Well, then we can at least agree both primary melee classes just took a huge DPS nerf. Arguing who got it worse is sort of pointless. Everyone will feel the effect of their raid losing damage, especially if you run heavy on melee. Fights lasting longer is bad for everyone.

So is the % of glancing penalty changed after all or not? Someone was saying it's 24% now instead of 30%.

As a Human Fury DPS warrior I can't help but be a little concerned at the implications of 2.0. Its fairly obvious that Rage Normalisation has been added to the game to dampen the scaling of Warrior DPS.

As it stands now, it’s the fights that involve excessive buffs & dmg modifiers (such as Patch/Loatheb/Thaddius), which result in basically unlimited rage & DW fury warriors topping meters. So if rage normalisation drops Fury DPS down on these specific types of encounters, but allows a DW Fury warrior to still do respectable dps on 'regular' fights then I think the change will have been a good one.

My concern is that Rage normalisation will also be a big hit when just running regular raid buffs (or even no buffs), and thus result in a pretty significant reduction in raid dps.

Here's hoping the new talents (and raid debuffs, such as Blood Frenzy) will help offset the glancing blow & rage normalisation, so that fights like Loatheb and Thaddius don't suddenly become significantly more difficult.

Hrm,
Having read all of this thread I cant help feel that this is a knee-jerk reaction by blizzard to leveling in TBC. I suspect that Blizard saw many of the T2/T3 crowd soloing level 65 mobs on day one and bypassing chunks of their content and felt that this was "not working as intended". The ability of T2/T3 players to punch well above their level in the new PvE content was therefore removed by reapplying the artificial cap on the level of mobs that can be killed in groups or solo; level difference.

I cant help feeling Blizzard have really got this issue arse-about-face.
Using the existing mechanics of glancing blows, defence and skill they COULD have broken the gear overlap between raiding and non-raiding.

Imagine for a moment that the T5 instance is a level 73 instance, the T6 instance was level 74 npcs. T7 was level 75 etc.. etc.
In this situation T5 could be itemized such that the majority of its dps increase over T4 came from +SKILL, and that all future sets could also have the bulk of their DPS upgrade tied into +skill.
Eg T4>T5; +10stam, +10agi, +20AP, +20 weapon skill rating.

If we now remove the effects of +defence and +skill on pvp, and make PvP interactions dependant only upon relative level and resiliance rating, suddenly your top PvE guilds dont totally dominate the PvPers in BG's. And similarly you dont get people PvPing a full epic set and skipping 3 tiers of PvE progression. This would make the game much easier to balance in terms of PvP vs PvE scaling, it would also remove some of the niggling concerns from healers about their gear helping them outside of raids, because now the DPS classess would find that their gear would barely scale outside of a raid. This would remove the "one set for all" advantage of dps classess.

Overall this seems short sighted and poorly concieved as an idea.

I'll have you know that without endless rage my beta CRITS generate as much rage as my WoW HITS, hence I can nothing but laugh at the claim that players won't really notice the rage loss. It's a massive nerf to rage generation.
I specced MS + Flurry + imp slam yesterday, dropping it again because I barely generate the rage now to MS on every cooldown. I was better off with Endless Rage, thunderclapping between MS.

They are calling it normalization, but I am fairly sure that there is no single warrior out there that has equipment so shitty that this would not be a nerf to him.

Wow, so weapon expertise really did replace throwing weapon specialization after all...

That is so amazingly bad I can't even figure out why they didn't just remove the talent.

well....atleast i can use my gauntlets of annihilation on boss fights after the patch...

This is a nerf, no way around it. However, Im not pigeon holed into gear with the change, so while its a nerf, I am glad they are doing something, I just wish it wasnt such a knee jerk over reaction.

I woke up this morning and got to the character selection screen only to find my rogue sitting down, crying.

