MoP Beta: Protection Upcoming Changes

[Viriya]

Quoting GC at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...47?page=18#347

• Shield Slam -- now generates 20 rage. Sword and Board generates 30.

• Unwavering Sentinel -- now grants passive rage generation like the old Anger Management effect. The intent is to make rage generation smoother when a tank is kiting or otherwise doesn't have high boss contact.

• Demoralizing Shout -- a new (old) Protection spec ability, now in the form of a short-term, free cooldown, much like Barkskin. Reduces the damage done by 20% by targets against the warrior for 10 sec. 60 sec cooldown.

• Shield Barrier -- cost reduced to 20 rage, but consumes up to 60 rage for up to triple the effect. (Total absorb adjusted accordingly).

• Glyph of Thunder Clap -- Not super useful. Redesigned to Glyph of Unending Rage, which increases total rage cap to 120, allowing interested warriors to be able to bank more Rage.

The sum total of these changes may provide too much rage. We'll have to see. We still want to mess with Berserker Stance and possibly Enrage rage generation as well to make sure warrior rage isn't too static and predictable. We want there to be some Heroic Strike use.

A lot of interesting changes. I particularly like Unwavering Sentinel - PvP tanks might not be rage starved for defensive cds if this is implemented correctly..
Demo Shout fills a much needed void for a shorter cd we lacked.
Shield Barrier looks like something that would increase the skillcap of the class.
Glyph of Unending Rage sounds great, but aside from pooling resources for more burst, I think it's not as good as you'd think. A good warrior should ensure rage doesn't hit the cap anyway.

[idefiler6]

Kind of looks to solidify the possibility of 100% uptime on shieldblock. Will be interesting to see how it pans out on boss fights.

ALSO: Link?

[Viriya]

Added link.

[kopcap]

Wow thats one OOOOOOOOOOOOOOP glyph right there. SBar looks more compelling now, would be nice to see the numbers on it. Not sure about DS change to be honest, barkskin should say where it belongs - on druids. This sounds like a massive blow to our survivability on aoe fights. But would be fantastic on magic obv.

[Anuibus]

This sounds like a massive blow to our survivability on aoe fights. But would be fantastic on magic obv.

The live version of demoralizing shout was baked into thunderclap, with thunderclap(along with related abilities) losing its attack speed reduction. a 20% DR on 1 minute cooldown is a buff to survivability, no way around it.

[XepNes]

Quoting GC at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...47?page=18#347


A lot of interesting changes. I particularly like Unwavering Sentinel - PvP tanks might not be rage starved for defensive cds if this is implemented correctly..
Demo Shout fills a much needed void for a shorter cd we lacked.
Shield Barrier looks like something that would increase the skillcap of the class.
Glyph of Unending Rage sounds great, but aside from pooling resources for more burst, I think it's not as good as you'd think. A good warrior should ensure rage doesn't hit the cap anyway.

I like the change, Demo shout is okay in the sense we get it, but in the end its just another recycled ability and nothing new.
Shield Barrier is just awesome how they did it
Unending Rage glyph is also kinda cool and 20 extra rage is never a bad thing to have unless we get other glyphs that would be more beneficial then easier rage management. We will never have 100% uptime on shield block and if we do manage to find a way to get it its most likely going to be hotfixed in some way as no other tanking class can compete with it.

[Deleted]

OMG! At last we got our 20% DR CD!! Hell yeah!

I've been talking about this one and been patiently waiting for it for I don't know how long now, and well, I'm sure glad to see this! And the new SBar is just great! It should allow us to use it in conjunction with Shield Block. But I need to see some numbers on it too, as the present one is way too weak for 60 Rage.

Perhaps it ain't the end of Prot Warrior yet ?! Really excited, can't wait, to try all of this out on the Beta.


@Kopcap
How can you be complaining about this extra 20% DR CD ? We should all be rejoicing about it! It's the greatest news for us Prot War since the beginning of this whole Beta, as it now means devs are truly ready to have things ''balanced'' and not leave us as we initially were, weak and unbalanced, with the excuse that they don't want to homogenize things too much.

EDIT
Plus this DR CD is really original and exceptional as it in fact inflict a debuff on the target that reduces its damage, rather than buffing us and decreasing damage on us. This is different form any other DR CD other tanks have, and the mechanism provides a more wider rang of uses, hence original and absolutely not homogenized.

