Considering that Prot Warriors were a very popular and very common tank for ICC on retail? Yes, I would say that he did. Of course, that's not something you'd know.
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Field Medic Moderator
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Member
Absolutely right up there with Unholy DK "God" tanks, they were.
I realize it's hard for you to help yourself but it's in poor taste to spread misinformation under the banner of a Warmane staff account.
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Field Medic Moderator
So you'd say it's in good taste to make accusations without evidence at myself, and at Ghostcrawler, particularly when it's painfully obvious how you can't possibly know the context of what he said a decade ago? "Research" on a topic that old doesn't really count, neither. Were Warriors at a disadvantage in that patch? Perhaps they were. (Edit: You'll note that nowhere in my post did I say they were good.) But that doesn't change that there *were* plenty of them that *were* successful in doing the content in question.
So do you want to take another shot at me as a staff member, or do you want to keep the ad hominem directed at myself and Ghostcrawler to yourself?
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Member
The context is clearly laid out in all of his posts. People were lamenting about the state of Prot Warriors at the time of the thread, and wondering what the direction for the spec was going to be heading forwards in Cataclysm, and GC was fumbling to justify WotLK's Prot Warrior design and deflecting criticism (for the most part) under the guise of wanting to avoid homogeneity, and commenting briefly on how the tanking + healing paradigms were going to be different in Cata.
The quote I referenced was a comment on tank quality (this is clearly implied given his stated metric was "chance of success"), whereas your statement was a comment on tank popularity, so whatever point you thought you were making fell flat because you didn't address what I was criticizing. Either that, or you were drawing a correlation between perceived popularity and tank quality, which qualifies as information when we're talking about Prot Warriors.
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Banned
Considering your reply I'm forced to be driven under the assumption that English ain't your native language. That's ok and that would also explain your misinterpretation of the line that you've refered yourself to, however, it doesn't seem that this is the case. I would go ahead and go as far as pushing this under the category of "ignorance" or "misinformed".
Declaring protection warriors as unpopular is something that is only seen in these same forums. You would know that, if you did indeed, play World of Warcraft during the prime time of this expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, since you would see a lot of protection warriors roaming around. You and multiple players that have been providing replies in this thread, seem to be driven under the idea that the expansion only had a specific raid or a specific fight. That's not necessarily truth though. You need to keep in mind (again, if you were indeed a World of Warcraft player back in 2009, you would know this) that only a niche of guilds were actually progressing and doing Heroic Icecrown Citadel. Not many of them were able of touching Heroic Icecrown Citadel, at least the late bosses I should say, until the massive nerf that Blizzard applied to the raid known as a percentual "buff" that is provided to the raid group. Now, with this said, have you gone and checked how many guilds did "Normal" Icecrown Citadel progression while using a protection warrior? I'm almost certain that you have not. In fact, allow me to provide you an example:
In this current expansion and current patch, protection paladins were declared as "handicapped" and with that they were placed in a "bad spot". Does that automatically translate as a "non doable", "non popular" or "non grata"? No, it doesn't. What it does mean though is that the class requires a lot more effort while compared to other tanks. The player makes the class and not the other way around. Obviously, if you ask a player that has no sense of knowledge about the class to play it and perform under the same level as other tanks, that will not happen. However, if you're an experienced player with a lot of information and knowledge regarding a specific class, you will be able to perform as intended and you will also be able to be up to par with other tanking classes. Following the example, in this same current expansion and current patch, protection paladins are actually used to tank Mythic Antorus. Some of them, even went as far as killing Mythic Argus, however, they're still sitting on the bottom of the tanking classes "tier tree". If the player is capable of making the class work, the class will perform as intended. Just like Ghostcrawler mentioned: It's performing as intended, however, yes, it does require a lot more effort and skill cap.
The information you're using in this reply baffles me. Not only you're driving yourself under the idea that what people type in the forums is actually the reality of things (I mean... Take a look at the current World of Warcraft official forums. It's a joke) but you're also stating it as an universal truth. There's no such thing as an universal truth. One specific characteristic from my class might please me but that doesn't necessarily mean that you agree with the current state of that same class. Example: Rogues, at the moment, are in a really good spot. However, if you go and check the official rogue forum section in the World of Warcraft official forums, you'll notice, that there's a ridiculous ammount of whining about the state of the class and the way that some mechanics work. Your whole theory has a huge gap and that gap is summed up to one single line:
The player makes the class work. Not the other way around.
