That's block value, not shield block rating.

Is that some elaborate joke I am missing? Oo
BV gives threat, BR gives... nothing unless you build a crush immune set.

Besides the fact that your entire post revolves around the mistaken belief that Blizzard is making available loot better than Tier 6 through the Badge of Justice vendors, you come to that conclusion by proposing (sans analysis supporting your conclusion) that nearly 3.5% shield block is useless. Perhaps the gigantic holes in your logical analysis led to disinterest.

I am not an endgame tank, but as a healer of them I would tend to think that equipment rating that helps stabilize and mitigate incoming damage would not be classified as useless.

You should probably try to refrain from speaking about things you know nothing about but I will humor you.

Warriors have an ability called "shield block", it raises their block rating by 75%, so, even with no gear, they become uncrushable. Except on strings of parries, crushes rarely get through.

This means that "block rating" is pretty much useless, unless you make a crush immune set, which, in the end, will actually be worse for overall mitigation then a standard tank set.

The 27 block rating on t6 gloves are garbage..Just as almost all block rating is.

edit: nvm, the guy has been proven wrong already.

I beg to differ, those were two seperate things. I was mistaken about the gloves being a BoJ reward (I followed a link earlier in the thread where all the items with no drop source were supposed to be BoJ items, the comment in WoWhead on Borderland Fortress Grips - Items - World of Warcraft didn't help either) but I still stand to what I said before. BR is useless and stating that is definitely not a reason "to stop reading" for an arbitrary reason.

Tanks use shield block to force a block anyway on bosses, hence BR is useless unless you want to build a crush immune set where you push off crushing blows without SB just by virtue of having enough avoidance + block rating that every hit against you will either be avoided or blocked - but such a set has big drawbacks compared to normal sets anyway.

I'm sorry for assuming people knew BR was somewhat of a dead weight stat for Warriors, my bad.

The values are pretty easy to extrapolate. T4-equivalent helms are 50 badges, T5-equivalent helms/legs/chests are 75. So I'm guessing T6-"equivalent" items in those slots will be 100 badges. I'm sure bracers will be more than the current 35, belts/gloves/shoulders more than 60, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised at a truly silly number (150?) for weapons, but would bet on 100 for those as well. That's A LOT of badges.

As it happens I do have a lot of "Retard Joes" in my guild (and I don't mean casuals either, I mean real idiots) as well as Casual Players and I think his post pretty well approximates their experience. We also have a tremendous number of level 70 alts (I have 3 myself) that we gear in Kara and heroics, and it takes a loooooooong time. I've been saving badges on my warrior since 2.3 came out and I'm only up to 175 out of the 270 I need for all the dps plate, because after spending 4 nights a week raiding on my mage, there's only so much time I feel like spending doing Kara for the 27th time or Random Heroic X. The notion that gets tossed around that all it takes is "running Heroic Mechanar for a few days" to get shiny epics is pretty disconnected with the actual experience of people whose only gearing avenue is casual content.

I don't think it'd be fair for t6 to give S3, no, and it seems that neither does Blizzard.
Right now:
t5-->S2
t6-->S2
Sunwell-only bracer/belt/wrist tokens --> "S3" honor gear (i.e. Vindicactor's) which I can't imagine anyone seriously contesting, since absolutely no guild is going to take an ilvl 150+ token drop from Sunwell that everyone needs and turn it into 15k honor

My guess would be that when S4 starts, the t6 token vendor will start selling Vengeful gear, which will now no longer be the best available.

So basically you have to PvP for the best PvP gear, but arena is more accessible to players who have primarily focused on raiding. There are a ton of people who would like to get involved in PvP after months of raiding, but realize that they need >300 resil to get anywhere, and get discouraged at the prospect of spending days in BGs and either buying points or sitting at 1400 with no resil for months until they can buy more pieces. Combine this with the fact that bosses now drop 3 tokens, which will lead to a lot of rotting tokens, and it makes sense.

Letting raiders get five pieces of S2 armor (no resil weapon, offhand, shield, wand, etc.etc... just the basic 5 slots) doesn't negatively impact PvP players, and it will introduce new blood into the arena system, which is always good. Some of those players might find they really enjoy it and start taking it more seriously. The rest will hover at 1700 and use it as a diversion. Either way, it's good.

Also for a brand new level 70, running PUG Kara and Gruul for s1 gear and badges for cloak and other stuff, while saving honor for Vindicator's stuff, is a nice prospect. Beats the hell out of either wasting honor on shitty S1 gear that will be replaced, or having to buy arena points to get a few S3 pieces in an acceptable amount of time.

Well with each boss dropping 3 tokens now, I foresee people doing this soonish, but not off the start.

BR isn't useless for warriors, it's just a little... situational. If you're up against a fast swinging mob (or multiple targets) then there's a good chance that your SB charges can be eaten before you can use it again. There's also issues with lag and such that may prevent you from reactivating SB in time, with BR providing a small safety net. It's not something warriors want to focus on, but it's not completely trash.

Of course, if you have a dual wielding mob or multiple targets to tank, any guild not using a protection paladin is just gimping themselves. BR is awesome for them.

Highly unlikely within the first 3 months unless a Sunwell guild has the worst luck ever (like 3 Vanq tokens per kill or something). I don't know about other people, but for us PvE offspec > PvP, especially as honor becomes easier to get with multiple new honor dailies, token turnins, etc. I'd want our feral druid to get resto bracers, or our spriest to get healing bracers, or a tank warrior to get DPS bracers, etc., before anyone thinks about taking something to turn into a PvP item. I'd estimate 12 weeks before that starts to really happen, and I would assume that we'll be in S4 by then.

