World of Warcraft®

what it meant to be a warrior tank...

I've only been back a short while and was gone since 4.2. Didn't have much time to play before but now as I am laid up until my back surgery I've had time to play again, at least for now.
But here's my thoughts.

Maybe it is just me but with the new rage system for protection warriors and not gaining rage in defensive stance for taking damage, it just doesn't feel right. Maybe I'm also just being a bit RPish(Oh lawd). I always looked at it like I would in any aggravated situation, if I get hit, I'm going to get pissed off. It was a great idea and it really made sense. But now we get the 1r/3s and gain it by using abilities? Sad face.
We've all seen WoW morphed and mangled over the years but as a person who has had more warriors than he can count on one hand in his WoW career and really loves them, this bothers me. =/

Onto another issue though, being as how mastery/dodge/parry are primary stats for avoidance tanks while exp/hit take back seat, how do you other warrior tanks handle your reforging in the beginning stages of tanking(360-375) and/or after that? This is kind of where my issue stemmed as I can't seem to find the right balance if there is one. If I can't land my Shield slam/revenges I can't get rage to readily use Block/Barrier in my rotation for the survivability I very much need right now. On the other hand if I try to get a modest chunk of exp/hit I lose out on some much needed overall avoidance. I'm probably just not seeing something and doing something wrong but any help on it would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Zoly.

Having played paladin and warrior in mop, I just wish active mitigation on warriors worked differently. Also, we have a loooot more cooldowns and abilities, to where it isn't quite clear when one is more useful than the other.

Do you mean the use of Block vs Barrier? If so I've been using it depending on what I'm about to pull or what the bosses I'm fighting primarily use.

If the boss or whatever it may be primarily uses magic I'll use Barrier.
If it/they uses primarily melee I will use Block.
If it uses both magic/melee but in a predictable manner I'll use them accordingly.
If it uses both magic/melee unpredictably I typically just wing it and hope for the best.

Pretty much what I do too. I think I just like the paladins style of SotR better than our set up.

agreed op.

I don't like where they took prot warriors. I think they are trying to do to much with them and failed.

as it is we need to do so much in a fight (cooldowns, watch for ads, move boss etc) and rage is crap at times.

I love where tanking in general is now. The first thing you have to realize is that its different from any warrior tanking in any prior patch. We now generate rage which we want to use for active mitigation thru our attacks.

So shield slam and revenge generate rage for us. Use them on CD. You'll get the rage you need. Throw in berserker rage on CD and you'll have plenty of rage. Now that you have your rage do NOT use it on heroic strike. Really most of your HS is going to come from sword/board procs when its free.

Use your rage for your active mitigation abilities like shield block and shield barrier. Which one you use depends on the situation. Sometimes you can use both.

You don't mitigate damage passively and rely on your rage to generate threat and dps anymore. Instead you use your dps to generate rage and actively improve your mitigation. Makes more sense to me at least.

As for your question about how to do stats:
dodge and parry get reforged to hit or exp until they are at 7.5 (exp can go higher but many don't feel its needed). Then once at cap, both can be reforged into mastery.

Our passive, no-thought mitigation has taken a back seat.

I disagree. I like the new active mitigation model. In cata all we had to do was stack mastery to get to CTC cap, and we'd mitigate everything, generate more rage then we could spend, and could just spam heroic strike till the cows came home, which wasn't very difficult or appealing. The new method of having to generate rage keeps me much more enagaged, occupied and involved.

I love where tanking in general is now. The first thing you have to realize is that its different from any warrior tanking in any prior patch. We now generate rage which we want to use for active mitigation thru our attacks.

So shield slam and revenge generate rage for us. Use them on CD. You'll get the rage you need. Throw in berserker rage on CD and you'll have plenty of rage. Now that you have your rage do NOT use it on heroic strike. Really most of your HS is going to come from sword/board procs when its free.

Use your rage for your active mitigation abilities like shield block and shield barrier. Which one you use depends on the situation. Sometimes you can use both.

You don't mitigate damage passively and rely on your rage to generate threat and dps anymore. Instead you use your dps to generate rage and actively improve your mitigation. Makes more sense to me at least.

As for your question about how to do stats:
dodge and parry get reforged to hit or exp until they are at 7.5 (exp can go higher but many don't feel its needed). Then once at cap, both can be reforged into mastery.

Our passive, no-thought mitigation has taken a back seat.

Thanks for the information, I'll be sure to go that way with it and see how things go. I suppose I was just so accustomed to having more passive mitigation and not having this active role in my own survivability, it does make more sense and it actually makes me see it in a bit of a different light.

