If APM was the issue they would be nerfing other classes as well as there are classes that have a higher APM than Prot warrior. This is just Blizzard excuse for not understanding warrior and failing to notice that Mountain Thane and Colossus play completely differently and when you do a general blanket nerf to rage to try and tone down Mounatin Thane you inadvertantly end up killing Colossus. But Blizzard hates to admit they made a misteak as we all know.
4 Likes
I like this feedback!
For me the prot warrior gameplay was always TOO fast paced and annoying.
I understand thou that some people like this playstyle.
Why not bringing/changing 1-2 talents and provide 1 faster and 1 slower playstyle?
Sure: harder to balance, but make both parties happy.
1 Like
Curious, what content do you play? What diff of raid, and range of M+ ?
Raids up to hero, Delves till 11, Zekvir lvl 2.
Don t like M+. Just doing other dungeons for friends/people who want them.
Thanks for response.
1 Like
Smaragdt
Raids up to hero, Delves till 11, Zekvir lvl 2.
Don t like M+. Just doing other dungeons for friends/people who want them.
If this is not a troll then Blizzard people take these words into your heads.
Nobody is forcing people to play high APM, nobody is telling them this is the only way to clear Delves and Heroics. They can play their own slow game while still clearing the content. I cannot speed up the game with 11.1 changes, but I can slow down the game with the current play style. For the majority of the people who are playing this game on a higher level (mythic/mythic+) love the current speed of gameplay. Keep it, and let them slow it down by just not pressing the buttons that fast, as they DO NOT need it.
1 Like
High APM requirement for prot warrior isn’t a bad thing - in fact, high haste requirements and GCD are our true enemies.
About dumping most of our rage into Ignore Pain: its the obvious thing to do or you’re useless in M+ !!!
1 - to make IP work, we need to cast it two to three times (thats about 70 - 105 rage points investment) to guarantee it will cover 30% of our max health (and trust me, this barrier goes down in a matter of seconds on +12 keys, so we need to cast Shield Wall/Block + Ignore Pain to make it worth)
2 - Ignore Pain lasts about 12 seconds, so not only we have to cast it several times to make it fully work, we have to recast it every 12 seconds to not lose all our resource investment. If you are wondering why we don’t risk casting Revenge, its because we don’t really have a choice.
I find this gameplay clunky but ultimately satisfying once we get 35-40% haste. If you really find this an issue, REWORK IGNORE PAIN, maybe make it so you only need to cast it one time to get the full benefit of it or increase its duration to 20-30 seconds.
Also, don’t forget that lowering rage generation affects directly into Anger Management gameplay, which translates into casting Avatar less often, translating into less DPS (we are already the spec doing the lowest DPS in M+, even my badly geared BDK is doing more damage, which is unbelievable)
5 Likes
Outside of high APM discussions, the biggest problem with these changes is that indirectly nerfs any rage-consuption feedback loop as stated by Dazluuzak.
Anger Management and Violent Outburst most notably as well as any CDR related talent that affect any other abilities.
By nerfing rage intake, a warrior will NOT be able to consume rage as fast as before, delaying CDR on cooldowns which nerfs both offensive (via Avatar CDR and Violent Outburst) and defensive output (via Shield Wall CDR). I understand some buffs have been added to even it out but I don’t think its a good change at all. You have a very live example of what will happen in the form of Colossus, just compare metrics about who plays it, how it functions defensivewise, how many buffs you’ve had to give it just to still fall short of Thane, etc.
3 Likes
I can understand the desire to slow down the number of button presses for Prot Warrior, but the changes they have made are doing this in a frustrating method that is not going to make the spec fun to play.
Less rage and resets means you get more globals free and less presses of Ignore Pain, however that means that each press of Ignore Pain is more impactful, meaning that any non free press of Revenge is LESS likely to ever be pressed.
