I think about warrior talents a lot, and after seeing the rogue review, not to mention priest and mage reviews, along with druids getting innervate as a core spell, I think the chances are good that warriors will finally get a real review.

The first warr/lock review was really lacking IMO, it was mostly bug fixes and tooltip updates, and effectively brought warriors in line with other classes at release, except it was 4-5 months later.

So, if I was doing the warrior review, here's what i'd do: (granted, this is ALL wishful thinking, since blizz has long shown by their actions they really don't hardly know what to do with warriors).

ARMS

Tier 1:
Deflection: unchanged

Improved Rend: Removed. Rend never needed any kind of improvement. It's sole use has only ever been when fighting rogues to break them out of stealth, which it does with or without talents. Replaced with: Weapon Expertise. Similar to rogue's new talent, except that it's 3 points for +5 skill to axes, swords and maces (1h and 2h). Why tier 1? All specs of warrior should have easy access to this ability. It's useful in pve as dps and tanking, as glancing blows can really hurt a tank's rage generation. It also makes the most sense to be in the arms tree, IMO.

Tactical Mastery: Move this to tier 1 and make it 3 points for 25 rage saved instead of 5pts, if they don't want to make it a core ability. Hopefully it will become a core ability, but you never know. At least move it here. Please :(

Tier 2:

Improved Charge: unchanged

Improved Heroic Strike: Make this 5 points, and make it so each point decreases the rage cost by 1, and increases your chance for this to crit by 1%. I've always though imp HS was ok, but needed something a bit more to make it more attractive.

Deep Wounds: Moved here from tier 3. Same as before. Wep expertise is the prereq for this in place of rend now.

Imp tclap: Removed. Most useless talent ever? maybe now that throwing wep specialization is gone :P Replace with a 3 pts for 3% precision talent? Afraid to suggest it :P

Tier 3:

Improved Overpower: unchanged

Anger Management: Same as before with TM as the prereq. Please just leave it bugged, it's only good that way :)

Impale: Moved here from tier 4, same as before. Why move Deep wounds and impale? It allows a bit more freedom in fury specs, in that you'd only have to take 15 in arms instead of 17.

Tier 4:

2h Spec: unchanged

Improved Hamstring: Move this talent here, but keep it the same. I've always felt this was too deep in the tree for what it does.

Tier 5:

Unchanged, with the exception of sweeping strikes. Reduce the rage cost or cooldown (or both) of this ability. For what it does, and it's current limitations with double hitting targets, SS shouldn't cost so much. Maybe change mace spec to something more pve friendly, say another 5% dmg? Dunno on that one, that might be a bit much.

Tier 6:

Polearm spec: 3 pts to increase the range of all your attacks by 3 yards. I've always liked this idea, you're fighting with a long weapon, why shouldn't your attacks have slightly longer range? There's (currently) very few polearms in instances for warrs (if any), but that could change.

Tier 7:

Mortal Strike: Unchanged.



FURY

Tier 1:

Cruelty: Unchanged.

Booming Voice: Moved and changed. New talent: Conditioning: Increases your strength by 2%/4%/6%/8%/10%. 5 pts for 10% more str, just like the paladin talent. Warrs need some talents to increase passive stats IMO.

Tier 2:

Unbridled wrath: Unchanged

Improved Cleave: Moved here, otherwise unchanged. Would be nice if 3 pts let you hit 3 targets instead of 2, but not getting my hopes up :P

Tier 3:

Piercing Howl: Unchanged

Bloodcraze: unchanged

Improved battle shout: Replaced with: Booming Voice: Increases the duration and range of your demoralizing shout and battle shout by 50%, the effect of your demoralizing shout by 40% and the effect of your Battle shout by 25% at max rank. Basically, this combines the other shout talents from before. 15 points for all those marginal improvements always struck me as stupid before. Why not just have 5 points to improve both shouts by what they did before? This makes the fury tree far more efficient IMO.

Dual wield spec: Moved up here, otherwise unchanged. Moving this makes it a bit easier to get for different specs that may want it.

