I get that train of thought entirely, but the fact is there is a hilarious point where a Mountain Thane Prot warrior will use ignore pain over the course of a fight more or equal to shield slam leaving it to entirely be possible to just macro ignore pain to shield slam and the spec will play itself defensively.
Anger Management is so powerful in it’s CDR for prot because of the excessive rage generation it’s been built upon and received via the copious amounts of talents that increase rage gen for Thane.
Prot warrior definitely needs a rework that removes shield slam resets entirely (ability resets are silly and don’t allow you to provide any actual weight towards them if they’re the main attack you spam) and they also need to adjust what abilities generate what amount of rage and increase the value of stuff like ignore pain’s shield per cast and then hard cap them with charges (Random rework idea - say 3x charge cap, 6s recharge per charge, 30s duration, one press uses up all current charges, but brutal vitality adds to it and refreshes the duration, rage consumption then moves to attacks as opposed to defensive abilities) while having a short enough cooldown that they’re usable often but also cannot be spammed to feed into degenerate methods of play.
Thunderclap’s cooldown is too short due to protection’s high uptime on Avatar and subsequently Unstoppable Force. Which eats up so much of Thane’s on GCD play. That’s also the main reason why you wouldn’t be pathing through any of the Revenge increase talents as thane as you already have so many GCDs pre filled with both Shield Slam and Thunderclap.
Virtually everyone agrees that there’s an enormous shortage of tanks in this expansion and the solution is to make tanking more tedious and less fun? Where exactly are all these people who have allegedly been demanding for Protection’s rotation to be neutered like this? Poppycock.
You are just describing the inexperience you have. There is a priority and you don’t have to slam all your buttons. There are maybe 4 or 5 outside of a big cooldown. APM feels fine the way it is right now. Fury APM is way higher.
This type of change should have part of a rework, making massive changes because someone doesn’t want to play a high amp class? So, you gut a spec and make it play awful so someone might pick up and play it. When people see that an unlucky string of no SS resets leads you do die when you run out of mitigation. When the spec was bad before it was at least fun to play. Now it’s no longer fun to play + no utility + horrible tuning, but those hypothetical new players will be sure to pick the underperforming tank that plays slower, right?
Testing out both warrior hero specs on PTR today and Colossus felt incredibly slow. I really like that spec as a concept, but it feels like it got sideswiped by the changes done to the rage flow of Mountain Thane. Colossus never had “too much rage” and often felt a bit starved. Now it is dry and there is a ton of sitting on your hands, waiting for rage.
Thats what Ive been reporting the whole time Colossus is dead if these changes go live. They need to undo the rage nerfs and look at Mountain Thanes rage generation rather than a blanket nerf of rage.
I appreciate the possibility of slowdown. it feel like the best way play prot right now is not with key presses but by almost playing chords on the piano i feel if I am not slamming 3-4 keys at the same time then I might die. I do understand that this may not be the most popular change i do wish we had the option for both.
Perhaps more passive defense and less rage generation for Colossus and more rage and APM for Mountain Thane.
Please don’t take my question in a rude way or anything, not an attack, just trying to understand the first person saying it is too fast.
In which content that you do on your warrior the speed is too fast? You are not raiding and barely doing M+. Sadly at that level, you don’t need to spam and mash buttons or even try that hard. So where does this come from?
Nerf to shield slam reset chance has too many side effects, even with current ptr buffs to prot numbers,
Less slams = less rage = less avatar cooldown reduction =less damage AND survivability
Also for thanes less slams = less thunder blast proc
It feels satisfying when warr press thunder clap button while TB proced, and now you about to turn it into a pile crap.
Not trying to be rude, but you haven’t touched mythic+ and it looks like you only got to 6/8 in lfr? Maybe you just don’t quite understand how the class plays or maybe you are speaking from inexperience.
I have no doubt that you have a genuine grievance here but I would like to invite you to think about something. Whenever I hear someone complain about how fast a spec is ( not just protection warrior but any spec that they feel is fast) I always ask them how they have their keyboards setup and without failure, 100% of them have a poorly setup keybind layout that causes them to have to move their hand in a way that is uncomfortable. Instead of complaining about something being too fast and uncomfortable maybe you should look at how you have your binds setup.
Honestly, the only nice thing I have to say is that at least we finally see a blue post.
I don’t think you’re going in the right direction on many class tuning/balance. I think you’re trying to make people get on a treadmill of regearing or leveling more characters to keep engagement up. Not everyone wants to have 10 characters to fit whatever you deem to be spotlight classes.
Make all classes and specs viable and very accepting for the PUG and Team experience. That means from LFR to Mythic and 0 to 20 in keys.
… No. Less Rage generation for Colossus is what currently is going to kill it in 11.1 You got that backwards. Mountain Thane abilitys generate rage, while Colossus is rage starved due to heavy use of Revenge.
