So....

We got two buffs that do not even begin to really address our issues.

As it is unless we get some additional buffs to aoe, damage, and our utility we are still the worst choice of tank to bring.

If there is not more on the way then I am still thinking of switching to paladin and I am NOT a FOTM reroller type. I want a tank with a shield, and even though I have literally hundreds of hours with this character I am still seriously considering switching.

Even after the paladin "test nerfs" I still don't see why a warrior would be a better choice for a raid than a paladin.

When GC is saying that buffing warriors doesn't make sense because they are the most popular tank and it will only make them more popular it seems like what GC is really saying is that other classes will be allowed to be simply superior tanks to warriors in the hope to even out the population for a while.

I didn't really mean for this to turn into a QQ post, espcially after getting buffs, but this seems like the second expansion where warriors have been exposed as having serious weaknesses to major aspects of the game and the "fix" again seems like it will take forever to come through.

obligatory "you bring sunders so you should be sub-par in every department" comment.



Oh, i almost forgot the natural counterpart to that argument: "WORLD FIRSTS ALWAYS TANKED BY WARRIORS BLAH BLAH"

This thread has run its course.

GC didn't say buffing warriors doesn't make sense because they are the most popular tank.

Here's what he said:

"I'm going to comment on this just once, lest we re-start the entire other thread. I am not personally going to address any other warrior issues in this thread.

-- Warriors are very popular main tanks.
-- This is probably because they used to be the best tank (by design) and because many MTs have stuck with the class for many levels.
-- We think they are slightly under-powered in Ulduar relative to other tanks.
-- If we are not careful and buff warriors too much then there are going to be more of them, which only feeds into the perception that warriors are designed to be (or should be designed to be) the best tank.
-- We've worked very hard to make sure there are 4 viable tanks, just as we've worked very hard to make sure there are 5 viable healers. We want to have paladins, druids and DKs tanking Coliseum, and not giving up (or being replaced by the raid leader) because they aren't warriors.
-- We don't balance around popularity. However we do take it into consideration. WoW is a social game and despite the excellent work by the theorycrafting community, player perception and psychology play a big role and often change very slowly.
-- We don't balance around past history. However we do take it into consideration. WoW is a game and players can form an emotional attachment to their characters. Emotion enters into it. While my team deals with cold hard numbers a lot, that is not the only part of game design. "

Emphasis in bold added.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031134480&sid=1&pageNo=1#17


It's not that we're seeing so few buffs and changes because we've been the most popular tanks, it's that the devs are still thinking about how best to make changes.

Personally, I think the devs are being too conservative about some of these changes, but it's good to see that they're at least listening and taking steps to improve our class.

Thoughts on the buffs we're getting:

Buffing our weakest threat move helps make Devastate a little more appealing, and gives us a little extra threat- won't bring Warrior threat and DPS in line with the other tanks, but it's a step in the right direction.

Shield Specialization: Not sure if it's worth getting the talent, even after the buff. That said, in its current state the talent is kinda weak what with the Block mechanic underperforming- it'll make for an interesting choice come 3.2

Glyphs: Increasing duration on our shouts is great, don't get me wrong. But, just as big a problem as their duration is their range- keeping Commanding Shout up on the whole raid during a boss fight is downright impossible most of the time because of the short range on the ability, and I don't think it should take two talent points in Booming Voice to even give us a chance of keeping the buff up on everyone. In fact, if I had to choose between a 4min Commanding Shout with 20 yd. range or a 2min Commanding Shout with a 30 yd. range, I'd go with the latter.

Well... I've kind of given up worrying about being mediocre.
I'm in a decent guild that are prepared to put up with their prot warriors (good players btw) being not the best at anything and even though the guild will use a different class to tank hard modes, we will still see the content over time.
Paladins appear to be elevated in the pecking order next patch so all I can say is good on them.

I think all the warrior QQ last week was responsible for getting us a couple of 3.2 buffs we would not have seen so I would'nt expect much else to follow.
GC made it quite clear they don't particularly want warriors to stand out of the crowd when they are putting in a large effort to promote other tank classes this expac.

My advice is to get used to warriors languishing behind a little for a good while yet and then learn to live with it.
A good example of this is our need to use major glyph slots and talent points to get our cooldowns to 2 minutes yet other tank classes don't have to do such a thing.
I call it the WotLK Warrior Tax :P

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Q u o t e:
Glyphs: Increasing duration on our shouts is great, don't get me wrong. But, just as big a problem as their duration is their range- keeping Commanding Shout up on the whole raid during a boss fight is downright impossible most of the time because of the short range on the ability, and I don't think it should take two talent points in Booming Voice to even give us a chance of keeping the buff up on everyone. In fact, if I had to choose between a 4min Commanding Shout with 20 yd. range or a 2min Commanding Shout with a 30 yd. range, I'd go with the latter.

