For 3 weeks in a row, I have been receiving 252 gear with bad secondary stats: Haste/Mastery, Crit/Mastery, and again Crit/Mastery.
FYI, Protection Warriors benefit from Haste/Versa gear. Haste reduces the cooldown of [Shield Block], and Versa improves the consistent damage reduction.
However, the Great Vault seems to insist giving me Mastery gear.
Should I switch to Arms for future Great Vault loots, or stay as Protection and hope that the Great Vault will eventually come around and give me Haste/Versa gear?
But like pretty sure prot dont have a dead stat, so all 4 stats are very close value and you would want to equip with pieces that provide you the most raw stats.
Thanks! Iâm thinking about staying in Prot for future Great Vault loots. I suspect that the Great Vault somewhat rotates secondary stats over the weeks.
It might be a way of Blizz to prevent players from stacking certain secondary stats.
They dont rotate stats, its loot rng. The only thing you can do is unlock more vault slot by doing more content,so you have more chance getting better loot.
They did put in place a system to avoid stat stack craziness, they added a stats diminishing return system where at a certain stats amount, the stats get less and less values as you keep stacking it. You will want to get the other stats that provide full value when you hit that point.
Your loot spec does not change what stats the items have. It will only change what weapons and trinkets you can get. That is because the stats are static on the gear and it does not give bias towards your preferred secondary stats.
For example swapping your loot spec to arms will only give you 2 hand weapons and dps trinkets when it comes to those slots. Fury can give you 1 hand weapons, 2 hand weapons and dps trinkets. While Prot is 1 hand weapons, shields and tank trinkets. Universal trinkets (trinkets that can be obtained regardless of role, e.g. device from DoS) can be obtained regardless of spec. However none of the specs will give you a significantly higher chance of getting the haste / vers helm from Necrotic Wake from the vault vs any other helm.
Ilvl is king, especially on those slots and other big slots like legs, chest, gloves, feet, etc.
Since ringâs/neck donât give main stat, I focus on ilvl for the big hitter slots and fill in stat needs on the lesser slots.
p.s drop ravager unless you get achieve 28.5% haste without ITF. 10% haste far outweighs the pitiful dps from ravager. Threat isnât an issue anymore, which has lost that talent a lot of value. 10% more haste is going to benefit you much more.
Taking ITF and Heavy repercussions will make the class feel a lot better. Your SB uptime will go through the roof and the extra rage from HR will make things feel a lot smoother.
Oh, and BSC is going to be a huge damage increase over booming voice in keys.
Or you thought you opened a big bag of âappointmentâ because you got a weapon, but then it turns to disappointment because that toon got the exact same weapon last week.
Haha I was actually min-maxing some aspects yesterday and was worrying if Kleia was a good soulbind. Currently, the majority (~41%) of Prot Warriors favor Mikanikos as their soulbind. Then I realized you are using Kleia as your Prot spec soulbind too. xD
Speaking of the 6th row talent, I was following Mwahiâs recommendation:
Ravager performs better in AoE and Into the Fray better on single targetâŠ
Ravager is a strong offensive CD that also provides us with a decent chunk of Rage. The 45-second CD also lines up with the base CDs of Demoralizing Shout (Booming Voice) and Avatar, meaning that you can pair them together for heavy burst damage.
While the Haste provided by Into the Fray is a nice passive bonus, it can feel a bit underwhelming when compared to the other 2 options. Haste reduces the cooldown of Shield Block, Shield Slam and some other abilities making it a competitive option in certain scenarios.
I did a testing with a couple of training dummies. Ravager feels better with rage, threat, and DPS. ITF make me rage-starve a lot, but allows for more Shield Blocks. Both talents improve the tankiness of Prot Warriors during big pulls: Ravager by generating more rage, and ITF by hastening the cooldown (recharge) of Shield Block.
From the test, against a single dummy (with another dummy close by for the 2nd stack of ITF buff), ITF provided a whopping 14.6% reduction in damage taken, but at the cost of 10.7% of loss in damage dealt.
Speaking of the 7th row talent, Mwahi doesnât like HR though:
Anger Management is a really strong choice on this row, especially due to the synergy it has with Unstoppable Force.It is also the most offensive option on the row due to the reduced CD of Avatar Icon Avatar.
Heavy Repercussions, while good, does not provide the same amount of benefit that Anger Management and Bolster do in most situations. Bolster is generally better than Heavy Repercussions defensively and Anger Management is better offensively (in AoE). While not being as good as the other 2, it can still find uses in mainly ST situations, like Raids.
PvPLeaderboard stats (I would hope that raider-io provides talent and build stats, but no) show that, currently, the majority of Prot Warriors favor the ITF (44%) + AM (68%) + Kyrian (78%) + Mikanikos (41%) + Reprisal (38%) + Versa/Haste build.
