Finalizing the Prot Warrior design
 

Hi there!
Now that all the content is on farm for a sufficient amount of time, I think it's time to look back at how Warrior tanking developed in Wrath and what is left to improve (or if there is anything left to improve in your opinion). I realized that we didn't have a proper Prot Warrior tank thread yet to discuss these things so let's use this one (people just throw in tidbits in the other threads, but I think we should channel this stuff into one thread).

First off, let me say that I absolutely love the tanking style in Wrath (Warbringer, new Shield Block, Shockwave etc) so while this post might seem to put it in a negative spot light - it's not. I am merely focusing on the parts that could end up giving us trouble later down the road in comparison to other tanks or flaws in the class itself. Also, keep in mind that whining and wish listing is frowned upon on these forums so try to keep things factual so we can properly discuss things. :)

Tanking aspects:

1) The dependence of getting hit and what happens if you are not:

a) The rage dilemma

This right here is my biggest concern. With better gear, we are still seeing the same problems we had to face in TBC and Vanilla: Rage starvation. A Prot Warriors rage generation is still mostly dependant on getting hit and while the idea of upping our white melee damage was a nice one, it doesn't compensate nearly enough. If you are caught in an avoidance streak or blocking big parts of a mob's swing, you are in a big trouble unless you have Blessing of Sanctuary (more about that later). Moreover, we are still reliant on Heroic Strikes to build threat (if not now, later when DPS is catching up on threat) and as you all know, Heroic Strikes eat our melee swing. So effectively, HSing actually got more expensive for us because our white melee swing generates a bit more rage than in TBC. I am sure that this is why we are all glyphed for Revenge but even then, it's not enough and I absolutely refuse to wear DPS gear just so my incoming damage is bigger. We just shouldn't have to, because DPS gear just isn't part of our tanking gear progession just like how healers don't have to swap in DPS gear to do their jobs. Don't get me wrong, I understand the concept of having multiple gear sets but a DPS set for tanking? No thanks.

So what's the solution? I bet you are all saying Blessing of Sanctuary - Spell - World of Warcraft and you are half right. BoSanc is great because it scales positively with our gear (unlike rage generation from getting hit, which scales negatively with our gear) and this is how it should be. You get better gear and you should be able to do your job of mitigating damage and holding threat better. Simple and logical enough, isn't it?
Now the issue I have with BoSanc is twofold: It's a unique blessing only acquirable by Prot Paladins and some raids, like mine, just don't have room for another tank because we have 2 good Warrior tanks and a DK/Feral to fill in as DPS/3rd tank. The second issue: BoSanc is too good. It's giving us so much rage that managing your rage gets trivialized. It's basically the other side of the extreme. I'd really like to see something inbetween that is not tied to a unique blessing and hey, we might see something like this in 3.1 because I am pretty sure Blizzard is aware of this issue because they gave us Justified Killing in Beta (2/4 rage on parry/dodge). For some reason they removed this ability, even though the Druid version Natural Reaction - Spell - World of Warcraft remained ingame (and their rage generation comes as a big part from white damage on top of this).

b) Enrage from improved Defensive Stance and Revenge

Revenge and our +10% damage modifier from being enraged are pretty big for our threat generation (and DPS, but more about that later). This may not be an apparent problem, because as long as we are MTing and getting hit, it doesn't matter. We get to Revenge on every cooldown and we do 10% more damage all the time. Now the problem occurs when either of these two things happen:
a) You OT a boss where you need to be second in threat (and one that is not tauntable) and that doesn't have an ability like Patchwerk that feeds you enrage/rage/revenge procs. While there is no such boss in the game yet, bosses like Bloodboil show that Blizzard can and most likely will design bosses with a similar mechanic so that could get us into trouble later.
b) You MT a boss but he doesn't melee you for whatever stupid reason. There is currently just one boss I know of that does this: Gothik. Yes, he is easy. Yes, he is tauntable but the point is that against bosses like these we might get into trouble later on when Blizzard's design team decides such a boss would be fun (maybe another Twins style encounter?).
(c) This will also go a long way in improving our DPS when we are in tanking gear but are DPSing like the 2nd tank on Thaddius.)

So how to fix this? Nerf Revenge damage and relocate it on either Devastate or Shield Slam (and ironically, Devastate in Beta had a 80% weapon damage modifier but they had to remove it and relocate it on Revenge because the Fury tree was so terrible back then that DW Flurry/Devastate was a dominant DPS spec. Now that Fury actually wants to DW 2 handers, this issue should be resolved and I have high hopes to see this change reverted).
I have no idea how to fix the Defensive Stance enrage apart from just making it proc from incoming spell damage or remove the Defensive Stance penalty altogether (and they may be working on that already).

