Hello, folks! Thanks for taking a moment to read my question. I reposted this here from another section as I was recommended to post directly on the class forum.
A prelude - I played Protection Warrior since vanilla, and I saw how the class lore grew and changed over the expansions. Right now, however, I feel like I’ve lost the track of it, and so I wanted to know what you people think.
So, as we know, WoW was originally based in many ways on the Dungeons & Dragons (DnD). Specifically, a WoW warrior class was based on a fighter and a barbarian (more of the former) DND classes. As such, at the start of WoW (Vanilla - TBC), while a warrior did have some identity crisis, it was at very least a rather versatile with all sorts of tricks up his sleeve (that back then were not available in one such package to most other classes) like disarm, fear, single target stun, 2 gap closers (3 in TBC), a skill to become uncrushable (unable to take tremendous amounts of damage due to a certain old mechanic), spell reflect (TBC), damage debuffs, movement speed debuffs, attack speed debuffs, 2 interrupts, several taunts (aoe taunt and 2 single-target taunts), damage buffs, armor reduction, etc-etc. It was truly what you would now call a “tactician”, a sort of Swiss Army Knife of a class, that could use a lot of skills in order to change the rules of engagement and control the battlefield.
Later on, as WOTLK, Cataclysm, Pandaria and so on rolled out, Protection Warriors, in my opinion, became somewhat of a high-octane spec/class, with a lot of mobility, crazy head-spinning pulls, jumps, charges, and some quick button-mashing. Was pretty fun if a bit braindead, compared to the intricacies of tanking, say, Shattered Halls as a warrior back in TBC. It was in Legion, however, that the warrior finally got an identity where his specs got a definite feel. Fury was an berserker (not much has changed), Arms became a more solidified version of a tactician (aka a Battlemaster Fighter of the 5th edition of DnD), and Protection… I feel like he became somewhat of a survivor, a person that through his own doggedness and determination, overcame all the odds and lived through the encounter. It did feel that Blizzard wanted to implement the “Battlefield Commander” role, somewhere, but it looked like more of the Arms spec domain, though perhaps I just didn’t feel it properly.
Now we are coming upon an end to the Dragonflight chapter, and, while tanking, I can’t help but feel that there is something missing. My damage comes mostly from bleeds, my most spammy skill of Devastate is all but (almost) removed from the game, made obsolete, most of my tools are now behind PVP talents or among other specs. I am not going to speak about the competitiveness of the Protection Warriors, because I still think that it mostly depends on the player, but let’s just say that there’s no way I control the battlefield or order my allies around, safe for the banter in the party chat.
So the question is - what are the protection warriors (or most warriors, in general) nowadays? I feel like I’m trying to find the trace of any old-school Fighter, with lots of tools to interact with the fight, a sort of a battle-master / sword-master with all those fancy stances, techniques to deflect / parry / disarm and general retain tactical superiority in the fight. But the more I look, the more I see that perhaps now the warrior is a very-very strong and determined machine of killing that favors raw power and physical dominance over the skill and the techniques.
What do you people think? What are we now?