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Skill Mastery: Shield Barrier takes the beating for you
Shield Barrier is one of my favorite new abilities. One of the reasons I love it is that it scales both with the amount of rage you have when you use it and with your attack power, meaning that it will continuously get better as you level and gear up. Shield Barrier provides you with a damage absorption shield that, when used with the minimum amount of rage (20 rage), puts up a respectable amount of absorption. On my level 89 tauren warrior, above, it did roughly 6k with a baseline use, eating more than half of that Agitated Seedstealer's fire spell. But when used at full rage, it can do significantly more. The most I've seen was a 20,000 absorption shield, which will admittedly be fairly rare because it's hard to ensure you have exactly 60 rage when you use the ability. You're more likely to pepper the area with 10k or 12k absorbs that make soloing an absolute dream. Tanking in 5-mans, it's still a potent part of your arsenal, but you're much more likely to alternate it with Shield Block there. Shield Barrier is an ability warrior tanks have probably needed for a very long time, a way to mitigate incoming damage no matter what it is. I personally love the ability. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Rage in the Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Because we already had a lot of stuff to discuss this week, let's look back at the Ghostcrawler forum post thread before we get rolling. A lot of the changes Dr. Street mentioned have gone live in the most recent beta build. I ran around and tested out the protection and fury changes while exploring Towlong Steppes, did some grouping, and in general played around to see what the average player experience would feel like. I haven't gotten a chance to play with the Glyph of Unending Rage yet, but I am definitely interested in doing so. Frankly, right now, protection feels much beefier than fury. It seems like it hits much harder and takes so little damage that you can essentially never stop for food or bandages and are never in danger from quest mobs, whereas several times as fury I went below half health and into sub-25% territory. Instancing is still taking some getting used to. Right now, I think Shield Barrier is coming out ahead in terms of the mitigation abilities you'll want to rely on.
