I recently started playing Warrior, and I saw on reddit that protection warrior is the best tank for mythic+. I thought it was bad, but I guess not. My question is what makes it so good?
2 Likes
Check out warcraftlogs. Look under tank damage and you’ll see where Prot Warrior stands in regards to damage. All tanks can tank a +10 and most up to +15. Some can push +20. That’s where Prot Warrior is at right now, pushing +20. If I went toe to toe with a Prot Warrior as Frost, possibly even Blood, I ain’t walking away…
Their biggest weakness is magic damage (they can only block one source with Spell Reflect) and the fact that they are nearly as reliant on a healer as BrM! They excel at taking down reaping mobs fast, though I am curious to see who handles the next seasonal affix better!
Prot Warrior is indeed the next tank class I’m rolling!
1 Like
Every tank can tank +22.
They’re the least healer-reliant tank except for prot paladin.
Well, it’s the damage. And the spell reflect. And Safeguard, and being able to facetank anything.
1 Like
In the current iteration of M+ with the reaping affix, Prot excels at AoE dmg and blocking high physical hits. Kind of the perfect storm really with this affix. I average 18-22k overall dps during an M+ but past that spell reflect can do a considerable amount of damage to tyrannical bosses, the 4th boss in WM,First boss in UR, and a few others.
Ignore pain also being off the gcd now just fuels prots survivablity and makes it play much smoother in this iteration. Another thing is azerite traits, Bastion of Might can double or even triples your mastery boost your avatar damage window to insane heights.
Many people dismissed the warrior at the start of the expansion myself included i’m glad i picked it up again for season 2, there is a slight learning curve but once you get past it you’ll be able to see great results. If you need more in-depth guides or anything head over to Icy-veins or the prot discord channel and have fun before they inevitably nerf it.
For starters protection warriors are specifically an elite type of soldier called a “vanguard”. Vanguard increases your stamina by %60 and armor by %45 based on str.
Furthermore we are masters of the shield, excelling the only other class that can wield a shield by our excellent blocking abilities, shield block, giving you a 100% block chance.
We can fight through the pain, and depending on gear, Azerite and talents I have been able to create an absorb well up to the 70-90k range. We are massive damage sponges and are proactive in our mitigation, planning ahead.
Now what makes us stand out? Our ability to do massive amounts of damage allowing us to hold mobs tight and control the flow of battle. In all dungeons I am expected to lead and stay alive during the toughest of pulls. Using our couple of stuns and one fear carefull calculation is needed, we don’t have cheats like mass grip or battle Rez.
Why is protection warrior good? That’s like asking why is the sky blue, it just is and has always been. I hear the QQ already from dk’s monks and dh’s. We are by no means broken and have quite a skill requirement in order to tank at this level.
I’ll keep it short. Amazing physical mitigation, great magic mitigation in small bursts but lacking a bit otherwise, pretty good overall mitigation with constant rotating big CDs like Demo Shout, Shield Wall, Rallying Cry and Last Stand. Has decent utility with Intimidating Shout, Shockwave/Storm Bolt, fear immunity with Berserker Rage and the small slow built into Thunder Clap. High mobility means easy kiting if needed. In M+ we really shine due to our insanely high burst AoE damage as well. I can easily surpass 100k dps on reaping or really large pulls. Azurite traits are pretty important though.
It is the cheese BoMx3 Avatar build that makes Warrior super fun.
With their CD, every pull is BIG BIG BIG pull every 3-4mins.
I mean, how often do you see 80k+ DPS on a tank character before the stats squash?
So if you run with a combination of a Rogue/DH/Monk, M+ is fun because everyone knows they will be seeing insane numbers for their log collection.
Avatar is less than a 1m cd.
Subjective.
DK with bonestorm, pally with Seraphim+AM+IV+SS, hell even bear druid can with Wild Fleshrending.
Triple melee is not a good idea.
they were terrible in early BFA and blizz noticed so they buffed them. They excel in mitigating physical damage in multiple ways though they are weak against magic damage. Some tanks rely on self healing or other utilities but prot warriors excel in straight up reducing incoming physical damage which obviously is very good since most damage is physical. Not to mention they deal surprisingly high damage for a tank and decent aoe as well.
Every tank but paladin is weak against magic.
