Atleast you get attention and have 2 hero specs that somewhat function.
DK has a ok tank spec albeit lacking and a casino spec that has the biggest degenerate playstyle going around. Dks would love some attention but all we get is silence, be glad atleast you are getting communication and changes.
Really holding out hope this will shake out alright for prot warrior in the end, I have thoroughly enjoyed playing my warrior for years, through the good times and the bad. However, this is the first time I am very seriously considering retiring him for a more viable tank class.
Everything I have seen from the patch notes and PTR builds looks like prot is going to feel incredibly clunky and boring to play in 11.1, the high APM was a large part of what drew me to play prot warrior in the first place, it felt fast-paced, engaging, and challenging.
I sincerely hope the devs working on the class tuning have a solid understanding of prot warrior and can figure out some way to do honor to the class, so far on paper it’s not looking good.
While I fundamentally agree with the idea of slowing down the spec some, I vehemently disagree with the current route that’s been taken. This type of change should be accompanied by a pretty drastic rework of our talent tree, something that has been extremely stagnant since the DF alpha/beta.
Its the tale old as time, PVP get screwed by changes made in PVE, the problem is M+ completely shatter that fine line raid-oriented balance had.
And to put salt into the wound, the pvp team just dont seem like they know how to take the class either, out of nowhere nerfs in our pvp talents, even ones that werent used that much, like, wtf, why?
So what now, kill thane to colossus become the go-to spec? 
We feel that reducing Shield Slam’s prominence in the rotation will allow for Revenge and other abilities to fill the rotation and serve to consume excess Rage.
I somehow completely ignored that for some reason… Ok let me irritate for you how this works.
The spam of IP makes us tanky and is the only thing we would be dumping the rage the higher you go. I only use Rev to sometimes reset my SS and that is it. It does not bring any value to Thane, while in Colossus I would spam Rev much more, but would have much less IP. That is the gameplay we like, one with spammy IP to be defensive and get CD faster/heal much, other with spammy Rev and hard hitting abilities.
Stop being so focused on fixing this spec for god knows who, if they said that Thane APM is too fast, let them play Paladin. I bet they will not notice its APM is higher, lol. Yet, as always UNTOUCHED, only ‘warrior’ is the problem. It is always the same…
I feel like this post from Kaivax needs to be broken down
Protection Warrior currently requires a very high APM to play, and we feel that the APM requirement is too high.
We don’t think so, as you can see from the thread.
High APM, especially from frequently pressed off-GCD abilities like Shield Block and Ignore Pain, can be uncomfortable or even painful for some players.
Gaming shouldn’t be painful, but are you really going to gut the entire feedback loop of the spec because some players (a minority as you yourself implied) can’t play the spec? that can’t be the reason… there are other tank specs with significantly lower APM, no one is forcing people to play something that causes them pain (even if the changes make us feel like we’re being forced out of the spec).
One of the culprits in driving up APM is high burst rage generation, which feeds into dumping excess rage into Ignore Pain.
Yes, and this is the part we like about the spec.
That’s what’s driven a lot of the changes we’ve made, cutting down on burst rage generation and putting more of it into steady sources, so you should always have enough rage for mitigation and your rotation without frequently dumping excess into off-GCD abilities.
So the fun part of the spec is what is driving you to change it? one can only conclude that you are against fun (there is probably a way to say this with more finniness, but this is how we sincerely feel).
The previous 30% reset rate makes Shield Slam more prominent in the rotation than we’re happy with, and leads to other procs stacking up and rage accumulating while the Warrior tries to keep up with Shield Slam resets. This also puts more pressure on off-GCD abilities to serve as Rage dumps, as opposed to abilities like Revenge. We feel that reducing the prominence of Shield Slam in the rotation will allow Revenge and other abilities to fill out the rotation and serve as excess Rage dumps.
then take Revange off the GCD (even if nerfd) it will be a lot of fun.
We’re monitoring Protection’s performance
Performance is important, yes, but performance is not the point, the point is that playing through the eyes of a Prot warrior with the current PTR interation is boring and tasteless, just like eating Sheldon Cooper’s favourite oatmeal, *plain.
At the end of the day, we really don’t understand the rationale here, we all signed up for a high APM tank spec, that was our choice.
These 11.1 pwar changes are really starting to read like blizz class dev who’s only ever played BrM tries pwar and thinks things are too fast.
No one wants these changes. No one asked for these changes. You’re completely invalidating an entire hero talent tree with these changes. Do better.
Agreed. Taking Revenge off the GCD would do a lot of good in the playstyle of pwar. Though, AFAIK they’ve went to great lengths to removing off-GCD damaging abilities from WoW so this is unlikely to be a viable solution from their eyes.
And this is the long and short of it. I have loved the pace of warrior tanking for a few expansions now. Changing it like this is actually just going to have me playing a different class instead.
This right here is the biggest problem because you are only looking at the Mountain Thane hero spec. You are completely ignoring the fact Colossus plays differently and is killed hard by the rage nerfs as you use Revenge commonly due to Tide of Battle. This is the biggest issue of the rage nerfs. Rather than looking at Mountain Thane you did a knee jerk nerf to all rage and didn’t take the other hero spec into account. Ive been playing Colossus since day 1 on both Arms and Prot as I love the way it changes things around for the warrior. The APM is slower for Colossus and you were already on the brink of being rage starved as you were dumping far more into Revenge rather than IP. This right here is what needs to be taken into consideration. Do not kill 1 hero spec for the fact the other is more popular. Stop and look at how both specs speed up or slow down the Prot warrior then make the changes accordingly. Blanket nerfing hurts Colossus too much.
