How is Ignore Pain on the Beta going?

[Deleted]

I'm vehemently against anything that supports a more passive playstyle. I would never, ever want to be forced into the situation of playing something unfun just because it was optimal. Less buttons is just less depth and less fun. I don't want to play a Prot Warrior where every button is just "spin the wheel for Sword and Board proc."

For me, "unfun" is the exact opposite. I have 36% haste and it's impossible to play properly if I would have to spam 1 more button just to have a filler. At this haste, I don't need a filler at all. I can press a button at every gcd and a Devastate button simply wouldn't fit to the fast paced rotation anymore.

Again: At low haste levels you have longer gcd and longer cd-s on your base rotation abilities, it's much slower gameplay and the Devastate button fits to it.

When your gcd is almost at 1 second and your abilities have lowered cd-s, the Devastate button becomes a burden and your survival will suffer it, because it becomes a suboptimal setup, no matter how hard you try.

Btw spamming abilities and mashing buttons shouldn't be a thing for a player that takes the game a bit more serious and can buy a gaming mouse/keyboard to use macros. Spamming is for the poor or stupid ppl that can't use gaming hardware in the 21th century. It won't make you more skilled if you mash the buttons, it makes you laughable.

[Charble]

Btw spamming abilities and mashing buttons shouldn't be a thing for a player that takes the game a bit more serious and can buy a gaming mouse/keyboard to use macros. Spamming is for the poor or stupid ppl that can't use gaming hardware in the 21th century. It won't make you more skilled if you mash the buttons, it makes you laughable.

My point is that the rotation as it is is not particularly nuanced, at least compared to previous iterations of the spec. The current rotation is spam. You flood with rage and hit Ignore Pain, and three of your abilities are all things that fish for Sword and Board procs, because Shield Slam is your only "good" rage generator.

There should be planning or thinking involved. There's no Barrier Weaving, there's no deciding what to use based on your Vengeance level or situation, and there's no real consequence to pushing a suboptimal offensive ability because they a) all do the same thing or b) your rage loss will be mitigated by the fact you're getting rage from damage taken. There's also no threat, so there's also little consequence offensively to getting your rotation wrong aside from getting low parses.

I understand that on live, Devastate may not play the best in the current rotation. But the current rotation is brainless and uninteresting, and having Devastate do something with more depth to it is integral to making a good rotation in the next expansion. The Ignore Pain spam is going away, which is good; and that means Devastator as a talent becomes a talent that says "have less fun," and that needs to change. And it needs to change especially if the talent that says "have less fun" is also optimal.

[Deleted]

My point is that the rotation as it is is not particularly nuanced, at least compared to previous iterations of the spec. The current rotation is spam. You flood with rage and hit Ignore Pain, and three of your abilities are all things that fish for Sword and Board procs, because Shield Slam is your only "good" rage generator.

There should be planning or thinking involved. There's no Barrier Weaving, there's no deciding what to use based on your Vengeance level or situation, and there's no real consequence to pushing a suboptimal offensive ability because they a) all do the same thing or b) your rage loss will be mitigated by the fact you're getting rage from damage taken. There's also no threat, so there's also little consequence offensively to getting your rotation wrong aside from getting low parses.

I understand that on live, Devastate may not play the best in the current rotation. But the current rotation is brainless and uninteresting, and having Devastate do something with more depth to it is integral to making a good rotation in the next expansion. The Ignore Pain spam is going away, which is good; and that means Devastator as a talent becomes a talent that says "have less fun," and that needs to change. And it needs to change especially if the talent that says "have less fun" is also optimal.

What if I told you: Your rotation and "skill" are not your offensive abilities (because you also admit, it's not hard to push the button), but the defensive ones. When to time the artifact ability, if you miss a few seconds of Shield Block uptime (or use it on a corner to pick up the incoming adds, situational), when to use Spell Reflection, Demo Shout, how to chain them with bigger cd-s. Anger Management reduces these cd-s and I find it fluid in M+ where you have much more things to do, than in a raid (that's why it's better to give up a filler ability for an actual defensive one).

Don't think it's rocket science, it's a game and as a tank, your primary goal is to prevent the death of your party/raid members.

[Charble]

What if I told you: Your rotation and "skill" are not your offensive abilities (because you also admit, it's not hard to push the button), but the defensive ones.

Yes, that's a given. That's always been a part of tanking. But the two systems should be integrated as they have been in past expansions, like an earn and spend model of rage. The Legion warrior model plays like if they took a Vanilla warrior system but took out the parts that gave you any sort of role or agency. There's no more threat like in Vanilla/BC/Wrath, and your AM is just to "push the buttons" because you're swimming in rage, and they put no effort into tank mechanics in raid any more. You don't do anything as a tank anymore. You're just a meatshield, and tanking is reduced to "push cooldown to live, don't push cooldown to die." There's no Vengeance managing, there's no threat, your offensive rotation barely matters, your AM is brainless.

