How can Blizzard increase Prot DPS?

[Durandro]

Lowering the cooldown on Bloodrage would be very nice. And also changing the glyph back to 50% damage sacrifice to balance it out a bit. Having Bloodrage on a 20 second cooldown (maybe using talents to decrease it from 1 minute?) would be excellent.

[Halgreg]

Rage starvation definitely is one of the key things, and I'm glad we're covering it. I did like the idea of some buff like Vigilance where you rage when another person gets hit. That would mean that talent would be tailor made for this situation because any other time, a prot specced warrior would be hit by mobs. (either in tanking situations, or when soloing)

What are your guys's thoughts on putting a tie between AP and Shield Slam?

[Doc309]

agreeing with many posts here ...
rage w/o tanking
but i don't think blizz will do anything about. not with dual specs coming.

[intolerantape]

My biggest issue with rage is that it is generally impossible to even use most of your global cooldowns without a big angry boss smacking you in the face. This makes soloing (and offtanking) painful to a degree that nobody else in this game has to deal with. Bonus rage from white swings while wearing a shield could work, either as a multiplier or a flat bonus.

I remember back in early beta, Ghostcrawler said something to the effect that we should be getting more rage simply from doing more DPS. Unfortunately, while this might be true for Feral Druids who gain rage any crit (and also have a significant amount of crit on their gear) this is simply not true for a protection warrior. I'm sure the rage normalization mechanics don't help the matter any.

In any case, recently Ghostcrawler stated that it is Blizzard's intention to see equal representation in arenas for all specs. In order for this to ring true, something is going to have to be done about a Protection Warrior's rage generation, and simply generating rage from avoiding attacks isn't going to cut it for obvious reasons. With this in mind, I am going to remain hopeful, though I am not by any means going to hold my breath.

[Guard_Khaz'goroth]

While I don't have a comprehensive solution, I believe the answer to poor DPS while not tanking may lie in a revision of Warrior stances.

[Satrina]

The mechanic of getting rage for being hit is broken. You're either rage starved or infinite rage. If you tune it today so that Patchwerk is not infinite rage, the hard hitter in Ulduar will be - and you're rage starved everywhere else. My ideal first step would be to base rage generation solely on my outgoing damage, possibly with a secondary rage gen mechanic based on some stat.

[Debulla]

A talent deep in the protection-tree could be changed, e.g. imp. def-stance or focused rage, which might grant extra rage over time and lowers generated threat when not being hit/having aggro in a battle.

[sylvore]

I have always loved the thought behind the rage mechanic as it makes warriors seem bad ass.

It is definitely what also caps our potential dps output while being an OT and not getting pounded on. We just cannot generate enough damage as our fury/arms counterparts.

If they do make some changes however, it should not get us to an infinite rage situation where we have free will to spam all of our buttons.

I think that it should be something that costs a percentage of our health I.E sticking to the old thought about how we generate rage. Either we are getting hurt or doing damage. It should go on for a long enough duration such that we can reuse it. It should also hurt us big time if we are getting hit. It should be something you never use while tanking, unless say you severely over gear an instance or something, this would also help us out when we do heroics and not have to take our pants off.

I think a name could be something along the lines of "barbaric inspiration"

Maybe it would be something along the lines of vigilance however reversed where we take a % of the dammage being done to the mob we are focusing on. Just thoughts, there would have to be some downside to gaining more rage.

I do feel in general that a prots DPS in general should be turned up a bit so we can compete with the pally (my normal tank partener), and also increased rage gen while not tanking.

[Halgreg]

Hmm, another Idea I had...maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we could Heroic Strike more freely without getting such a loss of rage. It's such a double whammy...losing the heroic strike cost plus the normal rage gain from a melee swing. Maybe a change something like this:

Old:
1. Activate Heroic Strike (costing rage)
2. ZZZZ Heroic Strike yellow damage.

New:
1. Activate Heroic Strike (costing rage)
2. XXXX next normal melee swing (rage gain)
3. YYY additional Heroic Strike yellow damage immediately followed after.

[Gintar]

What we need is a way to increase damage while dpsing that (A) will not substantially increase our damage while tanking or (B) let dps warriors do more damage.

