Discussion: Protection Warriors and Viability (Sept. 4th)
I’ll give you guys a fair warning as this is a pretty long post. I’ll shoot you some highlights and the rest can be found after the break.
- Developers want you to be able to quest, solo, raid, and PVP as protection.
- Protection warriors are going to be doing a lot more DPS than before.
- Protection warriors in Burning Crusade were really lacking and that’s going to change.
- Protection warriors shouldn’t be brought to a raid for any reason other than the player him/herself knows how to tank well.
Ghostcrawler does a great job addressing the concerns, but most warriors are just so fucking jaded and pissy that both their tampons are so full so they can’t accept anything from blizzard good or bad. Please read the full thread (after the break) it’s a great post that talks a lot about paladins, druids, death knights, and warrior tanks.
Wall o’ text coming…
As I said before, whether Protection should 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 (src)
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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. 
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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.
Q u o t e:
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. (src)
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