acx

Critical Block has the same long term effect on damage reduction as Shield Mastery. But it does not increase Shield Slam damage. So point for point its less efficient than Shield Mastery, which is a talent 3 tiers down.

 

• Riot

I don't honestly think most Warriors care about what they're blocking for now in terms of actually blocking - I think it's safe to say we care in the context of how much we can Shield Slam for, since BV is a cheap and easy way of increasing your threat generation.

If over an extended encounter Critical Block has the same practical mitigation as Shield Mastery, then frankly I think it's also fair to say it's clearly a subpar talent.

"Give me but one firm spot to stand on, and I will move the Earth" - Archimedes.

 

Nezralix

Note that these particular talents multiply. One isn't so good without the other, but together they add up to a significant effect.

Beyond that, I think it would be fun to periodically block for quadruple my normal block value.

 

Darian_TruBlade

Except Fury is getting more than just Heroic Leap. Slower weapons, better normalization values, additional stamina, much more significant self healing and the choice between Heroic Leap and a weapon spec. There's potential for Fury's burst damage/havoc causing to make up for the loss of MS.

 

Shha

We cant completely theorycraft without knowing the itemization in Wotlk. But 2h weapons , self healing etc wont make up for MS as it looks now.

a) If you wanna dual wield with Titans grip you lose more then MS.

- No imp intercept.
- No weapon specs
- Only POTENTIAL for more burst - but with itemization for arenas like its now (no hit, resilience making flurry way less powerful), overall 1x2h has much better chance of delivering burst.
- Extremely slow swing time. Granted its not that important, but your sustained damage in pvp will be a LOT lower then 1x2h - again no hit, low flurry uptime, low ap. I can even see you running into big rage problems, and not be able to use your BT all that often.

- Arms gets same stamina basically
- Arms gets bladestorm - which due to magic immunity and "cannot be stopped" value, seems a lot better then heroic leap.

Right now at 70 lack of healing debuff is only START of fury problems. You also lack damage (yes you do LESS then 2h), and lose imp intercept. At 80 lack of burst will be even more visible - id rather get another instant (execute, sword spec) then titans grip.


All in all if you look at other physical classes one of two things is needed:

a) Very high burst + CC - feral druids/ret paladins have it (and ferals arent all that hot). Ret has better burst then warriors and will have better burst - if anything simply because their "aftercrit buff" is 30% damage rather then attack speed. Seal procs only augment it.
b) Healing debuff. Hunters/rogues/warriors have it.

Well that leaves enhancement shamans i guess - but they at least have more utility then warriors - from ranged spell interrupts through anti fear totems to grounding and more.

I simply fail to see whats the advantage of fury warriors over rogues - you lose all the extra CC rogues bring, unlike arms you dont have more mobility (shadowstep is probably actually better then non specced intercept), You dont have easy healing debuff, you cant even hamstring reliably (dual wield with 4.4 speed weapon + no extra hit = good chance youll get rage starved).

 

◊ Fellwraith

I'm not sure I agree with that. You'd need to significantly scale up block values (either by changing str to block conversion rates or adding more +block value on gear) and/or armor mitigation to make it worthwhile.

Felmyst hits me for over 11.5k sometimes during corrosion (which is really the only time she's lethal). The gross value of that hit before armor is around 32k. If you double the ~700 block value I wear in that fight, that's only 700 extra damage off the hit.

Sure that's some nice mitigation, but it's horribly inconsistent and certainly not something that's core to my build. In my opinion, talents further down the tree should be something that I really have to make a hard decision about. It's not even a consistent source of mitigation, it's a 30% chance. I can't rely on it to save me very often, at best it'll reduce my overall damage taken throughout a fight. So I can maybe save the healers some mana, but most likely, I'll see that lost to overheal. They certainly aren't going to tune encounters for it because it's not a consistent source of mitigation.

Compared to safeguard which is in the same tier, it's really subpar. Hell, even if you compare it to vitality or stalwart protector, that talent is terrible. It needs to be redesigned. If it fully blocked one hit, blocked 50% of the damage of one hit, or if it increased my effective block rating by 30% (with the changes to shieldblock blocking more hits for 5-10 seconds could be good), then it's a more interesting talent.


Edit: I'm also having a very hard time seeing why any 25 man raid would ever bring a fury warrior over a blood or unholy-spec'd deathknight. There's far more group buffs/synergies in the blood and unholy trees and they look like they will be better when asked to tank. I guess we need to wait and see what the beta holds.

 

Whistles

The same reason that raids don't automatically bring ret pallies or moonkins over fury warriors. The group buffs and synergies still have to make up the DPS difference. But it's a little early to speculate on how that will work out until we see what kind of personal DPS death knights will be producing.

