I think all tanks including Prot warrior should get some cool dps ability. If anyone here has played FF14 think of GNB’s continuation, Warrior’s rage fill and getting those cool abilities, DRK’s charge and 3 epic attacks. Right now you go into a dungeon, you charge with a shield slam and thunderclap, and you hold off on revenge so you can build up rage to dump into ignore pain, keeping up shield block, and once your ignore pain is around a 100 stacks, excessive rage can go into revenge.
All the tanks in this game have something to this degree of minimal game play. Its quite boring and mind numbing. You’re expected to go into multiple mythic plus ques and fight 30 minute instances for hours on end to grind gear and climb the ranks spamming a few abilities? No wonder there’s a tank shortage! Add some cool things so we can have dopamine hit moments.
The problem lies within wow’s system that your primary resource in Prot’s case has both offensive and defensive uses rather than just having the defensive uses be short cooldowns on charges and the offensive abilities being the only way to spend your resource.
Blizzard could very much make Shield Block rage free, with the same effects as they have right now and then move ignore pain as a passive gained whenever you’ve pressed your offensive rage dump obviously tuning accordingly and making it sort of a pre-emptive death strike style ability on the GCD but also that would require a complete overhaul on Prot as a whole.
FFXIV’s thematic flair is doable in their game as each ‘job’ has a set theme while wow Classes have multiple themes overarching for each spec and hero talent subspec so designing around that would be limited in the scope of what they could do.
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Gotta admit, I see no benefit to removing the ability to trade between damage and mitigation.
I mean, they have a half a differentiating (usually ultimately negligible) gimmick. The rest is just defined by role (Tank, Melee, Ranger, Caster, Healer), within which each job is virtually interchangeable.
If it’s going to just be CD-limited and virtually always superior to Ignore Pain in any situation in which Shield Block would have any use regardless, it may as well be.
I’d honestly rather they go the opposite direction and make Shield Block more timing sensitive but less relied upon, but that’d be almost as great a rework as…
…this would be, insofar as I can imagine it (which isn’t very clearly, I’ll admit).
All that being said, I’d take Prot Warrior M+ tanking, especially in situations that require extremely timely CDs and kiting to survive, over XIV tanks any day.
I don’t need my 111 to have 3 different animations, or my singular other ST button to have potentially 4 animations available to it. That all is… nice… sure… I guess… but I want situations in which I have 4+ competing GCDs where my choice depends in some way on what’s coming up instead of a rote inflexible priority list. I’d far rather see those kinds of branching pathways and the added danger (or, “risk-reward”) to situate them appropriately than any “my plate-armored Dark Knight with a sword too heavy to keep in a solid ox guard… grows wings and does an ebon-angel front-flip slash before cartwheel-blading away”, or needing to sacrifice half of GNB’s space to pop defensives on uptime-draining bonus noodling attacks. They’re decent decoration, but on zero substance.
I like the idea of Shield Block being free and Ignore Pain being a passive. I almost never use them tactically as it were, and just keep them up all the time.
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I like how I can see their duration in the middle of my screen along with my health and resources. Be a shame if they changed it…