Uglesh

Greatest idea ever.... when can we get this implemented!! Make the suit actually be a Little Bo Peep costume complete with a shepards crook and I won't ever complain about having to down-gear for lower content.

 

Liar

Because Expertise is a tanking stat first and foremost (heck, DPS only gets to use the Dodge reduction portion of it). So is Hit and we find both on tanking gear (unfortunately we lose that Hit again in SW though). Crit & AP are clearly DPS stats and just because they improve some of our skills doesn't mean they miraculously became a tanking stat. Again, it's easy to become Hit and Expertise capped on trash and on bosses you have various options to get capped, too, without resorting to DPS gear.

Different strokes for different folks I guess. If I have a DPS Warrior grouped with me, I want him to be able to cleave/WW after a while. I don't consider holding threat over healers challenging, it's trivial. If you are content with single target DPS and holding AoE threat over healers, then more power to you. You would lack the rage for anything besides that anyway in your full tanking gear.

And while I agree that raiding/instancing requires teamwork, asking to make all bosses tauntable is ridiculous. We are tanks, we have fun in competing on threat with our fellow DPSers. And do you really think you as a tank are not supposed to keep aggro 100% on a raid boss that will oneshot anyone but you? Seriously?
I complained about losing aggro in an early RNG avoidance string because there is nothing we can do about it and I fail to see how you can interpret this into a claim to make Warriors taunt monkeys.

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

 

Shha

The fact that crit and AP arent top tanking stats, doesnt mean they are useless (well they are now, hopefully it will change).

As for 5 man - you still kill stuff faster with better gear. The dps warrior with you can cleave just fine and just "facetank" one mob. My point is , our gear doesnt really make it HARDER. Its still easier to tank 5 mans now , then in greens.

As for tanking , maybe I was a bit too aggressive but look. On a boss fight, where I dont have rage problems, and dont have miss streaks (basically using expertise/hit/stam gear as opposed to avoidance), I can make a 1 button macro and hold aggro vs anyone. Its exactly THAT complicated now.

Where the actual "fun" and "competition" starts, its right where the "miss streaks", "rage starvation" etc comes to play. Sure it requires teamwork from other people - thats good actually! If we push for changes that will assure we never get rage starved, and we dont have to worry about avoidance streak then we can just make a:

/castsequence Shield Slam,Devastate,Devastate,Revenge
/cast Heroic Strike
/cast Shield block

Which I use out of laziness on some fights, and it is basically foolproof. Where I do get challenged its entropius (tanking in full avoidance gear a biggest dps burn in sunwell is definitely fun), Sometimes early kalecgos with unlucky wild magic. Everything else in Sunwell I can use this macro with a good result.

I dont know, I just feel "dirty" using macros like that, but frankly with all the talk about "good warriors are better then macros etc", there really isnt anything you can do better then macro like that. Unless we talk about low rage situation - where actual warrior skill can contribute.

 

frisli

So you are proposing yet another must have 5pointer talent, as if the warrior trees weren't full of them, which is extremely overpowered in situations with several melee mobs due to the extremely high ammount of incoming rage due to both blocking and stalwart protector.

There is no single problem at all, the white damage will be buffed considerably, resulting in higher rage income, in additional stalwart protector is sufficient in my eyes for both multi mob tanking and boss encounters. Managing your rage is where you show your skills, every monkey can learn a certain sequence of keys to press in right order.
Further, warrior review is still outstanding and crying about the lack of talents/skills is premature so stop that.

Devastate scaling with AP - check.
Shieldslam scaling with AP - check.
51pointer whatever it ends up being called scaling with AP - check.
Thunderclap scaling with AP - check.
Revenge I'm not sure about.
Of course AP and crit will become very important stats in your threat set. Or do you propose a one size fits all gear outfit that lets you tank both shitty 5mans, 10man and the hardest hitting 25man boss because you don't want to swap certain pieces around for encounters?

