Yeah, I always have loved prot, but with df they literally took away virtually all skill expression from the spec and it has become quite stale unfortunately. Add on to that other tanks have gotten reworks and more utility and we have gotten like 8 lines of blue text in 2 years (including the war within upcoming expansion)… its sad whenever I read people are like “prot is fine. there is nothing wrong here. move along and be quiet.”
2 Likes
It is kind of boring, though it does serve an important role (in making Arms Warriors strong during execute, without invalidating the buttons they press before Execute).
That said, the reason it’s weak is because of some design flaws.
- it’s not intended to Crit or benefit from class damage effects like Avatar on purpose, because that leads to some degenerative gameplay (sitting on cooldowns for a full minute to make sure they’re active during Fatality isn’t really fun, neither is an uncontrolled 30% chance for a huge crit one time throughout the encounter).
- but because it’s not listed as a class spell for purposes of Colossus Smash/Avatar, it also doesn’t benefit from class buffs, like the spec turning aura, which is currently +30% on beta.
- it also doesn’t benefit from Mastery, for no apparent reason.
Not critting and not benefitting from class effects like CS/Avatar is fine, that can be tuned around. Also not benefitting from Mastery or the spec aura results in some scaling problems.
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Tuning aside, TWW Prot warrior is my current favorite tank spec by quite a large margin.
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Yeah I like blood too.
I like how health is almost like a resource and more active. Instead of something in the background to monitor you have control over your own health bar. You can choose to store up resources a little and then quick regen all at once.
Haven’t played it much in beta though.
Is it notably more fun than live then?
1 Like
Seems the changes for Fury in today’s build are intended to rein in the prevalence of the heavy Bloodthirst-focused builds.
Would it even be a testing cycle if we didn’t get a bug fix AND large nerfs at the same time?
This bug fix above is obviously a pretty significant nerf to Bloodthirst/Bloodbath damage and then throwing the baseline nerfs on top of that feels like overkill to me. For clarity I think the Reck Abandon and Odyn Fury nerfs were in line. But the other items after the bug fix as well has me scratching my head.
I can understand trying to balance out Bloodthirst and Raging Blow to some degree. But also THE TALENT ECONOMY DOES NOT EXIST TO SUPPORT BOTH ABILITIES. I can see a world here where the balance changes make more options available in the middle segement of the spec tree, but they hardly, if at all, impact how we actually play.
This is further compounded by on any aoe ever you have zero choice but to take Improved Whirlwind and Meat Cleaver. Reducing the extremely limited choice we have to practically nothing.
2 Likes
Fully understanding the RA and OF nerfs; justified, don’t we think the multiple additional nerfs to BT were a bit overkill? Buffing Ramp is nice, as I do believe ramp should ALWAYS be the target button to press, the rest seems to hurt the area we are still semi mediocre (ST) a lot, and it’s a concern on my end. The bugfix+nerf to CF is 16% alone, on top of additional 10%, and another 26% off BB, and then the Slayer 5% nerf to it at well; this seems like an absolute gutting of our main small CD ability, which should by design be fairly high prio behind ramp.
5 Likes
Not sure if it’s a bug or I’m missing something, but sometimes Anger management on fury is refunding 1 s per 10 rage instead of per 20. Not sure if it’s got anything to do with changing between specs while testing on dummies, but it is something I noticed
Feedback - 07/02/2024 Beta Build
Almost every change was tuning based, so not much to say for this week’s build.
Fury
The base reset chance for Raging Blow going up is nice to see for rotational consistency. I do think it could come up even more to be honest. In Raging Blow focused builds, the reset chance of Raging Blow is essentially irrelevent thanks to Hack and Slash, but for a lot of Bloodthirst Builds we’re playing right now, we’re going out of our way to avoid capstone talents like Unbridled Ferocity and sometimes even Titanic Rage in favor of getting Hack and Slash just to make sure we always have something to press. Maybe worth buffing it even more just to open up other options or even just have us keep those points in the capstone row where they probably should be (Though the issue there might be that UF and to a larger degree Depths of Insanity are awful talents that somehow continue to exist in their present state). Dancing Blades has also been severely weakened by the removal of annihalator. Though to be honest, i wouldn’t mind seeing it removed altogether. Between the clunkiness of clipping the Dancing Blades buff that I’ve mentioned earlier in the thread and the fact that it often outshined Titanic Rage (which is just more fun) in M+, because ST is often just more important, I don’t mind seeing it gone.
