Hi Etilist Jerks,
this is my second post to your forum and I hope there won’t be that much spell errors than the last time. I used the Open Office spellchecker to correct any errors and I hope it worked as intended.
First of all I want to explain why I post to your forum. I am from Europe and European WoW players are not allowed to post to the US forums but this game is developed and designed in the USA so as you can see it is not that helpful to start a discussion in a forum nobody is reading who could change something. Your forum is very well moderated and your community is helpful.

I want to start a discussion about the protection Warrior. I play my Tank since 11.Feb 2005 and I love my character. But even if I love it there are still some things that are frustrating me.

Since patch 2.0 we have a new 41 talent point skill named Devastate in the protection Tree. The idea of this skill is nice but the implementation is not that good. As you know “Heroic Strike” is the only way a Tank can build up Hate without using the global cooldown. I use Heroic Strike always if my rage gets over 50 points. This is my Aggro Cycle (after 5 Sunder Armor on the target):

Shield Slam -> Revenge -> Devastate -> Devastate

I often use this macro:
/cast Shield Block
/castsequence reset=6 Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Devastate
/cast [modifier:Shift] Heroic Strike

On our last Gruul kill is used:
68 Heroic Strikes
23 Shield Slams
19 Revenges
40 Devastates

So Heroic Strike and Devastate are the most used Aggro styles. But regarding to the tooltip of Devastate you need a very slow weapon with a very high max damage to increase your damage. To perform a lot of Heroic Strikes you need a very fast weapon because Heroic Strike is bound to the swing timer.
So Blizzard gave us a new Style to build up Aggro but we are not able to scale this style because increasing the damage done with Devastate by using a slow weapon would decrease the number of Heroic Strikes performed and overall this would decrease the Hate generated. Tanks do not have that much options to scale their Hate generation. We can go for a high block value to increase the damage done by Shield Slam and we can go for a high DPS weapon but values like crit or attackpower are no option for us. In my opinion it is very frustrating to have Styles we can not use the way we want to because that would nerf other styles we need to use.

Don’t you think “Devastate” has do be revised to scale with some value a protection warrior is going for, like hitpoints, defence raiting, armor class or a fast weapon speed?


Another frustrating point is the passive rage generation of a warrior. There are two ways to generate rage, the active way is to deal white damage and the passive way is to get damage by being hit.
A protection warrior does nearly zero white damage to generate rage because most time Heroic Strike is used to build up Hate. On our last Gruul kill I performed 36 Melee hits with an average damage of 193.
I used Kings Defender with a weapon speed of 1.6.

Rage Gained from dealing damage = ((Damage Dealt) / (Rage Conversion at Your Level) * 7.5 + (Weapon Speed * Factor))/2

((193 / 275) * 7.5 + (1.6 * 3.5)) / 2 = 5.43

5.43 * 36 = 195

With all white damage I generated 195 rage points. As you can see the active rage generation is not crucial for a protection warrior.

So the passive rage generation must be crucial. How does the passive Rage generation work?

Rage Gained = (Damage Taken) * 2.5 / (Rage Conversion at Your Level)

In our last Gruul kill is got 321430 Damage.

2922 = 321430 * 2.5 / 275

As you can see the passive rage generation is much more important for a Tank than the active. So the statement “I need Damage” is a common one for every Tank. Like Kungen said on his “Gruul killed by 15” video “After 9 dodge/parry in a row Muqq pulled aggro”.

Tanks are wearing Gear to avoid as much damage as they can do to survive the encounter and save healers mana but on the other hand they need that damage to build up aggro?!?

In a conclusion we can say “With getting better gear a tank is getting worse in generating rage.”. And as we know rage generation is important to generate hate so the statement “With getting better gear a tank is generating less hate.” is also passable. Maybe we can’t see that on highend encounters but a full T4 geared protection warrior has absolute no chance to tank against a full geared T4 Mage in eg. Shatterd Halls (non heroic).
So is the protection Warrior the only “class” getting worse in one of his jobs with getting better gear?

Don’t you think it would be fair to change passive rage generation from damage taken to damage avoided?

