definitely notable.

Augury of the Primal Flame - A TIER

As the trinket comes with critical strikes as opposed to main stat, it creates a small feedback loop within itself since its proc is heavily weighted around your own crit. The trinket proc itself does a large amount of damage and is worth using in every situation, both single target and cleave, albeit not as strong as Signet Brand.

Prophetic Stonescales - A TIER

A cheat death trinket that restores a large portion of your health as well as providing a huge haste buff and 20% damage reduction. The effect can only occur once every 8 minutes. This trinket is a must have for progression raiding or high mythic+!

Beacon to the Beyond - A TIER

This trinket is from Aberrus the Shadowed Crucible. It does a large amount of damage after a short channel, split between all nearby enemies, increased for each enemy struck (up to 5). It provides mastery as a base stat, which is decent for Warrior defensively.

Storm-Eater’s Boon - A TIER

This is a purely damage trinket, that roots you during its use but provides a sizable amount of damage, particularly on multi-target scenarios. You can negate the downside of this trinket through clever timing or final stand.

Branch of the Tormented Ancient - B TIER

A drop from the first boss of the raid: Gnarlroot. This trinket deals a large amount of burst damage on a 2:30 cooldown. It debuffs you with a minor slow while you attempt to proc its effect, but it’s not bad. It’s definitely worth having if you can get your hands on it and with it’s damage increasing up to 5 targets, it’s even good in Mythic+ as well as single target.

Whispering Incarnate Icon - B TIER

A pure stat trinket where most of the benefit is provided in a group setting where there are other wielders of this trinket. For tanks, you are provided with and provide Versatility, which isn’t particularly notable on its own. For the general playerbase this trinket won’t be worth it over other options, however, in a more organized setting, this trinket will shine very bright.

Pip’s Emerald Friendship Badge - B TIER

A big stat stick. Doesn’t synergise particularly well with Protection Paladin but if you manage to get it to trigger during wings you’ll output a large amount of solid damage. Every 12 seconds you have a chance to trigger the trinket, providing a massive amount of secondary stats before diminishing over 12 seconds, giving you a chance to proc it again. It’s proc chance isn’t great, but it’s not an awful option.

Dragon Games Equipment - B TIER

The damage output of this trinket is actually pretty good, although to proc it you have to run into orbs that can be both hard to see, and require you to adjust your positioning to min/max it. It’s likely using this is going to be more of a headache than just picking another option, but it’s definitely not awful.

Decoration of Flame - B TIER

This trinket has always been an odd one. The absorb shield doesn’t work particularly great, with it just refreshing the value instead of adding to it upon its second part. The damage can be decent but there are much better options.

Irideus Fragment - C TIER

This trinket is mediocre for Protection Warrior. It’s a 3 minute cooldown so it’s unlikely it’ll line up with Avatar the majority of the time and the strength will decay very quickly. A nice part about the trinket is that it’s passive Mastery, which gives us a decent defensive boost.

Algeth’ar Puzzle Box - C TIER

Similarly to Irdeus Fragment, it’s a 3 minute cooldown so it won’t line up with cooldowns the majority of the time, losing value of it’s on-use.

Idol of Trampling Hooves - C TIER

It’s a random proc trinket that provides speed and damage. It adds no defensive value and the damage effect is quite low.

Mutated Magmammoth Scale - C TIER

As a pure damage trinket, it’s not great. It’s a random proc chance to do fairly low AoE damage.

Blazebinder’s Hoof - C TIER

This trinket is likely the best of the C tier options. The passive haste is very nice but the strength proc rate is too low as of current tuning so you don’t ever really achieve max stacks.

Granyth’s Enduring Scale - C TIER

After its rework, it’s a much better tank trinket than its former self. However, as it’s a purely defensive option, and much weaker than its other counterparts, it’s not something I’d recommend.

Gift of Ursine Vengeance - C TIER

This trinket isn’t great. It was a powerhouse of an option before the most recent round of nerfs, seeing its potential drop massively. It’s still an okay option if you have nothing else. It’s a stat stick that procs from any damage event every 3 seconds.

Best Embellishments for Protection Warrior

• Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch (2x is BiS)
• Unstable Frostfire Belt (if you still have access to Eranog ring)
• Elemental Lariat (If you have 5+ sockets on your gear)

Notable Items

Gholak, the Final Conflagration: A drop from Fyrakk, this weapon has massive value, providing a large damage proc. There is the downside of it dealing damage back to you, but the amount is negligible.