Posts with tag protection-warrior

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

All right. With patch 4.2 dropping next week, it's time to discuss it in detail -- at least, what it means for warriors. What changes will it have in store for tanks (almost none) and DPS (less of it) warriors? What will happen to us in PVP (arms and fury warriors will lose burst, prot won't)? Why is our PVP set so ridiculously ugly that it makes me cringe?

We'll start by looking at what Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said about class balance. And specifically about warriors, because that's the column, you see. I could give a rat's hindquarters about the other, lesser classes. Except shamans. If you can't be a warrior, being a shaman is a good backup plan. Why not be both? Go ahead and roll six warriors and a shaman, I'll wait.

Ask the Devs is back for Round 9, which deals with the most awesome role in WoW ever -- tanking. Of course, coming from a tank, that might be a bit biased -- but deal with it, healers and DPSers. I've got creatures to keep from punching you in your squishy little faces.

Of note this time around is Blizzard's tough time dealing with tanks wanting threat stats (hit and expertise) and the current struggle with making it work. Currently, in cutting-edge content, threat stats are pretty good for initial aggro, but over time, Vengeance does its job admirably and keeps bosses on tanks with relative ease. I think that design decision is hitting the sweet spot, but it begs the question of why even have the threat stats in the first place?

Blizzard also discussed the mastery bonuses for each tank. The devs feel that death knights and druids are doing pretty well, all things considered, and that paladins and warriors have a similar problem in "capping" mastery, but that paladins are more susceptible to problems. There is still the sentiment in the community that Blizzard needs to add its own visual threat meters or some type of aggro status, but there is a reluctance on Blizzard's part to clutter up its own default UI -- understandable, but this may potentially be a part of Blizzard's forthcoming (but not discussed) "how to tank" solution.

Buried in this discussion, however, was a little tidbit about patch 4.3. Blizzard states that the design for the patch 4.2 legendary, Dragonwrath, has wide appeal to a number of staff-wielding ranged DPS classes. However, it then mentions the "patch 4.3 legendary" and its more narrow appeal. Will we be seeing a tanking legendary in the near future, or potentially another healer item? We do know for sure that it will not be as widespread, class-wise, as Dragonwrath, so we can only sit back and assume. What is interesting, though, is that patch 4.3 also looks to be a raid tier and not a patch 4.1-style dungeon content update. Could patch 4.3 be bringing us the War of the Ancients raid that we have been eagerly anticipating, especially with the return of Nozdormu and his crazy time antics? Only time (heh) will tell.

Also, don't expect a new tanking class any time soon. Hit the jump for the full question and answer session.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Last week, we discussed hit and expertise. Before that, we talked about tanking etiquette and how to work up to tanking. This week, we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of warrior tanking in heroics and raids. Before we do that, we should point you at the Protection 101 and Protection 101 talent guides, which will cover a lot of what we talk about here in more exhaustive detail.

Heroics and raiding are similar but have different demands on a tank. With the announcement this week of a new Call to Arms feature that will most likely result in added rewards for those of us willing to tank in the LFD system, it's a good time to familiarize yourself with the role and how to perform it to the best of your ability.

Frankly, I view tanking as something that requires more effort than DPSing. On my warrior, I find it takes less effort and less work to top DPS meters than it does to tank. This isn't necessarily because tanking requires more skill (I would argue it's no more complicated than DPSing in either spec) but rather due to a combination of added pressure, expectations and labor required to do it well and make it look like you haven't had to work hard at all. So let's talk about ways you can make it easier on yourself.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

A week or so ago, while I was planning out this series of posts about tanking in Cataclysm, our old friend (well, okay, I've never met nor spoken to him) Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) had some interesting things to say about the current state of hit and expertise for tanks. I wasn't able to immediately address them because I'd already written out what would be published, and so I had to wait until this column to talk about the history of hit and expertise for tanks in previous expansions and what the current state of the art is.

As warriors, we've been grappling with hit and expertise for years now. Why, you may ask, are they suddenly less viable for tanks than they were during Wrath? Well, believe it or not, hit and expertise have become less compelling for tanks entirely because of two big quality of life changes for tanks: the removal of parry hasting and taunt miss chance.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Last week we talked about tanking etiquette and how you can deal with the heightened stress of tanking an instance without convincing your run that your brother is actor Emilio Estevez. This week, we're going to talk about how you, as a new or returning warrior, can learn how to tank.

I've been playing warriors for a long time now. Right now, I have three 85 warriors that I'm working on, for DPS, tanking, and PvP. This means to some degree I'm in a constant state of relearning the class. In addition, I'm leveling a druid, DK, and paladin for tanking purposes as well, because I think it does help you as a warrior tank to see how other classes tank. (So far, my perspective is that paladins and DKs are brokenly good and druids need a little work. I don't pretend this is unbiased.) The first and best advice I can give someone who wants to learn to tank is, go out and tank things. While this is akin to the old teaching people to swim via throwing them in deep water approach to swimming, it has several advantages.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

One of the things warriors do in game is tank. We're one of four classes that can tank, and one of two classes that can only tank or DPS, meaning that there's a reasonable chance that any warrior you meet will be a tank and an absolute certainty that if your warrior isn't DPS specced, it's tank specced. (I don't include PvP in this because there are PvP warriors of all three specs.) Since tanking is something I talked about at great length during the past year or so, I have been endeavoring to talk more about the DPS specs since Cataclysm launched. So, I've done that, and I'll continue to do it, but this week and as a recurring feature here at TCAFOW I'm starting a Cataclysm Tanking series of posts. These will come as topics suggest themselves to me.

