Dulak

Not necessarily greens, but tanking heroics in T4/T5 was much easier than in T6.

Another good example I can think of is Archimonde. I used to tank him with every single avoidance piece I had back in the first kills, but those days are long gone and I couldn't even dream of doing that now, the rage is just not there. I even have a lot more threat stats in my current full avoidance suit than the one I had back then, but at 70%+ avoidance the rage is simply not coming in fast enough. So I have to deliberately make the fight harder to put out more threat.

 

jimbo229

Only thing I think would work for being threat capped in lower gear areas would be a buff for tanking classes that increases damage taken by 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% or something along those lines. It would have to be something the tank can willing turn on or off because otherwise to balance out lesser content you would always be unlimited rage/mana in higher content

 

Dulak

All I'm asking is for threat generation to not scale backwards with better gear. Is that so much to ask?

 

Prinsesa

Stalwart Protector? If anything, Paladins lack a similar talent.

Which brings up another question: What is it with Druids that makes it so they do not seem to experience this problem, or is that simply my inexperience with Druids showing?

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Pitbuller

This is like asking normalized rage gain from damage taken too. Think about it. If you allways gain rage nomatter if you take hit or dodge it. In this case you gain more rage in t6 content than t4 content becouse bosses hit harder. Problem with avoidance streaks is end game itemization. Blizz give too much avoidance. In sunwell there is bandaid fix for this. In perfect scenario there is allways same rage flow coming but it get litlle more spikier in late game and then players can handle it smoother.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

Nari

Another way to solve this problem can be.. to give any dodge, parry and block threat values. Mob tries to hit me, I parry, he gets angry, I dodge, he gets even more angry? I block him with a shield - he get's mad. No rage? Who cares.
It can solve another problem at the same time with multimob tanking. Push block, block all mobs in 5 secs, get your agro. More avoidance = more threat.

 

Aeverius

You realize that this solution would in fact make Rogues king of tanking, right?

On a realistic note, what exactly are the concerns with regard to Stalwart Protector? It's obviously designed to address this grievance, but no one seems happy with it. I'm assuming the sole problem is the amount of rage gained; if it were 3/6 rage per talent point, would that be worth getting excited about? I'm curious as to why so many Warriors are apparently discounting a talent that seems able to solve the avoidance vs rage generation problem, even if it needs to be buffed to actually do it.

Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:

 

Dulak

No, it totally isn't like asking for normalized rage gain. I can see that blizzard is already trying to fix this issue by making threat scale with more stats so they can put avoidance/mitigation stats on gear AND balance the threat loss out with more threat stats. I'm just not convinced that STR alone is the answer and that something extra needs to be done to incoming rage as well. I'm hoping this will not just degenerate into a "just wait and see"- argument. Stalwart protector might be the answer, but at 2 rage per avoided hit I don't believe it will cut it.

And about druids, I guess the bottom line is that since druid threat mostly comes from damage done which is then multiplied and their tanking gear has an abundance of stats that help them do more damage (str, agi), they have a talent that gives back rage when they crit and since they have a 2h weapon rage gain formula they simply gain a lot more rage from damage done while warriors rely almost completely on rage from damage taken.

 

Unity

It's a combination of factors.
They don't outscale old content as fast since all their mitigation is percentage based - shields block a bigger percentage of heroic damage than they do in Sunwell while armour stops roughly the same percentage in both places.
They cannot use as much rage - one 10 rage maul per 2.5 second autoattack and one 15 rage ability per GCD is the cap.
They get 5 rage per crit from a talent, crit often thanks to stacking Agi to dodge and often spam Swipe, a three target attack that can crit.

 

Densor

What part does using a 2H weapon play in the rage generation formula? The site linked earlier by Nezralix makes no mention of weapon type. The formula on WoWWiki makes no mention of 2H vs 1H, though there is a distinction between OH and MH and crits give double rage. As far as I can tell, the formula gives you normalized rage gain based on your weapon DPS and AP. It shouldn't matter one bit if you're using a 3.9 speed 2H axe or a 1.3 speed dagger, other than that you're more likely to be at the mercy of the RNG when using a slower weapon since you have fewer attacks to average your attack results out over.

In the same vein, with more AP buffs being available and strength as a tanking stat, I imagine that a tanking warrior will see a significant gain in rage generated from white damage, and thus also make Heroic Strike much more of a rage dump ability.

 

Liar

2 different things here, friend:
RNG avoidance streaks cause unpredictability in rage gain. This is obviously a problem as I addressed it earlier.

