Yeah it's pretty clear that something fundamental needs to change to make protection paladins worthwhile. Right now they're similar to prot warriors in that unless they're tanking 100% of a fight you're better off swapping them out.

Druids are in a very enviable position where their gear makes them do strong dps even in tanking gear due to how agility and strength help both tanking and dps, and their tiered gear has healthy chunks of both.

Defense, dodge, and block rating/value don't do a damn thing for a paladin unless you're tanking.

For all classes to be viable tanks they need to either move paladins to the druid model where they're good at a secondary role when not performing their primary, or dethrone warriors as the best main tank and have paladins be as good as prot warriors, which I don't think is the best solution.

Personally I'd "feralize" the paladin protection tree such that the talents that improve tanking also improve healing to some extent (not nearly to the level which holy does of course). Things like giving mana/5 based on a % of your block value, additional stamina from your +damage gear or whatever.

I would like to point out that the shadow priest synergy unique to holy paladins is mostly gone in 2.1 because of the spiritual attunment nerf.

I don't think that the sentiment that, "If class X can cast a heal, then they should be healing" is still an accurate assessment. For this reason, using the argument that there aren't too many pally tanks because healing is more needed holds much weight. It was pointed out earlier that feral druids are a big example that breaks this notion. Moving beyond that, there are plenty of non-resto shamans and non-holy/disc priests out there in raids.

Shadow priests in particular have become almost a required slot in raiding due to their synergy with caster dps. In my opinion, if a raid is going to have one priest, it's better for that priest to be shadow because of the added dps they bring.

The last few raids I've been on with my guild have been lacking a shadow priest. The general sentiment afterwards was, "damn, it would be nice if we had a shadow priest". I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone missing what a prot pally brings to the table, except maybe on a few select fights.

I didn't say it was the only factor, but up until the nerf in 2.1 holy pallys were so superior with that synergy that they would clearly need to offer some significant benefit for people to want them to move out of what was probably also their role before tbc.

Feral druids and shadow priests both offer significant benefits with their specs and thus the pool of healers is reduced still further since you now probably have a feral ot and a couple of dps'ing priests that were quite likely to be healers before tbc.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on these. I could continue on about how I've seen paladins both fear and tank Moroes (thanks 5-10 sec break while he vanishes), how the curse from Attumen can still be dispelled (though I must say I didn't realize it affected spells - I'll have to pay more attention to the tooltip), how disarm is limited both in use and in damage reduction, etc. But it doesn't really seem like this is a productive line of discussion, since you insist that they're significant contributors to the difference in tanking ability. I don't know what else to say.

I should note that Berserker Rage is exempt from consideration here, because it very literally does make it so that warriors can tank things (well, just Nightbane from what I can see) that paladins and druids can't. Probably fear removal should be an ability shared more liberally through other classes - if tremor totem were reliable, every priest had Fear Ward, and they maybe handed some anti-fear ability out to some other class (e.g. give rogues a "rabbit ears" ability, that renders any fear ability the mob uses in the next 5 seconds impotent) Berserker Rage would be balanced...the same way I think shield bash and Attumen's curse is balanced, because there are so many replacements/counters for those abilities.

The difference is that Thunderfury doesn't take up a raid slot.

Come on, it's like saying "the prot paladin can cast blessings even if he's not tanking!" Neither of these things is a good enough justification for bringing tank who's not tanking. Yeah, you save the MT a bit of threat, and yeah, you let the DPS warriors spend every last point of their rage on DPS, as opposed to only 95%...but the fact of the matter is that when you say that, what you really mean is "Since Protection warriors aren't really contributing anything meaningful while not tanking, they're free to handle the basic tasks that any warrior can perform".

That's not enough to justify your spot in the raid. Paladins and warriors and druids who tank all need to be able to say "While I'm not tanking, I can X well enough to justify not swapping me out" where X is either DPS or healing. X can't be "do the trivial things that anyone of my class could bring to a raid and do with little or no effort!"

Prot warriors currently do not DPS well enough to fit that bill. Druids do, but aren't prime choices for main tanks (something I think should change, personally). Paladins I *thought* healed well enough to fit the bill, but apparently don't (in which case I agree with BEEF - give them some feral-style talents that improve healing abilities - maybe with a focus on Flash of Light, since Holy seems very Holy Light oriented). But come on, Sunder, Demoralizing Shout, Thunderclap, Blessings, Fairie Fire - these aren't ROLES a player can fill, they're single skills. If that's the *major* thing you're bringing to the table, you're not pulling your weight.

I can't even honestly relate how frustrating it is to have to call a raid because a geared feral and a geared druid are available but Fear Ward isn't, making it basicly impossible to tank Nightbane. Just...'something' needs to be done about fear.