Odyn’s Fury nerf is warranted. The initial buff was probably a bit much, but this looks like it might be in a reasonable place now.
Reckless Abandon nerf is fine and warranted, though I’m concerned that between the massive Bloodbath nerf here and all the other changes (including a buff to RB) which I’ll take about in the next snippet, we may have overshot the mark a bit and lost sight of the goal for Bloodthirst.
Lots and lots of bloodthirst nerfs. Its hard to evaluate this since the PTR isn’t up yet, but at first glance, this seems like an excessive nerf to the power of Bloodthirst. The crushing force fix alone took off 10% of BT’s damage, ontop of a pretty big nerf to the critical strike chance again through crushing force, followed by another 10% nerf just seems like gutting the baseline ability. I guess the intent of the Rampage Buff is to compensate for this a little bit, which is fine, but then Raging Blow was also buffed and in the RA nerf, Crushing Blow was barely touched relative to Bloodbath. In my view, Bloodthirst should always be a stronger global in just base damage to Raging Blow. It felt like the damage parity between these two abilities had landed in a good place, so I’m concerned that these changes might throw that out of balance. At the end of the day, Bloodthirst is a static cooldown with no reset mechanics. It should always be, in my opinion, significantly stronger (and not just in number of interactions) than RB on that basis alone, which has basically infinite reset opportunity. I’ll have a clearer idea of where this stands when the PTR comes up and I’ll update my thoughts accordingly if I feel I’ve misjudged the nerfs, but that’s my first reaction seeing these notes. It just seems excessive and counter to the goals we’ve worked towards across the entire development cycle. It doesn’t seem like I’m the only one that believes this based on Linccstyle’s comments either. For slayer, its probably not as big a deal in terms of overall damage, since Slayer uses RB pretty frequently, but in Mountain Thane’s case, which using RB a lot less often, a BT nerf and an RB buff really just means a BT nerf, because with how frequently Thunder Blast procs are, RB tends to be a pretty infrequently used filler. My biggest concern is that AM Fury was already fairly weak on ST, so nerfing Bloodthirst just seems unwarranted. If the goal was targeting RA, that was already achieved with the Bloodbath nerf, so I’m just not sure why AM needs to be brought down on top of that.
Also, just a reminder that the fury tierset is still excessively weak and counter to the rotational goals of Fury, so it would be nice if a reworked version could come soon so that we can better test it. Please don’t repeat the season 1 DF incident 
Arms
The Blademaster’s change is definetly more intuitive than the first iteration. I did not enjoy that sweeping strikes / avatar would basically just reset each other since that was not really the intuitive feeling I’ve come to expect from the torment talents. I am curious how this will work with talents like Collateral Damage which had some odd interactions with the previous iteration. All of that being said, it does feel like between all the nerfs Warlord’s Torment has received and now this, that the torment talents for Arms are kind of just growing weaker. Maybe this is intended to promote taking double capstones in roar, but I kind of wish that if that was the goal, that it would have been resolved by addressing the egregious gateway node balancing. Though a more permanent solution of eliminating the number of 2 point nodes and adding more variety and interesting talents will certainly be necessary in the future.
3 Likes
The bloodthirst nerfs are very heavy handed. You basically quadrupal nerfed Bloodthirst.
Nerf to Crushing Force
Nerf to Bloodthirst
Fixed a bug through Crushing Force
Nerf to Bloodbath
This puts into question which should we press more now between Bloodthirst or Raging Blow. Our hero trees are more BT centric. If this was done in an attempt to make our 4p better this is a poor way of doing it.
FWIW, Bloodbath has a separate coefficient from Bloodthirst, so their tuning does not impact one another.
