[Ciderhelm]

Ghostcrawler has handed us another great bit of information... read up! (And, if you missed yesterday's news, scroll down for more good news!)

Source: Ghostcrawler, WotLK-Beta Wall o' text coming... As I said before, whether Protection shoud be viable for PvP is controversial. People on the extreme of both sides of the debate should be able to see pretty clearly that there are plenty of others who don't see their point of view. It's not an argument that is going to be won by debate, consensus or vote. As I've also said, there are some things we want to do with Prot to improve it. We could make a very fat, very boring tree with 30 talents that promise excellent passive mitigation. I don't think that's going to make warriors any more fun to play. Here's what we'd like to do instead: Add some more fun abilities to the tree. Warbringer is one such ability. It may not be something everyone will use, and honestly, we're cool with that. Some talents should be optional. We also know some tanks, even hardcore endgame ones are excited about the ability. As a tank it could be a good source of rage (Yes, we know you lose all your rage when stance dancing -- the design of Warbringer is not that you stupidly lose all your rage when you change to Battle Stance and then say oops.) It could also help your mobility on fights where you need to zip around a lot to put out fires -- that's part of tanking too. It's not all sitting there and getting hit by Brutallus. To make room for some of those abilities, you have to have some options. The classic tanking build from BC doesn't leave you a lot of free talents. We need to combine a few mitigation talents together to buy you some space. Also, must haves like Imp Heroic Strike and Imp Thunder Clap may not be must haves anymore, because... We're buffing Prot's dps. A lot. This is going to help with threat, and will make doing dps with a prot build (whether as OT, MT, leveling or doing daily quests) more fun. A lot of abilities that do +threat now are going to be doing +damage instead. You are going to see crits from Thunder Clap and Conc Blow that might blow your mind. You're going to hit Thunder Clap and have mobs stick to you long enough for you to use some other abilities. Oh and If you haven't tried Retaliation while tanking yet, it rules. For those who never got to enjoy the joys of Shield Slam with crazy +block, you'll soon get to. Warriors lost a very comfortable tanking niche with the removal of crushing blows. We need to make sure there are still good reasons to take a Prot warrior. Vigilance and Safeguard are good starts there, but we're also looking at buffing signature abilities like Spell Reflect. A lot of the recent changes were intended as buffs, not nerfs. We'll get you your Expertise back. We'll get you your cheap Devastates back. As we start to get the talent trees in better shape, we're going to be able to get a better handle on the state of balance. Simultaneously, people in the beta will start venturing into heroics and Naxx. This will start to give us some data for the first time on whether L80 Prot warrior threat or mitigation is too low compared to other classes. If it is, we'll fix it. I mention that because we designed Vigilance not as a band-aid to fix Prot warrior threat (because we don't know if it's too high or low yet) but because we thought it would be fun. Use it on that reckless warlock who likes to pull aggro and you turn a weakness into a strength. Use it on your fragile healer and you can, yanno, actually *protect* them. Instead of having to say "Please wait for 3 Sunders before you attack" maybe people will say "That tank has Vigilance -- no way you'll pull off him." We're not done with the trees yet. We still welcome your feedback on these concepts and abilities, but all this rerolling talk is quite premature... and almost always is. Source: WotLK-Beta Forums

This was followed up with this set of responses:

