Going off of the initial PTR tests by Satrina:

19 October PTR Devastate Testing - TankSpot
WoW Forums -> Satrina's 2.3 Devastate Testing (19 Oct)

It would appear that Devastate is finally going to be the cornerstone of Warrior tanking.



To Protection Warriors - how do you feel about this? What difference is this going to make for you in tanking situations?

For myself, I have yet to come across a situation where my DPS has been threat limited by my tanking. With intelligent use of their threat wipes or threat reducing abilities, we have not had any DPS being forced to 'AFK-auto-attack' or anything. The numbers suggesting that Devastate would trivialize Revenge in an unlimited rage scenario is incredible - but is it really necessary?

I see this as a great fix for overgeared tanks in lower-end content, or for struggling tanks in 5- to 10-man content, but it doesn't appear likely to greatly alter the face of raid tanking (in that it's not going to change how hard DPS can go, or the fact that they will eventually have to use their aggro wipes, etc.).

it's only adding about 200 threat to the ability. I don't think it'll be any more valuable then than it is now except that your TPS will go up about 66 if you're using Shieldslam/Revenge/Dev/Dev cycles... which will still be the best TPS/R cycle.

When I first heard about it, I was extremely pissed thinking that ooh all of a sudden any monkey with a finger could spam devastate and hold aggro almost as well as a thinking, macroing warrior using timing and precision to maximize his threat, but in reality it's not that big of a change. the -3 rage on devastate won't really up my threat much except on smaller, insignificant pulls, and the +200 threat doesn't surprass revenge or shield slam in TPR or TPS, so it's not like people should be changing their cycles. It might be that switching to a slower weapon might suddenly make sense for maximum threat, but on any fight that I take any level of damage, I have plenty of rage for heroic strike, and using a slow weapon... while would up my threat-per-rage via higher devastate and fewer heroic strikes, it would still lower my TPS...

so... all in all, it's a minor buff. Dps can now do another 100 damage a second more than before and still be under the aggro list. For off-tanks however, it's quite nice - slap on a slow weapon and go to town with it and shieldslam, youll be producing great threat now for significantly lower rage.

If I'm not mistaken, and I very well could be, but the new Devastate changes will give Prot Warriors more 'low end torque' for aggro. No need to build up and into a rotation- you simply just start anywhere in the cycle.
Also, should this go through, I wouldn't be surprised if the best tanking weapon in game would end up being a slow 1H with stam and... resilience. Furthering the appeal of arena weapons.

It's roughly a 200tps upgrade to the ability, makes it more threat per global than revenge and reduces the rage cost by another three for a final cost of 9. It's a pretty big upgrade for low rage situations (offtanking, avoidance streaks) and allows more HS spammage in flush situations. If your devastate averages more than 205ish according to one poster then the optimal cycle is SS-Dev-Dev-Dev repeat. I didn't look at his numbers but if true it's significant although now you can just devastate your way to victory!

As a shadow priest, there are a few fights where threat is extremely tight. On Gurtogg, I don't use vampiric embrace for most of phase one and I still have to use a 50/50 mix of max rank / low rank damage spell, even when I get tranquil air totem. Reliquary of Souls (specifically Essence of Anger) is particularly rough as well, and there are a few other instances in Black Temple as well.

So yes, the extra threat will be appreciated. But I think it will only affect the shadow priests.

This strikes me as mostly a soloing/non-tanking-dps change.

With this change, you can dual-wield and basically solo by just spamming devastate and bleeding off extra rage with the new DW whirlwind, all the while getting the mob fully sundered "for free" simply by spamming your primary damage ability. I tried this on the PTR with my warrior alt in her craptacular blue-green gear and I was soloing the barrier hills ogres in ~15 seconds each.

This almost makes me want to see a prot warrior with good dps gear working on killing elementals on Vashj, just to see how well it would work, since elemental dps'ing is basically just soloing with raid buffs.

