Grayson Carlyle

I'm a bit confused why people think Imp Berserker Stance isn't worth the points. 2% more AP is 2% more damage (slightly less if you spam HS all the time, or if you could get MS, but you can't), flat out. 1% crit is slightly more than 1% damage if you have flurry and impale, but impale still isn't worth the points because it's less than 1% damage for each point.

So why would you get a weapon spec, let alone impale over imp zerker stance?

 

• Avair

About raid composition and warriors, with a 25 man raid, you are looking at something like this:

3 warriors
3 priests
3 rogues
3 paladins
2 warlocks
3 druids
2 shamans
3 mages
3 hunters

If you bring 6 warriors, which other class doesn't get a raid slot? No, its far better for game balance if you don't need to stack a raid with one class just to get a successful raid. And that can be done by making more classes capable of tanking, which we know paladins are, and potentially even rogues (In my dreams anyway).

 

Tolgerias

The more I think about it, they really did a good job of mixing up Warrior specs so that there were many options available.

Anyways, every raiding guild I was in, fizzled out before any signifigance so I'm stuck with mostly BWL gear and stuff, but that's actually pretty good for my server. If you look at my gear you'll also notice I was dying to get some decent 1her's for Fury, but it never happened. Because of this I find myself really leaning towards a Blood Frenzy/Prot build. That is of course, if Blood Frenzy is something the whole raid can benefit from. Plus, it keeps me pretty safe from having to grab all new gear right away.

I imagine a spec would look something like this, although a few bits and pieces are interchangeable(2 points out of Imp Charge and AM for Second Wind or Imp HS. Same for a bit of tweaking in Prot)

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...40000000000000

 

Breaksmith

Fill out your profile or GOD will kill your FAMILY.

They're kinda serious about that kind of thing round here.

http://ctprofiles.net/19558

 

Highfather

What conserns me more is that from this early alpha point of view Protection tanks still ahve 1 major flaw - that being their selfefficient rage generation. Atm the good MTs with 31+ points in protection know how extremely valuable are the talents making you a "rage efficient" tank i.e. imp sunder, anger management, unbribled wrath (especially for Horde) and imp heroic strike. The new talent Focused Rage is a huge bonus for us but if the US talent calculator is the right one (with TM in tier1 protection) then after picking the mitigation talents we will be forced to dump half of the "rage improving" talents. The wide spread missconception that highend raid MTs have endless rage is not even worth being discussed - rage is NEVER enough.

So far the talents and skills are extremely vague, most of them are double-edged but I hope that wicked ideas like vitality for 5% sta or Commanding shout available only in Zerk stance will be fixed beefore beta. there is still the question whether or not AM will work in TBC the same way it works atm - if yes then it will be very hard to get it with TM being in tier1 protection tree.

...and I shall never find Solace for I was born Restless...

 

Rz

I think you're slightly confused here.

Your white damage is weapon damage + attack power, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 weapon dps and 120 attack power dps. Your exact numbers will vary, of course.

Thus, increasing your attack power by 6% is probably something more like a 3-4% increase in DPS for autoattack. It will directly increase your Bloodthirst DPS, of course.

Sword spec, on the other hand is way more than 5% - a SS proc is like a crit, but can itself crit! So multiply that 5% by your crit rate (ie 1.25 or 1.3). And, AFAIK, SS procs cannot be blocked, dodged, or parried. I might be wrong there. But that means that unlike an attack power buff, which would suffer from that avoidance level, DPS increase from SS would not suffer from that.

And, as you mentioned, there's the Flurry factor.

The only downside, of course, is being locked in to a specific weapon type - but for humans and orcs, there's already an added benefit to locking yourself in anyway.

 

Carnitine

SS procs can miss, or be blocked/dodged/parried. That's the main thing that makes sword spec equal to axe spec in my eyes.

 

Grayson Carlyle

Everything is affected by AP except for HS and MS flat damage. Sword spec is worth exactly 5% + the damage you get from rage. It can be dodged, parried or blocked. Just as sword spec could crit off a non-crit, it could non-crit off a crit, so those even each other out. The only part of sword spec that passes it beyond 1% per point is that you get more rage to use, regardless of it being from a special or not.