You can't spam Ignore Pain on Alpha, and that's a good change. Now you have to learn how to distribute and stagger your AM across time to live.

Now I want my offensive abilities to matter, too. Devastator as a go-to talent doesn't help that, and it seems like it amounts to absolute tedium on Alpha. My AM and my offensive rotation should be integrated more than "Shield Slam is the button that does the things." Devastator dumbs things down and feels bad in any iteration of any spec where you don't have a metric ton of haste.

The skill floor and skill ceiling are at an all-time low for tanks. It's what made me quit WoD. It's a big reason why I decided not to pick up Legion. I don't want this mistake made in a third consecutive expansion.

[thebdc]

I got alpha access last night, and of course I looked into the way the new IP works. I ran a dungeon with combat log enabled: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/XKdMph8yJTg1qPaw/

When IP reduces damage it creates an SPELL_DRAIN event, immediately followed by the actualy damage you take. Like this:

00:00:16.634 Irontide Enforcer swings at Shielderella
00:00:16.634 Irontide Mastiff 1 swings at Shielderella
00:00:16.634 Irontide Mastiff 2 swings at Shielderella
00:00:16.634 Shielderella's Ignore Pain drains 12 Rage from Shielderella
00:00:16.634 Irontide Enforcer Melee Shielderella 822
00:00:16.634 Shielderella's Ignore Pain drains 8 Rage from Shielderella
00:00:16.634 Irontide Mastiff 1 Melee Shielderella 540 (B: 793)
00:00:16.634 Shielderella's Ignore Pain drains 13 Rage from Shielderella
00:00:16.634 Irontide Mastiff 2 Melee Shielderella 846

From those numbers it looks like IP drains 1 Rage per roughly 100 damage reduced.

822 damage taken -> 1233 ignored -> 12 rage drained
540 damage taken -> 810 ignored -> 8 rage drained
846 damage taken -> 1269 ignored -> 13 rage drained

Fun fact: with casts it actually says that IP absorbed the damage:

00:00:30.634 Irontide Crackshot casts Shoot on Shielderella
00:00:30.751 Shielderella's Ignore Pain drains 5 Rage from Shielderella
00:00:30.751 Shielderella's Ignore Pain absorbs 571 damage of Irontide Crackshot's Shoot on Shielderella
00:00:30.751 Irontide Crackshot Shoot Shielderella 382

So if it's 1 rage per 100 damage, 100 rage could absorb 10000 damage. On alpha you got 22500 hp in the starting gear at level 110. 25305 hp on level 111. Not sure if the absorbed damage scales somehow (with level? With Azerize?), but if it doesn't that might be quite an issue, especially in infinitely scaling content (i.e. mythic+).

[Cylunaria]

So if it's 1 rage per 100 damage, 100 rage could absorb 10000 damage. On alpha you got 22500 hp in the starting gear at level 110. 25305 hp on level 111. Not sure if the absorbed damage scales somehow (with level? With Azerize?), but if it doesn't that might be quite an issue, especially in infinitely scaling content (i.e. mythic+).

Initial guesses right now would suggest it scales with your HP how much damage per rage you lose.

[thebdc]

Initial guesses right now would suggest it scales with your HP how much damage per rage you lose.

Yes, that seems to be true. I'm 111 now (with 25560 hp) and it now absorbs more. It seems to be about 0.5% of your hp per rage.

In the first log I posted the group was actually scaled down to ilvl 160, so I only had 19510 hp. 0.5% of that are 97.55. That aligns pretty well to the numbers I posted. It's a bit off for the first 2 examples, but nearly spot on for the 3rd. Might be rounding errors.

So I did some more tests with the increased hp pool. It's a bit hard to find mobs that actually hit so hard that they drain more than 1 rage, and unfortunately the class order hall is not accessible, so I can't test it on the tanking dummy. Anyways, here's the log entries from fighting a rare mob (full log):

00:00:21.218 Shielderella's Ignore Pain drains 10 Rage from Shielderella
00:00:21.218 Shielderella's Ignore Pain absorbs 1350 damage of Vukuba's Decaying Breath on Shielderella
00:00:21.218 Vukuba Decaying Breath Shielderella 901

00:00:50.341 Shielderella's Ignore Pain drains 8 Rage from Shielderella
00:00:50.341 Shielderella's Ignore Pain absorbs 1133 damage of Vukuba's Wind Burst on Shielderella
00:00:50.341 Vukuba Wind Burst Shielderella 756


901 damage taken -> 1350 ignored -> 10 rage drained (135 per rage point)
756 damage taken -> 1133 ignored -> 8 rage drained (141.625 per rage point)

As I said before my hp are now 25560, 0.5% of that are 127.8. It's a bit off, but the reason could be that the rage values are rounded down (or simply converted from float to int). That would also fit to the numbers I posted in my previous post.

