The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Great Divide part 1
Warriors, at the heart of it, only do one thing.
They hit things. And that's it.
Everything warriors do is in terms of hitting things, ultimately. An argument could be made that some warriors spend an awful lot of time trying to make it so things that hit them don't kill them as fast as they could and that argument would have merit. But I'd argue that those warriors are merely attempting to optimize their hitting things time. Generally speaking, most things won't hit themselves, so if you die when they hit you, then they'll go off and hit someone else. You have to keep upright if you're to keep hitting anything.
Well, okay, I suppose warriors do two things. They hit things and they yell a lot. They yell at the mobs, they yell at their fellow adventurers which somehow makes them feel healthier (I admit that I'm not terribly sure why my shouting can have all these variable effects. I must have amazing vocal control. Like Don LaFontaine, may he rest in peace.) Well, it seems to me in reading the various posts by Ghostcrawler in the warrior beta forums that the intention for prot warriors is to emphasize their hitting of things.
I'm going to be honest at my own expense here: the other day, when talking about upcoming warrior changes, I was extremely negative, especially in the comments of the post. (The post itself wasn't that bad.) I was more negative than was warranted. I don't like going back and saying "Man, I was wrong" but while my points were made from a sincere sense of how tanking is working on beta right now, part of the problem (as always) comes from the twin devils of insufficient gear (especially with the way warrior tanking needs have so thoroughly changed) and the beta effect, when skills and abilities and talents simply are not done or balanced. No, warriors are not now, and never will be AoE tanks and it is very annoying to see other classes get your abilities but you not get parity with theirs. But I think, reading between the lines of what's being said on the forums, prot is going to complete an arc that's already been described by some prot warriors in full DPS gear on live.
Prot warriors will hit things very hard, and also yell at them.
"You Sunder, you Demo Shout, Battle Shout, Challenging Shout. You might Piercing Howl depending on the encounter. You Execute. You Intervene. See where I'm going...? If you are really winning or losing fights based on whether your tank can Innervate, then we've probably made the content too challenging. The difference in skill (or gear) between a potential warrior and druid tank should have a much bigger effect on the outcome.
The situations we've had before have been more like "The paladin can tank all of Heroic Shattered Halls with no CC" or "The druid can do nearly double your dps while tanking" or "The warrior can achieve passive crushing immunity and has the only ability that can handle Shear." Those are egregious barriers to having 4 viable tanking classes, which is why we're trying to fix them. " - Quoted from this post because I really want to look at the implications for warriors inherent in this statement, which is in response to a list of ways each potential tank contributes outside of tanking.
For starters, I don't agree with all of it. How often does a non-tanking warrior sunder in raids? (It does happen, I've had DPS warriors sundering on mobs being paladin tanked, but often the rogue will just expose anyway.) Demo and TC are nice for lowering melee DPS on a tank, if that tank doesn't have those abilities. (Druids will be demoing for themselves in 99% of tank situations, unless a boss is very threat sensitive and they can't waste the GCD.) Execute's not really a big draw at present for protection warriors who aren't tanking.
But all of that is on live. The problem I'm starting to notice is the divide between live, and my experience on live, and what's happening on the beta servers: the warrior class is changing a lot more than you see at first. All three trees are changing into chimerical beasts, differently designed than they have been before. And prot is definitely undergoing this transformation.
The second part of the statement is what I'm looking at with more contemplation. It's already been stated that it might be okay for non-prot warriors to have the ability to generate really high threat as long as their mitigation isn't up there with a prot warrior, and he's also said that prot will be able to have enough damage to contribute to a fight if they're not tanking at the moment. (He's also said that prot's DPS has gone up so much that they might be outdamaging arms warriors, which reminds me of the days of devastate hitting with both weapons if you were dual wielding, and which rightly should not be the case. DPS warriors shouldn't out tank tanking warriors and tanking warriors shouldn't out-DPS damage oriented warriors.) But the goal seems to be clear: it's not to make all tanks exactly equally viable in all roles.
