Hello, all. I would like to give feedback regarding the current changes for the 11.1 PTR for Protection Warrior. I think the current changes to the class don’t quite meet the mark of either improving the quality of the class, or adjusting it after the nerfs that have been made. I will go through both sets of patch notes we have recieved to give my thoughts on how to improve the state of the spec - keeping in mind the mission goal stated and the current state of the class. This is partially from the angle of someone who plays at a more casual level (AOTC and weekly 10 and below keys), but shouldn’t be too different past that point.
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- Protection (19th of December)
Developers’ notes: Protection Warriors are currently constantly flooded with Rage which undermines rotational defensive decision-making and encourages constant dumping of Rage into Ignore Pain to maximize effectiveness. We’re taking a pass at reducing Protection’s overall Rage generation to make decisions on when and how to spend it more meaningful, without reducing Protection Warriors’ ability to tank effectively.
The class certainly has moments like this - and where it stands right now, Ignore Pain simply exists as a button that does two things: Grants the Ignore Pain effect, and allows you to spend 35 rage. We have quite a lot of talents that cause us to gain a benefit from spending rage, and I think that is a key important part of what keeps the gameplay engaging. However, I don’t believe that the decisions we have to make are best telegraphed, either. We currently have four abilities to spend rage on - Shield Block, Ignore Pain, Revenge and Execute. These all have their own uses (which is important), but for a character new to the specialisation they may feel that they should prioritise keeping rage spent on Ignore Pain and Shield Block over using their offensive abilities and may feel that they cannot make the choice to use their offensive abilities.
- Chance to reset the cooldown of Shield Slam from Devastator and Strategist reduced to 20% (was 30%).
While the current state of the class will certainly have moments where (as Mountain Thane especially) you may have moments of Shield Slam reseting back to back to back letting you press it three or four times in succession, I personally think this change was too aggressive in what it meant to tone down, and misproportionately affects the whole spec for what could in part just be an issue with Mountain Thane. I strongly believe that the Burst of Power talent for Mountain Thane is much more problematic and would be better if that would recieve the nerf over Strategist (or at least for some of the nerf to be split between the two.)
If this change is set in stone and can’t be changed no matter what, Shield Slam’s base cooldown desperately needs to be looked into. With 30% haste on retail this sits at around 7 seconds, and on the PTR there are moments where you will sit the full 7 seconds not getting a reset, which is problematic when the core gameplay of the class relies around Shield Slam. Bringing it down by roughly a second and a half would help bridge this gap better - Random procs for players new to the spec aren’t always easy to react to, but a clear cooldown being a certain length is something you can plan around.
It can’t go without saying, either, that Shield Slam is our main source of Single Target damage, and this change more or less amounts to a 33% nerf to it.
- Impenetrable Wall no longer increases Rage generated by Shield Slam.
I think this change is quite heavy handed in combination with the changes to Shield Slam already made. It’s alternative on the choice node does offer an option of a more active and more passive playstyle option, but without changes for this talent it will struggle to find a reason to be played - If the rage generation is being removed from the node, adding something else to it would help equalise it. Maybe increasing the cooldown reduction to compensate for the nerf made Strategist, or adding another effect to be reduced (Last Stand could be an option) - or even a damage modifier - I think this could do with another look into what could be done to balance the two choices against each other.
- Booming Voice causes Demoralizing Shout to generate 20 Rage (was 30).
- Champion’s Bulwark no longer increases the Rage generated by Shield Charge.
These are both pretty standard changes that are just number changes. I think losing more burst rage choices isn’t perfect, but these are already value nodes with their own benefits, too.
- Violent Outburst has been rebuilt to be easier to understand and track progress towards the next Outburst. Additional Rage generated from Violent Outburst reduced to 50% (was 100%).
