Mr Greg Street, aka GhostCrawler – Blizzards lead Systems Designer – took the time to comment on Warbringer nerf, in his usual style, commenting on a topic about it on the official wow forums. We will be updating this article in case of any further posts on the nerf.
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.
Q: I do find it dubious that you are nerfing Prot and using a comparison between them and Frost Mages as justification. What about the other melee classes that can not contend with a frost mage, and Frost Mages are just as overpowered against those melee classes as Prot is against Frost Mages?
A: 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.
Q: In this thread we see the speckled GC eat crow on threat modifiers.
A: 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 do want tanks to generate a ton of threat. There isn’t much of a way to make that math work without threat multipliers.
Q: Prot Warrior Tier 10 has a total of 659 Strength on it. DPS warrior Tier 10 has a total of 757 Strength on it.
I’m just using these as proxies to demonstrate that tanking plate has roughly the same amount of strength on it as DPS plate. How are you going to nerf Strength’s conversion to damage for Shield Slam for warriors in DPS gear while not nerfing strength’s conversion to damage for warriors in tanking gear?
A: “DPS gear” doesn’t just mean the head, chest, shoulders, legs and gloves that make the tier sets. A warrior geared for tanking and a warrior geared for dps have pretty different stats, in part because of the off-set pieces, the rings and trinks, the weapons, gems and enchants. When we say Prot warriors wear PvE dps gear for PvP, the point is that they have enough innate survivability that they don’t need the protection of PvP resilience gear or PvE +stamina tank gear. That lets them focus on damage.
(Source)
2 things…
1. This is gonna mess up prot warriors for pve and pvp. Way to nerf us blizz…again…
2. @Moosheep, this is about warriors and their nerfing for prot, not dks, no one really cares about them, if u wanna bitch about them and their failness then go to the dk section…
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All valid comments. Though I won’t lie about it, Warbringer did make warriors huge pests in PvP, I don’t believe Blizzard took full consideration on the matter. Perhaps I was a nuisance while Charge, Intercept, and Intervene weren’t on cooldown, but once they were, I was a sitting target for any mage or ranged class for that matter with the skill enough to kill me. Survivability was close to zero in PvP, and I don’t recall ever doing any serious damage with Shield Slam that made me top of the list in any of the Battlegrounds, not without me putting serious effort into it, and even then I was never number one. Kills are especially difficult to pull off because of either not having enough rage to finish an opponent off, or others being quicker to kill the opponent, that is assuming you even have a team capable enough to do that. Rage in general is limited enough to where us “dominating” any class is pretty much impossible. The way I see it I preferred being a minor inconvenience than a push over…
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True I don’t often hear about people asking for Warrior as tanks, it’s always about Paladin, but I don’t think Warrior got a suvivability problem, damage or threat problem, only problem I see as a Warrior is the AoE agro, Thunderclap doing low damage and threat, while having a big cooldown (compared to a Paladin Conesecration, which can be up 100% of the time). Strange but I don’t see paladin being nerfed that often, they got lots of shields, can heal themself, and can take massive damage, and got alot of damage reduction, and got hand of freedom to free themself. But when a Warrior get something to get out of snare, or have a small chance to take advantage, it get removed, I never heard someone asking for a Warrior in arenas. But anyway the main problem I think protection Warrior have is the AoE agro, because Cleave and Thunderclap just don’t do the work if a DPS focus on another target than yours.
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The background to the present problem plainly stated:
1. Warriors cannot heal/rez others
2. Warrior plate is effective only against melee dmg
3. Warrior tank dps is the lowest of all tanks
The present problem:
1. Ghostcrawler seems clueless how to run a MMORPG
2. Warrior nerfs throughout WotLK xpac have been crippling: Warbringer nerfed to extinction; Bladestorm nerfed to extinction; Titan’s Grip nerfed; Revenge (stun) nerfed.
3. Warrior tanks are becoming unheard of in high-end raiding guilds; warrior tanks (in PVE) are desirable only for heroic content, which content has become a faceroll due to upper-tier gear.
Why does WoW make a class that is unnecessary for high-end raiding guilds?
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I have a dk & warrior both duel spec, I love them both!!
I cried when I logged on after 3.1 or whatever patch to see my dk’s armor rating dropped 4000 points and all resist dropped from 80 to 60. Blizz likes to nerf things. I don’t know anything about the math, and don’t really care, I play because I enjoy the game.
I know what I see though, I’ve been living in random, I do more dps than tanking, and what I’ve been seeing or rather not seeing is warrior tanks, they are a rare bird. The few warrior tanks I have seen seem to have to work harder, “adds, trash”. The next rarest are druid tanks and then dks, at least 80% of the time it’s a pally tank. They do’nt seem to have to work nearly as hard at it either. I see a fair amount of balance with tanking in practice, “do’nt know about the math”, where dk’s, warriors and druids are concerned, but the pally’s seem to be exempt.
