Update on tank warrior

In Development Season of Discovery Phase 4 PTR
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Hello there!

This post is written from the standpoint of PvE.

Most of the buffs for Protection warriors has broadly been well recieved. Shield Slam scaling with AP and Thunder Clap being able to hit 10 targets is super usefull compared to before - good changes! We’re also now able to hold consistant threat from DPS players which is a good step in the right direction.

Though, Im afraid it’s not quite enough.
If we compare a Warrior tank to any other tank on the alliance side the differences become very clear. (I’m excluding shaman tanks as i play alliance exclusively)

Warriors Thunder Clap is at the moment the most reliable aoe threat ability and does around 600dps on 5 targets, where rage is spent every cast.

Compare that to a Feral druids Swipe which is around 1.3k on 5 targets, With the Primal Fury talent and WB’s this ability will be giving them rage which makes druids able to do way more casts of their aoe ability.

Paladins, even with nerfs, are still way of the charts on both singletarget threat and aoe threat - and does more damage as tanks than some dps warrior specs.

Rogues, if not changed, will be unhittable, meaning they will have the strongest pseudo mitigation ever in the history of the game.

Warlock is a powerhouse for damage, threat and survivability.

In regards to raid-utility warriors also lacking.
Paladins bring a whole bunch of buffs and auras to the raid that can be crucial in certain instances (Fire res in MC).
Druid tanks may provide Wild strikes, MOTW, Thorns and innervate
Tank Warriors bring Battle shout/Commanding shout for 4 other raidmembers and that’s pretty much it.
Now with the recent changes warriors recieved “Valor of Azeroth” which indeed is someway to help us catch up, but a strange way of doing so in my opinion.

It feels like the dev team want all the new tanks to be better than Warriors in every single way.
At the moment I am actively griefing my guild tanking P4 on a warrior. Simply because warriors have no nieche. If warriors were to have the best single target threat, best utility, best AOE threat or the best mitigation - our lower dps would have a fair trade-off in my opinion. But for the moment warriors are undoubtly the worst tank in the game and if not fixed prot warriors, except in a guild environment, will never be chosen to tank anything, simply because we are leaps behind every other tank in the game.

Please let the ones of us who has dreams of tanking as a Prot warrior be able to live out that dream without feeling like a grief to our community. I don’t want massive dps as a deepprot warrior, but i want to feel useful and like a worthy pick.

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Which can just be done by the 1 dps warrior they bring.

IMO, warrior doesn’t need to be buffed, the more OP tanks need to be nerfed. They’re too powerful.

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Very good point!
I’d much rather have OP tanks nerfed, than having warriors getting buffed. Imo every tank shouldn’t be the best at everything, and I think nerfing other tanks would indeed bring out the differences in the tanks.

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I agree with OP. I made a post about this called “warrior tank - concerns” and made some of the following suggestions but they weren’t really well received but here they are in case you missed them.

If you change the threat modifier on gladiator stance from -30% to (+20% when defiance is known) Tank warriors will receive a flat +20% overall damage output and those wanting to DPS with a shield can just opt to not spec for additional threat and keep the -30% threat modifier.

There will still be a reason to change between stances:

  • Defensive stance: 10% more mitigation, 10% more threat. (over glad stance)
  • Gladiator stance: 20% more damage. (over d stance)

These seem like they’d be easy to implement and is a small step in the right direction. I find that mostly people reply to feedback here looking for an argument rather than just saying “Seems reasonable” or “I agree”. It’s the culture these days to find something to be outraged over.

So TL:DR - Seems reasonable, I agree with OP

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The niche of the warrior tank was always single target vs boss. We were never designed to be AoE tanks and I think the dev team is going in the wrong direction. We always ran a paladin or a druid as an off tank for trash in raid and a warrior as a main tank for the boss. High armor values/ mitigation and single target threat was always the appeal of the warrior and it’s being completely lost with these changes. The devs are still not listening to the community.

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The sims currently show DW Fury tanking will do 500-600 DPS more than Deep Prot Tank in the end of phase 4 with near BiS. The change I proposed would close the gap to around 200 DPS with DW Fury still doing significantly more damage but the exchange of DTPS for DPS seems like a more reasonable trade.

