DKs have the similar dependency on hit/expertise though right?

Going by how our DPS DKs gear: No, not really. Hit/Expertise helps smooth out their rune rotation early on but they don't need it as badly as we do either. Rune Strike can only miss and should be up all the time while tanking (with BoSanc) and some of their moves ignore armor/cannot be dodge/parried/blocked either or are plain magical damage.

EDIT:
I'm disappointed they still won't acknowledge the health deficit as a problem but atleast they might be fixing Heroic Strike. I hope that this is just one piece of our rage problems solved and not all they are going to do.

First off, great thread.

Earlier on in the thread I saw a lot of threat comparisons between the tanks, and showing warriors on average above paladins. My guild runs a Prot paladin MT and me as an OT warrior, and this is largely due to the scaling on stam, the fact that paladins are VERY easily block capped, and what seems to be that Paladins have a huge threat boost over warriors. Now, I do everything I can to keep my threat high, using shield slam and revenge on cd, revolving conc/shockwave/heroic throw in between cds and devestating when those are down, but our paladin still seems miles ahead. Our gear is roughly the same, minus our weapon, but even when we were both using Broken Promise he was still miles ahead. Basically my question is have other people noticed paladins being way ahead on threat within their guilds?

I also some people mention why blizzard is dumping STR on us so much. It ties back into rage generation, they wanted tanking to be more "fun" (via big numbers) and for rage to be less of a limiting factor, so to do this they pump our strength for bigger white hits. Personally, I don't mind this because this is obviously a huge boost to our threat through every single skill we use, and adds to our generally avoidance due to extra block value.

I don't think that our healthpool is a real problem because we could reach around 31k HP unbuffed. Every boss (except Sarth+3D) is tankable with that HPpool.

But: Expertise and Hit which we have to cap, tie us to use either items that are behind the 213LvL standard or put +8Expertise+12Stamina Gems in our sockets. At all I suppose we lose around 2-3k HP by that, leaving 29k. Even feral druids are able to get this HP pool in leather gear.

That's an itemization problem and NOT a warrior problem.

In the contemporary state the game play is too trivialized because of the huge HPpools. Stamina multipliers (of the other tanking classes)perhaps need to be adjusted: Paladins do outscale us in Naxx10 gear, DK und druids not to be mentioned. I don't think that's how Blizzard want it to be.
Or they misdesigned some bosses who hit like weak noodles (Loatheb) compared to the HPpool provided even by blue items.

PS: BattleShout only needs a 30y range due to the changes to Sniper Training. Also the caster camp wants to gain the RetAura (Dmg and Speed) which force them to get in a ~25y around the mob. A melting of all shout talents in combination with a buff to Range and Duration would be a great step and free up over 12points in our Fury tree.

I haven't noticed the paladin problem that far.
The problem with a warrior OT is that most of the boss need only 1 Tank (Spider, Plague Wing, Malygos etc.). So the warrior loses 2 of his best threat generating abilities (and alot of Rage on top of that):
DefEnrage and Revenge
Both require to be hit.
When our warrior is MT he normally stays quite ahead, as OT he falls behind the paladins but stays around 50% ahead of the DD.

Pitifully with a paladin Naxxramas is very easy - pull everything together and AE it down. Their AE threat is still huge (Thunderclap cannot hold up to Consecration), the reasons why I haven't seen anything else doing MT in Naxx.

To itemization:
I still wonder why Def T7 Chest and Legs have more STR than the OffSet. It costs alot of itemvalue and doesn't provide a real noticeable boost in DMG or Avoidance. Moreover I would like to see some kind of item like AQ again (Str, Stam,Agi, Hit, Def). They were really interesting as OT. (Something we haven't really mentioned yet is Arms and Fury as OT, too)

To Protectoin Tree:
There are few talents really worth to be taken:
impDefStance, Vitality, 1h Specc and most of T1 to T3, I think.
Everything else are some kind of lackluster or funtalents to me; you have to take them to get Shockwave.

But there's quite a lot of RNG talents in it (imp Revenge, Enrage, impSpellReflection,S&B, Critical Block) which make the tree sometimes tricky to play. Don't misunderstand me, I like proccs because I don't have to care to activate another button, but Revenge and S&B Procc don't do anything good. Something like a counterattack which immediately ShieldSlam or with a mechanic like Retalation (being hit inflicts damage to the attacker) would be far more interesting to have.