The answer to your question is both. Without the inflated Recklessness uptime or increased enrage duration in Dragonflight, Raging Blow alone isn’t enough to maintain Enrage, so Bloodthirst will still be used frequently for its extra Enrage procs and Deft Experience extension, if nothing else.
The real question is how well other fillers (Thunder Blast, Sudden Death) compete against Crushing Blow.
2 Likes
Someone said fury was 1 shotting peeps in pvp
I am once again here asking for your support blizzard.
Uncap Intimidating Shout please.
Make intervene have stormshield modifier baseline.
Recook the 2 additional stormbolts + 10s cd increase / stormshield node.
Make choice node for dungeon rally vs raid rally.
If you really got love for warriors, give us a bleed removal (thematically fits too, call it like tourniquet) so we can undwarf ourselves or lust so we can run our drum cleaves without bm / marks hunters malding about pet buffs or pets in general.
Mountain Thane Fury
This spec is extremely fun to play. Thunder Blast is very satisfying, and I wish some of the lightning and thunder associated with it could be a little more present occasionally. But super minor complaint obviously. My only other two comments are:
- When Bloodthirst is cleaved it consumes two stacks of Burst of Power
- This hero tree needs a single target damage boost somewhere
3 Likes
Thorim’s Might also hasn’t been generating rage for the last few builds, all tracked on my list of bugs.
The gameplay is very satisfying, although it would be a little smoother if Thunder Blast had the same cooldown as Bloodthirst to avoid issues where the proc could become available but the button is still on cooldown - it’s a fairly minor disconnect overall though.
Mountain Thane is a little weak in general compared to Slayer, but my biggest concern at this stage is with the potential for Crushing Blow to push Thunder Blast down in the single target priority. Short of buffing Blast itself, a buff to Lightning Strike damage (guaranteed from Flashing Skies) could help address both issues.
7 Likes
Fury: Can we get a connection from Improved Raging Blow to Wrath and Fury?
There is nothing in between, just lets us skip the aoe/execute and only take the raging blow talents on the right side. Please and thank you 
Colossus Arms Warrior
Just checking back in on various specs here, and honestly there is A LOT that hits for me as Colossus Arms. A few points for consideration.
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Rage model during execute phase is a serious problem IMO. Otherwise I think the rage rebalance largely feels good. I’m not saying we need to spam execute, but we are not even in the same universe of approaching that at the moment. Execute just feels horrid, by far my biggest complaint.
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Demolish and Anger Management cooldown alignments are annoying, but maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m just sending Demolish on cooldown essentially and that’s fine but annoying.
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I still don’t like Mortal Strike being 40%+ of my damage on single target. The rage model struggles when you get chain resets from Exhilarating Blows and this obviously inflates MS damage. It’s probably too late to replace this, but I think the spec would be better off without it. If this talent goes away Colossal Might acquisition rate might need to be looked at?
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There’s a big part of me that says Battlelord needs to be earlier in the tree. The rage model even outside of execute starts to feel bad without it to me.
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Unhinged feels so good! It’s the shining star of both dps specs at the moment, but combined with Battlelord it makes our options in the bottom part of the tree feel very locked in. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but Unhinged + Battlelord feel mandatory and/or essential to making the spec flow well.
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The redesigned Torments are not doing it for me at all.
1 Like
Kinda wishing this would be changed to Mortal Combo from SL.
Protection Warrior Feedback
First, a disclaimer, as it happened in Dragonflight, we can all bet that everyone will claim that we are Meta and oppressively too strong. This basically means other tanks have no gear and while no one has gear, Shield Block is king. As soon as people start to reach normal levels of gear other tanks will dethrone us as it happened during S1 DF. This being said lets move on and try to not let Protection Warrior on the gutter as one of the least played tanks for an entire expansion past the first month.
So, this feedback goes into the Mythic plus genra since there are way too many variables for raids (including group composition).