2) DPS while tanking

I'll keep this part short because I don't have any WWSes to back it up but alot of Warriors seemed to think they don't compare well in this area. Keep in mind that I am refering to the DPS Warriors do while tanking, in full tanking gear (yes, I have seen Xav's video, and it's impressive for sure :) ). Why am I stressing this part? Imagine you are learning a boss with a tight enrage timer like Brutallus. Tank DPS is going to matter but so is survivability. I will bet you anything that you will not learn this fight in full expertise gear and DPS trinkets.

Anyways, what is your experience on this? Are we too low, just right, too high in comparison to other tanks?



Thoughts?

The troubles I see are:
+ warrior stamina multipliers being so low, other tank classes having significantly more hp than us down the road. It seems (and correct me if I'm wrong) that warriors do well enough right now because our base health is higher, but since our scaling is worse, relative health will scale badly.
+ powerful cooldowns giving one class (like deathknights) a huge advantage on a fight.... of course warriors are one of the offenders here, our shield block is unique and very good in certain situations.

On the other side, our spell reflect could make us a "required" class for tanking a future progression fight. In theory, Blizzard will do the right thing and not design a boss like this.

I'm also concerned about buffs in general, particularly dps buffs. With many melees, warriors do quite well, buffing both battle shout and giving the sunder armor debuff. If you move to a more ranged group, hunters probably won't get your battle shout and your sunder does nothing for casters, where prot paladins (depending on spec) can give both a 3% crit debuff and blessing of kings / might wisdom. The buff issue tends to matter more in 10-man raids and depends highly on who you raid with.

On AoE, I like our flavor where we have two cooldowns which generate huge threat/damage. There are situations where a consecrate or death and decay are better. I hope they keep this distinction.

You are right about the Stamina scaling issue. I actually thought about comparing Paladin and Warrior health there but I dismissed that idea after I looked at their T7 pants that has SBV and BR instead of the Dodge and Parry we get from ours so I assumed their bigger Stamina multiplier was being controlled by different itemization (like how Blizzard tries/tried to control Druids). Turned out I was wrong though: Valorous Dreadnaught Plate - Item Set - World of Warcraft vs Valorous Redemption Plate - Item Set - World of Warcraft

Both sets have the same Stamina on them while Paladins have a +~12% Stamina modifier from talents whereas Warriors only get +6%. This is definitely a valid concern but we'd have to see the T8 sets first to be completely sure because Blizzard might itemize the Paladin set with less Stamina and give them more BV to compensate for a our Critical Block chance over time. But yes, this is definitely an issue and they are the tanks we can relate/compare to most unlike DKs and Druids who have higher health because they lack Shields.

I think part of the trick with prot DPS while tanking is it's so reliant on heroic strike. HS is coming in at something like 30% of our DPS in a high rage situation. But if you don't have that rage, DPS falls off fairly dramatically. With the drop in avoidance, Patch, who doesn't really have a risk of tank death, combined with BoSanc makes it fairly easy to get 100% uptime on heroic strike, or close to. So for any Ulduar boss that actually challenges tanks and healers, we may as well just drop a book on our heroic strike key.

It seems odd to me that this early into content, rage can be at times very, very trivial, such that heroic strike isn't even a choice. You may as well have an option to auto swing heroic strike. Yet in any situation where you don't have that rage, not being able to HS makes a really dramatic difference in our damage and threat output. It's always been the case to an extent, but I think it's really magnified right now. And of course raiding with or with out a prot pally magnifies that even more.

I think they've improved rage generation a lot from TBC, between more powerful auto attacks, BoSanc, and the drop in avoidance through diminishing returns. Plus there is a lot more hit / expertise on early content tank gear. But we're in this odd place were we often have so much rage that it just doesn't matter, we can do anything we want. But it's easy to get rage starved, so it's a question of where the balance point is with heroic strike uptime.

We'll have to see what they've got in mind for the 15/5/51 spec. You get such a big boost from deep wounds that It's the cookie cutter spec. Blizzard intended to really try to get away from that with all the different toys in the prot tree, that no one picks up for PVE because of deep wounds.

Blue post update:

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Let's hope this means they are going to get rid off the Defensive Stance -10% damage penalty, too.

My feedback so far:

Enrage
Why is it Enrage at all--other than giving us a fancy 'Enrage' effect to use with Enraged Regeneration like they gave the other specs? Certainly it would just be easiest for 'Improved Defensive Stance' to just remove the 10% damage penalty on Defensive Stance.

Devastate
Secondly, I would look into--as you noted--boosting Devastate back up again. There is little to no chance of Devastate being an optimal Fury setup anymore after the massive changes to Titan's Grip and Bloodsurge since they nerfed Devastate way back in mid-beta. Currently Devastate is way too pathetic and really only survives due to Sword and Board proc potential and the fact that everything else is on cooldown.

