Avatar Change - Addressing Prot Warrior Issues

Classes Warrior
1

Summary

In short, protection warriors are a proactive tanks that reduce damage before it happens. Due to their niche, protection warriors can significantly reduce physical damage; however, it is very taxing to survive the high bleed and poison damage seen in high Mythic+ dungeons and mythic raids.

Solution A

What I suggest is replacing the Crackling Thunder talent with "Iron Giant" which reduces the remaining duration of bleeds, poisons, snares, and roots by 50% while Avatar is active.

Why Crackling Thunder?

Crackling Thunder wont be greatly missed because it is rare that you would want a larger radius when it is more likely you need to avoid breaking crowd control with your thunder clap. I think that this would greatly improve the toolkit where it is needed most. I agree that tanks should have a niche, but not being able to do anything to mitigate certain types of damage feels horrible.

Anecdotal evidence

Currently, I use Demoralizing Shout with Ignore Pain to reduce bleed and poison damage; however, my Ignore Pain needs re-application with every other tick of the dot. Hopefully, this change will give warriors something they can do about it without them being the masters at dealing with bleeds and poisons.

Solution B

Instead of replacing Crackling Thunder with "Iron Giant", Safeguard should be baseline (but only lasting 4 seconds) and add "Iron Giant" in its place.

Why Safeguard

It has very niche use (Fetid) and it essentially is an extension of what Intercept already does so it would result in very little power difference by becoming baseline (with a small nerf). Also, having Iron Giant would expand prot's toolkit by being able to deal with bleeds, poisons, snares, and roots.

Upcoming changes

In 8.1, prot is receiving azerite traits that also modify Avatar so it would probably be best if "Iron Giant" was tuned down a bit to 25% if it is too strong.
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The problem with prot warrior is that its talent tree is lacking in overall options, due to way too many weak options. Since Unstoppable force is taken everytime, this change further doubles down on limiting options for prot warrior. Currently, the only real tiers where you have a choice are 30 and 75 which are utility based. I would look into buffing or changing all the other extremely weak talents in tier 10, 45, 60, 90, and 100. Just saying, you have good intentions, but are avoiding the actual issues with our lack of options.

Edit: and crackling thunder is good for deathballing in dungeons, especially if the mobs are really far apart.

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As you said, fixing the extremely weak talents is important for the talent system to function properly. I have concluded that Crackling Thunder is one of those, and I do admit that others need changing as well.

Crackling Thunder is not particularly useful because most mob packs are close together and the ones that are not either get CC’ed or taunted/hthrow to get aggro. You can also charge and cast thunder clap while charging then thunder clap right after the charge to get aggro on a large area.

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Or you can go cackling thunder and not have to waste a taunt or charge due to the increased range grabbing it for you.

5

True, but is the minor benefit worth more than the talent that I am suggesting? Regardless of the radius, I still use that technique because it generates more threat by making use of the short GCD following a charge.

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Crackling Thunder is sometimes nice in PvP. I have used it in 3s when playing a comp that has no CC outside of stuns and would miss it a lot :rage:

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I take it you are speaking of using the increased radius combined with Thunderstruck. The way I see it is that other classes do that better so its best to choose the talents that your class does the best. I usually pick Bounding Stride and Dragon Charge for the extra mobility in BGs. In areas, I would pick Mass Spell Reflection and Safeguard to protect the healer.

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Warriors need a mastery change from critical block to defensive stance, we need something 5o mitigate all hope of damage, yes is cool to critical block a massive hit but a dot can kill you easy if you dont have shield wall.

3 Likes
9

Most bleed aren’t physical. Sure some are but most dots aren’t. Dont forget to use SPELL reflect to reduce damage from dots.

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Prot pally can block Dots and also has flat % reduction from it’s mastery. Prot warrior needs a rework from talents to mastery. It needs sustain and flat % mitigation. Dstance etc.

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I don’t think sustain is really necessary. If anything, the most sustain that we’d need is from making impending victory baseline, but I digress. The largest issue at lower levels of play is that prot warrior is simply too difficult of a class for a new player.

Dropping mitigation is far too punishing for a new player which leads to other players thinking warrior is weak because the last time they played with one, the dude sucked.

I agree that our talent choices are absolutely terrible. First row, ITF is simply too good to pass up. Nerfing it would do too much damage since the other options suck, buffing the other traits would be far better and replacing impending victory to make it baseline.

Second row is pretty safe. Crackling thunder is kinda meh. Bounding stride is super useful in m+, Safeguard has some utility for raid, but kinda useless for m+.

