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Q u o t e:


Oh and Devastate, for something with such a badass name, it should be badass, not fairy like and sounding like I'm sprinkling Infinite Dust over it and yelling EXPECTO PATRONUM.

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LOLED expecto patronum skill its more for paladin with pink glow and unicorn sparkle everywhere

Here's another to add to the list...

Spell Reflect - In addition to it's normal function, if a spell cannot be reflected it's effect will be reduced by X percent to the warrior.

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Q u o t e:
For a while there this thread derailed into pointlessness, but seems somewhat back on track.

I posted something similar in another thread:

Personally, I feel like, as a lot of others seem to be saying we aren't far off from being in a good spot, a few tweaks here and there. However, those tweaks need to be checked thoroughly first. Warriors are a sort of tight-rope class, there's a fine line to walk down and staying on that line while changing directions even slightly, isn't easy. A shift too much in either direction and we're off the rope into either overpowered or underpowered in either aspect of the game PvE or PvP.

Buffing block in some ways would give prot Warriors some somewhat-decent controllable burst coupled with stuns, disarm, and silences, aka OP. Giving us something that gives us more rage, does almost the same, only keeping us with current damage, which it's possible to take out many 2v1's already. Give us more damage and nothing else and then we're just that much more potent in PvP.

While I recognize, and agree with (many of) our shortcomings however varying they are in size in PvE raid MTing and OTing, PvP has to be considered as well. I just feel like a lot of the suggestions made on these forums don't take that into account, not saying Satrina didn't, or various others didn't, but many don't.

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I think the reason we don't see any changes is all because of the viability that Prot could actually become in PVP. If I received 10 rage for every dodge/parry/block like I did with sanctuary any sort of melee class would probably be destroyed in a matter of seconds. In the past when I have goofed off in pvp as prot the limitting factor for me ever doing damage to someone or usually killing them was that I had no rage to do anything with. This is the only reason I could really imagine they took away the initial change they were making and said nothing.

I have pretty much shelved my warrior for the last 4 months. It just isn't worth the frustration when 10 minutes into playing I realize why I don't focus on playing him anymore. This all came to me at the time I was running my brother and wife through a Heroic dungeon with other friends and we actually wiped on trash because there was 0 rage present the entire time and I couldn't generate any threat to pull stuff off my brother's druid when he was trying to heal, but it was pretty comical to watch him go from full to 0 with his 13k hp in mostly 70 epics.

The recent "big guilds are still using warriors, they are fine" is a pretty weak statement to make and even shows how much of a blind eye you turn to some of the main issues we are all talking about. If there were no hard mode encounters or we didn't make other content trivial it wouldn't be an issue. Sure we can make the encounter non-trivial or on par to what other tanks do but to do this we are required to gimp ourselves in another way and end up being dual specced for two different prot trees with different glyphs and slight talent point change.

Most of the stuff in the OP are long standing warrior concerns; decreased threat generation due to better gear in lower tier content has been a problem for warriors since day 1. Meanwhile, needing a major glyph and an investment of two talent points to get Shield Wall roughly on the level of Icebound Fortitude (post-nerf, even) seems an odd decision when trying to ensure that guilds don't replace their MT's based on such criteria. Most of these issues have already been hammered pretty hard though, so I'll let them be on move on to something else.

I would like avoidance stats to be a bit more clear cut and easier to manage. Diminishing returns and, specifically, different rates of diminishing returns among different types of avoidance mean that for any given piece of gear I need to pull out a spreadsheet, math formula, or UI mod (thank you, RatingBuster) to figure out if a piece of gear is even an upgrade in terms of avoidance. It's almost impossible to just eyeball gear upgrades. Such information really needs to be more opaque to the standard player. As it is, 50 parry rating is much less avoidance than 51 dodge rating at any achievable level of gear, and that's just not intuitive.

