Protection legion Discussion

[Agromat]

The surprising bit is this issue can very easily be fixed by basing Rage generation directly on incoming damage, and not on lost health. An asymptotic curve could then be used to ensure we don't end up drowning in Rage by patch 7.3, since damage will keep on increasing. This would have the desirable effect of making us stronger with time, but never overpowered.

What's interesting is that from a game design standpoint, basing rage income on percentage health is a pretty elegant system (how it feels aside). As Blizzard, you need a design that results in generally consistent rage income across multiple tiers of content, ideally without you having to change some universal scaling value every patch. You take as a given that rage is based on incoming damage for class fantasy, so you've got...

Rage = Incoming Damage / <Something that increases at a rate similar to incoming damage>

What can you plug in for that something? You can invent a new system, or put in some sort of asymptotic curve like you mentioned, but you've already got player health, which increases across tiers at a comparable rate to incoming damage. So they just use that. They've got a rage formula that's simple to understand (50 * damage taken / health!) with really complex implications to keep it interesting for wonks like us. 2 birds, one stone. So long as they don't inadvertently make us weaker with certain upgrades (and everyone doesn't hate the way it feels), it's a kind of genius.

Incidentally, that's why I've been investigating health. I think it's our worst weighted stat, and I was curious if it's value was less than 0. If it's not, then at least we're not broken.

EDIT:
Of course, as some here have suggested, they could keep the scaling factor but take away some of the negative feeling by basing the rage formula on health from Stamina, so rage income isn't affected by other health bonuses (Last Stand, Indomitable, mining, etc). That seems like a good change to me. It's not a win if your design is mathematically sound but feels bad, and that would take away some of the bad feelings.

[Murlocbait]

it's a kind of genius.

Couldn't disagree more strongly. It's moving backwards into a system that the devs, other devs, already tried to implement and tinker with and ultimately abandoned for numerous reasons. The move in MoP to active mitigation and giving prot warriors control over their own rage generation was genius. This is an inability to learn from the mistakes of the past, and instead insist on making them all over again, while also disregarding the concerns and desires of the players who already went through those mistakes the first time around.

[Breccia]

Actually, that isn't entirely true. Even now on live, some builds will get you more rage than some others, but that doesn't mean the whole design is flawed... i.g: stacking Crit will get you more Rage than stacking Mastery, whilst Mastery will tend to improve your TMI a bit more. We can compare this to what you've been discussing - stacking health (be it via talent, artifact, gear, whatever) could get you less rage, whilst slightly improving your survivability overall.

No we can't.

Generally speaking, you have some control over whether you get crit, mastery, haste and/or vers. Generally speaking, you have some control over which talents you take.

Generally speaking, you have no control over whether you get max health. Almost all your slots will have it.

It is not a valid comparison at all. One is a choice, the other is not. Unless you count choosing to pass on otherwise pure upgrades, which should be as blatantly stupid as it sounds.

In the end, there are basically two camps on this system.
Camp A knows it is factually true that more max health directly leads to less Rage, and they are interested in knowing how much less, and how to deal with that result.
Camp B knows it is factually true that more max health directly leads to less Rage, and they are not interested in knowing how much less, because they believe such a system is dogshit in the first place.

When an upgrade comes your way, it will almost certainly have Stamina on it. Paladins, druids, DKs and monks will get 100% of the benefit of this higher max health, because their AM systems are 100% unchanged by having more health. Warrior tanks do not get 100% of the benefit, since they will inherently lose Rage, and as such, lose Ignore Pain options over time. Unless we're so overloaded with Rage that we're dumping some to miss the cap (which, in turn, means we're being beaten nearly to death constantly, another fun fact of RFTD we have to deal with), any loss of IP means more of the incoming damage we have to eat ourselves.

Let me put it another way:
-- point to any tank in the game.
-- name any stat in the game.
-- give that tank more of that stat, by any amount you want.
-- does that tank get the benefit from that stat?

