Tanking in Cata and Prot PvP
Written by Faulken.

Quote from: Ghostcrawler
Without a defense stat there should not be a huge gear requirement to tank 5-player dungeons. It would be ideal if say an Arms warrior could go Defensive Stance, maybe use a shield, and be able to fill the tank role in any normal dungeon or even the easier heroics.

You will still likely need a Prot-spec warrior (or the equivalent of other classes) to MT actual raids.
(Source)

Quote from: Ghostcrawler
Prot in PvP is something we’re keeping an eye on.

So far, it doesn’t seem like Arena teams are stampeding towards Prot the way they did Ret and Unholy when those specs were overpowered. Now, representation is not a great way to balance, but it can be a good red flag. We’re also likely to nerf specs even if they aren’t highly represented when they are just really annoying to play against or are capable of success without a great deal of skill.

Nerfing Prot isn’t something we’d do without a lot of thought. There are no easy knobs to tweak. We’d have to be very careful about nerfing their survivability to avoid PvE consequences. We could nerf their damage, though we’ve also taken great pains to boost tank damage overall as a way of making the dps stats on tank gear more attractive, letting tanks feel like they are contributing more to their group, and just because it’s fun. (If you are asking yourself why tanking needs to be fun, you might want to ponder that question next time you’re waiting for your Dungeon Finder group to fill.) Finally a lot of the utility we added was to make tanking more dynamic so that tanks were doing something besides just spamming their defensive and threat moves. Sure Warbringer doesn’t have a big role on many boss fights, but it can be really useful on all of those encounters leading up to the boss fights. We don’t want the tanking trees to be 25-30 talents of nothing but “you take less damage.”

Furthermore, it’s clear some players’ reaction is just that “Prot has no place in PvP” even though we’ve been pretty consistent about saying we’d like to get all 30 specs viable. Make sure you’re commenting on the actual effectiveness of Protection PvP and not just complaining because you see people using the spec at all.
(Source)

December 28th, 2009 | Category: Blue post, Cataclysm, Class, PvP, Warrior | 3 comments

3 Comments so far

  1. soadnation
    December 30th, 2009

    | 1:28 pm

    great. now were gona have even more crappy tanks. Blizzard is really messing up big time getting rid of all these stats. I dont know about everyone else but one of the simple thigns i lvoe is having to pick my gear/gems/ and enchants to maximize my health and avoidance while still having to remaine defense capped.

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  2. Jordan Proctor
    December 31st, 2009

    | 12:56 pm

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  3. Khasym
    January 5th, 2010

    | 4:47 am
    I gotta disagree. One thing that’s universally no fun, is a badly GEARED, but well SKILLED tank. Because the numbers are so harsh, that skill is almost pushed off the table. You’ve seen them; they’re not idiot tanks. They try to manage the aggro while controlling their own damage, do their best to avoid overpulling by using a gun or a throwing axe, takes the pull around a corner to avoid pats, and throw on their soak boosters as fast as they can. but despite that, the numbers say “Squish Squish DIE!!! Now where are those tastier DPS”

    Conversely, bad tanks with great gear, will be dragged through by groups, because they’re afraid of replacing someone with 40-45k health and all purps. So what if the healer has to keep potioning mana back, or the DPS has to stop all DPS, throw on their hate dumps, and back away so the tank can get aggro control over and over.

    Better to ditch Defense as a stat, and let tanks focus on what they NEED to focus on: keeping the hate on them, and managing their damage mitigation via effects rather than a set number.

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