Prot Warrior Feedback

Classes Warrior
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Curious to hear some other prot warriors thoughts on here. While I am not new to WoW (been playing since vanilla) I only recently started to play prot warrior seriously this expansion. I really want to love this spec, I truly feel like a big chunky warrior when I play it, but for some reason I’ve never been able to truly enjoy this spec because it has always felt like there is such a skill overload, and with a lot of classes getting trimmed this expansion, I’m left wondering why prot warrior still feels this way to me? I know the class has historically always had a lot of utility, so maybe its just not the class for me.

I’m a little old school with bindings. I like having all my abilities mapped to keys where I dont have to move my hands all over my keyboard or mouse. I use action bar paging to keep most of my abilities categorized between pages and between nums 1-5 and I have some Shift+Key mappings so I dont need to move my hand off WASD. For some reason, with almost every other class, I can have all my skills very nicely mapped this way, but I’ve never been able to find a good feel with warrior. Too many skills that do similar things but take up space on the hotbar (i.e. charge and shield charge, storm bolt and wrecking throw). I understand there are subtle differences between these abilities, but it makes managing the hotbar a mess for me. I’d love to hear how some other warriors are managing this, or if I’m the only one that feels like the prot warrior has too many skills that are too similar. Thanks!

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I can’t agree with you, for the most part all of Prot’s and by extension Warrior’s abilities all have a unique purpose so they can’t really be condensed any further than they already are unless blizzard decide to go down the route of further follow up abilities, think Divine Toll into Divine Hammer being on the same keybind. The only abilities I can see working like this would be to have Demolish follow up from either a Shield Charge use or a Demoralising Shout, but even then that would require decent bit of reworking in the hero talent trees to make it function equally between builds as there would need to be changes on the Arms side too.

Anyway your suggestion of merging something like Shield Charge which is an offensive cooldown that you think would be well suited to be merged into Charge would be at an extreme detriment to the spec as all you’ve done is merge an offensive ability with gap closer flavour that you hit on cooldown with a gap closer you only use when you need to. This does nothing but create moments where you’re sitting on damage just to close a gap if they went the way you describe.

In terms of keybind amounts I don’t believe that 25~26 keybinds (Thane/Colossus) is anywhere near unacceptable when it comes to MMO combat. Sure once you add in other QoL binds like Health Potion, Health Stone, Combat Potion, Gateway Shard, Racial (if it’s a utility that you have to activate), extra action button and a Mount keybind that puts you at an additional 6~7 extra binds putting you still within the ease of filling out three full action bars, while also leaving room for additional focus based macros for Interrupts/Taunts etc.

Smart Keybinds do help make things a touch easier in that regard, personally my base keybinds are 1-5, `, tab, f1-f4, r, t, f, g and an additional 6x keybinds on my mouse side buttons and a further 2x keybinds next to my mouse’s left click (Logitech G604 :dracthyr_comfy_sip:), while also utilising a mousewheel up/down bind with a shift modifier for this an the other mouse bound keybinds. So this ends up with 24 natural binds (10 mouse, 14 keyboard), with an additional 10 mouse binds utilising shift. Mind you my mouse based binds only really cover Defensives/Utility/Mobility binds while the rest are dedicated to offensive binds. I also have wasd for movement still bound and q/e for strafe, tried having these as keybinds and changing strafe to a/d and let’s just say i hated that control scheme so i made binds that work for me. And yes I don’t have tab bound for tab targetting, haven’t had it since Cata been a mouse targeter for keys since I prefer the precision of it.

Mind you when comparing my Prot to my Fury and Arms binds, Prot and Arms utilise the same amount of binds in total with there being only one wildcard in a keybind going unused for the non Colossus builds and Fury ends up being 4~5 binds lower pending the build I’m using, albeit it also does macro two cooldowns together while Prot and Arms do not in the way that i’ve set-up my binds.

3

I agree with you. From a mechanical standpoint sure prot is really straightforward, but the spec still feels pretty bloated. That’s honestly kind of a problem with a few of the tank specs and another reason a lot of people don’t want to tank, why would anyone want to play the role that has to have the most knowledge of the mechanics of any dungeon/fight while also juggling the most keybinds. Not saying tanks need to be like BM Hunter with like 3 buttons to press, but the other comment here saying 25-26 buttons just for combat isn’t unacceptable is excessive…

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Before you use this word, let’s define the terms of ‘bloat’.

To me ‘bloat’ would signify that the spec has too many abilities that have the exact same function.

So by that definition the current design of Protection Warrior wouldn’t really have any ‘bloat’ as it’s toolkit can be explained in the following.

Three rotational abilities of Shield Slam, Thunderclap and Revenge all of which have their own unique aspects to stay as an ability. Conditionally a 4th offensive rotational ability is added in Execute sub 20/35% when tuned correctly. (right now it’s not even worth to be on your bars if you’re not talenting it’s augmenting talents). Then there’s a ranged threat tool of Heroic Throw, this obviously can’t be removed as it’s the only short cd way for Prot Warriors to gain threat on a target outside of melee range without using their taunt.

Then you’ve got Shield Block and Ignore pain which are your defensive rotational abilities, these have different unique gameplay implications so once again not ‘bloat’.

Then we’ve got the rest of the kit of the following. (/ signifying these abilities share a keybind slot as they are a choice node).

Offensive Cooldowns
Avatar

Mixed Offensive-Defensive Cooldowns
Shield Charge, Demoralising Shout.

