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.

"An instant weapon attack that causes 50% of weapon damage plus 35 and additional threat for each application of Sunder Armor on the target. In addition, this attack will renew the duration of the Sunder Armor effect."

This is Devastate's tooltip from wowhead. For what I know, usually skills provide a fixed amount of aggro for being used and a variable amount due to damage. Your concern about Devastate needing high max damage and slow weapon is quite wrong.

1) You DON'T need high max damage, for the simple reason that if your minimum damage is 1 and max damage is whatever, your average damage is half of "whatever". Slow speed usually means higher damage because DPS needs to be the same (for weapons of the same power). What you should want (I don't agree, but I've not done too many counts) is a weapon with a very small damage range (max - min damage), and high average damage (which, considering DPS fixed, means slower weapon).

2) If you change a slow weapon (speed X, average damage Y), with another one with the same DPS, your speed and average damage will be divided by the same amount (let's say K, where K= X / "new weapon's speed"), but you will be able to land a number of hits K times higher in the same amount of time (I'm considering K > 1, which means you are exchanging a slower weapon for a faster one). Conclusion? You gain the same rage from white hits BUT you land more hits, which is a sure advantage when you are using HS (and in the beginning of the fight - more on this at the end of the post). DPS is the same, crit chance is the same, this means both aggro from damage and damage dealt are the same.


Let's do a little example (numbers took a bit out of the blue, for the sake of easy counts):
Weapon 1: 1000 damage every hit, speed 4.00
Weapon 2: 500 damage every hit, speed 2.00
Crit chance: 10%
Crit multiplier: x2
Aggro gained from normal hit: 1 point per damage
Aggro gained from critical hit: 2 points per damage


Over a fight of 200 seconds we have

Weapon 1 (50 total hits)
Normal hits: 45
Critical hits: 5
Damage from normal hits: 45x1000=45000
Damage from critical hits: 5x2000=10000
Total damage dealt: 55000
Aggro from normal hits: 45000
Aggro from critical hits: 2x10000=20000
Total aggro from damage dealt: 65000

Weapon 2 (100 total hits)
Normal hits: 90
Critical hits: 10
Damage from normal hits: 90x500=45x1000=45000
Damage from critical hits: 10x1000=5x2000=10000
Total damage dealt: 55000
Aggro from normal hits: 45000
Aggro from critical hits: 2x10000=20000
Total aggro from damage dealt: 65000


For what concern rage generation, just put the "K"s in your formula in the right places and multiply for the number of strikes, you'll see all the "K"s elide themselves.


This said, I am not a tank. I've read a lot of topics about tanking tough, but I admit my knowledge in the field is not complete, I still have to study a bit. Still, if I've not missed anything, you should only search for a weapon with good DPS, tanking stats and the speed you prefear.


I prefear fast weapons because they help in spamming skills that stick to your swing and, in the very beginning of a fight, you get rage faster (altough total rage gained is the same, with fast weapons you get more, smaller, gains). I don't know if I explained myself so here is a simple example: if your weapon hits for 10k once every 10 seconds, you'll need 10 seconds to get some rage and aggro, and you will have the same rage/aggro which you would have with a weapon that hits for 1k every second (thanks to which your raid can start dps after 2 seconds because you gained enough rage to start sundering your target).


P.S.
Tanks don't gear up for taking less damage (ok, partly for this also), but to avoid spikes as much as possible. And, for this, I thank them <3

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.

I understand your concern and the frustration of not being able to post on the "official US forums". I also understand the perception of some EU players that the Elitist Jerks forums offers a more direct line of communication to the developers at Blizzard than the EU forums, which the developers obviously have access to as well. It's obvious you made some effort in your post.

I assure you, however, that the EJ forums is not really the place to vent your extremely specific frustrations and definitely not the place for a loose "what If?" discussion. Also, your exact concerns have been discussed to death and beaten to a bloody pulp since the release of the original WoW on the US Official WoW forums.

That said, I don't think you fully understand what Devastate does and how to implement it aside from dealing damage based on weapon speed. Although I am not at all a mathematically-inclined person, I also don't think your math/equations accurately models what actually goes on in "avaoidance" and the combat table. I don't think you have considered how such a drastic rage change would affect how warriors play in the game outside of the vacuum that is main tanking. I also don't think you read the forum rule that says "don't sign your posts."

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.

Well, I know you knew that part, what I tough you didn't know was the part regarding the fact that "max damage" isn't something worth considering. But if by that you meant the dps... well, how could I knew it

I miss the part where I suggested that. I said lower speed, with equal dps. That green items is more like lower dps with same speed.

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?

You are the 1st poster unserstanding what i wanted to explain. Thank you for that!
My Post is no "how to tank" or "please help me i am to stupid to tank in 5 man Dungeons" post. My Post should start a disscussion about some strange and unfair points in the design of the protection warrior.

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.

While it would clearly need appropriate scaling, probably the fairest way to calculate rage from incoming attacks would be to base it on the unavoided/unmitigated attack.

Change the formula for incoming rage to be something like:

Rage Gained = (Max Potential Damage * R) * 2.5 / (Rage Conversion at Your Level)


A sensible value for R to reduce the amount of rage gained per attack would have to be established since the maximum potential damage is obviously a higher value than actual damage taken and all that people want is a fairer amount of rage rather than a huge boost.

