Wednesday, July 30

Prot Warrior in the Beta

I'm currently fooling around in the beta and while i've was mostly on my Shaman main i also tried my level 70 Protection Warrior during an instance
To give a bit of an idea of my character and how i play it: My tank is tanked in full T4 gear-equivalent with some Heroic Badges gear so not half bad.
I've often maintanked Karazhan with some of our T6 mains tagging along which rarely took aggro even without a Paladin in the raid or a Shamy using his tranquil air which hopefully says a bit about my threatgeneration. (got threat spec tho)

When doing a 5-man in WotLK with 4 guildmates i took a somewhat simular build with some of the new talents aswell.
Now i must confess i quite missed my macro's but i recreated most halfway through the instance, still things felt a bit akward and i'm suspecting threatgeneration might be a bit lower then usuall... leaving out of consideration that my Warriors threat might be minimalized due to the change in how threat is generated. (as my kit has very little strength but does have Block value and such for threat generation)
My build was probably something like: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=LiZcZict0e0zcxsgzVo (can't check atm as i'm at work :P)

First thing i noticed was how threat was totaly messed up.
I was with a Ret Paladin which could overtake me on aggro within a second and many times throughout the fight so i used that taunt button more in one run then i normally would on 10 (taunt is more of an oh shit button most of the time). Now the Paladin is supposed to have some bugged talents which makes him do insane damage so can understand this up to some point (was just before latest beta update btw).
The Enhancement Shaman managed to do the same actually.... When starting out with a Shield Slam and a Revenge/Devastate he overtook me straight away. Normally the Shield Slam alone would give me a nice headstart (i never taunt at the pull to keep a mob on me) but it had little effect now.
Either the Warriors threatgeneration is completely messed up, the Threat bonus on Defensive stance aint working yet, the threatreduction on dps classes don't work yet or the new itemisation totaly made my current gear useless (had no Recount or such to check TPS :( ).
Now it has been said that Warriors are still getting their complete overhaul so i'm hoping i can test things again later.
I did get to try the new talents a bit however and the new skills part of that.

Vigilance: Quite nice to use on that constantly overaggro'ing person. I made a macro of it so i could cast it on my target's target (aka, what my mob was attacking), with no CD an it being active untill canceled it seems a pretty impressive skill.
I thought at first it was more of a panic skill but if threat is a problem for a certain player you can simply keep this skill on him/her, shouldn't be needed but i can imagen certain boss fights where this comes in handy.. surely Blizz will think of some uses for it aswell.

Sword and Board: a so-so talent, i think you get more benefit from it if you tank a raidboss and get use Shield Slam more often then you do in your current rotation, which also makes a fixed rotation a thing of the past ofcourse. Don't mind myself.
On trash it's nice to be able to Slam around a bit or build faster threat on the current mob so you got enough headstart and can build threat on the next mob in meantime. For those not stuck in a rotation this is quite helpfull eitherway, then again.. those people are perhaps not the ones who need that threatboost in the first place.

Shockwave: I guess my attackpower wasn't high enough with my Outlands tankgear but it seemed to do very little. I can't even recall i saw any stunning on the mobs and i used it quite a lot, perhaps it isn't finished yet.
Visuall it looked pretty cool altho getting all the enemies in the cone in front of me was tricky, it was easy to be slightly turned away and blast past some or have mobs to close. Then again the people in my group didn't give me much time to backstep to get them neatly lined up so that might help until you are more used to using this spell.

I could see the potential of the Protection Warrior but this far it's far from complete. In the current state it's quite frustrating to play as a tank on a protection Warrior... on an earlier run the Fury Warrior was MT and his threat wasn't much worse then mine and that shouldn't be possible imo, at least not to this extend.
Hopefully they will implent the planned changes soon so i can take another shot at this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As I dont have a Beta key, and I play a T6 prot warrior currently in a high end raiding guild Im really looking forward to your update on this when Blizz implement some of the new prot talents and base threat generation correctly, specifically how threat and aggro are meant to work in the expansion.