Not necessarily. If it's a parallel shift to our rage per swing, rather than an increase to the scaling coefficients it would work fine. Remember that rage normalization gives Blizzard a tool to "average out" your rage gains as gear scales up and it keeps things relatively linear. Basically the way normalization works, your rage is the average of what blizzard thinks you should generate for that weapon speed and what you actually would have generated for the damage you dealt. If you didn't do as much damage as you probably should have, then the static number helps you. If you generated more damage than they think you should have at this level, then the static number hurts you.

If you were generating 6 rage a swing in this tier and you'll get 7 in the next tier, I'd suggest they change that to 16 this tier and 17 next tier (or whatever an appropriate number is to use the abilities they think we should be using). The percentage gain from one tier to the next is lower, but in absolute terms you aren't at as much of a disadvantage when you aren't getting hit and rage is somewhat gear neutral. If they increased the expected rage per swing baseline at all levels it should work out ok.

What I'm suggesting is that you make 2/3 of the rage a warrior uses come from his auto attack at all gear levels and only 1/3 of his rage come from actual incoming damage. This is in contrast to the situation we have today where at best only 1/3 of your rage is coming from autoattacks (and it's usually far less when you factor in heroic strike). You'd probably have to do something about generating rage from hitting a shielded target and miss/parry/dodge, but it's not too hard to make that work.

That's almost a 21% scaling with AP on your revenge ability (and it scales 20% more with imp revenge). In comparison, your auto attack only increases dps by 1/14 or 7% of AP before modifiers. If you compared the AP scaling on revenge to mortal strike (for example) would it really be that much worse? I'd argue the base ability isn't the problem so much as how we have to itemize our gear.

There really isn't that much room in the item budget for us to get more AP on tank gear, so adding more AP scaling doesn't necessarily help us. We're still going to focus on stats that help us survive the hits first and generate threat/dps second. I'd be more of the opinion that we need some two-legged stats from our talents so we can make more efficient use of the item budget. One example could be adding a small str to armor penetration conversion to puncture or devastate.

Jayde, I think the reason they've shied away from giving us too much damage scaling is related to PVP. What they don't want is a durable class that's also able to dish out a lot of damage, silence, stun, fear, etc. all while partially protecting their party and dishing out damage comparable to the rogue.

Edit: Also the point below me is also very true. A "pure" dpser like a mage or a rogue is at a pretty severe disadvantage for a raid spot if warriors are too close to their dps in tank gear.

Isn't another reason that tanks shouldn't do comparable dps to hybrid classes that it further simplifies raid composition decisions? The number of tanks you take to an enounter is often a tactical choice usually between stability and dps, just as the number of healers can be. Taking Sarth+3 as an example, there wouldn't be much reason not to take an extra 1 or 2 tanks for additional safety if it didn't have any significant drawback. A fight like M'uru would be an even better example. I am fine with warriors doing low damage, though doing god awful damage when not actually tanking is a bit of a pain in raids, but duel spec will fix this.

I agree that scaling warrior DPS to be more competitive with proper DPS classes would be a welcome change.

I think we're currently sitting at approximately 50% of the damage that a proper DPS class will do, maybe a little less, and that gap seems to be widening with gear.

I agree that 70% would be a nice place to sit, so if DPS is doing 3k, tanks will do 2k. If DPS is doing 4.5k, tanks will do 3k etc.

Perhaps there is a way to increase our DPS scaling, while reducing our rage intake, or silly dependence on HS. So more DPS, but less HS and approximately the same TPS.


That being said, at least one issue that comes with drastically increasing tank DPS is PvP, where if you can deal 70% of the damage of a DPSer, but TAKE a lot less than 70% of the damage of a DPSer, and this could easily create an imbalance.

Frankly, though, I don't much care about the impact on PvP.

I'm sure they can find some creative way to gimp any mechanic so that it's not as effective in PvP. But, realistically, my concerns as a tank are in regard to raiding and having fun during raids, not arenas.

Many things can be done to change PvP balance without making PvE a drag.

