Protection warrior: The Top 5 Problems.

[Pua]

Okay, let's get this rolling then. For me, there are a number of endemic problems with Protection at the moment and these should be first and foremost on the design table for 6.0.

1) We get next to no benefit from DPS statistics, which is killing our scaling, and our DPS is unacceptably bad in general.

It's been said to death, but our damage is crap because we get such limited benefit from critical strike or haste. Sure, we could gear for critical strike, but we'd take a significant hit to our mitigation if we did so. Haste does nothing and while that's not an issue in and of itself, it becomes a problem when encounters have significant haste buffs - Sinestra and Sha of Pride are the types of thing I mean, while getting nothing from Bloodlust is also frustrating.

Solutions could include:

- Things like the Heavy Repercussions and Hold the Line glyphs should be baked in as baseline passives. Why hasn't this happened?
- Riposte would work better if it granted avoidance from critical strike, not the other way around; it's ass-backward at the moment.
- Devastate and Revenge should scale better with weapon damage, our weapons are little more than glorified stat sticks these days.
- Our baseline offensives (Recklessness and Skull Banner) are utter crap due to low baseline critical chance. Riposte will help here.
- Scumbagging is too rewarding with regard to Vengeance - this needs to be fixed across all classes so tuning can be made tighter.
- Either we need to get something from haste, or the buffs granting it need redesigned. White strikes proccing Sword and Board?

2) There's no way for warriors to use their rage offensively.

Basically, it should be the case that we can pour rage into Heroic Strike if we want to contribute more damage at a loss of survivability. Currently, our best damage return for rage is Shield Block, which also happens to be our best mitigation return. This is bad design. Ultimately, the problem is that Heroic Strike is fucking awful for its rage cost, and buffing Ultimatum doesn't help this issue because you're going to hit the button when Ultimatum procs regardless. There needs to be a reason to hit Heroic Strike without the proc and, right now, it's a waste of rage to do so.

Solutions could include:

- A flat buff to Heroic Strike for tanks so that it's actually worth hitting. This could be a passive addition to Ultimatum, I suppose.
- A drop in the rage cost of Heroic Strike would make its contribution more meaningful, but doesn't really address the overall snag.
- The removal of Heroic Strike entirely for a better alternative. That's a topic of its own, however, so I won't belabour it here.

3) Our mitigation cooldown package is, frankly, rubbish.

Our mitigation cooldowns include Demoralizing Shout, Spell Reflect and Disarm (this is omitting active mitigation and major cooldowns which are largely okay; we could add in Enraged Regeneration and Impending Victory, but that's another sub-heading). Demoralizing Shout doesn't work on environmental damage, which is a glaring issue with it, while Spell Reflect and Disarm barely work in PvE at all. It's just crap. Toss on top of this the fact that Demoralizing Banner suffers from the same problem as its namesake shout and it's a laundry list of flunks.

Solutions could include:

- Making Disarm work on bosses is an obvious one. If the Disarm itself is too powerful, just make it a 20% damage reduction.
- Demoralizing Shout really needs to be "Moralizing Shout" so that it's a character buff that works on environmental damage.
- There's bloat here, so assuming Disarm was made to work universally we could actually lose Demoralizing Shout entirely.
- Spell Reflect should work on bosses. Where that would be overpowered, a 20% drop in magical damage taken would work.
- Demoralizing Banner needs to work on environmental damage, and I'd accept the loss of Rallying Cry as a necessary casualty.

4) Our self-healing is atrocious and makes us too healer dependent.

I'm cool with being worse in this regard than other classes, but we have an entire talent tier dedicated to self-healing that is worse than what every other class has at baseline - it's awful.

Solutions could include:

- Make Enraged Regeneration or Second Wind baseline, then bake Impending Victory into a glyph. Redo that entire tier.
- Buff all three of the talents to a point where they're actually worth taking, potentially buffed or altered by glyphs.
- Make self-healing a part of our active mitigation package; this could replace Shield Barrier if Spell Reflect was fixed.

5) We get very little benefit to being a hybrid due to lack of a healing spec.

It's difficult to quantify exactly where this problem sits, but DK's also have the same issue. Essentially paladins, druids and monks all benefit from having a healing spec as well as their tanking and damage-dealing one; warriors get no benefit at all from having two DPS specs. What's particularly perverse is that warriors have two DPS specs, yet sit rock bottom when it comes to DPS. There aren't obvious ways to alleviate this particular gripe because it's not necessarily an objective one - there are arguments to be made about the hybrid tax, what it should be, and how it should be paid. Hell, you couldn't get consensus on whether it should exist at all, but warriors are paying it. We could argue that Skull Banner is our hybrid benefit, but tanks get very little benefit from it.

