Protection legion Discussion

[Breccia]

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

This is childishly easy to demonstrate. Again.

Your examples thus far have had one thing in common: predictable, dull damage flow. They reflect very few fights in the game. Our AM system, based on RFTD and IP, work fine with this because there are no moving parts. They do not work nearly as well with burst or unpreventable damage. If a period of slow intake is followed by a high magic-damage burst -- say, the forced tank swaps in Archimonde Phase One -- taking less damage now could very easily lead to more damage later, since you'd have fewer (or none!) IP's coming your way to eat that damage that comes later. As I've demonstrated before, an Archi hit on an appropriate tank is a significant portion of their HP and, as such, a significant portion of Rage, very likely around 10 per hit. Parrying one of his attacks is not, granting you at most 5 Rage every other swing due to the ICD of Revenge Procs. Blocking, critical blocking, same. Then comes the Shadow Blast and the vicious increasing DoT that follows. And while yes, you'd gain Rage from that damage taken, you'd have gotten just as much from damage absorbed because you had the Rage to Ignore Pain it.

And even if I were to ignore that comment about us not showing our work -- back off on that, this thread contains loads of examples -- the question isn't even if mitigation outpaces the Rage loss. The question is, why are we getting less benefit from mitigation (or max health for that matter) from everyone else?

Do you know what happens to a Paladin's Holy Power if he parries an attack? Nothing.
Do you know what happens to a Blood DK's rune/runic energy if he parries an attack? Nothing.
Do you know what happens to a Brewmaster Monk's energy and chi if he dodges an attack? Nothing.
Do you know what happens to a Guardian Druid's Rage if they dodge an attack? Nothing. Unless they took that stupid talent, in which case, they're left with just the baseline Rage, not the bonus.
Do you know what happens to a DH's Pain if they dodge an attack? Well they get less Pain, but their proportion of controlled vs. uncontrolled pain is better than ours, so it's a lower difference.

All of the above tanks continue to get resources better than us (four of them 100% unchanged) when attacks miss.

Now you might be thinking "Breccia, don't DKs and Druids get less healing when they don't take as much damage?" Yes, but mathematically they still come out ahead. They're healing up from a higher starting point, and while they heal less numbers, they end at a higher health. It's mandatory. Oh, and both have a fixed minimum they heal themselves. We get no minimum Rage from a span of 15 seconds of off-tanking and taking no damage. The same can be said for monk healing spheres. If they're hit less often, they generate fewer of them. True. But that's a big difference. We have to be pro-active. Self-healers are reactive.

And you might say "okay, but DK's absorb shield will be lower by virtue of lower heals". Maybe, but there's still a minimum. They can't be 100% fucked over. We can. A period of no incoming damage, such as offtanking, gives us zero RFDT, making it harder to protect against future attacks. DKs still have all the resources they need to make an absorb shield. Also, they could choose to just wait until they're hit, knowing they have the resources to land a potent self-heal and now upgraded absorb once they take any hit that doesn't kill them...which, since they weren't hit before, will be any hit. We don't have the luxury of waiting till we are hit, because IP isn't a heal, no matter what your graphs say.

In the end, the basic argument is still over. You can quabble over the exact specifics all you want, and I'm never going to give an inch. Because there should not be any specifics to quabble over in the first place. The RFDT mechanics mixed with preventative IP is a stupid idea that causes us to get lesser effects from max health and mitigation, a situation that should never have come to pass in the first place.

You can repeat "better gear is better" all you want. It's even more better for anyone except us. And that's some Orwellian shit right there.

[Beardyface]

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.

You're still forgetting two key things:

Never Surrender - as I stated before, this is essentially baseline. You're hurting yourself if you take any other talent. Even if you assume that a tank is going to be at 50% health on average while tanking, and only tanking half of the time, it's still more IP for your buck than Indomitable. If we assume this, they're both a 25% IP increase on average, which cancel each other out, except with Indomitable you gain less rage. When you consider Never Surrender, health becomes far, far less important.

Active Mitigation checks - ala Kilrogg and Mannoroth. There are more of these in Legion. Rage is the only thing that is effective for them. Health and mitigation do nothing. If you assume we are attempting to take as little damage as possible at all times (which I think is a given), you have to assume we're using IP as often as possible. This will be less problematic when we under-gear content and more problematic when we reach the gear level of the instance or over-gear it. Even a 740+ ilvl tank will still drop dead on mythic Mannoroth if they don't use active mitigation on Glaive Thrust.

