I'm still waiting on Improved Battle Stance. They've made Imp. Zerker and Imp. Defensive stances, I just don't know what Imp. Battle would even entail. Reduce the cooldown on Overpower? Making Whirlwind usable in Battle?

If they were feeling really adventurous they could move axe/sword spec to Fury and keep Mace spec in Arms, but people would probably become outraged at the thought of being 'forced' to get a mace for PvP.

I imagine they'd have to do a lot of wrangling to make staying in battle stance worthwhile. If anything I could see them doing something like "+300ap for 20 seconds after switching to battle stance." It's just so disruptive to dps to use 2 global cooldowns in order to overpower, especially without tactical mastery

Also, moving the arms specializations out of the arms tree would just be silly :I

Improved Battle Stance does seem like a pretty obvious oversight, and it'd be a good talent to replace Improved MS. Some sort of permanent haste % or cooldown reduction would be possibilities there. I'd like to see WW be usable in Battle but I don't see it happening; you'd lose almost all reason to use Berzerker stance.

Yeah, I don't even switch to battle stance to charge anymore on my warrior.

Also, while I think the respec stable would be cool, my personal opinion on the direction they're heading is such:

Every spec should have options to do the basic stuff and some improvements for covering for things outside their spec - warrior trees in 2.3 are a prime example. You're a DPS warrior, but now you have reasonable amount of tanking viability. But if you want to be the best at a role, you're going to need to pay your 100g a week. Hardcore means more time, more money, and it ALWAYS has. Honestly, I'm just happy I can farm up 100g in < 2 hours a week. :P

To clarify: Everyone should be ABLE to do everything with some level of effectivness - but being the best at more than one thing (i.e. spec stables at 5g) is unlikely to happen.

I'd totally be down for a spec stable at 50g though, I think that'd be a GREAT idea to save people the hassle of possible misclicks and time spent during respecs.

Speaking of oversights, where the heck is Improved Arcane Intellect? Power Word: Fortitude and Mark of the Wild get talent improvements, so why are we left out?

It existed when WoW launched, they dumped it because people said it was worthless =/

Edit: Trying to find the launch talent trees in WoW Vault, no luck so far(finding the trees that is). Does anyone else remember this talent or am I on a wild goose chase?

By the same token, Fury warriors already have little to no incentive to use Battle stance. Prot warriors don't go out of Defensive stance much, either.

A waste of points just like imp mark....I like that the 'imp" talents exist, I just wish theywere good. I much prefer AI to mark also. Imo, mark is by far the buff with the least gain for most players. Although I understand the argument that at least it does help all players, unlike AI that only helps mana users. Fort and BoK really do seem to be head and shoulders above both though.

I believe Imp AI was taken out pre-launch. It definitely existed in beta, though. And it suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

All indication is 2.3 will be hitting very soon; they have wiped the PTR discussion forum and reposted the bug reporting FAQ.

Also, let the tears of the masses flow: Edit:

Imp Battle Stance could, for example, give rage on switching to battle stance (warrior power shifting?), not usable more than once every x seconds, or it could increase damage dealt in battle stance by n%, or it could make overpower usable after some other condition than dodge (overpower spec has a nice ring to it, right?). Arms needs some character/flavor.

I think making battle stance DO something in the first place would be a good step before improved battle stance.

They need to swap DW Spec and Enrage at this point, especially if the SS-DW swap goes live. It's long overdue.

Skimming over the notes more, it soundsl ike expertise is actually a replacement for weapon skill, not a new skill. Also, the way in which this one works is much simpler to figure out, and as far as I can tell it's pretty zomg-good for tanks, both in terms of agro generation, and incoming parries. I also applaud the fact that it's weapon-type-independant, and should theoretically even apply to feral druids (please test~!).

Further in the notes, pally tanks can get 5% expertise for free, increasing autoattack threat and damagy by about 10%, but there's no equivalent skill in the warrior prot tree. It sounds like something that one-hand weapon spec could do, even at the cost of half it's damage bonus.

Quick, to the number-mobile, how good is this as a dps stat!

The Warrior notes mention that Defiance will provide 2/4/6 Expertise skill.

They really need to get rid of both 'Improved PW:Fort' and 'Improved Mark' and just increase the normal buff to the improved level to compensate. Such a lame use of talent points, very akin to the old 'Improved Arcane explosion'.

Also:
-Eliminate Improved Vampiric Embrace; make the spell itself 20% or 25%.
-Eliminate Improved Divine Spirit; make the 10% bonus innate to the spell.
-Eliminate Improved Holy shield; and increase charges based on the rank of the spell.
-Eliminate Improved Sanctity Aura; make the 2% dmg bonus innate to the aura.

They could also stand to go back and comb over a lot of old "standard issue" talents and reduce their point total cost to free up the investment in single talent trees, for example:

-All the talents that give "chance to avoid interruption caused by damage" should be reduced from 5 points to 3 points(24/47/70%) or 2 points(35/70%).
-Nerfed talents like Shadow Weaving, Mortal Shots, and Illumination should be reduced from 5 points to 3 points, (maintaining their current level of effectiveness)
-Many other talents like Improved Arcane Missles, Lethality , Restorative totems, etc. that are below tier 5(<20 points in) could be reduced in point cost.

Freeing up talent points to get deeper talents or balance more towards 41/20 or 40/21 splits just makes sense. Not that I expect any of this to happen before the next expansion, esp. considering the amount of irrational complaining any change seems to receive currently. They need to start covering up talent revisions by adding more non-combat pets in the same patches to distract the masses. Paladins didn't get threat reduction? Oh well, they added a 'lamont the baby penguin' quest!

There's a difference between global cooldown and stance cooldowns. It only costs one global cooldown to overpower, you do however invoke two stance cooldowns if you are not in battle stance and want to overpower.

Let me add to that list from a locks perspective:

5/5 points wasted in Imp Corruption to make it instant cast.
2 deep affliction points to make howl of terror instant (it's near useless without these two points)

Then theres bane and some other talents that are so needed and outright silly.

I was on the Imp. Corrupt bitching train at the beginning of the year

Someone posted on the official forums that, in line with the DOT damage recalculation, and the fact that untalented Corrupt was just outside the GCD that anyone *NOT* taking Imp. Corrupt, besides hurting their own convenience factor, was in essence double-nerfing themselves because they were stuck with an all-around shittier spell than before (the changes being made with the instant Corrupt cast assumption in mind)

The blue reply (Kalgan?) was basically DOTs are overpowered, we're not buffing warlock DOTs in anyway, enjoy Empowered Corruption in Affliction if you want it to be stronger

Which is to say, you are 100% correct, but Blizzard isn't gonna do a damn thing about it at this point, so give up on it

as 33/28 I pretty much never use battle now in any circumstance, except to charge and to pop sweeping strikes (and even that is questionable most of the time). Overpower is hardly ever worth it except in super rage starved situations where flurry isn't up yet

hum I guess I should have known this

Yes yes, but I was thinking more along the lines of PvP when I know I shift quite often between Battle and Berserker stances. There's no reason in a raiding environment for an Arms Warrior to give up 3% free crit from Berserker.