My take on some of the issues discussed:

1. Rage generation scaling inversly with gear. The rage generation from blocking is a step in the right direction, but my favorite suggestion is probably to have the rage formula altered a bit from dealing damage and reducing rage from taking damage.

2. HS queue spam. It is indeed very tedious to spam HS all the time in infinite rage fights. A toggle might be an option. It would be the same getting used to when to toggle on and off, as knowing when to queue/not queue HS. Or HS could be changed to cost a percentage of your rage and damage scale accordingly.

2.5. I was also thinking about a new ability to dump rage. Perhaps a Prot talent on a resonably short cooldown (20-30secs) that converts your rage into a damage shield. Something like 40-50 damage/rage point.

3. Imp. Revenge (2/2) reducing cooldown with 2 seconds. Excelent idea; would make our rotation a bit smoother. Not that I really have huge concerns with our current "rotation". The damage increase from the talent would perhaps have to be removed or lowered to 5/10% with a reduced cd.

4. Revert the Devastate change. I very much like this idea. Devastate is quite poor at the moment. Also, changing it back to how it used to be could make prot a viable dps:er when fewer tanks are needed. My experience on single tank fights is that mostly DK and Druid tanks go dps. This might be solved with dual-specs, but I don't see any reason not to increase the damage output of a prot spec while not tanking. Atm, my dps is laughable in a prot spec when I'm not taking any hits.

5. Vitality change. I'd like to see an increase to put us on par with Paladin stamina scaling. Also, instead of a flat Expertise increase I'd like to see reduction in parries (1/3/5%), much like Fury has reduction on dodges only (1/2%). Either this or have raid bosses parry chance reduced, so we don't have to stack up on huge amounts of expertise.

I know we have more stats to juggle than most classes but really at this point there are some that are sort of "set it and forget it" in gearing approaches. Prot warriors don't really need to worry about def, stam, or armor as they just come along incrementally with gear. Avoidance stats tend to be conflated on the same piece of gear (lots of dodge and parry pieces out there). Mitigation stats like block rating and block value are less frequent and seem to be something blizz increasingly needs to shy away from -- there are only 20+ viable epics today that work with those stats. I personally tend to be more focused on +exp and +hit gear since those numbers are still harder to come.

If blizz wanted to minimize the number of stats for us then they could:
- do away with block value as an itemized stat but keep it in the came. Maybe even turn it into a flat 1:1 conversion off of str. If need be they could also just increase the block number on shields themselves to compensate.
- move our +crit modifier off of agi and put it onto str instead.
- blend expertise and hit into one stat with 3 caps. The first removes dodges, the second removes parry, the final removes miss.

Of note, DKs don't just substitute Armor; they gain 10% total health from Frost Presence as well--which is why their health scales so quickly when also stacked with 6% Stamina from Veteran of the Third War. They also gain 15% spell damage reduction, which causes their base spell damage reduction to be similar to Defensive Stance (with talents.)

It's hard to quantify the damage reduction of DKs, though, since they seem to have more cooldowns than we have abilities in our normal threat rotation.

But, yes, it leads to a bit of an inconsistant situation. DKs and Druids will scale in health much faster than Paladins which will scale a bit faster than Warriors which are left quite a ways behind. I'm not sure what the argument for Warriors having lower health than Paladins is, though, considering we share most mitigation mechanics (Block and passive DR%) and they get some passive toys that scale very well with health, such as Ardent Defender. I could definitely seen an argument for bumping up Warrior Stamina scaling to at least match that of Paladins.

I understand your point, but I'm not sure I agree in all cases. I find that Defense is a very real consideration for Warriors, as hitting and staying over 540 Defense is not all that easy. Going between pre-raid and 10-man gear and then 10-man gear to 25-man gear actually results in a LOSS of Defense in many slots, leading to much juggling required. Even the best-in-slot setups don't have much more than 550 Defense, and that's even using Defense Gems and Enchants. Defense balancing is very much a part of Warrior gearing and consideration IMO.

