/delurk (again)

Hello fellow Lurkers!

After an extended period of read-only activity I'm back with a few thoughts and questions about tanking (the only way to play!) with the new talents that are going to be availabe with the next patch. I have come up with various builds that should work and now hope for some theorycraft (/point Concillian ) and experience reports from the Beta.

Here's the profile of my warrior Tarabulus. His gear is decent if not the optimal mix (too much block rating), but I reckon I should have no problems tanking early WotLK instances.

Here's what I came up with as tanking build for the patch, pre-WotLK:
5/5/51 Shockwave build

Some thoughts on it: No Incite and no Puncture? I went for Imp. Disciplines and Imp. Spell Reflection to boost the strenghts of tanking warriors, the reduced damage from spells and the nigh-invulnerability of Shield Wall (which gets a nice shorter cooldown). Rage generation is usually no problem in a raid environment, if I were tanking mostly 5-man Heroics I might go for Incite/Puncture to help with rage and threat generation.

My question: With the changes to threat (more from damage, less from modifiers), is this the right way to go? Does anybody have experience with comparable gear in instances and can comment on how important maximum damage output is going to become for tanking? I've read some Insider articles about tanking and healing in the Beta, but I have trouble relating to the information given without at least SOME experience of my own with the new mechanics and encounters.

The Warbringer/Shockwave combination looks nice on paper, at least to me. Def. stance Charge, Thunderclap and Shockwave looks to be a nice opener for some AoE tanking, that should be less difficult (if also less fun) for warriors post-patch. Anybody been trying it out and can comment on it?

Vigilance was mainly taken to try out the skill, aside from protecting the ever-pulling Enhancement and Fury aggro-monkeys from an early demise, it just really fits the tanking theme for my character.

I am going to level to 80 in prot spec, even though the damage output is certainly going to be adjusted downwards. Incite and Puncture look nice for that, also Armoured to the Teeth. I was hoping somebody could enlighten me as to whether AttT (argl, that looks silly) has a chance to overtake Cruelty for damage output/threat generation with my level of armor rating? (hm, not sure if the last sentence was proper English) I really am no good with numbers.

Thanks in advance

take care
Tarabulus

*EDITs: typos

Punture and Incite are better than Imp. Disciplines and Imp. Spell Reflection, no question.

Vigilance is also bad. Now that it has the threat siphon, it's better, but people are reporting absolutely INSANE threat. I honestly doubt it'll be necessary, which makes it completely useless.

Now that Imp. Thunder Clap is in Prot, you can take points out of Shield Specialization instead of Anticipation.

I'm going with this build at 70, then probably something like 8/8/55 at 80.

I doubt AttT is going to be better than Cruelty even at 20k+ armor values. At 20,000 armor, you get 50 STR from the talent. In order to get 3% crit at level 70, you need 66 crit rating. 1 crit rating costs the same as 1 STR.

You should also know that most of your gear is getting reitemized; while that will hurt in some places, you're also going to lose a bit of Block Rating for STR on your boots.

Thanks for your input!

take care
Tarabulus

I can make calculations at some point, but I need some meaningful values for what a badge / T5 / Hyjal tank looks like on PTR.

It might be competitive when you consider that STR is now 0.5 SBV per point. SBV used to be better than STR for pure threat. Since then STR gains:
over 10x more SBV
~15% more damage on devastate, Shield slam and heroic strike than it used to (due to talents that increase crit% on those abilities by 15%.)

My gut is that armored is going to be the better choice.

Anyone have a prot warrior on the PTR with decent gear? I need:
SBV
AP
STR
Armor
I was going to calc using Unbreakable Will as the weapon since this should be pretty "baseline" right now.

I can't use my warrior, because his tanking gear is Kara epics mixed with S4 gear. He has like 1500 AP and 20% crit in his tanking gear... on live =P. Not exactly representative.

If Vigilance is bad, then the threat mechanics are broken, full stop.

-Jester

True but I think it is still a nice to have talent, especially since spell damage is what hurts a tank the most.


I think it's a bad idea though. Improved shield spec = the best way for a warrior to get rage when AOE tanking. Now that we CAN aoe tank. If I was going that route I would pass on anticipation first.

I also think people are too big on cruelty, its great now but incite and sword and board bring your crit up a lot there. Besides you said yourself threat was already super boosted so there isn't a need for it. I'm thinking something more like this: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=LVZ0xZMItMxczibIzsGo The few things you lack can be picked up on the way to 80.