I consider Shockwave to be sometimes very RNG if the mobs stand bad. The cone is pretty small and the use is not very high compared to other 51talents.

Also the stuns provided by the Prottree have no significant influence on boss fights or trash fights.

A real review over the tree, ragemechanics and itemization (values and avoidance problem) would be really great.

I feel like a huge number of great points about the Prot Warrior class design have been made in this thread, so if even a few get translated into some changes it will be a serious improvement for the class.

However, here's my biggest concern if a lot of the issues in this threat are not tweaked/adjusted:
Dual-spec is coming, and I'm concerned that I'm going to end up DPSing more than I'm tanking.

At the moment, Warriors don't exceed at anything in particular that I can see. They are average at best in most categories, and below-average in the others.

A fight with huge burst or magical damage will go towards the DKs due to the high HP and massive cooldown availability. Heavy-hitting physical bosses will gravitate towards Druid MTs given their high avoidance, armor, and insane HP. Fights with many small hits or multiple adds are still the forte of Paladins, and although Warriors are a close second the ability for Paladins to block more consistantly means a more steady stream of damage which is easily healable.

Given that Fury DPS is so high, especially, Warriors seem to me to be the odd ones out. On any fight that will require less than 3-4 tanks, it seems like the Warriors will be the ones swapping over the Fury to DPS--until a fight is learned or it doesn't matter and you rotate to keep the tanks from being bored. But on learning periods and progression raids, specialization is king.

'Jack of All Trades, Master of None' may work for utility, small groups, or even possibly healing since cross-healing and multi-tasking is a natural part of that mechanic. But it has very close to no value whatsoever in the case of 25-man boss fights.

So while I have not minded spending some time getting my Fury gear in shape, I'm quite concerned that I'm going to end up using it a lot more than I would have liked. Warriors are a great class and are definitely headed in the right direction overall with WotLK, but a lack of forward-movement at this stage would be a very bad thing for us considering the current state and direction of the other tank classes.

I don't get this reasoning at all. Sarth 3D is the fight we should be concerned about. Boss fights will get harder, not easier so Sarth 3D offers a preliminary preview of things to come and what to expect of tanks which is why if we struggle there compared to other classes, we will struggle on the hard bosses in Ulduar.

Let alone the fact that equalizing health will help Blizz design bosses with a tighter tuning because at the moment, who do they design around? Warriors? If so, Druids and DKs will have an edge because of their similar mitigation but higher health. Do they design around the massive health pool of Druids? Then Warriors and Paladins will be in trouble again.

This is my feeling as well. I actually am already in this position. We have a druid, DK, and paladin tank all in guild with fairly close gear in terms of item level/progression. If all 4 show up to raid I respec fury. So basically given all of the options, we are last for tank order and at the same time first (or possibly second but the DK doesn't ever respec) for DPS order of the tanking classes. This does not bode well for guilds that are either focused on progression or have enough people to swap in and out to min/max specs.

Sarth 3D is fine. It's a really well done fight since they managed to get the scaling difficulty down just right. What's not fine is that the MT either needs high health or pretty good magic mitigation (and ideally, both).

The way I see it, Effective Health for magical damage needs to be equalized. How they do it is up to them, but one class should not have both higher health and better magic mitigation on top. Spread it around, change Spell Reflection to reduce X% magical damage while the buff is up and so on.

Having Shields has really nothing to do with this problem. Shield mitigation can be balanced via higher armor or avoidance - no need to drag health into this because it really skews the balance for magical damage heavy fights. Just like the one Sarth 3D happens to be.

EDIT:
The opposite is also true at the moment though. If you got a Warrior tank and a Feral/Death Knight tank, then you are better off putting the Warrior as MT if you want to maximize raid DPS because their DPS while not tanking is lower than Ferals and DKs. Neither of the scenarios are really great though, I wish we could just decide who MTs or DPSes what depending on their gear and skill not because class says so.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Our magical mitigation needs to be buffed up to a level so we take a similiar amount of damage compared to our max HP (e.g. feral at 50 takes 10k magical dmg. warrior at 35k should take only 7k from the same attack). I also like the idea of Spell Reflect being a on demand magic damage reduction, cause as it stands it's a gimmick talent for Malygos P2 and PvP as the flat spell avoidance is too RNG to make a difference.

