Protection Warrior Feedback & Suggestions

Classes Warrior
1

Hey Blizzard,

I’ve been thinking about some of the issues you’re having with how spammy and APM-heavy Protection Warrior is. I also want to voice some annoyance with talents that feel like they should not be seperate, as well as some issues with single target damage profile outside of execute range (namely how bad it feels.

I’ll split this post into 2 sections: one for Suggested Changes TL;DR and one with the explanations for those who care enough to see the reasoning.

Suggested Changes (TL;DR)

  • Revenge: Swing in a wide arc, dealing (65.2% of Attack power) Physical damage to all enemies in front of you. Deals reduced damage beyond 5 targets. Your successful dodges and parries have a chance to make your next Revenge cost no Rage. Deals 100% additional damage when hitting a single target.
  • Challenging Shout: Removed; replaced by Disrupting Shout in the spec tree
  • Violent Outburst: Every 250 rage you spend triggers a Violent Outburst, causing your next Shield Slam or Thunder Clap to deal 200% increased damage, generate 50% more Rage and grant Ignore Pain. This can also be consumed by Demolish to deal 100% additional damage, generate 20 Rage and grant Ignore Pain
  • Avenging Clap (new talent): Consuming Revenge! also casts Thunder clap at 100% effectiveness. This can consume Thunder Blast and other modifiers.
  • Last Stand: Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes (from 3 minutes)
  • Bolster: Last Stand cooldown is reduced by 60 sec, and it grants you the Shield Block effect for its duration. In addition, Shield Wall also grants you Last Stand for its duration
  • Bloodborne (reworked): Reapplying a bleed effect now causes the affected enemies to also be dealt 6 seconds of the bleed damage (i.e. Deep Wounds and Rend) instantly. This effect is reduced by 75% when applied by Devastator.
  • Battering Ram (reworked): Shield Slam critical strikes reduce the cooldown of Shield Charge by 6 seconds.
    • Note: Not applied until after Season 2 of TWW due to tier set effect

Suggested Changes (with explanations!)

Click here to see the explanations for the suggested changes above
  • Revenge: Swing in a wide arc, dealing (65.2% of Attack power) Physical damage to all enemies in front of you. Deals reduced damage beyond 5 targets. Your successful dodges and parries have a chance to make your next Revenge cost no Rage. Deals 100% additional damage when hitting a single target.
    • Explanation: This change is simple: it currently feels terrible to press Revenge in single target, even when playing Colossus. I know you can technically use Slam instead, but it doesn’t do that much more damage (~36% more damage at 0 stacks of Colossal Might; ~32% less damage with 10 stacks of Colossal Might; both without Barbaric Training for equivalent rage cost). I would like for you to consider adding the same feature to Protection Warrior that you added for Guardian Druid’s Raze ability.
  • Challenging Shout: Removed; replaced by Disrupting Shout in the spec tree
    • Explanation: This talent node feels awful to pick up. Please don’t give me two seperate talents for this; Disrupting Shout is a 90 second cooldown AoE taunt with an AoE interrupt. By comparison, Leg Sweep is a 1 minute cooldown 3 second AoE stun that Monks don’t even have to talent into and Sigil of Silence is a 90 second cooldown ranged AoE 4 second silence (6 seconds w/ Evoker’s Oppressing Roar). We should not have to spend 2 spec tree point to acquire this talent.
  • Violent Outburst: Every 250 rage you spend triggers a Violent Outburst, causing your next Shield Slam or Thunder Clap to deal 200% increased damage, generate 50% more Rage and grant Ignore Pain. This can also be consumed by Demolish to deal 100% additional damage, generate 20 Rage and grant Ignore Pain
    • Explanation: This talent feels fantastic for Mountain Thane in both AoE and single target, as well as for Collosus in single target. However, it feels pretty bad for Collosus in AoE since your Thunder Claps don’t do much damage. Even with the 200% boost, it doesn’t beats out a single 10-Colossal Might stack Revenge 3+ target scenarios, which is spammable every GCD if you have the rage for it. I was initially thinking about having Revenge being able to consume it, but Revenge is usually cast to trigger the effect, so having it also consume it felt awkward. Instead, I think it should grant its effect to Demolish (at reduced effectiveness given the damage that ability does. This would provide fantastic AoE benefits for Colossus Prot as well as prioritize focusing on effective usage of that ability on the correct spell. I generally find that it is currently better spent on Shield Slam even in AoE for Colossus given the Rage generated by Shield Slam and the damage it does is comparable (with the benefit of being done to the main target rather than in AoE).
  • Avenging Clap (new talent): Consuming Revenge! also casts Thunder clap at 100% effectiveness. This can consume Thunder Blast and other modifiers.
    • Explanation: This talent is meant to fill the hole where Disrupting Shout is currently located, and exists because I’ve often been in a situation during Avatar as Mountain Thane where I have a free Revenge! proc that I can’t consume because I also have a Burst of Power proc as well as Thunder Blast charges to use. This would allow Mountain Thane a little more freedom to cast Revenge with Revenge! procs.

