Infraction for Chasteyes: Useless Post

Kaubel · 08/09/08, 9:41 PM

Post: [Warrior] WotLK talent Preview/Discussion
User: Chasteyes
Infraction: Useless Post
Points: 1

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#5.

Original Post:

I'm also curious to see how the threat situation is going to pan out. For those warriors who actually have experience playing with a competent protection paladin in end-game content, you probably have picked up on the fact, even though paladins require a lot less button mashing, they dish out a considerable amount of single-target threat. The protection paladin we run with pulls around 1000-1100 sustained single-target TPS on regular trash mobs (that is, non-undead/demon). Given that he already starts out with full "rage," or mana, he will actually consistently out-threat me on single-targets unless I resort to somewhat extreme measures.

When I'm stacked with typical itemized "threat tank gear" provided by Blizzard (5% hit, 6% expertise, 1044 shield block value, 1300+ with trinket), I'd estimate 4 times out of 5 when we both begin to generate aggro on a single-target at the same time, he will get the mob's attention better than me. This is due to the fact he starts out with full "rage," and is able to generate high threat reliably right off the bat, and because Bloodrage -> Shield Slamming immediately does not compete well with Avenger's Shield + Judgement. I will follow up with devastate spam until the next Shield Slam, but by that point it's typically not coming off the paladin unless I get lucky crits and he gets unlucky resists. With our itemized gear, warrior threat requires repeated and in some cases constant usage of Heroic Strike to pull ahead of the threat paladins can generate basically on command. This is all on a single-target, mind you.

The only way I've really been able to contradict the above statement is by straying from Blizzard's intended prot warrior itemization and replacing tank gear with DPS gear. By sacrificing around the same amount of avoidance and health I would by stacking 1044 block value, I could instead get roughly +600 attack power and +10% crit - which turns out to be a lot better. Essentially, the highest TPS attainable by a warrior is through wearing fury gear in defensive stance. I would estimate when I get to the 1500 attack power, 25% crit rating, 19% dodge, 14% parry mark (unbuffed), I can generate more TPS than our paladin (while I'm raid buffed) without spamming heroic strike. On our last Gorefiend kill, where I was spamming Heroic Strike non stop, I averaged roughly 1650 TPS, with about the same set up as described above.

Link to our last kill: Sekzee produced 1643 tps

In summary, I'm concerned about how this balance will be affected in the expansion. From my understanding, prot warriors and paladins will receive about the same amount of added scaling in the expansion (originally, I assumed only warriors would receive the added scaling from attack power, but apparently paladins will be getting that too on basically all their abilities), meanwhile paladins will be receiving essentially an entirely new, and more effective, threat rotation via two new, fundamental threat generating abilities. This leaves me to believe protection paladins will have even a bigger advantage in the situations where both players are actually wearing the gear intended by Blizzard, and in situations where 1) The warrior has infinite rage and 2) The warrior stacks DPS gear to compete, our advantage will be either considerably smaller or... we won't have one at all.