On Prot Wars: The Problem is Not Warbringer

#0 - Jan. 10, 2010, 6:26 p.m.

TLDR version is at the end of the second post.

A lot of people are crusading for Prot Warrior nerfs, and the developers have decided to nerf Prot by hamstringing Warbringer. I do not believe the problem is Warbringer.

In my opinion, the problem is that Protection Warriors have too much control and utility. Their DPS is far lower than that of an Arms Warrior, and their burst is similar. However, the reason why people are frustrated by Prot Warriors in PvP is because they are constantly stunned or silenced, and cannot get any casts off.

Their control abilities are as follows: (duration/cooldown)
Stuns - Concussion Blow 5/30, Shockwave (AoE) 4/20, Intercept 3/15, Charge 1.5/15, Revenge (proc) 3/5
Interupts and Silences - Shield Bash 3 (silence) or 6 (interrupt)/10, Heroic Throw 3/60

This is far more control than any other class has at their disposal. Here is a quick comparison to a few other class/spec combinations...
Retribution Paladins:
Hammer of Justice (stun) 6/40, Repentance (disorient) 6/60
Protection Paladins:
Hammer of Justice (stun) 6/30, Avenger's Shield (silence) 3/30
Rogues (out of stealth):
Gouge (disorient) 4/10, Kick (interrupt) 4/10, Kidney Shot (stun, requires combo points) 6/20

As the above clearly demonstrates, the control of a Prot Warrior is comparatively quite high. They even have a spell reflect ability that protects two teammates within 20 yards, a probable source of much frustration.

Where Warrior damage is too high, there are two primary reasons why it is so: one, Armor Penetration is overpowered and is just as effective as stacking strength against low armor targets and far more effective against high armor targets; two, revenge spam that results from taunting pets onto themselves while they engage their focus target. There is also the possibility that the character just stacked Shield Block value, in which case, it's the Shield Slam skill that is broken.

Protection Warriors need the uptime on their targets because their sustained damage is so low. I suggest everyone who believes that sustained Protection Warrior damage is too high should hop on to test (when it comes up), set up a maximum DPS Prot build, and spend some time in a front of a target dummy. I spent a lot of time doing that, and even the most optimal rotations could not get me within 30% of the DPS every other class's basic DPS spec.

I am under the impression that nerfing Warbringer will just result in a migration over to the Arms tree. A Protection Warrior gives up Mortal Strike, overall damage and some limited self-healing in exchange for control, mobility and durability. If you take away the mobility, they will not be able to exercise their control and their durability simply means they will be handled last.

The final complaint I would like to make about Protection Warriors is that they basically sit in one stance the entire fight. Draek stated that he stays in defensive stance the whole time, while Alloran stays in battle stance. Warbringer is what allows them to do this, but it's also a function of their poor rage generation when not focused.

Here is what I propose the developers do to limit Warrior control:
- Nerf Warbringer to only allow Intervene to be useable in defensive stance, and Intercept in berserker stance. Leave the snare break intact, this is heart and soul of the spec.
- Take away some of the Prot Warrior's 5 stuns. 4 seconds of Aoe stun every 20 seconds, to me, is enough for PvE. Remove the stuns from Concussion Blow and Revenge. I particularly dislike the stun on revenge because it's RNG-based.
- The silence on Shield Bash should be removed completely. Instead, reduce the cooldown of Heroic Throw to 30 seconds, and leave the silence intact on it.
- I would think long and hard about what to do about the group spell reflect.

Here is my list of suggestions as to what to do about Warrior damage:
- Somehow increase rage generation of protection warriors that are not under fire to allow them to change stances more frequently.
- Nerf Armor Penetration severely before the expansion comes out so that it is mathematically inferior to strength against all armor levels. The stat will still be a DPS bonus on gear and not seen as "junk", but it will no longer unbalance Warrior damage to the extent it has.
- Increase the damage of Concussion Blow, perhaps double.
- To get rid of the insane Shield Slams, change Shield Slam to do damage equal to (attack power / 2), and be unaffected by Shield Block.
- Allow spell-reflect to trigger abilities that activate upon a Block, Dodge, or Parry (Enrage, Revenge).