01/24/2013 08:17 AMPosted by Ruhkouri

I disagree. I like the new active mitigation model. In cata all we had to do was stack mastery to get to CTC cap, and we'd mitigate everything, generate more rage then we could spend, and could just spam heroic strike till the cows came home, which wasn't very difficult or appealing. The new method of having to generate rage keeps me much more enagaged, occupied and involved.

Yeah I see what you mean, maybe I just have to get into the rhythm of things a bit more.

I guess it was just the RPish side of me that shows only with warriors that makes me miss gaining rage for being beaten on.

I agree to an extent.

I understand the desire for Active Mitigation, as the benefits of it are exceptional. As a DK tank now (putting behind me an 8 year old Warrior tank), active mitigation is simply an amazing thing to have, and it was the best way to level DKs with the other tanks, without gimping DKs.

The problem with warriors, in my opinion, was this:

The warrior "rotation" was fast. When you popped Shield Block, and every block net you 15 rage, and damage taken gave you rage, and you popped Inner Rage to make your Cleaves and Heroic Strikes hit faster and harder, you were really able to go after the enemy: really destroy him.

That isn't to say your DPS was incredibly high, but you felt that you were doing a lot. Shield Slam + Cleave into Revenge + Cleave into Thunderclap + Cleave... You were hitting a lot of buttons, quickly.

If you hit those buttons too quickly, and your rage went down too far, you'd miss a Shield Slam, or something you needed rage for. So it created a fairly fun resource system, and at the same time a very enjoyable tanking experience because of how vicious and brutal playing felt.

However, with Rage being converted into what is only a minor difference from Energy, and that resource being tied into mitigation, that play style was forced to change. Blue posts have always recognized that given the choice between DPS or mitigation, great tanks will the vast majority of the time choose mitigation.

This meant that rage would be used less like it once was, because it is bound to your mitigation. As I said at the start, active mitigation is great, and simply mitigating based on passive bonuses is boring. There is, however, no reason why they needed to change the play style of Warrior tanking. By leaving Rage alone, and adding a simple other resource that can be built up and spent on Shield Block/Shield Barrier, rage would be freed to still be used as aggressively and as interestingly as it once was.

This is not what happened, and for it, warrior tanking now feels slow, and is a game of whack a mole. I am not against active mitigation by any means, simply the destruction of the best tanking play style I have ever found in a MMO, and I've been tanking since my ogre warrior back in 1999 in EverQuest. Nothing matched the warrior's style in this game.

But now that is gone.

I know there are some who are happy with where Warriors are now, and that's cool... But I felt that Warrior Tanking provided the fast paced tanking to the game, whereas the other tanks provided slower, more predictable tanking. There is no more option for that fast of a tanking class, and it saddens me.

Nope.

New rage model is an improvement.

AM is kinda cool.

Warrior is more fun this time around than it has ever been. It doesn't feel mechanically different in terms of playstyle, even though it is completely different under the hood. The only real difference for me now is I'm using my mousewheel for block/barrier and F key for HS/Cleave, and I can use Execute!

Warrior tanking is a lot better than it was in the MoP beta (They made some appallingly terrible decisions there, but thankfully, most of them got fixed up) and while yeah, it is a bit slower, with Ultimatum procs and hitting Shield Block pretty often, it isn't that much slower. Like Zap said, the playstyle isn't actually that different once you get used to it, but instead of spamming HS, you hit SBlock/Barr more.

I was pretty sceptical about it at first, but once I got the hang of it, I think it is an improvement. I love being able to either mitigate damage, absorb a huge chunk of damage, or deal more damage and it really does feel like a meaningful choice.
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Combat tables, diminishing returns and you!
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2489160859

Rage is a terrible resource for active mitigation.

It really is.
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Combat tables, diminishing returns and you!
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2489160859

The current rage is literally holy power multiplied by 20.

Hey, that's not fair!

We can glyph ours to go higher.
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Combat tables, diminishing returns and you!
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2489160859

I like Raztrent's idea of having a separate resource for for shield block/barrier, and leaving rage how it was. Playing my paladin it feels like I'm doing way more during a fight. CS, judge, AS, SotR, Consecrate, etc. My warrior feels like I'm limited to only using rage for SB, and all my other rage abilities sit idle.

I never would have been able to Execute Elegon for 2.3 million before.

I feel more cooldown constrained than rage constrained... It's fairly easy to go from 0 to 90 rage in about 5 seconds.

01/26/2013 07:27 AMPosted by Zeroic

I like Raztrent's idea of having a separate resource for for shield block/barrier, and leaving rage how it was.

So, you mean a Monk.