Seriously. I’m 212 iLvl and get one shot by some trash packs in higher Mythic+ Keys. Go check raider IO. It’s all demon hunters because this entire expansion is just kite-city. It’s obnoxious. If Blizzard wants us to kite, give us more mobility, but this is just a joke. I played a Prot warrior in BFA and while I understand I’m not some unit dropping massive twilight dev everywhere anymore, I shouldn’t be 62k HP getting booty clapped within seconds of grabbing threat and grouping the mobs up together. Something is seriously wrong here.
8 Likes
Your “higher keys” would be what, 12s? There is a prot warrior timing 17s and 18s.
Actually, he’s lower item level than you. For all that that matters.
There’s a point here, I can feel it.
Prot has good mobility…?
Correct.
But you seem to be looking in the wrong direction.
4 Likes
I’m not going to give someone a hard time who is a high item level, which you can’t get by being a scrub right now, who is actually doing progression, even if the post is a little scant. Maybe give him the time of day if he’s doing the content beyond just that somebody else who was less than top 1 percentile was achieving higher progression.
You do have two options to kite, leap and intervene.
I’m about to start working on 10 keys, can you go into more detail? What’s the damage profile that is nuking you, and what pulls are you having a hard time with? I need to learn, personally.
2 Likes
A penny's worth of thoughts...
Prefacing General Changes:
- Threat modifiers increased slightly, but threat now decays (initially slowly) over time, at an increasing rate pushed back (and eventually reset) by direct damage dealt.
- This is mostly meant to combat the (imo) excess efficiency of kiting.
- With this, it takes more than just a modest Blessed Hammer every 6 or so seconds to keep threat. One is encouraged to actually engage for at least a few GCDs to maximize threat upkeep, and then may kite again for a while between short CDs.
- This may for a time unfairly disfavor VDHs, who somewhat lack for quick mitigation tools, when they cannot kite tightly enough to maximize Spirit Bomb. Such should be immediately addressed if so, but likely just by having orbs drift to the DH or similar rather than by bypassing this mechanic directly.
As for the Prot Warrior buffs themselves…
The basics:
- Thunder Clap slow increased to 30% baseline (still 20% in PvP). Crackling Thunder increases this to 50% (30% in PvP).
- Shield Block cooldown reduced to 14 seconds, down from 16.
- Shield Block rage cost reduced to 20, down from 30.
- Execute and Hamstring now instead have a chance equal to 150% of their Rage spent to refresh Shield Slam. (15% for Hamstring; 30% to 60% for Execute, thus maintaining the same efficiency at any Rage level.)
- Ravager movement speed increased slightly. It now also prefers positions that allow it to strike as many targets (exempting hard CCs) as possible, and can be ordered, on re-press, to fixate on a particular target.
- Conqueror’s Banner buffed (see other threads).
- Vanguard now increases the effect of your class damage absorption and suppression effects by 45%.
- This most noticeably affects Condemn, is already balanced around in the revised Punish talent, and does not affect Trinkets or external effects.
- Condemn now deals damage suppression based on its damage dealt, thus no longer favoring 20-Rage casts for mitigation for its simultaneous-damage IP-alternative niche.
Improving Reliability:
- Excess Block chance now becomes Critical Block chance. The base amount of Critical Block chance and the Critical Block scaling provided by Mastery: Critical Block have each been reduced significantly, while the base Block chance and Block chance scaling provided by Mastery: Critical Block have been increased.
- Ignore Pain now absorbs “up to 80% of damage taken” based on the current Ignore Pain value and the %HP attacks against you would otherwise reduce you to. It thus lasts longer when you’re at higher health and expends more of itself against damage spikes, naturally leveling out damage intake.
Class-wide Toolkit Improvements
- Spell Reflection, Intervene, and War Machine revised.
- Spell Reflection now has a cap to its damage absorption and reflection (or, in DoTs’ case, potential damage reflection) equal to 30% HP, but now persists for 3 seconds after the first reflect (or 1.5 seconds in PvP). Spells in excess of this limit will still be fully absorbed but only the remaining absorption value will be reflected.