Tier 4:

Improved Slam: Move this ability here, and how about in addition to the .1 cast time per rank, make it give 3% crit per rank as well, with 5pts giving you an extra 15% crit on slam. This gives arms builds who want to DPS in pve to get this for max 2h dmg.

Improved execute: unchanged

Enrage: Remove this as a prereq for flurry, otherwise the same.

Tier 5:

Improved berzerker rage: Moved up 1 tier to here, otherwise unchanged.

Deathwish: Unchanged

Improved intercept: Unchanged. Just fix the damned desyncing problem please.

Tier 6:

Flurry: Unchanged. No longer has a prereq.

Tier 7:

Bloodthirst: Unchanged


PROTECTION

Tier 1:

Shield spec: Unchanged

Anticipation: Make it 1defense and 1% dodge per rank. So +5 def and 5% dodge for 5 points.

Tier 2:

Improved Bloodrage: Unchanged

Toughness: Combine this with Iron Will, so 5 points gives you 15% stun resist and 10% increased armor. Too good? I don't know, but iron will was alway sub par unless you were an orc before, and all prot warrs should be more stun resistant IMO, so this seems like a good solution to me. Also far too many 5 pt talents in prot.

Tier 3:

Last Stand: Unchanged, other than maybe decrease the cooldown to 7 mins or 5 mins... 10 mins is too long for what it does IMO.

Imp shield block: anything past 1 point in this is pretty useless. Either make it 1 point, or make it 2 points and grant 3 blocks for those quick hitting mobs/people. 1 point is more likely.

Improved revenge: Unchanged

Defiance: Unchanged

Tier 4:

Improved Sunder: Make this 6 rage reduction for 3 points, instead of 3 rage reduction for 3 points. This isn't a bad talent IMO, just needs some love.

Improved Disarm: Removed. Replaced with.... VITALITY! Yep, 10% stam should go here IMO, for 5 points. Imp disarm has always been beyond pointless, just get rid of it.

Improved Taunt: Unchanged

Tier 5:

Improved Shield wall: Removed. Make this innate please, kthx. No reason this 30 min skill should have 5 secs less duration that the other 30 min skills, this has always bugged me.

Concussion Blow: Unchanged

Improved shield bash: Unchanged. MAYBE make this decrease the cd of shield bash by 2 secs as well, loved this for prot pvp when i had it :)

Tier 6:

1h Spec: Unchanged. Don't know why anyone complains about this talent, it's very good.

New Talent: Resilience. 3 pts increases your effective lvl vs spells by 1/2/3. So, with 3 points in this, spells vs you land as if you were lvl 63, instead of lvl 60, for example. Makes you more survivable vs casters, and for this many points in protection you'll need it :X.

Tier 7:

Shield Slam: Unchanged. MAYBE up the proc rate on the dispell, since I doubt i'll ever get my wish of having it be a 40% chance to knockdown your target for 2 secs :P


So there you have it, many small changes and mostly just economizing what we already have. Few things buffed here and there, nothing really major, with some more builds viable. Builds like MS + imp slam for pve dps, BT + full 2h spec for 2h fury, better fury + prot builds, since you only need 3 arms for TM, and so on. Prot needs the most help, these are ideas i've seen around before, so I don't lay any claim to them, just picked the ones I liked the best and how i'd organize them if it were up to me.

So, if you were making warrior talent changes, what would you do and why?


PS Props to EJ :) Great site and great job in naxx (wtb new server hardware :( )

They've said several times that warriors and warlocks will not get another talent review.

I'm always bummed to log on to my paladin and notice the 3/3 2h weapon spec does 6% and my 5/5 2h weapon spec does 5% on my warrior. I would seek to rectify this. Other than that, a lot of good stuff in here. Some of the stuff you are skeptical on is a bit over-powered or even abusive, which you have already pointed out.

...Untill the expansion pack, where many of these changes would find a nice home. I don't see the reason for this troll.

Because the first sentence contains The chances aren't "good", they're "zero".

