What’s Changed?
Let’s start with the basics.
The Protection Warrior Tier Set bonus from Amirdrassil and Dragonflight Season 3 is all about blood – specifically consuming your bleeds by casting Shield Slam. This tier set bonus was heavily single-target focused in its initial design, but it received a big set of changes in the past week that have made it much stronger across a broad variety of content.
So what’s changed? More importantly, were the changes a buff or a nerf?
Here are the old tier set bonuses for reference:
- (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.
Here are the new ones:
- (2) Set Bonus: Spending Rage has a chance to cause your next Shield Slam to consume your bleeds on a target, instantly dealing 40% of remaining damage and reducing your damage taken by 10% for 5 sec.
- (4) Set Bonus: For each bleed effect consumed from a target, your damage taken is reduced by an additional 2%. When Shield Slam consumes a bleed, the cooldown of Thunder Clap is reset and the cooldown of Thunderous Roar is reduced by 3.0 sec.
So here’s what has changed:
The 2-piece proc (Fervid Bite) has had its damage reduced by 60% – which is a lot, but it’s totally fine, we’ll get to that, don’t you worry! – and the single-target damage reduction debuff has been turned into a personal damage reduction buff.
This means that this bonus is vastly more effective as a defensive increase in AoE situations such as Mythic+, and against many of the bosses in the new raid, Amirdrassil! It also means that it can work against environmental damage effects, i.e., flame patches on the ground. Those typically aren’t affected by enemy-targeted damage reduction effects like Demoralizing Shout, Fiery Brand (there’s a reason Vengeance Demon Hunters’ primary resource used to be called ‘Pain’), or the old tier set bonus, but they are affected by effects like Shield Wall or the new tier set bonus. This is good. It’s a terrific defensive improvement, potentially even in a lot of single-target situations that have some kind of environmental damage, which is fairly common (think about the debuff from being thrown through walls by Neltharion or having Oblivion stacks during Sarkareth).
The 4-piece bonus was also changed to improve your overall damage reduction from 10% granted by the 2-piece up to 14-16% based on how many bleeds you remove with your Fervid Bite proc. This is more or less in keeping with how it functioned before, just altered to function with the reworked 2-piece.
Resetting Thunder Clap has gone unchanged, which is good. That’s still very good.
The 4-piece also received a massive boost to its cooldown reduction effect on Thunderous Roar. This effect now reduces the average cooldown of Thunderous Roar (baseline 90 seconds, often talented down to 60 with Uproar) all the way down to 38 seconds. Previously, the average cooldown of Thunderous Roar would be around 52 seconds. This is a massive increase to the availability of a major offensive cooldown that will have substantial positive effects in AoE situations, potentially adding 3-4 extra Thunderous Roar casts in situations where the old bonus would have only added 1-2 extra casts. In Mythic+, this change stands to be a 5-10% total damage increase on its own.
Pretty, pretty good!
Nerfing Protection Warrior Single-Target Damage Sounds Bad, But It’s Fine
Nerfing the weakest tank in the game is a bold move.
Here’s why it’s the right one:
In the previous iteration of this tier set, a highly-optimized Warrior playing well could consistently land Fervid Bite procs (i.e., the 2-piece procs) for upwards of 135k every 4.5 seconds. This is while wearing ilvl ~449 gear, and on top of the ~65k damage from Shield Slam itself.
Hitting a >200k single-target GCD every 4.5 seconds as a tank in normal raid gear is absolutely buck wild.
Hilarious PvP implications notwithstanding, consistently being able to deal upwards of 200k single-target damage in a GCD is just too much damage for a tank. It threatened to cause severe issues with threat management in raids, and could easily become a balance problem that Blizzard would have to address by nerfing other aspects of Warrior’s kit.
Even in a completely unbuffed, non-optimized situation, this bonus was capable of adding at least 15% more single-target damage, which is a lot for a tank tier set bonus that also adds defensive value and cooldown reduction.
The problem here is that the majority of this value was concentrated into single-target, and while that could have been useful throughout Aberrus’ many, many single-target fights, Amirdrassil’s encounters are much more AoE-focused. That tends to undercut the value of a powerful single-target bonus.
It also just wasn’t great in Mythic+. Sacrificing 5-10% single-target damage to gain 14-16% damage reduction against all enemies is a trade you can justify pretty easily in M+. Thanks to the improvements to the 4-piece bonus’ Thunderous Roar cooldown reduction effect, these changes are actually a meaningful AoE damage boost, too, on the order of 5-10% more damage in Mythic+.
Finally, it’s not as though Fervid Bite has been removed entirely. It was hitting for 2-3 times more damage than Shield Slam itself, and has now been cut down to hit about as hard as Shield Slam does on average. It still adds a lot of damage – 5-10% in single-target when used well, and that’s not including the 4-piece effects.
Along with the other changes, this strikes a much better balance. This tier set bonus is now very strong in all types of content, rather than being highly specialized towards single-target raid encounters. That’s good.
Things That Make You Go Hmmmm….
Okay, at this point we can all agree: It’s a good tier set. We’re all very happy with the changes. Good job, Blizzard!