If blizz wants balance, they need to put down the calculaters, and take a harder look at prot & ret pally’s.
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Did someone say Warrior tanks hold the least aggro? Seriously?
You clearly either don’t play a Warrior, don’t run Omen, or don’t have enough Hit and Expertise, because I have the highest sustained single-target threat out of any tank in my guild, and that’s before I put Vigilance on the offtank or highest threat DPS. With Vigilance I can even give our Paladin a run for his money on AOE.
Lowest damage is true, but low threat is patently false.
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Once again, It’s a good thing you don’t need to remove roots/snares for every raid boss fight huh?
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I just really dislike how talents of literally all classes are being change for pvp reasons, in general i mean. The rogue’s Cheat Death (Subtlety) talent for example is cheat death modified by resilience. No talent in the game should be linked to resilience.
Unfortunately this change to the prot warriros is 100% influenced from pvp. Same deal with linking LoH with forbearance on the paladin.
Again, just annoyed that many talents from many different classes are being changed *JUST* for pvp.
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And sorry for the double post, but it also seems like these threads are extremely presumptuous. I honestly doubt that videos that one guy makes are the reason that Blizzard would make any game mechanic change. If that was truly the case, I’m fairly certain that protection paladins would have been changed enough by now that we couldn’t solo Lich King heroics.
Before you accuse the blizzard team of nerfing your class without thinking, take into account that many of these guys have taken a lot more time of their lives crunching the numbers and figuring out the best solutions for balance in this game than you have played it.
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Question for all of you complaining about this change to prot warriors…
When was the last time you saw a prot paladin in dps gear melting face in arena as much as you guys do? I’ve made decent headway in the past in 2v2 as prot in shield block gear as a paladin, but I don’t even come close to touching you guys.
And as a raiding prot/holy dual spec, I’m always tank #3, and too be honest, I prefer healing our warrior tank over the other paladin tank. I prefer healing the warrior tank over our druid tank.
Also, is it just me, or do people lose the ability to spell when they are flying off the handle getting angry?
-Lylanthia, Thorium Brotherhood.
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IF you think DKs are overpowered. Stop playing the game.
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I think Blizzard has a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that warriors can kill other classes. The warrior (or whatever name they take in other games) is the first class designed by any game to be the tank. Then, when warriors start to do good in PvP, Blizzard takes is as a bad thing for some reason.
One of the big catalysts for Warrior nerfs is Swifty, of Darkspear. Most nerfs for warriors come after his videos showing him killing every class in the game, so Blizzard assumes that warriors need to be nerfed for balance issues. But the problem comes from that out of the 500,000 warriors in the game, Swifty is the ebst. He beats classes by outhinking them and emplying quick reactions, tricky macros, stance dancing, and high-tech gaming hardware.
When Blizzard nerfs these tricks and tips to balance warriors, the less then awesome warriors suffer greatly for it. Blizzard looks at the one amazing warrior in the game and assume we are all that good. Speaking as a warrior PvPer myself, I can easily say that’s not the case.
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This nerf completely ridiculous!
As our friend above PETE, Warrior is the worst of all tanks, which causes less damage, which receives more damage, which has fewer mechanisms to defend itself, and that holds less agro. Compared to the already overpowered DK Pally or Druid Tanker.
It is obvious that someone up there (Blizz) do not like warrior, compared to the incredible abuses that frost mages and warlocks can cause, with its endless snares and fears.
There’s no trinket that support it, and proves a TOP50 PVP full of mages and locks prove it.
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@ dks, i do truly understand ur feelings about not having block, but trust me, your not missing out on much… a block, in t10 gear only stops… 1.5k ish damage. were as a parry fully stops damage. so if a raid boss hits, i dunno, 10k? then an extra 8% parry is better then 35% block, however, trash that hits 1k will be fully stopped, so a block is not often worth more then parry, unless you like, tanking reg toc in t10, lol, or lots of trash that u have trouble staying alive against. but healthwise im not to sure i follow, does your tanking gear have less stam, well i cant really say i see it being THAT big a difference.
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Do NOT nerf warriors again..
I dont play one. never have. never will. I do play a warlock, that needs to keep them feared instead of trapped in ice, and i pwn prot warriors. Its the same set up…..keep them off of you. Tell the OP frost mage to learn how to play rather then nerf another class to make it easier for noobsause cheating frost mages…
Try frost nova, blink, mirror image, water elemental, ice block, and watch the warrior drop. He cant hit you while he is taking damage from all of them…
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I am my guilds Permie OT, I talk for 10m and 25m progression often. DKs can tank. It jst makes more work for others.
