Protection Warriors?

[Tengenstein]

I don't suppose anyone on the beta can calrify a few things? Are we only getting rage of our melee swings? Are HS/Cleave/Shield Block/shield barrier off the GCD? how does the rotation feel with long CDs on Rev and Dev?

[fengosa]

I don't suppose anyone on the beta can calrify a few things? Are we only getting rage of our melee swings? Are HS/Cleave/Shield Block/shield barrier off the GCD? how does the rotation feel with long CDs on Rev and Dev?

I'm not in beta so I can't confirm first hand but I think shield slam generates 20 rage and double that on SnB procs. I believe SS, melee and shouts are the only way we can generate rage.

[Libellus]

My understanding is that with the diminishing usefulness of Prot Warriors over time, in MoP they will be an equippable item for Monks and DKs.

[fengosa]

My understanding is that with the diminishing usefulness of Prot Warriors over time, in MoP they will be an equippable item for Monks and DKs.

Actually if MoP truly is the spiritual successor to classic WoW than warriors better be OP to no end.

[Pagezero]

I only got on to play around for about 15 minutes but I did notice Devastate has no CD and cost no rage, I don't know if it was reverted back or just hasn't been changed. Shield Slam is 6 sec CD and I think it was 20 rage, Revenge was 9 sec CD.

Something has changed with dodge, I only had like 7.5% dodge, down from like 15%. I noticed I had 60% block, down from 63%, not sure if it's a small DR at 85 or they changed the rating.

[fengosa]

Since devastate is neutral from a rage stand point I can understand why there's no need for a CD. It doesn't affect survivability or tank balance in general so having it as a filler ability is a nice quality of life change for warriors. I'm hoping that's the reasoning behind the change. If it still applies the rend effect you wouldn't want to spam it but the upfront damage is better than nothing.

[Tengenstein]

We are iterating a lot on tank rotations right now. We want rage (and all tank resources) to be something players actually use for mitigation, because we think that will be more fun than having a resource that gets ignored. Under this model, Protection warriors can’t have many DPS abilities that cost rage, because rage will be too valuable for Shield Block and Shield Barrier on fights where survival is a challenge. An ability with no resource cost needs some kind of cooldown or it will just be macro’ed and / or spammed, which isn’t a lot of fun.

Prot warriors have a lot of abilities to manage: Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Thunder Clap, Shield Block and so on, as well as several emergency buttons to handle situations such as streaming adds. We’re okay with melee specs having an occasional free GCD, as long as it doesn’t happen with frustrating regularity.

Or at least at one point they felt that way. I like the filler role it currently has and hope it's a case of them rethinking their postion rather than just [NYI]

[Kazeyonoma]

DONT TOUCH MY SPAMMY MC SPAMMY NESS =(

it's why i love my warrior =(

[fengosa]

Or at least at one point they felt that way. I like the filler role it currently has and hope it's a case of them rethinking their postion rather than just [NYI]

I don't think macros are an issue. Dev looks like its at the bottom of the priority list and shockwave/stormbolt have situational uses. Maybe strictly on a boss fight you could macro those in but I wouldn't want to on trash or in pvp.

[Tengenstein]

yeah i don't get it either, i wast my fish fish truck, even if dev is no longer a fish

[Auben]

I don't suppose anyone on the beta can clarify a few things? Are we only getting rage of our melee swings?

Shield Slam generates 10 rage, 15 in total with a sword & board proc. It seems that we no longer get rage from taking damage, just from SS, charge, battle/commanding shout, and melee swings. The rage from melee swings is increased by 25% when enraged, which happens when you critically hit or critically block, use Beserker Rage, or through talents like the new Vigilance.

However, virtually nothing costs rage. Revenge, Thunderclap, most shouts and cooldowns/talents are free. Apart from Shield Block/Barrier and Heroic Strike/Cleave, the only things costing rage are slows like Hamstring and Piercing Howl, Shattering Throw and Execute.

Are HS/Cleave/Shield Block/shield barrier off the GCD? how does the rotation feel with long CDs on Rev and Dev?

Yes all four of those are off the GCD. Shield Block and Barrier are not exclusive, either, you can have both up at the same time for a few seconds if you have the rage.

As mentioned by Pagezero Dev has no cooldown, so you can still spam that as filler. It feels a bit like the no-Revenge rotation due to the longer cooldown, but I'll need more time to get a proper feel for it. With the steadier, slower, rage income and keeping Shield Block/Barrier up, I haven't found myself using Heroic Strike/Cleave much. Maybe these get more use when enraged, or when you're offtanking.

