I just dinged my prot pally today and did a key NW5 today at 590 ilvl. It was a +2 because I died twice and caused 14 deaths.
So here is my experience with my prot pally from at the moment warrior’s perspectives.
Damage:
Prot pally does insane dmg. I played a full offensive build with refining fire and tyr’s fire (or w/e 2 point talent node for your AS to deal additional AoE dmg) Though I may have to remove 1 point from tyr’s fire later for spell ward, which may lead to around 3.5% overall dmg.
healing:
Prot pally’s self heal is very strong, my 620+ prot war usually has around 360k hps, but my 590 prpt pally has 450k hps.
reliability:
It sucks. I hate to say this, but my prot war feels a lot safer, its hp goes down way slower than my prot pally thank to large hp pool, short def cds, and ignore pain. In boss fights, I never run out of cds to deal with tank bursters because how broken spell reflect is. But on my prot pally, I struggle to rotate my def cds. I am using moment of glory together with wings, so that my wings become a real def cds. Because of that I have no EoT, and AD, DS, spellward, GoAK are too long cds to fully rotate for bosses’ tank bursters. And using these cds in boss fights may mess up my cds after the trash pull later.
When I checked my healing received from healer, he did 38% of overall healing on me. That number is way too high in comparison to my prot war, which is usually around 28%.
Overall, prot pally has a lot of potentials, but for people who want chill and easy wins, prot war is definitely the choice.
I think a big part of your experience is also due in part to your stats at 590 ilvl, because you’re not able to hit the haste needed to smooth out Holy Power generation and defensives. I also don’t think Moment of Glory is worth it without a full-5man team, but I get that you were going for a pure DPS build.
Like you said though, our viability largely comes from managing our defensives properly whereas Warriors don’t need to think about it as much. First boss of CoT is a big one where things will go very bad if you run out of CDs.
One of my problems with prot pal is that many their def cds (like DS, EoT, spellwarr) are on gcds. To play with well, you need weakaura to track bosses’ spells to pre-cast your def cds. It’s not hard, but it’s annoying.
Ya it’s a wild ride sometimes. It’s fun. It’s also painful how meticulous you need to be.
Playing my warrior is such a breath of fresh air. Just being able to not have to worry about CDs all the time hahah
I think it would be better if we could go back to the days of like 3 CDs and more reliability outside of that, or make us generate an absorb somehow, or scale our hp much higher