Would prot warriors become too good at tanking if they were able to passively block direct spell damage and abilities like they do with physical attacks?
Seems like that would go a long way towards improving their survivability in pve content.
Edit:as discussed later physical means melee. I just typed out the wrong thing. Leaving it because it opened up interesting discussions about blocking physical ranged attacks.
Yes. Prot paladins have no analogue to the shield block skill, nor do they have critical block. Prot warriors with the same ability would, for significant stretches of any fight, have a 100% chance to reduce all incoming spell damage by 35-70% before even considering IP and spell reflect. It would straight-up break the spec.
I dont really get the paladin comparison. Warriors don’t have a damage immunity bubble, self heals on demand, or paladin auras. Tanks don’t NEED an analogies skill with each other. If they did then everyone should be able to leap as much as a VDH, have a DK battle rez, druid aoe speed buff, and Paladin’s self healing.
Since warriors aren’t as mobile while also being able to maintain aoe aggro shouldnt they be better at straight up standing their ground? Same question for blood dk.
Neither do Prot Paladins, outside of the Final Stand talent, unless they want to murder their party. If one is wholly immune to every action an enemy may take against you in a given moment, you are made a least-priority target for that time, thus wasting that immunity until you are the last man standing.
Note that skills like Challenging Shout supercedes this function, allowing Warriors and Druids alone to be BoPed while tanking, and Intervene does not count as the target’s immunity, allowing them to apply BoP to tanks for 6s without costing them their target priority. A bubble on a Warrior is, for most builds of Prot Paladin, better than the Prot Paladin’s own true immunity via Divine Shield.
Prot Paladin self-heals aren’t on demand. They come at direct cost to either their ability to block during FoL’s cast-time or Shield of the Righteousness uptime.
They do, but note that analogies do not mean what you think they mean. You’re thinking of “(overly) specific parity”.
If a tank shares no analogs (features which ease or allow for points of comparison), or—by extension—an analogy (a speech act which considers a given feature through a point of comparison) to any other tank, then you have a spec which is an outlier to the fundamental gameplay or mechanical design of tanks. That would, in fact, be problematic.
Now, to return to the main point:
Yes, unless the chance or potency of block spells were but a small fraction of what is done against physical attacks, the ability to block spells (outside of Spell Reflection) would make us OP.
As I recall, Protection Paladin mastery increases their block chance to a greater scaling factor than warrior to compensate for not having critical block. Critical block is actually the primary component given the shield block active.
Easy fix regarding the shield block ability. It says blocks all melee attacks. All melee attacks. All melee attacks. All. Melee. Attacks. Not ranged attacks. Not spells. Read tooltips.
Personally, I’d slightly prefer they replace Shield Block’s “blocks all melee attacks” with “blocks all physical attacks”, thus blocking ranged attacks as well. After all, our block capacity is most analogous to other tanks’ temporary bonuses to Armor or outright physical damage reduction, which certainly works on ranged attacks but does not work against melee skills like Frost Strike or Templar’s Verdict.
Edit: (because context isn’t a thing, I guess.)
The immunity without a particular talent drops all threat and is mostly useful with a cancelaura to clear debuffs. And those heals everyone is constantly crying about? Are to compensate for the fact that Paladin takes far more damage than warrior. They also use the same resource needed for shield of the righteous. It’s one of the other, not both.
Blocking was changed to work against physical ranged attacks back in BFA.
Not really. A prot paladin with holy shield will have around 35-40% block chance, with a lot of their mastery budget tied up in boosting the DR from consecrate. Without holy shield, their block chance is about the same as yours. Blocking simply isn’t anywhere near the primary source of survival for paladin the way it is for warrior.
Just make the DR from spell reflect linger instead of dropping when you reflect something.
And stop comparing us to paladins
I haven’t actually tested it, but Shield Block’s tooltip specifies that it only blocks melee attacks. Is the tooltip wrong, or did they revert the BfA change, or does passive block work against ranged while Shield Block’s increase does not?