I eagerly await the exapansion beta because then I will have new things to bitch about. I doubt any thing signifcant changes are occuring between now and then for anyone or anything. I disagree with most everything you posted however.

No. The talent is fine, it's Rend that is horrible. Unfortunately multiplying a poor skill by a great talent leaves you with shit. I guess warriors aren't in terrible need of a super rage effcient armor ignoring skill. We'll file this under Wait For Expansion.
It's acually quite good if you're the 5 piece conq Thunderclap spammer because the 2 guys with Thunderfury have either been cryogenically frozen or are fighting a guerilla revolution in Wales for the past 3 months. Other then that though, it is not that good.

I'd like to see SS removed entirely. Warriors already have WW and Cleave. Another skill to hit multiple targets (especially in the 2h tree) is just overkill. If they can't replace it then making it not really shitty would also help.

I really don't think we need more damage.

Rather see the damage bonus removed and replaced with 2/4/6 rage reduction.

No, same as Imp. Rend. Talent is fine it's the skill that's shit.


Yes, the talent is basically useless. I'd like dodge but that's probably more avoidance than they want to give us.

I actually think the extra 2 points can be worthwhile in a full protection build. You can gain some rage effciency if you're willing to only hit shield block when the buff fades rather than hammering it every 5 seconds.

Disagree strongly. 20% cheaper sunders/25% more sunders is an excellent talent investment.

This, and not TM, is the only thing I think should be innate, especially considering the way some of the raiding encounters are designed.

13% flat resist chance against everyone else in pvp before hit% gear? No that's just really really overpowered.

The devs have almost flat-out rejected the idea of buffing warrior damage. With that in mind, a ton of these ideas are overpowered, but I do hear you on the poor quality of the warrior review. The most recent reviews are excellent because the game is well developed - the early reviews are poor because Blizzard didn't quite know where they wanted to go with things.

The biggest thing that strikes me was the idea for Polearm Spec. I've longed for a good warrior polearm for forever-and-a-half, and they bring nothing special to the table. Ugh. One thing I really liked about Lineage 2, though I played it for a very short time, was that polearm weapons swung with longer range and hit targets in an arc in front of the user. I'd really like to see some kind of innovation there, especially when you consider the lack of polearms in the game and the talent location in the tree.

My issues/gripes:

Slam - far down the fury tree, yet is a skill that mostly supports Arms. The talent is freaking useless - give it a 33%/66%/100% chance of being able to be cast "on top of" your normal swing (like in beta), rather than resetting it. Something to make it worth using in situations other than "I'm DPSing as arms and have more than enough rage to MS/WW every cooldown."

Lack of +hit talent - regardless of what tree it was placed in. It still irks me that we don't get ANY at all.

The many "useless" talents or talents that modify "useless" skills - fix them, remove them, replace them, merge them, anything would be better than their current implementation.

Weapon Specs - arms warriors and combat rogues (though to a lesser extent) get to respec every time they get a new weapon, which ends up being 50g in addition to the crusader enchant. Seems kind of... archaic?

Surprisingly, I think the Prot tree, with Vitality added and maybe a few "useless" things whacked would be perfect.

Wow, without going into detail, some of your suggestions would really overpower damage output.
e.g. +10% STR is just insane.

Most people always bitch about some new "overpowered" weapon being introduced (e.g. MoM) and how that would change damage output.
But very few realise that the AP part of the damage equation
(damage per hit = weapon damage + AP/14 * normalized Wpn Sped) has long been past the weapon DPS term.

Take e.g Might of Menethil: 95.3 DPS 3.8 Spd 3.3 normalized WpnSpd, raidbuffed 2000AP

[top]> avg (non crit) Damage done

95.3*3.8 + 2000/14*3.3= 362 + 471 = 833

Raidbuffed 2000 AP is not uncommon for warriors.

+10% STR would add another 100+AP to this, upping the avg hit by another 25 or so damage.

regards

I have to be honest, what's the point of this post? I could make a mage review list that gave all me dream unbalanced talents, but I can't see the dev's ever doing it, or anyone but the most ardent fanboy agreeing with them.