Due to this, I think Stamina becomes a strong consideration. Warriors aren't always able to optimize the highest-Stamina pieces due to the need for Expertise, Hit, and Defense balancing.

I would also say that Armor is an exceptionally good stat for Warriors from a statistical point of view, but it is almost never utilized due to the previous deluge of stat juggling--who is going to sacrifice Defense or Stamina on a trinket or enchant for Armor when it's already hard to get enough HP compared to the other tanks or reach the Defense cap? Many Armor items and enchants are actually very solid in terms of survival increases but simply must be ignored to meet harder requirements on HP, Defense, and Expertise.

This is made more difficult by the fact that Blizzard seems to design gear in 'niche' design types. There are certain balances of the stats they like using very often, and others that are never seen. It's often hard to make a 'well-rounded' set like a Warrior needs without a lot of calculator work and trial/error.

So, all in all, I just feel that it's a bit too painful to really analyze gear as the 'average Warrior'. Expertise is probably the biggest culprit, because not everyone understands how important it really is.

I'm sure most people don't really know that by swapping from Broken Promise (slow) to Last Laugh (fast) they will take about 3% more effective DPS due to Parry Haste--even with 23 Expertise!--on the average boss. It's just not an easy or intuitive mechanic to understand.

Well Prot Paladins have a much lower base health as part of the class, the logic being that they don't want a lot of base health on a ret or holy paladin (probably for pvp reasons). Paladins probably don't want a nerf, so you're right, they probably just need to have all the tanks running around with ridiculous healthpools and adjust damage to compensate. 14% stamina like a paladin is probably not the right answer given our higher base health, but it should be a lot closer than it is. Edit: To be totally honest what they should do is have deep prot paladin talents add some base health instead of a multiplier, reduce them to a 10% stamina multiple and increase warriors to the same. That puts all the plate tanks on the same playing field (more or less).

Originally the frost presence health and armor bonus were supposed to help compensate them for not having block or the stats from a shield (as well as related enchants). Then they upped the presence's armor multiplier to 80% (from 60%) in 3.08 because they didn't like DKs being so reliant on cooldowns and someone realized a squishy tank was out of a job. What they should have done was added a frost presence damage reduction multiplier so DKs are like every other tank. My ilvl 226 shield adds 56% more armor to my baseline tanking gear, it's nowhere near an 80% increase. Effectively what that 80% mutliplier does is give them a physical damage reduction modifier similar to our stance, but it interacts with other buffs in game in very strange ways. Ways that our stance modifiers don't (armor caps out, stuff like unbreakable armor needs to go through a wholesale revision, etc.) They've created a situation where you don't have apples to apples when you're comparing tanks mitigation and they didn't need to.

I think the base health argument made more sense at 70 with the previous Stamina and base values. Right now, Warriors only have something like 1.2k more base health than a Paladin, which quickly gets made up for with such a different multiplier.

Considering that around the 2200 gear/buff Stamina mark (without multipliers) Paladins have 500 HP more than Warriors, it's not hard to see that this will get worse quite quickly with another 13 ilevels of gear.

DK and Druid health scaling is pretty different with high multipliers and a health vs. stamina multiplier, so I won't even bother going there!

Interesting points about Heroic Strikes have been brought up. One of my biggest concerns related to HS is that it dictates our weapon choice. I recently picked up a [Last Laugh] but I really don't like using it over [Broken Promise] as a Human Warrior (and "fortunately" rage mechanics are so fucked up that I can get away with it on many bosses, specifically those that won't feed you so much rage that you need a fast weapon to dump it fast enough like Patchwerk or Thaddius etc). I trade 6 expertise (rounded up) for 15 more weapon DPS, so it's a terrible choice in my opinion - but unless they normalize HS in some way I will have to use it anyway.
Seriously, it's backwards at the moment; think about it, if Heroic Strike wasn't this messed up then who in their right mind would want to use a faster weapon with the same stats/DPS over a slower one? The slower one is vastly superior for deep wounds, devastate damage and less chance to get parried - it's not even a contest.
Warriors definitely need a different rage dump than HS to achieve this, I don't think a HS toggle will fix this though a cooldown might.

