Well its good to know Blizzard is ignoring the hell out of all the feedback we are giving and screwing over Colossus Prot reguardless of what we tell you.
Not being a total jerk thank you for at least giving a Blue post to warriors. But still we feel you are ignoring the fact Colossus and Mountain Thane play differently and Colossus is getting hit too hard with all the rage nerfs.
Not to be a jerk but Prot Warrior has always been a high APM spec to play so directly nerfing it because “some players” can’t play it as a result of the high APM is kinda unfair to those of us who do play Prot Warrior and play it well. I appreciate y’all trying to make it so people who can’t deal with the high APM can play Prot Warrior but frankly, some specs should have a high APM and that should be part of what separates the good and bad players otherwise it’s just a boring spec where you’re spending time waiting for procs to occur with nothing to press until the procs occur.
Not to mention the fact is the only reason our APM is so high is because we have to dump our rage into Ignore Pain, especially in M+ because y’all have made the M+ mobs extremely punishing even if they’re not casters. When I start a pull in M+, my first order of business is immediately getting Ignore Pain going else I’ll probably gain rep with the floor and that’s not a good time. Nerfing our rage gen as a result means we’re either gonna be spending more time with the floor or we’re going to be stressing our healers out even more. Neither of which are things current Prot Warriors (and healers) want or need.
So y’all’s genius idea is to nerf our Shield Slam resets… Really? Y’all didn’t think to, I dunno, make it so we can generate more rage from other abilities while taking away part of the rage gen that Shield Slam gives? Like come on, if you guys want us to use other abilities then make those abilities better/more appealing to use! This isn’t rocket science!
Okay but did you guys ask current Prot Warriors if we were happy with where Shield Slam is in the rotation? Oh yeah, that’s right… Y’all didn’t.
Changing a spec to appease people that don’t even play it while alienating the people that have been playing it for years is classic idiocy from Blizzard.
Thanks for replying and giving us additional insight about why these changes are occurring.
I think part of the reason this is such a big concern, is that Warrior doesn’t have a ton of buttons to press. Ideally we have Shield Slam, Thunderclap, Revenge (if it procs), Ignore Pain, and Shield Block. After that its a hodgepodge of cooldowns, and not a ton of group utility like Paladins, or even Druids.
By reducing the APM of the spec, you risk leaving warriors with an anemic playstyle with minimal skill expression.
Slowing down the spec is fine, and I understand the want to help players that can have physical pain from the high APM of the spec, however if nothing is given in return (Additional Utility, a more robust way of spending rage, etc.) you risk making the spec not fun for a lot of players, myself included.
Market to an audience that doesn’t exist or have any interest in your product while alienating your existing audience.
Sounds like the people Blizzard has hired over the past decade in a nutshell…
It’s maddening and it goes so much further than horrible class design decisions too
The main culprit of Prot’s APM issues (for the majority of players outside of cutting edge content) is the incentive to spam IP while already at the IP cap due to Indomitable/Anger Management. Fixing that, even with a hacky “Rage spent that causes IP to go over its maximum has less effect” for those talents (with some compensation) would be a good first step. Alternatively, an internal cooldown on IP itself (say 5 seconds) with a buff to its throughput to compensate would reduce button presses overall while still maintaining the hectic-but-fun SS playstyle.
The APM changes are in good faith, but clearly the devs did not consider the second-order effects (e.g. lower Avatar recharge) and overcomplicated things.
Don’t forget our group utility only effects melee. If you have a caster heavy group you are really bringing nothing of Value to the group. Make Rallying Cry Great Again. And consider giving Warrior Lust/Hero… whatever you want to call it. That or buff Battle Shout to do more than attack power only so the utility of the spell effects others than just melee classes.
Unpopular opinion, simply because WoW PvP is a second-class player base, but as a Prot War in PvP: losing all this “excess rage” for PvE reasons is going to make Prot vastly more squishy in PvP. Having high APM in PvP as Prot is fun, exciting, and engaging: I am absolutely loving playing Prot in PvP.
The upcoming changes are already nerfing the spec for PvP (Dragon Charge being available to all Warriors and it replacing Heroic Leap) in a mobility aspect, and I fear that with these Rage changes it will be awful in PvP (unless Ignore Pain is MASSIVELY buffed for PvP).
Just my two cents. I don’t raid or PvE, which of course is a priority for the spec’s design team. But as a lifelong PvPer… I am really worried about Prot for 11.1 and beyond.
Here’s a solution: rework ignore pain to work as an absorb shield that stacks based on damage done. This change would incentivize playing protection warrior rotation correctly while providing defensive benefit and reducing APM through reducing a button needing to be spammed when at high rage thresholds.
Rebalance rage gen/usage based on the change above. Can allow shield slam resets to work as they do currently and not the nerfed PTR version. Thematically it works by allowing warriors to ignore pain based on their combat/anger similar to how adrenaline can cause a person to not feel pain in the moment. You could then make ignore pain a passive baseline warrior ability that works for all 3 specs and creates a % shield that reduces X amount of damage based on damage done or abilities used in combat etc (you all can handle the balancing for those i’m sure).