So, that's enough for now - expect more to follow.

[Shiinji]

You should post this in the blizzard forums

[Deleted]

A very good read, you should indeed post this on the official forums and see what kind of response you get.

[Pua]

I'll be doing that, but I posted this on one of Eddy's posts but Darsithis locked it; it's a bleed over from all the other Protection-based discussions we've been having on assorted threads.

[warmann]

I agree 100% with all of the Top Five Problems. Now, this may not be the case with higher gear levels, but i have issues with AoE threat on my prot warrior. I mean, Why can't Thunder Clap hit harder, and be able to be used more frequently? I don't see what that would hurt, tbh. Also, WHY did blizzard have to give my gorgeous Shockwave to ALLLLLL warriors!? I don't think non-warrior tanks can fathom how important that shockwave was to us, and now if it hit's less than 3 targets, there's a 40 second CD; Total Garbage. Every other tanking class have ZERO issues with AoE Threat. Druids: thrash/swipe, DK: D&D, Diseases, Heart Strike, Paladin: HotR, Consecrate, Avenger's Shield, SoT, Monk: Spinny Kick, Dizzying Haze, Keg Smash. Warrior: Thunder Clap, and "Choose a talent in this tier for ur only other AoE tanking ability, oh and btw, it has a long ass cooldown!". I am absolutely willing to admit that i'm just BAD at playing a prot warrior, BUT, I think that these AoE Threat issues NNNEEEEDD addressed, and Fixed! /end rant

[Gurushock]

You know what's sad... Is the fact that all of this is true. I hope that next xpac that will fix prot warriors, well warriors in general.

[Valech]

1) Agreed, but I´m looking forward to 5.4 changes. Crit will be our offensive stat, stacked through avoidance. Our Dps will be increased by those means.
2) Agreed. Our best bet is still Shieldblock and Shieldbash while not tanking :/ At least we have Execute in the end if we happen not to tank then.
3) Disagree. Since you do not talk about Shieldblock and Shieldbarrier I assume you mean our Cooldowns aside from those. Our active Mitigation is actually great: A fix damage reduction (SBlock) which does not suffer from being soaked up by a big blow like bloodshield or fails because of bad luck like that avoidance thingy of druids and a shield that scales with vengance (SBarrier), that either reduces the spikyness of our receives damage (bleeding of rage into Barrier after SBlock) or manages to almost entirely soak up a huge blow (megaera breaths, Triple Puncture). Aside from those active Mitigation skills, we do not bad. Enraged Regeneration Needs to be buffed and will be buffed with 5.4, Shieldwall is mighty and Demoshout only has the problem, that it must be applied. I´d be happy if Demoshout was a buff rather then a debuff. Demobanner might stay a debuff then, or vise versa. Regarding Disarm and Spellreflect I don´t care much. There were worse tiers for Spellreflect than this one (Shenanigans with Mar´li still make me smile) and Disarm is mostly used in Trash stiuations.
4) Oh god, agree. I wish our current 2p-bonus would become baseline. I´m really tempted to take 2 pices of this Tier and 2 of the next.
5) Somewhat agree. I think this goies mostly hand in hand with point 4. You cannot blame it on our lack of a healing specc thou, DKs are huge when it comes to selfheal.

[Deleted]

First off, a very well constructed post and a great read

For the most part I do agree;

1) I do agree however I think this is encouraged in a healthy way to gear for avoidance in 5.4 to get crit from it, although some benefit from DPS stats might be nice

2) The part of the post I agree with the most, I would certainly like to see some better rage dumps and would add another layer of skill to the class where you have to play to maximise your shield block uptime and not cripple yourself by rage starvation and use that fine line of excess rage into pushing damage

3) I would have to disagree a bit here, I think our line up of defensives are pretty strong although not on the level of a paladin or DK. I'm pretty comfy with just using Shield Wall and Last Stand / Rally and just calling for externals

4) It is but I would honestly rather play, as I have said in previous posts; that tank that takes the least damage but doesn't have any self healing... just a pure Tank, eating the damage... thats it!

[Zaritte]

1) Yes. They are trying to fix this with riposte but I don't think they are quite there yet. I agree with other ppl's the suggestion of switching riposte to work off mastery. And zero haste benefit does need to be fixed.
2) Yes. But I don't find this that big of an issue. It would be interesting if we could place our SBarrier on friendlies in melee range. Or buff HS.
3) I don't have an issue with our CDs.
4) Yes! I think they should scale our tier 2 with AP like the other tanks get from their self heals.
5) Not a big concern.

