Comprehensive Prot Review
by Skarre | 30/07/2008 04:14:38 These are my thoughts on the state of prot warrior talents thus far: - Shield Specialization: Clearly meant to be a staple prot warrior talent as you can't get very far into the tree without dumping some points here. Let's be clear, block rating is a stronger stat than it used to be, but only because its been forced that way by a mechanics change. A lot of warriors are going to begrudgingly take this talent primarily because, as a tank, you don't need tactical mastery. That doesn't mean that this talent is bad, per se, but having no clear alternative is a bad thing. I have a suggested alternative, see below: - Tactical Mastery: Here's a talent that simply doesn't belong in prot. It was put here long ago in an attempt to diversify the trees, and it's long since due for reconsideration. My suggestion is this: swap Tactical Mastery with Improved Heroic Strike. They're both tier 1 talents, so the move shouldn't be debilitating. Arms warriors, who do the most stance dancing by far, will appreciate the change. The change shouldn't be noticeable for Fury warriors, and Protection warriors will finally have one of their key talents in the correct location. - Improved Bloodrage: Only thing I might suggest here is to consider revising this into a 5 point talent that increases rage generated by Bloodrage by 20/40/60/80/100%, particularly if Tactical Mastery and Improved Heroic Strike are not swapped. - Incite: Very Excellent talent. Consider adding Devastate to the list of affected abilities. - Anticipation: Even though the change from Defense to Dodge is a net increase in avoidance, I think I still might have preferred the Defense... but this is in line with similar talents so not too much complaining here. - Last Stand: Love the change to 6 minutes... anything we can do to convince you guys to get it down to 3? - Improved Revenge: With the change to blocking and the increased power of skills like Shield Slam, Shockwave, and Heroic Strike, Revenge is quickly being overshadowed. Yes, it's still the most rage-effiicient move we've got, but efficiency isn't really a concern when this move is at its most useful, ie, tanking bosses. The talent may be fine, but the ability itself needs some love. - Improved Shield Block: This is kind of a slap in the face. We understand you're throwing us a bone here, but it's not good enough. Shield Block needs to be able to be used continuously, or else it's going to get lost under the mess of cooldowns you've given us. This talent, and Shield Block itself, need to be reviewed. No specific suggestions here because I really don't know where you want warriors to go as far as blocking is concerned. - Toughness: 2% is good... 3% would be better. - Improved Sunder Armor: Nothing to see here. - Improved Disarm: Here's a delicate balancing act. The damage buff is a nice addition that actually makes me consider the talent, but the cooldown is still too long for an ability which too many mobs are immune. Of course, the pvp applications could be deadly... it's probably fine where it is. - Improved Taunt: No real desire to take this talent, especially if one wanted Vigilance in its current incarnation. How about something like a 10/20% reduction on cooldown for Taunt, Mocking Blow, and Challenging Shout. That might get my attention. - Improved Shield Wall: A longer duration would be nice, but the talent is fine. The problem is with the skill. Is there really a need for this to be on a half-hour cooldown at this point in the game? - Concusion Blow: Great change with the added damage and reduced cooldown. - Improved Shield Bash: Great change with the damage added to Shield Slam. - Shield Mastery: Still a great talent. Nothing new here. - One-Handed Weapon Specialization: Still a great talent. Nothing new here. - Improved Defensive Stance: Would love to see this increased somewhat substantially - 5% per point would be great. - Focused Rage: Still a great talent. Nothing new here. - Vigilance: You shouldn't need to contrive situations where a 31-pt. talent is useful - it should be universally helpful. That's not the case with Vigilance. Situationally, its of moderate utility. If we're doing things right and everyone is balanced correctly, Vigilance shouldn't even be needed. I love the idea of having a persistent buff that I can drop on somebody, but this is really lackluster. Move Shockwave here - it makes more sense following Concussion Blow - and put an entirely new version of Vigilance in its place. - Vitality: The added strength is much more helpful with the itemization shift, but we could really use some extra health - bump our stamina up to 2% per point. - Stalwart Protector: A lot of warriors are complaining that the rage generated by this talent isn't enough. Situationally, it does actually provide a good amount of rage, and when you need it the most. I don't think a change is needed here, although many warriors are bound to disagree with me. - Safeguard: This is a hard sell. Tanks don't like moving around more than they need to, and they certainly don't want damage flying around arbitrarily, so most tanks will avoid this talent on principle. As a pvp talent, it has quite a bit of use, and I understand the desire to add viability to protection. Is this good enough? Again, hard to tell. Arms warriors would kill for it, so its obviously desirable. A possible fix would be to swap Safeguard and Unrelenting Assault, but looking at Revenge once more, that won't benefit us very much unless Revenge gets some love. - Critical Block: A great talent in theory, but one that stings as an apology for nerfing Shield Block. I don't have any complaints about Critical Block, just blocking in general. - Devastate: This is still a great ability, but I feel like it'll start to get overshadowed by our other new tricks. More attack power coefficient please! Also, I don't know how this works, but I am a little bit concerned that if Sunder Armor adds threat based on attack power now, will there be situations where SA scales better than Dev after five sunders are applied? Would be good to check into that before it goes live :) - Sword and Board: This is badly in need of review. The basic concept is great - do a lot of Shield Slams and Devastates, and get free Shield Slams in return. The execution is clunky. There's too much to pay attention to while tanking to notice the buff, and even so, depending on when it procs, you may get drastically more or less bang for your buck. For five points, this is more of an inconvenience than a buff. Give us a 10% chance to get an automatic Shield Slam proc. It's not going to grossly change or overbalance the talent, and you'll have a lot of happy protection warriors. - Shockwave: This is a great talent that belongs where Shield Slam used to be. A slightly increased area would be nice. In summary: Protection is in a pretty good state. It'll play as it is, but some tweaks to keep us competitive would make us happy. There is one giant missing factor: where's the talent that makes us unique? The cry that's been heard over and over again the past couple weeks is that paladins and druids are getting the abilities that used to give us an edge, while retaining the advantages that they had previously. Paladins can do it all, now - they're the masters of AoE tanking, and their single target threat and survival matches ours. Druids can now out-survive us handily, and Deathknights do so much damage that they'll be the first choice of off-tanks... whenever they're not needed to soak magic damage. Warriors need to have a compelling reason to take them over a specialist. The increased damage is good, but that's not going to do it. Give me a reason to not go for a 2-hander/shield build with Titan's Grip or reroll Deathknight. [ Post edited by Skarre ] |
by Ghostcrawler | 31/07/2008 20:36:53 Nice summary. Some responses below.
There are examples in almost every class of cases where someone has to wade into another tree a little bit to get everything they want. This is something we actually like, within reason. It would be a shame if every tank was 61+ in prot and every PvP warrior was 61+ in Arms.
Defense is usually a pretty easy stat to max out with gear, whereas you can't really do that on dodge. We saw some tanks actually spec out of Anticipation at the T6 or so level because it just stops being as useful as your gear improves. Hit is another stat we don't really like to hit in talent trees, since it's possible to hit the cap with gear alone.
The problem with the old Shield Block was it was never a choice. It was available so often, and always so useful, that you could just about put a brick on the key you use for Shield Block. We're trying to get Shield Block to feel more like a mini-Shield Wall. Use it when Something Bad is about to happen. We're not trying to nerf it -- we're trying to make it more fun.
In classic WoW, a lot of mobs were immune. In Burning Crusade, most mobs with weapons could be affected by it, including many bosses.
This has always been a delicate talent to balance. The more you run with pugs and the more 5-player instances you do in general, the more useful it is. In raids, especially with people who really know your play style and manage their threat, it's a lot less valuable.