On our last Gruul kill I avoided 48,7% damage so this would lead to:

321430 * 48,7 / 51,3 = 305139

Rage Gained = (Damage Avoided) * 2.5 / (Rage Conversion at Your Level)

305139 * 2.5 / 275 = 2774

So I would have generated a little less rage by that change but I am a max AC max HP Tank. Max avoidance Tanks would avoid about 55% of the damage what would lead to:

392859 * 2.5 / 275 = 3571

And going to Shattered Halls (non Heroic) where an avoidance tank with great epic gear would avoid almost every damage this would lead to nearly endless rage.

With this small change the protection warriors rage generation would scale with his gear the right way.


I also still miss some style benefiting from dodge and parry to build up hate. Some style working like this:

“After 5 successful parries this instant attack will hit your target for 5% of your maximum Health and generate a very high amount of threat.”

I hope the spellchecker worked as intended.

I mentioned the scaling issues in an earlier tank discussion, and someone brought up the idea, that maybe you're not supposed to outgear an encounter as tank.

I myself try to counter it by using parts of my dps gear when tanking a 5man, especially hit heavy stuff to make sure i am on 8% hit total is nice.

Long term i'd prefer it if blizzard could add talents to the protection tree like Shield Spec. If they'd add a talent similar to shield spec that gives you rage for avoided hits we'd get alot further with warrior scaling.
Devastate seems ok'ish the main problem is you'd need a weapon with a "small" dmg range (high avg dmg) that has around 2speed and tanking stats. This would make devastate alot better while not gimping HS to much.... sadly all tank weapons i've seen are 1.4-1.6 speed. If you can easily hit the def cap without def on your weapon you could try if devastate spam with Talon of Azshara is more TPS than hs spam with Mallet.

You're exchanging survivability with less hate generation, which I think is a fair trade. I'm sure that the raid prefers the MT(s) staying alive against having some overzealous dps warrior dishing out 50 more dps.

Our MTs got more than 1 set of tanking gear, they mix it up with high stamina, low avoidance or low stamina and high avoidance - it all depends on the instance and the encounter. If you're outgearing heroic instances, then wear some dps items. I did four SH normal runs (Yes, to get a guild member to revered) in full dps gear 2 days ago with only one healer. So if you're trying to tank that place in full T4, then I can see why you're having issues with aggro.

Maybe if Blizzard decides to fuck with shield block and crushing blows. Until then, no I don't think so.

Greetings Splatter @EU Mal’Ganis
http://www.fichte.org

Regarding the notion of becoming worse at generating rage as you gear up does not simply swapping in your dps gear or even going dual wield solve the problem?

It seems to me a tank can balance mitigation with passive rage generation and if a raid tank is slumming in a 5 man you can trade mitigation for rage. I'm not at the stage with my Warrior I have really had a chance to see this except that I am finding it's best not to use Improved Shield Block in 5 mans when the fight is about keeping aggro against heavy hitting dps and not about healers going out of mana.

Another theoretical option might be to really stack up Block Value to the point where the block value is a large part of the incoming damage and hold aggro primarily through Shield Slams and Revenge.

A final option is to ask your dpsers not to overnuke. If you generate low rage because you have excellent mitigation you also don't need much healing so the healer won't overaggro you. And imho it's always controllable for a dpser to not overaggro the tank except in certain fights which have very wierd aggro rules.

While the US boards get more developer responses to questions, the EU boards have WAY better Community Manager responses.

Anyways, this thread probably belongs in Class Mechanics and Theorycrafting. But there are already threads there that are devoted to maximizing warrior TPS.

Nor he considered how such a drastic rage change would affect how DRUIDS play in the game INSIDE of the vacuum that is main tanking.

Because they don't have block, they would generate less rage from avoidance. I mean, at the moment they suffer more spike damage but generate more rage (less damage avoided), the OP way they would suffer more spike damage and generate less rage (compared to pala and warriors). Quite unfair.



P.S.
Pre TBC, when doing 5 man instances with dps characters equipped BWL (mainly)/AQ40, my tank (equipped with MC stuff, but with a 2hander from BWL) tanked with full dps gear, 2 hand weapon and (DAMN HIM!) berserk stance trough all the instance, apart from the final boss (and I was geared with the best 5 man instance gear and one or two ZG loots). He tanked by damage aggro and I assure you none pulled aggro from him (and the mage and the other 2 dpsers were not slacking). If you are well equipped and running non heroic, there's no need to put on tanking gear, just help dps so the run is faster.