[Gliff]

Disclaimer, I woke up at 5am and cant sleep so this is my half asleep response.

Great post. I think Eddy and I are on the same page about most of your post and he probably said it best for 1-3.

In my 25 man guild these are my guilds 7 healers: 2 Paladins, 1 priest, 1 shaman, 1 druid, 2 monks. That gives 6 tank externals and then add the 3 vigilance from warriors next patch and that gives my 25 man 9 tank externals. We do not need more CDs. Ours are just fine. While I would prefer for shout/banner to work on environmental, that is way down the list of thing I want fixed.

My proposal for how they can do #1:

Mastery gives us crit also. Plain and simple. I would prefer to get offensive stats from defensive stats rather then the other way around. I like not having to fight with plate DPS for gear.

[Deleted]

Mastery giving us crit would be really nice yeah, although I think probably a *little* OP..... then again looking at paladins with haste:P

Banner providing a damage taken reduced buff to the raid instead of reducing the source damage would be really useful as its currently worthless against environmental


Basically I'm pretty happy with how Warrior is on PTR and just looking forward to using it in progress ^^

[Gliff]

Mastery is the best defensive stat for Warriors and DK. Why force the 2 lowest DPS tanks to take a less optimal defensive stat to compete on DPS.

Haste is best for DPS and defense for Paladins.

Crit is best for DPS and defense for Druids.

Monks obviously are different because of the way they are designed but every offensive stat is beneficial for them on both sides.

It seems like a no brainer to make mastery be beneficial on both sides for DKs and Warriors.

- - - Updated - - -

I made a thread on the official PTR forums hoping to get some feedback from Blues. Please go hit it up and show support for this. If enough of us do then maybe we can get this changed. We need to learn to bitch like Warlocks.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9560156171#1

[Deleted]

US it's the only forums it's worth to post, but can't do from EU. Hope you get some posts there.

1), they didn't put Riposte to solve the DPS problem. It was just to justify the STR avoidance gear they weren't ready to remove on a non- X.0 patch. They should rely on mastery/crit and kept avoidance as it is right now. But they don't want tanks gearing DPS gear; paladins simply have enjoyed being a expansion ahead of everyone else. Would DPS players set on fire Blizzard HQ for this? Surely. Tanks though... I reckon that high profile tanks don't bitch since guilds don't bench them, they simply reroll or just play through it.

Anyways, I had rather much prefered they had gone with the mastery/crit build, without artificial, one-patch lived things like Riposte. Don't know, Crit providing crit block was a good one. Crit blocks having a chance to trigger SS, SS crits shortening Sblock CD. You know, the system that works with other classes and make them satisfying, the better gear you have, the more resources, the more buttons you have to press, the harder you are and the more you diss out damage. Crit needing 600 rating to gain 1% ensures Mastery gearing. Want dodge/parry to have higher value? There is Revenge for that, just like GC was there for Paladins. Because haste is zero value stat, we won't be going around grabbing every single piece of dps gear that it's around avoiding tank ones. We would have used some parry/dodge because of that anyways.

Also, unblockable physical damage, wtf blizzard, don't hate on us.

About point 2) Zellviren, I feel like the whole rage to DPS doesn't really work that well. Even something as rewarding as Execute feels wrong to use when a boss is dishing out pain. And I would rather not have that conversion as the "supposed" way of doing damage. It cannot be a solution to a dire damage numbers problem.

About 3), I too feel we are ok too CD wise. But I think that Spell Reflect could find his way into PvE bosses more frequently. Reflecting has always been the most rewarding feeling when it comes to defense, since those lvl 60 trinkets. Would love to see it more around, but I understand if they can't (although that now both DPS warriors and shaman have groupal reflect skills, it is probably ok to bring more reflects into play. This tier hadn't been that bad in this department, truth be told).

4) Self-healing, I had rather be the tank whose health bar moves the less, even if we can't heal it back. I feel it for DPS warriors though, having that shitty healing tree on an age when everyone and their mother heals themselves like crazy.

Which leaves me to 5). Yep, that correlates to the point above. We have shitty heals because we are not a healing class, that fits and I'm ok with it. We are a pure physical class, only DPS and tanking. Let it show.