1350 / 127.8 = 10.56
1133 / 127.8 = 8.86

[Toore]

There used to be tanking dummy on prvious ptrs in either Vale (Pandaria) or Shattrah

[Deleted]

Slightly offtopic.
But i think Mannoroth's Bracers are by far the best thing that has ever happened to this class.
I absolutely adore being able to be self-sufficient in the healing department and not having to rely on the clueless "#¤%'s you group up with in pickups.
Is there any hint that Warriors will get something similar in next expansion so if you outgear content you don't need to rely on a healer to survive?

[thebdc]

There used to be tanking dummy on prvious ptrs in either Vale (Pandaria) or Shattrah

Nice idea, but they don't seem to be in either city, unfortunately.

Slightly offtopic.
But i think Mannoroth's Bracers are by far the best thing that has ever happened to this class.
I absolutely adore being able to be self-sufficient in the healing department and not having to rely on the clueless "#¤%'s you group up with in pickups.
Is there any hint that Warriors will get something similar in next expansion so if you outgear content you don't need to rely on a healer to survive?

There's nothing new in the healing department right now, so your only way to heal is the (good?) old Victory Rush.

In fact we're worse off right now in terms of self-sustainability. On live thre are many low-damage situations where mobs don't even get through your IP. But on alpha IP absorbs 60% of the damage, so we effectively take more damage. This also means we're more reliant on healers than on live. For leveling it's ok, because with Impending Victory you can still pull bigger packs and use the kill-proccs to heal yourself up.

Just baking the effect of the bracers into the spec wouldn't probably work too well the way the rage gaining/spending and the new IP works.

[Jastall]

Yes, that's a given. That's always been a part of tanking. But the two systems should be integrated as they have been in past expansions, like an earn and spend model of rage. The Legion warrior model plays like if they took a Vanilla warrior system but took out the parts that gave you any sort of role or agency. There's no more threat like in Vanilla/BC/Wrath, and your AM is just to "push the buttons" because you're swimming in rage, and they put no effort into tank mechanics in raid any more. You don't do anything as a tank anymore. You're just a meatshield, and tanking is reduced to "push cooldown to live, don't push cooldown to die." There's no Vengeance managing, there's no threat, your offensive rotation barely matters, your AM is brainless.

You can't spam Ignore Pain on Alpha, and that's a good change. Now you have to learn how to distribute and stagger your AM across time to live.

Now I want my offensive abilities to matter, too. Devastator as a go-to talent doesn't help that, and it seems like it amounts to absolute tedium on Alpha. My AM and my offensive rotation should be integrated more than "Shield Slam is the button that does the things." Devastator dumbs things down and feels bad in any iteration of any spec where you don't have a metric ton of haste.

The skill floor and skill ceiling are at an all-time low for tanks. It's what made me quit WoD. It's a big reason why I decided not to pick up Legion. I don't want this mistake made in a third consecutive expansion.

It's a bit more complicated than that in practice. I've been assigned as our third tank for Argus progression and actually tank the boss sometimes in preparation for when we'll do ph3, and my survival is in my hands. For instance Battle Cry with the T21 bonus is very much an offensive CD that I use defensively in order to get the fattest IP possible for the second scythe so that I don't have to waste Demo Shout or Nelth's Fury, and it doesn't matter how much Rage I'm swimming in (which is not that much) because the boss punches through IPs very quickly once I have 2 stacks. And ph2 of that fight is pretty much all about the tank's reaction time. Thank the heavens for Heroic Leap is all i'll say to that.

The skill demand has changed, but it most definitely is there. There's a massive difference between a poor warrior that mistimes or overuses their cooldowns and a good one that can gauge the situation and maximize both their DPS and survivability by judicious ability use.

[Deleted]

I got Alpha last night and i've been spending the day tanking random dungeons on different classes.
So far i'm liking the new IP a lot compared to the spamfest we had before. That being said we do seem to lack in other departments.
Comparing to a paladin which is the other tank i've played the most on alpha we are:
100% behind in self sustein. We literally have like nothing compared to a paladin.
Our mitigation is a bit better against large hitters.
Paladins can take a talent that increases their shield block chance and in turn also does damage when they block. This is absolutely godlike for speed running dungeons.
That plus a few other things like ret aura as an example also means that we are just absolutely patheticly behind when it comes to aoe threat. Our only reliable AoE ability is thunder clap and revenge procs. Since rage is very important we cant just waste it on revenge whenever we feel like.
Paladins have some truly awesome utility aswell compared to us.
I'm not worried for us when it comes to raids. But for mythic plus i dont think we are going to compare to the other tanks