I understand you're just trying to get concrete numbers - we would all like that - but even SimCraft's numbers on tanks are still wobbly, due to the sheer amount of variables inherent in tanking. Even with a formula like TMI, which accounts for quite a lot, you're still only going to get a very basic idea of what's going on from a math standpoint. You can get pretty good math against a tanking training dummy, but there are zero raid or dungeon encounters that work like the dummies do.

If you're unfamiliar with TMI, see here. It's interesting:

http://www.sacredduty.net/theck-melo...ence-document/

And as Tigger said about "better gear is better," you can't simply analyze warriors in a vacuum. With RFDT in the equation, IP has to be far stronger than other tanks active mitigation, since other tanks benefit from stats mostly the same way we do, but they don't gain less resources as they gear up (again, DH notwithstanding). This is why IP and it's tie to RFDT are so important.

Finally, none of this even matters when most raid leaders find out that Prot Warrior doesn't scale as well as the other tanks. No amount of math matters when you're on the bench.

[Deleted]

Never Surrender - as I stated before, this is essentially baseline. You're hurting yourself if you take any other talent. Even if you assume that a tank is going to be at 50% health on average while tanking, and only tanking half of the time, it's still more IP for your buck than Indomitable. If we assume this, they're both a 25% IP increase on average, which cancel each other out, except with Indomitable you gain less rage. When you consider Never Surrender, health becomes far, far less important.

But you don't take Indomitable to directly compete with NS in IP throughput. If you can afford to roleplay a DK with Never Surrender IPs, then great, this boss' damage pattern/mechanics favor that talent. If you meet another Tyrant or you're undergeared, Indomitable will more reliably keep you healable.

Active Mitigation checks - ala Kilrogg and Mannoroth. There are more of these in Legion. Rage is the only thing that is effective for them. Health and mitigation do nothing. If you assume we are attempting to take as little damage as possible at all times (which I think is a given), you have to assume we're using IP as often as possible.

Shield Block is 10! rage, IP is 40. As long as you have a charge, you can pop a Block whenever and save 2/3 IPs. In our "Golden Age" of WoD rage generation, it's 60/60*, allowing you to save up two in whatever combination. Sure, you generate the minimum 20 rage for a minimum Barrier whenever you feel like it. But a minimum Barrier is a fickle thing. Nor do you just frantically shotgun your mitigation at either of those bosses disregarding ability timers. Nor will you in Legion, we may as well assume. Otherwise the class is undertuned in all kinds of ways and we're zeroing in on RFDT out of spite more than anything.

And as Tigger said about "better gear is better," you can't simply analyze warriors in a vacuum. With RFDT in the equation, IP has to be far stronger than other tanks active mitigation, since other tanks benefit from stats mostly the same way we do, but they don't gain less resources as they gear up (again, DH notwithstanding). This is why IP and it's tie to RFDT are so important.

I very much agree. IP really has to measure up to its cost. Not just RFDT but our diminished rage generation in its entirety. I dread to get another semi-hard Shield Barrier for another whole expansion.
You can't analyze anything in vacuum, be it rage generation, warriors, tanks. I can't wait for people to actually throw the classes at Legion encounters with some semi-reasonable tuning and see how they hold up in comparison to oneanother.

From the looks of it, we definitely get to press IP less often than Barrier right now (although getting more flexibility in Block use). But if IP is tuned to be accordingly more potent, then so what? Tanking BRF, I would have loved to trade in a bunch of wimpy insignificant Barriers for even a fraction of that meaty Guard.

[Deleted]

I'm in Finland and I am pretty wasted. Holy shit, there's some tasty stuff here.

Right.. Let's try again when you're sober, okay? ; )

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?!".

I do agree with most of this, which is what I was trying to point out on the previous page.

The rage loss might be so damn negligible in comparison to the rest, and especially to the increased survivability from extra health, that it would become the least of our worries. The important question then becomes how are we actually doing when compared to the other tanks? Are we on par or doing clearly worse? Then work towards fixing any major disadvantage instead.

