Unique POV From a Protection Warrior

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Hey all,

I’ve been playing Protection Warrior since phase 1. I also have been jumping around various high end and semi-hc guilds ever since MC so I’ve been able to experience Prot Warr with many different combinations of tanks, healers, and DPS. I feel as though this experience makes my feedback at least worth reading.

As we all know, Protection Warrior has been struggling with adding any value to a raid. We don’t bring raid wide buffs, our threat and damage are extremely lack luster, and our survivability is not good enough to make up for any of our other downfalls. Even if you have a skilled tank, they still cannot provide for your raid like other tanks can. To bring a Protection Warrior to your raid at this point is just a let down to your raid.

Now let me say that I love the Protection Warrior playstyle. It’s high apm, cooldown management, buff management, debuff management, “skill shots” with shockwave, and a large toolkit so there is a TON of room for skill expression. Especially with the Regicide and 6 Set bonus this phase (which is so insanely fun but so hard to play perfectly).

The problem is that, even when you’re playing at the highest level you are doing less than competitive DPS and TPS. Threat is even more of an issue this phase because we are barely outpacing Ashbringer Warriors even with a perfect opener!

I’ll be upfront that I’m not a game designer and I have not raided in WoW for that long (SoD is my first) so I don’t know the best ways to fix these issues. BUT I do have highly competitive parses and I’ve been in many different raid compositions so I think that these issues are real.

So the the meat and potatoes:

Best pwarr opener so far is: Shoot with Enrage active (1 Global), Charge in, Taunt, and Recklessness at the same time (2 Globals), Shield Slam (3 Globals), Rend (4 Globals), Shockwave (5 Globals) and after all of that you will BARELY be ahead of a well skilled Ashbringer Warrior.

5 Globals to get our rotation started, and the first few seconds is highly dependent on taunt still being active until Shockwave goes off or else you absolutely will lose threat (1st Shield Slam is not enough).

Compared to other tanks whose repeatable abilities (Searing Pain, Hammed/Shield of the Righteous) can hit multiple targets AND do more DPS/TPS than our main ability Shield Slam, it’s truly depressing.

These issues are just worse when trying to tank trash, it’s hardly worth trying to hold threat in raid from DPS.

I know you guys have made changes to help Protection Warrior and I can acknowledge the effort put into making the class fun, but the spec continues to struggle as it has been for a very, very, long time.

Thanks,
Abraxxås

2

I brought these issues up in the past and was told that I had no idea what I was talking about about and that Prot war is one of the best tanks in the game. Discord is the place to go not this cess pool. If they made a way for Prot to bring imp shout it would be a huge game changer but that req you to go into fury which is kinda a no go.

3

Yeah it’s definitely not true. Don’t get me wrong we have a large tool kit but none of them do enough to warrant bringing a warrior to your raid.

Can’t main tank because other tanks have to AFK to let us have threat, can’t off tank well because we can’t rip adds off of DPS without taunt (rage is also an issue here)

4

Yeah at the high end Prot war is probably the worst tank atm. It’s very sad and they definitely need a buff maybe even an overhaul to make them feel more competitive.

5

Warriors have been global locked since p4 and yet every other class can use the trinket that reduces GCD. Crazy!

6

I completely agree.
Even with the latest buffs we’re still behind of every single tank, in threat and mitigation.
It’s not surprising that so many tanks are leaving warriors to tank with other classes.

Rage can still be an issue.
Our runes are extremely boring and underpowered and list goes on and on.

7

Not to mention our offensive cd (we need to keep up in threat) makes us take 20% more dmg. The 4pc even buffs it by making it last 12seconds longer