I think we few things need to be adjusted so we aren’t left behind as people get more gear these are my suggestions:
- Spell block cooldown increased to 2 minutes (from 1,5) but added to Anger Management CDR so, with more gear we can deal with blockable magic damage better;
- Indomitable healing increased to 2% (from 1%) per 10 rage spent, with more gear (haste) the more selfsustain we gain;
- Disrupting Should changed to be a silence instead of an interrupt, especially now with BDK getting a 3 second silence on mass grip;
- Our Mastery is boring, hopefully with more Spell Block we it would become slightly better but maybe baking into it Tough as Nails and scaling it with mastery could be fun, making us value mastery as a stat.
Spec tree
Our spec tree is fairly bland and our capstones aren’t exciting. I don’t think Shield Charge is exciting as capstone, for me it’s just another macro baked into charge and pressed on cd. Ravager itself is a button that feels good to press, but anything that is added further on it is beyond bad and pointless as it has been for an entire expansion and lastly Battle-Scarred Veteran has been bugged through most of DF, activating before mitigation was taken into account and, even fixed will likely see 0 play.
We could use a shift and I feel our tree is a missed opportunity, especially considering how Avatar is such a big thing for Prot Warrior and so iconic.
Things that could be removed or be made baseline because realistically it doesn’t make much sense.
- Devastator, no one plays with Devastate in modern wow, its button bloat and a bad filler, sure the animation used to be awesome but that’s not even ingame anymore, it’s just a bland, no cd, no resource filler on a spec that has no free time to press anything else. Make Devastator Baseline and remove Devastate (or keep it for leveling and then gets replaced after X level).
- Instigate, with Devastator being baseline this should be baked into it as well, good for raids and that’s about it.
- Dance of Death and Storm of Steal, another 2 talents that see no play and wont see play unless a tier set forces us to - a bad idea btw, don’t troll please.
- Battering Ram and Champion’s Bulwark, two addons for a talent that shouldn’t be a capstone to begin with.
- Battle-Scarred Veteran, the issue is prot warrior has not enough self sustain for a Cheat death that doesn’t instantly gets you to full HP, either remove or buff it beyond reason else its going to be useless most of the time.
This would allow for some changes.
- Shield Charge would move to Devastator’s place.
- Champion’s Bulwark and Battering Ram become a choice node in Instigate’s place.
- Bastion of Might (new talent, old azerite trait) is added as a capstone. When you press Avatar it increases your Mastery by X amount or % and instantly casts an Ignore Pain.
- Deafening Crash (new talent, old azerite trait) comes where Champion’s Bulwark was. Can even be changed to, During Avatar, Thunder Clap extends the duration of your Demoralizing Shout on affected enemies by 2 sec, up to 6 sec.
- Avatar modifier (new talent) during Avatar you take 5% less magic damage and every time you take damage (some sort of internal cd) you do thorns damage, dealing X% damage back to the attacker. In the place where Battering Ram was.
- Aberrus 4-set in the place of Dance of Death and Storm of Steal choice node, with a minor change. Reading for 20 sec sec after Ravager ends, Shield Slam unleashes a wave of force dealing (X% of Attack power) Physical damage to enemies in front of you and reducing damage they deal to you by 5% for 5 sec.
Cosmetic stuff:
Avatar animation is showing its age compared to a lot of other specs, this could use a cool new facelift. Especially now with the new Dwarfs. And to be fair Mountain Thane Avatar animation is much much much better than regular Avatar, so really good job, it just could increase your size a little bit. But, that doesn’t mean regular Avatar doesn’t deserve to be updated.
The best Avatar animation I’ve seen was in Heroes of the Storm, that could be it, both the start and the end animation. We could even get some cool quest chain to get more cosmetic appearances for Avatar (since warlocks got both Greenfire AND now more pet skins!). Here are some ideas:
- Stone Avatar (Heroes of the storm)
- Fire Avatar
- Lightning Avatar (which we get from mountain thane)
2 Likes
Are there aby plans to shake up prot talents at all? It feels pretty much the same exact thing as DF with very little choice in what is played.
After playing tanks over df, warrior dk and brew, I can say without a doubt brew and blood dk feel even better than before. They also had updates while prot didn’t really have anything in the spec tree change.
As it is now, despite loving my warrior, I am going to end up benching him for my dk without a second thought. (Though slayer fury pvp has been fun on the beta)