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.