Sarth 3D is a nice fight actually and I already successfully did 2 out of 3 possible tanking roles. Drake tanking is more or less a TPS race and warriors have no problem atm doing this. Add tanking is a bit trickier than say for a Paladin or a DK, but with a high strength block set and vigilance on the MT for taunt refreshing it's very doable and no problem either.

--
What I don't fully understand is your ranting about how the Protection tree is broken. It's actually good there are not so many mandatory talents in there. And no Deep Wounds is not mandatory either. I find it a bit funny for example when people complain about DKs being able to use their cooldowns so often but at the same time saying Improved Disciplines is crap. Imp. Disarm and Safeguard are more useful in PvP than anything...but such talents are part of the design of almost every talent tree in the game since 3.0. Some say "lol Imp. Bloodrage I already have infinite rage", it still sucks to be rage starved and it is useful here and there. If Devastate wasn't nerfed to the ground (and Deep Wounds not so strong) then Puncture would be up for discussion again. It could be boosted with a damage modifier on Devastate for example. Vigilance is a nice tool too but you don't have to take that either. So I wouldn't say broken, though not perfect either of course. The toolbox-like design is intended by Blizzard and is understandable after they made so many tanking abilities baseline (including the higher threat modifier in defensive stance).

--
I share the concern that we do too little damage while tanking. Compared to other tanking classes we could sure use a buff here.

How do raid buffs increase warrior threat generation? Pallies will gain extra threat through Stam->Spellpower conversions when they get Fort/BoK (not sure about DK/druid). Warriors will gain Might/BS in a raid, but one of our largest threat abilities only scales with Str, not AP. I know that Blizz changed AttT from Str to AP to avoid having all that extra Str but was that really that OP? All tanks pick up that ability regardless, so it's not like the change was a big deterrent to prot warriors. Changing that back to Str and adding more threat scaling or mitigation to Str seems like a good way to address our threat generation.

Also, Blizz will change the mechanics for Sunder Armor to be a percentage instead of a flat amount with 3.1. Why not continue that trend by making Shield Block block a percentage of attacks, as has been discussed. That would feel more consistent as well.

As a dps warrior but also as an OT, I'm annoyed by the desire to have both a glyph of cleave (for packs) and a glyph of HS (for single targets). Both seem reasonably important for decent threat generation (or dps). And only one ability/glyph can be used at any given point in time, since both replace a normal swing. It's annoying to lose 2 glyph slots for normal swing replacement abilities.

I think the reasoning there wasn't that changing it to AP would deter tanking warriors, but that leaving it as strength would make it 'mandatory' for them (and/or too good for Fury and Arms).

Well, I don't think it's fair to classify it as a 'rant'--it seems to be an obvious place to look for feedback in terms of 'finalizing' the design of the class and polishing up unpolished elements.

My main objection to your points are that Deep Wounds and Impale are actually fairly mandatory if you want to produce decent TPS figures. Those 5 points are somewhere in the neighborhood of being over a 10-15% TPS increase and over a 15% DPS increase. Given the lack of other TPS increasing talents to take with the additional points, there really are no particularly viable alteratives in the Protection tree itself.

Also, Improved Disciplines provides little to no meaningful impact as to how many times Shield Wall can be used per fight. A 4 minute vs. 5 minute cooldown when the majority of fights are less than 4 minutes in duration (ignoring that Shield Wall is often used towards the middle or end of a fight anyway) is pretty much a non-factor in all regards. Death Knights are in a different ballpark due to their large amount of reliable and short cooldown abilities which can be rotated in a cyclic manner.

Many of the Protection talents are simply weak or lack polish/synergy with the Warrior playstyle. I don't think it's a problem to delve into how they could be spruced up a bit.

This is somewhat of a summary of things written in this thread, wrapped into specific talent changes I would like to see:

Improved Spell Reflection - When the ability is used it will reflect first spell cast against the 2/4 closest party members and reduce all spell damage you take by 10/20% for 5 seconds.