Continuing the discussion of avoidance, parry rating is currently a second-class form of avoidance (to the point where it's a "don't bother" stat) when compared to dodge rating. Parry's one advantage is that it slightly improves threat generation and rage generation through increased speed on white swings. This is an advantage that has essentially stagnated for years that could easily be improved upon. Some mechanic whereby warriors can convert parry rating into more than a trivial amount of threat can 2 for 1 the issues of undervalued parry and reduced threat via increased avoidance - additional damage done (based on your parry rating or parry chance) on your next attack after a parry is a clunky but serviceable example. There have been a couple of exploratory attempts into this territory (2 piece Tier 4, Blade Ward enchant), but no serious attempts into this design space to help increase the offensive value of parry.

What's your wishlist?[/quote]

Protection Warrior Changes that Need to be Made:

1. Need to fix the rage starvation and infinite rage situations while tanking. Too many times have happened when I am either rage starved in a heroic or OT role in raids and can't even keep a solid threat rotation. While other times its seems that you have infinite rage and never have to worry about running out while spamming HS. Like the idea of a quick band-aid of linking rage generation to avoidance.

2. Increase our damage output overall so we can be in-line with other tanks like DK and pallies for dps numbers. I raid regularly w/ a prot paladin in our guild and i can never come close to is overall damage because of the AoE and his abilities (some similar to warriors) hit for twice as much. It doesn't seem equal or comparable when a boss encounter is completed faster or easier because the use of a different tank that can actually add some dps to the fight not cause of their different damage reduction or avoidance abilities. Not sure how to fix this besides giving us more AP from gear or armor or just increase the damage output from our main abilities.

3. Need to Fix the Blocking mechanic and make it more reliable. Just seems to be ok on most raid bosses where it will block a fair amount of damage, but at times its seems useless against trash or fast hitting bosses.

4. Need to add some type of magic resistance or reduction to the base abilities and not have it has a tier 8 4 piece set bonus. Any type of magic damage reduction or resistance ability would help make us more comparable to DK at least.

5. Cooldowns on raid savers like shield wall or last stand need to be reduced to make it comparable with other tank cooldowns. I am not just talking about glyphs. These reductions in Cooldown timers should be class wide and with an option to reduce it further using glyphs but at a cost like the current shield wall glyph.

6. Similiar to my #1, but slightly different. Need to be able to make some way of gaining rage at an acceptable rate when filling the role of OT and not taking much or any damage. An example that comes up in my mind is when there is a different MT and the warrior has to OT and add duties. Then once the adds are killed the OT goes to help the main tank or add some dps to the boss, but can't do anything cause the OT can't generate any rage w/o a boss hitting him and used all the rage in the first 10 secs after the adds are dead.

7. Fix Heroic Strike please. Not sure if there are any other classes in WoW that must spam hit or click an ability continuously to keep threat and still keep a regular rotation. Nice to hear some ideas about how to help alleviate the situation a bit by binding HS to a mouse wheel, but it is not the solution. Whether do away with it or make it a toggle on/off button or works passively when you reach a certain rage level. Just sick of spamming 1 button the whole time while other classes have nothing close to this problem.

8. More bonus health from Stamina or talents upgraded to increase % gained from stamina. Its sad to see warrior tanks as the class with the lowest Effective Health and usually the lowest hit points when compared to other tanks at the same gear level. Not saying we should be on top but sucks being on the bottom. And if we must be on the bottom gives us something more to help counter. Like lowering the incoming damage in def stance by a considerable amount maybe 15% instead of 10%.

That's my wish list for improving warrior tanks.

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Q u o t e:
Here's another to add to the list...

Spell Reflect - In addition to it's normal function, if a spell cannot be reflected it's effect will be reduced by X percent to the warrior.

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This was suggested any number of times. Instead we got 4pc siegebreaker.

Consider that Spell Reflection has a 10 sec cooldown.

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Q u o t e:


This was suggested any number of times. Instead we got 4pc siegebreaker.

Consider that Spell Reflection has a 10 sec cooldown.