Either way, Devastate needs some love. It's becoming ridiculously weak for a its placement in the tree.

Revenge
Revenge is a strange issue because, generally speaking, there isn't too much of a problem with it. Not having it light up is a very rare case when tanking, but it obviously causes huge TPS differences if you aren't getting hit or if you are fighting a magic-damaging boss.

The other issue with Revenge is the cooldown and that it doesn't match up very well with any kind of GCD cycle. Pre-WotLK when a standard cycle was 6 seconds, it was no issue whatsoever... however, with the addition of Sword and Board and variable cycle lengths, it is possible for Revenge to get terribly desynced with the GCD timing and position of a given cycle.

A good example of this is the fact that if SnB procs mid-cycle, Revenge is often on a 0.5s cooldown after an ability on the next cycle unless you delay it to a later place in the cycle or get another SnB proc.

Personally I find this unwieldy in terms of a mechanic and it makes the cooldown-watching minigame a little more distracting than it needs to be. I would like to see some more synergy between Shield Slam and/or SnB with Revenge somehow.

But, more importantly, I would like to see a solution to the fact that Warrior TPS (and DPS in tank gear) is basically horrible if you aren't triggering Revenge.

Rage Generation
I think the simple solution is to revive Justified Killing. I really don't understand why Druids and Paladins got this in WotLK and Warriors did not. BoSanc is totally insane for Warrior tanks and my TPS becomes very inconsistant without it.

Luckily we almost always run with a very good Prot Paladin, but this isn't really a solution.

To be perfectly honest, given that so many Warriors have viewed Shield Specialization as a joke for the last 3 years or so (with the only saving grace being the old-school additional blocked attack to Shield Block) it would be interesting if they could simply rework this talent to be something better (Block% + additional effect on blocking or more Block%) and then isolate all the rage gain stuff into a single talent.

I think it's unequal that Prot Paladins get BoSanc for 1 point, Druids get 2% dodge per point -and- rage gain, while Warriors only get 1% shield block and a 0.4 rage on blocks per point. It's just not very balanced.

Edit: I didn't see the blue post before, and I'm really looking forward to seeing their solution for this.

Heroic Strike
Maybe it's just me, but I get kinda annoyed with having to tab up HS every 1.2-1.4 seconds in addition to all my other abilities. Many tanks have put this on mousewheel and I think it just smacks of 'faceroll' to me. HS threat is a massive component of our TPS, and missing HS queue-ups on a fast weapon will sink our threat. I feel like it's a very un-fun mechanic and would like to see some improvement to how it works.

I don't have many suggestions for this, other than normalizing the threat on HS so that slow weapons are a viable option again. It does seem odd that it's one of the few non-normalized mechanics lingering out there.

Another option would be to allow HS to cost more Rage but apply to multiple attacks in a row--but that could have negative effects on DPS Warrior rotations.

The last option is to give Prot Warriors specifically an additional rage dump that is a quicker and more threat-efficient way to get rid of Rage than Heroic Strike. Rune Strike is a good example of this. This would allow Heroic Strike's additional threat to be removed for the sake of DPS Warriors and give a viable replacement for Protection Warriors. This could easily cost more Rage than Heroic Strike to make it non-spammable with fast weapons, thus bringing some equality to fast vs. slow and helping us burn away excess rage more efficiently.

All great concerns. I'm a bit less concerned about the rage dynamic at the moment myself (I only feel this pinch in a few moments). My big worry is about dps while tanking in a tank rig. We're outpaced by every other tanking class and spec.

The impending changes to stances should help with that somewhat since we'd be able to swap over for things like execute. That would be a nice bit of flavor too (and even harken back to vanilla playstyles in some respects) assuming it didn't just overwhelm the priority queue. It'd also open up for more opportunities for things like retaliation tanking which GC himself was so very big on during beta.

For that to really be viable though as a source of fun and dps they really would have to ditch the stance penalties which for whatever reason they still seem needlessly cautious about doing. I hope they get the courage to do so. Looking at the divine spirit change coming up for priests that gives me hope that anything is possible.

Do you have some links or WWSes to back up that claim? I heard alot of Warriors being lower than other tanks but people usually don't post the source of it so if you have any, that would be awesome.

Also thanks for reminding me about Retaliation, I meant to put it in the OP but I forgot:

Retaliation in it's current form is useless for tanks. Why? It doesn't proc on avoided hits and most importantly it doesn't proc on partially blocked hits. This is negative scaling over again. I wish they would fix this from proccing on blocked attacks atleast so we can pop Retaliation, charge into an AoE pack and add some free threat every 5 mins (as compared to the 1 or 2 charges you lose now, and god forbid you use Shield Block on the pull to smoothen out the damage and increase Shield Slam damage).