You're comparing one point in AttT to 3 points in Cruelty? 3/3 AttT is 159 Str with 20k armor and 3/3 Vitality. With Kings as well, it goes up to 174 strength.

D'oh! You're absolutely right. Mea culpa. In that case, AttT all the way.


Jester, no; that's not necessary -- if Vigilance has a serious effect, it's still just as bad because then either a) we're balanced (with the other tanks) around having it, which means we're subpar without it, or we're balanced without it, which means we're overpowered with it. Vigilance is just period a bad idea.

We've now changed the parameters of what we're talking about, no? Your original claim is that it's a bad ability, as in "Even if you can take this, you shouldn't, because it sucks." Now it has morphed into "Vigilance is a bad idea on Blizzard's part because it can't be balanced", which may be correct, but it has no bearing on whether the talent is worth taking or not.

-Jester

I did preface it with, "If Vigilance has a serious effect"; i.e. if threat IS affected enough by Vigilance to make a difference. I doubt it will, but even if it does, Vigilance is still bad.

I'm looking at http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=Lcrc0bZhxZVIzrgbzibIdoGo keeping in mind I favor PvP much more over PvE.

I can't see taking Vigilance. Alleria hit the nail on the head when he said that it's a bad idea. Back when it was 5% Dodge, I might have considered it - better to dodge the Mortal Strike and eat the Overpower than be stuck with the healing debuff. But now that it's just a paltry -3% damage? No thanks - I've got Safeguard for burn protection.

I'll need to do some testing, but I don't think Iron Will will be worth taking unless you're an orc. 20% off the longest stun I can think of (Hammer of Noob/Kidney Shot, which are both six seconds) is only 1.2 seconds... hardly worth three talent points that can be better spent. Charge, especially with the glyphs available for it (+5 yards to range and -20% to cooldown, for a 12 second timer), will now be pretty damn nice - every 12 seconds, I have the option of instantly getting 25 Rage - no more need for improved Bloodrage. I'm not sure how many Enrage effects are around (I know bears and Warriors make frequent use of them), but Rend's supposedly getting much better with the expansion, and even though the base damage is fairly low, quadruple damage against Enraged targets isn't anything to sniff at.

I do not think I'll be using Improved Heroic Strike, given that Revenge (which I use on everyone except Warriors with Second Wind) can now proc a free Heroic Strike with the proper glyph. More Parry is handy, since your base avoidance values will be somewhat low in PvP gear (I sit at about ~8% dodge, 11% parry, and about 15% block in mostly PvP gear with a couple of tanky pieces used primarily for extra block value) and you have to dodge/parry/block in order to proc Improved Defensive Stance.

Having to sink three more points into Fury means I lose Critical Block, but I think that's more of a PvE talent, anyway. More crit chance on Shield Slam would be nice, but AttT is much better.

With a 40 second Shield Block and 20 second Shockwave, it'll already be very easy to control how much damage I take from physical sources, and because I won't need to worry about finding gear with block value on it (instead relying on a much better STR:Block value ratio, and there's already tons of STR on PvP gear) I don't need to worry as much about the bonus crit - PvP gear is already loaded with it.

Word of advice, though - never Shockwave when Shield Block is active. At least, not in PvE; you're wasting the extra mitigation afforded by the free blocks if they're stunned.

And, continuing the loop, if the threat generated by DPS or healing is not close enough to tank threat that a moveable 10% threat buffer is not valuable enough to spend 1 talent point on, then the threat mechanics are busted. In that case, warriors would be generating far too much threat.

3% damage and taunt refresh is just icing. It's having an extra salv effect that's valuable. Unless, of course, it doesn't stack with other such effects, which would render it useless.

-Jester

I doff my cap to you sir, trying to PvP as a protection warrior. It is not a road I would travel.

-Jester

Well early impressions are that prot dps is closer to the 80% of a dps warrior than than the 20% of live with more tools to harass and interrupt.

It's not as hard as you think. I've had several allies get on alts to go "wtf?" now. Part of it is people don't know what to expect against a plateboy like me, and part of it is that I'm just plain better than Arms Warriors at handling some classes and specs.