And for the tard that said I SAID you get to enchant and shield and gun. Reread the statement. The statement is read as follows…
“You get to wear and enchant a shield and Wear a gun. Again, Check the blackhand DK ranks of frost tanks. Thats me at number 3. I’m sure I know a thing or two about this game.
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Yes, While I am not here to defend the nerf or fight for DKs. To simply sit and watch the overexcessive amount of crying done by warriors because PvE tanking is being “nerfed” It is not. As pointed out, Not removing a Snare or Root from anyone is a problem in how many raids?
And yes, I do have a blast tanking the slimes on rotface
.
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As a prot warrior, this nerf doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it seems to scare everyone else. Shield Slam getting a lower cap isn’t going to change what you’re capable of dps wise that much. Yes, we are lowest on the dps totem pole, and we make up for it through massive utility and capability. We don’t take the most damage and DK’s definitely have lower health than us. Going into ICC, warriors certainly weren’t the best at any particular thing(except maybe snap aggro), but they were second or a close third in mostly everything. They are still in a fantastic spot even if some of their crits won’t hit as hard.
If you’re crying about the Warbringer buff, tough shit. It’s not gamebreaking in the least, and neither is the Shield Slam damage nerf, and frankly, the nerf could have been a lot worse.
To all the DK’s, I feel ya. You are certainly a the bottom of the barrel at this point, though you certainly are great for Rotface Slimes XD
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Being a frost DK tank myself (lol fail), I have to wholeheartedly agree with Moosheep, even if it is way off topic to the blog post. To Anost: Being the tank in of itself is what you bring to the raid. You keep the squishies from getting slapped around like your name was Whitney Houston. And, by definition, you also bring the fact that you’re NOT going to be wanting some spirit gear that the raid healer looks at and says “Oooh! Finally! A new trinket!
” like Paladin Tanks might.
If these two points aren’t enough justification to your raid organizer to use you, perhaps some research into your class and spec is required.
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I don’t claim to know the intricacies of high-level arena play, so my comments do not pertain to arena. This nerf may very well be insufferable to recently-empowered PvP warriors who are losing a major PvP mechanic.
However, the above arguments are, in general, a bunch of warrior tanks QQ-ing over “another warrior nerf”. I don’t disagree that warriors have some pretty significant limitations over other tanking classes — but the same can be said when comparing any tanking class to another. Warriors are not suited for certain things; of that, there can be no doubt. What they are suited for, however, is a MT role in Icecrown. Warriors still generate outstanding TPS, and they still take big hits admirably. Compare to, for instance, Death Knights in Icecrown. Chill of the Throne severely hampers DK tank survivability. A warrior in a mix of 10-25m ToC gear, with raid buffs, will have, say, 50% avoidance plus a shield. A DK in similar gear may have even as high as 60% avoidance plus the flat damage reduction from Frost Presence and applicable talents.
Now, take away 20% avoidance. This change affects Death Knights and Druids far more than it affects Paladins and Warriors. The damage that the former two previously accounted for in dodge/parry must now be made up for in damage reduction — of which there is precious little. Warriors and Paladins, on the other hand, are left with their shields, which are responsible for a massive amount of mitigation, and have not received any sort of nerf (not that they should — I’m simply comparing). Death Knight and Druid tanks are left far behind the curve, with Druids having very high HP to compensate for the larger number of smaller hits, and DKs having nothing.
Now, look at the currently released fights in Icecrown. None of the seven have any snare mechanics whatsoever. The closest to a “snare” is movement speed reduction when trapped in Rotface’s poison flood — which a tank should never be in to begin with, and which Warbringer would not affect anyway. Furthermore, assuming in one of the yet-to-be-released encounters, a tank is snared, what difference will that make? Certainly no more than it has in the past, which, as Ghostcrawler and the above comments have indicated, is next to no difference at all.
The final complaint is that warrior DPS while tanking has been nerfed. This is untrue, or at best untruthful, when MTing a single raid boss. Perhaps, given differences in gear, a warrior may do a couple hundred less DPS than a DK tank. In 25m, this is an insignificant difference. Even in 10m, however, simple itemization differences can do the same thing (not ilvl differences, mind you — itemization). What extra DPS a DK gets from using a 2H weapon, Warriors get in trade by massively increased survivability through a shield.