I actually raised the issue of dps as early as #7 in this thread. We should look at some parses (like the one I posted on page 1 for example) so we can actually figure out if our dps is really too low. Overall figures are going to suggest yes but that's clearly inflated from superior aoe dps from pallies and dks. When you look at specific parses (and again Patch is a fluke since we can revenge and enrage) tanks are much closer to each then we may think.

Perhaps I was a bit unclear about revenge. It's a nice ability with a medium scaling through 21% of the AP compared to Conc.Blow and Shockwave both gain 75% of our AP. But due to its mechanics it cannot be used as DPS while nottanking. So one of the big three talents which do DPS as prot is useless as DD.
I also don't want to bring in more AP on the tank items. 3k AP which are realistic are very nice.. as tank.
But in my opinion I think Blizzard could perhaps do some kind of "low rage DD" talents which will guide us very nice through Trash (I think of around 3k-3.5k DPS as tank) and some kind of "high rage threat talents".

The baseline DPS as tank atm is quite good, but a protwarrior as DD is pretty aweful to play atm (and you mostly are DD unless you MT).

I am sure that I am quite alone with this opinion but I miss the point where we can convert some of our Threat in DMG.

TPS "meters" are really not a good way to give feedback to players for a job well done. There is no concept of a benefit from doing "more" TPS if you are already doing enough to hold aggro. 10 TPS higher than the DPS or 10000 TPS higher than the DPS is equal for the purposes of killing the boss.

Allowing tanks to advance in their ability to assist the raid towards a kill via some other means than being a simple meat shield is not something that should be frowned upon.

There is no reason a tank cannot or should not do decent damage while tanking. None. It's a simple fallacy grounded in little more than habit of many games which have decided they should.

True, but the problem is how to give prot warrior competent dps in raids while tanking without affecting other parts of the game.

If we got prot warrior A, who tanks with 3k AP and 20% effective crit (gear, talents) etc., now we scale his dps so he does 75% of fury warrior B:s dps. Guess what happens when the prot warrior changes gear to 6k AP and 40% effective crit? He outdps' the fury warrior. Scaling is difficult thing. You can try to keep this from happening to make the prot warrior even more dependant on being hit, but then you're getting the same OTing problems discussed earlier in this thread, which may be a bigger problem than MTing warrior's dps.

You can't avoid scaling problems, if you use same stats to scale both fury and prot dps. Like I said, one solution would be giving prot warriors dps from mitigation/avoidance stats, but that's kinda cheesy. It would work for threat though, I know I'm mad when someone dodges or parries my trinket+shieldblock shield slam.

Pallies gain threat through mitigation/EH already, with their Touched by the Light talent (deep prot). It also increases their healing capabilities. It doesn't seem unreasonable that there be a deep prot talent that would scale with a mitigation stat. And increasing the scaling from AP by a few % (10ish) is hardly going to push us past fury warriors, especially on low dps/tps (Dev) abilities or those with long CDs (CB, SW, etc). Even a lower CD on a few of those would help a bit. Might imbalance pvp a bit but since everything is on DR, the second use wouldn't cause any stun anyway.

I'd rate it about equal to Armored to the Teeth - Spell - World of Warcraft , just much deeper in a tree and only usefull for 1 spec.

Ahhh but their talent scales in a raid. When pallies get BoK and Fort, that talent gets that extra little buff. We get a buff from stoneskin/devo aura?

AttT : 1205 armor * 1.5 (if it's a prot pally) * 3 / 180 ~= 30 AP
TbtL : 10% stam from BoK (assume 2k stam?) + 215 Stam (Fort with Imp Fort) * 30% = 124.5 SP

Their talent is much deeper in the tree so it should be significantly more valuable but 30 AP =/= 125 SP, especially considering it's talent that will scale reasonably well and ours will remain generally static since armor values aren't increasing much.

And that's just the scaling from raid buffs, not accounting for the fact that they can drop 24stam gems in gear and know that they're increasing their threat (7SP per 24stam) as well as raising their time to live. And it's not like we can throw armor gems in our gear to try to exploit AttT either.

Druids are getting their new shield ability (in 3.1) which will scale with their AP. Seems like they'll just be stacking agility/stam to increase dps, dodge, crits and the shield, and make them even better for OT positions. Not sure about DKs and any new changes there.

