Agreed. In SoD it’s weird because we don’t have our 51 talents. In MC and BWL we could get Bloodthirst and Defiance. And the dps didn’t have broken runes to push back against us.
If Prot spec has always been that bad it makes me wonder why, so far, nothing in SoD has been changed to improve that. I would love to see a rune or buff to incentivize shield blocking or some other form of defense. Going to swap to Fury talents and give it a shot. I just don’t see how people are saying mitigation is not necessary. I had 50% physical damage mitigation with nearly 3.5k armor and a shield in a Gnomer and was still getting slapped constantly for 300-500 damage hits. That’s a lot of damage for the healers to keep up with. If I wasn’t wearing a shield those numbers would be 400-700 damage.
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I would absolutely love to see something like
Rune of Riot Shield/Spiked Shield/Mirror Shield (etc, that sort of thematic): While wearing a shield in defensive stance, reflects 10% of all incoming damage back at the attacker, causing a high amount of threat. Successful blocks reflect 50% of the blocked damage.
Could be a useful form of mitigation even for PvP to swap to a sword and shield when being focus-fired. But if you wanted to make it prot exclusive (which I personally would) you could make it require Shield Slam or another deep Prot talent or number of points in Prot.
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Protection warrior with titans grip is the only way I play, Not on SoD of course…
That deep protection needs more block rating to hold threat better. Shockwave would be great to help with aoe threat. Add bigger threat mods to just about everything.
I think Shockwave would actually hurt us by stunning mobs and thus reducing incoming aggro for threat generation. Would probably be decent for PvP situations though. 100% agree on increasing threat modifiers. I don’t wanna hold aggro by being a better DPS than the DPS, I wanna hold aggro by having high aggro-causing abilities based on being a tank spec.
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Bears and sword/board warriors would gain great benefit to an increase of double the amount of enemies hit with their aoe threat ability (ie swipe and thunderclap) amd increase either its scaling (as in the new buff to druids if 10%ap isnt enough) or give it scaling.
Make a rune, that both can do together thats maybe the head or the weapon for druids and the head and or shield for the warriors
They need uncapped AoE threat, period. The general expectation seems to be to hold threat while [insert OP DPS AoE ability] kills everything. This isn’t going to change, no matter how hard the other group roles or developers want it to, and results in aggro all over the place.
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Some times they hit for 600-1000 when you going for the last 2 bosses. Block dont mitigate enough for the rage value and it feel a waste of rage when you can use it to generate threat. Blizzard have to fix Protection Warriors.
Protection warrior is fun on paper (sword and board) but is poorly executed in WoW Classic. Season of Discovery was supposed to be an holy grail for it (reason why I subbed back) but it truly is not. Blizzard gave us phase 1 and now they want us to go fury prot and abandon our shield (due to threat).
The better shield carrier is sadly shaman in this case since they gain the armor benefit of shield the most (lower diminishing return by stacking armor on mail vs plate) while still being crit immune. They pull incredible threat and got -10% dmg flat.
With the buff to Devastate, do you think Prot warrior is any more viable than before? I’m thinking no. The change to weapon DPS made Devastate do 25% of it’s original damage in Phase 1.
Using Phase 2 as an example,
~Best 1-hand weapon damage = 115
~Best 1-hand weapon DPS = 34
Devastate buff of 100% weapon DPS to 150% weapon DPS is hardly a buff at all.
The buff would make a 34 DPS weapon do baseline 51 damage Devastate hits, which is still LESS THAN HALF of what it originally did when it was based on weapon damage. Kind of insulting really.
They’re kinda just screwed this phase, for the reason they’ve always been screwed pre level 50.
Rage Gen.
Protection needs love. They need to generate about 100% more threat than they currently do to be viable with how much damage output DPS can do in SoD.
I went full fury and tanked last boss gnomer yesterday and it was ok. I was squishier than I would have liked with only 1 block per shield block and lower mitigation, but with Alpha my threat was fine (our shaman healer had to sacrifice some healing capability to give me alpha).
I watched some videos about rotations and runes and dps… the “math” says that you can fury tank with a shield, spam devastate, adrenaline rush and slam and do pretty awesome dps for a tank… however I HATE that this is the argument people are making.
My enjoyment from tank does not come from maximizing my damage output. It comes from controlling the battle field. If i have to swap out Warbringer for Flagelation, and swap out furious thunder for consumed by rage, then I give up a ton of that control for that dps.
I also would rather focus on improving my survivability to make life easier on the healers so they can perhaps participate more in damage rather than making their job harder so I can join the parse game. This is a great example of the negative effect of parsing.
Some people literally feel like the only way to play this game is to look at a dps sim and just follow it, but the sim can’t account for the little things that make me enjoy tanking… such as my threat and survivability being the thing that helps my party live where we might have otherwise died.
I would like to go deep prot and still tank. That’s what the tree is for… fighting with others for the objectively “best” way to tank is so tiring.
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Deep prot is in an okay place and having an objectivaly best tank spec isn’t a great thing as warrior as a class has tanking talents sprinkled around the trees. Deep prot should be better at mitigation and fury or arms should be better damage while being about equal for threat.
The problem is the need for mitigation isn’t as valued as the want for damage and the threat balance is slightly off with devastate being the only dial they use to tune it.
A rune that triggers a buff/aura depending on the capstone ability being used would be a good way to reward each spec without eating up 3 seperate rune slots.
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