Ghostcrawler from Blizzard shared some information on upcoming changes to Protection Warriors. These are in the works for testing in Beta and he wanted players to get a chance to comment on them. They are as follows:

NOTE: These changes were in the works before the recent round of dps discussions. I hope to have some Arms and Fury changes to report soon.

Armored to the Teeth -- Changed to AP, but amount reduced to 1 per 360 armor (to compensate for the loss of Blessings of Kings etc.). We implemented this talent for dps warriors and didn't want it to feel like the ultimate Shield Block Value talent. It's still good for Protection, just not as good. Death Knights will get the same treatment.

EDIT: I meant 2 AP : 360 per talent point. My point was that we understand 1 Str > 2 AP for warriors.

Thunder Clap -- Increase in threat generation. No target limit. Swipe gets the same treatment. With these changes, all 4 tank classes should be able to generate very respectable AE threat. Consecration is still a little higher in threat to account for Thunder Clap's debuff.

Revenge -- Added to Sword and Board as a chance to proc Shield Slam. Increased its damage significantly. We want Revenge to be the button you push first.

Shield Slam -- Increased its flat damage to compensate for the Devastate nerf a few weeks ago. The Revenge change will help dps too, though only when you're tanking. We didn't want to increase the scaling portion of Shield Slam for fear that warrior threat becomes too high at ultimate gear levels, but we might still change it if they fall behind. We're not saying (for now) that Prot must do dps with a shield instead of dual-wielding Devastates, but this should make it more viable.

We're doing some more mitigation and survivability tests now. Our suspicion is that warriors are fine in this department and paladins might fall behind in the area of Shield Block Value at very high gear levels. But we'll see.


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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Byron has been playing and writing about World of Warcraft for the past ten years. He also plays pretty much ever other Blizzard game, currently focusing on Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, while still finding time to jump into Diablo III with his son.

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