Feedback: Protection Warrior

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
1
  • Chance to reset the cooldown of Shield Slam from Devastator and Strategist reduced to 20% (was 30%).
  • Impenetrable Wall no longer increases Rage generated by Shield Slam.
  • Booming Voice causes Demoralizing Shout to generate 20 Rage (was 30).
  • Champion’s Bulwark no longer increases the Rage generated by Shield Charge.
  • Bloodsurge now causes damage from Deep Wounds to have a chance to generate 3 Rage.
  • Violent Outburst has been rebuilt to be easier to understand and track progress towards the next Outburst. Additional Rage generated from Violent Outburst reduced to 50% (was 100%).
  • Shield Wall cooldown reduced to 3 minutes (was 3.5 minutes).
  • Amount of damage ignored from each use of Ignore Pain increased by 30%.
  • Colossus
    • Colossal Might is no longer applied by Execute.
      • Developers’ notes: Using your hard-hitting rotational ability regularly is core to the Colossus playstyle, and Execute applying Colossal Might pushed Colossus away from that during Execute phases.

I want to give honest feedback on these changes. Rage generation changes were supposed to increase meaningfull decision making on how to spend rage. As a result the spec design and flow has went back 8 years. Spec plays slow (compared to current retail version). Meaningfull decision making really came down to never using revenge unless it’s free. Less rage converts to less CD reduction, less damage, less healing. Strategist nerf is absolutely insane. This single change is detrimental to the spec. Downtimes with nothing to press are unpleasent to play. Impenetrable Wall having 50% of text removed from the talent is asking questions. While at 0 rage shield slam with outburst isnt enough to cast shield block. The 30% compensation to Ignore Pain doesnt compensate the nerfs.

That was from Mountain Thane perspective. Colossus is effectively unplayable now. Colossus had tendency to be rage starved before the nerfs, now it’s just not functioning properly. This is major design problem where Thane is revolving around 2 rage builders to deal damage (can therefore dump rage into ignore pain) while Colossus is build around builder and spender. At the same time it is Thane who has increased rage geneation and not the other way around. Cherry on top is removal of execute from generating Colossal Might stacks (combined with strategist changes) heavily nerfing the Demolish which is core of the hero talent tree.

Lot of words to say the changes are not good for the spec, some of them are asking serious questions. Spec feel objectively (I hope I can speak for others too) worse to play and my biggest fear is the solution will come in form of aura tunning, maybe some increased cooldown reduction/rage spent formula and call it a day.

I wrote this before, current retail version of Prot Warrior is one of the most fun iterations spec had and it would be a waste to just throw it away.

6 Likes
2

In retail right now i can max ignore pain and 2 charges of shield block in 26 seconds, in the ptr i need 1 minute and 30 seconds.

prot tank in the ptr current state is dead and you not only are killing a class but a tank that is vital in this game ecosystem, less tank equal less games equal less paying customers equal less money for you.

we know you do not give a frick about us player but you sure love your money, so protect your money by fixing tanks and let people play more and pad your metrics for your shareholders.

7 Likes
3

Warrior should have never been nerfed in anything. The class / gameplay was great for Thane. I would probably slightly improve rage gen on Colossus but NOT decrease it.

Warriors (and DK/Brew/Druids) just needed some cleaning up in their spec tree and get some proper utility fixes such as:

  • Disturbing Shout being a new talent and ability of its own, CShot being a baseline and replacing it spot on the tree

  • Extra talent for DS that is currently there giving so better interaction with it, CD reduction?

  • Ravager talents REMOVED, replaced with ‘Ravager now deals 30/50% of damage, but pulls mobs towards the center of the blade storm’

  • Intervene giving 20% DR to player

  • Commanding Shout in 5man gives 10% more HP

This is what was needed from you blizzard, not these weird nerfs making this class just agony to play. Just look at how many people will swap / unsub and you will know why.

6 Likes
5

Tested in on the PTR , its sad … the rage regen feels horrible, colossus is unplayable, rotation is slow and you just sit and wait for the next melee swing.
Congratz on destroying this lovely tanking spec.

6 Likes
6

From testing it looks like the 30% buff to ignore pain is coded as 30% nerf instead on ptr…

7

Taking a lot of rage from various things and adding it majority to where we cannot control (outside of SS) is wrong. You want me to have chance to make decisions, but you took my rage from Demo, Shield Charge, Outburst by 50% - these were MY decisions on where to use them.