 

Graul

As has already been stated, Blizzard seems to be taking steps to prevent the "the better your survivability the worse your threat" dilema by making str a very important multipurpose stat for Warriors. One thing that I'm not sure that could be implemented (but if it can, why hasn't it before now?) is a way to make your dodges and parries produce threat, but with a scaling modifer. You would not be getting as much threat if you'd been hit and given the needed rage if you were low, but it would be much better than the way it is now at least.

And this mechanic doesn't have to be so generalized to encompass every class, it could be "Tanking class" specific or could be a first tier talent for those classes.

Blizzard is supposed to be working on an in game threat meter, and how many DPS Warriors do not use Omen? Maybe not everyone uses a threat meter, but it's fair to say the majority of raiders that have any chance to pull aggro use them. You also would not jump from 100% threat to 110% threat from a dodge or parry.

I agree with this completely and seriously cannot understand why so many tanks are up in arms because they are rage starved in content they massively outgear. When you progress through an instance, you should be wearing most of the best gear you could get from the previous, and by the time you've had the last boss on farm for a bit you should be ready to move on to the next instance. If you could beat the instance you just put on farm in your current gear as a tank, unless your rage bar was always above 40 with every GCD used, why would you think better mitigation is going to make you tank that same instance better? The only reason you would be able to "tank" better is through threat stats as long as you were not in risk of dying. Gear swapping has always been an "issue" with Warriors. Use the set that's best for the fight, and if that includes a piece or two of DPS gear then what's the downside? Many Warriors have to collect two sets of gear anyway, at least DPS Warriors do.

Also, could someone post a link of the "double spec" idea Blizzard is thinking about implementing? I browse the beta Warrior forum mostly, but tha's about it and have not seen this mentioned there or in the general forum. When I first started seeing this pop up here, it made me think the same as some others; if we are going to have two specs, what exactly is the logic behind making Arms and Fury able to tank without having to respec? And are these respecs supposed to be on the fly, or do you still have to go back to town...which just means this is just saving gold and not so much time?

 

Liar

Please read in the context. We were discussing the effect of AP scaling currently. And it should be pretty obvious now what I want from my gear, I am not going to keep repeating myself over and over again just because people want to read small extracts of my posts instead the whole thing.

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

 

Shha

I just think that you put equation mark between avoidance/survival gear and "good" tank gear.
For me tanking is composed of two aspects unlike most in this game - aggro and survival. I find it actually the most fun part about it - finding balance between two. There are fights that focus on your ability to produce threat, and there are fights that focus on your survival. Im happy with having 2 different gearsets for both, and being able to fine tune my performance to specific fight. Id rather have that, then have "the best, ultimate, tanking set" that provides maximum survival , AND aggro adequate to ANY situation at same time.

Same way I feel about resist fights. I dont like fights like Mother - where you are forced with a resist set down your throat. I however endorse fights like Kalecgos or Felmyst - where putting on SOME arcane resist, can make the fight significantly easier (but important part - it doesnt ALWAYS make it easier- it works for some raid setups, and doesnt for other).

 

Dulak

This most definitely is not the case. There should be a difference between threat gear and dps gear and while people here tout season x gear as the ultimate solution, I think you cross a line there where it just becomes poor design and not "lols decision making skillz". Compared to the threat increases you get from hit and expertise pvp gear just can't compete, but one is simply forced to wear it or some other dps gear to get avoidance down to increase incoming rage because hit and expertise are already capped. I just find it funny how people don't see any problem with that.

 

Liar

Am I not expressing myself clear enough or can people just not be bothered to read my posts fully? I feel like we are going in circles because of that. Anyways, for the last time:

(I might add here that I absolutely despise the big Orc dudes on the way to Bloodboil (the ones that come solo). Who thought it would be a smart idea to have them Dual Wield with DW penalty? Seriously?)


Oh, and Strength on tanking gear is all nice and dandy for rage and threat generation but keep in mind it also adds to your Block Value. At some point you will have so much BV that you just added another form of avoidance - and one you can't deliberately turn off because both your tanking and DPS set will have Str on it.

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

Just a comment on the wee table someone used to list our Threat Scaling: Shield Slam does not scale with AP as such it's pure Block Value (as it is now) but the source of the BV is Strength now rather than a discreet BV stat. So I guess we can agree it's similar thing since our AP will be coming from Strength on tank gear - but see later.