 

Nezralix

If you seriously expect them to scale block values up until they're reducing major portions of damage done by the hardest hitting raid bosses in the game, then you're going to be disappointed. That's not happening.

I also don't see them giving you a 30% chance on block to take no damage from the attack, because that's basically giving your average well-geared Prot warrior an extra 10% dodge. Extremely unlikely that they'd take that step.

I can agree with the proposed middle ground, where a "critical block" reduces the damage done by the hit by 50% or something, and then applies your block value to the remainder. You're not avoiding the hit, but it's still reducing damage in a way that scales with the size of the hit. A middle ground between the concept of full dodge/parry avoidance and the current fixed reduction block concept, and probably sort of the way block should have worked all along (so that it's not disproportionately powerful for small hits when compared to big hits). But it's still a pretty major change.

 

Darkrenown

It might also be nice if it added block value for a short time after a critical block for bigger shieldslams. Also, I wonder if the +100% block of Shield Block will act like the 2T5 bonus and add block value for a short time. Huge shieldslams are always fun.

 

Graul

Getting back to the "Berserker stance is outdated" arguement a bit; I agree the stance needs to be altered in some way, but is anyone suggesting that the extra damage recieved is doing absolutely nothing for your damage? Why is it that on any fight that has excessive (not life threatening, but somewhat predictable and periodic) incoming damage Warriors always do much better DPS wise? Is the trade-off "never" worth it, or just not worth it "sometimes"?

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand what it's like being the person in the raid that takes more damage than anyone besides the tanks, and at times it's annoying, but except for the low health + instant burst ae situations it's manageable. The problem to me at least is when your overall health pool lowers as you upgrade gear going into areas that have ae damage scaling at an exponential rate.

They should just simply merge Intensify Rage into Berserker stance and add a different talent.

 

Darian_TruBlade

You make a lot of good points, much of which I'll have to think on. I hadn't noticed that arms gets a stamina buff as well.

 

Hisstok

IMO it should be changed to +10% more healing in berzerk or -10% damage in berzerk.

+healing would provide synergy with BT, BC, and its too far down the tree to be really that useful in PVP, let the warrior soak the extra damage like blizzard wants but dont punish raids and their healers for trying to keep them healed up while they take more damage and deal less than most rogues.

-damage would be better, but I dont see blizzard ever doing it, they are pretty adamant about it seems.

 

Crimsonstorm

Thinking about what would be the best single target threat generation spec for boss tanking, I'm thinking:

Single Target Threat Spec
(25/5/41): http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=LAhczhiZVZfct0e0zfxshz

Alternately, points can be moved from Cruelty into sweeping strikes and/or Vitality.

Shockwave is for AoE threat, so this would be for a build where you werent needing AoE threat. Sword and Board looks pretty bad as it is currently, since you only refresh the SS cooldown and you thus have to wait for your next GCD and notice that it procced. If it procced a free shield slam it would be far better but right now its not worth 5 talents. Safeguard seems like a PvP talent or maybe for offtanks, while this is a maintank threat build so it doesnt fit. Critical block seems petty poor also, and Stalwart Protector is ok, but the extra threat youd get from 2 rage per parry/block isnt as much as you'd get from extra crit AND crit damage from axe spec, given that youre getting a ton of heroic strike crits.

The goal of this build is to spam 9 rage heroic strikes which have much increased bonus damage, high crit rate, and 2.25x Crit damage with Impale and Axe spec. Basically the top of the Prot tree seems pretty terrible overall except for shockwave, and its for AoE tanking not single target. Therefore, it makes sense to not go over 41 or maybe 43 in prot and instead to take advantage of the synergy between Incite, Impale, and Axe Spec.

Fury DPS with better tanking ability
Given that heroic strike will give huge bonus damage now, I think a fury build with incite is interesting, like this:
17/46/8: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=LGh...V0VxxRVdoeoZbI
(If Imp Rend turns out to be bad, you put those in deflection instead, but it seems reasonable now).

With this build you basically get a very fast main hand and spam heroic strike while doing your BT/WW rotation. It would probably perform very well on high rage fights. This build is probably much better at offtanking than a standard arms/fury build, because your threat generation while tnaking with Incite and TM will be higher (and Incite keeps flurry up well, which means faster weapon speed for more heroic strikes).

The threat reduction talents are taken to account for the high threat of heroic strike. I figured that with a fast weapon, getting some slams off of bloodsurge wouldnt be very useful, though if you want you could move the Furious Resolve points there. This build could also be useful while leveling to 80, from 75 on you can have all of Impale, Rampage, and Incite, given a build that is good for grinding/leveling while also being decent for tankign a 5 man.