There is a very easy way to fix this issue, slow down the use of off-GCD abilities and make the playstyle feel better. Give Ignore Pain a cooldown. Make it more powerful (way more than the 30% bump it got), give it a 10-15s CD, have it cost 30-40 rage so you have to pool for it, but can burn any excess rage off with Revenge without feeling the need to spend every extra bit of rage on IP.
If this reduces the overall damage mitigation, Defensive Stance is such an easy tuning knob that affects both physical and magical damage (which Ignore Pain equally affects). Make Ignore Pain a sizable shield on a 15sec CD that lasts for 15sec, and then bump up Defensive Stance to 20% (or whatever value would even out the mitigation).
Now Warriors can use Revenge, have Ignore Pain not compete as much with it, and have their mitigation be less tied to spamming Ignore Pain off the global GCD so many times.
Then bring Anger Management up to 2s instead of 1s CDR per 10 rage.
There you go. Spec slowed down, can use Revenge, Ignore Pain impactful and overall mitigation balanced, and cooldowns not nerfed for no reason.
Wasn’t that easy?
3 Likes
Sorry posted on my Rogue (Nimchy) for some reason but I wanted to make this clearer since there’s a whole lot of discussion about the defensive power of Ignore Pain which is missing the point:
Ignore Pain as it stands is used to cycle rage as a priority. We make this very clear on Skyhold (warrior discord) which has warrior one-trick-ponies such as me and our mods and guide writers for Wowhead and Icyveins. Ignore Pain is not something we recommend that others “worry about maintaining” outside of very niche cases: the biggest priority is to use it to consume rage and keep the rage feedback loop going in the most efficient manner possible. Period and full-stop. Rage consumption drives both our defensiveness and offensive output higher due to Anger Management CDR (cooldown reduction) on Avatar and Shield Wall and provides burst via Violent Outburst. These are far more important than any absorb that Ignore Pain provides. Our active mitigation is Shield Block, not Ignore Pain. Ignore Pain is effectively a rage dump that is used only when we’re about to cap rage.
You cannot compare Ignore Pain versus Revenge because the idea is to cycle rage as fast as efficient and fast as possible. An off-GCD ability like Ignore Pain completely obliterates any GCD ability (read: Revenge) that could take the position of one that grants rage (read: Shield Slam and Thunderclap). Again: what’s the fastest way to cycle rage? Is it by using a GCD ability or by using something that we can weave in between GCDs? The answer is the latter: weaving an off-gcd in between Rage generators like Shield Slam and Thunderclap! Of course there are exceptions, see Colossus.
So the problem with comparing these and “slowing down the spec” really snowballs down to affect heavily on very important key points of a tanking class and of any class in general, which again are Defensiveness and Offensive output. These shouldn’t be muddled with comparisons between abilities that are not even in the same plane except for the fact that they consume rage in VERY different ways as explained above.
Are there any plans to address this? I saw one guy commented on increasing the CDR per rage point spent on Anger Management, which sounds like a step into the right direction as long as it also involves Violent Outburst. This provides a solution for one of the two biggest problems that we Prot Warriors have with these changes: that by slowing down Rage generation, and effectively slowing down the speed at which we consume said rage, you would need to increase the CDR per rage of talents that work with the rage feedback loop in some way so that it does not have a snowballing negative impact. This also applies to how fast we can generate Seeing Red stacks for Violent Outburst as well. The other problem being that, well, high APM feels good to play.
That being said I am not happy about these changes, they sound like something that is being analyzed superficially without any real thought on the underlying consequences and some of the feedback posted here does as well.
15 Likes
Obviously the solution is tunnel every tank into paladin, so they have an easier time playing 
Even better, since now you only need to balance one tank
1 Like
“ Ignore Pain is not something we recommend that others “worry about maintaining” outside of very niche cases”
Could you elaborate more on the niche cases? I understand the roles of shield block, shield wall and even shield reflect, but I am convinced that Ignore Pain is equally as important for damage mitigation.
Thats because it is important. I would like to know the answer to the “niche” question myself.