We have to be careful with this talent because prot warriors are going to generate a lot more rage than before, just because their dps is going to be higher. A lot of tanking gear comes with strength now. Strength is a good stat, and even before the shield block change, it was probably the best +threat stat you have. I sort of feel that for too long we have all emphasized mitigation as the primary role of a tank, when in reality it's only half the job. Doing more dps will let tanks be more fun when not-tanking, and for warriors, might make a lot of rage starvation issues go away.
Devastate includes Sunder Armor as part of its effect. Any benefit to Sunder will apply. |
| by Ghostcrawler | 02/08/2008 21:57:22 I know it can seem like a useful strategy to act outraged or insulted in order to get changes made. But please try and be civil while we're in the beta forums. It tends to attract more blue posts. :) AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We'll see how that feels. The old Shield Block wasn't fun. We think we can make the new one fun. Numbers are the easiest thing to tweak if that's all that's called for. So we tend to focus on mechanics at this stage in development. Once we like the mechanics, we can massage the numbers. Hit is a good stat, but it' a tough one to itemize since you can hit the cap at which point more becomes useless. While more defense is almost always better, it isn't as good once you have removed crits and maxed out block (though this will be harder now). Strength and stamina are almost always beneficial no matter how high you get. We can always put them on an item (or talent for that matter) and know they'll be valuable for warriors. You'll get some hit, expertise, defense and all your old friends too. But strength and stamina will be everywhere. It's almost impossible at this stage to talk about which class can generate the most threat or has the most survivability at level 80. There are no level 80 characters in beta, and we haven't done our own testing yet. We want to come up with mechanics we like, then we get the numbers in good shape. I'm not saying don't talk about it -- it's very useful when someone can point out a potential problem, particularly if it's one we hadn't thought of. Yes, that happens--a shock, I know. Just don't slip down the slope from there by declaring the class dead or breaking out the slaps to the face. There are 4 tanks in WoW. They all are intended to tank 5-player, 10-player and 25-player instances. They all have their specialties, and the warrior specialty will probably remain as the best tank for single, hard-hitting bosses. But if you only have a death knight for that encounter, or you bring a warrior to a fight with a bunch of adds, you'll still be able to get purps. This is a slight change in philosophy for us, but one we feel is necessary in a world with 10 classes and several specs getting a boost to raid viability. |
| by Ghostcrawler | 02/08/2008 12:40:10 Warriors need to be better AE tanks without eclipsing paladins. Thunder Clap is a good place to address that problem. If Shockwave becomes the ultimate tanking ability than we're concerned nobody would want to run a 5-player dungeon without it. That's not the goal. We don't want to hand out Consecrate to every tank, but we want you to be able to tank groups better. I didn't want to imply that all tanking gear would be strength and stamina with no other stats. But compared to what you are used to, expect more strength and expect strength to benefit you more. Let me also clarify a couple of previous comments. I can't always spend as much effort analyzing every word I type as the community ends up doing, or else I would never get to post. For that I apologize. I understand the value of defense and Anticipation, though you must agree that volumes have been written about how well defense scales and its value at various points in progression. Tanks have debated about whether it was always worth 5/5 in Anticipation, even if they ultimately concluded that it is. That was the point I garbled. I also acknowledge that hit and expertise are great threat stats, and expertise can offer a little mitigation to boot. The point I was trying to make is that putting strength on tanking gear solves a lot of problems in the game -- it can improve dps and threat (and mitigation if we build the talents correctly) without us having to worry about whether plate-wearing tanks are already capped in some other stat. Defense means something different for warriors and paladins than it does for death knights, and unless we build different gear for each class we can't count on defense as always being desirable above everything else. The last thing we want is for some classes to feel that they don't have access to the gear to do their jobs properly. Make sense? Sorry for any confusion. It's never going to bother me when players point out errors I may make in my posting or that we make in our design decisions. It makes the game better. The fact remains that we want warriors to keep tanking. If they aren't there yet, we'll get them there. :) |
Recent Blizzard Announcements