@Dirich

I know about the tooltip and I know about avarage damage. I could have written all the stuff you have written in my post to be more accurate, but it was not worth the time because a slow weapon with the same DPS value always has an higher avarage damage than a faster one. That is all I said or do you really think I would use a green 50 dps weapon instead of my Kings Defender just because of it's speed?
Anyway, thx for your explanation.

@Ivriniel

Thank you for your tips and tricks how to tank in 5 man dungeons but you missunderstood my point. I have absolute no problem how to tank in 5 man Dungeons. I play my warrior since more than 3 years and i know how to deal with those problems. What i wanted to disscuss about ARE the problems not any solutions with the current game design.
I want the game design to be roofed.
Using a slower weapon to push your Devastate damage would be a great fault! Every Heroic Strike you spam is much more hate than the small increase of your Devastate. Please do not think about using 2.0 or even slower weapons to tank, you would corrupt your hate generation.


@Kalroth

I also got an avoidance gear and a max stamina gear. Our 2nd MT is an avoidance "freak" while i am a max stamina "freak". We switch tanking as assumed by the encounter.
As i wrote to Ivriniel how to tank is not my problem, the game design is what i want to talk about.

Deleting crushing blows from the game design would make me skill fury. Ever seen a 30.000 Armor and 21.000 Hitpoints Feral tanking Lurker (Lurkers attackspeed is to fast to avoid crushings with shieldblock so using a feral is the better choice - mo need for SDR )?

@Brista

As written to Ivriniel - i have no problem with tanking. I am well geared started tanking Molten Core early 2005 and i would never use my tanking gear to tank in 5 man dungeons. It was just an example to explain what is wrong in the game design in my opinion.

This seems a very dubious argument to me, every other role is able to do their job easier with better gear on lower level content except tanks who find their job vastly more difficult in an instance when they outgear it, especially if the rest of the group also outgear the instance in question.


Personally, I find the easiest way to do 5 mans is not to swap in dps gear, blockvalue gear seems to work better for me, but it just can't compare with the ease of using my feral druid instead.


This would not be an ideal comparison choice really because your tps would also go up from the weaponskill on the mallet.

After 5 Sunder Armor Devastate generates a default Hate vlaue of 100 (20 with every Sunder Armor) and the damage dealed.
On our last Gruul kill my Devastate avarage damage was 265. So we get:

100 + 265 = 365 in it's avarage while Sunder Armor got a fixed value of 300. in Defence Stance and with talents I got a hate modifier of 1.45.

A 90 Dps Weapon with a speed of 2.70 would Devastate the mob much harder than a 90 DPS weapon with a speed of 1.60. But you would perfom less Heroic Strikes.

So what didn't i understand about Devastate???


And yes, offensive skilled warriors would get less rage by getting dmg, but that is absolut ok for me and many formulas work different ways in PvP and PvE, so why not here?

My understanding (and I'm not a warrior) is that Devastate is not so much a tanking skill as a DPS skill for prot warriors. It gives them something to do when they're not tanking on any given encounter. It means you can take 2 of them on the raid (for when you need two tanks) without crippling your DPS.

So, when MT, equip your fast weapons and go nuts for threat with HS. When you're not tanking, grab your slow weapon and do passable damage with Devastate.


The other issue you mention is the trouble of threat scaling with gear - essentially that your TPS scales much worse than the raid's DPS, because of reduced rage income with better mitigation, and the lack of white damage-based rage income. This augurs particularly badly for groups like mine, where I can see tanks struggling with aggro even before scaling issues start to bite.

To be honest, I'd like to hear whether the tanks in real bleeding-edge groups have a problem with threat, since if there were insurmountable scaling issues, you'd expect them to have already confronted them. That's not to forget the point that bleeding-edge tanks may have a skill differential that lets them overcome scaling issues that would deep-six any normal tank, though.

If there *is* a significant issue with TPS scaling, the obvious way to improve it would be some way of increasing rage income specifically in a raid setting. Either threat bonuses on raid gear (as they did for Tier 3), or some equivalent.

I already addressed that issue in my first post. I don't think it's strange nor is it unfair to exchange tank survivability with less hate generation.