I feel quite the opposite. Song Shield only affected a target after being affected by a crescendo. That means you used your big heal, and now you’re protecting for a small portion of the next hit. That didn’t really come into any rotations in end-game with any of the Bards I talked to.
We had several Bards on Crypt 15s yesterday who used Instrument of Protection and found it far more preferable than Song Shield, especially because Song Shield would have negated the Encouraging Note.
The bosses in crypt don’t really need heals like that, so that example doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m talking about. I’m talking about things like temple and certain raid bosses that actually need a lot of heals and the shield helped a lot back when it actually mitigated a relevant amount of damage to give time to send another heal because as bards we have 2 big heals and sometimes in the rotations you will send them back to back. Also it sounds like they were just happy about the damage buff, and in crypt yea that makes sense. That doesn’t mean protection was actually doing anything more useful.
The Broken Hall 15, Mines 15, Crypt 15, Temple 15, Guild City Raid, and Citadel Raid that I’ve run since the patch have been easier as a Bard since Instrument of Protection becoming the Bard’s shielding ability. I’m going to be honest, Song Shield protected for around 6k before the buff, and 19k afterwards. 19k damage reduction once or twice every 20 seconds or so was not enough to make a difference in end-game content reliably.
How much does the current protection mitigate?
Around 7.5k every 3 seconds.
An additional change that would benefit this class is having the heals succeeded if a target is successfully hit.
Often healers find that they cannot heal a targeted player (even when succeeding in hitting that player with a healing orb directly) because they (the healer) were too far away.
Add a leashing point in pvp, the leashing distance should be how far u can throw ur hammer right now, that would fix pve issues i think?
So if you were to calculate the over all maximum damage mitigation per second (which in practice you can’t) then it’s about 2.5k per second in both scenarios. (My crescendos usually popped off twice within 13 to 17 seconds with upbeat and encore). Now in practice song shield can mitigate an entire 19k from a single attack, and then mitigate another 19k from the next attack within seconds of each other. Protection can only mitigate 7.5k every 3 seconds. That means within 3 seconds I can mitigate 38k damage with song shield, where as with protection I can mitigate a whole 7.5k in those same 3 seconds. The two are not comparable. They serve two completely different purposes.
If you use both crescendos within seconds of each other, you’re then going around 14 seconds without a crescendo to heal your tank with. How are they surviving that? Even with the meager protection from Song Shield I’ve not had many tanks able to survive against most bosses without a crescendo for that long.
The point is to coordinate their heal and their shield with your crescendos with the rest of the mechanics.
Can you get video of this? I’m always happy to learn more about Bard, and that’s something I’ve not seen on a 15. I’d love to learn your rotation 
Never done videos, but I’ll see what I can do 
I’ve been quite passionate about proving bards capabilities and potential since I was told as a green leaf that I needed to quit and play musky to heal high end content because I have no turret and no shield. Took a lot of patience, good team mates, and critical thinking, but it definitely was fun once I got it. I’m also open to learning new play styles and strategies as well to accommodate and get the most out of the new changes. I feel like there’s so much more that bard CAN do in different situations that hasn’t been discovered yet.
100% why I’ve been pushing Bard changes for over a year. It took this long but we finally got back into the meta.
Right! Now it’s going to take time to readjust since things actually work 
They always told me “You can’t heal end content as bard… unless you’re Mishka” As soon as I heard one person was doing it and it was possible, it inspired me to keep going
I just saw the message, it was specced entirely into damage right side talents, basically as much bonus as I could get to my damage aside from proper affixes like bleed. +6 weapon. No tiles though, haven’t figured out a dps tile set for warrior, but if I could you can assume maybe 30% ish more damage? I guess theoretically you could make it into the 40k range but this was me breaking my arm and buffing with charge and shield strike every chance I got. Against an enemy hitting back it could be even more by getting free recharged wounds when I block? I’m not sure. Testing using the charged hit after every combo only yielded around 24-25k.
@Mathieu_D From my personal testing the damage change on the warrior is noticeable (with small shield and full damage talents) although I cannot see a reason I would use it over my Ranger who still does considerably more damage even being much lower geared.
I have never really experienced any issues maintaining or regaining agro.
The magic and range issue is a serious one. It’s frustrating that a +5 warrior has to run like crazy to stay alive in high level content when a Paladin can stand there and absorb massive amounts of damage with ease. Possibly give the warrior a constant % of resistance against those attacks to make it not such an instakill, or let the shield block those attacks too and just get destroyed that much quicker (maybe reduce shield cool down times slightly).
First of, the damage increase wasn’t supposed to make it able to compete with DPS classes, it’s still a tank, not a DPS.
A good warrior can tank all the bosses stationary in level 15 shards, a good warrior will even require less healing than a paladin for most of them. Warrior is not in need of a defense/survivebility buff.
Then why does dps even matter?
I guess I’m not “a good warrior” so I’ll try to rephrase…
“to where your average warrior can compete with a Paladin in high shards”
I would agree on certain bosses but as far as ancient temple or citadel are concerned there are very few warriors regardless of skill and experience that can complete them. Warriors also have little to no ranged defense and are not very useful for clearing adds in a timely manner due to no magical/ranged defense.
I think it’s like you have to be a good warrior to be well good but you can be a bad pally but still do good, warrior just has more of a skill gap