Assuming we won’t hear anything till next Thursday or so (in terms of patch notes)? Highly doubt they will be the one bending the knee as they did with Hunters and MM pet. Looking at the post we will see some changes to AM (and probably making it even worse, lol) and maybe a little more tunning of Revenge (or Revanche, lol).
Blizzard, developers and the team working on the awesome looking new patch,
Please DO NOT NERF anything, revert everything. We need ground breaking rework on our spec tree as we are the only class that didn’t get any since start of DF. You are trying to do hit and miss and see what sells right, wrong! Listen to your player base which says - NO to your changes. We told you what the class need and where we could slightly tune down the rage (Thane).
I mean, they really aren’t. They nerfed VDH tier so that VDH will not exist really next patch. They minorly nerfed prot pally, but then gave them are rediculously strong tier set that allows them to extend their tier set buff by double, making up for the damage they lost and more, generate a ton of holy power that will make up for the cooldown reduction they lost and given the scaling of secondaries, my pally on PTR was unhittable without the need for the full power of their parry on AS talent.
Bears damage is gutter trash and they refuse to update our tree to make us compete with other tanks, Brews and Blood will still be next to useless for M+ content.
It is looking like Prot Pally all the way next patch by a freaking mile. It is nice to know that they might still be looking to do some more balancing before the patch, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high.
So the answer is from them is “we don’t like the high APM”, but that’s what makes prot warrior…prot warrior. So in a few paragraphs they just proved they have no clue how or who plays this class/spec.
Glad to know these clowns really don’t play prot warrior at all.
If they didnt like high APM there would be more nerfs. Once again Blizzard failed to take every aspect into account when they did a knee jerk reaction nerf and this one is really hated by everyone playing Warrior. Its now up to Blizzard to descide if they are going to listen to our feedback or just go ahead and kill warrior tanking for a season. They did not even consider what a blanket nerf to rage would do to both hero specs cause lets be honest they dont play warrior. Anyone who has tested this change on the PTB hates it and has given nothing but feedback on it as such.
!!! Kaivax thank you for responding to the thread and I hope you and the team are doing well!
I and many others are still going to standby Devastate and Strategist being brought back to 30%. This is still a non-negotiable. Because Prot Warrior is essentially a two button class for it’s core rotation, we need that higher reset chance. As someone else said in the thread, Shield Slam → Thunder Clap → No reset → No reset → No reset → Thunder Clap → No reset is absolutely awful (and it happens more often than you’d think). If not then we need to make SS and TC have charges similar to Judgement and Blessed Hammer to allow for smoother resource generation and better rotational decision making.
As someone who changed their key binds due to prot’s rotation I do understand the APM challenge you are trying to tackle. I agree with other people in the thread that Thane vs Colossus should be our choice between higher and lower APMs and I would love to see that continue to be the case. The extra rage gen on SS in Colossus is great but still isn’t going to compare to the extra rage from thunder strikes, thunder blasts and the three free SS’s we get from Thane. Colossus still ends up massively out performed in survivability.
I get SS being a higher priority than “Revenge!” and “Sudden Death” procs being weird but if that’s the case then why did we change Execute to no longer give stacks of Colossal Might? That just makes it even less valuable. Also I don’t think taking Sudden Death into consideration for balance/rotation is valid. Maybe I’m totally wrong but I don’t think that is taken much in raid and it is a dead talent in M+ so we shouldn’t be thinking about it at all.
I think in order for you to achieve the goal you want Ignore Pain needs to be reworked. Making it a passive and like I said in an earlier post and someone else mentioned, we generate a shield based off the damage we do. Then we have to balance rage between Shield Block and Revenge for more damage/resets = more damage and when we are in execute we actually use Execute. This also makes Sudden Death a useful talent in M+ and it would narrow the chasm between Colossus and Mountain Thane. It’s possible we would need some other skill to “choose” to dump rage into as - ultimately we are going to press Shield Block relatively off CD and there isn’t much choice in how we would spend our rage outside of saving enough for Shield Block uptime - but it’s a start.
This could also allow for a talent node to allow for a faster or slower APM that’s already in our talent tree. Barbaric Training is never taken over Sidearm but if Ignore Pain generated a shield based of dmg done then this talent could allow for players who want more APM to take Sidearm and players who want a slower playstyle to take Barbaric.
I think this change to Ignore Pain would be a massive W for prot but would require a LOT of testing. I think right now Prot should remain largely unchanged/buffed from it’s current state on live and this rework is saved for season 3 or later on when the team has more time to flush it out and then a full PTR cycle for feedback.
Regardless ty for posting! It is genuinely great to know the team has seen this at the very least. I know there is a lot of bureaucracy but I would love for you to feedback to whomever that the post you made in this form should’ve been in the original changes. We want and deserve this level of transparency and the amount of context it provides is so helpful. These changes went from being entirely unprovoked and senseless to having a solid reason behind them and being planned. It also allows for more curated feedback to help you all get the changes right!
