I miss my old prot

Classes Warrior
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I, and i cannot stress this enough, miss WoD’s prot warrior, it was perfect imo, I cant stand ignore pain, threats gone in the bin, its all stuffed for me :confused: Ive tried a few others, blood dk I enjoy but Ive played a dk too long, I dont understand monks stagger, dont like being a bear and Ive not tried paladin because I nuke them in pvp on everything so I figure theyre probably bad… rip the tank dream

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You figure wrong.

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What does this mean

You mean you can’t stand slightly-different shield barrier?

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Blizzard’s new take on Prot Warrior = best reason to go Arms.

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I absolutely loved prot in wrath.
Quit in the first tier of cata, didnt come back till bfa so i cant comment on what happened during those expacs.
I don’t like tanking in bfa because its focused on active mitigation and defensive cd rotation. Much preferred the days when mitigation was mostly passive and your rotation was about threat.

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I’ve just recently returned to WoW. Aside from a brief check-in during WoD, I haven’t played since the end of WotLK. I played all tanks back then, but prot warrior was my favorite spec because it seemed a little busier/more involved than some of the other tanks. To me it was just more fun (although I might have enjoyed monk brewmasters even more when I came back during WoD…sadly, they do seem to have made significant changes to simplify that spec!).

Perhaps my memory is off, but it feels pretty similar to before with the only major difference I can tell being that they traded cleave/heroic strike spam for shield block/ignore pain as rage dumps.

I may be missing some of the angles here, but so far it has that same great prot warrior feel, but with a bit more consequence. By that I mean that there is a bit of a choice to make between mitigation and threat generation, although this seems to apply mostly at the beginning stage of a multi-target pull and is not so much applicable on single-target or once you are in position.

I guess I’m having trouble seeing why this change is so significant. The one argument I can’t speak to is threat generation. When you say threat has gone in the bin, are you saying that warriors at max level have trouble maintaining threat? I’ve been dungeon leveling with prot spec (only up to level 90 so far) and haven’t noticed any issues so far?

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The threat generation aspect isn’t super important after the first seconds of a given pull, so it’s more of a “choice” between active mitigation and using revenge for more damage. Seems like a ridiculous choice on the face of it as a tank, but tank damage in the modern game is actually fairly significant compared to wrath and earlier, with a good tank doing 50-60% the output of a good DPS single target instead of like 10-20%. So in situations where you aren’t taking heavy damage or actively tanking, it’s a worthwhile spender.

Pretty sure he’s talking about how threat output doesn’t particularly matter much. It’s slightly more present now than it has been in any expansion since BC, but it’s still mostly a nonissue.

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As somebody who also skipped everything between wrath and BFA let me clarify.
Functionally yes, prot warrior today is very similar to wrath prot, high aoe, high physical mitigation, high damage for a tank. The big difference is that in wrath mitigation was mostly passive, you had shield block yes, but i thought of that as a damage cd as much as a mitigation cd, due to those sweet shield slam crits.

I just don’t like the active mitigation model that modern tanks all seems to be designed around. i much prefer to have defensive CDs as an “oh s**t” button or for boss mechanics, and for my rotation to be focused on damage/threat, positioning, interrupts/ stuns. that is just more fun to me.

Another thing to consider with tanking in wrath was actual choice with talents and gear. i could swap out tank gear for dps gear in easier content to make things more fun, prot warrior with high armor pen was hilarious. By the end of wrath i had stopped using my dps spec completely, prot all the way for solo questing, world pvp, everything.

In BFA you there is zero talent choice and no difference between dps gear and tank gear. There is only 4 secondary stats ffs.

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Correct! :,)

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I see. We all have our preferences. Personally, I enjoy prot warrior specifically because it’s a more active spec than most. Given that, I like weaving in skills like shield block and ignore pain. In that sense it isn’t much different to me than the old way of weaving in cleave and heroic strike. I suppose the major difference there is that shield block and ignore pain tend to have more of an impact than heroic strike and cleave did. And for me, that’s a good thing.