Ghostcrawler

#52 - Jan. 10, 2010, 10:54 p.m.

I always struggle with whether to handle this topic in the damage forums or the tanking one. :(

Let's look first at the Warbringer change.

Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. Aside from stuns and Dismantle, rooting or snaring the Prot warrior is the major way to keep him off of you. Considering all of the stuns and silences that Prot has, when they can also jump out of every Frost Nova with Warbringer, then there's not much in the way of skill a mage can employ to stay alive. They just get countered in every way.

Will it nerf them for PvE? Yes, but really slightly. I'm not sure I can ever remember a case in my WoW-playing history where my warrior or some other tank caused a wipe because of a root, so even if it did happen, it can't happen that much or be that memorable. Warriors certainly won't get sat because of some new Achilles' heel and we don't design encounters around the assumption that tanks can't be rooted. The important part of Warbringer from a PvE perspective, removing the stance restrictions, is still intact.

Now the damage change. As Bornakk posted recently, what we essentially did was look at some of the successful Prot PvP characters and compare them to some of the Prot tanks out there. We nerfed the block conversion to Shield Slam damage so that it would hit the PvP guy without really hitting the PvE guy. (The PvP warriors aren't stacking a ton of Shield Block Value, but they do have a lot of Strength which also converts to block for purposes of making Shield Slam hit harder -- many of these guys are wearing PvE dps plate.)

Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. We want Prot to be able to hit reasonably hard, but they also need to pay some price for their massive survivability. We thought the Warbringer change alone would nerf the warriors vs. e.g. mages but wouldn't control their damage. Those big Shield Slam crits should go down a lot.

Will it nerf them for PvE? Probably not, or at least not much. If you tank with a lot of Strength or SBV, you might see your Shield Slams go down, but that's why we buffed the threat of Shield Slam to compensate.

Again, keep the changes in perspective. We want Prot to be PvP viable. We don't want Prot warriors to dominate PvP or have everyone feel like they need one for their team. Likewise, we want Prot to do higher damage than the almost trivial damage that they did in BC. But that doesn't mean they need to be competitive with the dps while they're tanking.

Ghostcrawler

#74 - Jan. 10, 2010, 11:23 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I do find it dubious that you are nerfing Prot and using a comparison between them and Frost Mages as justification. What about the other melee classes that can not contend with a frost mage, and Frost Mages are just as overpowered against those melee classes as Prot is against Frost Mages?

This discussion isn't about other melee classes vs. mages. It's about Prot warriors. I used Frost mages as an example of a spec with a lot of control. In a nutshell, the problem with Prot is that they can't be controlled, have a lot of control, can't be damaged down, but deal a lot of damage. We don't want to attack their ability to take damage or to control because that does hurt tanking. That means attacking their ability to manage control or deal damage.

Ghostcrawler

#80 - Jan. 10, 2010, 11:26 p.m.

Q u o t e:
in this thread we see the speckled GC eat crow on threat modifiers.

I think you're misinterpreting our stance on the threat multipliers. They aren't going anywhere. What we want to de-emphasize are those abilities that do almost no damage but just a ton of threat, historically Sunder Armor. We don't want tanks doing as much damage as dps classes (because you should have to give up something for your ability to survive) but we do want tanks to generate a ton of threat. There isn't much of a way to make that math work without threat multipliers.

Ghostcrawler

#166 - Jan. 11, 2010, 1:21 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Prot Warrior Tier 10 has a total of 659 Strength on it.

DPS warrior Tier 10 has a total of 757 Strength on it.

I'm just using these as proxies to demonstrate that tanking plate has roughly the same amount of strength on it as DPS plate. How are you going to nerf Strength's conversion to damage for Shield Slam for warriors in DPS gear while not nerfing strength's conversion to damage for warriors in tanking gear?

"DPS gear" doesn't just mean the head, chest, shoulders, legs and gloves that make the tier sets. A warrior geared for tanking and a warrior geared for dps have pretty different stats, in part because of the off-set pieces, the rings and trinks, the weapons, gems and enchants. When we say Prot warriors wear PvE dps gear for PvP, the point is that they have enough innate survivability that they don't need the protection of PvP resilience gear or PvE +stamina tank gear. That lets them focus on damage.