I will say that from seeing DMs and seeing people do it, I honestly feel (and I've brought it up before, but it was long enough ago I don't think I'll get in trouble for it!) that prot warrior dps is vastly underrated. It's not that of a pure geared dps class, and it obviously takes a secondary gearset, but I would go so far as to say that Prot warr dps is significantly stronger than Protadin healing capacity (assuming the prequisite gear swaps), with dps clocking in at ~80% while healing is closer to 60% of primary specs. I want to emphasise that this is just my opinion and I don't have hard WWS logs to back this up; merely what I've noticed on DMs after raids and certain fights lead me to this.

Which is not to say that I don't think both specs could use 'something' so they're not quite so much a drag on the raid. While I realize the vast majority of the people reading and posting on these forums are hardcore raiders who think nothing of swapping raid members, it's not a realistic option for a lot of guilds because of social conditions and overall makeup. I don't have any issue with min/maxing to the extreme being both highly desirable and profitable for the raid group, failing to swap members feels to me too much like a penalty, and that irks me.

I'm also not entirely certain how to fix it. Another debuff for prot warriors (say, 50 extra AC per sunder?) might fit the bill without making Fury and Arms look like bad raid choices, but that's a really fine line because once you make prot dps equal to either of the other two the desire fore them in a raid rapidly plumets to zero. It's perhaps easier for paladins: giving some healing or better yet some mana regen based explictly off of a tanking stat might let them hyrbidize a bit further; however since paladin aggro is so ridiculously reflective I'm not sure if even that would help overmuch. Protadin's horrible mana-in and aggro-out while not being hit by steady (blockable) physical hits.....it feels almost like painted into a corner because of the very nature of thier aggro mechanics to excell at a single type of encounter.....that warriors and druids are at least comprable if not better at (depending on fights of course).

I realize that there's a lot of opinion in the previous three paragraphs and it's slightly tangentalizing but I'm not entirely sure I can address the OP's point without getting deep into 'what if' land.

This would be fantastic, and I'd welcome it. I wouldn't mind being a demonstrably inferior tank to a warrior/druid in most situations if speccing that way didn't also have such an enormous negative effect on my healing.

Let us tank better, or let us hybridize better. Either way works for me.

In regard to protection warrior damage in a non-tank role:

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=yqz2inh4izqqc (until June 18th or so)

Now, I'm not that great at doing damage really and don't have the gear for it (blues/green quest rewards). Only 317 DPS. I can barely beat a Beastmastery hunter pet (Bowmin). I suppose I can get better though I don't generally practice raid DPS roles very often.

Defac and Adrik both running Arms at the time, otherwise would have moved up a significant number of places.

I really do wish the Devastate change from last patch had gone live, so that Prot Warriors would have a chance at at least being somewhat useful when not tanking. Right now, it's a big handicap for them. That's one point where Druids really excel--our primary tanking Druid, for instance, has pulled nearly 700 DPS on Gruul with a simple gear swap and no consumables.

In regard to the prospect of Prot Paladin "hybridization", I'd say that it might not be a bad thing to see more of this in both Paladin and Warrior trees really. I guess the issue in regard to Warriors is that with 2 trees already dedicated to "damage", it feels a bit strange to have damage-oriented elements in Prot too--but, realistically, something needs to be done about the inability to stack Prot Warriors to any resonable degree.

I also agree with some of the seniment that it would be nice to see Pallies have some more reliable anti-fear mechanism. It would make sense. I hate having to call raids if we don't have a Warrior or Dwarf. It's just a bit too narrow for today's raiding environment at times.

I think that by now we're all pretty aware of what each class can/can't do. What it excels at, what it falls behind at, what class X
could use some work on, and at what class Y should be doing better at.

Personally, I'd like to see all 3 classes being viable and inter-exchangeable between the multiple tanking roles (MTing, OTing, AE tanking),
all with their respective perks and scenarios they're not so great at, but without ever hitting a wall where they couldn't tank an encounter based
on their own class available skills.

I'd love to see a druid being able to MT a fear-based encounter without needing to rely on Fear Ward for reliable tanking. As I'd love
to see protection specced warriors being able to offer more than they currently do while they're not tanking. Same for paladins.

I'm not saying all three classes should be a copy of each other. Besides paladins, I'm happy with how Druids/Warriors fare when compared
to each other -- they both have unique traits to how their tanking plays out.