Right now though, without conclusive data, we can't accurately answer the important question. We can merely speculate and conjecture.

[Beardyface]

But you don't take Indomitable to directly compete with NS in IP throughput. If you can afford to roleplay a DK with Never Surrender IPs, then great, this boss' damage pattern/mechanics favor that talent. If you meet another Tyrant or you're undergeared, Indomitable will more reliably keep you healable.

Never Surrender is better in every situation every time at all gear levels, unless somehow you massively out-gear the content. Period. And by massively out-gear, I mean you're tanking WoD raids in Legion and taking almost no damage. Look back in the thread if you need more info.

Shield Block is 10! rage, IP is 40. As long as you have a charge, you can pop a Block whenever and save 2/3 IPs. In our "Golden Age" of WoD rage generation, it's 60/60*, allowing you to save up two in whatever combination. Sure, you generate the minimum 20 rage for a minimum Barrier whenever you feel like it. But a minimum Barrier is a fickle thing. Nor do you just frantically shotgun your mitigation at either of those bosses disregarding ability timers. Nor will you in Legion, we may as well assume. Otherwise the class is undertuned in all kinds of ways and we're zeroing in on RFDT out of spite more than anything.

There was some debate about whether or not Shield Block worked against AM checks, even though it's listed as AM. I never saw a consensus on that. I need to try and look it up.

From the looks of it, we definitely get to press IP less often than Barrier right now (although getting more flexibility in Block use). But if IP is tuned to be accordingly more potent, then so what? Tanking BRF, I would have loved to trade in a bunch of wimpy insignificant Barriers for even a fraction of that meaty Guard.

If IP is potent enough to outpace the other tanks, we will be nerfed. It's a terrible tuning knob in it's current design. There are ways to help fix this. See my giant post a few pages back for examples.

[Valkaneer]

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

Like I said before, a boss doesn't hit you harder because you have more gear on. Mythic Archi at 720 ilv and mythic Archi at 740 ilvl.... So when does Mytic Archi decide to hit you harder because you now have full mythic gear? In any Tier you will start the tier generating more RPDT than the end of the Tier, and that is fact. I don't need any math annalist to prove it because its beyond common sense.

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I don't know why were are even having this discussion anymore about stamina. It's so simple and easy to understand. A raid gains nothing from your stamina once you have enough to survive a boss fight. Giving you more stam will only drain the healers mana pool faster when you could have spent those stats on mitigation and dps stats that will make the boss fight end faster. It is also common sense that the more haste and str (mitigation and rage) you have, the less HP you will need. Common sense.

Not only is it common sense, it's what always have done before active mitigation.

[Deleted]

Never Surrender is better in every situation every time at all gear levels, unless somehow you massively out-gear the content. Period. And by massively out-gear, I mean you're tanking WoD raids in Legion and taking almost no damage. Look back in the thread if you need more info.

How about every 'Impale' mechanic ever? You have to be topped off before it lands, you usually are (otherwise RIP), you pop a cooldown or absorb, you don't get oneshot \o/
Never Surrender does nothing because you were not and could not afford to be at a HP deficit to game its benefits. Indomitable gave you the extra health cushion and the default bonus to a preemptive IP.
Gruul's Inferno Slice, H&F's Crippling Suplex, Flamebender Charring Breath, Kromog just being himself, Socrethar's Reverberating Blow (so-so)

It's exactly the opposite. If I overgear a boss or its damage is by design smooth and predictable, all of it during the entire encounter at all times, then I can game Never Surrender's benefit to the max. If I severely undergear a boss or it can by design predictably or randomly 100-0 me, then my health is in the hands of the healers and the best I can do is my pad my healthbar enough to give it some room to yo-yo around.

There was some debate about whether or not Shield Block worked against AM checks, even though it's listed as AM. I never saw a consensus on that. I need to try and look it up.

This is something they've brought in with Legion then? It sure works on AM checks currently.

[Valkaneer]

How about every 'Impale' mechanic ever? You have to be topped off before it lands, you usually are (otherwise RIP), you pop a cooldown or absorb, you don't get oneshot \o/

IP is an absorb, one that gives you rage. If you stack stam / parry or dodge you will have a smaller IP and less rage generation, but if you stack MASTERY, str, or haste you will build rage and for sure have a higher IP. No way on the planet that Stam out weighs mastery. Since mast increases, block, critical block, and AP. Stam is such a faulty argument.