Another thing I have wondered about it is Spell Reflection. It is one of our key or even trade mark skills but it's just too inconsistent at the moment. Remember that void dude in Heroic VH? Imp Spell Reflect trivializes this boss so much it isn't even funny: You can SR his stacking -healing debuff for yourself and all melee and reflect all Shadowbolts from the adds so you don't even have to target them. Then on other fights, like that first boss in UK it does absolutely nothing against his Shadowbolts but the next bosses Shadowbolts are reflectable just fine.
It also does nothing against Dragon breathes which would have been a great way to make Warriors better Sarth tanks (obviously not reflecting the whole thing but possibly redesigning SR to give 5 or 10% less magical damage taken while the buff is up goes a long way into make it always useful instead of just sometimes).

Is there a particular parse you'd like to see? Patchwerk would be the best example since all tanks are essentially doing the same thing but if you'd prefer another I could dig one up.

That's another thing... if they really want to see us using abilities from across the stances then I'm sure there are a few abilities themselves that would have to be tweaked to be more useful. Retaliation would seem to be one of them based on your comments.

This would have been (is?) a great candidate for the secondary effect of Imp Spell Reflect, rather than the passive 4% resist chance it currently has. I think it's generally agreed that the resists chance is lackluster. Applying the reflect to nearby party members isn't that great in PvE in a strict utility sense (except in a few very specific situations), but it's a fun mechanic and I wouldn't want to see that taken away. Turning it into 4% passive damage reduction from spells would be much more useful, but this effect is already on Imp Defensive Stance, and it's not that interesting to begin with. Your idea for magical damage reduction, only while SR is active, makes perfect sense, and also makes it a lot more useful.

I hate to jump on the wishlist bandwagon but I LOVE the idea of SR reducing magic damage as an active ability. I'd probably prefer to see it somewhere around 20%-25% so we could use it to survive Sarth+3 almost as well as a DK does, but that may well be asking too much on an ability with such a short cooldown (and I'd hate to see it increased very much).

I'm also curious about whether all the tears about relative tank DPS are merited.
Tankspot's been running a patch thread, but most of the population is 3k DPS warriors, with out much in the way of the other classes.
WoW meter Online has an interesting ranking. These are comparative TPS reports from the top ranked TPS for Patchwerk 25. Obviously, their TPS could be wildly off, but I'd guess it gives at least a vague snapshot. Not to mention, how much tank gear are these guys wearing, and how much DPS gear, etc. All kinds of room for error. The links have the next 50 ranks.

top druid - 3667
WoW Meter Online - The Best World of Warcraft Combat Log Analyse System!Fully support Wrath of the Lich King!

top Pally - 3601
WoW Meter Online - The Best World of Warcraft Combat Log Analyse System!Fully support Wrath of the Lich King!

top warrior - 3673
WoW Meter Online - The Best World of Warcraft Combat Log Analyse System!Fully support Wrath of the Lich King!

top DK - 3325
WoW Meter Online - The Best World of Warcraft Combat Log Analyse System!Fully support Wrath of the Lich King!

The DK and the Druid had fights closer to 3 minutes, the warrior and the pally closer to 2, so bloodlust time influences things. But it seems like there's not much difference, other than the DK's coming out low. Even with all the potential for silliness. Obviously, what happens on other fights where rage starvation can actually be a concern could change things, but the top end seems completely fine to me with out taking a really close look.

You could go through and average the top 50 to get a more accurate view, but I'm guessing things are close enough that RNG and skill plays a bigger difference than class balance.

I'd be wary of assuming tps as a proximate for dps.

Also the Warrior on that WWS was using DPS trinkets, and like I said in my OP that is worthless for comparisons.

EDIT:
Any WWS with Warriors in tanking gear on boss fights that arent gimmicky or too short (Heroism having too much of a factor on those).

Liar, here's a patchwerk parse from a few weeks back. Specifically we're looking at Fenriswulf (me), Shields, and Skox.

I know (and everyone should feel free to comment on tweaks I could/should make) I'd prefer my normal swings to be lower than that but I chalk that and some lower potential dps to losing cycles to stuff like thunderclap and demo shout which I try to apply to make things a bit easier on the healing crew (not that they really need the help). You'll see that the pally and I are within range of each other but the DK is eeking out quite a bit more damage. Which I'm conceptually fine with since they're supposed to be nasty bastiches but I worry about that leading to a devaluation of warrior and pally tanks on dps intense encounters in the future.

edit: Just saw your reply. I know Patch is short but I don't have comparable samples inguild of the other guys tanking stuff since I'm usually MTing.