How Stuff Works
Let’s begin with the most important part of a tier set breakdown: What it does and how it works.
- (2) Set Bonus: Spending Rage has a chance to cause your next Shield Slam to consume your bleeds on a target, instantly dealing 100% of remaining damage and reducing the target’s damage dealt to you by 10% for 5 seconds.
- (4) Set Bonus: When your bleeds are consumed on a target, their damage dealt to you is reduced by an additional 2% per bleed consumed, the cooldown of Thunder Clap is reset, and the cooldown of Thunderous Roar is reduced by 1 second.
These bonuses are very good. They add a ton of single-target damage and single-target damage reduction, but they scale with Rage generation and reset the cooldown of Thunder Clap, so they’re surprisingly good in AoE, too.
The Devil’s in the Details
Now for a proper breakdown:
The 2-piece bonus has a chance when you spend Rage, seemingly somewhere between 1% to 2.5% per point of Rage (yes, that’s a wide range), to give you a buff called Fervid. Fervid lasts 9 seconds, and it makes your next Shield Slam consume all of your bleeds on the target (Rend, Deep Wounds, and potentially Thunderous Roar), dealing all their damage instantly and giving you 10% damage reduction against the target for 5 seconds.
In practice, this means that your Rage generation is immensely valuable for juicing this tier set bonus, and effects like Windfury Totem, Bloodlust, and Power Infusion (hahahaha), all make it much stronger. You should fight for the Windfury Totem, but don’t expect PI. This tier set also triggers more often in AoE due to generating much more Rage.
As a baseline, the proc rate is currently around one proc every 5-6 seconds in single target without any of those external buffs, which means that 80-100% uptime is VERY attainable.
Even better, Sudden Death procs can trigger the 2-piece despite costing no Rage. This makes one of the most fun talents available to Warriors even stronger, and could potentially result in it being used even in AoE situations. It is in a hotly-contested section of the tree, so that’s still an outside possibility. Free Revenge procs can also trigger the 2-piece. Nice!
The 4-piece bonus simply adds more juice to the squeeze. Instead of 10% damage reduction, you get 14-16%, and you get an immediate cooldown reset on Thunder Clap, which does, in fact, make this tier set pretty good in AoE, and Thunderous Roar’s cooldown gets ONE ENTIRE SECOND OF COOLDOWN REDUCTION!
WOOOOOOAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!
Calculator Time
Now, this sounds awful. Compared to Protection Warrior’s ability to get upwards of 50% CDR on most of its important skills, it’s pretty underwhelming, but in practice, it’s worth about 15-25% cooldown reduction on Thunderous Roar.
Thunderous Roar is a pretty hard-hitting skill, so shaving 10 seconds off its 60-second cooldown if you’re using Uproar, or 15 seconds off its 90-second Uproar-less cooldown isn’t bad.
In a typical 7.5-minute fight, you’d be able to use Thunderous Roar 7 times. With this tier set bonus, you’d be able to use it 9 times. That’s not bad. In shorter encounters, you may only get one added use, and that’s less good.
The cooldown reduction is a little underwhelming. If it granted cooldown reduction based on each bleed removed, or added more damage onto the 2-piece bonus effect, that would be more interesting.
TL;DR: It’s good.
Considering that Protection Warrior is limping into Patch 10.2 as the least-popular, arguably weakest tank in the game, it really needs a set of buffs or an amazing tier set bonus to get it up to the level of the other tanks.
It’s really not that bad of a tank, it’s just uniquely weak against unblockable damage, and Season 2 was loaded with unblockable damage.
This tier set does a lot to fix Protection Warrior’s problems. It provides tons of single-target damage. It provides a large amount of extremely reliable single-target damage reduction. It grants Rage generation and cooldown reduction that scales really well into AoE.
This is all great. It may not restore Protection Warrior to its Patch 10.0 state of insane dominance, but it’s a really good tier set that fixes some of the main problems plaguing the class.
But Wait, There’s More!
Beyond the numbers, beyond the class design, beyond everything else, this tier set is fun.
Fervid procs hit HARD. They feel like a point-blank shotgun blast directly to the enemy’s face. Hitting Shield Slam and watching health bars turn to dust feels great.
The decision to make Thunder Clap reset when you consume Fervid is another really smart choice with this tier set. It creates a nice 1-2 punch that changes your rotation in a satisfying way.
This is the biggest issue with the cooldown reduction component of the 4-piece bonus, the effect is so delayed that you really don’t feel it, but every other aspect of this bonus is satisfying to use, and has a meaningful impact on the gameplay experience. You feel it, and it feels gooooood.
Making this tier set bonus be tied into basic rotational skills instead of a major defensive cooldown is just such a good choice that reinforces Protection Warrior at its weakest points, where it really needs help the most.
Basically, it’s good.
The future’s bright, shades, etc.