On a different topic, I really don't mind that we have to care about more stats than other tanks (barring Block Rating, because it caps out early). Sure, it means we have to get a good balance of all stats but on the other hand it means we have the potential (and I am saying potential here because some things like our lower stamina scaling have to be solved via talents, gear cannot change these sort of problems) to scale well because spreading stats out is rewarded in the current itembudget calculations. I am hopeful that better itemized tier gear in Ulduar and beyond will alleviate some of our scaling problems but I am not kidding myself that it will fix everything. Stamina scaling needs to be addressed. Blizzard will need to figure out where they want to go with Block as well, the mechanic is just too random. It's basically full avoidance on hits that are below youblock value but it's relatively worthless compared to just having higher health/armor against hits like Hatefuls.
I am all for a niche where we are better at something than other classes because of our block as long as it means we can still tank other stuff without being too much of a burden (and vice versa!). Sarth 3D is sort of an odd one here: We are amazing tanks for elemental/whelp duty because with Block Rating/Block Value gear and Shockwave we require so much less healing than non-shield tanks that we are, dare I say, the best choice for this particular job. On the other hand this does not exclude DKs, Druids or Paladins from being able to a good job on whelps/elementals either which in my eyes, is how it should be. However, if you compare a Death Knight or a Druid with a Warrior or Paladin for MTing Sarth, then the gap is just much bigger than the one you have when you compare whelp/elemental tanks with each other. If Blizzard could manage to lessen that gap right there, then we'd be in much better shape - and I don't see this happening without Warriors and most like Paladins getting some health buffs down the road.

Roughly, Warriors have 30% more Block Value through Critical Block and Paladins have 30% more Block Rating than us. I don't know the exact itembudget values but I am pretty sure that 1 Block Rating is worth more than 1 Block Value so it might look like Paladins could have the edge there (this is a bit simplified tho, see below):

Now keep in mind that Holy Shield has limited charges. The way we do our Sarth3D in 10 man is that we do not DPS the adds down apart from the add tank's own DPS and Magma Totem(s). As soon as whelps spawn you generally have 10 whelps and 3-4 blazes on you at all times*, which can eat through Holy Shield pretty quickly. On top of that, we have Shield Block and/or Shockwave for multiple enraged adds to keep damage down by quite a bit.
Paladins on the other hand will generally have a bit more AoE DPS than us while whittling down the adds and can possibly throw in another HoSac/Blessing on your Sarth MT so they bring a different tool set from us while still being within what I would call the "block niche".
I can't speak about upcoming encounters and I assume that your question was more in a general sense of "what if there were X adds continously hitting on you, who would make the better tank?". It's hard to say as you can see above. How many is X? Are they stunnable? Do they have any special ability that we can mitigate with Shield Block? Are they undead? Etc.

*unless the RNG gods really hate/love you - anyone else think it's somewhat silly that the hardest fight is so RNG based? <_<

I am generally the add whelp and flame for Sarth3D also, yeah. It just works better that way.

Block niche would really depend on the mechanics of the fight, yep. Holy Shield may have limited charges, but Shield Block has limited time, so that could work out as a wash if you get owned as soon as it ends. A set bonus that extends Shield Block duration could be interesting, though.

I find it very odd that there are as many effects as there are that REDUCE the rage cost (imp hs, glyph of revenge) of our rage dump or give rage back (glyph of hs). Seems to be at cross-purposes. Improved heroic strike should just add more dmg to the spell. The Glyph of Revenge could be used for what Jayde is proposing or something else like it to light it up when you're offtanking. The glyph of heroic strike could add even more dmg to hs but at the cost of adding a cooldown to it.