If you aren't expecting magic damage in a fight, you can macro Shield Block into dev/revenge/ss. It works, and is an easy way to get decent uptime, but it feels lame and may not be what they intend for us. On the other hand, hitting shield block every 6 seconds is a throwback to the old days, so maybe they are happy for it to be automatic most of the time... with the occasional moment where you pool rage for an incoming burst of magic damage.

[Tengenstein]

Okay i've just noticed the 9 second ICD on TfB and the 6 second CD on Motal Strike. This has me thinking Blizz are being really cheap with warriros this xpac, or want to make warrior tanking extremely easy to get into if you already have a DPS warrior.

Mortal strike/Shield slam > rage builder
Overpower/Revenge > cheapest ability
Colossus Smash/Thunderclap> Raid Debuff
Slam/Devastate > filler of spammy goodness
HS & Cleave/Shield barrier & shield block > rage dumps

[Auben]

From http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...1713?page=2#27

We wanted to clarify a little the direction we are trying to go with Protection warriors and ultimately all tanks.

You generate rage through auto attacks. You also have some sources of rage more under your control, such as shouts, Charge, and in particular Shield Slam (the same is true of MS or BT if you are Arms or Fury). You no longer generate rage from taking damage, because we found that it basically meant Prot warriors always had infinite rage, so the resource wasn't relevant to gameplay. We think classes are more fun and interesting when they have to manage, even to a small extent, some resource.

For Protection, we expect you to spend most of your rage on Shield Block. Shield Block is not an emergency button. It generally won't save your life. But this is a good thing. Emergency buttons with resource costs aren't reliable. On the other hand using Shield Block (or Shield Barrier for magic damage) will make a difference over the course of a fight. It will help your healers out. It will slightly blunt spikes. Shield Block has no cool down, allowing you to use it more frequently when you have lots of rage, but also letting you play a little with when you use it. If you know a big hit is coming soon, you can delay the block for a few seconds. Otherwise, you can use it, knowing you'll have rage soon for another one.

One of the changes for old time Prot warriors is getting used to not spamming Heroic Strike. Think of HS (and Cleave) as an alternative to Shield Block for times when you don't need to worry about blocking, such as when you are soloing, off-tanking or doing easy content. If you use too many Heroic Strikes, you won't have rage for Shield Block as well. Your other attacks, Devastate, Revenge, Shield Slam and Thunder Clap, should fill in most of the holes in your rotation and should be sufficient for holding threat without HS spam.

As I mentioned recently, Prot warrior damage is probably 50% of where it needs to be. When we have that adjusted, your threat will be higher and those Shield Slam and Revenge hits in particular should feel meatier.

If you are a Guardian Druid, there are a lot of analogues. Notice what costs rage, and don't spend it on the wrong things. If you are a Prot paladin, spend your Holy Power mostly on Shield of the Righteous (in this case for damage and mitigation). If you are a Blood DK, your rotation isn't that different than it is on live.

We will ultimately balance all of the tanks around their suite of survival mechanics. Just be aware that we balance based on typical group situations and not how long a tank can go without getting a heal. If a tank can be two shot by a boss (assuming appropriate gear and skill), it's a design problem. If a tank is getting four or five shot, it's a healer problem.

P.S. Standard caveat that our design intent here is to make things more fun overall, not to nerf anybody.

[Gregasaurous]

Personaly, i think this will be very interesting. I do hope that blizzard does this right though. Because if we are spending our resources on surviving instead of for example, HS spam, and they don't compensate enough for that, then the DK (who's mechanics are changing minimally from present if i read correctly) will become even more overpowered then they are now (ROFLDEATHSTRIKE), simply because they put out high damage. Because as we all know, in hardcore progression, high damage output from everyone is important. It can go the other way though, if they overcompensate on any of the classes receiving changes, then that class will become preferred. And this is assuming that all classes get close to equal survivability, but since they mentioned this was part of the goal, i'm not to worried about it.

Another possible balance problem that will come into play is competency of healers. If you have a healer that is somehow just REALLY good, then you might not have to work on survivability as much as the average tank, and you put out more damage. SO, really, after all of Blizzards best intentions, that DPS gear-check fight might just come down to how good the healers are, buecause if they heal better, the Tanks can put out more damage.

I apologize for the slight off-topicness of this as it isn't really going towards clarifying anything, rather raising more questions. Though i think it does pertain to warriors specifically. Is there a chance we might take all of this and say: "That's cute blizz, oi, H-pally, hope you have enough spirit to spam big ones on me" simply for the DPS output on progression fights?

