The changes recently made to prot warrior might make sense for raid and/or low M+ (keys between 2-12 range) but are damaging for warrior to play at a high end. Warrior offers little utility and synergy in a 5 man comp. I have some suggested changes (besides entire re-works and utility added).
With reverting the nerfs:
Tune best served cold &/or Show of force talents. This way you can tune revenge to be in line with your design intent.
remove or reduce rage required for defensive abilities (kinda like how demon spikes is free for vengeance DH). Can reduce shield block to 0 cost and/or reduce ignore pain cost.
Without reverting nerfs:
remove or reduce rage required for defensive abilities (kinda like how demon spikes is free for vengeance DH). Can reduce shield block to 0 cost and/or reduce ignore pain cost.
improving some of the least taken capstone talents &/or middle tree talents.
Buff ignore pain since in big pulls itâs sometimes immediately removed upon application.
The rage nerf is really lame, you just sit there doing nothing for 3 seconds waiting for shield slam cd. I have never seem any other spec just sitting there and do nothing for so long in their rotation.
There is also an undocumented nerf. Tide of battle was announced to be nerfed from 10% to 7% per stack. However, in game, if you mouseover the buff, itâs only 5% per stack. My revenge now hits like wet noodle. None wants prot war for high keys, all they want is a VDH.
Reduce or remove the rage cost of revenge (would probably require a rework though)
Reduce the base cooldown of thunderclap and/or shield slam. (Itâs awful waiting for resets and not being able to afford the revenge cast for defensive reasons to fish for shield slam resets).
have Ignore Pain ignore a variable portion of damage based on the HP to which youâd otherwise be reduced and nearness to capping Ignore Pain (allowing it not to fall out of Brutal Vitality so quickly but also allowing for greater burst sustain and low HP),
have Ignore Pain also reduce the damage of individual hits by a flat amount (allowing it to fair better against large numbers of targets),
unneuter macros to allow for CD-less fall-back actions (e.g., Devastate > Heroic Throw behind each targeted skill), and
nerf Devastate slightly but have Devastator no longer remove access to Devastate and again form a choice node against an improved Devastate (say, maybe stacking increasing the consumption and therefore damage rate of Deep Wounds atop adding 5% extra reset chance to it and Thunder Clap / Revenge).
With that, you can empower Devastate or gain part of its benefit from auto-attacks anyways, but in either case thereâs no downtime (only reduced output) to be caused by defensive spending, greatly reducing the penalty to overall activity/economy caused by taking very high amounts of damage.
The issue with IP is it doesnât scale with dmg intake. So for low keys, IP feels strong, the higher key we go the weaker IP becomes to the point that we spam rage on IP to survive. Using dmg to funnel IP is only useful in big pulls where we donât have rage issue. We have rage issue in smaller pulls. So I would like to see brutal vitality changes from dmg dealt to dmg taken, the more dmg we take the bigger the next IP we cast becomes. That would help in both boss and AoE encounters.
Also the 30% hp cap for IP should increase to 50% like BDK.
No, I mean Devastate, the filler GCD normally replaced by Devastator that would otherwise be capable of removing the need to simply wait on autos or CDs for oneâs chance at a Shield Slam reset. Yes, I typoâed, but shouldnât its being a spammable have made clear that Demolish, at the least, wouldnât have ben what I meant?
By still having Devastate as a fallback at no additional button cost, the doubled punishment (via missing procs and therefore activity, ST damage, and resource generation) for reduced Revenge spending is, in effect, removed.
At present, the spec plays like it should always be GCD locked⌠and it is, right up until it hits a wall and gets hit by the doubled mismatch of, atop losing damage, also losing Leech, Brutal Vitality, Strategist resets, and thereby Heavy Repercussions, resource inflow/outflow reduction, and ultimately less Anger Management and Seeing Red contribution.
Give it a free fallback option, and now you only have to deal with the lost damage, not your whole activity/resource/buff loop getting halved.
That spellâs called devastate, or if talented devastator, not decimate. Devastate has always felt lackluster and pointless with the current iteration of prot warrior, and would only be used if absolutely nothing else was usable since itâs essentially a slightly modified auto attack that also applies deep wounds.
Under âthe current iteration of prot warriorâ that specifically makes it useless. Itâs a still a free proc generator and slight Rage generator.
If, as posited above, the problem is that extreme demands for Ignore Pain would otherwise cause us to have to just be idle while waiting for AAs or TC to eventually reset ShS, then having a no-cost fallback means of generating procs beyond mere auto-attacks would almost wholly remove the issue. Without Rage, you still wouldnât put out full damage or any AoE each filler GCD, but you would have full activity and resource economy.
All it requires is for Devastate not to necessarily remove access to that fallback action.
I.e., if we want to be only conditionally GCD-locked, and to be especially hard hit by incoming damage pushing our flat mitigation to the brink, then we should continue to leave Prot no free fallback option, while if we do not want idle time nor to see Prot doubly punished from being pushed too hard, then making that fallback option free without necessarily losing access to Devastator would largely so the trick. Without that, weâd have to fall back on variable Ignore Pain mitigation a la Ironfur, which then makes Shield Block feel redundant in its design.
Yes, I realize I suggested a change that would let Ignore Pain value scale slightly with the number of hits, but at least a flat reduction to each hit taken would feel distinct from Shield Block.
Allow us Prot Warriors to summon a Valkyr from Skyhold to battle-resurrect teammates!
Prot Paladin received a brez spell last expansion, and they are not even a low-utility class. If we can also have brez with appealing golden Valkyr visuals, that will help us a lot with our low-utility status.
BL would make sense for Warriors too but I think if they want us to be a basic class like this at least buff our stuff, like make our stuns last for 6 seconds in PvE. IDK, just give us something lmao.
We have Battle Shout. Remove our pre-capstone-tier obligatory bloat damage/stat talents so we can actually take our utilities and weâd have, on the whole, enough small things for that to be a âthingâ.
that wouldnât make any sense. Warriors arenât magical so them having a Brez in their kit is kind of dumb. Warriors are just normal people who picks up a weapon and starts fighting. and donât have any magical attachments to them.
Honestly protection for M+ needs the same as both Arms and Fury. That need is a full rework of their class tree (to a degree) that focuses on the following.
Removing at least half of the silly pointless throughput nodes. The warrior class tree is bloated with way too many mandatory dps nodes which would actually then allow warriors to be able to double back and pick up crucial utility nodes we otherwise never have the freedom of picking, as warriors are one of the worst when it comes to freedom of expression through build diversity.
Having Thunderous Roar / Championâs Spear as a choice node so only one can ever be taken, this allows them to buff these abilities considerably since youâll no longer have the option of taking them both.
At minimum changing Crushing Force and Reinforced Plates would provide 2x free floater points until they do a proper rework.
Surely warriors can bres someone by shouting obscenities at them while telling them to stop being a baby, walk it off, reassuring them itâs only a flesh wound and they will get better or threatening them with giving them a reason to cry (the wog parent special).
A+ for creativity but iâd rather have bloodlust and an ability that can reposition mobs as prot, and heroic throw silenceâŚmaybe a stomping ability that makes mobs fall inward working similar to vdh grip thingy they do.