Revenge does not scale at all currently and even lacks a Rank.


Back to Block Value and Liar talking about it becoming another form of avoidance (via 100% mitigation) I would hope by the time this happened the corresponding Shield Slam Threat and scaling of other moves from Strength would compensate for 100% Blocks - with rage coming in from high-strength white hits and the trickle from Block/Parry/Dodge....I guess probably not but this will only happen v Trash in non-Heroics so not too worried about it anyway.


I do however have a concern about BV moving entirely to Strength and indeed all our new AP-Scaling relying on Strength: Item Budgets and the accelerating cost of Stats compared to the flat-rate cost for Ratings.

With Block Value gone and presumably no +AP on Tank Gear we will start to get diminishing returns from Tank items relying on the Strength stat to scale our threat.

Once we hit 80 and start gathering Epics, cap our Hit and Expertise the DPS Items will see continuously increasing amounts of +Spell Power and +AP etc. Strength-based AP can't keep up because for example 100 Strength costs more than 75 Strength + 50 AP though both generate the exact same total AP (200).

We saw this problem hit DPS Warriors in TBC where Leather was usually the better choice because it was itemized with a good mix of Stats and +AP whilst the Warrior DPS gear blew too much budget on pure Strength.

And this is even taking the +10% BoK bonus into account. +AP on items just worked out at a greater total AP than from Strength.

So unless we see some budget converted to +AP on very high end TANK gear, or some other way to boost threat there I fear DPS could pull ahead of Warrior threat purely due to the cost of Strength vs the cost of AP/Spell Power.

 

Nezralix

Just a brief reminder: My initial comment on dodge/parry offering rage was in the context of a link to a thread that was talking about "how to make tanking fun". I think that's a fundamental gap in understanding here; I see an oddly large number of posts here going on and on about how you can circumvent the "avoidance problem" by doing this or that, but I can't help but see all of that as dwelling on workarounds to defend a broken system that really doesn't deserve defending. Stop defending it. It's not fun to be starved for rage based on the RNG. It's unnecessarily punishing the player for something they really have no control over, and something that, with 20% avoidance *with no gear on*, warrior tanks can't even easily remedy by swapping in DPS gear, as broken as I think that notion is in the first place.

In fact, I'm going to engage in a little bit of pop psychology here: I'm going to venture a guess that your average raiding-guild-main-tank Protection warrior is going to be naturally a little bit defensive of the status quo and not particularly receptive to ideas, even good ones. Why? Because (1) they've played a warrior for quite some time, and are thoroughly used to it, and probably spent a fair amount of time illuminating guildmates how warrior tanking works, (2) they've probably been a guild star (or prima donna?) for quite some time, and enjoy that particular position, (3) they probably don't entirely appreciate how other tanking classes work (that is, how much more fluid it is to play a protadin or feral), either because they haven't played them or don't consider them "real tanks", (4) they're browsing this particular warrior class forum with as much or more interest in telling other people how to do things as they are in having a discussion about the class, and (5) (etc. etc., the list goes on).

Before the introduction to expertise, I remember suggesting how great it would be for Protection warriors to have some way to remove an NPC's ability to parry, and was badmouthed up and down for how "dealing with unpredictability is part of playing a tank". I've suggested in the past that attack power should play more of a role in tank threat, including things like scaling Sunder Armor with attack power. Same basic reaction: tanking is fine, L2P, you've got hit and crit to increase threat. Hell, a few days ago in this thread there were people talking about how important it was to them for heroic strike and cleave to have extra threat in all stances so that they could effectively hold aggro in berserker stance. People get incredibly stuck up on how things are *right now*, and refuse to really consider whether modifications could make the game more enjoyable, more intuitive, and more interesting.

