The New Tanking

[Taelas]

Yeah, a properly played Protection warrior in PvP is essentially a constant crowd control: Disarming, stunning, interrupting, dispelling, spell reflecting, etc.

It's possible to fill that role even now in a limited capacity, but with Wrath, it becomes quite a bit easier, with more utility effects and more importantly, burst damage. A warrior can get there now, but it requires a very rigid gear set that emphasizes block value.

With the change to the STR-to-BV conversion, a Protection warrior can use a pure PvP-set -- with all the resilience benefits it confers -- without losing the burst.

[Concillian]

Prot still has pretty reasonable burst. on the PTR target dummies, my recklessness burst is 1.5 seconds and about 10k. This is on no armor, but there will be 5 sunders on whatever target. Concussion not being on GCD lets you loose a lot of pain if you're willing to burn both Shockwave + concussion blow at a 1.5 second burst. And since shockwave seems to stun even evading rogues, it's pretty reliable.

I'm positive we will see a strong tendency towards 2DPS teams in 2v2 in 3.x arenas at 70. I think healer / warrior with anything but a druid is going to be a decent combo for prot shamans will have it rough on surviving a burst, but others should at least be able to survive the first burst attempt with their mitigation ability + intervene. Prot has a lot of peeling capability that warriors never had before. Pain suppression every 30 seconds means no healer is going down easy, they'll have to attack you. And with a shield wall for survival, followed by a rather painful burst (non-crit is still 5k and fully doable in defensive stance.)

I'm a little afraid of 3.x arenas at 70 though, it seems like it's just going to be a massive DPS zerg fest where not even coordinated CC matters, just who is able to execute their burst first.

And yeah... prot in BGs on the PTR is very fun. Very different from Arms PvP.

[NuurAbSaal]

Thanks to all posters for some insights into the changes.

A little bit of information from the Test Realm, courtesy of a guild-mate: tank threat overall seems to be through the roof. Damage output of protection warriors looks VERY respectable with my friends 157-block-value warrior shield-slamming for 3k damage and some tasty 5k crits.

He was pugging Karazhan on his warlock and the tank (warrior in Karazhan gear with a few badge items thrown in) never lost aggro once. I think he said he was pushing about 1500 dps with his warlock (not sure if I remember correctly) and was far from the top of the damagemeter.

Another guildie has been playing around with his tankdruid and, while initially mourning the loss of some stats, was rather happy with the threat increase. Having never played a druid above level 25 I have no point of reference, but overall it seems like tanks will certainly enjoy the next patch.

I, for one, am thrilled:)

I'll ask yet another guild-mate about stats of his warrior from the PTR so Concillian has something to feed to his spreadsheets.

take care
Tarabulus

[Artega]

Yeah, I'm excited about the upcoming changes, though I'm more interested in the PvP aspects than the PvE ones. Either way, tanking won't be boring anymore:)