Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Why I Will be Tanking in Wrath

Yep, I changed my mind, but Blizzard really came through for protection warriors. I expected them to fix a few things for Wrath, but I never expected them to totally revolutionize the way the class was played in such a great way. The protection warrior changes in Wrath are absolutely fantastic. These are the things that made me love tanking again:


Charging in Defensive Stance
- At first, I thought the warbringer talent wasn't that big of a deal and would mostly help warriors while farming in their prot gear. I was wrong. It's completely awesome, it's a great rage generator, and I find myself using it quite often.

AoE Tanking - Shockwave and Unlimited-Target Thunder Clap. Not to mention glyphs like this. It's about time. I can't explain how satisfying it was to run through heroic shattered halls and mount hyjal while trying these out.

Removal of crushing blows/Better tanking rotation - In BC, warriors had the most ridiculous ability rotation of any class in the game, especially for bosses. First, you constantly kept your global cooldown occupied with this: SS->rev->dev->dev all while spamming shield block (not on the GCD) every few seconds to keep from getting crushed. On top of that, there was this list of other stuff to keep up with: renew tclap and possibly demo shout on the boss every minute, renew commanding shout every two minutes, hit trinkets every 2 minutes, drink pots, use healthstones, and watch for the best place to hit last stand and shield wall.

Thankfully, Blizzard recognized this. Crushing blows are history, and shield block is now on a 60 second cooldown and now gives a really nice block value bonus. We also got a new talent that keeps things a little more interesting by creating a random chance for SS to be refreshed and free!

All Content in 10-man form - I was really excited about finding this one out. I have always had a lot more fun in 10-man raids than 25-man ordeals. It's very cool being able to see all the content without having to necessarily jump that hurdle from 10 to 25. I'll still eventually want to check out the 25-man versions, but at least I won't feel like I have to just to see everything.

Dual Specs - When the rumors for dual specs came out, it was too good to be true. But now we've all heard the devs promise this to us, and it sounds nothing short of amazing. Being able to instantly switch over from Fury to Protection wherever I am is revolutionary. If I'm in a raid and there are too many tanks, it's not a problem anymore. It apparently will even remember your glyphs!

Reasonable Threat vs. Avoidance trade-off: Much of the warrior community debated this for years. Many protection warriors (me included) felt that it wasn't fair that they always had to significantly 'downgear' when fighting anything other than the hardest boss they were currently working on, lest they be completely rage starved and the raid get angry at them for not pumping out enough threat. The argument was that DPS classes really didn't have this problem. I think most of us were actually fine with needing several 'threat' type gear pieces, but I always felt that I was having to spend too much time constantly adjusting my gear to find that perfect balance depending on if I was in a heroic, Kara, or SSC. Not finding that balance either resulted in getting squashed too quickly or not getting hit hard enough, which was sometimes a very slim window, especially if running with a weaker healer and insane DPS. Some warriors felt special by having that extra challenge. I thought it got incredibly old.

This problem has essentially been eliminated. The concept of having to maximize threat is pretty much gone since defensive stance gives more base threat and all classes were basically given Blessing of Salavation permenantly. Outgearing content is not really an issue anymore with Damage Shield. Rage starvation is much less of an issue in general, with several glyphs to help out with it. I'm guessing we'll still have our separate avoidance and threat gear to some extent, but the trade-off should be much more reasonable and won't require so much attention, which is fine with me. There's plenty of other more interesting stuff out there to concentrate on.

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