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4pc siegebreaker is stupid, and way OP.

maybe I am just mad that I don;t have it. But it does several things I don't want it to do, it forces me to get 4/5 T8, perioid end of story, it forces them to balance around warriors having 4 pc T8, and it makes me save shield block and use it as a CD, rather than as a DPS tool.

I would just like to see the Tclap cooldown reduced and maybe a lil buff to the dmg it does :).

Other than that i'm fine with my warrior.

Small QOL buff via a minor glyph:

Glyph of Bloodrage: minor glyph, When you cast bloodrage, your next Battle Shout or Commanding Shout is free.

Keep your shouts up easier and get to use the rage too!

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This was suggested any number of times. Instead we got 4pc siegebreaker.

Consider that Spell Reflection has a 10 sec cooldown.

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I've seen you post countless times how the 4piece is such a flaw to be able to match AMS.

It was a problem when we first saw the gear, its a problem now (basically giving warriors who have it an extra tank cooldown) and it will be a problem in the next tier of raiding, when breaking your 4piece to upgrade your gear means losing it.

The problem was

DKs are able to use a third cooldown in AMS to absorb large amounts of magic damage on a short cooldown. Other tanks do not have this ability.

Instead of the practical solution "make AMS a pvp tool only, not work on major bosses like spell reflect or remove it entirely" they instead chose to give warriors a "like" ability that can be used on a similar cooldown.

While nice for warriors, it ties them to that gear, and it does nothing for the fact that paladins and druids don't have something similar. (paladins SORTA do with glyph salv, on a much longer CD)

I think the simplest solution would be to treat AMS like spell reflect, just make bosses immune to it and have their spells go through anyway.


Shear made it rough on feral tanks in BC, and it seemed as though they learned that tanks having to fight against different boss mechanics with different toolsets was going to lead to bad imbalance issues. 3.2 on the horizon and still no balance.

Wish List of Warrior Changes

1. Vigilance. Just remove Vigilance (or at least the threat transfer portion) and buff prot warrior damage/threat to compensate. Having my threat be based on how well someone else is doing irritating. This is also annoying to some classes that are running into threat issues (*cough* warlocks) that having Vigilance feels mandatory like Blessing of Salvation used to.

2. Devastate is a good candidate for a buff to help prot damage and threat. If was nerfed in the WotLK beta because Arms and Fury were making builds that included it and doing too much damage. Arms and Fury are both in better places currently and probably would not be inclined to do that. Perhaps tie Devastate damage to defense skill to prevent this outright.

3. Fewer mandatory tanking glyphs. This is sounding like a broken record on the forums today, but its still true. There should be interesting choices for tanking glyphs, not just Shield Wall, Last Stand and Vigilance to bring our cooldowns and threat up to the DK's level.

4. Better baseline shouts. 7 talent points (Booming Voice and Commanding Presence) and a minor glyph (that only affects one shout) is too much to invest in a group buff. Combining Booming Voice and Commanding Presence into a 2 point talent and making the glyph affect Commanding Shout would be a nice quality of life improvement.

5. Rage based more on damage done than damage taken. This would alleviate rage starvation when prot warriors are off tanking or out gear an encounter as well. This would likely require an Heroic Strike change as prot melee attacks while spamming heroic strike generate no rage. This one is complicated, but the two issues are closely linked. It has become mandatory to spam HS as Prot and to a lesser extent as Arms/Fury in order to maintain threat/dps. Perhaps remove rage generated from damage taken, but allow yellow hits to generate rage.

6. Shield Bash down to a 10 second cooldown. Just to bring it in line with Kick, Pummel, Brain Freeze, etc.

7. The interrupt effect being given to Silence effects should include the Gag Order talent for Heroic Strike.

Bumping for Great Justice! I agree 100% with what Satrina has posted so far. I'm really glad there's a decent thread that *gasp* talks about actual warrior concerns rather than pointless QQ about which class is better (like some other threads....). I wish I could contribute but everything I wanted to say has pretty much already been said LOL.