One change I have been thinking about that would be an overall raid buff for warriors is changing block value to a percentage rather then a static value. One less stat to worry and possible make it scale of def instead of block value and str(pretty much like Icebound fort does for dk). I mean a successful block stopping 30% dmg would be an overall buff for most raid bosses. Obviously it's a nerf for easier content as you will go from being able to completely block an attack with enough block value to never being able to block a full attack again from just about any level of mob. Would greatly increase the value of def and block rating for warriors also.

Would be quite a boring change, why not then remove block altogether and just add armor? That would also take away the niche of paladins and warriors: ability to be almost melee immune to large groups of low-hitting mobs.

Well, stamina would be obvious modifier for us ofcourse. And I'd be happy to get a buff for devastate, but there was discussion about making our dps double, which would get a bit out of hand. Stamina for strength would propably be our version of the paladin talent, although I'm not sure how paladin skills scale with spellpower.

One thing that would help us too would be itemization. Hit, exp and strength on tanking plate would be cheaper in item points, so our survivability wouldn't suffer so much for having to collect so many more stats than other tank classes. Btw wasn't that paladin talent for letting paladins itemize more defensively, without having to gear for spellpower or such?

Yeah it would be a boring change, but one that scales extremely well(better than the current block value will). 30% is a bit on the high end. 20% would be a more balanced number. It will eventually see pretty much almost a 100% up time of 20% dmg reduction. Pretty much equal to the up time dks will start to see with Bone Shield and higher avoidance. Same as druids as their gear gets more AP and crit(i mean the new bubble shield they are getting in 3.1). Paladins are in the same boat as warriors so I don't see a major downside outside of taking more dmg on trash and lower hitting mobs.

I'm pretty sure the pally talent was added in when they did the item consolidation and removed Spellpower from tanking gear. That way pallies could pick up "warrior" gear and still increase their largest threat stat. Seemed like a nice idea for item consolidation but they may have ignored the longer term picture.

A Stam->Strength modifier would help a bit but since Strength gains us very little at this point it would have to be a pretty hefty gain to be worth comparable. Anyone have a clue how Spellpower is rated for pallies as a threat stat? If we knew that, we might be able to do a closer comparison.

It's my understanding (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) but spellpower is largely irrelevant for paladins. Most abilities can run off of attack power or spellpower whichever. Given the itemization changes most are getting the biggest bulk of their modifiers from attack power. It also means if they're in offspec gear and need to toss a consecrate or something to help out that they can do so effectively.

Most abilities are Total damage = (Base damage + (AP * AP Coefficient) + (SP * SP Coefficient)), this is mostly for those crazy guys who like to level as holy in holy gear. It has the flipside that spell power is indeed a scaling stat, but a fairly poor one because it is treated as 1 SP = 1 AP, but for the same budget as 1 SP you can get 2 AP (Or was it 1.8AP budget-wise? I forget, either way, its inefficient). Shield of righteousness and hammer of the righteous are the only 2 tanking abilities that scale purely with either AP or str/BV.

Considering the talent currently grants me 785 SP, it would probably be seen as wildly overpowered if it gave strength unless you considerably reduced the conversion rate.

I've been main tanking for well over a year at this point and recently I've been trying to wrap my head around why I've been so bummed about tanking... and I think what I determined is my own uselessness in a raid situation and I'm not even talking about our dps.

Basically, I feel as though I'm no longer worth the raid spot MT'ing as a warrior in this content and with how classes are currently represented. Our aoe is worse and more annoying to use as it involves only 2 legitimate abilities and then tab target spamming of abilities. Our inability to do dps or buff the raid in any meaningful manner means on a fight which we aren't MT'ing (if you're an OT) and there are no adds to pick up or job to be done we are useless. The other TPS from tanking classes do just as much, so it's not as though I'm forced to MT or the dps will be pulling aggro. A hard hitting physical boss, as nice as shield block is, it seems that a druid at or near the armor cap seems a better choice.

The only thing that we bring is sunder armor. If that's what I'm grasping on to, is it time to default the sunder armor job to a dps warrior while I choose a different main? What encounters at the moment are we the best at tanking? I ask all this maybe out of simple boredom or some strange self-hatred, but I honestly want to find an answer. Am I overlooking a huge aspect of our class that I just can't see because I'm too close to the problem?