If the answer is "yes" then you're good to go. Congrats!
If the answer is "no" you've hit a hard cap. This happens sometimes. You can only multistrike 100% of attacks, for example.
If the answer is "yes, but not as much as before" you've hit a soft cap. This also happens sometimes, with things like haste breakpoints. The effect of the stat is lessened as a result of a soft cap, and you're mathematically encouraged to look elsewhere for upgrades.

Warrior tanks now have soft-capped stamina, arguably the single most important stat any tank could have. And, while some +Stamina can be moved around (by removing/not using +stam gems, for example) a lot of it cannot be. We are one of two that has it, and of those two, we have it worse. It's a stupid fucking system, and Blizz's failure to even dismiss it patronizingly like "why not Whirlwind?" implies to me they can't defend it. I'll happily eat my words the very day they decide to talk to us, but that has yet to come. Until then, I'll be waiting in Camp B.

- - - Updated - - -

Rage = Incoming Damage / <Something that increases at a rate similar to incoming damage>

I have between zero and negative one hundred percent faith Blizz both can, and will, do anything remotely like this. Simply put, I have looked at both tank stats and raid boss damage on enough raids since the Lich King to know that they have never, ever, scaled equally. I don't think they'll start now.

It would be genius if that was their plan. I do not believe it is. I believe, instead, they'll adjust the % formula when they drop the second (and last) raid tier, rather than try to get the balance right as you suggest.

[Deleted]

What's interesting is that from a game design standpoint, basing rage income on percentage health is a pretty elegant system (how it feels aside). As Blizzard, you need a design that results in generally consistent rage income across multiple tiers of content, ideally without you having to change some universal scaling value every patch. You take as a given that rage is based on incoming damage for class fantasy, so you've got...

yeah... mythic, heroic, normal and lfr modes output different amounts of damage on the tank. so good luck getting consistent rage content across those multiple tiers of content.

and even if you dont consider those tiers of content, try going back to the previous tier when you overgear it and see how consistent that rage income is compared to when it was progress content.

if you want consistent rage, it cannot be determined by variable factors like incoming damage, player health, player level, ilvl difference between player and content, etc. the only way you are gonna get consistent rage is if you get a fixed amount (or range) of rage for every time you get hit, maybe with some limit when multiple mobs are involved. more or less rage from autoattack, but instead of your autoattacks its the bosses.

[Coffeh]

I know it's an aspect of the game that doesn't matter, but I'm envisioning soloing old raids...or any outleveled content. You're not going to be taking any damage, so you won't be generating any rage outside of the few abilities that generate a bit. That just seems odd.

Also, in pvp, can't people just kind of ignore a prot warrior? If the enemy isn't hitting you, you won't be generating much rage to be of very much use.

Lastly, off-tanking. Prot warrior seems like they'll just...suck at it.

[Agromat]

yeah... mythic, heroic, normal and lfr modes output different amounts of damage on the tank. so good luck getting consistent rage content across those multiple tiers of content.

Sorry, I should have clarified. I meant "across multiple tiers of content, in gear that's appropriate for that content." Rage income in 7.1 raids in 7.1 gear will probably feel a lot like rage income for 7.0 raids in 7.0 gear. If you bring 7.1 gear to 7.0, or heroic gear to normal content, you're right, that'll feel a lot different. But that's probably fine with Blizzard.

[Deleted]

Sorry, I should have clarified. I meant "across multiple tiers of content, in gear that's appropriate for that content." Rage income in 7.1 raids in 7.1 gear will probably feel a lot like rage income for 7.0 raids in 7.0 gear. If you bring 7.1 gear to 7.0, or heroic gear to normal content, you're right, that'll feel a lot different. But that's probably fine with Blizzard.

So it appears, which is a rather stupid mindset to have seeing how most people spend the vast majority of their time overgearing content, whether it be 1 month or 1 year old.

[Deleted]

No we can't.

