Recent or lack of changes tell me that nothing will be done and we (protection warriors only) can join shamans as a laughing stock with no changes whatsoever and no improvements to the spec.
Dear Blizzard, please can you have another look at all the Protection Warrior feedback and approach the spec accordingly? I could vent about how we are always kicked out of the cool kids club just because we are a generic fantasy class or how you nerfed us S1 because we were overperforming (54% were PW btw…) and didn’t do anything like that while others were 90-99% played class but I will just keep calm and /catjam.
My main issue and probably the vast… I mean the small community of Protection Warriors, we have two new Hero talents yet:
Thane
This tree is a copy/paste of what we have no with Holywood special effects. It is the same talent setup with probably 1 change in the class tree if you want extra damage, but the playstyle did not move a bit, the talents you picked didn’t move either. I thought we were supposed to have refreshing gameplay each xpack so it does not feel like we just playing Dragonflight again. Don’t get me wrong, that is the playstyle I enjoy but there is no twist, no spec tree changes, nothing which isn’t right.
Colossus
And here we are using/buffing the wrong talents without providing enough rage generation. This tree is based on the spender without any sort of rage gain from other sources, causing this tree to be slow, rage starving. And to be fair… Adding a legendary effect from a previous expansion as a feature is not to my liking, but that is my personal opinion. Also, the animation of that Hero talent is nonexistent. Can’t you add some overlay on warriors when the stacks grow up? So each 2-3 stacks warrior becomes (temp) burning with fire around the character and one the 10th stack you have a cool animation of being a Colossus, being angry, and releasing this with a Smash (this could add up to your overall Demolish animation).
Class Tree
The second part is a class tree and talent positioning, and their interaction with Hero talents etc.
If you are playing Thane, it would be no no-brainer to pick Intervene as your safe pick, not that Thane Intervene’s shield is great but that is just an extra value, nothing to be hyped for yet (tunning?). Although if you are playing Colossus you may NOT want to pick Intervene as without the ability to intercept spells it does not bring anything special than it was. But to get to your 2nd rage generator - Thunderclap you have to pick it or waste a talent into Storm Bolt going through the Leech route. That is where you failed with the class talent tree, pathing like that is just badly designed and forces users to pick something they may not want. If you have added your main abilities such as Thunderclap into the talent tree then position them at the start. You should be using this to provide options for users if they are Raiding/5maning etc and if only one Hero talent has anything to do with Intervene, don’t force it on another one! Put TC on top after the defensive stance, make a path for SB, and Intervene as an extra choice on the side, don’t force people to play it.
Class Talents
Some talents are pointless or require urgent assistance which we already mentioned about it here or on our US bro’s side, yet still nothing.
Intimidating Roar - It is capped. It has a 1.5-minute CD with an 8-yard range. Why capped?
Cacophonous Roar - Why does this even exist? Remove.
Menace - Why does this even exist? Remove.
Honed Reflexes - 5% on Spell Reflect? Pummel? Well good like seeing a difference.
Bitter Immunity - Talent with a 3-minute CD and not even taking bleeds or magic debuffs. Why? Why would you put such a horrendous long CD while it only affects something that is usually applied every 15-30 seconds or more? Don’t force everyone to play Dwarf…
Blood and Thunder - I can see that you tried to make second talent better by moving the 10% damage there, but nobody would swap out of it for any fight that has more than 1 target. Not even to mention if that is a sanguine week, that slow from second talent isn’t the best choice!
Unstoppable Force - Whole Hero talent is based on TC and it’s damage so how we would not auto-pick that? Yes, making Immovable Object not get ‘reduce efficiency’ now could help it but there is no way out here.
Commanding Shout - Reducing this to 10% and removing the increased effect talent made this much weaker talent and our usefulness in raids smaller outside of one warrior to bring AP buff. At least what you could do to increase this in 5 man content.
Too many 2 point strong nods which are a must and are boring.
Spec Talents
Nothing has change here as adding 5% Magic DR as a pick is telling us, you are struggling with the spec tree and adding blanket DR for us to be useful.
Fight Through the Flames - 5% DR? Eh.
Last Stand - This was nicely covered on US forums so please read that.
Challenging Shout/Disturbing Shout - For love of god and Xalatah. Please dont merge these two talents into one. There were raid bosses where you would love to use the interrupt but you shouldn’t be taunting the boss with it. Yes, CD for both could get better. To be honest the Challenging Shout as a standalone button should be affected by AM as it is just a flavour button. While Disturbing Shout would still be 1.25 or 1-minute CD with a silence effect after it interrupted the mobs.
Unnerving Focus - Already said that but let us repeat it. If there is no tier/spec/hero talents interaction with LS, this would never be picked as LS has 3 freaking minute CD.
Dance of Death/Storm of Steel - The recent change to make it one nod made me laugh. Are you trying to hide it so we don’t complain it is a dead (as the name suggests) talent? You have the fantastic option here to add something to beat Shield Charge nods. I would rather not have it this way but…
“When the Ravager is cast, the blades dance around and pull all the mobs into the center of the storm”
Trust me, I’m a pilo… Protection Warrior at heart. This would be a banger, it would be crap to tide that to Ravager but would maybe provide some nice gameplay.
Battle-Scarred Veteran - I can see you are trying to get this working as a cheat death if you want such ability for warriors, you should redesign it.
“Mortally wounded warrior just before the dead he becomes a rock. Warrior is unable to use anything for 3 seconds and after that, he is left with 50% hp and losing 25% of its hp per 8 seconds.” or something.
Hero talents
Storm Bolts - This is the worst try of making a talent good and you are adding a CD on top of that? It is random, and with other talents, we have this will not be useful quickly. You can easily change this to “Target struck with Storm Bolt, will cause other targets around him to suffer nature damage”.
Storm Shield - Just please do the tunning here, shield is too weak. Good idea, but only available for Thane isn’t the best course of action and Colossus should have its own counterpart.
Martial Expert - Critical Block?? We already (when critically blocked) block enough to laugh at the damage. Not sure what the author wanted to achieve here, to be honest.
Demolish - I can’t see or know when it is done. Better animation, please.
Mountain of Muscle and Scars - You are comparing 2.5% less damage to 8% that Thane provides. Yes, it is less often but Thane also does 5% on Demo.
Propositions
- Grip (class/spec - PW). This can be linked to 3 different talents and we have empty (wasted) nods on class or spec tree.
- Ravager
- Intimidating Shout
- Heroic Leap (second to worst)
- Thunderclaps (worst possible due to Thane)
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Blood Lust (class). This is something other people really would like, I’m natural about this. It would bring some refreshment while composing a M+ group thought.
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Commanding Shout nod (spec - PW). Ability to change 10% HP into 10% DR.
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Necro Banner (spec - PW). The banner theme is always something that brings good memories out. You would have an open option to play around with different nods that would affect it instead of dead nods that are currently there.
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Ancient Aftermatch (spec). Replace the spear, everyone would be happy.
I guess that is it for today’s story. Probably won’t be read as this is EU and this topic got barely 20 posts before mine (including 4 of my own posts, lol). But I do hope at least some of it would pass thru to the devs, of course only the good things.