I stand by how annoying I think the dodge/parry rage starvation situation is, and I stand by the belief that it's absolutely fucking retarded to think that warriors should reasonably be expected to swap into a second gear set if they want to have sufficient rage to use their abilities. I say again that getting *a percentage* of the rage you *would have gotten* is a fine compromise between getting nothing (shitty and un-fun) and getting full rage (probably too rewarding, given the fact that, after all, you're not actually taking the damage). It scales appropriately to the situation, in a way that Stalwart Protector does not. In fact, I don't think any fixed-rage on dodge/parry/miss mechanic will be successful, as it's impossible to balance in a way that it's meaningful for single target rage and not ridiculously overpowered in multiple-target scenarios. Regardless, I absolutely don't care at all if tanks have effectively infinite rage when getting smacked in the face for huge amounts of damage by 25-man raid bosses, and I would sincerely caution Blizzard against designing tanks to have limited rage even in extreme scenarios, just as I would caution them against designing DPS warriors to have limited rage when decked out in top-end gear and multiple rows of raid buffs.

Furthermore, while attack power will be useful in scaling threat from abilities, it won't do a damn thing for rage gain, unless they change something substantial about the rage gain model. Hitting for 200 with a 1.6 speed weapon yields 5.5 rage; hitting for 300 (representing a substantial boost from attack power) yields 6.9. A very small increase. I think it was Ghostcrawler who made the comment that rage gain would be improved by having more attack power, but I just don't think he fully appreciated the rage normalization scheme when he made that comment. It's a solution for some problems, but not for rage starvation.

 

Gruntle

I'm definitely not trying to "tout season x gear as the ultimate solution", T6 dps gear works fine as well (but for the obvious lack of stamina). Feel free to wear your T6 tanking gear all day long, even when grinding. Personally I think being able to do heroics in half dps gear adds variability to tanking. You cannot tank the same way (neither in terms of gear or skill usage) as MT in a raid and as 5-man tank, I see this as a good thing. I find it funny that you think this is such a big problem .

Anyway, I guess this discussion doesn't really belong in this thread, we'll see how it works out in WoTLK with the new scaling.

edit: In reply to Nezralix above. I completely agree that it's stupid if you have to switch to dps gear for content that you're progressing through. I'm only discussing the overgearing problem.

 

Fellwraith

• As you get better dps gear, you do better in heroics and raid content. You only have one criteria to measure, dps output. You don't have to swap to lower tier dps gear or tanking gear in order to do your job better (most of the time).

• As a healer you shift to a regen or throughput set, but it's still the same tier of gear.

• As you get better tanking gear, your performance gets better from one perspective (survival), worse from another (threat). As a warrior, paladin or druid, you're going to wear pvp or pure dps gear to offset the threat loss. Deathknights entire tanking cycle is based on runes and runic power. Neither of those require they get hit to generate threat. Their threat generation is basically unchanged from Raid instance to 5 man.

Step back for a minute and think about the design there. Does that make sense? Is it logical that you're going to be wearing a completely different "type" of gear in order to do your job? Even a healer's regen gear is still healing gear, they aren't swapping to their dps set to heal more effectively.


I agree with Liar, even in a hybrid or dps set, you will run into situations where you get rage starved for short periods of time because you either don't get hit, you mitigate more damage (armor value goes up even on "dps gear"), or you fully block incoming hits. That's problematic for us as a class. Sure we can work around it, but it's clunky as hell. It almost seems like it'd be a better model to have rage based on the unmitigated, unavoided hits for druids and warriors and re-tune the game around that (although I'm not sure how you fix paladin tanking with that model).

Also, I thought I remembered seeing a note that resilience wasn't going to work in instances anymore in Lichking? That would make it so that you're better off using a couple pure tanking gear pieces and a couple pure dps gear pieces over arena gear.

There's also the problem of our "on next swing" abilities. The added str increases their effective rage cost and prohibits their use in a cycle. As you get better tanking gear, you'll cleave and heroic strike less because you're getting hit for less overall damage over time (which also reduces the effective value you derive from talents like incite). Cleave matters quite a bit for trash tanking.


Completely separate point, but I see a couple people arguing that talents like sword and board should grant extra crit chance. I think you are forgetting that every "this attack causes high threat" ability has a damage and added threat component in WoW today. Unless they change that, double damage is less than double the threat, it's not equal.

