A Disappointing First Look
When the Patch 9.2 tier bonuses were initially unveiled, nearly all of the tank bonuses appeared to be tuned towards Mythic+ much more than raids. Protection Warrior was the lone standout, with consistent, powerful bonuses that are strong in every situation.
The 2-piece bonus adds burst damage and Rage generation, and the 4-piece adds even more value onto
Avatar, including some much-needed damage reduction. This also pushes players from the safe-but-boring
Lourdes répercussions playstyle into
Maîtrise de la rage, and smooths out a lot of the accompanying defensive concerns. This is great. It all looked great.
Unfortunately, there are several overlapping bugs and design flaws that seriously limit the value of both the 2-piece and 4-piece bonuses, and simply fixing the bugs won’t be enough to make this set function effectively.
Bugs Are Bad
Let’s start with the list of bugs:
- The 2-piece will sometimes stop working, and you will no longer be able to generate stacks by spending Rage until you relog.
- If you cast Dur au mal while you have 6 stacks, and you would generate both a 7th and 8th stack, the buff is consumed because you used Dur au mal, but you do not receive an empowered Dur au mal, because you didn’t have the buff when you cast it.
- The increased Rage generation from the 2-piece’s interaction with Heurt de bouclier does not interact with Lourdes répercussions or Le mur. The extra Rage does not get multiplied. The extra duration from Lourdes répercussions does not get multiplied. The cooldown reduction does not get multiplied.
- The increased effect from the 2-piece’s interaction with Coup de tonnerre does not interact with Tonnerre crépitant or Sire-Tonnerre. You do not get a 90% AoE slow. You do not get triple the cooldown reduction.
The first bug on the list kept triggering while attempting to test. It made testing much slower than it should be.
Design Flaws Aren’t Great, Either
Now let’s jump into the issues with the design.
- The 2-piece cannot go above 8 stacks, so using Avatar at any point while above 0 stacks wastes value from the 4-piece.
- The Heurt de bouclier interaction with the 2-piece adds the most damage and the most Rage. It is the only one ever worth using.
- The Coup de tonnerre interaction adds less damage, even in AoE, than the Heurt de bouclier interaction due to being able to dump the extra Rage with Revanche.
- The Dur au mal interaction grants 50% extra power from a Dur au mal cast. This is worse than the Heurt de bouclier interaction in literally all situations!
- It adds no damage!
- Casting Dur au mal gives you an extra 50% for free.
- Using Heurt de bouclier gives you an extra 30 Rage – 75% of an Dur au mal! -- for free.
- 75 > 50
- Using the 2-piece on anything other than Heurt de bouclier is a trap.
Numbers Are Our Friends
On average, a Protection Warrior in single target generates about 8-10 Rage per second. There’s a good bit of variance thanks to
Heurt de bouclier resets, taunt-swapping, and good old RNG, but this is a decent range.
The 2-piece triggers every time you spend 240 Rage. This means it triggers every 24-30 seconds. If used on
Heurt de bouclier, as it nearly always should be, it grants an extra 1-1.25 Rage per second, and an extra ~300-360 dps. For a reasonably skilled player, that’s 4-5% more single target DPS. Pretty good for a 2-piece.
The 4-piece bonus complicates everything, and not in a good way. If you are running
Maîtrise de la rage, you don’t really ever want to let
Avatar sit on cooldown, but using
Avatar while you have stacks of the 2-piece wastes them. If you’re at a high level of stacks, wasting a bit of
Maîtrise de la rage may be worthwhile, but generally speaking, you’re going to waste a lot of 2-piece stacks while using this bonus.
If
Maîtrise de la rage has an average cooldown of 45 seconds (a totally reasonable assumption), you get an extra 2-piece proc every 45 seconds, which is worth about .667 Rage/sec and 200 DPS, or roughly 2%-2.5% ST DPS. This is enough to compensate for the wasted 2-piece stacks, but it’s really not a great bonus once that waste is factored in. This part of the tier set’s interaction feels like a snake eating its own tail.
The other component of the 4-piece bonus: “Avatar increases your damage dealt by an additional 10% and reduces your damage taken by 10%” is terrific on the defensive end. With an average uptime of 45-50% on
Maîtrise de la rage, the offensive component is worth about 4% more damage in both ST and AoE.
Compared to other tank bonuses, these numbers are really disappointing, especially considering that 4% more damage on a Protection Warrior is noticeably less than an equivalent amount of damage from most other tanks. Even worse, both the 2-piece and the 4-piece’s direct interaction with it are direct single-target DPS increases only. Rage generation from being autoattacked is higher in AoE, but not by enough of a margin to affect balance in a meaningful way. The
Coup de tonnerre 2-piece bonus simply does not add enough damage and Rage to ever be worth using. Even in AoE situations where a single
Coup de tonnerre cast can deal more than a single
Heurt de bouclier, the 30 extra Rage can be spent on
Revanche, which will add substantially more damage than wasting the bonus on
Coup de tonnerre. The only time you should use the 2-piece on
Coup de tonnerre is if you need the AoE slow.
The only time you should use the 2-piece on
Dur au mal is if you need the extra 50% RIGHT NOW and can't even wait literally 1 second to get more value out of using
Heurt de bouclier. This should never happen. If it does, you've already made bigger mistakes than just wasting your 2-piece bonus.
Can It Be Fixed?
Absolutely. There are several ways to make this set of bonuses work much better than they are currently, and I'm just going to list off the ones I think are best.
- Remove the Coup de tonnerre and Dur au mal interactions from the 2-piece. They are traps. Retuning them to be competitive isn't complicated, but they just aren't as satisfying to press as Heurt de bouclier.
This would fix the 6-stack Ignore Pain carryover bug, too.
Change the 2-piece to allow stacking up the 8-stack buff while an Empowered
Heurt de bouclier buff is active and has not yet been consumed. This eliminates the waste caused by the 4-piece bonus.
Lower the stack count of the 2-piece from 8 to 6 to compensate for the 4-piece's waste.
Make triggering the 2-piece bonus grant a free
Dur au mal buff (potentially at 50% effectiveness).
Conclusion
Protection Warrior’s defensive capabilities have been inconsistent throughout Shadowlands. In some situations they're pretty good (i.e., blockable attacks), in some they're underwhelming (i.e., unblockable damage). This tier set could provide some much-needed stability to the class' defensive and offensive kit, but it needs more attention from Blizzard in order to function effectively.
In addition to their defensive inconsistencies, Protection Warrior's damage output has been underwhelming all expansion, and while this set of tier bonuses is capable of being a successful band-aid on both of those issues, it’s nowhere near there yet. The good news is that it’s fixable, and if the Brewmaster Monk 4-piece is any indication, the devs are hearing feedback and acting upon it, so I remain very hopeful that this tier set will be reworked. The fundamental idea is good. With a few big tweaks this can be a really nice set of bonuses for a spec that could use a boost.