Warriors, as is, are pretty much fine. The Protection tree needs a bit of work, which the Vitality talent looked like it was going to do, but it's hardly like warriors need more damage - and yet that seems to be most of the changes you've made to the talent trees. I don't think anyone *anywhere* thinks that warriors are in deed of a damage output buff.

Heads up though - all classes still have pointless, useless talents, even after great reviews like the Mage one. They aren't going to get rid of *all* the bad talents, because someone out there likes them.

As an MS warrior I don't really feel that much needs changing. Tactical mastery is obviously already on the agenda … I think a good balance would be to have warriors retain 10/15 rage on stance change innately, and change TM to a 3 point talent to raise it up to 25/30 rage (thus freeing up a couple of talent points and allowing wider range of builds).

SS needs a bit of a tweak … I would prefer they change the hit check on SS to be WW range (or just stop it using charges when a hit doesn't result in a Sweeping strike landing). Something needs to change either way.

There is also a complete void of +2 hander skill items available. It would be nice if they either added some +skill items somewhere, or add a +skill to bonus to either the arms weapon specs, 2 hander spec or even just add a separate 5 point talent.

I just thought of an awesome tier 1 talent for Arms because I've noticed that DPS armor rarely has any resistance on it now. This is a bad situation in PVP as mage damage has continued to increase whilst resistances have decreased.

I call it "Tooth for a Tooth" - 5 points, for each point, a warrior gains resistance to all magical schools equivalent to 4/8/12/16/20% of their Attack Power.

The second paragraph was a joke but the first one isn't :(

Cloth wearers armour isn't increasingly massively either, yet physical damage is going up a lot as well. All classes are suffering mroe and more from the "two shot" syndrome - it's just that warriors bane classes usually do it at a distance.

(As a mage, I will add that hunters doing this to you from behind a bush a mile away is just as unpleasant...)

Unless I'm off my rocker, white hits are not normalized, only instant attacks, which would increase the damage to 1014 per swing, or 267 DPS from auto attacks, but these numbers are pre-mitigation so the actual amount will be lower,


As to the OP, I don't see any of the DPS changes going through, but consolidating some talents would be nice. Polearm change would make them the premier PvP weapons, but that's just not gonna happen. I would like to see the protection tree be more PvP friendly.

I think protection's problem is they can't actually *kill* anyone - and they can't actually *protect* anyone. Just ignore a Prot war, and kill him last.

If they buffed Shield Slam to where it actually did respectable damage in pvp (i.e a prot war in AP gear could hit for 700, 800 with shield slam - we'd be talking.) and let protection warriors have an ability that allows them to take all damage incoming for a target for an amount of time and dependent on proximity - we'd see alot more versatility in gameplay regarding warriors.

No offense but warriors already do damage on par with rogues and they can meet more raid viability options (aoe buff, offtanking, etc). In PVP their lethality and survability make them far more powerful. Break fears, aoe, fears, etc. I seriously doubt that the warrior DPS talents need a review. You already have a very nice set up.

That said tanking warriors seem hit or miss with the talents. If the 10% health talent ever does come out, that would make the tree much stronger, but currently it just seems to be missing something.

Yes, you're right. I somehow did not decide whether to compute yellow or white damage.
So suppose my example was for yellow hits without flat bonus (like WW) :)

non crit autoattack for MoM: 95.3 * 3.8 + 2000/14*3.8 = 362 + 543 = 904. (dont know how you computer your 1014)

regards

Warriors are fine, just the Prot tree needs something interesting past 15 points besides 1H spec and Shield slam.

The increased health talent would work.

My only real issue with the Warrior talent tree set ups is the fact that you have to take one 31 point talent. Most other classes, although fairly limited when it comes to effective specs for any task, don't lose anything like the effectiveness Warriors do without a 31 point talent. I haven't thought this through, but would giving warriors somewhat tweaked versions of Shield Slam, Bloodthirst, and Mortal Strike as standard, on linked cooldowns be that overpowering? I suppose that would depend on the tweaking.