 

Muggins

How funny would it be if in order to dps effectively in a heroic you had to put away your shiny new apolyon/gloves of immortal dusk/etc and instead throw on some old kharazan dps gear? Or perhaps you had to put on T6 tanking boots? Would that give dpsing in heroics interesting variability or would it annoy you that you couldn't use your new hard earned dps items?

No one is asking to get rid of threat sets, or to make it easy to faceroll your way to victory. What they want is that if you go back to 'old' content you have a choice to gear for threat or for avoidance as per the encounter. Which at the moment you flat out can't without seriously starving yourself of rage. If you can choose to step into your threat gear or avoidance gear for progression content (how many people wore their full avoidance gear on shade of akama or RoS when progressing through BT for example) why can't you make the same choice for lesser content?

 

DarthGreg

I agree with you that more avoidance shouldn't mean less threat, but I feel that in order for this goal to be realized, the Protection Warrior must make a shift from generating his rage by taking damage to generating rage by dealing damage. This would allow itemization to have a much more straight-forward and direct effect on rage generation, as it does for Arms & Fury Warriors. However, this points towards a fundamental change to the nature of rage which may not be what Blizzard is looking to do here. Short of that, there are any number of ways to mitigate the avoidance/rage problem, but I believe that by nature they will be either too good and make Prot Warrior an easy spec to play, or that past a certain point they will fall short of their purpose and drive us all back to the age-old solution of down-gearing. Clearly, we want neither of these things.

 

Nezralix

One of the other points I proposed is increasing rage gain from damage by 20% or so when you've got a shield equipped, to compensate from the absence of a two-hander or an off-hand. It seems reasonable to me, but I'm sure that will be interpreted as another end-of-the-world proposal by some people.

 

Gruntle

I fail to see the similarity. If it made dpsing in the heroic easier, then why not. In some cases, gearing for dps is also done based on other things than ilvl (e.g. to reach soft hit cap, Solarian Sapphire, resist gear). I think these decisions add to the game.

Personally I find overgearing content to be boring and a waste of time (badge collecting can be done, albeit slower, in the 25-mans). At the gear levels where you run into these problems it seems to me that you don't really need the badges anyway.

DarthGreg is spot on, fiddling around with the rage gain might do more harm than good, in particular if it's only done to prevent end-game tanks from feeling rage-starved when they go back and do old content. I don't really mean that it's perfect the way it is, but I do not think this problem is so large that it warrants a fundamental change to rage mechanics.

 

Shha

It will directly impact use of heroic strike however. Right now, warrior threat is balanced with heroic strike being used on almost-every swing while tanking. our rage generated from damage on sunwell fights is next to zero honestly (with exception of offtanking twins, and maybe some entropius tanking).

Increasing rage gained from damage by 20% doesnt solve the problem - we CAN use devastate/slam/revenge anyway even in heroics, its the cleaves/heroics (aka skills that shut down rage generation from damage) that have to be cut off.

In all honesty, what *I* would like more, would be just simple tweak to revenge. Remove/reduce cooldown from it, reduce threat. Simple as that. Make it so IF you have rage like on heavy hitting bosses, you just dont use it, because lets say devastate offers better threat/use . If you however avoid most attacks and are rage starved, you start using "2nd best" filler skill - revenge, which doesnt give you as much threat, but for the cost of 2 rage, is extremely effective (which would mean balancing threat that way so revenge+heroic from spare rage use would be more threat then devastate alone, but less then devastate/heroic in unlimited rage situation.

 

Fellwraith

I agree. A more straight-forward solution would be to make maul/heroic strike/cleave still generate rage like a normal swing, but it costs you a base of 15-20 rage to get the added damage/threat. It's probably harder to code, but it'd make it so you don't have as big an implicit penalty from using the abilities.

 

SSLanfear

What about the idea of getting rage based on the unmitigated incoming damage? They would have to rework the numbers of course but if you got the rage from the damage that's incoming before armor and dodges/parries/block, then it wouldn't matter if you dodge 5-6 in a row. Also getting better tanking gear wouldn't stop your ability to tank in lower instances.