Now I might understand that your experience with protection warriors might be limited. I also understand that you play on a private server that used to have (still has as far as I'm aware) an extremely bugged protection warrior scripting. However, that's the reality of a private server, not the reality, of the game itself when it was still relevant and actual. With this, you should conclude, that your knowledge and "research" might be limited since you lack the experience that you should have acquired back in 2009, alongside, with the theorycrafters from this expansion prime time.
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Field Medic Moderator
Since you aren't aware;
>The forum is always full of the people who are loudest. That does not change that Prot Warriors were doing and clearing the content.
>You want to talk about Blizzard's design philosophy at the time? It's very different from how it is now. But again, you wouldn't know that, would you?
>Claiming that popularity and rate at which a tank spec clears the content isn't relevant to their "chance of success"? What? Doesn't address what you were criticizing? Pray do tell in what metric do you think Prot Warriors are not capable of clearing content just as quickly as any other tank?
- Does that metric include specific boss encounters? Then I think you should ask yourself if the majority of the player-base were doing those specific boss encounters. If the answer to that is anything labeled [Heroic] beyond Deathbringer Saurfang (Valithria excluded, aka "Lootwalker"), then the answer would be a resounding NO.
- Does that metric include the majority of boss encounters? I highly doubt the difference in EHP between a Prot Warrior and other tanks is going to prevent them from doing the bulk majority of boss encounters. (Oh wait, that's because it *didn't*!)
And in case it's not obvious, the questions are rhetorical. Blizzard's metric wasn't (and still aren't) about a perfect homogenized tank line-up, but rather about how the specs are performing in the game in overall numbers.
>And none of what you said answered my question. Do you want to take another ad hominem shot at me or no? Because this ends here and now. How poorly it ends for you depends on the choice I'm allowing you to make here.
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Member
Hi pyro, long time no see.
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Member
When you broaden the scope of the discussion to the "bulk majority" you're changing the topic entirely. No one in this thread is arguing a good Prot Warrior can't do a damn efficient job of tanking for the purposes of most raiding content, at least not that I've seen. However, when you narrow down the fight selection to the most bleeding-edge, grueling, and boss-damage heavy encounters, then that EHP difference absolutely matters. That's when a Prot Warr's EHP inferiority rears its ugly head. A lot of posts earlier in the thread were devoted to going back and forth on the topic of the EHP difference. Your "chance of success" when bringing a Prot Warrior to heroic LK or Sindy is a lot worse than it would be if you'd just brought a Pally tank. There's a tank quality ceiling of sorts that gets imposed particularly brutally on Prot Warriors in these encounters. It's not really felt so much until you get that far, chiefly because most of the earlier encounters aren't as tank-intensive in the same way, but when you finally get that far, it's certainly there.
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Banned
I don't know why Ghostcrawler's opinion is in any way relevant to this thread or Warmane in general but if you actually read his replies, most of them are just him indirectly agreeing that warrior design is bad for the content they're supposed to tank and that Cataclysm will "fix" it. Even the design team at that time was aware that warriors were weaker than other tanks. Considering the Wotlk servers on Warmane will stay on Wotlk, all of his promises about the better future of prot warriors in Cataclysm are completely pointless and all the criticisms about prot warriors being weaker are still valid.
They don't balance tanks by EH alone but as part of a package that includes cooldowns and other mechanics but the sad reality is that warriors are severely lacking in those as well. Warrior tanks are the only tanks who have to waste a glyph slot and 2 talent points to make Shield Wall have the same cd as the equivalent of other tanks and even when they do that, theirs still provides 10% less damage reduction. Enraged Regeneration is largely insufficient as a cd and is only really used in conjunction with Last Stand and the same goes for Shield Block, being too weak to be relied on as a solo cd for most mechanics that demand one. The warrior package then in reality provides the worst passive defenses and pretty much the worst active defenses tied with bears but at least bears have the highest passive EH to compensate. It's just pants on head balance.
You will have a lower chance of clearing heroic content if you pick a warrior tank because warriors simply have worse tools for tanking and seeing how tank is the role with the highest impact on your raid's performance, it's pretty easy to understand why having a weaker tank is a significant handicap.Edited: January 26, 2018
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Field Medic Moderator
I'm glad that we got that settled.
