Danath

It would be nice if we managed to gather a lot of data about this nerf and then post it on the official forums. Maybe they will consider how much this unnecessary change is hurting PvE in both DPS and TPS purposes, eventually reverting it.

 

Punscho

But it is necessary. How can you guys think it is not?

Some of the people posting here sound more like the lot on the official forums than the old crowd. This place is falling apart.

This change will nerf rogue damage output by some, and warrior damage but much more, but they will still stay in the high end of the charts.

This change will nerf prot warrior threat output by some, 4-6% maybe. Maybe you will notice this on some fights but I'm sure you can cope with it.

Look at the guys who are always dead last of their class in the charts. Maybe your solution is there.

 

Vohbo

It's not necessary.
It's necessary that windfury does not proc from a few skills like Hamstring and maybe MS (to avoid lucky bursts in PvP). There is absolutely no one who actually cares if WF procs from a sunder armor or revenge, and most likely no one that is bothered when it procs from Slam. I do agree fully that some attacks just shouldn't proc it, but for most skills there is no problem.

 

Lujaar

Ran some numbers through the rogue DPS spreadsheet tonight. Or rather, I had a friend just pull up the spreadsheet with his gear input, and then flipped some values.

We came up with 1490-ish DPS using old "good" Windfury (ridiculously raidbuffed, we included fucking Improved Faerie Fire), 1370-ish DPS with no MH poison and no air totem down, and 1420 with GoA + MH Instant Poison. Strictly estimating based on his breakdown of white vs yellow damage, we estimated that his DPS with the new "Blizzard hates melee" Windfury would be about 1420-1430.

Since gear matters for this kind of thing, his armory is here:
The Armory


As far as I can tell, WF isn't substantially better for a combat sword rogue anymore.

 

Punscho

Why should prot warriors rely on wf totem as a crutch for their TPS? See it as an opening for another hard look at warrior threat scaling.

 

Hidden

Why does everyone say it shouldn't procc off Harmstring?
Harmstring costs 10 rage, a global cooldown, does nearly no damage (around 80 at Level 70) and with the old Windfury Totem, it has a 20% chance to procc an Autohit. It's worse than Mortal Strike, Whirlwind and Slam in every aspect. It costs more rage per extra attack and a whopping 5 global cooldowns on average. How can it be imbalanced to give warriors something to spend their rage on when BT/WW are on cooldown that doesn't cause a bunch of aggro?
Give Windfury Totem proccs a short Cooldown and revert the change, it fixes the Burst Damage problem and doesn't nerf Melee's DPS by 10%. Or if Blizzard wanted to make a pure PvP change, they could've lowered the duration the Windfury buff lasts and given the Windfury Totem itself a cooldown so destroying it would counter the Burst Damage easily.

 

songster

I think the intent is most likely to forestall a genuine feedback loop that can occur with warriors. We all know the old fact that warriors scale better with gear because more damage -> more rage -> more damage. However there was always a brake on that in that yellow damage didn't itself grant rage.

With specials being able to proc WF, you genuinely do have a situation where specials directly translates to more rage and therefor more specials.

Now, there's two ways to break that feedback loop.

1) Specials don't proc WF (except ones that replace white swings)
2) WF procs don't grant rage

(2) would be a much heavier nerf. It was indeed part of the original nerf back in Naxx days that never got past the PTR. So they opted for (1) instead.

I don't think this is aimed at current DPS - it's aimed at making sure there isn't an uncontrollable feeback loop as itemisation goes forward. Remember that right now they'll be designing and testing itemisation for the Sunwell. It's a fix for scaling behaviour, not for DPS per se.

Of course, it will have an effect on DPS - I don't think it's past Blizzard to adjust for that if necessary, especially since some of the affected classes are already slated for quite significant changes in 2.3


Edit: I agree that it would be nice for warriors to have a rage dump that doesn't have extra aggro attached. However, there has to be a more elegant way of achieving this than spamming a crowd control move that does almost no intrinsic damage and hoping for procs. If nothing else, think of the warriors who aren't lucky enough to have a shaman - yes, there's lots of them in smaller raids and on Alliance side.

 

Hidden

I'd prefer the second version, I have more than enough rage to spam BT/WW and Harmstring without any Windfury proccs at all. It wouldn't decrease my DPS by 10% as the first fix does.

And Harmstring spam is even effective after the nerf since "nearly no damage" that can procc Mongoose, Dragonstrike, Tsunami Talisman and Dragonspine Trophy is better than no extra damage.

 

Danath

I'm totally with this guy. I think this nerf was mainly directed towards Spamstring, which actually is lame because it costs 10 Rage and it is instant with no cooldown, resulting in being totally overpowered(I tested it just a few days ago). They should just negate the chance of Windfury to proc off Hamstring, that's all. Does anyone have anything to complain if Windfury procs off Bloodthirst, which costs 30 Rage or Whirlwind which costs 25(and both have cooldowns)?Also, even by limiting the nerf to Hamstring, it would still affect Arms warriors(they're the ones who use Spamstring) thus giving Fury an edge in PvE Dps, which is reasonable. Every other nerf is totally unnecessary as Warrior PvE dps is not overpowered at all at the moment, and may I add more, without WF totem we don't stand a chance against casters even with full epic gear.