Generally speaking, you have some control over whether you get crit, mastery, haste and/or vers. Generally speaking, you have some control over which talents you take.

Generally speaking, you have no control over whether you get max health. Almost all your slots will have it.

It is not a valid comparison at all. One is a choice, the other is not. Unless you count choosing to pass on otherwise pure upgrades, which should be as blatantly stupid as it sounds.

So are you telling me you could manage to replace all (or even most) of the mastery on your gear with Crit? Obviously, no...
And what do you mean you don't have some control over your HP? You have Gems, Trinkets, Talents, Artifacts, Flask, Food, etc... to control HP. In contrast, one can't even manage secondary stats via Talents or Flasks. So yeah, I disagree...

I do agree with some of what you said below that though, but I guess I've already said all I had to say on this in that post you didn't bother reading, so no point in arguing just for the sake of it : )

[Deleted]

Why cant they base a rage formula like they do with resolve?

Resolve gets calculated before mitigation and the higher health you have the higher resolve cap is right?

This way we scale troughout the expansion and health doesnt result in less rage but more.....

Or is this just me talking bullshit because to me the solution seems so simple but for some reason blizzard came with a retarded rage formula, i mean if you want us to get rage from damage taken atleast do it fucking right.

[Deleted]

Forgive the ignorance, but if bringing higher gear to lower content might be an issue, doesn't that just mean the group will suffer when signing up for Random Heroics with i780s when you're 850? Blizzard want people to join LFR, so a good tank joins, but because his raid gear is good, he's more of a hindrance to the team because he can't generate the rage? I dunno. It just seems like they've dug out the old scraps of paper with Vanilla design on them and tried to shoehorn certain principles into 7.0. :/

[Deleted]

EDIT: Either way, I've moved on personally. Playing a lot of DH on beta to get used to it, and unless significant changes come to increase the power of prot I'm not going to play it. The utility alone on DH is absolutely insane, and it's core abilities play out very similarly to live protection.

Not a fan of conspiracy theories but would it be reasonable to assume that Blizzard plays one of their adverse moves urging experienced Protection Warriors to reroll Vengeance DHs as an advertisement of the new hero class? Already happened to a certain extent with the the other hero DK class

[Agromat]

Forgive the ignorance, but if bringing higher gear to lower content might be an issue, doesn't that just mean the group will suffer when signing up for Random Heroics with i780s when you're 850? Blizzard want people to join LFR, so a good tank joins, but because his raid gear is good, he's more of a hindrance to the team because he can't generate the rage?

Hi Pastuzo. There's no harm in asking, but if there's one myth I want to bust, it's this one. Getting better gear unquestionably increases your effectiveness as a tank, against previous, current, and future tiers of content.

Gear affects us in 3 general ways - higher health total, better mitigation, and increased attack power. Let's touch on each:

Higher Health
Higher health is complicated. It's generally good for us, but it's offset by reduced RFDT (rage from damage taken) rate. There is a window of incoming damage and healing values where a player with lower health will live where a player with higher health won't, but generally higher health makes us more resistant to spike damage and gives healers more time to heal us. There's been a lot of discussion of health in pages 74-77, so I won't do a deep dive, but here's a couple posts if you want to read more.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post40523301
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post40540728

Mitigation
Mitigation is anything that passively reduces the average percent amount of damage we take per second - armor, versatility, dodge, parry, block chance from mastery.

First, it is better to not take damage than to take damage and get some rage for it. You need to take 80% of your health to gain enough rage to generate an IP that will generally absorb damage equal to 20% of your health. That's not a good trade. Assuming there are no bosses that regularly hit us for 100% of our health - and given the presence of tanks that recover with healing, I think that's a safe bet - there's no situation where keeping health isn't better, so anything that reduces DTPS is an improvement.