On AM (anti magic?) - Spell Reflection (zero rage) instant 25 sec CD, last for 5 sec + Artifact talent will give you an unlimited amount of spell reflects for the duration.

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I am fairly sure we will be stacking Mastery / Haste.

To stack stamina you will have to give up one or both of the other stats on something like trinkets. I highly highly doubt any of the post made showing Stam is great replaced that stamina with Mastery.

[Deleted]

How about every 'Impale' mechanic ever? You have to be topped off before it lands, you usually are (otherwise RIP), you pop a cooldown or absorb, you don't get oneshot \o/
Never Surrender does nothing because you were not and could not afford to be at a HP deficit to game its benefits. Indomitable gave you the extra health cushion and the default bonus to a preemptive IP.
Gruul's Inferno Slice, H&F's Crippling Suplex, Flamebender Charring Breath, Kromog just being himself, Socrethar's Reverberating Blow (so-so)

It's exactly the opposite. If I overgear a boss or its damage is by design smooth and predictable, all of it during the entire encounter at all times, then I can game Never Surrender's benefit to the max. If I severely undergear a boss or it can by design predictably or randomly 100-0 me, then my health is in the hands of the healers and the best I can do is my pad my healthbar enough to give it some room to yo-yo around.




This is something they've brought in with Legion then? It sure works on AM checks currently.

while you cant get the benefit of never surrender before the big hit, if it does indeed hit you that hard you will almost assuredly have enough rage for another right after that will get 60%+ increase from it. But anything 50% and over will equal out with indomitable in that regard.

and a situation where indomitable is a hard requirement to survive, i don't see happening because in that case only bears and warriors would be viable tanks.

[Valkaneer]

while you cant get the benefit of never surrender before the big hit, if it does indeed hit you that hard you will almost assuredly have enough rage for another right after that will get 60%+ increase from it. But anything 50% and over will equal out with indomitable in that regard.

and a situation where indomitable is a hard requirement to survive, i don't see happening because in that case only bears and warriors would be viable tanks.

According to the theory crafters Bey talked to, Indomitable is only better if you hardly ever drop below 25% hp. Indomitable increases you HP by 25% making your rage gain from RFDT 25% less. There saying your not going to make up that difference from the benefits of NS.

[Beardyface]

This is something they've brought in with Legion then? It sure works on AM checks currently.

It was reported early in the alpha. Could have been a bug. Still trying to find the original discussion. I don't have beta access so I can't test it. Anyone know for sure?

[Valkaneer]

It was reported early in the alpha. Could have been a bug. Still trying to find the original discussion. I don't have beta access so I can't test it. Anyone know for sure?

I'm in beta, what exactly are you meaning when you say AM checks?

[cRawmode]

After reading through the last couple of pages there seems to be a lot of discussion about warrior's tuning in general and their toolkit as well as the new RFDT mechanic which is a questionable design choice.

Now to my question to the more experienced warrior tank fellows: How do you currently feel about the current protection warrior toolkit and its viability for 5 man mythic dungeons and mythic + dungeons. Will we be once more outshined by DKs, Paladins and also now DHs for such content?

I am asking because I for myself am not quite decided which Tank I am going to play between DK, Warrior and DH which also has a strong and effective DPS offspec for such content. Your input would be really helpful. Thanks

[Carmion]

I'm in beta, what exactly are you meaning when you say AM checks?

Boss abilities that require a defensive mechanism flagged as active mitigation to be up OR ELSE!
Like Mannoroth Glaive Combo or Kilrogg Shred Armor or Rukhran (Giant Eagly Boss in Skyreach) Pierce Armor.

Currently Shield Block and Barrier both count as active mitigation and question was, if in Beta still both skills are flagged as such.

[Deleted]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouKSfBJPdZ8

You can see the rage generation when both tanking and off-tanking. Whatever Blizzard gods are bestowing her the rage while off-tanking, I'm actually surprised how... sufficient it looks.

And of course thank you to Yse for the prot warrior representation

I was searching through the Mythic+ logs on Warcraftlogs, but it's mainly just DKs with some DHs, Druids and Paladins dotted in. I only found one prot warrior who stopped after the first boss in Maw. Could be a prot warrior 'tradition' thing of not sticking their nose in CMs.