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Just how many warrior issues can they bandaid with glyphs and really... where are we going to slot them all?
It's getting rather funny really!

These buffs are nice, and there's only has to be more to come in the PTR before 3.2 goes live.

Are you guys being serious? We get 3 very nice buffs and you honestly make this thread about how the buffs are "lousy" and dont solve any issues? We're getting rage on avoidance, something that we have been asking for for years. We are getting a buff to devastate and a buff to our total AP. Please lets just be happy with what we got.

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Q u o t e:
We got two buffs that do not even begin to really address our issues.

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Warriors are low on DPS and TPS - so Devastate got a small buff.
Warriors have rage starvation issues when they avoid strings of hits - so now they get rage on avoidance.

While they may not fully fix all the issues with the class, saying that the current changes "do not even begin to really address our issues" isn't accurate at all.

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Q u o t e:
I think all the warrior QQ last week was responsible for getting us a couple of 3.2 buffs we would not have seen so I would'nt expect much else to follow.
GC made it quite clear they don't particularly want warriors to stand out of the crowd when they are putting in a large effort to promote other tank classes this expac.

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I call bull%%%#. Why would it be impossible to balance the 4 tanking classes in a way that wouldn't make one or 2 blatantly OP for most fights than the other?

If Blizzard goes by "popularity" factor to nerf/buff a class, they're doing it wrong. Usually you sensitise your targeted public on your product (in this case the tank classes), you don't make a product the majority loves crappy on purpose so your buyers/clients jump to the next best thing. If anything, you're gonna lose many of them to something else instead of picking a new flavor (non-tank job vs FotM rerolls). It's basic marketing right here, and it works perfectly with this aspect of WoW.

I'm sure many remember how you heard the average misinformed player's gibberish on how Frost was the only tanking tree for DKs at the start of WotLK for weeks on. Or in TBC where pallies are druids even after their buff to the tanking trees had a hard time from that same majority about how they're not "real" tanks vs warrs. Spending some time to inform your clients of the changes in a more explicit way, for most to see/read, would be a step in the right direction, instead of playing Slinky with each class. It really confuses people more than anything.

Edit: can't spell at 2:30am

Fun fact.

Most of these "Tanking imbalances" become apparent only only in specific situations on specific bosses. Most of the time the difference is relatively negligible (or within a range that is easy to balance), however, it's once fight X makes tank Y overpowered because of Z, that Z gets nerfed and now X sucks at tanking C, D, and E but all the other tanks excel at it.

Balance is 1/2 class design, 1/2 encounter design. And from what I can guess, the item designers, encounter designers, and class designers don't work very closely on a lot of issues.

I'm in a more casual guild I guess by most people's standards. We can't usually get enough people on to do 25 man ulduar so we just go for 10 man 3 or so days out of the week. Well, we were working on vezax today and we were having problems with me dieing, sometimes to regular hits sometimes when im eating his damage buff with shield wall up or last stand and a pally using sacrifice on me (yes we tried kiting already but we had problems with healers not staying in range while im running away). We had our DPS feral druid whos tank set is decent at best from what I've seen try tanking him just for @%*!s and giggles. Well after the fight, in which he was doing fine until a healer made a stupid mistake with shadow crash causing others to go oom while trying to keep him alive, the healers told us that we should keep trying with him because he was taking much much less spike damage than me, and he was sitting on about 2k more health than me. My tank set is far better than his. I /cried as I told the raid leader that he should replace me with a better dps because my fury spec is shaky seeing as I just dual specced fury 4 or so days ago and there are still many upgrades for me out of naxx/OS/EoE. Before you say anything, yes i have stupids in my guild, but its one of the few guilds on my server that has raid times i can make and is even into ulduar, and yes my server is a crap hole. I believe i logged out in my fury gear, full tank gear im almost 31k unbuffed (im positive i was right around 41k fully buffed with what we had in the raid), 26-27% dodge, 18-19% parry, lower 20% area for block (lolblock imo <.<)

TLDR: Druid kitty gone tank, hardly as geared as i am did as good or better for vezax tanking according to our healers and i was a sad panda. :P

Edit: Wow, much more of a wall of text then it seemed while I was typing it out...
Btw, mimiron was fun.... :D

@ the OP. Honestly I think guys like you and I are part of the problem. People who rolled warriors in the beginning with the specific purpose of being tanks and stuck with them rather than switching class with every swing of the nerf penduillum. I think there are alot of us; especially people who have played since vanilla which would be a very large chunk.