This, to me, is a bit of a shame, as I think the Violent Outburst Minigame when it was first added in the Shadowlands Tier Set represented a really potent minigame in which playing it ‘correctly’ would give an awesome moment where you could get 60 Rage from Shield Slam - and now it has been reduced from 200% all the way down to 50% increased rage. With the combination of nerfs to rage sources, and nerfs to the buff too, this could do with a much lower cost of rage to gain the proc. I think something worth considering is making the amount of additional rage a flat proc, if the percentage is this low, to make the two options of spending Outburst to be more focused on the damage buff, if the rage buff will be minimal between them.
- Shield Wall cooldown reduced to 3 minutes (was 3.5 minutes).
- Amount of damage ignored from each use of Ignore Pain increased by 30%.
These certainly seem a targetted effort to make up for the loss of rage to push into Anger Management / Ignore Pain, but I think they feel pretty flat and boring comparatively. The current amount of rage / Ignore Pain we will no longer be spending will not be made up for by these buffs, and could be tweaked further.
- Colossus
- Colossal Might is no longer applied by Execute.
- Developers’ notes: Using your hard-hitting rotational ability regularly is core to the Colossus playstyle, and Execute applying Colossal Might pushed Colossus away from that during Execute phases.
This feels like a change that was just copied over from Arms without a single thought for how it works for Protection. During Execute, Execute IS your hardest-hitting rotational ability, even without using any talents to buff it! It deals ~350% more damage than Shield Slam does - and we will never pass up pressing Shield Slam to cast Execute! This single handedly feels like one of the most negligent changes made - all because of the fact that it fundementally ignores how the spec functions. Colossus is already on a weaker footing to Mountain Thane due to the differences in rage generation, please don’t make it worse.
- Protection (15th of January)
- Developers’ notes: As we continue to iterate on improving Protection Warriors’ rotation and Rage economy, we’re making adjustments to several talents to account for those rotational changes and feedback from testing.
I am glad that these changes are being listed as ongoing, because I think they need a lot more attention. These changes below listed I don’t think are actually better than the current playstyle, but it is better than being in the state we were from the last build.
- All ability damage increased by 5%.
- Shield Slam damage increased by 20%.
- Brace for Impact stacks up to 3 times (was 5), and grants 10% Shield Slam damage and shield block value by 5% (was 5% Shield Slam damage and 3% shield block value).
These changes together probably help make up for the gulf made by nerfing Strategist’s reset rate. I think reverting the nerf partially to Strategist still wouldn’t go amiss here. I find the change to Brace for Impact confusing, but it does end up with more Damage and lets you hit your stronger side quicker. I assume there may have been players who struggled to keep this buff up before, or found it punishing during downtime.
- Punish reduces damage the punished target deals to you by 4% (was 2%).
Punish was looking in a sore spot after the Strategist nerf. This is a nice change.
- Bloodsurge has had its chance to trigger increased significantly and generates 5 Rage (was 3).
- Instigate causes Devastator to generate 2 Rage (was 1).
This seems to be a choice to increase passive rage generation while making our active rage generation weaker. Depending on the numbers on this, this could in theory make up for some of our lost burst rage and make it more predictable on when you might cap rage. I think it might however be more worth moving the Devastator effect onto the baseline spell itself, rather than on instigate (or make Instigate MUCH stronger for rage generation), as Bloodsurge is probably always going to be better in most forms of content.
- Colossus
- Practiced Strikes increases Rage generated by Shield Slam by 3.
This change should have come in a lot earlier. But Colossus was hit very hard by the nerfs, moreso than Mountain Thane, so this could go well to equalise the choices. I think more iteration can be done on how to balance them by either giving Colossus access to either a little more rage or options for passive damage reduction somewhere.
- Mountain Thane
- Avatar of the Storm has a chance to grant 6 seconds of Avatar (was 4 seconds).
This is fine. It helps make up for the damage loss from some of the nerfs, without being obnoxious in it’s implementation.
Undermine(d) Tier Set Bonus
Protection
- (2) Set: Each time you take damage you have a chance to activate Luck of the Draw! causing you to cast Shield Wall for 4 seconds. Your damage done is increased by 15% for 10 seconds after Luck of the Draw! activates.