This is obviously not easy to balance around, otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here talking about this even though the game has been
out for more than just a couple of years now, so, my thoughts on this are equally either just as good as the next person's, or worthless,
depending on your point of view:

Look at how they changed the Warrior 'Revenge' this patch, and what they similarly did to the Bear 'Mangle', reducing the innate threat value
and giving it more raw damage power while maintaining an equal level of threat generation. Maybe that's one thing to consider for warriors:
Shift the balance between 'damage:threat' on their skills, even add damage to currently 'pure threat' skills (all while taking into account
armor mitigation) so that when it's not about the TPS, their DPS doesn't come so abysmally behind everything else.

Agreed.

The biggest problem with this is that it's the approach that Blizzard seems to have abandoned - I'm not wholly convinced that the useless mana / 5 clogging up the various Paladin tanking sets was entirely a mistake. My guess is that they genuinely thought that they could make Paladins able to tank and heal in the same gear. The problem was that rather than doing this by making tanking stats help healing / vice versa, they tried to do it wholly by itemization and simply made it fail.

To be honest, that probably made things worse - Paladin tanking is somewhat more viable thanks to the 2.1 changes. It's still definitely lacking compared to both of the other classes, but there is some potential for a Paladin MT for a guild lacking (for whatever reason) a good Warrior MT. Hell, our guild's MT has cursed a few times because I linked him Righteous Shoulders and Justicar Crown.

The problem is that although they've switched approaches from "we'll try to get pallies to be healers/offtanks," they did so to avoid the problems that approach was causing, and neglected to address the problems facing the new approach while implementing it. Either switching the tree around considerably or giving Paladins the tools they need to MT would work fine. (Eg: About a thousand more health, useful mitigation tools.)

The problem is that there are useful abilities provided by a protection warrior tanking a mob, and there are very few, if any, such abilities provided to others. One fear per Vanish on Moroes is pretty sad crowd control.

When you benefit from using a tank, your benefit usually comes from having a Warrior tank. Are they all gamebreakers? Of course not. Fear's the only dealbreaker present in the raid game, and even that's only for Horde. Still, when choosing who tanks a mob, the rational choice is to pick the one whose abilities have the most impact. I'm a better choice for tanking Shattered Halls because there are limited tank slots and having a tank controlling the adds is actually quite useful. There's nothing like that in the raid game, however, which is the point I'm trying to make. Nothing in the raid game says "Bring a Paladin!" Several encounters, however, by having techniques that Warriors are uniquely suited to countering, say "Bring a Warrior!"

Archimonde.

Bingo! What I was saying was a response to the repeated claims of "Well, no one would bring a Protection Warrior any more if pallies were close because Protection Paladins have more utility when not tanking!" It is repeatedly flatly stated that Protection Paladins bring substantially more utility, but the claim lacks validity.

In particular:
Familiar?

While the change was cool and demonstrated that Blizzard was paying attention to the Protection Warrior complaints, there's no question that Devastate was far, far too powerful with the considered change, especially for soloing.


Beef's proposal is almost certainly the best one, though - "feralization" of Protection Paladins. Make Intellect increase dodge (thus making Paladin tanking stats go Spell Damage/Intellect for threat, Intellect/Stamina for mitigation, similar to to the way Strength/Agility/Stamina work for Warriors), add healing abilities to the tanking talents. The only foreseeable problem with this is that, unlike Druids, Paladins can get both benefits at the same time. The best answer I've come up with for this has been "Make Righteous Fury increase Holy spell threat by 200%j and reduce damage/healing done by 50%." Still makes "heal-tanking" pretty unfeasible, and makes for a "tankform"-esque ability that allows more buffs to healing in the Protection tree without making it the "spec this for awesomeness" tree. The biggest side effect is losing the Righteous Fury functionality in Aran and Nightbane, so far as I can tell. (Added bonus: Spiritual Attunement only active while Righteous Fury is up - allows the ability to be buffed without making Paladin healing entirely ridiculous.)

The point of paladin tanking, judging by 2.1 changes, is taking steady damage without ANY huge streaks from crushings - even when mob get hasted due to parry, phase changes, or thrash-like abilities. In theory that allows healers to use stable and efficient heal rotations once encounter is learned, and maybe even exchange one backup healer (who is there just in case of "oh shit" moment, and mostly overheals) for dps. And then, if warrior is in danger of losing shield block in particular encounter, paladin gets more HS charges spent, generating more threat and rising threat-cap for dps compared to warrior. If you look at it this way, assuming that devs think this goal is reached, having health equal or close to warrior makes you superior right away, so it's unlikely to happen. Hell, they might think you're already superior for some encounters, just need different tactics from warrior tanking.

