The Defense Warrior in PvP

[Olon97]

I have to disagree about Last Stand - let me see if I can point out some other examples of its use.

In my opinion, Last Stand is most useful in the heat of a tough battle, and not just at the end of a fight. There have been lots of times when the tank was low in health and then took a damage spike, while I was still casting a heal. Maybe I was OOM, maybe I was finishing a inner focus'd group heal, maybe I was chain-flash-healing them but was getting hit, but the damage spike came too fast and their potion timer wasn't up, so they would have hit zero if not for Last Stand.

From a healer's perspective, Last Stand works exactly like using a healing potion followed by taking a critical hit 20 seconds later. Sometimes we just need another 2 seconds to land that critical heal to get the warrior back into yellow or green. Last Stand effectively delays a chunk of incoming damage, allowing us to do this.

Another way to look at it is that Last Stand lets a warrior go to -30% of their HP before being killed, for up to 20 seconds. What's not to like about that? I realize it requires 3 talent points with its prereqs, but if you assume that you use Bloodrage each fight, Last Stand is effectively extending your heath bar by 33%. This could easily be another 1000 HP, and I just don't think that should be underestimated.

Point taken. I haven't been in many situations where a heal potion + cleansed whipper root wasn't enough to cover for a gap in healing, but maybe I haven't been actively looking to note such times. If I ever do try a build with last stand, I will make a macro that sends a whisper to every healer assigned to healing me when I use it and another set of whispers when the backend is about 5 seconds away. Considering how rare crits are once you have enough +def gear, a 30% instant HP drop will take people by surprise if you don't communicate what's about to happen. In scenarios where mana isn't likely to be a bottleneck, predictability of incoming damage becomes pretty key to effective healer/tank dynamics.

While in principle, extending the life bar is a handy tool, without a "full heal" spell in the game, there is such a thing as enough life. That would be enough to take the worst case scenario of the pull in question (usually back to back crits on a boss) and still leave healers time to get in their biggest heals. Some discussions I've read (either on the Steel Warrior forums or Conquest guild) estimate that ~5000 life unbuffed is generally enough for MC/Onyxia main tanks, and giving up other useful stats (or talents) to go beyond that mark does not improve the tank's durability enough to justify the loss.

That's PvE, however. PvP it can be a bit harder to predict how much burst damage might be coming your way, or whether you'll even be targetted before the healers in your group are dead anyway. If you're using this sort of PvP tactic (taking point with heal support), having 10k+ life (counting last stand) might be an excellent idea. Granted, that life extension is only once every 10 minutes, but I can definitely see the potential.