Tank like a girl

Originally, I had wanted to post a rant about protection warriors this week, and how tanking in ICC-10 has been so far, but yesterday’s patch changed my tune. Instead of ranting I am going back to being bubbly and excited about prot warriors.

I didn’t have time to play yesterday and had a lot of issues with the loading screen boss, but I managed to run VoA with my shaman and then test the warrior changes.

As quick summary, here are the changes that affect protection warriors:

• Revenge: Damage done by this ability (base and scaling) increased by 50%.
• Thunderclap: This ability now counts as a ranged attack, granting it double damage on critical strikes instead of 150% and ranged miss chance, and still cannot be dodged or parried.
• Improved Revenge: This talent can no longer trigger a stun, and instead increases damage done by Revenge by 30/60% and causes Revenge to strike an additional target.
• Vitality: Now boosts Stamina by 3/6/9%, up from 2/4/6%. Strength and expertise benefits have not changed.

Now, I don’t love every change. I am still torn about Improved Revenge. It kicked ass in the one heroic I ran yesterday, but this will do absolutely nothing for prot warrior DPS on bosses. Admittedly, the old Imp Revenge didn’t either as 99% of all bosses were immune to the stun. But it would have been nice to get something like that.

So how does this play in action? I queued up for a random with some guildies last night and we got H Halls of Lightning. First thumbs up: I was finally able to break 40k health unbuffed, sitting at 40.8k now. This is a big deal for me as I had been hovering at 39k for weeks now, well behind the other tanks in our guild. Yay!

I lost aggro to the pug warlock on maybe two pulls, the rest was smooth sailing. Damage was definitely up for me, hitting 3-4k most pulls. Revenge hits like a truck, like a huge truck. I think I giggled a little when my crit tracker displayed the delicious line: New Crit Record! Revenge hits Loken for 10383! Yes, you read that correctly, it broke 10k multiple times on that run. Now imagine this with full raid buffs. Muahahaha. The cleave effect of Revenge was also pretty nice, and will definitely help in heroics and AoE tanking. But it’s not enough to make us stop spamming Cleave and Thunderclap.

Last night I felt pretty awesome tanking. Zipping from group to group happily. I love Charge and Warbringer, it’s the ability I miss most on my paladin. Nothing will ever beat Charge.

I am not sure if I’ll tank or heal in ICC-10 this week, but I think the changes will not really affect my raid tanking DPS much at all. I will still be FAIL on Festergut, a fight that I really hate. When it’s not my turn to tank, I am in Battle Stance, lolrending, applying sunders and waiting for my turn. The buff to Revenge won’t do anything for me in that fight because the mechanics won’t allow Revenge procs. We will still be the weakest class to bring in that fight.

We are still struggling on fights in the Plagueworks, often held back by our DPS output, and so every little point of DPS I can add matters.

TL;DR summary: Revenge hits like a truck, Imp Revenge is a lot of AoE goodness, heroics DPS definitely up, so bring back Revenge to your action bars. How this affects raid DPS remains to be seen, but it’s a good change. Let’s go kick some ass now.