The whole point of the nerf was to tone down an overpowered ability in the arena while not crippling (or even really affecting) endgame PvE play. As such, this particular nerf has had little to no effect on warriors tanking in Icecrown. If you feel that warriors are an underpowered tanking class in general, you may be right — but that argument doesn’t belong in a thread regarding this most recent change. And keep in mind the poor Death Knight. While initially overpowered (and certainly still the most overpowered leveling class) their viability as MTs in endgame content has been nerfed…and nerfed…and nerfed, over and over again. Stam, avoidance, mitigation, cooldowns, even glyphs — every aspect of DK tanking has been obliterated in every successive patch since 3.0. Of the four, they are currently the least viable MTs in Icecrown.
TLDR: This nerf may be brutal in arena — but it does not affect Warrior tanks in the slightest. They are still one of the most viable MT classes in Icecrown, with outstanding TPS and excellent survivability, and their strengths match up well with other tanks while still allowing them to be unique.
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Your comments have been downrated for a reason. Because you are largely wrong. You have the ability to wear and enchant a shield and a Gun. You will in the end in the same gear, have more health then a DK. As far as our avoidance goes. You are dumb for wanting extra parry over a block mechanic. Our avoidance WILL indefinately fail, and we will get hit, hard, harder then you will ever get hit. You check your facts before claiming you oh so hurt tank is the lowest on the food chain.
We as DKs are the laughing stock of the tank community. And I dare you to prove me otherwise.
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i agree with Maminski, its always the warrs that get nerfed to hell, in pvp ive bin ripped apart by a pally that used protspecc and a mix of dps/tank gear but they dont ever get nerfed ever, + they can get out all cc. warbringer was the only thing us warrs had to atleast have a small chance to get out of a crap situation, and ur removing that from us wich is fecking pathetic,
if u realy nerf warbringer, u should nerf pally dps to in pvp, and nerf gnome mages, they are almost imposs to control cause they can use blink + there racial to escape,
but WHY does the pvp players always have to feck up for us that focus 95% of the gametime on pve instead pvp?
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As a long-time Prot Warrior tank, I must agree with several of the comments above. I was originally the only tank in my guild (a long time ago). Now that we are pursuing all the raids like TOTC and ICC, it seems that all I hear is reasons that I should no longer be a tank. Pally and Druid tanks can take about the same beating as I can but have so much more DPS with similar gear. I end up having to play my other DPS toons in raids because the raid would easily prefer the other classes, given a choice on tanks to include in the raid. Prot Warriors seemed to have really been tossed aside by Blizzard for a long time. The little effort they have put forth to make us more viable in the past just adds to the depression. I really like playing my Warrior, so it’s really frustrating to me.
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An addition to my comments already made, we’re not as prot warriors asking to be competitive in dps with the other melee classes…we’re asking to do competitive dps to the other tanking classes, and to maybe become competitive as tanks again too…let us be the good tanks we could be without the pointless nerfs please!
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What your really saying is bye-bye to warrior tanks in good raiding guilds…positions in raids are set not just by the players ability to play there character but also by the viability of that character to fill the role they are in. If you have a choice in a raid between a similarly geared Pally, DK, Druid or Warrior tank then even pre-nerf the warrior will tend to be passed over…the healing burden is higher with a warrior tank (lowest health of the 4 tank classes), and our damage is already the lowest of the 4 tanks by a long way so if you are looking at any kind of progression raiding as a guild they are also passed over…a similarly geared DK and Pally will do at least 1k more dps. Overall we take more Damage, do less damage and bring less to the raid in the way of buffs and debuffs as warrior tanks. Looking at a few really good arena pvp warriors and casting the lot of the entire prot warrior community on them is not the way to go…plus if Protection Warriors are so good atm why are they not dominating the top 10 or even top 50 lists in arena pvp…think youll find its the hunters and those self same,weak frost spec pvp mages that are dominating the lists.
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Not to bang on about it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Arena, I do however think that Arena was, for all intents and purposes, a mistake. At the end of the day, Nerf, buff whatever, nobody makes you play. If you don’t like it, stop playing. QQ
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Im sorry but warriors get nerfed way more than any other class ingame Swifty of darkspear clearly pointed that out that mostly warriors get nerfed alot!
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GC always says that every class and spec should be viable in arena. Prot Warrriors haven’t been viable in any of the previous seasons. Then they finally solved this issue and now decide to nerf it because “it was OP against some classes” (e.g. the mentioned Frost Mages).
Why don’t you nerf Prot Pallies against Rogues? Or even DKs against Mages? I’ll answer these questions: because the game balance NEEDS some classes to have advantage against others. And disadvantage against anothers.
Now, as if the Prot Warrior didn’t already have the lesser damage output out of all tanking classes, you decide to nerf our main damaging skill because of PvP issues? Come on, I don’t need any more TPS.
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