Edit: I guess i can contribute some. I'd like for the devs to do away with having to glyph Last stand and Shield Wall. I think there's a very viable way of fixing it in that you can make Shield wall 50% damage reduction baseline (or have it scale with defense like IBF does) and making Improved Disciplines Reduce the CD on both Shield Wall and Last stand by 1/2 min and 30 sec/1 min respectively.


P.S. Thank you Satrina for your Buff Bars addon =)

my wish list?

1. shouts at 10 min base
2. add a 5% to each point spent on AttT conversion for stam->str. ie: rank 3 = 15% of stam added to strength.
3. hamstring talent changed to add 10% per point to proc off bleed effects.
4. vigilance changed to party/raid wide buff
5. devistate dealing 110% weapon damage and hitting 2 targets and having the sunder and devi glyphs affect it
6. damage sheild changed to 20/40%
7. shockwave changed to 360 degree instead of a cone and a 15 sec cd
7. Tclap actually doing more then 1-1.5k crits
8. have our special attacks add bonus damage based on a % of AP
9. add a second teir to def stance talent to reduce spell damage by 14% so it totals 20% with the first teir
10. charge/intercept stuns to be increased to 4 sec and not subject to dimishes
11. remove TG and juggernaut penalty's
12. 10% threat gen reduction baked into battle and fury stances
13. my raid spot back

How about instead of guarateed rage from dodge/parry/block, you make it a chance to generate rage.

It could:

a) scale the chance-to-gain and amount of rage you gain based on the target's defense / resilience (balanced for PVP, since while you WOULD gain rage, it could be scaled down if the target is well-defended)

b) scale the chance-to-gain and amount of rage you gain based on your own chance to dodge / parry (flavorful too - someone who dodges more by accident would be more scared than angry; someone who dodges because they know what they're doing would be more prone to get angry).

Either-or, these would sure make avoidance gear desirable, rather than a consideration. I shouldn't look at ilvl239 avoidance gear and go "hmm".

Criticisms?

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Q u o t e:
I've seen you post countless times how the 4piece is such a flaw to be able to match AMS.

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Yeah, I enjoy having and abusing the bonus, but I never thought it was a good idea to give us equality via a set bonus.

Not that absorbing half your hp is all that identical to 20% shaved off all incoming spell damage for 10 sec. Both are kinda dumb, particularly in a land of big magical hits.

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Yeah, I enjoy having and abusing the bonus, but I never thought it was a good idea to give us equality via a set bonus.

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I just hope our 4 piece T8 set bonus is the exact same as our 2 piece T9 bonus.

Shouts
1. Shouts are pitiful now and need an overhaul. Pull them off GCD so it's not as much of a pain to keep them up if we have to maintain them on such short timers. Consider removing rage cost as well.
edit: consider horn of winter. To make it still seem worthwhile give it a CD and have it give a boost to our resources like either bloodrage or berserker rage.


Resource (Rage)
1. I don't care if I require a prot paladin, revert BoSanc to the way it was or bake it into our class. I'm sick of seeing every class rush in and not care about their resources when I have to take special precautions on my own.


Boring and worthless talents/abilities

1. Vigilance is terrible. Bake the threat into our class and make that 10% threat a bonus instead of something we need to remain viable. Cut out the taunt refresh maybe refresh intervene and make it automatically taunt the target if our vigilance focus gets hit. It's too high maintenance and needs to be automatic so we aren't forced to babysit it.

2. Make spell reflect more interesting for protection warriors. It screams protection, but ends up being nothing but a gimmick and a pvp ability.
edit: To make the talent useful, if unable to reflect, maybe redirect damage to the warrior similiar to intervene but for magical damage.

Threat

AoE
1. Either reduce Thunderclap's cooldown or give it an even larger burst threat to bring it at least close to the other classes ability to AoE.