Plus it never gets old watching all the fools in BGs attack the Prot warrior because he's the first thing they saw. I'm the designated "alliance tank" for the premades we run... I load up on things like Elixir of Giant Growth and Winterfall Firewater go run in, and sure enough, most of them attack me first. Generally speaking, only people with at least 3/5 Brutal seem to be smart enough to realize I'm a giant metallic bovine bait.

And none of the -%healing. Prot will still be gnats you can't kill in PvP.

More Importantly:



Edit: I could see Vigilance being useful if you have one insane DPSer to give all the Tricks of the Trade and Hysteria to.

No. Blizzard has pretty much stated it's intentional. All tanks will get that much threat.

To correlate this with a blue post:



Edit: Don't forget NPC abilities can still mess around with threat alot. If they wanted, they could easily make encounters that test how you react to threat, rather than having every encounter be based off how you build threat.

We'll see. They'd have to scale threat mechanics back to being pretty trivial if an ability like a free 10% off for your biggest threat generator is no longer useful. Even as a buffer against heal aggro, AoE threat, etc... it seems worth it to be for a single talent point. But hey, maybe they've just decided threat isn't a cool mechanic, and scaled it back so far it barely even exists. In which case, as I said, they broke the threat mechanics.

-Jester

Yeah, it's unlikely that Prot will be great for 2's, though I run with a Feral Druid right now and it's pretty fun how easily we stomp melee and hunter teams.

There's some potential for 3's, but it'd have to be a 3's based on control... probably unlikely.

I think where Prot will shine is in 5's, where you can conceivably replace a second warrior a rogue with them, since Prot will have similar or greater control than those classes, and some very powerful secondary abilities... a spell reflect that affects your entire team, 10% more damage on any target through improved disarm, and 30% damage reduction on demand to protect the burn target sound like they'd be very useful.

Yeah, a properly played Protection warrior in PvP is essentially a constant crowd control: Disarming, stunning, interrupting, dispelling, spell reflecting, etc.

It's possible to fill that role even now in a limited capacity, but with Wrath, it becomes quite a bit easier, with more utility effects and more importantly, burst damage. A warrior can get there now, but it requires a very rigid gear set that emphasizes block value.

With the change to the STR-to-BV conversion, a Protection warrior can use a pure PvP-set -- with all the resilience benefits it confers -- without losing the burst.

Prot still has pretty reasonable burst. on the PTR target dummies, my recklessness burst is 1.5 seconds and about 10k. This is on no armor, but there will be 5 sunders on whatever target. Concussion not being on GCD lets you loose a lot of pain if you're willing to burn both Shockwave + concussion blow at a 1.5 second burst. And since shockwave seems to stun even evading rogues, it's pretty reliable.

I'm positive we will see a strong tendency towards 2DPS teams in 2v2 in 3.x arenas at 70. I think healer / warrior with anything but a druid is going to be a decent combo for prot shamans will have it rough on surviving a burst, but others should at least be able to survive the first burst attempt with their mitigation ability + intervene. Prot has a lot of peeling capability that warriors never had before. Pain suppression every 30 seconds means no healer is going down easy, they'll have to attack you. And with a shield wall for survival, followed by a rather painful burst (non-crit is still 5k and fully doable in defensive stance.)

I'm a little afraid of 3.x arenas at 70 though, it seems like it's just going to be a massive DPS zerg fest where not even coordinated CC matters, just who is able to execute their burst first.

And yeah... prot in BGs on the PTR is very fun. Very different from Arms PvP.

Thanks to all posters for some insights into the changes.

A little bit of information from the Test Realm, courtesy of a guild-mate: tank threat overall seems to be through the roof. Damage output of protection warriors looks VERY respectable with my friends 157-block-value warrior shield-slamming for 3k damage and some tasty 5k crits.

He was pugging Karazhan on his warlock and the tank (warrior in Karazhan gear with a few badge items thrown in) never lost aggro once. I think he said he was pushing about 1500 dps with his warlock (not sure if I remember correctly) and was far from the top of the damagemeter.

Another guildie has been playing around with his tankdruid and, while initially mourning the loss of some stats, was rather happy with the threat increase. Having never played a druid above level 25 I have no point of reference, but overall it seems like tanks will certainly enjoy the next patch.

I, for one, am thrilled

I'll ask yet another guild-mate about stats of his warrior from the PTR so Concillian has something to feed to his spreadsheets.

take care
Tarabulus

Yeah, I'm excited about the upcoming changes, though I'm more interested in the PvP aspects than the PvE ones. Either way, tanking won't be boring anymore