How-to nerf warriors, player suggestions

As I mentioned in a similar thread, there is precedent for keying certain PVE oriented talents to Defense. Both AD and IBF scale with defense as a means to ensure that these pve oriented abilities aren't as effective without pve gear. For example, you could:
- Give warbringer snare reduction a chance to fail with sub-540 defense
- Add defense rating into the scaling for damage done by shield slam / damage shield / conc blow / revenge (especially would like to see revenge buffed for pve prot warriors, it's a shame that it's fallen behind)
- Add defense rating as a scaling element into the shield block ability

If they did this in such a way that 540 defense gives exactly the same damage as done today, it becomes a PVP / Solo PVE only nerf. No tanking warrior will notice. If they do it in a smart way, they could even buff us in the process, as most warriors go above 540 without trying.

Resiliance should increase resistance to spells and armor pen by the same amount as it currently decreases crit %.
So you could have:
12.5% less player damage
12.5% less crits
25% less damage from crits
25% resistance to spells
25% resistance to armor penetration effects

Then make all pvp gear 5 stat items with a full set counteracting the 25% resistance to spells and 25% resistance to armor pen (aka casters get 25% spell penetration and melee get 25% arp)

Finally add a debuff to the shadow sight icons that gives a 100% mortal strike for 10s effect to prevent matches from going too long.

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Originally Posted by TomHuxley

Waiting for Cataclysm isn't a suitable solution. I know how it will be fixed then, but I'd like to not finish out the last tier of Wrath doing 20% less DPS than other tanks. I don't want to have to quest that much slower, farm heroics that much slower, or see near-kills that would have beaten the enrage timer if I'd been able to do another 100k DPS during the fights. It's crap and they need to fix it.

The whole point of this thread, and others like it is to find solutions that will allow warriors to be nerfed in PVP while buffed in PVE now, before Wrath.

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World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Do we REALLY have to wait for Cata for fixes?

Waiting for cataclysm is probably the solution you're going to get.

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Originally Posted by Maelstrom

Waiting for cataclysm is probably the solution you're going to get.

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I'm sorry, but what on earth are you talking about??? The post you linked was some doof complaining that we aren't going to see major overhauls from their long-range plans next week, and he got the response he deserved. The threads here on tankspot are trying to find short-term solutions to hold us over.

Here's an example from another topic: PVP is too bursty. The long-term solution is inflate health pools while decrease the (relative) amount of healing and damage. The short term solution was announced today (a hotfix to how resilience works).

Likewise, there are many longterm changes that will help fix the problems with prot warrior DPS in Cataclysm, including some rage tweaking, a total redo of heroic strike, and even the above-noted inflation of HPs.

But for now we need short-term solutions, because it's ridiculous for prot warrior DPS to be 20-25% behind druid and pally tanks. The developers have even stated that they want to find a way to raise sustained prot warrior DPS while softening our burst in the short term, so it's just a matter of finding clever ways to do that. That's why there are entire threads here on what those sorts of changes could be.

So yeah, anyone who actually cares about the problem is most pointedly going to ignore your "solution" to just wait out another entire tier of content till the next xpac comes out.

There's quite a difference between a global pvp imbalance issue and prot warrior DPS, the latter being somewhat niche. I've already presented my arguements for why buffing prot warrior DPS is a very hard thing to do, and even linked to you a developer post explaining that Blizzard operate on a longer timescale than some people may desire.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, but there's no need to get emotional over it.

This isn't "agreeing to disagree", you are literally quoting posts that have nothing to do with the topic, which is immediate and short term fixes to the tank DPS imbalance. Furthermore, your post directly contradicts what the devs have said themselves:

The devs want to buff sustained prot warrior DPS before Cat.

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Q. Following the upcoming protection warrior PvP nerf, do you plan to make our abilities focus on doing threat instead of damage?
A. We are applying threat modifiers where we nerfed damage. We'd also like to boost sustained protection warrior damage (for PvE) without adding too much burst (for PvP).

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While your general observations on the source of the problems with prot warrior DPS are correct (and I think universally agreed on) this thread and the others on tankspot (and even some on the official forums) are not discussing that, but rather are littered with ideas that would buff sustained prot warrior DPS without increasing burst damage now, to patch the problem until the reset at 4.0. The question is which one(s) would work the best, and which one(s) will the developers use (or do they already have a different solution). None of them require reworking anything major, like rage usage or heroic strike.

All I'm seeing from you are repeated postings that fixing it will take "huge" changes, as if you haven't read the dozens of ideas that would in fact help, or perhaps you have some other axe to grind on the issue? And if you really think that prot warrior DPS is "just fine" for the rest of this expansion, why don't you just volunteer to have the other tank classes see their DPS nerfed by 20% so we'd all be balanced?

After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

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Originally Posted by TomHuxley

or perhaps you have some other axe to grind on the issue? And if you really think that prot warrior DPS is "just fine" for the rest of this expansion, why don't you just volunteer to have the other tank classes see their DPS nerfed by 20% so we'd all be balanced?

After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

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I don't have to put up with patently false, patronising and inflammatory responses like that, so I think I'll just leave the discussion there. Good luck with your buff campaign.

i don't see why maelstrom thinks that increasing prot warrior dps would need to change EVERY ability they have.
and on topic, this proposed nerfage is making me sad, if i'm not mistaken blizzard has justified warrior's slightly lower EH with their larger range of utilities, but now they are taking some away? and i don't know about you guys, but with SB used i'm lucky to get a 9k crit on most bosses, where my guild's DK is pumping out 10k rune strikes with out using a CD in slightly lesser gear. why is the majority of the prot warrior population getting punished for a handful using gimmick sets to compete in (not dominate) arena?