Safeguard - Reduces damage taken by the target of your intervene ability by 15/30% for 6 seconds and decreases the cooldown of your revenge ability by 1/2 seconds.

Puncture - reduce rage cost of Sunder Armor and Devastate by 1/2/3 and gives your Sunder Armor and Devastate a 10/20/30% chance of Rending your target.

Vitality - Increases your total Strength and Stamina by 2/4/6/8/10% and your Expertise by 2/4/6/8/10.

These would all go a good way towards addressing some of the concerns listed in this thread, and I think would be easy enough tweaks to implement. And they aren't just straight buffs because all of them would require talent point choices not currently included in the standard 15/5/51 spec.

Nice summation. In general warrior talents don't compound like that near as much as other classes. It'd be a nice step in the right direction.

Well, I have this problem not only while oting, its while mting too. However, it could very easily be how huge exp/hit is for us, and I don't have a lot of it atm (don't want to regem more until I get my malygos legs). It also could be that most warriors would vigilance their OT, which would provide a large sum of threat for them, unless the OT is OTing an add.

Edit: I never clarified this, but I'm not saying I'm having trouble with tanking off dps, more so that a paladins threat seems a lot higher than mine on average.

@Zaon: Part of those changes still favor the 15/5/51 build, especially if you are using a slower weapon, and would only require minor adjustments. Vitality/puncture (rend up-time, plus higher rends due to base weapon damage) changes would easily scale more this way, and it would be easy to drop focused rage to pick up puncture, seeing as this eliminates a need to even hit the rend button, and makes it so you don't have to take away from your tanking cycle so you could add in extra devastates between cds to ensure rend stays up. Obviously, you'd be getting the rend glyph and imp rend so you would be able to get very high rend up-time. However, this really only applies to slower weapon users.

Maybe the word 'rant' was a bit harsh, sorry about that But I think the Protection tree is in better shape than much of BC.

I did state that I believe Deep Wounds is not mandatory and I stand by it. I cleared all the contemporary 25man content and I didn't yet encounter the need for speccing DW in order to keep up on threat. I even ran most of it without impale though I realized that Impale is really worth it. Sure it's a threat boost and I'll try it out one day or another, but it's not mandatory in the sense of "we don't work without it". If we go with your figures you are implying that there would have to be a talent(s) that boost TPS/DPS by roughly 10-15% in order to make it viable over Imp/DW. Since I don't see us so bad on threat in general atm (as I noted before DPS is low imo, but threat is fine) I wonder where this would put us at.

This may be anecdotal: One of the more challenging jobs I had to do threat-wise is drake-tanking in Sartharion 3D and I found it pretty interesting that some DPS complained about a feral doing my job when I had to tank the little adds. For them my threat was superior to the feral. So I wonder was the feral just performing badly?

And the Shield Wall thing, well, let me put it this way: Would you prefer a 2min CD Shield Wall with 30% reduction? Or even 1min with 15%? It would be cool to be able to glyph for it for some fights, but in other cases a longer "hard" CD is preferable. And I guess the fight duration might go up a little once more challenging content arrives.

I don't disagree that there is room for improvement. I disagree that our talent tree is broken.

I whole heartedly agree, I feel like there aren't enough talents that give enough to (I don't wanna say mandatory, so wording is awkward) prot tree to outweigh just going into deep wounds, as it is ridiculously powerful atm However, with a lot of the suggested changes in this thread I feel like it'd still be along the lines of something like 12/5/54 and just skipping deep wounds for other talents.

Magical damage is quite a big concern. There are too many components and it's to RNG to mitigate or avoid.

At all it is just too spiky. Perhaps you remember some of the Vanilla encounters (or Illidan flame tanks) where resistances just gave you a chance to suffer a part of the original spell damage (http://www.wowwiki.com/Resistance). Even while being resistance capped you sometimes took big blows.
It is still the same concept (for PvP and PvE). Armor, defense/resilience or any other "physical" avoidance stats don't mitigate the damage like blocks do (in terms of physical damage). You can have luck and avoid 1 or 2 spells but you can also be 2shotted, like some of our cloth or leather classes were in Malygos P2 (focus of 3-4 scions and they weren't very high at the threat meter).