I was referring specifically to Shield Block, as per its mention in the post I was replying to (just above me). Unless the tooltip is errant and ranged attacks from those in front of me have somehow been circling around to hit me in the back, it still doesn’t guarantee blocks against ranged attacks, physical though they may be.
I agree with that, I’ve suggested it many times.
Stop comparing tanks to each other, they only exist in a vacuum, or something.
And I’ve got 26% passive block chance on my warrior. Granted, I don’t have a lot of mastery, but with Holy Shield, that’s certainly a higher passive chance.
And they can block what few spells get through a resettable Avenger’s Shield and a second interrupt.
Your warrior also has a skill that blocks 100% of blockable attacks.
That’s sorta the root problem with wanting block to work on spells: where the Paladin has a little worse than a coin flip on whether it works, the warrior guarantees it.
/reads Shield Block tooltip
Blocks all melee attacks
All melee attacks
All
melee attacks
melee
attacks
Wow, I guess that’s not a friggin’ problem, then.
It’s almost like the programmers can change the way the abilities work based on what they want them to do, or something. Wild.
They might. They might even have the ability to balance classes based on some of those abilities. Maybe even the talents. Maybe.
I’ve not have any raid experience as prot warrior so far in past 2 expansions…but it seems like prot warrior issue is more in mythic+ than raid so far. Unless a significant increase - which i highly doubt so - i do not think an increase in our passive mitigation will resolve the under-represented trend of prot warrior in high end contents.
Like said, i do not know about the extra abilities of bosses in raid, hence i could be wrong about raid, but as far as Mythic+ goes, i’ve done a few as dps and see that what many said about M+ environment is legit.
It’s a headache to plan timed run around Prot Warrior with an “in-content” group (aka group that is not overgeared for the content) due to their long cooldowns. Having no bursty self heal outside of our major cooldowns means we rely on all our long cooldown cds more than say Paladin, which, ironically have more utilities and cooldown than us.
Some commented about mobility of Prot warrior, which i don’t believe is the case. While we’re not the fastest runner, we’re not lacking in mobility department as compared to say DK. Some classes like DH and BM just had advantage that’s all.
Back on the topic, to be fair, allowing us to block spells will not break the game. The conundrum of the case is that, it is not usually the spell’s damage that is key in killing us, it’s the debuff that comes with it, especially those stacking one. On the other hand, if a spell is deadly enough, even if critically blocked, it’s still can’t really match paladin’s ability to self heal when need. At least for me, i would take the ability to heal where needed as compared to blocking spell to be honest. I know we can take up Impending Victory, but it’s gonna gimp our mobility, so it’s not really useful, not to mentioned it’s only 30% as compared to Paladin’s WoG.
Perhaps the way to “evolve” prot warrior under current requirement to cope with top content, and being as fair as i can think of, would be following suggestion
(1) Impending Doom made baseline.
(2) Instead of reducing cooldown based on rage spent through Anger Management, make a talent that give us another charge of Shield Wall, Last Stand, Demoralising Shout and Shield Block. Will it be OP? i doubt.
(3) Raise the cap of Ignore Pain, i didn’t mean to go back to the OP extend of previous expansion, but perhaps increase 50% - 100% from current value would help giving us a small cooldowns that actually need to be managed.
(4) Spell Reflection can only reflect one spell during each use but will not be cancelled upon reflecting a spell.
(5) Give us one of the Deadly Calm, Enraged Regeneration or Die by the Sword.
(6) Give us one of the Howling Roar or Stormbolt as baseline.
(7) Double Time also affect Intervene.
I don’t think having ALL of the above would make prot warrior better than any tank counterparts.
Just my 2 cents.
That’s not a Warrior thing.
Yes, yes it absolutely would be. It wouldn’t in itself remotely bring us parity in M+, but we’d have the greatest contiguous high-percentile mitigation in the game, which could make us mighty cheesy for certain raid fights.