Actually it was early in the morning, I moused over and thought it said block value. Rating translates to wasted itemization points, value translates to threat through shield slam (and mitigation). Sorry about that, but either way, those gloves are a trash drop (or at least they were). And yea, Teron gloves are better than t6 if you don't have Illidan's helm.

In response to the comments about "Brackish Mixed Schools" earlier in this thread, I've done some analysis here. The changes make pools the most efficient source of Golden Darter, which they generally aren't at the moment. Golden Darter can also be fished 50 skill points lower than before (in Zangarmarsh), although higher skill is still needed for the most efficient location (Terokkar Forest).

On a related note, I've not read much feedback about the usefulness of Luminous Bluetail. They're caught off the coast of Isle of Quel'Danas: About 30 per hour at 450 effective fishing skill, so only moderately annoying to farm. These are consumed like potions, not eaten as food. Although the mana bonus is small (330 mana over 30 seconds), they share cooldowns with Healthstones, Mana Emeralds, and some odd items like engineering trinkets. Unlike Dark/Demonic Runes, there is no health trade-off. It occurs to me that some classes, notably healers, probably aren't making use of that cooldown during tough boss fights, and so could make use of Luminous Bluetail to effectively gain an extra 22 MP5 for part of the fight. Or am I missing something?

I'm pretty happy Blizzard finally decided to give BM hunters and ehna shamans some custom tailored weapons to match whatever tier 6 content lacked, and apparently, the druid staff is quite good. However, I don't see the point of the daggers.

There's 3 fucking daggers ([Blade of Serration],[Swift Blade of Uncertainty] and [The Mutilator]) available (and in my opinion, a bit lacking in itemization, but that could be a compromise to keep raiders and non raiders happy at the same time), and I can't think of a single class that could use them anywhere near a PVE enviroment, given that dagger rogues are almost extinct. Couple that with the lack of swords, and it makes me think that Blizzard developers either have no idea what the current state of things is, or there are some massive rogue viability changes incoming. Although, I have to say, my money would be on the former, rather than the latter.

BR does mean that after those charges are gone you're looking at less of a chance to be crushed than having no extra BR at all. I think that's the point he's trying to make.

Well for multimobs it helps a little, but BR doesn't help at all with preventing crushes untill you start pushing them off the combat table (that is, getting a crush immune set as was already mentioned). If you forget to SB you have a 15% chance to be crushed no matter how much or how little BR you have untill you get into the crush immune zone.

This.

It's after those charges are used that the BR, or any other avoidance stat you have on your gear, comes into play. No SB charges left? That boss about to crush your face in? Better hope you have enough miss, dodge, parry or BLOCK on your gear! It's certainly not an ideal stat, but calling it useless is a bit of a stretch.

And to add something vaguely on topic, I can't wait to buy glad gear for tokens, for the same reasons posted above. Getting a new character started in PvP now is a real chore, so running my alts through Karazhan and being able to pick up tokens for gloves, helm and badges for non-set items means less time spent being two-shotted by S3 warriors in AV. The blue rep sets will really help a lot too.

I'm with Gurg on this, in large part because I'm one of those semi-casual PvPers who will benefit. For PvE there's a clear and content-filled progression path to get anywhere you want to go. It may take a while to get there but no matter what your gear level is, there's content that's appropriate to you that you can be successful at. For PvP this isn't the case. You are expected to grind huge quantities of honor (a process that is extremely slow with the state of AV these days) just to get a S1 set, at which point you're still not competitive. Basically you're looking at months of boredom and failure (getting crushed by better-geared teams in arenas, getting crushed by better-geared players in BGs) to make yourself competitive. Imagine if all the PvE content in the game was set up for people with the best gear, and the only way you could get to that level was by running the same 3 heroics every single day for hundreds of badges.

IMO, this is an elegant solution to the problem casual PvPers face when trying to get more involved in Arenas. On the PvP side you have your "content" pushed up to the very top end of gear, with no satisfying progression path for new/casual players. On the PvE side there's actually a very nice and clearly laid out progression path, from 5 mans to heroics to Karazhan to 25-man raids. By following this path you have the option to get the tools you need to at least be competitive in arenas, where the progression system is lacking.

Derail due to two people's mistake of block value on an item that actually had block rating. Back to real topics of 2.4, warrior class / block: this way -------> http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18771-protection_warrior/

If you are so keen on discussing a class you dont seem to fully understand, do it here: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18771-protection_warrior/

The problem being you're wrong. As several people have said, BR does NOTHING to help avoid crushes untill you get into the passive crush immune zone.

Perhaps you should read http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18771-protection_warrior/

I was referring to situations where block rating would actually stabilize your incoming damage better than parry. An example would be non-crushing mobs, like 72 and under trash, where your primary concern might be generating threat and consistent rage to create that threat. I was assuming that you would want to take the hit for 700 damage less (or whatever your BV is) than the full hit rather than parry it or take the full damage. If that's never the case, then I apologize for that part of my response regarding the usefulness of block rating. I stand by the response that it's silly to be upset that Sunwell trash loot is better itemized than Tier 6 set gear.

For the record, I never made a "stopped reading" comment, I just tried to explain why someone might.