  • Last Stand: Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes (from 3 minutes)

  • Bolster: Last Stand cooldown is reduced by 60 sec, and it grants you the Shield Block effect for its duration. In addition, Shield Wall also grants you Last Stand for its duration

    • Explanation: Outside of the Shield Block, which isn’t all that useful with all the ways we have of extending our Shield Block effect, Bolster feels sort of dead. In addition, Last Stand feels really bad as a 3-minute cooldown that heals and increases max HP by 30%. By comparison, Guardian Druids (all druids actually) have Renewal, which heals for 30% max hp on a 90 second cooldown. I know that it doesn’t increase maximum HP as well, but it still feels bad that this talent has double the cooldown for a similar effect. I think it would be significantly better if you allowed this effect to proc during Shield Wall to give it more uptime. This could also give life to the Unerving Focus talent as well!

  • Bloodborne (reworked): Reapplying a bleed effect now causes the affected enemies to also be dealt 6 seconds of the bleed damage (i.e. Deep Wounds and Rend) instantly. This effect is reduced by 75% when applied by Devastator.

    • Explanation: The current iteration of Bloodborne, besides being a massive talent sink, is one of the most boring and uninspired talents in the entire tree for Protection Warrior. I think you have an obvious way to make this talent cool by making it do something with bleeds. For this, I drew inspiration from the Internal Combustion talent that Destro Locks have which does something very similar to this.

  • Battering Ram (reworked): Shield Slam critical strikes reduce the cooldown of Shield Charge by 6 seconds.

    • Explanation: In it’s current state, Battering Ram feels bad to play (like most +X% damage/crit/etc talents). The 11.1 Prot Warrior tier set, however, looks very interesting. Reducing the cooldown of Shield Charge provides both offensive and defensive benefits for Prot War in the form of more Shield Block uptime for free (with Champion’s Bulwark), more Revenge! procs and more Rage generation. I would like to see this tier set intergrated into the talent tree in some way after Season 2 of TWW is over (similar to what you did with Arcane Mages with their S1 tier set for TWW, which is now a talent). The 6-seconds per Shield Slam crit looks steep, but keep in mind the tier set also nearly guarantees crits for Shield Slam during the Jackpot! buff with a +75% crit chance buff to Shield slam for 12 seconds. If I take away that 75% crit chance and assume a reasonable 25% base crit chance for Shield Slam, then I should have the same total number of crits as that tier set in ~48 seconds, except that the tier set reduces the cooldown by 12 seconds instead of 6 seconds. Regardless of what number is chosen, I would like to see this tier set in the future because the CDR on Shield Slam is very good.
1 Like
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The real problems plaguing protection warrior design atm is the current overcentralisation on excessive rage generation and no cooldown on ignore pain incentivising players to play builds with increased resource generation to consistently spam ignore pain for CDR of offensive cooldowns.

Nothing you’ve suggested leads to a net drop in APM which at the cause of it all is excessive Ignore Pain casts.

It’s kinda fine as is for Colossus, adding another modifier to Demolish to keep track of isn’t exactly intuitive for the spec as it would lead to annoying gameplay where you’ve already built your 10 stacks, and now you have to waste CDR to build up an additional Violent Outburst to stack ontop of Colossal Might.

Even though yes the damage of a Violent Outburst Thunderclap is less than a fully mod stacked Revenge, you’re still benefiting the free ignore pain to fuel into more revenge spamming for Brutal Vitality value.

Could be alright but the protection tree suffers in it’s talent economy in the final section of the tree where you’ll mostly want to path into the passive increases and then pathing into Indom, Booming Voice, Shield Charge and Champ’s Bulwark leaving only 2 free points to then spend into options like Violent Outburst, BSV, Ravager or doubling back and picking up something you’ve missed earlier in the tree such as Distrupting Shout.