[Tengenstein]

Another possible balance problem that will come into play is competency of healers. If you have a healer that is somehow just REALLY good, then you might not have to work on survivability as much as the average tank, and you put out more damage. SO, really, after all of Blizzards best intentions, that DPS gear-check fight might just come down to how good the healers are, buecause if they heal better, the Tanks can put out more damage.

I apologize for the slight off-topicness of this as it isn't really going towards clarifying anything, rather raising more questions. Though i think it does pertain to warriors specifically. Is there a chance we might take all of this and say: "That's cute blizz, oi, H-pally, hope you have enough spirit to spam big ones on me" simply for the DPS output on progression fights?

This isn't exactly something new though. Alyz was very much a case of put a DPS flask up, and some dps gear when it first hit, Ultraxion also allows warriors to pretty much deck themselves out in full arms gear, up until the threat change it wan't uncommon to don DPS gear for 5 mans, and HoT ones are so easy on the tank you're healer probably won't even notice if they do. i'm not really sure it;s interesting that this makes us choose between doing a little extra damage (lets not kid ourselves; the age of HS Spam is over) or taking a little bit less, it basically a slightly more involved variation on whether we put demo shout up or not, or dip ourselves in the fire or not.

[Libellus]

So, rage permitting, we're going to be popping Shield Block as often as possible providing its relevant to do so?

This seems very reminiscent of TBC, which is no bad thing to my mind. I enjoyed using Shield Block actively in TBC.

[Gregasaurous]

This isn't exactly something new though. Alyz was very much a case of put a DPS flask up, and some dps gear when it first hit, Ultraxion also allows warriors to pretty much deck themselves out in full arms gear, up until the threat change it wan't uncommon to don DPS gear for 5 mans, and HoT ones are so easy on the tank you're healer probably won't even notice if they do. i'm not really sure it;s interesting that this makes us choose between doing a little extra damage (lets not kid ourselves; the age of HS Spam is over) or taking a little bit less, it basically a slightly more involved variation on whether we put demo shout up or not, or dip ourselves in the fire or not.

I think it's a little more than that, but i guess we'll see how it pans out.

[Blackcurrant]

I really like the spammy ability style of the protection warrior. And with that having different rotations depending on single target, aoe, and perhaps one could say less damage taken (vanilla and tbc shield block).

When the threatgame got lost it felt like a big deal of what differented between good tanks and bad tanks went away with it. Say all those tanks that went that route because they could never top the damage meters as dps, so not getting that receipt felt good (anecdotal reference here but i imagine it could be true to others).

Especially in TBC i felt it really made a huge difference having a prot warrior with high threat compared to one that throttled the raid dps. In T11 hc we noticed that to some extent as well.

When the topic of active mitigation came as a light in the tank darkness i hoped the spammy rotations could come back. Like one could "weave" different rotations which generated a better resistance versus incoming damage. So it would be the same very active threat tank of TBC but weaving protection instead of threat.

Say mastery gave more block, and the better rotation the better the block worked, increasing in effectivity. Not to some crazy extent of course, but so it mattered and could be one trademark of a GOOD tank.

Keeping the playstyle but for a different purpose. (mitigation instead of threat)


The protection warrior described here is not really what i hoped for tho?

[Emerich]

I never tanked raids before Cata so I don't have any sense of what the "threat game" was like, but having tanked all Cata raid encounters, the control over my own survivability that I enjoyed as a DK tank made it the most fun to play for me. Monitoring my damage intake and external healing received and seeing how this changed as I learned the fights was really satisfying. The warrior on the other hand felt by far the most passive, and through that the most frustrating.

I do worry a bit over that the rage resource system in its current form feels much less involved than that of DKs and Paladins. I don't have beta access so I can't try it myself, but I imagine there being a lot less to think about when you only have one resource to juggle. Can any beta-able person with multiple tanks give some insight about how the different tank "mitigation rotations" feel?

[Airowird]

Right now, Shield Block feels like the WotLK HS. If you macro it to your entire bar, you'll do fine 97% of the time and you still won't totally suck the other 3%. It has no direct relation to your abilities (unlike Paladins with ShotR) and it's so RNG based it doesn't actually feel like you are doing something special. The short amount I've been using it, I always ended up with the thought of "Did my SB just cause a Block or was it going to happen anyway?" Not the greatest feeling you should have when 'actively mitigating' damage.

DKs haven't changed, so I suspect they feel just as powerful as before, Druid one I just can't help but look at and compare it to the 2min CD Shield Wall I've been using for years and weep a bit on the inside. Overall I think the active mitigation stuff still needs a lot of work, hopefully they'll manage to come up with some interesting stuff I might actually look forward to.