The overall feeling for me is that we're powerful enough and we have excellent natural versatility, but we pay for that by having some really pretty damn dull talent trees and what feel like exceptionally limited choices.

Also, the complete inability to "tank" in PvP does rather limit the things that can be done with our DPS. Without the DPS choice in PvP we are literaly big bags of irritating meat waiting to die at the end. Blizzard have been emphatic in their declarations that taunt and so on will never work in PvP. I still have absolutely no idea why. It would allow us to fulfil a tanking role in PvP and would also allow some reduction of DPS without impacting our overall usefulness.

Also also, I have no real problem with the warrior's DPS as it is, as we are so limited by threat. The idea that we could top DPS meters on Aggro delimited fights seems fair, fun even. In strictly limited fights, we certainly cannot go all out. The Rage normalisation issue, while needing some attention to allow for more class development (some high rage cost/low rage efficiency abilities would be another potential solution to increasing rage income) seems to often ignore the threat limitation in PvE and the CC limitation in PvP.

This type of comparison is a slippery slope imo. As a shaman talent discrepancies like this one are always used against us in class comparisons but it is unfair.

Warriors will get much more benefit from their weapon specializations than pallies will. This is why they have to pay more for it.

Similarly flurry gives warriors increase rage generation which increases their dps even after the effect has subsided. That is why the same talent costs more for warriors than it does for enhancement shaman.

If shaman/pallies had to spend as much for a similar but lower impact talent, that would be unfair.

I guess this is a serious derail, but I heard this complaint--that the changes nerfed how +healing affected our heals-- about the 1.10 preist changes before, and it baffles me.

Yes, the old 4s GHeal got 100% of your +healing. The you could get it talented to apply that 100% of your +healing every 3.5s.

The new 3s GHeal gets 85% of your plus healing. (Which, if you notice, applies 100% of your +healing every 3.5s *before talents.*) You can now talent that down to 2.5s, and still get the +healing applied as if the cast time were 3s, which give you 85% of your +healing every 2.5s-- you get *more* HPS under the new system than the old one. You just see smaller numbers more often.

And, since they increased the efficiency of GHeals by decreasing the mana cost, downranking got even better, since you could apply your +healing for a lower base cost.

And all of this doesn't even include the fact that the changes made the more efficient, slower heal usable as a core heal instead of Flash (at least for me), which made light-years of difference in my longevity.

There might be some complaints with the Priest review if you weren't happy with the group PVP survivabilty boosts, or if you really liked the Mental Strength/ Spiritual Healing combo, but there's no question that it made the +healing on our gear better, not worse.

(Another derail sorry)

I used Heal R2 well before the priest patch, and I still use it as my bread and butter after. 1S hasn't been noticeable, since if I need to up the HP/S I use flash. I cancel ~75% of my heals on any given fight - so the cast time change really didn't change a thing, except my gheals and R2 heal heals for alot less now.

Honestly the Priest changes changed *nothing* for me. I play the exact same way, have basically the same spec, and I was just angry at the overall tone of the changes. The more efficient slower heal should have always been your bread and butter - if it wasn't well I don't know what to say. I'm just mad that they addressed 0 of our issues, and gave us fluff we did not need in the least.

We're still stuck with the same level 22 heal that we've been using for over a year (or whenever you broke 400 healing), we're going to be stuck with this spell well into TBC ,and even at level 70, simply because nothing comes close to the efficiency of that spell - and in the end thats all that matters. Efficiency.

/rant off :).

If I were a warrior, I'd be scared of any talent review that does anything outside the Protection tree. Warriors do too much damage as it is, I doubt the devs want to give them more.

As for Prot- The problem with a vitality talent is that you have to balance around that so much. That's why it surprises me that BoK is so powerful - not that it adds an immense amount of HP now, but that eventually it will become a massive difference. 10% more HP is an incredible talent investment, but either it will be way too good or it'll be completely required for every MT until you outgear an encounter.

It still boggles my mind that they give Protection no pvp viable talents like a Shield Protect or something that they can use on smooshy players.