There's this undetone that RFDT is a crutch that all our mitigation is standing on. Half (bigger or smaller half, depends on boss) of our mitigation, Shield Block, costs so little rage that it's even less limited by rage than it is in WoD. All the rage left over from SB can freely be used on IP. IP looks quite strong in the video, we're definitely not supposed to have 100% uptime as that would make us immortal DKs. The bonus rage income from RFDT then seems to be a pseudo Resolve mechanic more than anything, to give us that extra IP boost if the boss is hitting obscenely fucking hard or if it's a damage type that could not be mitigated by Block (and then probably not avoided by parry). It's not a gating mechanic for (dis)allowing any IP use ever.

[Ashenia]

Alpha raid testing was pretty always full of over/under-tuned stuff which might have change the way rage was generated from RFDT. As for the normal active rage generation, that was only caused by going super hard into Haste gear setup. This was pretty easy as any gear would scale up to certain ilvl that was set for specific test. Comparing the gear I did get (and I really tried to push Haste as prio number 1) on Beta after leveling to 110 and acquiring some of the loot from dungeons/world quests is far, far away from what I was getting on mentioned above tests. The easiest comparison is the cooldown on SS from 6/5.8 sec on raid tests to 8.5/7.9 on Beta.

So from what they are giving us in terms of gear that we will get as soon as we level up and gear up for raids, it won't be that tasty. There could be a quick solution to be fair to all rage problems by getting us lower CD's on SS/Rev or just getting more haste from other source then talent/gear. There is also a trap there called Into the Fray which with that could cause it to be choice number 1 to push our CD's to certain level, which would be too low. One way or another, we end up with issues..

For me it would rather lowering our CD's (IF the gear they are planing to drop for us won't provide enough haste to not go stupidly haste heavy) or just make Haste only affect Shield Block and reduce our SS/Rev to 6 sec.

[Deleted]

Is there any competitive outlook for crit atm? I can't tell from the tooltips whether Sword&Board procs from Devastate crits or hits or both. That plus Revenge resets. Given the latter is rather low rage and counter-intuitive for IP spamming.

[Valkaneer]

Boss abilities that require a defensive mechanism flagged as active mitigation to be up OR ELSE!
Like Mannoroth Glaive Combo or Kilrogg Shred Armor or Rukhran (Giant Eagly Boss in Skyreach) Pierce Armor.

Currently Shield Block and Barrier both count as active mitigation and question was, if in Beta still both skills are flagged as such.

Shield Block and Ignore Pain are flagged as Active Mitigation in the spell book.

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Is there any competitive outlook for crit atm? I can't tell from the tooltips whether Sword&Board procs from Devastate crits or hits or both. That plus Revenge resets. Given the latter is rather low rage and counter-intuitive for IP spamming.

There is no such thing as Sword and Board anymore in Legion.

[Beardyface]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouKSfBJPdZ8

You can see the rage generation when both tanking and off-tanking. Whatever Blizzard gods are bestowing her the rage while off-tanking, I'm actually surprised how... sufficient it looks.

Isn't the off tank always taking damage in this encounter? I thought there were adds that were for the off-tank only.

Is there any competitive outlook for crit atm? I can't tell from the tooltips whether Sword&Board procs from Devastate crits or hits or both. That plus Revenge resets. Given the latter is rather low rage and counter-intuitive for IP spamming.

Says crits only. Crit should end up being our least valued stat.

Shield Block and Ignore Pain are flagged as Active Mitigation in the spell book.

Shield Block has always been flagged as Active Mitigation, but early in the alpha it wasn't working against spells that can only be countered by Active Mitigation

There is no such thing as Sword and Board anymore in Legion.

Did they remove it? Still on wowhead: http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=46953/sword-and-board

[Deleted]

I'm still thinking intercept on cooldown (on ally), especially with the JC neckace, will be a big part of rage gain. kinda makes me miss double time

gonna be tricky to do without turning the boss though on fights where you can't use it on the second tank though, but maybe it's only really needed when offtanking.

i'm really really hoping the redirected attacks from artifact talent will be a usefull mechanic, and that it won't mess up debuff stacks and stuff like that.