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I was pretty disappointed with the change to give Warriors AoE threat. “Everyone can do everything” is retail design, not classic.

Warrior should be the best single-target & small AoE tanks. Shaman/Paladin large AoE tanks. Druids in between. Warlock/Rogue meme dungeon tanks, not balanced for raiding.

They actually did this right for most of SoD but seem to be going backwards on the PTR.

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I agree with this. If we’re just talking about the three ‘traditional’ tank classes of warrior, druid, and pally I don’t think they really needed to do more than:

(1) give pallies a taunt
(2) give ferals a talent (w/ a cooldown) to mimic MCP so we didn’t have to live in gnomer

In my mind the warrior (once geared) was the primo MT, the druid was the flex tank, and pally was the AOE/pally bubble tricks tank. All of them could either MT or OT, but each had a distinct niche. As a feral, there were certain fights I wouldn’t want to do without a shield (Mograine) or shield wall (Maexxna), but I felt like a stud on other fights like Ouro or HS soaker on patch.

Now, it’s all just starting to get a bit weird lol. I mean it’s SOD so whatever, but I do think things are getting muddled

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The issue is the # of aoe abilities for all classes increased so much that the relative value of a tank that can hold aoe threat just increased to the point where you just wouldn’t bring a warrior to tank anything but a raid boss and at that point the difference in damage may not be enough for a raid to ever consider a warrior tank.

Warrior tank did the most damage in phase 3 but it generally felt like a smoother run if you just let a paladin tank the whole thing. They simply had more tools on top of insane aoe threat.

EDIT - Anyways I don’t see them reverting all those AOE abilities so a solution has to be dialed in and I really hope they dial in some kind of balance so that there isn’t a tank that clearly under/over performs the other tanks. With a long PTR I don’t think there is an excuse for too much imbalance.

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There are required tank swaps in ST. Meaning 2 tanks are needed.

Warrior + Paladin/Shaman should be the optimal tank setup. And then a Druid should have the ability to step in for either role and get the job done, but not quite as well or easily as the others.

That’s classic tank balance. As of the most recent PTR changes, it will disappear. Making everyone equal at everything is how they try to do it in retail, it doesn’t belong here.

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Hate to tell you but current state of Paladins in PTR don’t do anywhere near the dps of some dps warriors? Unless they literally have no clue how to play the class.

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Maybe at the beginning of the phase. By the end of the phase even many pug groups could do every boss with 1 paladin tank.

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A pug isn’t cheesing mechanics & tanking both mobs with one tank.

If it’s ever possible, the solution should be to “make stuff hit harder” not give every class the exact same abilities.

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Things can do similar things and feel unique to a class. The damage doesn’t need to be what creates class identity. For example, shadow bolt and frost bolt. They are basically the same thing yet warlocks aren’t upset that their too similar and it feels like retail. The argument that damage balance = class homogeny is a narrow mindset idea.

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Frostbolt and Shadow Bolt are actually very different. One slows enemy players. The other is pure damage. In practice, this leads to very different playstyles between the two classes.

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The slow was almost meaningless in a raid setting. The tank held the mob where it was, the abilities felt different for several reasons and the slow is pretty low on the list of things that make it feel different.

The animation was different
The sound was different
The tooltip graphic was different

There are many other such examples of this same scenario, shadow word:pain - corruption is just another example. There have always been abilities that are very similar between classes and they have always felt like they had class identity.

While there is an argument for damage playing some roll in class identity, I think it should be a minor difference when compared to other classes of the same archetype.

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That’s one scenario. His point still stands in many other scenarios that give the two abilities separate identities.

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If we are going down the every tank gets AOE threat road, then make Thunderclap scale. It feels bad having an ability that constantly gets worse as the game will progress.

Address rogue tanks reaching mitigation cap. Or is it intended that one tank will be unhittable in melee eventually?

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And you could use that very same argument for slight difference between the new tank abilities still distinguishing one from the other. They don’t need to do dramatically different amounts of damage to feel different and the bulk of their utility can be very similar while still feeling unique to the class.

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We’ve already seen the AOE threat thing play out before. The end result is that you have a button which might as well be named “Keep all AOE threat” and you just spam that.

The slippery slope is indeed real.