And as we mentioned before, magical encounters like Gothik don't hit you what makes magic encounters quite horrible to tank as warrior(no rage, enrage or revenge).

I think that Blizzard should link a linear magical damage mitigation to a standard stat like defense/resilience or armor. The second would perhaps compensate some of the PvP issues but still make druids and DKs no1 magic tanks unless warriors or paladins gain some significant magic avoidance via talents. The first would degrade druids, but still there would be some issues with DKs (they do mitigate 15% spelldmg just in frost presence + antimagic zone and shell). Blizzard has created a very-well all-around tank with the DK class but they haven't done any bigger favor to the other tanking classes. In my opinion there's a compromiss somewhere in the middle between warriors and DKs for all tanking classes. (Buff the warriors + paladins a bit and nerf the stamina/armor pool of DKs and Druids by adjusting their multipliers)

Edit say: Blocking magical damage could perhaps be a nice idea, increasing the usefullness of a shield.

I’ve been reading this thread with some interest, and it seems that there are 2 particular issues with Protection Warriors at this point in time;

1. Itemisation requires too many trade-offs between different stats, more-so than any other tanking class, resulting in lesser effectiveness as a tank
2. Infinite rage situations resulting in broken keyboards and/or carpal tunnel syndrome

To address the first, people have suggested a number of minor talent changes and other similar tweaks affecting Warriors only. Personally, I fear that these would only act as a band-aid and do not go far enough to balancing tanking classes in the long term.

The main problem, as I see it, is balancing defensive stats to put tanks on an equal footing from a defensive perspective. Its all well and good trying to make each tanking class feel different, but where there is difference people will always perceive that one is better than the other - and as such we need to minimise the differences as far as possible from a defensive perspective, while maintaining the unique play-style and offensive abilities that each class has to offer.

Considering the 3 Plate-wearing tank classes in particular, my suggestion would be to homogenise avoidance and mitigation by condensing the current 3 stats (dodge, parry, and block) into 2 stats: Dodge and Deflection. Dodge would retain its current functionality, while deflection would have a similar functionality to block in allowing a player to deflect part of an incoming attack using either a weapon or shield. As shields currently have a block value, so weapons would also have a deflection value (maybe based off weapon DPS since this tends to be consistent across weapons of the same ilevel). In order to retain the current attack tables, deflection chance would be applied twice in the case of tanks who dual wield or use a weapon and shield combo (once for the main-hand in the place of parry and once for the off-hand in the place of block). Shields could have a multiplier applied to give a greater chance to deflect an attack than using a weapon in the off-hand.

This would bring Death Knight’s onto a level playing field with Warriors and Paladins in terms of defensive stat requirements, and allow for more consistent scaling of defensive stats between the 3 Plate-wearing tank classes. Balancing the 4 tanking classes would also become more straight-forward, as you can ensure that gearing allows each class to achieve the same amount of avoidance (dodge) and balance health/armour in such a way that a Druid tank with higher overall HP will die in as many hits as a Plate tank with lower HP but taking less damage per hit due to deflection.

Stat-wise, dodge for all classes would be based on agility while deflection would be derived from strength. Current plate gear would clearly need tweaking to include both.

Once general tank survivability is balanced so that there is no clear best class, then magical damage mitigation can be looked at in a similar manner. Perhaps remove the emphasis from gearing to survive magical attacks in non-resistance fights by making them a fixed percentage of target maximum health. The emphasis is then on the healers to top the tank up before and after such attacks to ensure that he/she has sufficient health to survive the physical damage which is constantly ongoing.


Regarding the second issue, something clearly needs to be done to make rage gain more consistent. After all, someone getting in my way in a 5-man instance isn’t going to make me any less angry than someone getting in my way in a 25-man instance! I currently operate with 2 bars set up with the same abilities, but one combining each of them with Heroic Strike for use during high rage situations, that I switch between as and when I need to dump rage.

To make rage generation more consistent, removing the component from incoming damage and adding a baseline rage generation when in defensive stance and in combat would be one method that could be employed. This would make for more consistent rage generation, whether tanking and taking damage or off-tanking and not taking damage, and also make it so that rage generation would scale with damage done.