Seems to me that the easiest way to do A is to tie it to berzerker stance and the easist way to do B is to tie it to a protection talent high enough up that dps warriors can't get it.

Perhaps adding this to Shockwave: "Increases damage done by all abilities by x% when in berzerker stance."

[intolerantape]

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the majority of our rage should come from damage output, rather than intake.

Goal #1: Enough rage should be generated by the warrior to keep his GCD spinning with his best moves at least 80% of the time. This leaves rage from damage taken to fill the gap, and anything left over is heroic strike / cleave fodder. I have a few ideas for how this could be implemented.

Step 1: Normalize rage generated from damage taken. Every attack that lands is clamped to a specific range, lets say 1 to 20. Small hits would still give just a trickle of rage, and huge hits would cap out at the max instead of filling the rage bar instantly. In addition, the rage gain should be calculated from the unmitigated damage value. Better gear should not reduce your ability to generate rage.

Step 2: Passive rage generation from avoided attacks. Since we are getting most of our rage from damage output, this does not need to be big. However, better gear should not reduce your ability to generate rage, so this part is still crucial to the overall idea.

Step 3: Change how rage is generated through damage done, at least while a shield is equipped. This is the complicated step, and there are a million ways that it could be implemented. I will provide a few possible scenarios:

- Lets start with the obvious: A multiplier or a flat amount of rage gained per white attack. (Scaled by weapon speed, of course.)
Pros: Little or no mechanic changes needed, this would be easy to fit into the game.
Cons: Kinda boring, and the rage multiplier thing has already been done.

- White swings generate a set amount of rage, based on weapon speed. This is really just a variation of the above idea.
Pros: Easy to do. Great for balancing things because you have a predictable baseline for how much rage a tank is going to be generated.
Cons: Pretty boring.

- Putting on a shield grants a substantial amount of haste. This would have to be very large to have any effect, I'm thinking along the lines of several hundred percent. Before you say, "But Cow, that will make prot warriors do too much damage!" No it won't. White damage with a single one-handed weapon equipped is pitiful.
Pros: Fun! An interesting way to solve the problem.
Cons: Heroic Strike and Cleave could get out of hand. If the numbers are tuned correctly, Blizzard could have a pretty good idea of how much rage would getting tossed around, but you still have the situation where a warrior just builds up a bunch of rage and then lays into some poor sap with glyphed, 9 rage heroic strikes two or more times a second.

- While wearing a shield, auto attacks ignore the targets armor value. This is just a variation of the haste idea.
Pros: A unique butterfly - nothing like this really exists in the game at the moment.
Cons: Rage normalization might still get in the way, and in any case, further tweaks would probably have to be done to rage generation or this would fall short of Goal#1. This would also reduce the value of armor penetration for Warrior tanks. (Lol.)

Well now that my brain is empty and my server is back up, I think I'll log on and play. Let me know what you think of the ideas.

[Halgreg]

The ideas are sound. Something that is key or consistent is that building rage only needs to be applied when you have a one handed weapon and a shield involved because a two hander and dual wielding seems to generate enough rage for the other Warrior specs. The Haste idea in particularly was very interesting indeed since while Haste isn't as beneficial to DPS with other specs/classes, it helps out Prot DPS quite a bit by virtue of just generating rage faster with more white hits.

Honestly, making Anger Management inherent but have it generate more rage per second (1 rage per second?) would be just fine with me.

Currently, I'm specced with Anger Management, improved bloodrage, and puncture. This, with a high crit set, gives me enough rage to do Devastate and other cooldowns most of the time, which keeps deep wounds rolling. I can't heroic strike all the time, but I can maybe once every 8-10 seconds.

This leads me to believe that even with decent rage generation, we would still be too far behind.

Other than better rage generation (which is a fantastic topic that I think has gotten pretty good coverage lately), what else can be changed to improve Prot DPS?

[Guthammer]

I would give a buff to a deep prot talent (Sword and Board?) that doubles (fudge numbers for good DPS) rage generation from damage done when not in defensive.

Perhaps a second talent buff that lets prot warriors get enraged off crit hits when not in defensive--as the enraged mechanic is big now.