It's to make all tanks equally viable by giving them the capacity to perform in all roles to some degree while also providing them with some sort of utility outside of their tanking role. And for warriors, this utility seems to be in damage output. Druids will still have their larger bag of tricks outside of tanking, as will paladins, but DK's and prot warriors who tank really only have one other option if they're not tanking at the moment, and that option is killing things. DK's bring a lot of AoE options (trust me, I've gotten mine to Northrend, they're quite impressive) and prot warriors can't hope to match it. So what are we left with? Single target DPS.
Prot warriors will be the tanks who hit things and yell at things. They'll just be better at both. Does TC count as hitting or yelling? I guess it's like both combined.
Now, to be fair and completely honest, the other day we ran Hyjal without any tanking paladins, and so I got to experience the real limits of warrior AoE tanking. I say this in part because I had devalued it. It is unequivocally true that paladins are by far the best AoE threat generation tanks, and they do so with much less button mashing than any other tank in live. But it is in fact possible for a warrior to go forward, spell reflect properly, and hold six necromancers and six abominations on himself through rather frantic use of every possible ability (I found myself rotating through aboms and spamming devastate and shield slam when possible, constantly shield blocking when it was up, hitting TC and using Cleave instead of HS as my rage dump, spell reflecting like mad, and swearing like an inebriated pirate who just stepped on his last bottle) although I will never say that it is or fun or remotely easy for him or her to do this. But it is possible. (And it was only possible with amazing healing and off tanks who ran in and peeled Abominations off of me as fast as possible so that I didn't die like a cockroach at a tap dancing invitational.)
One of the complaints I've seen on the beta forums (by frequent commenter Tchernobyl who also posts here quite often) that is valid is that warrior tanking turns your hand into a withered, gnarled unholy claw which is really more fit for wrenching the still beating hearts of the living from their bony prisons than, say, holding hands or doing something less awful. Well, okay, he didn't go that far. But it's a fair complaint: that night in Hyjal, my wrist felt like I'd replaced the cartilege and connective tissue with Folger's Crystals. I actually still have a rather large bump on my wrist from the experience. I am going to argue here that warrior tanking needs tweaks just to minimize this level of discomfort.
No, I probably shouldn't be hitting two buttons to tank every mob in a pull. (We can argue back and forth as to whether or not anyone should be.) But constant global cooldown spam (in order to tank at maximum threat a warrior pretty much constantly rides the cooldown, using every ability he or she has as soon as he or she can, to the point where on threat sensitive fights you may not be able to use abilities that don't directly contribute sufficient threat) - if the supposed changes to prot DPS and warrior threat free us in any way from this constant hammering on the keyboards, I will be totally supportive of them.
In the end, statements like "there's no reason to bring a warrior to tank" may feel valid... I know, because I made that statement two days ago... but they're both premature and they don't take into account the philosophy of tanking as a warrior being outlaid in fits and starts here. Now, I know as much as any long time warrior that you can't take every blue post as gospel, that you don't always understand exactly what they mean, and so on. But it seems pretty apparent to me in reading over those posts that what we're looking at is a shift in how warriors tank towards not only more damage, but also attempting to make tanking less about spamming every ability you have every time it's up.
At present, this means that warriors have huge itemization issues going into the expansion. Old school tanking gear doesn't combat rage starvation or address the new realities of how good strength is for warrior tanks now, and it's not going to be easy for well geared tanks to look at their Tier 6 and say "I guess I'll only wear the hat and gloves." When I level my human warrior on test (as his gear is far, far superior to my tauren) I'm going to have to swap out some of my standard tanking set for PvP pieces to do the first dungeons. My Gauntlets of Enforcement will probably stay desirable due to the expertise on them, but other pieces may well need to make room.
In the end, I'm hoping that, once this all shakes out, we'll see warrior tanks with greater AoE ability, less ridiculous button smashing (seriously, I have a bulge on my wrist from this, it's not cool) and solid ability to contribute to the raid. And I'm hopeful that the design philosophy that Ghostcrawler is outlining will allow us this. Warrior tanks won't have the plethora of abilities the hybrid tanks do. We won't have the sheer volume of AoE options DK's do. No, we're going to contribute to raids by smashing things and yelling at things, and I'm starting to believe that will be enough. I can only hope my trust is warranted.
Next week in part two, we'll talk about how Arms is shifting paradigms as well, from a dedicated PvP tree to one that provides a lot of DPS options for instances and raiding instead of one debuff.