For this week, rather than discuss gear or rotations (some of which we covered in the Cataclysm Protection 101 posts a little while ago) I wanted to talk about something less tangible but more immediate in its impact, namely, how to behave while tanking and how to behave towards your tank. Lately, with running heroics so much a part of the gearing for raiding experience, and some people really feeling at the mercy of the tank and resenting it, it's time to talk about how we can all make each others lives easier and more enjoyable.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Tanking. It's what we talked about last week, and if not for a massive burst of gut rot that hit me Thursday like a hammer wielded by the Spectre himself, we would already have talked about it more this week. Better late than never, I suppose. To give you an idea of how sick I am as I type this, I didn't want to move all day, so I'm actually writing the column from the floor of my living room using my TV as my monitor. I'm so sick and exhausted that I find this screenshot of my worgen in his prot stance and gear standing on Anduin Lothar's shoulder to be hilarious. You see, Lothar was so badass, he had a werewolf for his conscience.

Maybe you have to be extremely dehydrated to appreciate it.

Anyway, this week, we're going to talk about protection's talents, which ones are niche talents and which are more generally applicable. Not all of the talents we discuss will be in the protection tree, as we'll also look at arms and fury talents that are well suited to tanking. It would be hard to justify talking about useful tanking talents without discussing Field Dressing, for instance. I had to tank those annoying parasites on Magmaw this week, and I was very glad to have the boosted self healing from Field Dressing for my Victory Rush heals.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Tanking. The role wherein you go and let very bad things do other very bad things to you so that they don't do very bad things to the rest of your party or raid, giving said party or raid time to do very bad things to them. I wrote a protection 101 guide almost exactly a year ago. We're revisiting the subject now for several reasons. Much as when we wrote the DPS warrior 101 guide, things have definitely changed for prot warriors over the past year. The addition of the mastery stat, the removal of defense on gear, the talent revamp and Vengeance have all had a cumulative effect on tanking warriors. So we're going to cover the basics and give as broad an overview as we can.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

OK, first up: I have been playing a warrior and writing this warrior column for quite some time now. So while this week's savage, astonishing ravaging of the warrior class wasn't something I haven't seen before, I feel pretty confident in saying that yes, it was really jarring. Not jarring like a friend braking a little too hard while driving because she was totally checking out that person's butt and missed the light change. Jarring like a friend driving into a concrete abutment at 95 miles an hour seems more apt. The whole epic saga of metagem changes didn't help anything, either.

Still, we can't say we were surprised, can we? I wrote a post that mentioned it a while back, but it bears repeating in this calm after our collective jubblies have been kicked right in that we were kind of nuts for a while there. It was not uncommon for arms warriors to lead the DPS and fury warriors to do more DPS than everyone else combined on some 5-man fights. Frankly, even with these changes, fury is still capable of decent numbers. (Not great, not what I would say they should be, but good enough for now.) Arms was the more hard hit, of course, as it always seems to be. I'll also admit to disappointment that the whole rage redesign didn't remove from us the constant buff-nerf cycle we've been living with for six years now.

A lot of people seem somewhat terrified of the new Vengeance mechanic and how it might play in PvP. People are always leery of tanking specs in PvP, due to the general tendency of people playing in arenas and BGs to want to, you know, kill the other guys. Tanks are generally designed to be harder to kill, which tends to make people nervous, especially when tanking specs saw increased damage output in Wrath of the Lich King and went from "Hey, guys, look, it's a free kill!" to "Wait, you mean trying to burn down the dude specced and geared to not die is a bad idea?"

The forums seem to be rampant with terror that Vengeance will rule them all. I personally don't see the concern. Vengeance doesn't stack up terribly fast and it falls off fairly quickly; you'd need to focus fire a tank for significant levels of damage while he was being focus healed (and you'd need to completely ignore his or her healers) in order for Vengeance to really be a concern.

But don't take my word for it -- just ask Ghostcrawler. Not only do the developers not think Vengeance will be an issue in PvP, if it turns out to be, they'll just turn it off.

Ghostcrawler - Re: So Vengeance... am I doing this wrong?

Q u o t e:

In group PvP, there is an answer to vengeance. Don't attack the tank. Vengeance is a really good idea imo. If you are sitting on a tank and stacking that buff up, why shouldn't they do comparable damage? And from my experience, even with a max stacked vengeance, the coils between blood and unholy are relatively the same. Also, there is more to DPS between the two specs than Deathcoil. Even if someone is sitting on my blood DK I can assuredly say Unholy and Frost do more overall DPS, in pvp.