 

Hidden

You should use more Harmstrings as a Fury Warrior than as a MS Warrior for PvE DPS. It is not overpowered as Harmstring spamming is still inferior to BT/MS/WW/Slam in every aspect. Your "fix" would make the nerf apply to Fury Warriors mostly.

And if I may ask, where did you "test" it?

 

gatz

MS / slam warriors dont spamstring
Our rotation looks like this :
white hit => slam => instant => white hit

That's DW warriors that spamstring when BT and WW are on cooldown.

 

Gokey

Looking at those numbers, this doesn't hurt rogues nearly as much as it hurts Arms warriors.

I'm fine with windfury not proccing off specials anymore. It's a fair PvP balance change I'd say. But for the love of god, let it proc off Slam. Slam isn't even instant, and it was the staple for Arms DPS.

 

Darkrenown

Yet they're just given casters a feedback loop with spriests and VT. More damge = more mana back = more damage..

 

Malan

Yah and they've already reduced the gains from that in a previous patch. How quickly we forget.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Hidden

What patch have they nerfed Vampiric Touch? They only nerfed Vampiric Embrace.

 

Malan

Ah right.

Well at any rate the same cries of "shadow priests are no longer raid viable" went up from that change, and hey look we still use shadow priests.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

◊ Kalman

Indirect nerf via reducing Shadow Weaving from 15% to 10% and increasing SWD cooldown from 6 to 12 seconds.

 

Lumi

If you've ever seen a shadow priest in action, you'd know their feedback loop is hardly at the level of a warrior. They chain drink mana pots and still run out of juice at times. SW: D is often dropped just to sustain a little longer (and not kill yourself of course).

 

Trupster

Imo, once you start to get gear from T6 instances, specifically being T6 and other non Tier armor slot items with haste, which also make WF an even more awesome buff then it was before these instances.

Ah well, shit will keep getting changed, just sad to see this one changed. Extra attacks are of great epeen value . All I hope is the rogues that don't have access to these raiding instances and love PvE won't get a big hit in the face. I'm afraid I can't say much about warriors as I've never played one, but it sounds pretty harsh after reading comments here. ;s

 

dr_AllCOM3

There is a reason Hamstring has +181 Threat. It's not like they didn't expect it to be used in that way.

 

Quixotic

This change will be about a 15%+ dps loss for a 33/28 PvE arms warrior. Already there are 1-2 times a fight in which you will get chain dodged on two white hits in a row, and will have to change your cycle slightly, but now with no WF on slam/ms/ww/hs, I have 4 auto attacks every 13.9 seconds in the DPS rotation with my 3.7 speed Soul Cleaver with haste items to make it 3.4 speed.

0.0 Auto Attack
0.5 Slam
1.0 Mortal Strike
3.9 Auto Attack
4.4 Slam
4.9 Whirlwind
7.8 Auto Attack
8.3 Slam
8.8 Mortal Strike
11.7 Auto Attack
12.5 Slam
13.0 Hamstring
13.9 Auto Attack

So essentially MS/Slam warriors lose 8 chances to proc windfury every 14~ seconds. This coupled with the fact that any dodge/glance on our white hits will destroy the rotation is a huge nerf to arms warriors, much moreso than any other class/spec.

 

Dontmindme

I think people are vastly exaggerating the effect of this change.
Let me explain....
So what's the standard ratio of white attacks to yellow attacks? 2 white for every yellow? At worst 1 white for every yellow.

Now, for this change (eliminating yellow procs) to cause a 10% reduction of damage:
2 white / 1 yellow: You are saying WF extra white attacks are directly responsible for 30% of all your damage output. Because you are losing 1/3 of your windfury procs and losing 10% of your damage.

1 white / 1 yellow: 20% of your total damage output.

If that's the case, Blizzard really needed to nerf this, as one simple totem is increasing 4 other people's dps by at least 25%.

Let's stop the exaggeration and get back to real numbers. In many ways, this discussion is beginning to sound like WoW General where people blurt out unsubstantiated "facts".

 

Brissa

That completely depends on the class you are playing.
For a Rogue this might be the case but for a 33/28 warrior using slam you have 2 yellows for every white and the implications are enormous.

A warrior using this cycle will loose 25% of his rage, 1.2X rage in a cycle instead of 1.6X

 

Malan

This is misleading. Of those 8 specials you would have only (statistically) procd windfury on 20% prior to the patch anyways. You make it sound like you're losing a windfury off every single hit that you make in that 14 seconds. Of the 8 special attacks you should have expected a windfury from 1.6 of the eligible (non miss/dodge/parry) attacks.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06