Lets be serious for once Blizzard Dev - What you are trying to do is WRONG, you just need to revert everything and focus on tasks that are actually called improvements of gameplay. What that would be? Utility such as;

  • Commanding Shout in 5man is too weak
  • Intervene should be changed into 20% DR
  • Ravager talents removed, replaced with Grip ability to compete with Shield Charge talents
  • 4set redesigned as it does not proc at all, barely visible and nothing to play around, I prefer something I can aim for than random proc of SW
  • Disrupting Shout as a talent, Challenging Shout as a baseline (split them!)

That is when we can talk ‘you have improved the spec and we are all happy how warriors plays’. You started your message with ‘you are happy where the warrior is’ and then you nerfed it to the ground, well played.

8

Second round of testing after their “improvement on prot war’s rotation and rage economy” .

increase in ability damage and shield slam damage is always welcome to compensate our big loses to rage but was not really what i had hoped to see as compensation …

Brace for impact stack change is good.

Punish talent change is also good.

Blood surge is back to 5 rage but the significantly chance to trigger is not noticeable.

Some of these talent changes are choice nodes , but like Punish its pretty much the go to talent point , with the current rage gen on ptr, we wont be picking up :

  • juggernaut ( barely have rage for an execute )
  • massacre ( same story)

Instigate causes devestator to generate 2 rage instead of 1 is weird , pressing devastate to "fill up the dead moments " feels bad .
Just revert the proc chance on shield slam resets .
Highly doubt i’l ever actualy use devastate again.

These changes will not help out the colossus build , even with the higher rage gen on shield slam in the tree (wich should have been there since the start of the xpac) .

So in conclussion to all the changes so far … just revert the changes.

9

I would like to say a few things about 11.1 prot warrior changes even if developers doesn’t respond to this subject either on eu or us forums, not even with a statement that they read people’s feedback.

There are lots of posts saying developers don’t know what they are doing. I don’t think developers would be employed by Blizzard if that was the case and can understand that people are mostly frustrated with gameplay distrupting changes and nerfs. However I would like to point out a couple of things on patch notes and would kindly ask developers to clarify their intentions so players can provide meaningful feedback:

Developers’ notes: We feel that Warriors are in a good place overall, however, there are a few places we’d like to make improvements to each spec, and to the class as a whole.

and

Developers’ notes: Protection Warriors are currently constantly flooded with Rage which undermines rotational defensive decision-making and encourages constant dumping of Rage into Ignore Pain to maximize effectiveness.

First statement is how developers feel warriors’ performance is with respect to other classes so not much to say on this, subjective to developers. Personally I can say a few utility abilities and freeing up couple of talent points especially in spec tree would be nice but anyways,

Second statement, I partly agree. Not for Colossus, but for Mountain Thane I feel that sometimes prot has too much rage and nothing to do with it except dumping it into Ignore Pain, when we are out of execute range.

We’re taking a pass at reducing Protection’s overall Rage generation to make decisions on when and how to spend it more meaningful, without reducing Protection Warriors’ ability to tank effectively.

(Now, you can’t take a pass at reducing rage generation easily without effecting core prot warrior mechanics, ability to tank or ability to deal damage.) I would expect something like this after these 3 statements:

We now let prot warriors always use execute but execute does 50% less damage to targets above 20% hp.

Instead, it’s followed by lots and lots of rage nerfs, (especially from active abilities where we have to make meaningful decisions when to use either offensively or defensively) and some passive rage generation increases but more importantly, a nerf to strategist from 30% ss cd reset chance to 20%.

Now I have 3 major issues with this:

  1. Subjective to me: Reducing apm (both from strategist nerfs and rage nerfs there will be no rage to spend on anything, no decision to make) which directly interrupts prot warrior playstyle. For me, high apm playstyle and heavy shield slam hit sound effects define a warrior.

  2. Objective: Now you just can’t say you are happy with where warriors are and significantly reduce their rage generation. Funneling that rage through talents like anger management and violent outburst keeps warriors where they are.

  3. Subjective to me: The ways and the amount developers chose to reduce rage generation. Nerfing active abilities, invalidating a talent in a choice node, not tuning anger management and violent outburst for reduced rage spending.

And to sum it up, developers’ stated observations and intentions doesn’t align with the changes implemented in 11.1 PTR. That’s my 2 cents.