Raid dps for non-tanking prot warriors will also go up a bit since devastate will be 9 rage instead of 12. And again, you'll have DW whirlwind as well.

This is the same patch where they're trying to boost the tankability of non-prot specs, so it makes sense to also be boosting the dps of Prot. More hybridness all around. Everybody wins.

I mostly consider this as a needed buff to a 41 point talent that use to be weaker than non-talented skill and weaker than a lowered tier talent skill.

The only way I imagine it affecting my rotation is that I'll probably skip revenge in my rotation until I have 5 sunders up, if I'm only losing minimal threat, and gaining the ability to get sunders stacked a few seconds faster. Otherwise, it really doesn't change anything. Even if a 9 rage Devastate is more threat than a 2 rage revenge, the revenge is a lot more threat per rage, and that extra 7 rage can go toward the next devastate or toward a heroic strike if I have enough rage. So I imagine I'll end up going something like SS-Devastate x 3 until 5 sunders are up, and then right back to Shield Slam - Revenge - Devastate - Devastate rotation as normal.

If what they're saying is true, then they nearly doubled the threat of Devastate. Devastate is already a threat upgrade over Sunder in most situations; I really don't think it needs another buff if the basic Sunder isn't getting a buff, because it's just going to deepen the gap between Arms/Fury and Prot tanking, and Arms/Fury tanking is so hilariously bad that I'm really not convinced that buffing the threat on MS/BT (both very high rage skills) is going to change anything.

This, plus a few new and lovely pieces of expertise gear as well as the 6 free expertise skill from defiance, should make holding aggro completely trivial as a prot warrior.

My biggest concern is going to be where to find the 3 points to finally put into Imp. Sunder Armor (15 rage saved per mob wasn't attractive post-Before the Storm). I could afford to drop some from Anticipation, or that one point in Imp. Taunt (which is a lifesaver in heroics), but I think dropping Cruelty points might be unwise (as a big bonus of devastate is the ability to crit, ditto the recent change to revenge), and I'm really having trouble figuring out the value of Imp. Shield Bash (nice for heroics and Blindeye, don't know if it's much use elsewhere).

Thoughts?

Here's a thought:
Since the new Devastate will incorporate 5 Sunders into its effect, would it be more worthwhile to use Expose Armor in lieu of Sunder, effectively stacking the 2 for a tank's purposes? Would there be any scenarios this might prove useful?

I agree with most of your post, but isn't it tested to be 300 pre-stance modifiers, similar to sunder armor? That'd make it 300 tps more if you spammed it non-stop ([1.495% threat modifier]*[300 threat]/[1.5 GCD]). If you divided the TPS gain on devastate by the full 6 second cycle with Shield slam and revenge it'd be that low, but the base ability is a much bigger gain.

Quite frankly, this would be a very significant change to raid threat. Even if you're only using the ability twice every 6 seconds, your raid can pump out 230 more sustained dps per person before they pull aggro. It's also debatable whether you'd ever use revenge anymore as a protection warrior. Edit: You're also pumping out that extra threat as a newly minted level 70 alt in greens of the champion or as a fully-decked out T6 tank.

I agree with Hope, the only classes I ever see in danger of pulling aggro if they play smart are shadowpriests, DPS-spec'd shamans, and fury warriors. The latter 2 are both getting threat reduction abilities 2.3. Maybe other guilds see it differently once they get more BT gear and their rogues start to pull away.

This level of threat generation would be excessive, I doubt it goes live if it maintains a 400 threat modifier after 5 sunders. I can see sunders 1-5 having the static threat modifier, but not every use thereafter (in effect all you gained was the +dmg part of the devastate ability). Personally, I would much rather have a faster scaling threat move than a move that has a very high static threat value.

While improved expose armour does do more than sunder armour, the damage lost from spending 5 CP every 30 seconds on it vs. a Rupture and the damage lost from the required points spent in it would not really make it worthwhile, especially since the 5 sunders are being applied anyway now at no real cost to threat generation.