Prot (and let’s face it, warrior in general) needs some form of useful/unique utility because other classes are valued much greater than warrior in raid/M+ unless warrior is either unkillable as prot (or you don’t need utility/buff/debuff from another tank) or it does substantially more damage than any other class at season start/end (and if it’s ever strong at season start it’s almost always nerfed to mediocrity by season mid/end)
Just to give my two cents on this:
That’s definitely a valid point, however given that there are multiple options of extra button mice (even the basic 2 side button mice) where players can reduce strain on one hand by splitting oGCDs to their mouse hand instead like they should be doing, isn’t exactly the reason to be shooting ol yella in the back yard for those who’ve used critical thinking skills to set-up their keybinds to a comfortable way.
I disagree with these highly. As respectfully the devs have no clue what the issue is here as it’s not the base tree shield slam talents, the problem is Mountain Thane’s Burst of power, thunder blast, lightning strike and unstoppable force reducing thunderclap’s cooldown by 50% during avatar which prot has at such a silly high uptime in thane as a result of these combinations it’s generally achieving 75-80APM as thane while Colossus prot ends up at an average of 65APM with the current gameplay on live.
Colossus Gameplay in keys at least does in fact focus on Revenge on GCD rage spending and doesn’t spam IP as much for a rage dump since it uses Brutal Vitality to fuel it’s IPs until it’s low enough that they have to IP again.
To put it in perspective the rage generation throughout a key for Prot between Thane and Colossus is roughly the same for Shield Slam casts but the massive difference is in thunderclap.
Throughout a key Mountain Thane will generate 4000 rage with Thunderclap/Thunderblast/Lightning Strikes for every 1000 rage a Colossus warrior would generate through their Thunderclap casts. This is largely due to Colossus favouring other nodes in the Class tree such as Immovable Object over Unstoppable force or being better to pick the other augments to the capstones they’ve taken out of Thunderous Roar / Champion’s Spear.
Thunderclap’s cooldown ends up at a bout a ~4.2s cooldown after haste. That’s 2.1s during Unstoppable force… You’re pressing thunderclap every 2.1s during avatar, which has a ~50% uptime for Thane. The GCD consumption of Thunderclap/Thunderblast rivals that of shield slam.
You’ve got next no option to dump rage though as Prot. Casting a 20 rage Revenge will do next to diddly squat in putting a dent in your rage bar when Ignore Pain dumps 35 rage per cast which also has a 1s cooldown on being able to recast it.
So once again when the main culprit is thunder clap where else is the Mountain Thane Warrior going to spend their rage? If every 2nd GCD for half the time is a Thunderclap? And then most other GCDs end up being filled out by Burst of Power procs causing excessive shield slam resets.
TLDR: Shield slam is not the problem, thunderclap and the excessive amounts of excess rage generation talents in mountain thane is. Remove rage from Thunder blasts. Remove the thunderclap CDR from unstoppable force, double the damage dealt modifiers to compensate on Thunderclap.
Reinstate removed baseline talents to their live state until you rework prot to not be such a slot machine fiesta of ability resets in the next patch.
Also put Crushing Force and Reinforced plates to 1 point talents for the love of god, we’ve got no flexibility at all in our talent builds next patch due to these two hogging so much of our t2 points and all out t3 points are locked in to damage modifiers. This is even more apparent with the rage cost being removed from Barbaric Training which causes yet another mandatory talent to be taken in t2.
ok well then why did they decide to do all these changes and a season at the same time clearly they should’ve focused on the raid/myths/tier sets. They decided to ruin 2 specs for warrior with changes no one asked for.
The Rage income changes affect other talents like Anger Management
Dumping rage to get your cooldowns back quickly is part of what makes prot warrior great.
This also puts more pressure on off-GCD abilities to serve as Rage dumps, as opposed to abilities like Revenge.
That’s because Revenge does such terrible damage relatively that ignore pain is way closer to competitive than it should be on damage because it’s an off the GCD way of getting Avatar back faster and you’re comparing something like a shield slam/tclap + ignore pain to revenge, and not just ignore pain.
I don’t understand why the total rage economy is the issue here. Just make revenge do a ton more damage (reign in tclap, shield slam as necessary to compensate) and cost a ton more rage. Barbaric Training is already the right idea, just nowhere near enough of a swing. As someone further up said:
Casting a 20 rage Revenge will do next to diddly squat in putting a dent in your rage bar
If casting revenge used significantly more rage it would obviously leave less to spam on ignore pain and represent an actual decision between whether ignore pain is efficient or revenge is. As it stands, I would randomly land in top 50 overall damage done rankings in some +12 dungeons a couple months ago before I quit with only like a dozen revenge casts because the ability sucks.