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Originally Posted by Maelstrom

Good luck with your buff campaign.

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It's a balance campaign. I want tank DPS to not have such a large delta. I'd greatly prefer they bring warriors (and DKs if it turns out they need it) up to the pack, but if need be they can bring the others down. The point is there's overwhelming data that it's still a problem, and it's not that hard to fix.

Meanwhile, it's ludicrous that the situation was even allowed to get this bad, let alone people saying it doesn't need to be addressed (or worse, that we should be fine with a further DPS nerf because like 2 people managed to top PvP by using BiS gear on their prot warriors).

Related blue posts:
"PvE Gear in PvP
I think teams may try to focus on PvE gear as a way of blowing up healers on the other team. If that doesn't work (because the healer has resilience), then the PvE-geared guys won't have the survivability to stick around long. If you can't blow people up very quickly, then the glass-cannon thing just doesn't work and longevity becomes more important to everyone. If you can blow up healers too easily (while wearing PvE gear), then we might need to buff resilience even more. If you can blow up dps specs wearing PvE gear easily, well, mission accomplished. If you can never defeat healers (note I said defeat, not blow up in 2 globals) then we will need to nerf healing. Again, the goal is to have slightly longer matches with a little more back and forth. (Emphasis on "little" -- 20 min matches can be as tedious as 20 sec matches are unsatisfying.)"

from: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - PvP Resilience Changes

and

"We are currently in the process of applying a hotfix to buff resilience. While some modifications may be made, we intend to have this buff in effect for the remainder of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The change will double the value of resilience in reducing damage done by players. So depending on their current amount of resilience, characters might experience a 10 to 20% decrease in damage taken from other players. The critical strike chance and critical strike damage reduction components of resilience will remain unaffected by this change.

We are also aware of the possibility that this change will make healing in PvP too difficult to counter. While we are not making any immediate changes to address this issue, we have prepared some further changes that will allow us to quickly deploy a PvP-only healing adjustment if we feel it is warranted.

We will be applying this change very soon while we are between Arena seasons so we can evaluate how it works in multiple PvP scenarios for the upcoming Arena season, and as we continue to prepare for Cataclysm. As we have mentioned previously, one of the goals for Cataclysm is to have a PvP environment where it is harder to regularly achieve so much damage and healing in relatively few global cooldowns compared to what we currently have in the game."

from MMO-Champion BlueTracker - PvP Resilience Changes

In all honesty, we all knew this was coming and I still don't understand why the dials and knobs couldn't be twisted on these values to do away with the need to nerf prots shield related dmg.

seriously, if they were planning on doing this anyways, why the nerf to warriors warbringer and shield slam damage -_-'

To be fair...they haven't gone live yet. Maybe they won't have to with this change. Or at the least maybe it will make it easier to buff our DPS elsewhere. Hey, one can at least hope :D

I swear the whole reason there was even a serious forum discussion is because of the "annoying to pvp against" thing, and not because of actual PVP balance issues.

I never really understood the whole annoying to pvp against thing. A frost mage can throw out more novas than we have charges, slow is spammable for arcane, and the ice armor chill is instantly reapplied once we charge in. A mage can also dance within the charge dead zone if they know what they're doing.

Not to mention the double standard... are rogues suddenly not annoying to PvP against? Their entire class is designed around making PvP as frustrating as possible. Cyclone too... what's a healer supposed to do against that?

Bah. Hopefully this resilience change will be the holy grail and we can keep all our utility. Damage still needs to be balanced between shield slam and our other abilities though.

I'm actually a bit on the surprised side that the Resilence update did not include reduction to Armor Penetration effects.

I would have thought that was a no-brainer and would solve a lot of arena balancing problems currently being dealt with... if they're touching Resilence as a mechanic anyway, it would seem like a good time to do it.

My guess is that would make balancing melee vs ranged DPS more difficult than the other problems it would solve. And a greater flat reduction to damage does effect ArPen damage as well OC.

I still don't get why this + shield slam nerf + warbringer is necessary, i'm almost positive the resil change alone will scale prot back down to manageable numbers, this seems a bit of an overboard triple nerf to prot warriors for what seems like 5-6 prot warriors who would excel in arenas regardless of spec.

I agree with you Kaz, I don't think it's needed soly for arena balance. I think it's simply because too many classes don't like playing against a utility-laden class that is also survivable.

Hopefully the Warbringer nerf is not all snares (that would really foul up PVE uses as well) and let's really hope the SS nerf is not too strong.

On the up side, GC said this today:

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We'll buff sustained damage in the same patch where we nerf Warbringer and the block conversion to Shield Slam. It probably won't end up being a 2000 dps increase for anyone, but it should help close the gap.

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Source.

god, i hope by him saying "not a 2000 dps increase", he means, in actuality, it'll be a 1000 dps increase, cuz that'd put us on par with other tanks! ;x

Could almost bet money on a Revenge buff there, or perhaps something like Imp Def Stance. I doubt it will be anything that does not rely on being attacked because of pvp.

Revenge buff has issues when not being the main target either though. That's why our recent damage buffs have been to things like Devastate. I'm sure you're right but on fights like Festergut or Putricide or Saurfang or any of the other taunt switch bosses it means they'll have to scale it higher to accommodate all the time we wouldn't be able to use it.