Curious to gather some information from the Warrior community regarding Prot hyrbid or even deep Prot spec in the current state of Phase 2. I personally love the playstyle of feeling like a true “tank” with having massive HP pools and sheer armor/ defensive capabilities. My only complaint right now is that with the Devastate nerf it feels pretty tough to generate enough threat to be viable. I understand WHY it was nerfed and I’m okay with that. I agree Prot Warriors should not be competing on DPS meters by spamming Devastate. I do however feel compensation is needed somewhere to buff the threat generation since the Devastate nerf dealt a huge blow to rage generation. I think a good option to consider is buff the amount of rage generated from shield block. Shield blocking itself feels worthless as the amount of damage mitigated is almost negligible. Currently a shield block costs 10 rage and awards 1 rage on successful block (2 if you have the talent to block an additional attack.) With a common block value of 30, a successful block negates 30 physical damage. When bosses are hitting for 300-500 in Gnomeregan for example, it feels like shield blocking is pointless. If shield block’s rage cost was reduced, block value dramatically increased, or rage generated for successful blocked was increased, it would help with overall rage generation leading to using more abilities to generate more threat. I have a lot of rambling thoughts on this. Just curious to hear from some others.
They are in a better spot then Rogues or Bears, but worse off then Paladins or Warlocks IMO.
I think the devastate nerf was dumb to. But as far as threat goes warriors pretty middle of the pack.
Warrior is still the best single target threat, they just don’t spec deep prot because that isn’t the threat spec, it’s the mit spec.
There are fury warriors tanking. But prot is dead imo.
The devastate nerf hurt
People weren’t running prot for the Devastate build back in P1 either.
My Prot warrior MT is having a great time.
(Even he thought that Devastate needed a nerf, despite how much it hurt. It was doing WAY too much damage)
My first trip into gnomer is with my guild tomorrow night so I can’t speak to that experience yet. What I can speak to is that Warrior threat needs a big boost. Just using dungeon spam as an example, if I didn’t have a Shaman or at very least a feral in group…I wouldn’t have enough rage to even use devastate in the first several seconds. I’ve seen shaman tanks while running on my alts that can literally hold threat while afk. Somehow they got the alpha buff though? I dunno, having major regrets about sticking with my Warrior personally. Hoping things improve but if not there is always my crew of toons sitting on era to go back to.
You must have some high DPS 
What I’ve gathered from my own thread and those of others is that Deep Prot is dead until we get content that hits too hard for Fury or Arms to tank it. Warrior in its current state requires DPS talents and DPS gear to generate enough threat per second to hold aggro without throttling the raid’s DPS unless you have the Shaman buff to boost all your threat gen by 40%.
Warriors have never been good at AoE threat, and are notoriously difficult dungeon tanks before coming online with end of phase gear. You either tank with sweeping strikes and a 2h early phase, or you tell your DPS to chill out and give you a second to do your thing (gl with these players).
Warriors are single target threat powerhouses with great mitigation options. That’s their niche. There’s nothing to fix, this is how Classic works.
You see that talent tree on the right hand tab called Protection? Just act as if that doesn’t exist, then you’re doing great.
Also, those items called shields? Get an addon that shows the disenchant value so you can determine whether or not to DE or vendor them.
I am aware of how warriors tanked in vanilla and I still run a fury prot on era. This is not either of those anymore and every silly tweak to other classes makes that argument less relevant. I wanted this to be a “classic+” feel and to some degree it has that. Unfortunately to a larger degree it feels like “retail light”. In classic for example you don’t have warlocks or shamans holding ae threat while eating a cheeseburger and clicking with the other hand. I’m not trying to start an argument. I’d rather have a discussion. In order to do that, you gotta stop comparing classic to SoD. The deviance from standard classic play is already too far to make like to like comparison.
Sure but with sunder costing 3 less rage and 10% more damage when using a one hander old devastate could have pop’d off.
I’m still trying to make this work. Tried the axe/crit 1h build. It does pretty good on ST but multi is a challenge w/o Alaph/WF(S). Now trying the sword/extra attack arms build. It feels pretty good so far but rage gen is low. Would really like to tank like a tank… and have a shield but all signs point to fury working best. Going to give that a test this afternoon also. I’d like to parrot all the others also in saying, forget the prot tree right now as it is garbo.
prot spec has always been bad, especially for leveling
they should have done more work making it better. a rune that adds damage to concussion blow, maybe.
I kinda wish deep protection had an advantage.
Well I was making the melee hunter sweat his top spot… with a twin RB enhance.
A consistent rage generator would help.
SoD is a season of Classic, so no, I’m not gonna ignore that. Trivializing threat by removing the mitigation - threat tradeoff is the most retail-lite change they could make. You don’t get free threat because you have the most health. That’s not how RPGs work.
Old devastate was popping off without any of that added benefit.
Duh! So is holy for priests. It’s a spec for group content.
It has advantages… to protection.
It exists and its called damage.