Source: Ghostcrawler, WotLK-Beta Please explain to me why I have to spec into arms (43/5/23) to attain more threat generation than a full prot spec on beta: Because we haven't done the numbers yet. But that's still a useful data point to know. It might even be okay if non-tanking specs can generate a lot of threat (heck, hunters do it), so long as they also don't have high mitigation. Call me jaded but we were promised "awesome changes" in the past. Plus I saw mages promised the same sort of thing and well....no one wanted them anymore by the end of TBC. That's an understandable position, but it also leaves us at sort of a dead end. You're jaded so you don't want to get excited or perhaps even post. I stop coming around because the environment is hostile and the posts aren't informative and we all sit around sad and lonely all the time not talking to each other. The only alternative is to keep plugging along and try to do better. I've got thick skin. I'll be around. This is what we want. It's what *you* want. I think you can see that not everyone agrees with you, at which point the only option is for someone to argue they are more qualified to know what the class wants than someone else... and that never ends well. The best we can offer is flexibility so that you can pick up all the passive mitigation talents and someone else can try out a different build. The problem with Prot before, I'd argue, is that there weren't enough choices to go around so that by the time you got the bare minimum, the options left were pretty paltry. It's like we post and you don't listen.. Au contraire. We listen and listen and listen. We also listen to other forums, and hardcore tanks who have been raiding forever, and people we talk to in game and in our guilds. We also do a lot of testing ourselves and we do have some experience designing games. But the point I actually want to make is that WoW is a very big and diverse community with a lot of hardcore players. It is very rare to see consensus, and that also is assuming that majorities are never wrong. Simply put, we bring nothing to a raid. Nothing, no buffs, no debuffs that can't be applied by someone else. That is pretty much the point. No class brings anything so unique that you want them to come at the expense of others. You should earn your raid spot because you know how to tank and have some decent gear and a guild who can back you up. Maybe you're a great leader or maybe you don't argue. Maybe you've got a great sense of humor or are a good guild recruiter. All of those are better reasons to get into a group IMHO than because your buff is a unique snowflake. Quite honestly I'd rather raid with my friends than some jerk who has the perfect buff. And I really don't want to send one of my friends off to reroll a level 1 dude because we both happened to choose rogues at first level six months ago and now our group is suffering for want of a buff. If you can tank, you'll get into raids. What they'll do is say "Ok, aside from tanking, what do they bring to the table?" In my experience, what they do is say "This dude knows his class backwards and forwards," or "This dude has a new epic shield," or "This dude is a consistent player who won't leave us in a lurch on Thursday." But for the sake of argument, let's continue. The druid steps forward and says "I have Battle Res, possibly the best ability in game for guilds when it comes to learning new content. I can also innervate, and I'm really good at switching to dps when I don't have to tank. If we ever get to an extreme fight that requires a lot of healers, I can respec if we need it." The Prot warrior should also be able to switch to dps, and they come with Battle Shout and Commanding Shout, two very solid buffs. No, they can't heal. The Paladin steps forward and says "I can cover one of your 3-4 primary Paladin Blessings. I'm still the best AoE tank for large pulls, like those spiders you see scampering around down there. I have many auras which are useful to stack in the raid, I have wipe prevention in the form of DI, and I have plenty of other tricks like BoP or BoF, or Lay Hands. Oh, and I can respec healing too if the raid really needs it for a fight." If the paladin is so much better at AE that you take him instead of a warrior, then we have a problem. Yes, pallys are able to heal. That part is totally valid. The Death Knight steps forward and says "I know I'm new, but I'm the WotLK favored child and you know it. I'm the best Magic boss tank, and you know there'll be fights tailored to me. And I bring just as many tricks as the Paladin, only mine are cooler cause they involve ghouls and exploding corpses." Again, the "best Magic boss" shouldn't be to the extent that you call the raid when she can't come. There will be no fights tailored to a particular class. Sorry. Believe me, we don't have to come up with a gimmick to encourage death knight raiders. Northrend is infested with them already. Ghouls are cool though. The Prot Warrior steps forward and says "I can Disarm...some mobs, not quite sure yet if it'll hit bosses and how many. And there's an ability that let's me put a buff like Pain suppression on people, which..maybe will come in handy, depending on the bosses we find? And I have a single-target 10% threat reducer." You Sunder, you Demo Shout, Battle Shout, Challenging Shout. You might Piercing Howl depending on the encounter. You Execute. You Intervene. See where I'm going...? If you are really winning or losing fights based on whether your tank can Innervate, then we've probably made the content too challenging. The difference in skill (or gear) between a potential warrior and druid tank should have a much bigger effect on the outcome. The situations we've had before have been more like "The paladin can tank all of Heroic Shattered Halls with no CC" or "The druid can do nearly double your dps while tanking" or "The warrior can achieve passive crushing immunity and has the only ability that can handle Shear." Those are egregious barriers to having 4 viable tanking classes, which is why we're trying to fix them. Source: WotLK-Beta Forums

[Klimpen]

Consolidation of talents so you have a core set of talents and then some 'choice' is awesome. I'm jealous and I really hope they do the same for Tankadins.

[Freeway]

They are starting to get me really pumped up for LK

[Ciderhelm]

Source: Freeway They are starting to get me really pumped up for LK

Yeah. I've been in overdrive for the last week, and it's getting worse.

[Galushi]

When they first said that pallies were getting a holy shield slam, and their abilities would scale with AP, i got really psyched about my pally. I have basically had him retired since my priest replaced him as my 70 healer. So i was really thinking about lvling him first in LK. But with all these new prot changes for warriors. Man...Im really stoked again for warriors. Especially the Slam mechanic change. Soooo long overdue.