- Intervene will no longer intercept attacks that would reduce you below 30% HP, but will now intercept all damage types, thus making use of Spell Reflection on/for allies.
War Machine fully revised
War Machine
Once every 30 seconds, you can Execute a target regardless of their health. This effect is refreshed by killing any enemy that gives honor or experience.Your damage dealt and absorbed generate temporary Haste and Speed, each separately consumed over further attacks or movement done. Killing an enemy instantly generates a large amount of this effect based on their maximum health.
- Technicals: “Damage dealt” refers instead to %AP, and thus does not scale with primary stat. In PvP, “Maximum health” refers to that of the original, pre-scaled unit, and thus does not outscale its competing talents at higher difficulty levels though it still rewards killing lieutenants and the like more than basic trash.
- This is meant to scaled to be a faint loss relative to Sudden Death for Fury, nearly competitive against Fresh Meat in frequent Rampage builds in dungeoning QoL, and comparatively strong in M+ for Arms, while a notable mitigation loss vs Punish but nearly competitive with Devastator mitigation synergies while providing slightly more damage over time in M+ than either other Prot option would.
- This is spitball, but seemed a more interesting and thematic take. Your big hits lead to some follow-up Haste and Speed, while killing enemies offers snowballing speed by which to chase down further kills, funnel damage post-adds into boss, or escape on-death negative effects (self-destructs, ghosts, Spiteful, etc).
- Challenging Shout, Intimidating Shout, Victory Rush, and Hamstring buffed.
- Challenging Shout cooldown reduced from 4 to 3 minutes.
- Intimidating Shout now slows enemies by 70% while active.
- Hamstring damage now increased to 30% AP, up from 15%. (It also no longer has a Rage cost for Fury.)
- Given on-hit effects and spammability in PvP, I can understand why Hamstring has a Rage cost for Protection and Arms, but I feel it ought to at a bit more nearly proportionate damage in that case.
Further Cooldown Power Buffs
- Demoralizing Shout now additionally increases your Critical Strike chance against affected enemies by 20%. (This does affect Riposte and indirectly buff Booming Voice.)
- Last Stand now increases your maximum health by 45%, up from 30%, but decreases to 15% over its duration.
Talent Buffs/Revisions
- Punish has been revised to better scale against lower priority mobs.
Punish
Shield Slam damage increased by 20%. Enemies struck by Shield Slam are inflicted with Impedance based on their damage taken, dealing damage to you as if blocked by further armor. Impedance is consumed over damage thus prevented. Multiple applications of Impedance may overlap.- This allows Avatar to play a larger part in burst mitigation while also giving Punish greater value over time (albeit at a bit of a soft cap) against less powerful targets and burstier and more controllable effect against strong targets.
- Each Shield Slam effectively gives a directly derived amount of eHP, but the nearer to the incoming big hit the more mitigation can be generated (the more of that eHP can be spent) at once to smooth damage spikes.
- Devastator’s %chance to reset Shield Slam on auto-attacks increased to 25 or 30% to remain in line with the buffed War Machine and Punish. (War Machine’s damage absorbed value makes it stronger for Prot than Fury and Arms in terms of raw contribution while Punish has also been tuned a bit higher in addition to its more important functionality buffs.)
Notes:
- The suggested War Machine revision may likely scale too well or wildly with damage absorbed.
2 Likes
While I don’t disagree that Prot could use a buff in both damage and defense (against unblockable damage i.e. a bump in ignore pain), the main issue here I believe is correctly identified by the OP as the kiting meta in M+ at the moment. Though we DO have enough mobility (simply heroic leap away), we don’t have enough damage to safely maintain threat on the mob pack, especially since we cannot deal meaningful damage (and hence threat) from a distance, like how Paladins can, for instance.
It used to be that kiting was only really necessary when doing keys far in excess of your current ilvl, such as doing high 20s in BFA. Yet now trash packs in keys 10 and above hit so damn hard that kiting seems far less uncommon than it was for similar key levels in previous expansions.