No other role needs to make such tradeoffs though its simply the case that better gear makes for an easier run in easier content, tanks have spent time gathering their gear just like everyone else so it just seems illogical that they are penalised when nobody else is.

Since I am no 24/7 player and it is much more important for me to play WoW together with some real life friends i am no "bleeding-edge" tank. But after watching many of those tank videos and disscussin a lot with well known tanks out there I can also tell you, not every "SSC cleared" and "The Eye cleared" tank out there knows that much about his class you might be thinking.
To build up Aggro this is the max Hate cycle possible:

Shield Slam (6 sec. CD) -> Revenge (5 sec. CD) -> Devaste (1.5 sec global CD) -> Debastate (1.5 sec global CD)

More hate can not be build on the global CD (with 4/5 T4 you would switch Revenge and SS).
The only Style generating lots of hate and not linked with the global CD is Heroic Strike. So there is no magic about how to build up max aggro

Only the raid can do so. But try to tell your rogues and healers the only Shamy in your raid has to be in the MT group to give windfury and heroism to you - gl - they will kill you .

Your right with your statement of Devastete being one of the DPS styles we protection warriors got, but i would love this style to be conferted to a hate generation style scaling with devence values, because 99% of my raiding time i build up hate and not dmg.

An alternative would be to allow prot warriors to get some rage from damage dealt, rather than replacing all their white damage with yellow Heroic Strikes. That way the DPS on their weapon actually constitutes a proper upgrade, as it does for other types of warrior.

You could either simply have a talent in Prot somewhere that says "Your Heroic Strikes now generate rage", or more sensibly you'd give a replacement for Heroic Strike that acts equivalently (i.e. instant cast, on-next-attack, spammable), called "Thundering Strike", or some such. You'd then tune the damage/rage/threat of that attack specifically for its role a a spammable attack for tanking.

Question is whether that would be OP in PvP, but if I understand rightly, Prot is nowhere near a powerful PvP spec, so that's not a worry.

Yes abolute every other class in the game is gettign better in every point with getting better gear. Only the Tanks are Fuc&$§$ up. And as one poster mentioned about Druids , Drueds skill feral, switch gear, go to cat form and deal much dmg, they can still battle rezz and innervate they can switch to bear and tanking gear and easy build up more hate a tank can do.
We tanked Gruul 6 tims with a Def tank to get those HFS and 5 tiems with a feral. The feral wath worse equipped but he was able to deal the same hate as I (MT) was and after some dodges and parries by me he had to do slow in hate build up to not overaggro me. So please do not tell me anything about "unfair" and druids. I am the raid bitch not being able to Quest (as well as others can), PvE or Farm....

Doing something along the lines of what I suggested wouldn't make things harder for anyone, whether they were a lesser geared warrior or a druid.

Better geared tanks would not gain more rage with the idea I put forward, all that would happen is that all tanks would gain the same amount of rage from incoming damage on the same encounter, the ones with better gear would simply take less damage.

A tank has to do all that, however unlike us, you don't have to downgrade your kit in order to do easier content, your job gets vastly easier with gear upgrades ours gets harder.

Now this thread is where it should be. Resume.

Welcome to the club. I need a dps gear to be able to do something in pve solo, and a respec would be better. For this part you can simply choose between:

1) Respec in the weekend, and do some farming (there are people that do this)
2) Roll a "farming alt"

PvE solo problems should stay out of the pictures. For those you don't need a tanking gear anyway.


Now, there's no point in being so pissed about the good points in druid tanks, you should consider the global picture: they lack block.


I understand this difference, on the other hand probably you missed something on the "priest swapping equip" part. I would try to explain from what angle I watch the problem.

I need to use equip that grant me a lot of mana regeneration when doing trash mobs, while on bosses I need to use more +healing than on trashes. I can do my work in any case, but my performances would be better/worse if I use/don't use the best equip for the kind of fight we are doing.
For tanks the problem isn't "am I tanking trash or bosses?", it's some sort of "am I tanking strong or weak mobs compared to my actualy strenght?". When tanking strong mobs, go for the best tanking equip, when you tank weaker mobs, you need to change to the second equip (not +heal but mana regen), which you should develop for this specific task.

From one perspective our problems are different, from the other one they are alike. You can call it a downgrade, but I see a swap from some stat that's too high for what you need, to someone else that is more useful for a certain kind of fight.
Of course priest gear switching seems tactical, while yours seems a downgrade, but in the end they can be view as an adaptation to your role (what "create" the aformentioned "difference" is that I switch stats for healing purposes, you probably should switch stats from tanking purposes to dps' ones... but you would do this without problem when running a low level instance.. so what is the big difference now? Can't you consider Gruul as a "low level instance" for you right now? When hitted level cap, your "level" grows with your gear, there's no difference).
In the end, if you are a too strong tank, than there's no need for you to be so hard, just be a bit more squishy and help with dps.

Devastate will be in a cycle for any tank that maximizes TPS. To be more precise, any tank that has say a King's Defender or higher for tanking. Unless the mob has very high armor values, devastate should give you slightly more threat for the GCD than a sunder would. Although in a low threat situation, a talented sunder would be more threat per rage (if my brain is working right this morning).