Not to mention Training dummies! =D

[Jasra]

Although I'm not a fan of the "Protaferal" direction (particularly because it's so absolutely inverse to where we started with 1.x tanking), but it's good to know that they've appear to have come to a decision.

I'm having trouble understanding what she's saying about Warbringer though. I can read that as "It's supposed to be good to have so defensive stance is a possibility.", or I can read it as "If you want to be foolish and throw away a full rage bar on it, that's your prerogative."

[Bonerot]

I'm voting for Ghostcrawler 08. Very nice to have so much communication regarding tanking. I don't see that level of involvement from the dps or healing side so we are certainly lucky to be getting posts this detailed.

I think GC's tank balancing must be working since the only significant advantage a tanking class has would be the AoE tanking from the paladin. If I can hold a complete 5 man dungeon pull vs dps multi-mob abilities (not just healing) as a warrior though the need for a Paladin to make dungeons faster is certainly a bit lower then it was in BC.

[Sandmann]

sounds really nice, looking forward to it.

[Aughban]

i was looking forward to wotlk anyway but now im gonna have 2 do a cartman and freeze myself in the ice because i can't wait no more!

[Lore]

Warriors are silly.

[Tenraiel]

Source: Jasra I'm having trouble understanding what she's saying about Warbringer though. I can read that as "It's supposed to be good to have so defensive stance is a possibility.", or I can read it as "If you want to be foolish and throw away a full rage bar on it, that's your prerogative."

I believe that it's more of a statement saying that they assume we will play intelligently with the talent. GC doesn't see the fact that you have to stance dance a real problem if you are good at controling your rage and using warbringer like they intend it - situationally. I think that it's a good call: know you need to charge soon? Dump all the rage you have on threat as quick as you can before it's time. Plan around it. Stance dance for more than just fear ... I'm so excited - wrath is beginning to sound like a ball.

[Kromzul]

I'm a bit confused how these two statements follow one another:

Also, must haves like Imp Heroic Strike and Imp Thunder Clap may not be must haves anymore, because...

You are going to see crits from Thunder Clap and Conc Blow that might blow your mind.

If you're doing half of your potential damage from Thunderclap, doesn't that preclude "crits from Thunderclap that might blow your mind"?

[Noc]

Imp TC 3/3 increases TC dmg by 100%, so won't that make it == your pot dmg before crits?

[Daimon]

does any1 knows if they release the fixed talent calculator, i can't wait to put the numbers.

[phaze]

Source: Kromzul If you're doing half of your potential damage from Thunderclap, doesn't that preclude "crits from Thunderclap that might blow your mind"?

Yeah, I noticed that too. A little too much spin from GW; now someone's dizzy!

From the changes I've read, I don't see anything that will convince me to not take 3/3 Imp TC.

[Aughban]

Source: phaze Yeah, I noticed that too. A little too much spin from GW; now someone's dizzy! From the changes I've read, I don't see anything that will convince me to not take 3/3 Imp TC.

well they increased the CD on thunderclap so obviously it was generating more threat than it was suppost too, even with a 2 second increase it must be a phat load of threat so 3/3 imp TC makes sense to me.

[Orenus]

Source: Tenraiel Stance dance for more than just fear

Given that GC also mentioned tanking with Retaliation and using Execute, I think we're going to be stance dancing alot. TM might just turn out to be a must-have raid tank talent.

[khelben]

Source: Lore Warriors are silly.

<3 chu Lore.

[jere]

Source: Kromzul I'm a bit confused how these two statements follow one another: Also, must haves like Imp Heroic Strike and Imp Thunder Clap may not be must haves anymore, because... You are going to see crits from Thunder Clap and Conc Blow that might blow your mind. If you're doing half of your potential damage from Thunderclap, doesn't that preclude "crits from Thunderclap that might blow your mind"?

I think they actually follow quite well. She is saying their aim is that you won't "need" to spec those talents to tank and one of the reasons is that they are boosting the base DPS of warrior tanks enough that you are going to notice much higher numbers/crits without the talents that boost damage, such as Imp. TC 3/3. Obviously, spec'ing them would increase that, but I think they are aiming to make the need to spec them go away by making sure the base damage is sufficient and viable.

At least that is how I interpret them in the context she provided.

[Seph]

I dunno, all this "fun factor" that they're spreading when talking about how they're developing the talent/tree changes somehow scares me.
Would be great if the "funny" talents had a... let me see... different and colorful border so I can skip them =|

On a serious note I do like what I'm seeing now about damage and threat, seems like we'll let our DPSs go all out a lot more, and earlier ;D