Well, Improved HS is beneficial to DPS types for increasing DPS. Ditto the HS glyph. The Revenge glyph is a bit puzzling, yes. As we well know, the perfect rotation is one where all white damage swings are replaced with HS. Back in the day, that wasn't possible very often, so we took Improved HS to get closer to that ideal. Now we're at the point where rage generation is fairly binary in general. If you're tanking raid bosses, Improved HS is pretty wasted. If you're tanking a 5 man, well, it's actually pretty wasted there too since you don't often have enough extra rage to take even a 9 rage HS =)

You can't really change the presence of Improved HS, or the HS glyph. We could always start building specs that don't use Improved HS, but the question is then what to take instead?

some of you claim that a slower weapon is better for devastate, but since this attack is normalized the difference should be marginal

edit: typo

Devastate doesn't scale all that quickly with a slower weapon, as both the attack power contribution is normalized and the bonus damage from Sunder stacks is a constant.

It does favor the slow weapon slightly, but you're still only talking something like 60-70 damage difference between extreme weapon speed differences.

The biggest reason to use a slower weapon is that it causes you to take substantially less damage on parry-hastable mobs if you are not completely expertise-capped. You can take upwards of 3-4% less effective damage by adding 1s to your swing timer even if you are dodge-capped on expertise. In worst-case (no expertise) scenarios, it's quite possible to take between 6-8% more damage against a hastable boss.

The additional stam scaling on protection paladins also helps to adjust for the discrepancy in the ranged weapon slot, lest it be forgotten.

As a minor note, any competent prot Paladin will be spec'ed into redoubt, the proc of which is a fairly non-trivial amount of extra block mitigation that scales well with the number of adds beating on you.

On the subject of stamina scaling, I would say a lot of warriors overplay this issue a bit much. I'm on 2600 stamina unbuffed at the moment, and I don't have more HP than similarly geared warriors on my server; a lot of warriors gem or enchant for expertise which obviously impacts upon their stamina. You can't really have your cake and eat it too.

Jere calculated it over at TankSpot:

Paladin Ghostcrawler Hits the Paladin Boards - Page 3 - TankSpot

The calculation is before the extra 2% from sacred duty, so just swap one of the 1.06's for a 1.08. Either way, the point at which paladins outscaling warriors becomes a real issue is a very long way down the line.

You don't get the problem. Warriors have to enchant or gem for expertise to be competitive on threat because we do not have the luxury you have with undodgable or unparryable special attacks. Neither do we get 10 expertise via a glyph. Paladins on the other hand, can get away with gemming for stamina and not worry much about hit or expertise, which is exactly what falls under "having your cake and eating it too". Honestly, why did you think Warriors were gemming and gearing for expertise to begin with?

Point is, either we get the same health at higher tier levels while having the same chance to be parry-gibbed/TPS or Warriors will need to get a bigger stamina scaling so they can make up for the expertise gearing Paladins get for free.

I am basing the calculations on the base healths from Chardev (chardev.org - a World of Warcraft Character Planner - x)
Warrior: 7941
Paladin: 6754
Delta: 1187

Taking the calculations from the link you gave me, modifying the Paladin scaling to 1.08 and the base health to I get
[1187 + 1.06*1.1*10*(159 + 78) - 1.06*1.08*1.1*10*(143)]/0.6996=3072 before all talents.

Assuming the previous calculation I took from the thread is right to begin with, I get 3072 Stamina as break even point for when Paladins start to eclipse Warrior health.

From your armory you have 2599 stamina/33019 health but we have to subsctract the Stamina modifiers which drops it down to 2287 Stamina. With Fortitude (214), MotW (52) and Food (40) you would have 2593 stamina which puts you ~480 stamina short of the 3072 stamina in this tier already. And all the while you only have to worry about staying crit immune and gemming for more stamina. One more tier will most likely be another 400-500 stamina and there will be more in the game than just T8. And this isn't even considering the different gem choices we have to pick.
See the problem?