The other thing is that rage flow can be low regardless, this is especially true for trash or 5 mans. Mobs don't hit hard enough to give you rage for a proper threat rotation even if you didn't fully avoid them for 10 secs which is why I wince at the notion of stacking even more Block Value. Why would I do that when mobs already hit me for 500 or 1000 max after block? That's just shooting myself in the foot by adding yet another source of avoidance (I consider blocking a form of avoidance if it reduces your damage taken to 0 or close to it). In my trash/5 man tank gear I am hit and expertise capped anyway plus I have to drop around 10%ish avoidance so it's managable, and yet, there is only around a 10% chance for a hit to get past unblocked.
Now where is the skill part in this? I had an easier time generating threat in blues and expertise badge gear because mobs were actually giving me good enough rage in a 5 man or on trash than I get tanking in full T6. Did I just lose part of my skill by upgrading my gear? I mean is it supposed to make 5 mans/trash harder on us, really? Or is this just some sort of oversight by Blizzard concerning overgearing and rage generation? I'd wager it is the second, and just because we found workarounds for it doesn't mean it's fine.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

mhr_78

Allthough on some bosses (Zul'jin Phase 1 for example) i sometimes notice that the slow attacking mob, my 50% avoidance even starves me of rage.

The handy thing is that druids can gain rage from special attacks if they crit (5 rage per crit). It's not tanking heaven though for me as a druid if the dps goes ball to the walls and my first threat moves get dodged or parried (Mangle/Maul) dps might draw agro if they are careless.

Overall druids gain rage through avoidance. More Agility = more dodge = more crit = more rage even when avoiding attacks.

This is where white attack crits also shine, a lot.

However - i run around with so much gear in my bags that i can shift on the fly. Raid Boss Tanking, DPS, and a mix of tank + DPS gear for trash which i also exclusively use to tank stuff that i outgear (heroics/karazhan).

 

Dulak

I guess you are right about the rage formula, but in all fairness you snipped it out of my post like it was the only point in making druid rage gain better than a warriors .)

 

Densor

With more AP, white damage will make up more of your rage generation, probably enough that you'll be fine tanking with a proper threat rotation, even without taking any damage. You just won't be able to use Heroic Strike, which is supposed to be a rage dump anyway. As long as the removal of Blessing of Salvation is somehow mitigated by a slight increase in threat generated from your abilities (once they get around to balancing TPS), Heroic Strike may end up being just an added bonus in most situations, rather than necessary to spam whenever you have extra rage.

And yeah, RNG is a part of the game, otherwise we wouldn't have crits, misses, parries, dodges, etc. We'd be playing a strategic tabletop game with no dice. It'd be like reading a "Create your own adventure" book, where you can go through and figure out the ending just by having numbers and having a complex series of macros. RNG sucks at times, but it is a necessary part of the game.

Yeah, that was the only thing wrong with your post. Druids get tons of rage and can't spend it as fast as warriors (as mentioned by Unity), so they are much less likely to suffer rage starvation. Plus, 2H rage generation was mentioned in another post and I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing half of the rage generation formula somewhere.

 

Nari

You can give this perk to warriors only or via some talent that works only in def stance. Besides I don't see it as a problem at all. Rogue can hold agro well? Fine. They already can tank this way keeping aggro through damage. It doesn't change anything in mitigation for them.

 

Densor

Rogues do have a Thunderclap-like ability now, too. I don't know why you'd even bring them up, though, since their threat is mitigated by their passive threat reduction, while a warrior or druid's threat is buffed. If mitigation directly generated threat, I'd be willing to bet that rogues wouldn't be better at tanking than warriors or druids.

It is also a stupid idea. Just imagine if a DPS warrior gets close to pulling aggro, turns off his auto-attack to stop himself from pulling, and then dodges a whirlwind which generates enough threat to cause him to pull aggro. That would cause no end of crying.

 

Liar

I dearly hope you didn't imply that the choice of being able to avoidance stack is bad for the game. I think it's yet another thing that adds flavor to the game and I sure hope they keep giving us a choice to stack effective health or avoidance with each having an advantage depending on what boss you tank. Like I said, I don't mind having to gear specifically for a boss (i.e. Avoidance, EH set, Threat set). My gripe is with "unlucky" RNG avoidance streaks and some bosses/mobs giving you low inc rage even in your threat set (thank god most of these bosses have a magic damage component part which help you out on rage because you cannot mitigate it).

Since I already talked about avoidance, I might as well say something about Retaliation: It's silly that avoided attacks and even partially (or just fully?) blocked attacks don't trigger it. I mean what's the point of using Retaliation at all then as a Prot Warrior on AoE trash? This needs fixing, especially because it's CD got shortened by so much now.

