#0 - Jan. 10, 2010, 11:30 p.m.
Q u o t e:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22418705342&sid=1&pageNo=2
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.
and
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 don want tanks to generate a ton of threat. There isn't much of a way to make that math work without threat multipliers.
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.
i find the last one to be the most interesting