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ll...?s=4983&e=5065

I mean, I'm OK with a paladin solo-healing Ra-den for the last 1:20 of the fight (well, I'm not, it's retarded). It's their perk as an hybrid class, it's fine that all classes differentiate from each other. You want increased raid offhealing, you tank with monks or paladins. You want increased raid damage? You should bring DD/tank classes. Skull Banner? It's a good start, but that's baked in on the class, not on the spec. And it's very very VERY far from making you think "I should have a warrior tank this, we need more raid damage".

Sigh... I'm a bit sleepy, but I don't think I have much more to say. I feel like all this will be left to 6.0. They CAN do drastic changes between patches (new masteries?), but what we have is what we will roll with. I just pray that the numbers pass will do us justice, and that the next expansion will be a better one for us.

[Delath]

Let's just hope the US forum thread doesn't get derailed by people with no clue about it coming in and saying all is good... Sadly I can't post on US forums either.

[idefiler6]

Let's just hope the US forum thread doesn't get derailed by people with no clue about it coming in and saying all is good... Sadly I can't post on US forums either.

That happened with the very first response.

[Zaritte]

It really is unfair that warriors are being pushed into parry/dodge. Primarily because passive avoidance is no fun and lowers the skill level of mitigating damage. One of the best changes to Mop tanking was AM. Now they are trying to push warriors back to passive mitigation. Perhaps the crit benefit could be based upon the percent of blockable/avoidable damage the warriors/DKs mitigate. This would ensure warriors gear towards mastery>avoidance>>dps stats. This would also benefit the more skilled tanks that effectively use their AM.

[aGit]

There's bloat here, so assuming Disarm was made to work universally we could actually lose Demoralizing Shout entirely.

demo shout is aoe. a working disarm would in no way replace demo shout.

Currently, our best damage return for rage is Shield Block, which also happens to be our best mitigation return. This is bad design.

why is it a bad design?

There's no way for warriors to use their rage offensively.

You didn't mention execute.

Our self-healing is atrocious and makes us too healer dependent.

imo other tanking specs are too independent. Class mechanics aside, all tanks should need a healer.

5) We get very little benefit to being a hybrid due to lack of a healing spec.

i don't understand the point you're trying to make here at all. Are you suggesting that because we (and DKs) should do more dps because of the 2 dps specs we have?

[Deleted]

Modern girls those times,

We are warriors, we shout at enemys to scare them, we bash them, we no use magic no we got brains.
While reading post, i was thinking about another player sick of having problems and issues with playing.

1. We will be gaining some benefit from critical, moar rage and thats fine. atm 530~ 10man prot warriors should be already mastery capped and gone for crit anyway.
2. You have 2 skills for rage dumping, its heroic strike and execute, go ahead use them, rage starve and die. Even now at 540ilevel i sometimes starve for rage when bad things happen, and im not happy about it. i would preffer biger rage pool for my warrior over anything else.
3. Class works the way class works i guess, try shouting at enviroment and scare it away, does'nt work this way does it? For me things works like they should work, things like disarm could replace demo shout, No. Isnt rallying cry is unique? think about it, its really beneficial.
4. Yes our selfhealing suck's, thats why we smash things and no use magic, yes? Coz we are warriors, nobody teach us magic.
5. I love my warrior, love doing stuff with him, love standing afk with him. I would hate to see blizz changing warriors in big ways, teaching them magic, and other crappy stuff wich warriors should not do, we interact with enviroment with strenght not with brains. We encourage stuff and demoralize them.

And its weird, why you play warriors if you dislike so much about him? Most of the things that you qq about is going on fixplate 5.4, no moar vengeance scumbaging, more damage for prot warriors.

Im seing a vision that in alternative universe, dk's and paladins whine about how other tanks are mobile compared to them, and paladin's should grow a wings with 30sec cd to fly around, and dk's should learn how to summon in combat blood scateboard, to go around fast. ;|

Have a fun playing your class fellow warriors

[iamthedevil]

You should post this in the blizzard forums

Stop that. Blizzard reads these forums. GC has said so himself.

Oh my god I love you, thanks for all the responses. The people on MMO-Champion will be happy you guys saw the post.
We read those forums all the time. There is good stuff in there (there is a lot of I FEEL NEGLECTED too, which waters it down).

source: https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/sta...09460412538880

[Tseng]

Another thing related to point 1) is the difference in gains from main stats:
Agi gives AP + Crit + Dodge while Str only gives AP + Parry.

While the AP portion is neglectible due to vengeance, the Crit from Agi part is a plain "bonus" leather wearers have and that gets stronger and stronger the higher gear levels become... (Monks gearing for Crit reaching 50%+ is... interesing )