You are partially right. There are two problems with Stalwart Protector (sorry for calling it Stalwart Defender earlier - there is just too much Stalwart Blahblah in this game :P):
1) It's a Protection talent. Unless they expect Arms/Fury Warriors to tank in a more DPS slanted set than Prot Warriors - which is not always true, there are fights where they put on their mitigation gear as well - these specs will get the shaft. Rage starvation via avoidance is not a Prot Warrior only problem. It is more related to gear, not spec. If anything, Prot Warriors are more rage efficient and we still have problems from time to time. So Stalwart Protector being a deep Prot talent and not trainer learnt (or a Tier 1 talent) is just plain stupid.
2) The numbers are off as you said. If they went through with the 3/6 rage numbers I'd be alot happier. 6 rage every 2 seconds plus my white attacks will ensure that I can atleast pull off a Dev/Rev rotation with a possible SS thrown in there. It's no full threat rotation but that's fine if it can bridge the gap of those deadly (for your threat, that is) ~10 secs avoidance streaks on the start of pulls. Currently Stalwart Protector will fill up your rage on AoE mobs where we possibly can't dump our rage fast enough to make use it of, while barely making a dent in our rage generation on bosses/single target tanking.

To sum up what I think most of us want in one sentence:

Do it via Stalwart Protecter, increased rage generation or some fancy tricks that occur after avoiding an attack - I don't care. I don't care as long as we don't get punished for wearing gear in a zone where it actually drops.

EDIT:
Yes, RNG is part of the game. But our RNG woes are somewhat special. If a Warlock doesn't crit for 10 Shadowbolts in a row in a long fight, it does not mean much because it will sort itself later with a crit streak so he gets his average crit rate at the end of the fights. Warriors, too, will get their average TPS like this but here is the thing: RNG avoidance streaks midcombat do not have the same effect as one at the start of the pull. We are looking at a potential overaggro wipe here vs just some TPS averaging. Not sure if I am clear enough about it, but keep in mind that the first 20-30 secs of a pull are vital. Miss/crit streaks later in the fight can be averaged out. Someone getting aggro at the start of the pull because of bad RNG is just silly and we are the passive ones here because we can do nothing about it. Stuff like that is plain frustrating (and I am sure someone could mention that a 10 crit SB streak at the pull is also bad and I agree, it is. But atleast they can stop DPSing because they have actual control over it - we don't).

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Borodin

Well in Blizzard's words "we don't want Warriors to have to tank without pants" so let's hope the next Warrior pass addresses our rage-starvation issues.
We are indeed the only class that has to downgrade our gear to perform and no matter how much you value choice, individiual skill and rage-management having to downgrade gear is an anachronism Blizzard needs to consign to the "Bad Design" bin.

 

Gruntle

While I agree that it's a bit weird that the best available tank gear is not the best for all tanking in the game I still think the problems is a lot less important than what most of you seem to think.

If you have problems with avoidance streaks in T6 content wearing T6 gear I agree, it needs to be fixed somehow. But complaining about T6 gear being bad for heroic 5 mans feels a bit over the top honestly. The instance clear will go quicker if you equip some dps gear instead (group dps will be higher), it's all about choosing the best gear for the situation. In short, the T6 tank gear is just not the best when faced with that situation, you are not downgrading. It's like saying that you don't want to equip tank gear when having to offtank as a dps warrior, because "I shouldn't need to downgrade my gear".

If you don't have any dps gear, well I won't feel sorry for you, dps warriors have to collect tank gear all the time. I'd rather see that Blizzard spends time on other issues than this, in my opinion, non-issue. I don't see any real difference in having to equip some dps gear to resolve a threat/rage problems than having to equip resist gear for a resist fight.

 

Polishedhead

Too much whining imo before we have even seen the level 80 tanking gear.

A warlock critting 10 times at the start of the fight would stop dps around the 2-3 crit mark.
A warlock noticing a tank avoid 10 hits at the start of the fight (from looking at Blizzard's threat meter) would stop dps before they pull aggro. The tank could even say via Vent, "Hold dps for a moment, im having avoidance streak", which i personally have done plenty of times.

We'll make the best out of the gear we have available to us, this doesn't and shouldn't mean that the item with the highest item level is always better.

 

Dulak

If you mean the instance will go quicker because of the prot warrior's personal dps, then allow me to laugh. Equiping some dps gear makes my dps go exactly from laughable to pathetic. If you mean the group dps will go up because you get more rage and can produce more tps, then you just hit the heart of the problem. I can wear my "best of the best"- tanking gear on bleeding edge progression fights only. Which other class/role is wearing, as you put it, resist gear for all, or nearly all of the farm content? I can only imagine the outcry if suddenly mages would have to wear special "sheep suits" that would nerf their damage by 20% just to perform that part of their raid tasks.