Although this sounded extremely self-loathing or some sort of desire for a pity-party, I assure you it's genuine. Oh yeah, I'm sick of spamming HS too.

addon/edit: Upon evaluation I suppose it's not quite as bad as my post would make it seem. No tank really outshines us in all the areas so I suppose we still fill the standard "Well they're not bad at anything" tank spot in the raid so it's not catastrophic if others are better at most of the fights than us.

One small issue I think could be fixed is that now Fury uses two-handers it seems time to stop prot from needing to use one-handed weapons for dps. It just seems odd to collect one or two one-handed weapons specifically for when you are forced to dps in prot spec which you won't use for any other spec. Making Devastate work with a 2hander could be a solution, it would make prot dps a bit more fun and with some scaling it could mean we do about equal dps to a bear druid that is going cat. Of course duel spec will make this fairly redundant but it seems like a pretty harmless change - dps as prot feels pretty strange at the moment, especially when using a shield, and it's pretty terrible damage.

While the issue may be valid, Blizzard can't afford to buff devastate in this way, simply because it would make devastate too powerful for dps specs. There are other possibilities that can increase prot dps -- a change to revenge to make it usable in a non-tanking role is probably the most commonly discussed that I've seen.

I agree with you that the change wouldn't be implemented, but not for that reasoning.

I know devastate dps builds were sort of a fluke in beta during the phase when it's weapon damage component was buffed, and titans grip had yet to be really refined, but since devastate doesn't really scale very well with DPS stats I can't really fathom any 41point Prot build being a DPS build that could compete with either of the DPS trees. I think any attempt to do so would yield at best a sub-par tank build that did sub-par DPS while in DPS gear, sort of the worst of both worlds.

More to the point however, if they made that change it would preclude (or unnecessarily complicate) a host of other changes which could improve devastate's performance with one-handers, which is the ability's real intent and which is what it should probably be designed/balanced around. Forthcoming dual-specs in particular make a change like this wildly unnecessary, anyway.

EDIT: Along those lines, I think with TG in its current form they could probably reinstate the improved weapon damage contribution to devastate without worrying about DPS specs picking it up. Alternatively, some method of scaling the per-sunder bonus with either a gear-stat (like AP) or based on weapon DPS (possibly rolled into a deep prot talent) might make it more appealing than the Only-if-I-have-nothing-else-to-fill-this-GCD-with kind of ability it is presently.

The other big cycle annoyance people have commented on is lack of sync between the revenge cooldown and the GCD, in addition to Revenge's poor integration in the cycle when SnB procs are considered. It was proposed earlier in the thread that reducing the CD on Revenge to 3sec would always allow it to follow a Shield Slam (both procced and natural), but I'm torn as to how big an improvement to the cycle this would be compared to simply having SnB refresh both the SS and Revenge cooldowns.

With a reduced Revenge CD the cycle becomes SS - Rev - Dev - Rev, with an SnB proc essentially starting the Cycle from the top, every time. This effectively removes SW as an optional replacement on your fourth attack (until they fix it, CB is always an option, since at the moment it causes no GCD and can be macroed in front of your SS). With the revenge CD intact but SnB refreshing both cooldowns, the cycle remains the same as it is now, (still allowing the flexibility to vary your 4th attack if you've had no SnB procs), while still allowing a revenge to follow any Shield Slam.

I guess I'm torn in that I love the simplicity and power that a lowered Revenge cooldown allows, but I also appreciate that right now we have the option of integrating other abilities for a max threat/dps cycle. Of course, all this is also predicated on the notion that a 2nd devastate is not the best use of the 4th GCD in the cycle, which isn't necessarily a given if they decide to make positive changes to devastate scaling.

Derailing.

With the new glyph that will reduce the cooldown of Shield wall and disciplines, you can get the CD down to 2 minutes. Combine this with the last stand glyph and a couple good trinkets, you can easily cycle cds like a dk. Add in cds from paladins (bubble/bos) and holy priests (guardian spirit) we could tank 3D reliably. Its a bit late as most of us will be done with 3D and working on Ulduar, but its a thought.