As for "oh shit", just removing deaggro portion from bubble will instantly make paladin's "oh shit" button noticably better then warrior's (10 sec of immunity on 5 m cooldown (that's fear immunity too btw) vs 10 sec (15 talented) of 75% damage on 30m cooldown). And it's not like it'll significantly change any encounter too...

Thunderclap isn't a tanking warrior ability, any more than blessings are a protection paladin ability. Any warrior in the raid can keep up thunderclap, reguarding thunderclap as a perk brought by a prot warrior is naive.

I was more of point it as a perk of having a warrior over the other classes in reference to werebeef's alternate roles.

Also I'm concerned that Blizzard might implement a fix by introducing another overpowered in the game to "balance".

On a slight derail, the Thunderfury saga continues to this day. We are now farming Garr every week (we have 4 of the other half scattered through our Warrior ranks :boggle: ).

Our guild MT pre-TBC who had Thunderfury is taking an extended break from the game and with many SSC mobs being immune to T/Clap for us it's worth the effort. They should just create an upgrade questline for it and be done with it.

What is this ment to show other than the rather obvious "If I wear blues/ greens, then the dps'ers in large amounts of T4/T5 beat me at dpsing". You haven't given any context for that meter at all, most importantly were you even in a group with a shaman/feral druid for buff ? You already admit you havent practised your dps role, so what is the chance you put out an effetive dps cyle compared to others in your raid who dps more regularly ?

Posts like this are less than useless because they are downright deceptive and usually posted in such a way as to mislead.

The idiotic thing was the speed that they dumped the change, if it was doing too much damage they had plenty of time to tweak things in order to give prot a boost without making it an option as mainstream dps.

In my guild we have a lot of warriors that want to be prot for heroics and don't seem inclined to try more hybrid specs, but with our progression level we just don't have raiding for more than about 3 prot warriors a week, so theres a lot of rotation as we just can't afford to take most of them on raids.


The thing with boosting prot pallys or warriors is that nobody expects them to perform at a similar level to their holy or dps specced equivalents, they just need enough of a boost that they are not a liability in fights where they aren't needed to tank.

Not if you've got multiple mobs that need to be tanked.

I actually think the reaction to the change was a bit hasty, personally. Seemed a lot of backlash was caused by that one video doing crazy DPS against a Blasted Lands infinite HP mob, but honestly I found that example to be quite bunk. Fighting against a mob 14 levels lower than you with infinite HP, pre-stacked with 5 sunders, lots of buffs, and popping Recklessness is hardly an example of an "average" situation. Realistically, it was raising the damage contributed by Devastate by 80% or so (perhaps less) and as Prot Warriors don't do any notable raid DPS now, I doubt they would have been doing "insane" DPS even with the change.

Just my 2 cents, but at the very least I wish they would have made an effort to come up with a solution rather than basically saying, "Well, we knew Prot DPS needed some love...but this isn't working so we'll just give up."

As for the Thunderclap/Demo Shout issue, we have a very active DPS Warrior (rare breed nowadays, seems like) who is capable of keeping all of those up as needed. So, in that way, it doesn't matter too much who we have MTing various encounters. I still tend to lean towards Warriors though, simply due to them being unable to do much of anything else if they aren't tanking.

The damage boost to devastate would be nice, but if they do revisit it that in the future the other thing I would like to see from that skill would be for it to apply sunders and not simply refresh them.

As far as thunderclap, I have just got into the habit to apply/reapply it automatically these days even in 25 man stuff since you won't tend to have anyone else to do it for you in 5/10 man stuff.

I also support better Hybridization for Protadins, that seems a better route to go than simply boosting our tanking capability. As far as I'm concerned, if we were to look at the Paladin's current tanking ability we'd be fine if we had some better Hybridization options; Druids already fill the tank first, DPS later variation, Paladins would fit neatly into the tank first, Heal later variation.

I rather liked the Righteous Fury suggestion someone posted above as well, though something like that would have to be carefully implemented since it'd bring a change to how people handle Nightbane and Morogrim. Having tanking stats provide other boosts in regards to healing would be good too, as well as possibly the other way around.

The point was a different one. Paladins already are the best multiple mob tanks, druids are quite good at it as well. Thunderclap just happens to double as a major boss debuff and decent ability to tank multiple mobs.

Not sure what your warriors are doing, but I can't think of a single mob in SSC that is immune to TC. Farming for Thunderfury isn't really worth it anymore with comparable or perhaps better weapons out there.

/sigh

Let me rephrase:

If you've got multiple mobs, each of which needs to be singly tanked, Thunderclap is a legitimate advantage for a warrior tank.

EDIT: Not necessarily single tanking. More generally, what I'm referring to is any situation where you need multiple tanks tanking different things in different places.