I was really hoping for Blood and Thunder + Blood Frenzy, or for the free version of Devastate that was basically our main filler dealing damage and sundering that we had in… Legion, I think? Maybe WoD? Been a while so I’m not certain when we had it, just that we did.
People (likely in reply to this comment) would complain that having a free spammable devastate would be abused for DPS by DPS warriors, or would make tank warriors do too much damage… but if the alternative is tank warriors speccing DPS and wearing DPS gear anyway, um… what’s the difference?
I believe what would be a good fix is a costless Attack that generates 15-20 rage. Something that could be relatively spammed or cycled in to help smooth out Rage Generation when stuff isn’t going so well.
Maybe tie it to Devastate for Prot Warriors specifically, so they have something to reliably build rage.
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Yeah, I’ve had this thought before as well.
Even looking at classic.
You make sunder cost zero rage and tanking would have been so much better and, imo, not broken.
If you’re spamming sunder for threat you don’t do any damage. Now SoD devastate changes that but with the nerfs to devastate if it cost zero rage you wouldn’t be breaking the meters either.
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I feel like this is how a lot of people played Warrior tanks back when I first started playing WoW, and it was super frustrating for everyone. They couldn’t get rage, weren’t getting hit, and took a long time to get aggro, then got rage starved.
While personally, I feel that warriors are in a pretty good place right now, and that’s only going to get better as the phase goes, I suppose that for people who like the deep Prot Warrior fantasy, they could do something with Shield Slam where maybe it does an AoE effect, increasing threat generated by number of targets hit, and generating rage based on magic effects dispelled, or something like that.
That would give a reason to go deep prot in P2, (you have to to get the 31 point talent), give a block-tank, AoE threat, single stance, easy-to-play style rather than the stance-dancing, master-of-arms playstyle we have now (which I really like personally).
Checking Warcraft Logs for SOD Phase 2 and filtering by warrior tank, I’m seeing a common theme of using sword/ shield but going full Fury spec. Logs don’t show what talents specifically are being selected of course, so what do you think? Obviously the dual wield specialization is ignored, but are they choosing improved shouts over crit chance? As far as I know, improved cleave, blood craze, and improved slam are not worth the value.
I see a lot of DW fury with whirlwind in their damage. They are probably just in fury stance, dpsing. The damage most likely out performs on TPS versus the defiance talent in the prot tree.
I leveled as Prot 25-40 and did my first two Gnomeregans as Prot. It is currently unplayable and I think it’s due to itemization. It COULD be fine with just high attack power/crit gear with block value. If you could make Shield Slam a higher priority move, right now I would put it at about equal with Devastate if you’re running Focused Rage on your Waist slot because the rage spent:damage done is about equal. The problem in the original itemization of level 60 Classic Era is that all of the block value gear was coupled to high stamina, low damage-stat gear. You make high damage block value gear, you won’t have to do anything to Prot’s PvE. I personally want to see Prot be good at PvP and that’s a whole 'nother beast to slay.
We are. I tried out shield slam last week and it wasn’t worth it. Since you can one tank five of the six bosses easily, I was just standing around pushing devastate occasionally while the other tank MT’d.
I just don’t see how you can tank Gnomer bosses without a shield unless your healers are GODLY. I have 50% physical damage mitigation at around 3700 armor and still take 300-500 damage hits from bosses. Without the shield I feel like the healers would not be able to keep up. I’ve selected some random middle of the pack tanks in Warcraft logs and I’m seeing Melee, Bloodthirst, and Devastate being their top damage sources in that order. But the talent selection in the Fury tree is what I cannot pinpoint.
Warriors are just going DW fury prot again, at least we can thunderclap in defensive stance if we want to now. But other than that it is like 2019 again.
Devastate was nerfed to the ground, I was hoping prot was going to be like it was in TBC for SOD but it is a joke. TBC devastate was great, you could tank with it easily with a shield, and if you were not needed to tank, you could just toss on DPS gear, go berserker stance and DPS with devastate spam and whirlwinds and be decent damage, not pure DPS or fury damage but respectable.
Having devastate require defensive stance AND a shield was a bad move, leaving prot warriors to be basically useless if it was a 1 tank fight and they were not the main tank, then they nerfed it on top of that with devastate being a waste and it being better 100% of the time for the priest to debuff the bosses.
I’m assuming the best way to play in the current state is duel wield fury spec in defensive stance for trash packs and just throw on a sword and shield for boss fights to beef up the armor stats. Swap Single Minded Fury rune for Devastate on the boss fights.
Get a priest to do the debuffs, use endless rage if you are going to only have a shield on at least you will be able to hit more heroic strikes throughout the fight, I am constantly rage starved and doing nothing if I use devastate. You still get rage from wildstrikes and swings where you aren’t heroic striking to burn off rage
So Devastate just isn’t worth the value anymore at all?
I rarely used Heroic Strike because I barely had any excess rage between thunder clapping, rebuffing shouts, and shield blocking.
you might be able to throw a few more in with ER over devastate.
Fuey warriors have always tanked. I OTed MC, BWL and Aq in vanilla on warrior.
The original dungeon speedruns at 60 were with dual wield or 2h fury warriors, whod only swap sword and board for harder hitting bosses. Fury has always been lightyears ahead of prot for threat gen, but much worse for mitigation
Stone shield potions increase your armor by a lot.
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This would have been very broken in P1 but in tbc it was a lot of fun.
The problem is that nothing we’re doing right now, all the way to 40, hits hard enough to warrant much investment in prot trees. The tanks are better served bumping whatever help threats since dps’ers are even more brain dead and dps attention starved than ever.
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Exactly this. And with five of the six bosses in Gnomeregan being easily one tankable, you’re almost doing nothing if you are a prot warrior OT that isn’t bloodthirst.
Then you walk into the menagerie and you might be tanking the chicken and squirrel with no defiance talent with cracked out dps classes with powerful dps runes.