I'm sure happy to see all of these changes. I feel like I didn't waste my time after all, when trying to point some of these issues out, ; )

[Nobleshield]

I'm really excited about these changes. I've been trying a bit of the Beta (way too much lag in Jade Forest though to do anything much) and so far I'm liking the fluid way Prot Warrs seem to operate. Things feel a lot smoother than they do on Live (although this isn't in a raid environment so there's less cooldown management) and these changes sound like they can only be a good thing.

[Rorke]

Thanks Ghostcrawler. I'm looking forward to testing out the new changes.

[kopcap]

The live version of demoralizing shout was baked into thunderclap, with thunderclap(along with related abilities) losing its attack speed reduction. a 20% DR on 1 minute cooldown is a buff to survivability, no way around it.

Oh great, did not know that. Having second most important debuff on a spell table was annoying.

[dd614]

I love that they're giving the warrior more tools and leaving it up to them. You'll be able to distinguish good warriors by how they use their abilities at the right times or not.

[Deleted]

I think you should add the second part, even though is in the homepage now:

Overall, the goal is to mix up Protection's rotation a little more. Prot warriors are used to lots of buttons, and we don't want too much waiting around. (For Arms and Fury, we can just flood them with rage, but with Protection the risk is that we hit 100% uptime of Shield Block, which turns it from being a short cooldown to a managed buff like Thunder Clap.) We also want to make sure tanks who execute their attacks with more skill are rewarded with better mitigation. To make this compelling, we think it needs to tie into Rage generation.

As part of this, we're going to try Defensive Stance no longer generating Rage from auto attacks at all. Instead we'll have nearly all Rage come from special attacks while in Defensive.
In addition to Shield Slam, we'll try Revenge and Devastate generating some Rage. Devastate will do so by once again being the ability that procs Sword and Board. For Revenge, we agree that the more rotational version has lost some of its old excitement. Revenge will generate Rage outright. It will no longer proc from blocks but will also have no cooldown so you will sometimes get multiple Revenges in a row.
We're going to try Shield Block using the charge system that we've tried for a few abilities, such as the monk Roll. This one may feel too different, but we'll see. What it means is you can use Shield Block twice in a row, but then pay a 15 sec cooldown. (The first use will start its cooldown as soon as its used.) This mechanic should let you chain together two Shield Blocks but not keep it up 100% of the time.We think this rotation feels better and more traditionally Prot, but let us know how it feels to you.

So... for the prot PoV I do think it's really nice to make a heavy difference on a well done rotation in regards to how much you can mitigate. That and having a short CD for mitigation is what I really wanted from active mitigation (PD: Demo Shout reads "Reduces the damage done by 20% by targets against the warrior for 10 sec.", so all in all, it's worst than other CDs like Barkskin, since you can't use it to reduce damage on others, and ranged opponents may be not affected by it. The may want to look into it...)

But for Arms/Fury, makes using Defensive Stance a bit too much too much restrictive. I suppose you only want to use it in short moments anyways, but hey, there are the consequences.

[Deleted]

Sounds pretty solid. I'm really liking the idea of being able to stack an absorb with shield barrier. Much more interesting than prot on live.

[Deleted]

(PD: Demo Shout reads "Reduces the damage done by 20% by targets against the warrior for 10 sec.", so all in all, it's worst than other CDs like Barkskin, since you can't use it to reduce damage on others, and ranged opponents may be not affected by it. The may want to look into it...)

Yes, I thought of this, and I found it a bit weird too, as I don't think they are gonna add a rang restriction to this.
It could work as such; if a mob is attacking the Warrior, when this Warrior triggers his DS, that mob automatically receives the debuff no matter how far it's standing.

[Deleted]

With a glyphed shield wall and demo shout, that's a total of 80% damage reduction, plus the absorb from shield barrier. Even without the glyph, it's 60% on a 2 min cooldown.

[Deleted]

Yes, and other tanks already had this, so it's only fair.

[Deleted]

Well, there is the banner too as a 3 min raid CD, unless they somehow don't stack or it gets removed, so in fact it's a 1-(0.9*0.8*0.4), 71.2% damage reduction when glyphed... Though it gets a bit overkill to stack that many CDs.

[Deleted]

Although now Demo Shout makes Demo banner look even more lackluster.