I'm trying to read through as many threads as I can, but has a Blue posted about the option to modify the Weapon Expertise talent? It really does seem less than ideal for such a high talent, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

The biggest thing on my mind as of late has been dagger selection, and I was sure I would try to pick up a Death's Sting, citing it as necessary to maintain top dps as much as possible. I am a rogue, for pete's sake. As it was mentioned earlier, DS is now slightly better than MF come patch time, so is it still worth it to hold out for the item? Is there any idea of any other type of +skill buffs that could conceivably take place to worry about? I just tend to be so picky about what gear I pick up, this whole +skill change has my pantie's in a ruffle.

The wording is very strange. "Per weapon skill", not per weapon skill > 300...

Hey, look at it this way. Now Maexxna's Fang is better than Death's Sting, so it doesn't have to rot or go to shamans.

I've been running some basic numbers, and I'm curious about a few things. With 300 Weapon Skill, it seems that Glancing Blows themsevles make up about 15% of a Rogues Total DPS (not total hits, just DPS).

I guess the question is, how much does the change from the Glancing Blow default from 30% damage reduction to 24% plus an increase in Crit on all your Yellow and White Non-Glancing attacks increase compensate for the fact that WS no longer effects Glancing Blow damage.

I wouldn't be surprised if the DPS difference wasn't nearly as large as people think it is. Is WS in TBC still the "Best" PvE skill? Well that's probably not true anymore as you could replace +weapons kill with straight crit and probably get a bigger benefit, but I don't think it will be that bad. I need to run the numbers in a bit more detail, I'll post when I'm done (lunch first).

In other related news, my hakkari warblade will soon be a better dps offhand than my maladath. Maybe I'll get lucky and Razuvious will drop an Iblis for a change this week...

I gave myself some time since reading the patch notes yesterday to mull over the change. I thought I had to be missing something, but I just can't fathom how Blizzard thought this was a good idea. Paladins now have a talent to increase hit/crit by 0.4% (1.4% crit against higher level mobs) and decrease chance to be dodged/parried/blocked by 0.4%. For FIVE points. In tier 8 of their TANKING tree.

Considering that the tree is designed around idea of increased threat via Holy damage, the talent was bad even with the current glancing blow mechanic in place. Now it's absolutely horrid.

My alts are a Warrior and a Rogue too. Argh.

Something I posted on some other boards is think is worth repeating here.

Like others have mentioned you also need to consider that the glancing mechanic was changed as well so at most you are losing 9.6% of your white damage (40% glance for 24% less damage) and white damage only.

Our first deaths sting going to a warrior a week ago, doesnt hurt so much now. Only took 25+ kills for it to drop, lol.

:ssh:

At best, weaponskill is +.14 crit and .8 hit per point (-miss / -dodge).

+12skill rating = +5skill = .7crit .4hit. (vs higher lvl mobs only) Now, assuming the typical 1%hit = .75% crit, we have +5skill ~ +1% crit. So, we spend 2 fewer stat points get the same return. In this case, it would be a better use of itemization points than +crit and +hit, but not enough so that you would want any +skill gear at all since its only situational and using +hit/crit instead will result in almost the same dps against boss mobs, but fair much better vs non-boss mobs.

If I missed anything, please correct me.

ack, double post, please delete.

Be careful what you wish for. I'm guessing a fix for WE is schedule for sometime around 2 months after the heat death of the universe.

Grats warriors pulling solidly ahead of rogues for dps though. The one good buff to the combat tree in the rogue patch just got completely wiped out.

ps. Is it just me or is weapon skills new role of adding crit just salt in the wound? I mean, its crit that only applies when fighting mobs 3 levels higher than you... with a 40% glance chance... So in all likelyhood your white damage is crit capped. So a point of weapon skill is +.1% crit, vs mobs that are 3+ levels above you, that only applies to yellow attacks. Fantastic.

Throw in the WS nerf basically killing sword/mace rogues and you get +.1% crit on an attack that already had 60-70% chance to crit?

How will warriors pull ahead of rogues again with 50% rage reduction?

Dual wield warriors will have enough rage to BT/WW/rampage/Overpower on cooldown. Anything else will be hamstring or heroic strike. With just the above listed moves, a fury warrior can keep up with a combat dagger rogue and will surpass them when 20% hits assuming equal gear.