Disclaimer: I used the calculations from the linke because I am too dumb to do the math myself so if anyone finds any mistakes, go ahead and let me know. ><

In all honesty, I don't get why Combat Expertise - Spell - World of Warcraft doesn't read as:
Combat Expertise Rank 3
Increases your expertise by 6 chance to critically hit by 6%. Also increases your base health by 1187.

It's simple enough. >_>

If Delta is the difference between Warrior and Paladin baseHP than its 1187 and not 1007 (7941-6754=1187).
So:
[1187 + 1.06*1.1*10*(159+78) - 1.06*1.08*1.1*10*(143)]/0.6996 =~3072.68

With Ivona's armory data it's around 480stamina to get the 3072.
(I assume formula and buffs are correct ...)

Edit: Typo

I'm not sure why we are bringing in Commanding Shout and Blood Pact, etc? They have nothing to do with the relative Stamina difference and are just constants on either side. Neither Paladins or Warriors have health mutlipliers, so it seems quite moot.

Assuming base HP difference is 1187, solving for the amount of Stamina from gear/buffs needed to make up the difference between that and the 72 Stamina currently available on a gun slot.

((1.1 * 1.06 * 1.08) - (1.1 * 1.06)) * 10 * X = 1187 + ((72 * 1.1 * 1.06) * 10)
0.9328 * X = 2026.5
X = 2026.5 / 0.9328
X = 2173

Considering I have already seen Paladins with JC/Enchanting break 2.2k base stamina from gear/enchants/gems, I'm really not certain where the hypothetical 'far away' 50k health statements come from. As far as I've seen, this already happens--especially when you toss in PW:F.

I could be missing something critical here, but I'm not really certain what that would be.

This is, of course, ignoring what was already mentioned about the fact that Warriors have to spend gem, mod budget points and even trinket slots (!) on Expertise instead of Stamina and thus will have lower Stamina in most situations in addition to the above numbers. It is highly unlikely for a Warrior to have 2.2k gear/enchant/buff Stamina compared to a Paladin.

An ever-scaling 8% additional multiplier is nowhere near equal to a gun slot which represents only around 3% of the unbuffed Stamina on a Warrior and a static amount of base health which has already been overcome.

Your calculation seems to be right ... I wonder where they got the 0.6996 from (or can anyone explain it?)
But isn't it actual 72Stamina on the gun slot (42stamina +24stam gem +6stam socket bonus =72)? Would lead to 2172.5Stamina (2173Stamina) as outscaling point where paladin HP passes warrior HP.


Another point I want to mention here is: Tanking as DD.
Blizzard said that they want Arms and Fury become more attractive and able to tank 5man and 10mans. With the contemporary DefCap and Defrating->Defense it is nearly impossible to either get critimmun and/or perform your DPS (lack of crit and threat abilities). I know that comparing warriors to druids might be inconsequent but a feral can easily swap into bear and tank if necessary. We had such situations where one of our MTs died (due to lagg) and our feral tanked in offgear.

Also some of our offWarrior would like to tank 5 or 10mans but are afraid because they need a quite a bunch of Def.
So changing the defense rating -> defense value or lowering the defCap could become a nice idea to help offensive-specced Warriors (and Paladins) to do some offtanking while also allow the Maintank to either go for more def (as avoidance) or take some DPS trinkets/gear. Both (OffWarriors as Tank and Tanks as DD) were Blizzard's idea to close the difference between Warriors(Paladins) and ferals/DKs.
The other point (lowering the defCap) could also be realised by a general reduction of mobcritchance which would also prevent some situations where non-tanks are critted down (Hunters/Shamans at Gluth e.g., Shades). In an old TBC discussion thread we assumed that a reduction of 2% could be enough (in other words: mobs with your level should not crit you) (Pitifully the forum isn't online anymore). I liked this idea because it also means that if a mob breaks out you aren't automatically dead(what is the case atm).
On the other hand it allows tanks to stack something else than defense. There are good DPS plate around with enough stamina to be interesting for tanks.But we cannot take it cause else we would be critable. It would also free up some itemvalues for expertise or hit.