Second, mitigation multiplies the value of your IP absorbs. Say Tank A and Tank B are identical, except Tank A has enough armor to take 75% as much damage per attack as Tank B. If they both put up a 100,000 IP absorb, a boss will need to deal 100,000 to Tank B to consume his absorb, but 100,000 / 0.75 = 133,333 to Tank A to consume his absorb.

So mitigation is double plus good.

Attack Power
Any increases to attack power (from strength or mastery) increase the size of your IPs. Your versatility value also increases your healing done, which includes IP. Increases to those stats make you stronger without any downside. I'm going to include haste in here as well - its benefit is harder to measure, but it's all upside.

Dealing Damage and Holding Threat
Bonus section! Back in the bad-old-days of WotLK and BC, tanks would take gear off in low level content because we got rage from taking damage and had to pay rage to deal damage. If we weren't taking damage, we couldn't deal enough damage to hold threat. That is no longer the case - rage is only spent on active mitigation (and Focused Rage, which isn't a big deal). Therefore, there is nothing about getting better gear that reduces your ability to deal damage or hold threat in any way. You could be taking 0 damage and hold threat fine.

As you can see, all the benefits from better gear are good. Health is the only weird one, and the downside to higher health is outweighed by the benefits to mitigation and AP that come with it on gear.

Therefore, better gear is always an upgrade. QED.

[Maradar]

This is probably suggested and looked at a million times already, but...

Wouldn't inverting the formula be more intuitive though? So Rage = X * Max Health / Damage Taken. Maybe (probably) tweak it here or there. This way more health should increase rage gain, but reducing damage intake achieves the same. Then it should just be a matter of finding a balance between the two, and preferences should roll out again (stam vs. mitigation). Of course a cap or something should be there so a dodge/parry/miss wouldn't result in a full rage bar.

Am I stupid and not looking at it the right way, or is it actually as easy (barring the math behind it) as this sounds? What are the implications behind this?

[Beardyface]

Hi Pastuzo. There's no harm in asking, but if there's one myth I want to bust, it's this one. Getting better gear unquestionably increases your effectiveness as a tank, against previous, current, and future tiers of content.

Gear affects us in 3 general ways - higher health total, better mitigation, and increased attack power. Let's touch on each:

Higher Health
Higher health is complicated. It's generally good for us, but it's offset by reduced RFDT (rage from damage taken) rate. There is a window of incoming damage and healing values where a player with lower health will live where a player with higher health won't, but generally higher health makes us more resistant to spike damage and gives healers more time to heal us. There's been a lot of discussion of health in pages 74-77, so I won't do a deep dive, but here's a couple posts if you want to read more.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post40523301
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post40540728

Mitigation
Mitigation is anything that passively reduces the average percent amount of damage we take per second - armor, versatility, dodge, parry, block chance from mastery.

First, it is better to not take damage than to take damage and get some rage for it. You need to take 80% of your health to gain enough rage to generate an IP that will generally absorb damage equal to 20% of your health. That's not a good trade. Assuming there are no bosses that regularly hit us for 100% of our health - and given the presence of tanks that recover with healing, I think that's a safe bet - there's no situation where keeping health isn't better, so anything that reduces DTPS is an improvement.

Second, mitigation multiplies the value of your IP absorbs. Say Tank A and Tank B are identical, except Tank A has enough armor to take 75% as much damage per attack as Tank B. If they both put up a 100,000 IP absorb, a boss will need to deal 100,000 to Tank B to consume his absorb, but 100,000 / 0.75 = 133,333 to Tank A to consume his absorb.

So mitigation is double plus good.

Attack Power
Any increases to attack power (from strength or mastery) increase the size of your IPs. Your versatility value also increases your healing done, which includes IP. Increases to those stats make you stronger without any downside. I'm going to include haste in here as well - its benefit is harder to measure, but it's all upside.