Some people have suggested a ‘toggle’ that allows you to activate Heroic Strike on each swing during high rage situations. Personally, I’d take things further and limit HS to Arms and Berserker Stance to give Protection Warriors a new ability that functions differently. Let’s call it ‘Focused Aggression’, and make it a passive ability when in Defensive Stance - when you have more than 50 rage, your abilities cost an additional 50% rage and deal an additional 25% damage. Goodbye excess rage, hello DPS/TPS increase, and you can keep your attention on what’s going on around you and maintaining your tanking rotation. Hell, it could even have an ‘execute’ type function for Protection built in - when your target is below 20% health, your rate of rage generation is doubled.


In conclusion, I think that the solutions to these issues have to be lasting long-term solutions. We don’t need another band-aid to hold us together until the next major patch or expansion, only to wind up in the same situation once everyone has upgraded to the new best-in-slot gear.

This would be pretty unbalanced for PvP. If you haven't done PvP as prot spec go try it sometime. I'm already critting people for 5K shield slams and 8K shockwaves with only self buffs.

All of your suggestions are nice, but involve too much work (development time). We are looking at Uldur coming out soon and probably Ice Crown not too far in the future. The bulk of development time is going to be spent on these encounters and PvP balancing. I really don't see them engaging in any significant reworking of a combat system, rage system, or anything that crosses classes like that in time for this content. And if the changes don't make it for these two content patches then they might as well wait until the next expansion.

You may consider the proposed solutions band-aids, but that is what we might have a chance at getting to improve our play experience. All of the best ideas to rework the whole thing for long-term playability don't matter if you don't take into account the difficulty/time required to implement and test them.

The heroic strike toggle would be a very minor development effort that would solve 90% of the problem with key mashing. I'm actually wondering if it may be possible to work up some kind of addon that does this without needing developer support - basically have a toggle on/off key and whenever it is on the addon would listen to all action bar keypress events and queue up heroic strike. This would function pretty much like having two action bar setups but being able to easily toggle between them.

You are also incredibly easy to ragestarve with 1h/shield if they ignore you (no revenge/enrage either) but that's really besides the point of the thread.

About the HS toggle: It's a bad idea. It will force us into using fast weapons when slow weapons are the best for anything but HS to begin with (Rend, Deep Wounds, less chance to get parry gibbed, bigger Devastates). On top of optimizing HS for slow weapons would solve another issue with itemization, namely that Warriors are pretty much the only class that wants fast MH weapons. Paladins don't care about their weapon speed because HotR is normalized on weapon DPS. Dual Wielding DKs want slow weapons as well because of their % based strikes and parry gib. And Druids use 2 handers anyway.

Issues
• Abilities could benefit from smoother gcd management (revenge does not play well with others)
• Rage generation/management is still flawed. Rage starvation is an issue for off-tanks (and occasionally for main tanks) and infinite rage is a button mash circus. Upcoming tweaks to stance dancing could minimize the latter.
• Too many stats to juggle (expertise and hit costs too much stamina opportunity)
• May still be too weak on magic fights
• Dmg may be too weak

Ability changes
• Decrease cooldown on revenge
• Make devastate scale with ap
• Consider reducing the timer on shield wall and last stand to 3 minutes
• Consider removing the range limitation on imp spell reflect and or reduce the cooldown further or make more attacks reflectable

Talent changes
• Imp HS - Increase dmg by 5/10/15%
• Deflection and Anticipation - "and has a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to generate 2 rage when a parry/dodge occurs (a likely change given comments about rage and avoidance)
• Shield Mastery add "and increases damage reduction of your shield wall ability based on defense"
• Remove puncture and replace it with a taste for blood clone for revenge i.e. something like "Reprisal" - "Whenever target takes damage, you have a 10/20/30% chance of allowing the use of your Revenge ability for 5 secs. 1 charge. Target must be the victim of sunder armor."
• Remove Focused Rage and replace with "Increases your attack power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your Stamina and increases the amount of rage generated by your melee critical hits by 10/20/30%.
• Improved Def stance increase spell dmg reduction by 5/10%
• Vitality increase exp by 3/6/9%