However, I expect this build wouldnt be nearly as good for raid dps as a 32/39/0 build with Blood Frenzy which I expect to be the 'standard' warrior dps spec (because Titan grip looks terrible, and MS shares a cooldown with Bloodthirst)

 

◊ Fellwraith

You guys may have missed the discussion earlier in the thread, but bloodthirst is changed to heal 1.5% of your health per hit now. Adding to your stamina pool effectively increases your ability to self-heal and reduces the amount of healing you need from outside sources. If you're somehow able to use all 5 charges in 6 seconds, that can be 7.5% of your max hp in healing, every 6 seconds. Using all 5 charges with a TG build may be a challenge (with a 4 second swing speed and WW on cooldown, you'd need multiple targets and cleave or really good timing), but it's not a trivial amount of healing.


We already take ret paladins over fury warriors in a lot of Sunwell fights because most of the enemies are demons and the ret paladin provides non-trivial raid dps buffs (in addition to a third blessing). You can get better raid dps out of the ret paladin if you're horde.

Deathknights can get a 130% damage modifier in blood stance (blood gorged, blood presence and necrosis), 15% self-buffed strength bonus, and pretty significant group/presonal buffs (in addition to dealing double damage periodically with a dancing rune weapon). It really won't take too much to make their personal single-target dps quite good in their current form and they require a lot less healing. Take a look at their talent and ability tree on MMO or wowhead.

 

Crimsonstorm

Yes, dps warriors in WotLK will have a constant healing stream coming in of 7.5% of their hp every 6 seconds, which is pretty good.

Warrior who take bloodfrenzy (32 arms) will still do better to put the other 39 talents in fury and use Bloodthirst and not MS. Warriors who dont take blood frenzy (because there is another dps warrior in their raid with it), will still do better with something like 25/46, taking weapon spec not the lame Titan Grip and Heroic Leap.

 

Muggins

It does give you a free SS, read the latter part of the description:

'When your Devastate and Shield Slam abilities deal damage they have a 10% chance of refreshing the cooldown of your Shield Slam ability and reducing its cost by 100% for 5 sec.'

 

Crimsonstorm

By free SS I meant that it needs to just Shield slam the target immediately when it procs, without you doing anything. Forcing you to watch the SS cooldown closely to hope for a faster SS and cost reduction just isnt good enough for spending 5 talents on it at the bottom of the tree.

 

PSGarak

You don't need to watch the cooldowns at all, just macro Shield Slam into your devestate button. It will occassionally replace devestates with shield slams, which if everything scales appropriately, will be a non-trivial increase in threat both from the shield slams and the extra heroic strikes you can afford. The talent is good, your complaint is basically that you can't play well enough to take advantage of it.

I wouldn't be opposed to a Shield Slam Overload talent instead of Clearslamming, but I do think it's unnecessary and that the current functionality is fine.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Muggins

I'm not entirely certain you'd have to babysit the cooldown icon exactly, its pure assumption at this point but i'd expect that it'd show up in your scrolling combat text in a similar fashion to the 'Overpower!' and 'Execute!' messages we get already. I'm always keeping a beady eye on the SCT anyway so i can't see it being all that tricky to spam the SS key as soon as the message flashes up.

Personally i think i'd be a bit disappointed if it was an automatic slam as at least this way it'll break up the rotation a little and stop me falling asleep on certain fights(Mother Sharaz i'm looking at you). The number of talent points you have to spend to get it is a matter of opinion, i personally think its probably a little too expensive only because of the bloating at the bottom of the tree, but i'd still probably pay out for it.

 

Crimsonstorm

Macroing shield slam and devastate together is good. That solves that problem.

So at that point its not a pain, then the question is wether it gives enough bang for 5 talents.

 

Morsexy

The issue I have with this, is that this would be the same result with or without that extra 10% damage taken. In fact, in those scenarios like Felmyst, there is a generally predictable ramping up of the damage at some point where you can berserker rage to gain a ton more rage.


They've already made defensive stance modifier for threat occur regardless of spec, so why not just do away with both 10% modifiers. Both scale unbelievably well, and while I tank just as much as I DPS, perhaps both are outdated.

 

Emeraude

You had a lot to say and I didn't want to quote a wall of text, but for the most part I agree with you, I can't count the number of times I've wanted to bash my face against the wall because somebody would cry about not having Blood Frenzy in the raid, luckily my guild is extremely tolerant of my love for Fury and Duel Wielding so I "get away with it" so to speak. It is however freaking me out that nothing has been done to address it in WotLK so far, and that the mentioned 32/39 builds I've been reading about might become reality. All because this one little debuff provides so much damage and scales so well in a raid environment. It would really calm my nerves a bit if they would just acknowledge it, but I don't even think they're aware of it.

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