Dealing Damage and Holding Threat
Bonus section! Back in the bad-old-days of WotLK and BC, tanks would take gear off in low level content because we got rage from taking damage and had to pay rage to deal damage. If we weren't taking damage, we couldn't deal enough damage to hold threat. That is no longer the case - rage is only spent on active mitigation (and Focused Rage, which isn't a big deal). Therefore, there is nothing about getting better gear that reduces your ability to deal damage or hold threat in any way. You could be taking 0 damage and hold threat fine.

As you can see, all the benefits from better gear are good. Health is the only weird one, and the downside to higher health is outweighed by the benefits to mitigation and AP that come with it on gear.

Therefore, better gear is always an upgrade. QED.

I'll let @Breccia tear this post apart, simply because it's more fun to read. Just posting to add one thing:

Versatility reduces the damage you take as well as increases the damage you do. Meaning you get less rage and generate bigger IPs. Mastery is similar, except we want mastery due to the tier 19 bonus - more "giving tier sets abilities that should be baseline" - which is stupid, stupid, stupid design. Wether the IP gain from Versatility will outpace the rage loss is yet to be seen. It's entirely possible that Versatility could be a complete wash as a stat, though my guess is that it will be an increase, although a very, very slight one.

Our stat priority is going to be Haste > Mastery > Versatility > Crit.

Forgive the ignorance, but if bringing higher gear to lower content might be an issue, doesn't that just mean the group will suffer when signing up for Random Heroics with i780s when you're 850? Blizzard want people to join LFR, so a good tank joins, but because his raid gear is good, he's more of a hindrance to the team because he can't generate the rage? I dunno. It just seems like they've dug out the old scraps of paper with Vanilla design on them and tried to shoehorn certain principles into 7.0. :/

The simple answer to this question is:

If you have T19 4pc, you should be fine. That will add quite a lot of rage, as will the gains from haste that you'll have from having better gear (hopefully with haste on it). Gear with both crit and versatility will be absolutely terrible for us, so avoid it at all costs.

If you don't have T19 4pc, you may have to take off a couple of pieces of gear to have enough rage to pass AM checks.

[Breccia]

I'll let @Breccia tear this post apart, simply because it's more fun to read.

I'm in Finland and I am pretty wasted. Holy shit, there's some tasty stuff here. So I'm not even going to reply to the person who thought, when I said "Generally speaking, you have no control over whether you get max health. Almost all your slots will have it." that I was talking about food, then suggested I didn't read his post.

Fuck I just did.

But short addendum to your addendum: even if all of that was true, and I am not conceding that yet, literally every single tank other than Prot Warriors would benefit more, as they have either no, or fewer, downsides to compensate for. We suffer by comparison, and raiding is competitive.

The company does well. The boss hands out $10,000 checks to literally every employee but you, who gets <insert any amount under $10,000 it literally doesn't matter which> and Damion Hunter, who gets <insert any number between what you got and $10,000> and says you still got more money than you had before so everything is working fine. Are you satisfied?

If the answer is yes, enjoy your partial bonus and don't spend it all in Camp A.
If the answer is no, welcome to Camp B.

Lonkero.

[Murlocbait]

*Snip*

Absolutely nothing to do with this thread, but every time i see your avatar, I think it's an image of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh dressed in armor with an axe and shield. Those orange and black bits just read as "Tigger" every freakin' time. Then I look at it more and realize there's a Tauren in armor, at which point I'm strangely disappointed that it's not a WoW/Tigger mashup.

[Breccia]

Absolutely nothing to do with this thread, but every time i see your avatar, I think it's an image of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh dressed in armor with an axe and shield. Those orange and black bits just read as "Tigger" every freakin' time. Then I look at it more and realize there's a Tauren in armor, at which point I'm strangely disappointed that it's not a WoW/Tigger mashup.

The wonderful thing about tauren
Is tauren are wonderful things!

[Murlocbait]

The wonderful thing about tauren
Is tauren are wonderful things!

Aaaaand now that'll be in my head all day. Goddamnit...