They were never that bad. Played properly, they always excelled at blockable physical damage. But IP on the gcd, lower Block uptime, and lower armor/hp, made even a slight mistake punishing enough to kill you. That’s the biggest difference.
They’re a lot more forgiving to bad play now.
1 Like
most tanks do take magic dmg as much as other tanks but the thing is other tanks have other defensive utilities that help them with magic damage they would take when warrior is oriented on block which is great for physical damage but does not work on magic.
As it was, maybe they weren’t that bad, who knows, but if one were to compare them with other options, they were definitely bottom tier but hey, all’s good now
Spell reflect? Ignore pain, specifically with a bloodsport.
yes they are nice
The only tanks that actively have no real way to handle magic is DH and bear. They fall over anyway though, so it’s akin to kicking a dead horse.
What can you reflect from 4th boss? I didn’t know.
Wasting strike or something along those lines.
Thank you! I only knew that you could spell reflect third boss in motherlode but that was it.
Wasting strike, yes. It’s part of what makes prot so ridiculously good for tyrannical waycrest. Higher level keys, the Waycrest fight begins to outscale even Coven, in regards to damage output and healing required. Wasting strike hits the tank like a miniature freight train. Reflecting every other one is huge.
1 Like
While not a mythic plus… being able to spell reflect the dot portion of grongs throw is a huge help also. As warrior my job is typically to eat the throw assuming we dont get slammed with the smash x3 combo. The spell reflect is too strong in combination with the mobility the spec has.
This is just 1 specific example. It should be noted that every tank in the game is capable of every piece of content. That isnt saying that its not harder for certain tanks to do certain things. For instance DH. It may have very little in the form of magic resistance increasing abilities… but its base magic mitigation is higher than any other tank. Fiery brand is probably the worst mitigation ability in the game for multitarget fights… but when it comes to tanking a ST magic damage boss DH has plenty of room for error.
My current guilds MT is a blood DK and my warrior takes more specific assignments. That said there are some fights I wish my warrior wasnt getting burnt to a crist on jadefire cough. I am going to start gearing this again so I can utilize the DHs strong points. A lot of people will disagree with this but I think DH is the ideal off tank. Built to soak massive hits periodically. Can you MT grong the entire fight on a DH? It’s not ideal. Would the DH do what my role in that fight has already become? Sure.
Sadly though I am in a unique position of being in a guild that is trying to push further into mythic with a healing team that is full of people who want to parse and view tank healing as a necessary evil. Tank slots dont open often so I will try to meld my style to them. If it means taking a tank that can look after it’s own hp a bit it will be worth it.
Sorry this became a bit of an off topic rant.
All tanks are good for what they are designed for. Warrior currently is designed to stop incoming damage soak up a moderate amount of healer mana and be the BD deeps every ground wants for massive aoe (reaping). Sadly if they nerf warrior because it’s great at one affix they are doing a huge disservice and proving how ignorant they are to their own design.
If reaping weren’t a thing monk and DK would be top tanks in MDI instead.
The main thing that makes Prot warrior so preferred for mythic+ is that our damage is overtuned right now by more than a little bit, there are a few situations where spell reflect is a bit brokenly good (less of an issue, because most tanks have at least a couple situations in mythic+ where some ability of theirs is strikingly good), the amount of threat we put out is enormous, and the amount of we take runs anywhere from reasonable compared to other tanks to a bit on the low side.
The overall effect is that, for an organized group (that isn’t some sort of niche comp that makes it a special case), the typical difference between running a mythic+ with a prot warrior and some other comparably geared tank is not small (getting bigger as the keys go higher), and is very much in the warrior’s favor. There’s some variation depending on dungeon, affixes, etc, but there’s definitely a broad trend.
It’s probably all intentional. Blizzard developers have admitted in the past that sometimes they deliberately overtune something to help shift player perception. There was a weird delusion during season 1 that prot warrior was ridiculously bad (it wasn’t, it wasn’t at the top, but it was midrange relative to the other tanks). Chances are that they’ve overtuned us a bit for now, and they knew before 8.1 even came out that they were going to have to nerf it back down a bit later to bring it into a reasonable range for the longer term. (Spell reflect, however, is a somewhat separate issue and may eventually have to be addressed in some way because it’s only getting better as we push into higher and higher keys and it may eventually cross the line from “possibly a bit much” to “seriously broken”)