I guess with big pulls, Mikanikosâs short Spear of Bastion cooldown (from his Effusive Anima Accelerator trait) works really well with ITFâs hastened Shield Block recharge. Iâm not sure how they deal with the more-than-happy-to-pull-adds Bron (from his Bronâs Call to Action trait) though. Itâs embarrassing when Bron pulls adds.
I mean, to each their own I guess, but IMO ravager feels awful and underwhelming to push. The reduction in haste makes the class feel lethargic. And training dummyâs are a poor test as they are not punching you back. So ofcourse ITF is going to feel bad if you donât have all 5 stacks (which you do almost all the time in M+) and arenât getting procs or rage built with things attacking you.
Ravager generates rage, but it doesnât increase your survivability in the way ITF will. Heavy repercussions seems to get a bad wrap, but what people seem to forget is how central shield slam is to your rotation and adding 3 rage per shield slam adds up - quickly.
Itâs one of those scenarios where ravager + AM seems better on paper, but it plays out a lot differently in real time. But you do you man. I watched Andyclap swap to war briefly and fly past all other top wars on RIO running ITF and HR. He got asked about it all the time and had the same response, the haste and SB uptime is more valuable. I swapped at the time and never looked back. The class feels super fast paced and Iâm not rage starved ever. 88-95% SB uptime is pretty great.
The tanking ones do. Do you not remember the meme that was the tanking training dummy in WoD? How many poor melee were killed by cleaving on it. Blizzard had to swap its position with the healing one so people would stop dying to it.
What do you think about Prot Warriorâs soulbind choice? I like Kleiaâs crit and having no Bron around (who likes to pull adds). But highly ranked Kyrian Prot Warriors overwhelmingly favor Mikanikos.
I went to Raider-io and manually profiled 7 of the most highly ranked M+ tanking warriors:
I donât even bother trying to go for vers/haste gear because there just isnât enough of it to begin with without doing PvP. As long as it has haste and its an ilvl upgrade, Iâll gladly wear it.
Ravager is only good for non-Kyrian for the purpose of ranged aoe-tagging/threat. Thereâs no general reason to pick Ravager as Kyrian because you already have a ranged-aoe tool. Ravager is great for Execute/Condemn windows, but other than that its just an AoE heroic throw that generates rage.
I am tempted to go to Kyrian just because of Mikanikos final soulbind, plus the Potion is more useful than Door of Shadows. I just donât see a point swapping Covenants when I can just play a different class as my main for a tier instead. Maybe theyâll finally rework Condemnâs useless Conduit next tier, or give Prot Warrior Sudden Death or something equivalent to Avenging Wrath to allow Condemn outside of âexecuteâ window.
Generally for all tanks Ilv> all. The main reason you will want to stay as a tank for the great vault is for the Blood-Spattered Scale from Hakkar. Even at lower item levels this trinket provides a beefy shield and dose some nice snap damage. Vers is valuable but not really valuable enough to turn down more Stam, Armor, and prime stat which helps you contribute more damage to a group and in Prots case increases the max absorb of Ignore Pain.
The current loot system is rather frustrating but in most cases Blizzard has done a pretty decent job making item level a bigger value over secondary stats which was a HUGE problem thought the entirety of BFA. The main times you will find people with lower item level pieces on are with neck and rings on DPS and healers because they donât value stamina as much as a tank.
My thoughts are similar to yours. Iâve been playing around with them a little, but conduit energy and âmeaningful choicesâ are limiting my ability to do so.
With my gear lately, and with Kleia, I have ~23% crit during pulls (more for the first 10 seconds), 31 haste, 24 mast, and 25 verse and I feel solid all the way around. I havenât been pushing really at all this seasons since my m+ group fell apart and started raiding on a different schedule, but I feel solid standing infront of any pull so far.
I have reworked my warrior by switching to BSC (3rd row talent), HR (7th row talent), Mikanikos (soulbind), and Celestial Guidance (weapon enchant). I did not take ITF (6th row talent) because I wasnât satisfied with it when testing against dummies.
The new build feels okay in the subsequent M+ runs. Rage is more abundant and Shield Blocks have better coverage. Maybe an improvement equivalent to an item level or so.
I prefer Haste then a mix of verse/crit. Crit gives a bit more damage but more RNG defensive. ideally, Iâd like Haste on every piece than a 60/40 split of vers/crit with ZERO mastery.
How are you measuring this? Because you canât look at it per cast, you need to look at it overall for the dungeon. How many more revenges/Tclaps can you get off with the extra haste from ITF in the 45 second downtime windows when ravager is on CD? And that assumes using ravager on CD. You then need to factor in SB Uptime, because if youâre seeing windows without coverage thatâs more time you need to kite and/or more time youâre taking extra damage. That means less overall dps from your group due to spread cleave and less dps from your healer because youâre taking more damage.
All in all, Iâm sure itâs comparable. I just value the haste way over ravager. Itâs an extremely underwhelming button to push and is on the GCD so it feels even more awful to demo shout, ravager, then get into your rotation.