It all depends on the formula balancing whether this would be too much rage or not enough. I don't know how hard it would be to implement something like this.

 

Shha

Because if you get rage based on unmitigated damage, they would have to reduce the amount drastically to keep in generally with same amount as now, but more stable. If they do that, it throws all current pvp balancing (where you dont avoid much damage if any), out of the window.

 

Liar

They could just use two seperate systems for PvE and PvP. Really, filtering out the source as PvE or PvP should be trivial since even our combat logs can do it currently.

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

 

Polishedhead

No No No No No.........

Seperate systems for PvP and PvE is terrible.

I'd also say armor/avoidance not preventing rage gain a bad idea.


What's all this talk about unequipping your Sunwell tanking epics for Karazhan DPS gear? Why not unequip your Sunwell tanking epics for BT/Sunwell DPS gear? I tanked Gurtogg last week due to lacking tanks, i switched the following pieces of gear:


Girdle of Stability (iLvL141) ---> Onslaught Belt (dps set with 10 hit gem) (iLvl 154)
Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch (iLvl 115) ---> Dragonspine Trophy (iLvl 125)
Commendation of Kael'thas (iLvl 115) ---> Shard of Contempt (iLvl 115)

actually gaining 23 item levels total.

 

Liar

Care to elaborate or do you want us to guess your possible reasoning?

And who was talking about swapping SW tanking gear with Kara DPS gear? Especially on BB it sounds like a silly idea since you want avoidance, expertise and hit and DPS gear only has the latter 2.

EDIT: Having to swap in DPS gear for tanking purposes is bad design, regardless of the ILVL of the DPS pieces.

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

 

Densor

Watching the threat meters in my Sunwell raids, the only classes that even have issues with threat are warlocks, which Blizzard has admitted as doing more damage than expected, which means more TPS than expected. I think that if the classes were better balanced, the threat levels required to tank would be lower, which would reduce the pressure to use Heroic Strike.

One of the things that seems grossly wrong with the current situation is that the use of a rage dump ability (Heroic Strike) is required for tanking against warlock threat in normal situations. As a mage, I find it difficult to actually do enough DPS to challenge my tanks on fights that require massive DPS (Brutallus, namely). The only time in my recent raiding that I can remember actually getting close to pulling on Brutallus (i.e. 120%+ threat), I didn't have salv, had a 50% crit rate over my first 20 casts, and was in a group with 2 BM hunters (was a very odd group setup for me). The next attempt, I wasn't in the BM hunter group, did have salv, and had a 80+% crit rate over my first 20 casts, and didn't break the 100% mark on my tanks.

Granted, I'm specced Arcane/Frost, which isn't the highest DPS spec, but I can't imagine I'd be doing much more TPS as Fire at the start of the fight (since Fire does a lot of its DPS at the end of the fight, due to Molten Fury). And in 5- and 10-mans, I wouldn't be doing the same TPS, because I'd be unlikely to have all of flask, oil, food, Wrath of Air, Winter's Chill, Improved Divine Spirit, Judgement of the Crusader, Misery, Curse of Elements, Kings, Gift of the Wild, Totem of Wrath, Moonkin Aura, Ferocious Inspiration, and anything else I'm forgetting, while I could have all of those in a 25-man raid.

So, it is possible that you aren't supposed to be required to spam Heroic Strike in order to keep from threat capping your DPS'ers in non-25-man situations (and aren't supposed to have to use it as much in 25-man situations). If that is what Blizzard expects, then they may not see an issue with tanks not being able to use Heroic Strike on cooldown in non-raid situations.

Liar: Making separate systems for PvE and PvP seems like a really band-aid way to fix problems. If Blizzard follows that line of thinking, we're eventually going to end up with our damage and healing being reduced by 25-50% so that we can't 3 shot people in PvP or heal people forever.

Even the current situation with CC diminishing returns and duration changes in PvP is only acceptable because being stun locked or CC'ed forever isn't fun, and our damage is at the point where 10-15 seconds of straight up DPS is enough to kill anyone if they aren't getting heals. Plus, not every class had CC or stuns when it was implemented.