What he means is we don’t really concern ourselves with how much we have most of the time, we just press it to cycle rage and you really only want to make sure you have a full shield for large tank hits.
6 Likes
This ^, just use an ignore pain tracker weak aura and if the bar is good after a press, there’s no need to keep mashing it unless you’re about to cap on rage. If you’re rolling with a block and just have melee inc damage, look at your health, look at the health of the mobs. If you have a caster you will probably use ip a little more but its not something you need to macro with shield block and maintain 100% of the time. Dump your rage into other dps spenders like Execute, Revenge.
1 Like
Not quite. You will keep using it to cycle rage, regardless of if it’s up or not.
That being said, an Ignore Pain tracker is very good to have for Colossus gameplay. In that specific case then I agree with you. It just isn’t for Thane and Guarok was spot on in that case.
Let me reiterate what I mentioned above:
Ignore Pain is not something we recommend that others “worry about maintaining” outside of very niche cases: the biggest priority is to use it to consume rage and keep the rage feedback loop going in the most efficient manner possible. Period and full-stop.
In the case for Colossus, the fact is that it suffers greatly defensivewise due to not having as many Shield Wall CDR as Thane and of course less IP absorbs. Offensive-wise its not affected since Colossal Might stacks makes up for it, at the cost of less Avatars per time intervals as well as less Violent Outbursts.
All in all what I wanted to get at is that the idea of “slowing down gameplay” has huge ripple effects for a lot of our toolkit, and these things should be considered perhaps just as equally as their main effects. If we want to continue discussing Ignore Pain usage, I’d be happy to but hopefully we don’t lose sight of the changes that are being discussed since it can be considered a bit tangential.
2 Likes
Basically any situation where our toolkit isn’t enough to cover us. At the moment there’s just very few of them and for the most part they fall into any Tank Buster where Shield Wall or Spell Block aren’t available or in the case of Spell Block, not spell-blockable.
For example: Kyvezza’s tank buster hits ridiculously hard and leaves a DoT, specifically on Mythic difficulties but can apply to lower ones depending on gear. If you’re a prot warrior on that fight the recommendation is to not take the boss at the start and that ensures you take Tank Buster #2 and leave 1 and 3 to other tank classes. This ensures that you use Shield Wall for the buster paired with Spell Reflect for the magic damage reduction since its both Magical and Physical and not blockable. The DoT is countered by Spell Block. If you’re forced into tank busters 1 and 3, you will need to rely on Wall for one + Spell Block for the DoT, and then pray for tank buster #3, which means that you should have a fully loaded IP going into it - hopefully with some Punish stacks and an external.
This is a very specific example of course, but it goes into what I explained in the first part. In other words “when our cooldowns aren’t up or aren’t effective against”.
3 Likes
Once again their stance is “you think you want it, but you don’t” in terms of high APM. Telling the community and playerbase that even though no one on their staff mains a prot warrior (and if there is they should really be moved somewhere else) THIS is how prot warrior should be played.
The amount of GCD rot and rage starvation is going to be rough, not to mention this will forever kill Colossus Prot.
3 Likes
I think they should just make IP a passive that converts excess rage into a shield at the same ratio. So basically IP without the button spam. You can let the rage overflow into IP shield, spend it on SB, execute, whatever…
Less APM, easier for a beginners, otherwise plays near identical for ‘experts’.
Protection
Barbaric Training no longer increases the Rage cost of Revenge.
Execute damage increased by 10%.
Frothing Berserker now has a chance to refund 50% of the Rage spent on Revenge (was 25%).
Fixed an issue that was causing Bloodsurge to trigger less frequently than intended.
Liberation of Undermine set bonus – Luck of the Draw! duration increased to 12 seconds (was 10 seconds).
Liberation of Undermine set bonus – Shield Charge cooldown reduction increased to 12 seconds (was 6 seconds).
Liberation of Undermine set bonus – Fixed an issue causing Luck of the Draw! to incorrectly modify Shield Slam’s critical strike chance.
1 Like