After having been required to tank for my guild this week, suffice to say I'm a bit sad to see everyone else shield charging without me. However, Prot Tanking itself has been a blast and not all is grim. I know I'm always 1 GCD away from Gladstance. Today's topic will be some advice on what talents/configurations are working best for Gladiators in Highmaul Heroic. This will be a series and as of next week I'll start digging into Mythic kills instead :). What I've done is review the top parsers on Warcraftlogs to look for any tricks/common themes.
Remember that your raid leaders strategy may not allow for these recommendations.
Kargath Bladefist
Reviewing the top Gladiator's on Kargath shows that there are two route to go here. You can either focus Kargath the entire time, or help with adds. We've got Bladestorm and Dragon Roar which is decent, but in this instance I think it's our best bet to forgo the adds for some pretty amazing single target damage. If you wanted to focus adds for your raid, I would recommend you go Arms!
In the top 10 Gladiator parses we're seeing between 23 and 25k DPS. The top parse is also the top damage done to Kargath himself by Intrepid ( Armory ). Dropping a staggering 8.6M Damage on Kargath in a 22man raid.
Unyielding StrikesIf you take a look at the above picture, you can see a great uptime on Unyielding Strikes. 91.36% is a great uptime. Just having US up is half the game though, you need to make sure you don't let it drop early, and take advantage of it at top stacks. Below you can see that Intrepid only ONCE let US drop at 5 stacks. And It looks like he decided to start executing sub 20% and stopped keeping US going. This was actually a DPS Loss, as you can see that he dropped to 23k DPS from a Solid 25k before that.
Lining up CD's.
One of the most important factors is to look at how he lined up use of his Scabbard ( Sword Technique ) with his other Trinket ( Strength of Steel ), Potion and Bloodbath proc's.
This really shows the power of a right click trinket being used effectively!
Tracking these sorts of Proc's is a UI Issue, and while I plan to do a comprehensive post for gladiator UI soon, I think what you will want to do is either have an addon that automatically shows you when proc's like "Strength of Steel" are active, and even the internal cooldown of that trinket to know when to save a right click trinket like the scabbard. With the RPPM trinkets, is very important to know when the trinket CAN'T proc. Look at the mountains of DPS when all of that lined up.
- Cyc