Maybe make safeguard change how intercept would work would make it more viable. Instead of making intercept take an attack, make it share a percentage of all the warrior’s current mitigation and defensive values with the target.

Currently, intercepting anyone useful during a raid boss can more often than not lead to a wipe due to stacking debuffs. Changing it so the talent makes it work this way would make the talent a very useful choice for raid and have potential for interesting gimmicks. In m+ it’d still be kind of meh but it has its uses.

I could go over every single row individually, but I don’t know much about how viable the other traits are, so I’m going to skip a few rows down to the level 75 options.

  • Menace: Super useful, but it’s a m+ talent which competes against the next trait.
  • Rumbling Earth: extremely strong in m+.
  • Storm Bolt: It has it’s uses, so it is fine.

Menace I think is the biggest problem talent. I can’t speak for other warriors but I personally have never really found a use for it. I can see the potential uses for it but I currently use intimidating shout as a pseudo interrupt for m+. Perhaps taking some notes on that could create a more interesting use for it, especially since single target magic damage is a pretty big problem for prot warrior’s to deal with.

PS: the editor for this forum blows.
PSS: ok nevermind its not that bad
psss: im a snake, also sorry for my rambling

1 Like
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What? Menace is completely useless. A fear typically lasts 2s. Having them stand still is no different than them taking a single step.

Personally, I didn’t like Rumbling Earth when I had it. I watched the stuns on name plates and if I was in a group with someone who used there’s, I was giving it DR right away. Probably goes up significantly in value with mob count, but the urge to hold it for 3 mobs was too high for me and for those reasons I was hesitant to use it.

Storm Bolt, on the other hand, is very very useful. Don’t sleep on a ranged 4s stun for runners or just taking a mob out for 4s. Not to mention all the various stun based mechanics like riot shield, mech engineers, a secondary 30s cd interrupt. Honestly, if Storm Bolt interrupted mobs that couldn’t be stunned, I’d be set.

2 Likes
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Menace is a niche ability that requires planning to use.
The fear is actually too strong if used properly, but it is more likely that it will be instantly broken if used improperly.
The way I use it is to heroic leap into the group, use intimidating shout, and taunt the add I want to pull away. This relies on the group not dpsing until you have the add clear of the others.
I agree that storm bolt is more useful than rumbling earth because the range on it is simply too good to pass up.

14

I just want Gag Order and Mocking Banner back, tbh. Being unable to reposition casters outside of pummeling and kiting is infuriating, especially when I have other stuff beating on me. Though now that I look it up, Banner doesn’t do what I remember it doing; it won’t cause casters to try and meele me. Blegh.

15

I made this suggestion else where but I think a change is needed to how mitigation is handled beyond just taking Ignore pain off the GCD. Having the Spell changed to a passive that is triggered from Revenge and gives an absorb based on the damage dealt by said Revenge would fix the one of the issue and fill the gap Prot suffers in AoE situations right now. In addition this makes dealing with multiple Debuffs from multiple enemies easily as you will be hitting them all with Revenge and stacking an absorb with each cast. The idea is kind of like Blood DKs Death Strike from Cata and WoD but is will scale better due to it being a Cleave AoE ability which will scale with Strength just like it dose now.

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Crackling Thunder is pretty much a requirement in mythic +, it allows for kiting big deathball of mobs without taking melee hits. Especially in necrotic

3 Likes
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That’s why I was so confused about his suggestion. If anything safeguard needs to be changed. It’s really only used for pvp prot.

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Safeguard can see niche use as a tank on Zul or Fetid, to be fair, but it’s still rarely taken there either.

2 Likes
19

safeguard helps with giving the co-tank externals, which then gives yourself more externals when you actually need them. It loses it’s niche when both tanks are taking high sustain damage for whatever reason. I wouldn’t trade out safeguard either

20

I miss the days of being able to choose avoidance vs. mitigation. Why not make 1 column avoidance, one column damage mitigation, and one for PvP (I haven’t played enough this xpac to know if Prot is viable in PvP, but I digress).

We currently have 2 abilities that reduces your bleed damage: shield wall and spell reflect. We have no self healing whatsoever (I’m looking at you, BDK!!)…just 2 temp HP boost, that we lose when they time out.

I’ve been playing WoW since vanilla, and this is as frustrated as I’ve been since wrath, when our inability to AoE tank was crippling.

Make Impending Victory baseline, put overall damage mitigation on shield block, and make thunder clap more like consecrate (fixed area and ticking rage increase). You’ll fix warriors and make them fun instead of crippled.

I get that the shiny new classes are a bit OP in the start to encourage people to play them, but many of us still love the OG of tanking.