 

Liar

I already agreed that choosing the best gear for a situation is fine - within a limit. Equipping DPS gear to tank with is not fine (Shard of Contempt being an exception because it adds Expertise) and it's where I draw a line between the strategic meta game of having to do valid gear choices and just bad design. I am talking about MTing here obviously, not OTing where you tank your 2 adds (say, at Hexlord) then continue to DPS. I do these things in DPS gear + Shield as well and there is no problem in doing so because your job is DPS to begin with. And I honestly mean no offense with this but reading something like "I have to collect Tanking gear as DPS Warrior, so you should be forced to do the same" (note the wording, you are saying you don't do it because you want to, but because you have to) indicates a different problem altogether. I am well aware of DPS Warriors having problems getting into PuGs unless they are willing to tank. But this is completely not relevant to my point of rage starvation.

Again, I am not really sure what to make of your notion that because DPS Warriors have to collect tanking gear, that MT Warriors should collect DPS gear as well (and this is the important part) because they need to use it while tanking 5 mans? FWIW, I own a good Prot and DPS set and I enjoy both aspects of the class. I can do formidable DPS when I am not MTing but did I collect that set for the purpose of making me a better MT? God no, it's to give me flexibility in my roles and to help with soloing/farming. Again, just because we can workaround the problem by using DPS gear does not mean that there is no problem at all. And rest assured, Blizzard won't go all "Hey, we just wasted one of our Development cycles on fixing the rage starvation problem now we won't give you Super Skill X. Haha, eat that, suckers!".

PS: Resist fights are stupid for the same reason. It's like they tell you "Here, enjoy your new full T6 kit but oh... I sort of forget to tell you: You can't use it on the last fight in the zone so you better be willing to equip your ILVL 110 Fire Resist gear.". It contradicts the whole sense of gear progression.

We are still at the whim of the DPS here though and once again acting the passive part.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Gruntle

I mean both, prot warriors personal dps will go up considerably by equipping some arena gear (S3+) gear and do heroics in them. Ok, if you're used to doing guild heroics with T6 geared dps, this will not really be noticeable, but in a standard PuG you might even be top dps doing that. You may have to do some smart stance switching to up your dps, but it's perfectly possibly.

To Liar, no I don't mind collecting tank gear in the slightest, I like having multiple gear sets to collect (my previous main was a druid). I also enjoy tanking a fair bit, but haven't got much time to do 5-mans nowadays. I still don't think there is a real difference, I have to collect tank gear (i.e. not my main raid role) to do heroics. That you have to get some dps gear to do them might be a bit odd, but I still don't think it's worth much effort to sort out. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

mhr_78

what would be benificial to the "avoidance" problem would be to buff the amount of rage generated by shield specialisation to generate 1/2/3/4/5 rage when a block occurs or tier an improved rage generation with shield mastery or any higher tier protection talent.

You could even fix it by giving tier sets a 2 set bonus or trinket, allthough then you run in the risk of having to stick to gear thats possibly below the tier you are raiding at due to a superiour set bonus - as druids experience with the feral bonus of the malorne set (allthough it doesnt matter as much when it comes to dps gear).

 

Shha

Why do you consider Expertise a "proper tank aggro stat", and hit crit ap not as much? I mean its just a matter of stereotypes whats "tank gear" and what is not. Just rename "dps gear" to "threat gear" and you are fine.

Personally ever since badges started to drop in 25 mans/kara, I dont think I tanked 5 men instance more then few times. Just move on really, or wear threat/dps gear (wearing sunwell dps gear+ some tank pieces, is actually a LOT easier tanking then when you did it at t4 level with "proper" tanking gear, so there IS an upgrade). Besides frankly ... I have no problem tanking 5 mans in full tanking gear... it just requires proper approach. In my avoidance gear nothing in heroics can really touch me, so it simply means healer is never gonna pull aggro. A tclap now and then is enough to keep aggro on a pack of mobs, and devastate with decent hit/expertise is enough to hold 1 not-raid-debuffed mob.

I agree paladins have it easier , but the distance is much lower - besides while paladin in full t6 gear makes clear a PACK easier, he suffers from the same problem as us - he has to drink every pull, since hes not taking damage. Bears are probably best off, but its not that much different then before. Honestly warrior tanking gets still easier with better gear - mainly because you dont "aoe tank" with spamming tab sunders etc on many mobs. I do a 4 pull, I tclap them like 4 times (12+ seconds), before my healer has to cast ONE heal.

I would say its because raiding is supposed to be a teamwork. If you are supposed to have aggro every time , why not just remove cooldown from taunt and lets us do that. Would be about as entertaining.