The problem starts when blizzard introduces and buffs other tanking classes and they want them to be seen as roughly equal it's an uphill battle. With apoligies to GC, they've worked themselves into a place where they don't necessarily want warriors to be the weakest tanking class, but there's no way in hell they'll allow us to be the strongest because they know that there ARE those people out there who will switch class depending on who's day to shine it is. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, you can do what you want with your account, but that would just put blizz back in the position of working against the notion that tank=warrior=tank. As a result, those of us who do feel invested in our characters and reluctant to re-roll end up suffering for it in the long term.
On a side note, if blizz doesn't want warriors to be seen as THE tanks, it would really help stem the tide of new players if they changed the description/picture on the warrior clas info on the warcraft homepage to something less tank-y.

All that being said, I think the new changes on the PTR are a step in the right direction. More damage + more rage = more rage & more damage = more threat. Rather than just seeing this extra threat at face value I hope warriors will be able to use that extra threat and change their spec/glyphs for more mitigation/avoidance and thus become better tanks. Maybe even spec out of deep wounds.

TL;DR version: We aren't in a great spot but the buffs help. I'll stick with my warrior but you all should re-roll...

....actually, to be qute honest, I am slowly leveling a paladin, but I'm not happy about it.

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Q u o t e:
Fun fact.

Most of these "Tanking imbalances" become apparent only only in specific situations on specific bosses. Most of the time the difference is relatively negligible (or within a range that is easy to balance), however, it's once fight X makes tank Y overpowered because of Z, that Z gets nerfed and now X sucks at tanking C, D, and E but all the other tanks excel at it.

Balance is 1/2 class design, 1/2 encounter design. And from what I can guess, the item designers, encounter designers, and class designers don't work very closely on a lot of issues.

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Incorrect.


Most of those tanking balances you speak about are based ENTIRELY on mitigation, and EH.

Equalize Mitigation and EH, and you get a much more balanced tanking game.

I think GC mentioned that the rage system is outdated and obsolete. I think these are just bandaid fixes to address temporary problems.


Avoidance Rage is a good thing, will fix some of the rage issues.
More uber devistate is always a good thing.

- Would like to see an AOE threat ability or re-design of current AOE abilities.
- Would like to see a real fix for Block
- Would like to see extended duration on shouts 10/30 min (reagent needed)
- Would like to see Shield wall addressed to not require talents and glyph to match DK cooldowns. If not then make it 50% instead of 40%.

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Q u o t e:
Fun fact.

Most of these "Tanking imbalances" become apparent only only in specific situations on specific bosses. Most of the time the difference is relatively negligible (or within a range that is easy to balance), however, it's once fight X makes tank Y overpowered because of Z, that Z gets nerfed and now X sucks at tanking C, D, and E but all the other tanks excel at it.

Balance is 1/2 class design, 1/2 encounter design. And from what I can guess, the item designers, encounter designers, and class designers don't work very closely on a lot of issues.

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This is just not true.

Warrior AoE threat just plain sucks compared to the other tank classes. This isn't about "feeling like it's worse". It is worse. It is clearly demonstrable in game. It is clearly demonstrable with numbers. Really, do the math for yourself.

Personally I like the incoming buffs. I don't see why anyone wouldn't like them.

BoSanct left us swimming in rage, absolutely swimming. That was 10 rage per avoid/block. This is going to give us 5 without having to have another class around. Yeah, 10 would be awesome... but lets give 5 a shot to see just how much it will do. I'm sure it will be worlds better than dodgedodgeparrydodge oh look no rage. At all.


The devastate change is nice too. Why should they overbuff Shield Slam and Revenge (just to use examples for our heavy hitters) to massive proportions? Why not buff the low end of our spectrum to see how we even out from there?


My biggest question mark is how I am going to get 5 full points in Shield Spec. I haven't done that since TBC, and frankly I am scratching my head. Considering the negative changes to Deep Wounds (in regards to Damage Shields and modifier nerfs) I may go with 12/3/56. Bah. Will have to see.


Edit:

Also the buff to AttT is bloody awesome for a minor change. People went ape%!** crazy over Deep Wounds' performance, even when it was a ~6-10% damage boost in a best case non-gimmick scenario. IDK what percentage the AttT change will add, but couple that with Devastate and I think we are getting closer.