Or hell, if you don’t want that large a change to the feel of the spec, just make both rage spenders cost more. At the very least, don’t make anger management worse.
Look, Revenge as it is is going to be pretty nasty next patch for Colossus even moreso than it is now, the issue is talent pathing for Thane opts to not pickup Revenge damage increases due to Thunderclap being overly central in it’s rotation.
Revenge’s base AP modifier is 65.2, however just look at all these buffs to it that are accessible now.
Best Served Cold (10% or 20% on Free Revenges).
Show of Force (10% flat Revenge Damage)
Seismic Reverb (30% echo damage 3+ targets)
Newly adjusted Barbaric Training (25% extra revenge damage)
This puts Revenge at a 98.615% AP without Free Revenge proc or 107.58% AP while procced, which does a further 30% damage echo so 128.1995% AP and 139.854% AP.
Then we start adding in Hero tree modifiers.
Colossus Specific
Practiced Strikes (20% damage all the time)
One Against Many (5-25% damage mod based on 1-5+ targets hit)
Mountain of Muscles and Scars (5% flat damage to all attacks inclusive so we’ll count it too)
Tide of Battle (+10%-100% Damage mod per Colossal Might stacks 10% per).
This boosts us to 310.63725% AP regular revenges in a pack of 5+ targets and 340.1725% AP for Free Revenges.
Then we’ve got the 30% damage echoes which make these 403.828425%AP and 442.22425%AP respectively.
Revenge at a 20 rage cost is also practically spammable to no recourse when playing Colossus correctly in keys and fuels Brutal Vitality exceptionally well and does AoE damage better than some dps specs on live as it is but this build also hasn’t had much exposure on live because of the Mountain Thane Meta which brainlessly spams IP while Colossus uses it more tactfully in it’s upkeep which it focuses on adding to it through sheer damage.
If you’re curious about live numbers just remove the 25% damage mod from Barb Training and that’s what you’re dealing with atm.
And that’s the real issue nerfing Prot due to Mountain Thane and not taking into account what that nerf is doing to the other hero spec of Colossus is why Blizzard is failing to listen to the feedback of the warriors playing the spec. Heck I have 2 Colossus Prot warriors this one who is focused on haste and a Dracthyr warrior who’s focused on Crit. Yes I realize I should have done it the other way around due to the Worgen bonus for crit but I just decided on a whim to make a second warrior. I’m just hoping Blizzard listens to the feedback and takes a look at the fact they are harming one hero spec by such a broad general rage nerf and seemingly not taking the other hero spec into account at all.
Thanks for the response, Kaivax. You can hear that a lot of people are pretty upset about the changes. And I appreciate your willingness at least to acknowledge that.
It sounds like the development team has settled on the decision to remove APM from Prot Warrior. I hear that. I don’t like it and still wish you’d reconsider or, at the very least, consider options as others mention here which could give options for both parties.
I again would like to point out that other specs in the game have equivalent or higher APM. If this lower threshold is a new part of how you want to design specs, I’d hope to see this eventually applied evenly.
I’m confused why the solution to fixing mandatory high APM playstyle isnt just creating choice nodes with active/high APM option vs passive/low APM option with the low APM option being like 0.2-5% behind in effectiveness.
It’s been a staple solution for other classes for quite a while now.
Thank you for the honesty and insight into the development’s thought process. I am disappointed. I am not disappointed that this response didn’t meet my expectations, I am disappointed because it did meet my expectations.
I am going to continue gearing up my VDH before the season is over and probably main that in Season 2 now. I accepted when playing Prot Warrior that we were going to have a laughably low amount of utility and the second worst damage out of all tanks in M+. The thing that kept me playing was the fast-paced, high APM fun the class provided. When you take away the fun, it is just bad now.
Next season is expected to start in 4-6 weeks and I just don’t have faith that everything is going to be tested and balanced accordingly. I am glad you are aware of Anger Management, but it concerns me that I don’t hear Indomitable in there as well. Warriors are dead last in HPS out of tanks, and with the tank changes, having even more reliance on healers is going to be infuriating in any content that is slightly difficult.
There is so much more like how pathetic Storm Shield’s tuning is, but there is no point of getting upset anymore. We are going to be bogged down in the weeds of balancing out the rage gameplay that there is zero expectation that any pass at giving Warrior competitive utility will be in the near future.
Interesting take - having a combat rez as a tank can be a burden, Grip is laughable asn 80% of mobs are immune and mass grip resets swing timers and you can get 1 shot, pallies and VDH only have mass silence not all tanks.
But look at what you do have that others dont…
30sec 16yd AoE Stun,
Spear (leash and crit bonus),
Block - only warr and pallies have this,
Add shield block on top of natural block
remove root and snare,
intervene to help allies,
leap,
demo shout,
AoE Taunt (not all tanks have this)
Charge
You have more than you realise, go play some of the other tanks and see what is truly lacking and you will realise that Warriors arent actually as down bad as you make them out to be.