Warrior's 5% damage reduction. Contradictions

#0 - Oct. 3, 2010, 7:29 a.m.

Currently on live, Warriors have a 5% damage reduction when in Defensive stance. I think it's great that the devs are finally removing that in Cataclysm. However, also on live, we have a 100% chance to become enraged when we mitigate an attack. This enrage gives us 10% more damage, which more than compensates the defensive stance loss of damage done.

In the PTR, I noticed that the talent for this only gave us a 20% chance to become enraged. So the 5% damage penalty is removed, but we're rarely ever getting the 10% damage bonus from being enraged? So we'll still be doing the same, or less damage than currently on live? It just seems a little bit contradictory to me to buff defensive stance, then nerf the enrage that we've become so dependent on for Enraged Regeneration.

With the removal of Bloodrage and the downtime on this enrage effect, we're going to have to use our 30 second cooldown in Berserker Rage every time we want to reliable heal ourselves.

Can someone explain why they did this? It doesn't make sense to me.

Ghostcrawler

#4 - Oct. 3, 2010, 8:17 p.m.

We think it's dumb for Enrage to be up 100% of the time. What's the point? It should just be tacked on to Defensive Stance at that point. We aren't going to balance warrior dps around it being up 100% in Cataclysm if in fact it is not up 100% of the time.

Virtually every number related to Prot warriors changed, so it's difficult to just compare a -5% here and a +5% there to figure out if your dps went up or down. The most helpful thing you can do is report on differences you notice before or after a PTR copy / beta conversion or even how you stack up relative to other tanks or other dps.

Ghostcrawler

#10 - Oct. 3, 2010, 9:55 p.m.

Q u o t e:
It seems to me that most agree that prot warrior dps is lacking. I can only assume this will be addressed before Cata comes out.

Unfortunately, "most agree that prot warrior dps is lacking" is not an actionable item. I need something more concrete than that to take to my team. Is your dps lower than it is on live? How much lower? In what circumstances? Is it lower than other tanks? How much lower? In what circumstances?

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with being vague. Maybe your post will spur someone else to chime in with more details in agreement or disagreement. Just don't make the leap from "My dps feels low" to "Why haven't they buffed me yet?"

In the specific case of AEs such as Thunder Clap, we don't want them to be so powerful that they can hold threat all on their own. We don't want the AE tanking rotation to be just TC and Shockwave. If you are killing things one at a time, then you should make additional attacks to the next target to be killed and Thunder Clap should be sufficient to prevent healer aggro or the like.