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 legacy of Thunderfury shall forever augment the place of the tanking classes.

The ability to mitigate that much damage is pretty spectacular.

With the fallout and implementation of an upgraded thunderclap, drurids and paladins may need similar mitigation abilities.

Paladins already get an oshit button in the form of LOH.

Avenging shield is such a niche ability, it doesn't hold up against mangle or devastate.

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".

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.

Yet it doesnt change the fact that devastate dps is shit; even when you reach an insane 500 dps you will be threat capped; and you will not be able to improve any further. We may predict some changes like revenge took though.

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.

/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.