Anywhere near even a 50% bonus to Ignore Pain would be overpowered and would likely prevent us from using Revenge on anything but Deep Wounds maintenance, in any serious content, worsening an already, imo, playflow-poor trend.
Reasonable.
One of these is not like the others.
Howling Roar is, again, not a thing. And why add Piercing Howl, or even Storm Bolt, rather than dig Thunder Clap’s snare modifier and Shockwave’s duration out of the grave?
So, 4 charges of dash-to actions?
I don’t think there’s any time zone where it could still be Sunday when you posted this?
Spell Reflect DR shouldn’t be burned on a reflect as a Prot warrior, but a full spell blocking mechanism for warriors would definitely be broken.
The main thing we need is to be able to generate more rage to dump into Ignore Pain… like we did in WoD. There was plenty of unblockable damage in that expansion, and warriors were considered one of the weaker specs, but we really didn’t struggle in progression tanking.
Part of me wants Ignore Pain to be rolled into Revenge, so that we don’t have threat competing with survivability. Sort of like how Demon Hunters have both healing and a threat generator attached to their main fury spender.
Obviously, this would require some retuning of rage cost, absorb amount, and/or free Revenge procs.
Spell reflect DR not being burned on reflect is a necessity.
Anything more can wait.
That said, I find the pronouncement asinine that spell blocking on base block would be OP. Consider that your base DR on spells is 0-versatility. Compare that to 10% base DR on Paladin, or 20% base DR on VDH. That’s baseline. Meaning 100% uptime.
Consider how 10% base spell mit would compare with 20% DR with a 5 second duration and a 25 second cooldown. That’s a 20% uptime. So 20% of 20%, or 4% mit. That’s not comparable, and that’s your proposal. They magic damage mit is simply better.
Not counting spell block, with higher block chance through holy shield, not counting a second chain interrupt which is resettable and has a 30 yard range on avengers shield.
There simply is a significant discrepancy in magic damage mitigation between the tanks. You simply read the tooltips and you can see that.
I’d actually like to see a similar baseline DR against ALL damage baked into Vanguard similar to Sanctuary at the expense of a commensurate amount of the armor buff from Vanguard to compensate. That is the most obvious tuning knob.
This would also keep your physical damage intake flat, or increased based on class tuning objectives.
Those two changes. Add at least 5% base DR from Vanguard, if not 10 to keep in line with Sanctuary from Prot Paladin, and don’t drop the DR from Spell Reflect after a spell is reflected. Commensurate nerf to the armor bonus from Vanguard.
In fact, this is even easier to do, since they buffed the armor bonus to Vanguard pre-release. Undo that and give us back some nominal global damage reduction in our spec aura.
I get it, no one likes stances, but losing that 20-25% DR sucked and left a big hole in the spec, creating a gaping hole. Patch it up with a nominal baseline DR so you’re not eating 100% of all spells.
I don’t see a spell block mechanism for warriors as being necessary. The main argument in favor of us being good tanks is that we block a lot of physical. Sure, kiiiinda. However, more and more mechanics related to tanks is damage we can’t block, such as a stacking DoT on the tanks (very common nowadays). The best secondary behind haste is Versatility, and nobody liked Gladiator Stance for tanking when it was around–a flat 5% DR on top of everything else (underrated at the top end, imo).
I don’t think we need such a wild change. We’re weak against magic, but that’s not our only problem.
We need some love in the magic dr department. It seems to have been a common theme for prot warrior the last few expansions.
Blizzard kinda slacked on prot warrior and did little to fill the void that azerite traits and other borrowed power we had in bfa. We need some love
My suggestion is to take a look at the tower abilities we get in torgast. I would love a talent that allows ignore pain a chance to pop shield wall for example. Or another that increases the duration of SR by 200%.
Furthermore our dmg and therefore threat generation is lacking (so I hear) but so far I’ve been tanking plus 5 with no problem. I’m worried about when I reach the double digit keys