(4) Set: During Luck of the Draw! Shield Slam’s chance to critically strike is increased by 50% and its critical strikes reduce the cooldown of Shield Charge by 6 seconds.
This one seems quite disappointing across the board - having a role specific 2 set is disappointing itself, and the effect itself is not super engaging - a Random proc of our major defensive from damage taken which increases our damage isn’t super fun. I don’t know the best option for this across all tanks but I think something more deterministic would be desirable.
The 4 set is specific to the spec, and it still isn’t great. We have 10 seconds of the buff where we want to get in as many Shield Slams as we can - and we have to hope that we get a favourable roll on how many we crit for Cooldown Reduction on Shield Charge. I think there are three things that could combine to make this better:
- Increase the Duration of Luck of the Draw! to allow us to make use of the buff. 10 seconds is really not that long.
- Increase Shield Slam’s Critical Strike chance to 100% during this window. The idea is nice, and it gives something fun to Colossus. Why not go all the way?
- Change Critical Strikes on Shield Slam to all casts, and adjust the Cooldown Reduction as necessary. We generally enjoy Cooldown Reduction and it would feel bad to miss out on it from bad RNG.
This also really feels a strain after our nerfs to Strategist.
Suggestions moving forward
I think it is quite clear that the design direction is shifting towards using rage in Ignore Pain less. But we are currently in a position where we will be using all our other abilties less, too.
We are the only tank with abilities that are purely only offensive - comparing Revenge and Execute to Maul and Raze - the roles they serve for their specs are quite similar, but Maul / Raze have the extra benefit of being able to provide Guardian Druids with a very sizeable absorb shield if talented. Currently, all Revenge and Execute can offer on defense are their chances to reset Shield Slam, and spending 20-40 rage for Anger Management - which is very similar to the Gore! effect for Guardian, and their Ursoc’s Guidance talent.
Shadowlands offered Warriors from the Venthyr Covenant Condemn as a replacement to Execute - this was very popular with DPS warriors, but barely picked by Protection as it offered quite a weak effect comparatively. That being said, a design idea that wasn’t really touched too much on was the defensive element of Condemn. Perhaps in a world where we are using Ignore Pain less, it would make more sense to give some level of defensive application for Revenge / Execute. This would give Warrior a nice niche in raids that has come up before - that of a tank that has it’s own potent execute potential.
Anger Management will also suffer due to these changes, which has previously been a defining part of the warrior playstyle - the faster you can cycle it, the stronger you become - so slowing that down feels disappointing. Maybe some number tweaks could happen to it to mitigate it. With the choice of trying to slow down the spamming nature of the playstyle, I wonder if there is not also room for trying to make an Anger Management ‘alternative’ - similar to Spiteful Serenity for Arms or Reckless Abandon for Fury which could either look at increasing Avatar / Shield Wall uptime or granting shorter bursts of empowered abilities, to help players who might struggle with keeping up with a faster paced playstyle.
We could possibly do with a second parse on talent choices, as we have had very little change since Dragonflight launched. There are older effects from previous versions of the class like the Vengeance Talent - that allowed Ignore Pain to buff Revenge Damage and Revenge to reduce Ignore Pain’s cost - which would incentivise more rotational changes over trying to spam Ignore Pain. There were also similar talents that could allow Ignore Pain to increase our Damage through Enraging, or the old Focused Rage mechanic.
We have the Talent Brutal Vitality which causes 10% of our damage to be added to an active Ignore Pain - and our Tier 1 Dragonflight Set bonus could also give us a buff that granted us an Ignore Pain absorb based on our damage. This could be an angle as well to allow us to use more offensive spenders in lieu of using Ignore Pain less.
I think any of our talents that are based on spending rage could do with a numbers adjustment to compensate for our lost rage, too. Talents like Shield Specialisation, Enduring Alacrity and Focused Vigor also feel comparatively boring, and are almost always taken due to their value - could they not just be added baseline and make room for choices that are more meaningful?
I will add more to this thread as we get changes.
Barbaric Training