Early Protection Gear in WotLK

I haven't been playing my Warrior much but when I do I like to tank instances. And because I am a Max/Min personality when it comes to gear I am trying to put together a "wish list" if you will of the first set of WotLK tanking gear I will be shooting for. I personally don't like relying on random boss drops to gear up and I always look for crafted or quest rewards that I can get now to help later in the farming of better loot off of bosses.

Crafted Pieces

If you weren't a Burning Crusade tank then you may want to look into getting the entry level Cobalt piece crafted for you. The mats are minimal and these pieces will provide you with a good starting point for tanking places like The Nexus.


Cobalt Belt
Cobalt Boots
Cobalt Bracers
Cobalt Chestpiece
Cobalt Gauntlets
Cobalt Helm
Cobalt Legplates
Cobalt Shoulders

37 x Cobalt Bars will get you the entire set. If you are a miner you can scavenge up the ore pretty quickly while doing your quests.

Quest Rewards

Head over to the Borean Tundra and make sure you do all the quests over in Coldarra until you get:

Have They No Shame (68)   for Tundra Pauldrons - Plate: Shoulders
Postponing the Inevitable (69) for Gauntlets of the Disturbed Giant - Plate: Hands
Quickening (69) for Boots of the Unbowed Protector - Plate: Feet

Once you have those quests get yourself a group to run through The Nexus. You can easily bang out all 3 quests in one run and net yourself 3 nice upgrades. Unfortunately none of the bosses seem to drop any decent tanking gear. So doing this dungeon more than once to get the quests done really isn't necessary. There are however a few nice DPS items in there which I'll probably cover in a different post.

Next time I get a chance I will cover the next level of tanking gear beyond these pieces which should hold you over until around level 74 or so.