Don’t forget your also already nerfing Colossal Might by removing stacks from our Execute phase which not only hurts our DPS but also slows down our spec as well. That on top of the prot rage nerf double slows down the Colossus warrior. The question is why? Did you not take both specs into account when you made these nerfs? Who asked for these nerfs? Warriors have almost 100% agreed that the changes on the PTB feel bad and make the class unfun to play is that your goal?
Look, i had to read this post twice in order to understand what the motivation for the changes are. I still dont understand what the problem is. There is nothing wrong with procs going to waste if Shield Slam is the priority ability of choice. Sounds more to me that Revenge is a problem. Im sorry i think you are just trying to justify a change saying there is a problem and there isnt actually a problem to solve.
At this point, i would say just leave the Prot Warrior alone and focus efforts on underperforming tank specs. Prot Warriors are fine.
Lol…oh wait, you were being serious?
having a combat rez as a tank can be a burden
There is zero burden in having a combat rez. It is literally one click with cells. What is a burden is doing a +13 and the ret paly with the only brez in the group dies and we have to fight a boss for 4.5 minutes. Meanwhile, on my Prot Paly I get them up with said one click.
Grip is laughable asn 80% of mobs are immune
In what content are 80% of mobs immune to grip? The complaints here are m+ related, and 80% of mobs are most definitely not immune to grips.
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
Which tank(s) are you saying has less utility than prot warrior?
Why are you even here? This is a thread on Prot Warrior PTR feedback.
I agree with you. There isnt any problems right now except for the fact that as stacks of Colossal Might increase so should the Rage Generation.
Now you know how we’ve felt the last 6-8 months over in Arcane Mage land. They made a bunch of tone deaf changes to our spec too.
Is nice to see blizzard trying to do some changes but actually It does feel good for a lor of us to play a high APM class, now, for the people that do not like it either you can choose another class or you guys can try to rework some talents or even colossus and make it way less APM demanding, and leave Mountain as a high apm hero talent, why change it all? Another problem I see with the changes you are doing to not wanting us to spam Ig P is that for the montain thanes out there which are the vast majority, we need to spam it to get avatar faster with anger managment, and lastly the utility, ether you take some from a broken class like prot paladin or you give us some, we are warriors we should have like a cry or shout giving our party members less dmg taken for xx sec, and maybe something else to have lore control, the meta status is getting out of control, when you put on Live patches a broken class like prot paly things get out of control
This is such a stupid take. You clearly do not play a prot warrior. They have one of the easier less spammy rotations. You want to fix a ‘spammy’ class, fix mistweaver, that rotation is a mess.
‘we’re working to keep all aspects of Protection competitive following these changes’
No you’re not. They’re already 2nd class to prot pallys (even after the nerfs), BDKs (which are still nearly invincible if they aren’t 1 shot), and even bears. You’re just gutting the spec.
No way you’re serious listing these “pros” for prot warrior lmao.
Tell me you don’t understand the game at a high level without telling me you don’t understand the game at a high level.
Bear and prot paladin absolutely need the same treatment.
Look my friend I have an 80 Blood DK I tank on too. While they are not the unkillable tank they once were they are still a viable tank and if you sacrifice your dmg hero spec you can stay in the fight long after others have fallen with sanlayn. The issue here is they are doing a up to 50% rage generated nerf in some places which not only slows warrior down but kills one of the two tanking hero specs. A blanket nerf of rage was never going to work with two different hero specs playing in two different ways. Imagine they nerfed death runes by 50%.
I’m not trying to insult you here but have you played warrior? If so what hero spec have you played? Warrior tanks while lacking a ton of self sustain feel good right now but if these changes go live it’s going to kill the fun of the class. This is why we are fighting hard to be heard by Blizzard and while we got a blue post it was “we read what you say and promptly ignored it cause we aren’t looking at both specs to see the impact it would have on the game.”
Do you realize that Kaivax isn’t a developer? He’s a Forum Community Manager. Show some respect and don’t shoot the messenger.
Well thank you for confirming this. I’ll go ahead an cancel my subscription.
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.
And that’s great for colossus, but of those modifiers, Thane (which is the only hero talent spec that Blizzard is apparently even thinking about while making these changes) isn’t really taking show of force or best served cold, seismic reverb also affects tclap through crashing thunder, and is even pretty commonly taking sidearm over barbaric training. Of course, also Thane doesn’t have the Colossus specific modifiers.
The end result is that Revenge is sitting at the base 65.2% AP, plus the 30% for reverb.
Thunderclap sits at ~89% permanently baseline as Thane due to crashing thunder’s damage buff + adding tclap to reverb, and all of your damage just scales insanely well as you dump as much rage as possible to sit in avatar as much as possible, achieve high uptime on booming voice, and get violent outburst thunderclaps.
This leads to exactly the situation I mentioned, where – because you only take literally one of the modifiers you mention for revenge, it is barely out competing or even not competitive with the strategy of “just dump rage as fast as possible with ignore pain to maximize avatar through anger management + booming voice + violent outburst.” Worse, spamming ignore pain becomes less inefficient scaling with key level from a survivability perspective as individual melees start to make each press grant closer to full value.
All of this leads to the situation they’re talking about where prot warrior is very high APM because it has an off GCD rage spender that is very very commonly correct to be pressing while doing the rest of your rotation, rather than pressing the on GCD one.
Now, that’s not to say I even agree this is a problem. I actually quite like the high APM playstyle of Thane prot warrior, and think warrior is best when it’s generating and spending a lot of rage because all of the CDR talents that synergize with spending rage feel great.
What I am saying is, if they are dead set on decreasing APM, I’d rather they do it by increasing the cost of rage spenders rather than decreasing rage generation, because decreasing rage generation explicitly makes the “spending rage does X” talents worse and those are fun. Increasing the cost of rage spenders does not nerf those talents in the same way, because you’re still spending the same amount of rage just in fewer button presses.