Taunts
1. Give us a second taunt or make Challenging Shout a taunt.

2. Remove temporary taunts from diminishing returns. Nothing is more lame than using your mocking blow only to have taunt be immune because you tried to save that dps.

3. Honestly the taunt diminishing returns needs to be made a little more lenient. There's always "that guy" that likes to taunt off you or dps that don't know when to back off and the strategies I've used since I've first gone prot now are detrimental and can turn the mob into a raid killing machine that can't be taunted.


Dated Mechanics and Confusing Penalties

1. Remove the penalty from Glyph of Shield Wall or have it's effectiveness only reduced by 10%.

2. It was stated that the 50% penalty reduction to our stances was only temporary and that it would continue to be looked into. Just remove the penalty. No warrior will ever PvP in defensive stance just for that 10% damage reduction. It's just gimping our stance for no reason.

3. Allow us to change stance while dead. It makes absolutely no sense at all as to why I cannot change my stance when necessary as I return to my corpse.

4. Silence should not affect our Thunderclap. I'd even debate that it shouldn't affect any of our abilities.



I've finalized some of my thoughts and cleaned up my post.

I'm slowly starting to bring back a prot warrior that was my main in naxx (and got benched for ulduar because my guild needed healers and I've played a resto shaman far longer than a warrior).

The first thing I re-did was keybindings. Guess what THE defining part of doing that was for prot? Getting some way to click heroic strike every second for a 5-10 minute fight that didn't leave me in pain, that let me hit most of them, and that let me still move my character with ease while doing my rotation.

My solution? Is working at 75% capacity, and that affects my ability to be a "pro" warrior. So therefore my biggest change would be something to heroic strike. There is no way I'm going to find myself completely at home on a prot warrior while playing it well is this irritating (also cleave falls into this).

> Rage on avoidance.
How will it not break tank balance? Bears get rage, pallies gain mana via BoSanc.

> 2 minute SW and LS, at the same time also lower Survival Instincts to give bears similar treatments.
- I suspect warrior CDs are longer due to having shield block (40s talented). However how powerful is shield block in reality (does it fulfill its role as a mini-shieldwall when bosses hit up to 18k)? No other tank CDs (beside Lay on Hands and Army of the Dead) have a 5 minute base CD. Alternatively, buff Shield Block (how about an additional 10% damage reduction), change SW CD to 3 minutes.

> 4p8 bonus rolled into talents - It can be a very good addition to improved Spell Reflect or Improved Shield Block
How will it not break tank balance?
- We already have access to 4p8, does it make warriors the best tanks? Not really. DKs have AMS, paladins come with the highest magic damage reduction. Bear shields work on spells.

> Improved spell reflect made more useful/reliable (above or magic damage reduction instead of a RNG ).
How will it not break tank balance? 4% "spell avoidance" over a fight that lasts for an infinite amount of time can be "treated" as a 4% spell dmg reduction - but without the RNG factors.

@Warrior AoE threat:
> Lower TC CD to 4.5 seconds
OR
> Allow sword and board proc to refresh Shockwave CD (there might be PvP balance issues, but i dont expect prot warriors to be the FotM arena spec)
OR
> Give warriors a baseline 3 target cleave (this will also give dps warriors a stronger AoE)
How will it not break tank balance?
- Warriors atm are already inferior in AoE threat compared to all other tanks. Warriors have the snap aggro but Damaging Shields + TC + Cleave does not compare to DnD, etc..

> Buff devastate, nerf threat from heroic strike.
How will it not break tank balance?
This will do 2 things. 1) Buff warrior damage. 2) Lower the "necessity" of heroic strike spamming.
(using GC's equation: +1 -1 = 0) Warrior damage is already the lowest compared to other classes.

> Lower CD to Heroic Throw to 30 seconds. Give it the spell interrupt treatment given to similar abilities when talented into gag order.
How will it not break tank balance? Its more a quality of life issue - if it does break arenas then have talents deep in the prot tree affect it.