Defensive Cooldowns (both self and group wide)
Shield Wall, Rallying Cry, Spell Reflect.

Role Specific Required Abilities.
Taunt, Pummel.

Utility Cooldowns. (not always hit on cooldown and only with a purpose)
Disrupting/Challenging Shout, Shockwave, Stormbolt, Wrecking Throw/Shattering Throw, Piercing Howl/Intimidating Shout, Battle Shout.

Mobility
Charge, Heroic Leap, Intervene (Optional, mostly never taken outside of niche situations where it provides utility)

As you can see once you’ve gone through prot’s rotational abilities, active mitigation, required abilities to perform it’s role alongside utility and it’s very few offensive/defensive abilities you have next to no overlap at all.

So please point out the ‘bloat’.

And? If you play your DPS spec well you do almost the exact same prep in needing the exact same knowledge sans the route you’re going to take for that key. Mind you, this is something you would know if you actually played at any level where it mattered.

I don’t think it’s necessarily bad if bad players get filtered out by the system itself, not everyone is equal and not everyone should be playing the same content if they do not want to put in the same effort as others have done so before them.

MMO combat has almost always entailed 30-40 keybinds so the reality of 25-26 keybinds isn’t really all that farfetched. Mind you you’re not hitting all of those abilities in sequence all the time and you go plenty of stretches potentially not even using some of these abilities at all throughout an encounter.

Quite genuinely have you ever stopped to look at the casts per minute of how a spec actually plays at all? Because so many abilities end up at sub 1 casts per minute sometimes even only being used once in a 5-10 minute fight when the opportunity presents itself.

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5

As an expert forum goer and avid contributor to the WoW biosphere, my reply to this ponderous post is that ur mum gey (top 10 most intelligent forum posts of all time)

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Have you tried working in another trio of buttons into your flow, by any chance? Say… RFC, or CVB, or maybe including Caps, A, D, F while using just Q and E for your typical movement needs? They’re each still quite comfortable from a WASD or near enough position if you strafe with Q and E anyways (which, if still having RMB at default use, pretty much objectively improves upon A-D anyways, while LMB and RMB together forgo the need for W itself).

For example, I have Revenge on R, Shield Slam on F, Thunderclap on C, Execute on Shift-R, Shield Block on Shift-F, Ignore Pain on Shift-C. (V is my Reflect, since it’s easy to thumb, and B my Interrupt/Howl, Shift-V my Racial, etc., etc. I then potentially have T and G for an easy bit of extra reach past R and F, very comfortably without sacrificing QWE if playing with

  • This leaves 1234 for my utilities (Heroic Throw, Pummel, Shockwave, Taunt) and Shift-1234 for my not-wholly-defensive CDs (Shield Charge, Storm Bolt, Wrecking) and Alt-1234 (or Caps-1234 in my case, via key-swap) for defensive CDs.

Another potential easy helper is just to mouse-bind Ignore Pain and maybe Revenge (likely in addition to whatever you prioritize for smoothness – e.g., Taunt/Pummel or Charge/Heroic Leap), since they’re spammable.

For my part, I don’t feel like any of those keys go to waste or feel “bloated”, especially if you can be greedy enough to take Sudden Death (which I wish felt a little more valuable, if only, say, by giving Prot its own Fervor of Battle in having Execute also cast Revenge, perhaps in place of the 3-target talent, which would be quite nice for Colossus, especially). So yeah, making Execute a bit more viable in 5+ target AoE would be nice, but the buttons otherwise feel very, very solid.

7

As someone who’s had a prot warrior since Vanilla WoW I can say it feels really good right now. I’m playing Colossus Prot and honestly the number of buttons isn’t too bad. The only thing that feels bloated to me is our shout snare.

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I click a lot of stuff so here is a rundown of my bindings, it is engrained into me at this point and the only thing I don’t really like is shield charge. This is the basics of how I fight.

4 - Charge, walk past the enemies. (Shift 4 is Shield Charge, gross, I know)

Q - Thunder Clap, turn around

E - Shockwave, when the stun wears off

F & C - F is a macro of Ignore Pain and Demo Shout & C is Shield Block. I continue spamming this throughout the fight.

2 & 3 - Shield Slam & Revenge, you know how these work.

Shift 3 - Spell Reflect, Good to toss up when casters are blasting or vs magical bombs even if you can’t reflect them.

That is a stable base, I know it is busy, but it does a lot of heavy lifting.

I use my mouse buttons for leap and spear (my life saver vs melee adds in a pinch) as well as clicking my mouse wheel is my interrupt on all my characters. 1 is my Storm Bolt and Shift 2 is my Victory Rush which are also used pretty commonly.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!!! But I wont load you down with more, your not wrong about it being an intense amount of skills, but I enjoy it.

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P.S. Having all the interrupt skills is also very important

Shift Q is the shout and Shift E is the throw for me, it just makes rounding up casters easier.

10

I’ve been playing warrior since vanilla. Prot and arms and later dabbled in fury. I think prot is in a perfect place right now as far as keybindings go. There really arent that many abilities so I have to disagree with you.

11

Troll post.

12

Dude, why do you feel the need to type a novel on every single post that someone comments an opinion you disagree with? It’s like you go into every single thread looking to debate someone

13

So you shouldn’t address points of contention in an open forum by clarifying why you think the way you do?

Would it have been easier for you to read and reply to a couple paragraphs if we put some footage of Subway Surfers or Minecraft Parkour on half your screen?

14

It’s what they do, you get used to it. It can be useful.