The risk is that lowering would trivialize the gameplay.

Ah, you're right.. not sure why I put down 70 Stamina instead of 72 for the Combat Shotgun. Will adjust.

How much hit are you guys aiming for? I've been trying to get close to cap, while trying to get to 6.5% dodge reduction, and then focusing on stam/avoidance from there. I haven't had much in the name of threat issues, but as I sift through the armory, I feel like I have way too much hit.

The more I read, the more I think about a talent that either boosted BV from Str, or % of stam to BV... kind of mirroring the stam to spellpower talent for Paladins. Maybe have Imp Disciplines and Imp Defensive Stance swap places, and changing Imp Disciplines to a new BV mod talent, or modify the current 30% BV talent to give us more.

I still dont know how I feel about the HP issue.

Generally you never want to drop below 26 expertise and 5-6% hit for most bosses and trash. The gear I logged out with is my multipurpose/trash set and I swap in more expertise or hit depending on the boss (like, you really want to be hit capped on KT so your interrupt never misses when it counts for example).

A Str --> something conversion would be nice. But please, no more Stamina --> something conversions. I like choices, but currently it feels like when you have to choose between more health or more avoidance, health always seems to win on bosses that matter. That's quite said and a step back from TBC gearing where either choice had it's advantages or disadvantages. The game really doesn't need to give tanks yet another reason to stack even more stamina.

I haven't put too much of an emphasis on hit, particularly. Expertise is a no-brainer simply because it's both a huge aggro tool and also a mitigation tool in many cases.

Hit is less of a deal for me since it serves no purpose in terms of mitigation, and offers slower returns on TPS compared to Expertise. I think right now I only have around 3%, although I do have Grim Toll to swap on if I feel the need.

I'm also considering picking up Bracers of Dalaran's Parapets one of these days, since I'm just collecting spare badges now. (Mostly just waiting for Razuvious to stop holding out on his, which I find to be the better piece given the socket... not sure I really want to waste mats on another Major Stam enchant for what's mostly a sidegrade.)

A lot of the Hit items aren't super-well itemized for Warriors I've noticed. For instance, Heritage isn't really any better for aggro than Nexus War Champion Beads with a Stam/Expertise gem due to the loss of Strength and gemmed Expertise. And the Gatekeeper (as the 2nd high ilevel ring with Hit on it) having zero Defense on it makes it very inflexible.

Think the biggest problem for me, though, is that even when Expertise is soft-capped it is worth 80% of the TPS value per rating point compared to Hit, in addition to a fairly notable survivability increase on Parry-hastable mobs. Prior to the soft-cap it obviously blows Hit out of the water. I'd say Expertise borders on being overpowered in terms of its impact as a single stat, and I really wouldn't object to Blizzard dropping boss Parry rates down to more resonable levels.

I probably would have a different feeling about this if we didn't already have to spend so much budget on Expertise and if Expertise didn't make such a massive difference for Warriors in particular. Right now, I'm more inclined to continue to pump points into Expertise even past the soft-caft, as the overall return is a lot better and Hit doesn't seem too critical in most cases... so, that just goes back to my feeling in regard to Prot Warrors needing way, way too many different stats to 'work' gear-wise. (And that very few items seems super well-designed for us due to our specific gear needs when compared to Paladins/DKs.)

I agree about the conversion thing. I think Strength is where Blizzard needs to be looking, because it just isn't useful enough right now. Perhaps they think it is, but mathematically the value simply isn't there. A two-for-one of both making Strength more viable and lessening the strain on some portion of our itemization would be a welcome change.