In my opinion, this results in very unsatisfying gameplay thanks to 2 major factors:
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Tanking difficulty is far in excess of the ilvl drops of the dungeon: the incoming damage from trash packs (especially certain pulls such as before the Hakkar wing in De Other Side) is ridiculously insane, and sometimes it may not be possible to even establish threat properly (due to Prot’s current low damage) before dying. You then slog your way to the end of the dungeon, only to receive/watch others receive items ranging from Normal raid to just below Heroic raid difficulty in ilvl.
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Kiting is just unfun: I believe most people who play tanks play one in order to be the “shield of the party”, so to speak. The one who controls the situation and dictates the position of the mobs. However, the fact that right now, the tank has to run away in many situations greatly diminishes this fantasy, and thus part of the fun of playing the role. People who fixate only on numbers may dispute this point, of course, though we need to remember that this is also an RPG, and the feel of playing the classes/roles is equally as important as the numbers.
I believe that Blizzard should do something about resolving the “kiting meta”, by making tanks tankier (in PvE), and also preventing excessive kiting by changing how threat works. I remember reading in another thread that threat could be reworked to decay exponentially when the mobs are no longer interacting with you, so as to prevent kiting for too long. This, coupled with damage/survivability reworks to all tanks could result in more satisfying gameplay more in-line with the term “tanking”.
If I wanted to kite all day long, I would play a mage or hunter. I mean, if all we were supposed to do was to tag mobs and run away, we shouldn’t be called tanks, we should be called jet bombers or something :V
26 Likes
I kited back to the login screen on my warrior and there he remains for now. Other tanks do much more with greater ease and more efficient.
7 Likes
It seems like the affix system is showing its flaws. It’s neither fun nor interesting, just arbitrary garbage thrown in to make things “harder” and most of them aren’t that great to begin with.
1 Like
While I’d probably actually enjoy Spiteful if it just preferred targets beyond a certain minimum range, that is a bit of a sore point for me in regards to quite a few M+ affixes, yeah.
I’d prefer affixes feel like something interesting everyone can optimize around, rather than just something (usually unevenly) punishing, but that’s an admittedly tall order.
1 Like
Thanks for saying what I was trying to say, much, much more eloquently.
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I think there is some degree of ALL tanks getting booty clapped against certain mobs. My group has been working on progressing past 10s slowly but surely, and I definitely get deleted if I walk into a pack of mobs without defensives rolling.
From what I’ve seen, all tanks do in higher keys. The meta really seems to be to jump in with defensives, generate a ton of threat/damage and then kite as soon as defensives are down.
I personally hate it. I think tanks should tank mobs instead of kite.
All that being said… I totally agree with you man. I really hope prot warriors get some love soon.
2 Likes
Lol what you say is so true. Why are we even called tanks? We should be called kites. Or hit and runs. It’s honestly sad what’s happened to tanking.
2 Likes
While he has a point, I still can’t not for the life of me, find yours. Oh man Prot war is 17 and 18s while even lower gears tanks like DH are doing 20s
3 Likes
I enjoyed spiteful
I hate necrotic…
And I hate kiting all the time, it’s not fun on a warrior
3 Likes
Get in line dude. Prot is fine for most content.
Fury is literally unusable lmao
Honest question. Do you think if the teams playing m+ for eight hours a day, pushing those top keys, switched to a prot warrior, would suddenly be unable to time their keys.
They can balance more than one class. I hope.
Depends. Is it a fresh toon or do you mean bringing in a Prot warrior from outside? Is said Prot warrior somebody like me, or somebody with an equivalent level of experience and gear?
Do you randomly change your comps mid-tier and notice no change in your performance?
This is blizzard you’re talking about dude. You hope wrong.
I did not think this was a complex question.
If these players were using a prot warrior character instead of a vdh character, do people honestly believe they would not be timing the same level of keys.
There’s really no extra factors to the query.
All things held equal, quite likely
Bear in mind, you’re saying 4 players that are 17-18 geared and mentally at that level. You can have one dude pulling less at that point than ideal and you still have the rest of the comp around you to support that.
1 Like
What the actual hell are you talking about.
Meeres, Gingi, Jimmy, Zaelia, and Naowh walk into a dungeon.
Instead of a vdh they have a prot warrior.
Do you think for even a moment they’re not timing a 20 in every key.