I'd bet on the shield slam buff being more hate rather than more damage.

Rumor I've seen is that AP will add to the damage of the ability.

That could easily go one of several ways... base Shield Slam damage changed or unchanged? What speed is the shield normalized at, or is it a % of attack power?

Shield Slam would only need a few hundred damage to rival Mortal Strike and could make PVP with a Jagged Obsidian Shield an interesting option. And if anything it would encourage more warriors to abandon Mortal Strike.

It would be great if the changes to Shield Slam made the damage / threat it produced scale with the quality of the shield you were holding. That would make the talent future proof in a way that it is not currently, especially with the type of weapons we are likely to see in Naxx.

Seems that shield slam is pretty beastly now:

That's rank 1. I wonder if the damage range is what's possible based on your AP, or if it's that damage PLUS whatever the modified AP amount is. If it's that damage +AP stuff, that's pretty sweet.

Copy and pasting myself from SA forums. My math might be shoddy, but I don't think so. This is stuff culled from a couple posts, so it might sound jumbled. Sorry for that.

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Tooltip shows 137-143, an average of 140. Talented skills show rank 1 in the tree, so that's compared to the current rank 1 average of 320. It's 43% base damage of what it used to be. Assuming it scales consistently with the old shield slam (not necessarily a safe assumption), and the top rank of the new shield slam would be an average of 215.

Assuming that it scales like that, and that it is normalized like a 2.3 speed weapon, you would need a whopping 1734 attack power to average the 500 currently averaged on shield slam.

Based on that, I would guess it is treated as a slower weapon (if it were treated like a 2h, you would only need 1208 attack power) or it will scale to higher base damage that it currently does. Otherwise it would basically be a nerf, since that is a LOT of attack power to be asking of anyone, especially a D spec warrior.

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the new rank 1 is 43% of the damage of the old rank 1, so I made the (quite possibly incorrect) assumption that it would scale like that for other ranks. The current top rank is an average damage of 500, and 43% of that is 215.

The difference in the average damages is 285. In order to make that much damage up, you need a hefty chunk of attack power, which is why I said it leads me to believe my scaling assumption was wrong or it was an indirect nerf for levels 60s. I suppose a level 70 prot warrior might have retardo amounts of attack power, who knows.

Edit: I looked at the scaling problem another way. There is a
56.25% increase from rank 1 of old shield slam to rank 4 of old shield slam. This would make the base damage of new shield slam in the range of 219 instead of 215.

1710 atk power for this method at 2.3 speed normalization as compared to 1735 for my old method. Negligible change.

1192 attack power is the shield is counted as a 3.3 speed, as compared to 1209 on my old calculations.

Conclusion: doesn't matter which way I look at scaling, at 2.3 speed normalization, you're gonna need more attack power than a DW fury warrior to break even with new shield slam. This leads me to believe it will scale up faster, or will get buffed. Assuming they WANT to buff shield slam. Otherwise, this is just fancy words for a nerf.

Of course, someone can answer my question by looking at rank 4 instead of rank 1.


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Hope that makes sense taken out of context. It should.

Another possibility is that it is normalized at six seconds, since that is the cooldown. This is highly improbable in my estimation, but the you would only need 665 attack power, if I am understanding your math correctly.

If that is correct then they have reduced the rage cost of it from 30 down to 20 which is a nice improvement. I'm not so keen on them modifying the damage with attack power though unless the attack counts as a very slow one.

It could act in a similar fashion to Bloodthirst, that being the damage done is a percentage of your attack power.

In my opinion shield slam should scale with block value; based on the Dreadnaught set a lot of pieces are concentrating on that department.

Something I posted on my guild forums:

Currently, against an unarmored target, shield slam generates:

(250 base threat + 500 average damage) * 1.3 defensive stance modifier = 975 threat (divided by 30 rage, 32.5 threat per rage point).

Assuming you reached the 1.11 break-even point for attack power, giving your new Shield Slam exactly as much damage as the old one, but at a lowered cost:

(250 base threat + 500 average damage) * 1.3 defensive stance modifier = 975 threat (divided by 20 rage, 48.75 threat per rage point).

Of course, most of the wonderful aggro shield slam COULD create is heavily mitigated by target's armor. Assuming 50% DR:

(250 base threat + 250 avg dmg) * 1.3 = 650 threat / 30 = 21.7 threat per rage.
vs
(250 base threat + 250 avg dmg) * 1.3 = 650 threat / 20 = 32.5 threat per rage.

For reference, untalented Sunder Armor is 261 * 1.3 = 339 threat / 15 rage = 22.62 threat per rage.
Talented, it's 261 * 1.3 = 339 threat / 12 rage = 28.275 threat per rage.

Even if shield slam's damage didn't increase, this is a MASSIVE gain to the skill - shield slam was only useful as a snap-aggro tool and didn't generate more threat per time unit or threat per X amount of rage than sunder or HS did. Now it's going to be worth using on a mob that's already stuck on you for even more threat (of course, depending on mob armor and if you have Imp. Sunder or not).

Also this could provide another benefit, depending on the specifics of the attack power threshold. If a warrior could actually do respectable damage with a shield in 1.11, it would open up protection warriors for a bit more pvp/self defense viability in much the same way the priest and druid changes did.