[Agromat]

Versatility reduces the damage you take as well as increases the damage you do. Meaning you get less rage and generate bigger IPs. Mastery is similar ... Whether the IP gain from Versatility will outpace the rage loss is yet to be seen. It's entirely possible that Versatility could be a complete wash as a stat, though my guess is that it will be an increase, although a very, very slight one.
...
If you don't have T19 4pc, you may have to take off a couple of pieces of gear to have enough rage to pass AM checks.

All of the above statements are based on the assumption that taking less damage overall from increased damage mitigation (from dodge, parry, mastery, versatility) results in decreased survivability due to rage loss. I tested that assumption, and I don't believe it.

I state (and ask anyone to try to disprove) that anything that reduces all damage we take over time by a % is always a power gain, because it is better to not take damage than to take damage and generate rage from it. In addition, the increased IP efficiency is greater than the effect of lost rage.

EDIT: Thought of a hopefully illustrative question here - "Should you ever cast Shield Block?" Obviously the answer is yes, but if rage loss from mitigation hurts more than the reduced-damage-taken helps, then you should never cast Shield Block and should instead channel all rage into Ignore Pain. Which I think we can all agree is wrong.

I tested the results over time with different amounts of incoming damage and healing and there are no sweet spots or exceptions, and no talent changes how it works. The warrior who takes less damage lives longer. Here's a chart, with values from a 110 Prot Warrior in dungeon gear:



Check my work:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

I mean, test me - prove me wrong. I'm not infallible - I backed off on my claims about health's value. I'm open to critique. But you guys are just saying that we can't know if mitigation outpaces rage loss and not showing your work.

Whether the IP gain from Versatility will outpace the rage loss is yet to be seen.

Since more mitigation is better than less mitigation, the damage reduction from Versatility outpaces the rage loss on its own, and on top of that Versatility also increases your actual IP size. Versatility is all upside. Same with Mastery - it increases your mitigation and your AP, which increases your IP size.

Better gear is better.

[Deleted]

literally every single tank other than Prot Warriors would benefit more, as they have either no, or fewer, downsides to compensate for. We suffer by comparison, and raiding is competitive.

What if IP (and the rest of prot warrior toolset) is so madcrazy strong at baseline that other tanks need to scale slightly better just to catch up

Like I understand there's a problem in the principle of the whole RFDT thing. Practically the strongest argument against it is that it gives us relatively less control and predictability over our resource generation, due to avoidance mainly (dat Revenge reset doe). As for "what about my lost 2 rage?!" due to Stam/Versa, I'd be far more concerned over how the toolset versatility and base number tuning compares to other tanks in relevant encounters at relevant ilevel, which is yet to be tested properly. Oh and btw I lean to agree with Agromat in that mitigated damage probably beats a pittance of extra rage, as the RFDT income stands now.

I look at Blood DK and I see a passive 20-28% DR vs anything from any angle, with talents vs pretty much anything you could throw at them and think WTF that's all about. Your hard-fought +2 rage isn't going to cover that.

We have no passive DR, same HP(?), no heals. Block is, as always, strong but situational. If the base IP formula turns out to be crap, then this bickering over Stam/Versa scaling is not going to have significant effect on it whichever way they ad hoc fix the RFDT formula for either stat, unless they put like a straight-up *2 or *3 modifier on it as a whole.
For example - last footage I watched of Beta was of Sloot getting shrekd by ranged mobs in level 4 CM Halls of Valor. Ranged attack, probably unblockable (not even an issue for his prot pally), hits for 650k, x3 because 3 mobs.
Unless the one IP I can muster up by that point isn't going to save me from the next volley because of numbers, then I don't particularly care if a tank with 10% less HP (who might have just died right there) is going to survive for a theoretical 20 sec longer after enduring a theoretical 10 minutes of such a barrage.

Otherwise it seems just first world problems over who can overgear content faster and go be a livelord in LFR/normal. It's practically exactly the same in WoD - "Gear stam until you stop getting oneshot, after that it's worthless", "why can DK/pally solo outdated content and why can't I?!".