That said, in the future, I would strongly recommend that you stick to the topic and not take shots at me rather than my argument. Doing so again will be at your own peril.
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Member
I struggle to see how that was ever a point of contention but I'm likewise glad we arrived at the understanding that it evidently isn't. I'll be sure to heed your advice.
Slightly more on topic, you mentioned something that stirred some intrigue. You stated Prot Warriors were very common in ICC. I assume you meant this in relation to other tanks (do correct me otherwise). Were you basing this off some kind of census gathered from various pugs and guild runs, etc? I'd be interested in getting my hands on some kind of source pertaining to class and spec representations, for tanks and other roles.
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Member
While it is true that warriors were the weakest in absolute EHP terms (especially by the end of ICC), that never meant that they weren't able to tank all the content in the game. This is true for all the classes, I should add. At the beginning of Wrath, DK's (Unholy) and Druids were the absolute god-tanks, yet all the content was cleared (even on progression) with both Warriors and Paladins as MT's, it just required an adjustment of your guild's tactics for a specific encounter. In the case of Sarth+3 (pre-Ulduar), you just needed to get more gear from Naxx and EoE so that your shield tank could maintain defense cap in frost res gear without obnoxious amounts of defense gems.
In Ulduar, Mimiron P1 was perfectly doable with a Warrior or Paladin MT, you just needed a tank swap. This theme continues throughout the expansion. While there were certainly tanks that were superior on specific encounters (no one could tank Anub 25 HC adds like a Warrior - Paladins came close, but only later on), all encounters were doable with all tanks as MT, provided you were willing to adjust your tactics accordingly.
Bringing that into ICC, there seems to be this misconception that Warriors can't tank LK 25 HC, despite numerous proofs that they are fully capable of doing so. Are they able to deal with every Soul Reaper without outside assistance? No. Can your RAID still deal with it? Absolutely. Before the ICC buff reached obnoxious levels, our guild's common tactic was to tank swap on Soul Reaper, with the OT standing on the other side of the platform. Obviously this creates some minor issues with melee having to move, but nothing that can't be dealt with. We got our normal LK kill with the 5% buff, reached HC LK with 20% buff and finally downed him on 25% buff using this same tactic. While our MT was typically a druid (myself), we had 3 warrior OT's (obviously not at the same time). Our maiden kill was with a Warrior as I missed the raid that night (all of this is to show that I'm not talking out of my ***). We didn't need my mass of EHP, we didn't need Paladins rotating LoH (we only had one ret and one holy), we simply adjusted our tactics (the warriors both specced Safeguard and used it accordingly).
In conclusion: are Warriors the weakest of the tank specs, based on one specific encounter that the majority of players will never see? Maybe. Are their flaws detrimental to the raid? By no means.
Btw: A half-decent Warrior is a god OT on LK (or any fight with adds). Paladins are easymode, but the Warrior just brings so many small utilities that can make everyone else's job a helluva lot easier.
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Wind of Northrend
In conclusion:
Warriors have lowest EHP,
least amount of defCDs,
imaginary OP utility,
and: Intervene + Spell Reflect > Sac + Dsac + LoH.
(I basicly saw a Warrior Intervene a Main Tank before Soul Reaper and that same Warrior got one shoted from Soul Reapers initial DMG)
Again, noone is saying that Warriors are not playable. Noone is saying Warriors cant tank LK.
Yes, u can. People do it every day maybe, who knows...
Is it ur best choice to tank as Warrior? Hell no.
Is there a better MT for LK?
Yes > Bear (aka: Feral Druid Tank).
Is there a better OT for LK?
Yes > Prot Paladin.
Warriors does not have anything that is special.
Stop with that crap pls.
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Banned
There is no such misconception, the consensus is that warriors are the worst choice, not that it's impossible with a warrior. Learn to read and stop strawmanning the positions of others.
Warriors being the weakest tanks has nothing to do with the LK encounter specifically, their weaknesses are simply more pronounced there. They are the weakest main tank because they have the worst passive and active survivability. But I guess that doesn't really matter in whatever backwards dimension you seem to reside in where the main tank having a greater chance to die to the boss is somehow not detrimental to the raid.
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Member
That's impossible if he had safeguard.