Protection Warriors are on track to have a great time in Season 3. They’re looking powerful and fun, and that’s pretty much all you can ever ask for in this crazy World of Warcraft!
So now let’s talk about the weird stuff that’s going on with this tier set.
First: The proc rate for the 2-piece bonus is wildly different among skills.
Ignore Pain, which costs 35 Rage, tends to trigger a 2-piece proc over 75% of the time. This indicates a proc chance of around 2% per point of Rage spent.
Revenge, which costs 20 Rage, should trigger a 2-piece proc around 40% of the time then, right? Well, yeah, it should, but its actual proc rate is <15%. This is strange. Execute, which costs 20-40 Rage, has a proc rate as low as Revenge’s regardless of whether it costs the minimum of 20 or the maximum of 40. Shield Block, which costs 30 Rage, has a higher proc rate than Revenge or Execute, but more in the range of 20-25%, nowhere close to Ignore Pain’s >75%.
Free Revenge casts and free Execute casts (thanks to Sudden Death) can trigger the 2-piece, which is good. This is arguably not how the tooltip is written, but it is probably intended, and it is the right choice. Making free casts unable to trigger the 2-piece would punish players for using their procs correctly. That would suck.
If this behavior is all intended, then it rewards casting Ignore Pain with damage, defense, and cooldown reduction, and that’s nice. It’s a little weird that Ignore Pain’s proc rate is dramatically higher than your 3 other Rage spenders, and it might have the unintended effect that you don’t really use Revenge unless it’s free or you’re in large-scale AoE, which isn’t terrific, but that’s still to be determined.
Next up: Crit Chance.
The 2-piece procs are capable of critting, but just barely. Players with upwards of 30% crit chance (such as me, testing this weird bonus) are achieving crit chances under 5%. I went two entire minutes of triggering a proc every 5 seconds without a single crit! This tier set is heavily suppressing crit chance, but it’s not completely incapable of critting, which is really weird.
Last: The nerf to the 2-piece also has a strange, possibly unintended interaction with Thunderous Roar.
On the one hand, you want to consume Fervid Bite procs as quickly as you can. The damage is good, maintaining the buff is important defensively, and the cooldown reduction on Thunderous Roar is great!
That being said, consuming the bleed and dealing only 40% of its remaining damage from the bleed is actually kind of bad for your single-target damage if Thunderous Roar is active. Given that around 65% of the damage Thunderous Roar deals is through its bleed, you can lose up to 40% of the total damage of your Thunderous Roar cast in single-target if you consume it with a Fervid Bite proc immediately. That’s not very good.
There are a couple of ways Blizzard could fix this – Fervid Bite procs could not actually remove the bleeds, or the bonus could simply be changed to grant the full value for Thunderous Roar only.
As it currently stands, consuming Fervid Bite procs as quickly as possible at all times is still probably the right call, but this is another weird potential interaction caused by this tier set. You might – might! – want to hold Fervid Bite procs for several seconds if Thunderous Roar is active and you’re in a single-target situation. In AoE, you’re probably going to want to consume Fervid Bite procs as fast as you can in order to maintain the valuable defensive buff and maximize the Thunderous Roar cooldown reduction.
There’s also a very real possibility that you would want to mix the new 2-piece bonus and old 2-piece bonus in single-target. Wearing old tier set bonuses over new ones isn’t great, especially as a tank (that item level difference is severe!), but it might be better for pure single-target damage output.
In the Blood
Let’s start wrapping things up. This tier set bonus is really good, and unlike the previous iteration, it’s very strong in all content, rather than being concentrated to single-target situations. It has lost some single-target burst damage, but in every other way it has been improved by the changes, and the redistribution of that single-target damage is easily justifiable.
If Protection Warrior single-target damage is still lackluster after these changes, it should be tuned up directly, rather than being propped up by an insane tier set bonus. Not only is it kinda janky to get upwards of 35% of your single-target damage from a tier set, it’s a classic recipe for the underlying class to go untouched – or worse, get nerfed! Then, once the tier set is taken away in the following season, Warriors could wind up right back in the dirt like they’ve been for much of Dragonflight Season 2, unless the new tier set is also similarly overpowered.
This is how vicious cycles start!
The tier set still has some weird eccentricities such as Ignore Pain having 400% the proc chance of other Rage spenders, and the massively-suppressed crit chance. Whether those are intended or accidental is still to be determined. The next few weeks of the PTR will hopefully be illuminating.
In conclusion, Fervid Bite no longer does enough damage to kill a planet, but the buffs way, way, way, waaaaay outperform the nerfs, especially in Mythic+.
As we concluded the previous tier set bonus writeup, this tier set’s strong. It’s really good, and one of the best ways in which it is good is that it is fun. The cooldown reset on Thunder Clap is fun, the increased cooldown reduction on Thunderous Roar is fun. It’s a really, really fun tier set. It’s rotationally-impactful, and the recent changes have emphasized that even further. This is excellent.
Protection Warrior is going to be great – and more importantly, fun! – in Season 3.