Maybe if you were hunter/melee heavy, expose armour would do more damage than rupture...
Also maybe if you were vs. a bleed immune mob, expose armour would probably do more than Eviscerate... but you need the talent points in it. It's, i believe, 475 armor penetration better than 5x sunder. (for comparison, Faerie Fire is 610, and CoR is 800)

If they stacked, that's a whole new ball game, but would basically reduce every bosses armour to 0 and negate all the utility of the -armor items which blizzard is flooding the game with via Zul'aman and BoJ items, so I doubt that's going to happen.

*edit* yeah, actually, nevermind entirely as half of devastate's threat is still from the damage it produces, which would be terrible without 5x sunders on the mob.

I've been wondering if anyone has done any number crunching on the new weapon expertise. I did a search and couldnt find any related posts yet pertaining to this matter, and being new to these forums i am not yet allowed to make new posts.

Specifically, i was wondering if there was a cap we should be reaching for for expertise rating, a point where the value gained just isnt worth the stats lost.

One of the biggest things holding back my TPS seems to be my dodge/parry rate on certain encounters. Our first Gorefiend kill had him dodging/parrying 23% of my devastates, and 28% of my HS.

Any help would of course be much appreciated

Probably should post this question the couple of threads that actually discuss this, but since you asked...

If what Blizzard's tooltip says is true, and it does exactly what they say it does, it should be your number one offense stat to aim for until you get to -5.6% dodge and parry. At that point, it scales about evenly with +hit for threat. But I still will favor it because it will reduce the "parry problem".

In short, it will be incredible. I did some testing in ZA with -5.5% and it was very noticeable.

22 or 23 I believe.

Teron Gloves, Brutalizer, Talents, Bracers from Badges.

I'm interested to see the math on what sort of RoI we're getting from Cruelty with the improvements to innate threat on Devastate. My theoretical post-2.3 build currently looks something like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

If Cruelty is still a significant source of threat, I'll likely give up AM, Imp. HS, and Imp. BR to pick up Cruelty and 1 point of UW.

Your ROI is unchanged.

Static/innate threat amounts do not change if you crit. They are only impacted by whether or not your attack lands (static amount * threat modifiers or 0 when you miss).

Essentially, it will amount to a tad bit more DPS/TPS; it will be nice if it fills that "I just missed with Shield Slam" gap.

Shut up, get in the limo and give every race +5% hp.

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Revenge and shield slam are still very useful. They both add more dps than devastate and the threat they provide isn't bad either.
Shield Slam threat per hit is still awesome while the threat per rage will be only an issue in situations with very low rage.
Revenge does more damage and much more threat per rage than devastate. Plus you save rage that could be invested into an heroic strike for even more threat.

Overall we should see a ~200-300 tps increase for tanks, which was needed badly.

p.s. You need ~600-700 block value to equal the threat per rage for shield slam and devastate.

While Blizzard have possibly slightly overbuffed this Talent it's one which is both welcome and needed to help solve the problems of tanking for groups and even sometimes for raids: Sunder Armour just got left behind in TBC and with Devastate only effective at 4-5 Sunders I found I was barely using it except on Raid Bosses.
So not only had Sunder become something of a poor filler but the associated 41-point Talent was laying dormant most of the time.

I always loved Devastate so I resented barely getting to use it and of course it never made sense that it did not apply the Sunder debuff which it renewed.

Another poster mentioned the Threat generated by Bears and Paladins and he's right: certainly my experience with Druids is that regardless of the players skill it's simply far easier for Bears to generate threat than a Warrior (significant white damage, far higher Crit rates with bonus rage on Crits and so on). The two Ferals in my guilds are very skilled so their threat is effortlessly high but immense when they really try, I have to get lucky to match them with my similar gear and use of the optimal threat cycle.

Devastate will items help Warriors compete again and will make groups/solo and more tolerable/viable for dedicated raid tanks.