(One of these days I’ll remember to switch character first before posting)
Hello!
With reset on the second week of 10.1, we saw the hotfix:
- [With weekly restarts] Fixed an issue where Battering Ram was providing a passive 20% critical strike damage bonus to all damage rather than to Shield Charge.
(I’m unable to include a link to the patchnotes)
As noted, this abilitiy applied a 20% critical strike damage bonus to all physical damage instead of just Shield Charge. In total, the damage this provided over the the intended modifier was about 7% of protection warrior’s damage profile in single target.
This bug was active for the entirety of 10.0 through the first week of 10.1. As a result, I have the impression that protection warrior’s damage profile was balanced around having this extra 7% damage buff. When it was bugfixed, we did not receive any compensation and we entered the T30 raid tier dealing less damage.
With the T29 tier being phased out, we lose the defensive bonus of Vanguard’s Determination and synergistic Brutal Vitality effects. With T30, we gain a comparable single target replacement, improved AOE, but the Punish like defensive bonus does not make me feel as durable.
Looking at warcraft logs (clearly not the best metrics), in terms of single target, we seem to be behind all other tanks on average. That’s not an issue in a vacuum, but we also appear to have the highest death rates in Heroic and Mythic raid right now, so what are we here for? We look to be low on cleave, single target, and survivability, all while requiring a higher casts per minute count to be effective over the other tanks. Our mobility should not be understated, but there are many fights in raid that just don’t require it as much as a fight like M Sennarth.
All that being said, I believe it would be more fun to be compensated in some way to address our shortfalls in at least one area. As the title suggests, I’m looking for damage compensation in response to the significant nerf that came with the bugfix. Specifically, I would like to see an improvement to our single target damage in some form.