Not sure it needs a rework as much as a change to a 1 talent point node as opposed to the current 2 pointer it is to invest in so it ends up being a viable pathing option if you don’t have a need for spell block.

3

You’re right; I had an initial idea to make Ignore Pain a passive that casts whenever you spent a total of 35 rage (i.e. casting Shield Block or Revenge) rather than an actual button but I felt that people wouldn’t like that.

4

Honestly even if some people will not like the oGCD gameplay being turned down a notch to a more reasonable level, it would definitely be the play for the spec to be in less of a degenerative state where it’s just overflowing with it’s resource and never really interacting with it.

Few things come to mind how this could be fixed, these ideas also fall into an idea where the rage cost is removed from IP/shield block entirely, rage is reduced income wise and is only spent on offensive abilities.

Something along the lines of 9s recharge (hasted cooldown, or 6s cd if haste doesn’t effect it at all), 3x charge cap, all charges are consumed on keypress and provides a decent sized ignore pain per stack consumed with a 30s duration. Brutal Vitality would be key in this sort of set-up where your on GCD damage dealt while you’re in the ignore pain will keep adding to it’s value, while also cutting down APM tremendously if played smart since you wouldn’t need to be hitting IP as many times throughout a minute.

Another variant could be something of 12s recharge, 2x charge cap, one charge used per keypress. Same deal of 30s duration per IP so the whole Brutal Vitality synergy but this would also allow for IP to be pressed a little more often (every 12s on cooldown if you so choose) and would still meet a similar aim of reducing that off GCD gameplay.

Realistically Prot Wars alongside Bears and Prot Pallys do have degenerative gameplay with their oGCDs making them quite a bit more spammy than their other counterparts and do need proper reworks in transitioning them to be less ADHD in their gameplay and providing more weight to GCD gameplay while still having oGCD defensives that aren’t spammed the most out of every other ability count wise.

5

say that again

6

You don’t think so?
I like hitting giga-Thunder Blasts that do 10 million damage on 10 targets with that buff

1 Like
7

sorry, was making a lame Fant4stic reference lmfao

8

This seems excessive. Thane Revenge already hits for more than a base Arms Execute and Colossus Revenge rapidly scales to the same. If you want a bigger split between ST and AoE spammables (and tbf, that would mostly just mean nerfing Revenge unless throwing intertank balance out the window), that’d predominantly come from allowing Devastate to be an option vs. Devastator, such as by reducing Rage generation (and perhaps again scaling Ignore Pain into Rage range or an initial activation cost + reserved drain cost).
…And why have there be zero damage benefit for 2-target hits?

Why? This just feels like a way to try to push Thane over Colossus and push even more Rage gen and Demo Shout uptime.

Would honestly rather see LS added to AM (making LS feel less insignificant a cooldown in itself) or dropped 90s or 120s CD baseline and otherwise just see this talent left as is, but I wouldn’t hate this either.

Unless this consumes said duration (and still largely so even then), this just seems a wonky way to add damage to the 2nd+ attack (and, if balanced around, to nerf our first attack). It doesn’t change our gameplay beyond that.

I’d be fine with this. Gives more reason to drop one of the other capstones for full focus on Shield Charge for a change, or a more purely burst-offensive option for a singular augment.

9

I would kinda hate this. I like being able (and, even if I hate it at the time, the fact that I can be forced briefly) to turtle.

I wouldn’t mind seeing it removed from Shield Block in favor of a bit less Rage overall.

I’d rather IP just spend 50% of Rage over 20–60 to mitigate for a higher max duration and cap, consuming excess Rage over 40. E.g., at 40 Rage, it’d spend 20, and at 110+ Rage, it’d spend 70. And then allow for capstones that buff the hell out of Brutal Vitality to allow for juicy IP windows opposite our extendable Shield Block windows.

  • Maybe even have it so that while in Battle Stance, a portion of the remaining Ignore Pain shield can be spent by your attacks to increase their damage, assuming we ever even out their ratios again (e.g., return Prot stances to the Arms/Fury versions and tune its passive defense and offense around that nerfed Defensive Stance).

Orrrrr… hell, if we’re to make those skill into CDs… at least allow Rage to be spent for early cooling / CD-“Rush” of Shield Block and Spell Reflect —and perhaps even Ignore Pain and Revenge (each placed on CD but able to gain a charge from effects that currently make it free).

Agreed, though I feel that all multi-point nodes should just allow pathing through them after the first point. In that way, they can essentially combo the most obvious augmenting node into the same space, vastly improving talent tree pathability overall.