If a couple of people are beating on a tank, Vengeance isn't likely to stack very high. You need to take damage that is a big chunk of your whole health pool, which typically only bosses are available to provide.

Now if you have several folks beating on a tank flag carrier, then Vengeance may stack up, but once you have several people, you almost certainly have a way to dispel the Vengeance or just CC the tank.

If Vengeance ever gets to be a problem in PvP, we'll just remove it, plain and simple. The mechanic is only there to help with raid gear scaling, not to give tanks a fun toy for PvP.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

The short version: Single-target threat is pretty solid, AoE threat isn't what it used to be, and certain talents are good on paper but not really worth taking right now.

Slightly longer, before-the-cut version: Basically, the redesign of rage and abilities like Heroic Strike/Cleave, combined with the total talent redesign, have had a significant effect on protection as a spec. While it's certainly a viable tanking spec, there is definitely a noticeable shift in tanking mechanics. Threat is once again much more in the hands of the DPS to take, rather than in the hands of the tank to lose, especially when talking about AoE threat. However, while the Cataclysm mechanics are already being felt, we are still in the Wrath era and many heroics will be tanked with DPS who simply will not wait for a tank to establish any sort of threat before unloading. You will lose threat in those situations. In some cases, even if the DPS does hold back, it doesn't matter. Their damage is so much higher than your threat generation that there is simply no way to prevent them from pulling aggro, and since the mobs die so quickly, they see little to no consequences for doing so.

This is a habit that will only be solved with the coming of Cataclysm dungeons that punish such behavior with repeated wipes. Until that time comes, grit your teeth, do your best, and accept that the fundamental balance has been altered. It may feel a bit like being a whole new class, but ultimately protection is still primarily about the same things.

If you read Fox's post yesterday, well, I hope you braced yourself for more changes. Because here they are. When the devs said more specifics were coming soon, they were not kidding us. Also, Fox is mean to tanks, but he's a DPS player; we're used to their silly little ways. Anyway, let's take a look at the newly announced changes, shall we?

Zarhym - Re: Upcoming Tanking Changes

Here are a few additional changes we are making which will be applied in patch 4.0.3a:

• Guardian of Ancient Kings -- Damage reduction changed from 60% to 50%. Cooldown still 2 minutes (talented). Duration still 12 seconds.
• Icebound Fortitude -- Damage reduction changed from 30% to 20% (or 60% to 50% talented). Cooldown still 2 minutes. Duration still 12 seconds.
• Shield Wall -- Damage reduction changed from 40% to 50%. Cooldown still 2 minutes (talented). Duration still 12 seconds.
• Glyph of Shield Wall -- Now buffs damage reduction by 10% (to 60%), but only adds 1 minute of cooldown.
• Survival Instincts -- Damage reduction changed from 60% to 50%. Cooldown reduced from 5 minutes to 2 minutes. Duration still 12 seconds.
• Bear Form -- Stamina bonus lowered from 20% to 10% and Heart of the Wild health bonus from 10% to 6%. Bear health should be close to plate tank health with this change.
• Vigilance -- No longer reduces damage by 3%, but will still reset Taunt cooldown and provide Vengeance for the warrior.

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In addition to these changes, there was much expounding on the tanking design philosophy, which we will cover after that jump I hear so much about. Being a tank (and thus kind of slow mentally, according to Fox ... man, see if anyone taunts for him in Cataclysm dungeons), I need to go over these things in detail.

Last week, I said that we'd see changes to protection. This week, we're seeing them. It's build 13033, also known (to those of us who care) as the protection warrior pass. Last week firmly started balancing fury's DPS, but this week is definitely protection's turn. Today, in fact, just hours before this patch went to the beta servers, I got done writing a long post talking about protection in the beta, what I saw as its strong points and its weak points.

Every single one of the weak points was addressed in this build. Every single one. This is what you call serendipity. It also means I have to completely rewrite my column with not a lot of time to spare, so as you may understand, I am at once pleased to see things improved and irritated that I spent all that time writing a column that will never see the light of day. It should be noted that these changes are on the PTR, not live on the beta as yet. It's a little odd to see the PTR get updated first, but I'd expect the beta servers will see a new build soon as well.

Having been 85 for a week, as well as having transferred over two level 85 premades, I've been running around testing out various alternate specs and taking them into instances. Why did I do this? Because, as we have already established, I am certifiably insane. Even before this patch, protection stood out as the strongest of the warrior leveling specs, and now it should see increased power as a tanking class. Vengeance is amazing for a leveling protection warrior. It takes the greatest strength of the tanking classes -- the ability to soak up damage -- and turns it into offensive power.

Welcome to Pimp My Profile, the column in which the WoW.com staff turns zeroes into heroes. Don't think you're performing where you should be? Not sure how your class/spec is supposed to be gearing up? E-mail us with your Armory link, and you might be next to receive our help!

I WANT TO RAID GOOD. Please, teach me to raid gooder than I already raid.

-Derongar

While I believe that your gear is pretty solid (at first I was confused by the lower stamina but then I realized you'd logged out in arms spec but tanking gear) there are a few places that can be adjusted.