But yes, I was also mistaken, I completely overlooked weapon DPS. If your weapon DPS == the DPS from AP, then 2% AP = 1% more damage excepting HS. Which would be less than 1 point into axe or sword. This is generally not the case though, 2000 AP is 142 DPS. Do you have 142 DPS 2H or MH + .65*OH? Not likely. So it's going to be more than 1%, closer to 1.5% more raiding situations. closer to 1% for solo.

So it comes down to individual mileage will vary, but you definately can't dismiss it outright.

 

Carnitine

One little nitpick:

Adding 5% crit or 5% chance for an extra attack does not give you a 5% increase in damage. If you have a 25% crit rate and increase it to 30%, your dps goes from 1 to 130/125 = 1.04. So you've gained 4% dps. As your crit rate gets higher, more crit becomes less valuable. Going from 30 to 35% crit nets a 3.8% dps increase, 35 to 40% gets you 3.7%, and 95% to 100% crit gets you 2.56% more dps. 1% per point of crit is still a decent number to use as a rough estimate if you're including deep wounds, impale, flurry, and rage generation, but don't make the mistake of adding those things in on top of the erroneous 1% base.

The same principle applies to sword spec. Yes, it can crit, but your crit rate is generally equal to the chance of the extra attack not landing, so the same estimates can be used.

 

Deathwing

For 2H, axe spec is pretty equal to sword spec, you're probably best off adopting the WDF policy. However, for DW, where you can abuse the Slow MH/Fast OH principle, sword spec comes out ahead.

BTW, I just got back to working on my spreadsheet. I'm almost done implementing the new talents. Curiously enough, assuming you have a competant shaman and paladin, a 31 fury/30 protection doesn't do that bad compared to the best single dps spec(overpower/battle stance). Should be up later today.

 

Rz

Hmm, I sort of find that hard to believe... with sufficient +hit and attacking from behind, you're telling me that raid mobs have 25-30% dodge? Granted I haven't played in a month, but this seems suspect.

I never suggested that your weapon dps equal your attack power dps. As I stated, your weapon dps is probably about 1/2 your AP dps, and which is exactly why I said 3-4% for 3 points. It looks like we came to approximately the same conclusion.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning on sword spec, though. Given that you can crit AND proc an SS, which itself can then crit, and that crit rates are generally higher than avoidance+miss rates (when attacking from behind, for sure anyway) it seems that SS increases dps by more than 5% - sure, adding axe spec would be <5% dps increase, but with a 30% crit rate and a 5% sword spec rate, don't you also have an additional 1.5% dps increase from the potential "supercrit" (.05 * .3 = .015), since you've made one swing that did triple damage? Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way.

 

Grayson Carlyle

Yes, you are approaching it the wrong way, because for every swing that could do triple damage, you could have one where a crit triggers a non-crit, so you're only getting 50% more damage. You can't think of it as a chance to get another crit, but it's just another swing with the exact same conditions of hitting as the swing you just did. 1 more swing for every 100 with the exact same chances of effects being triggered from each is exactly 1% more damage.

What Carnatine was saying that your chance to not hit with the bonus swing is the same as your chance to not hit with the original swing. If the first one has a 15% miss rate in DW, 5% dodge, 5% block and 5% parry, then the second swing is subject to the exact same conditions. In fact, when using DW, the bonus swing only counts as a white attack, so if it procs off a yellow attack, it has a lower chance of landing than the original attack did. And depending on what yellow it procced off of, that second attack may have a lower (off of HS) or higher damage (off of hamstring) than the original.

 

Carnitine

You'll notice that those were all estimates, since I was explaining how to estimate more accurately. Unless you have all of the best gear, you'll still be sitting at 10%+ chance to miss, and boss mobs tend to dodge 5-6% at least. It's not always possible to attack from behind, and I wasn't even attempting to be specific. For most of us non-humans it's somewhat of a moot point, since we wait for axes to drop so we don't gimp our rogues.

 

Rz

Yes... I see what you're saying now. Sorry for the confusion.

In any case its still seems to come out above Imp Berserker Stance, which was the overall point... but 1h Weapon Spec should be better than either, with more utility to boot.

Buff first half of the Arms tree?

 

Carnitine

Yea 0/31/30 is tempting, assuming it comes within 10% or so of putting out the same damage as a pure dps build, which it might. The only issues are the lack of deflection and imp HS, which are very nice for tanking. It just seems odd to put that many points into prot and not have deflection.

 

Grayson Carlyle

Yes, 5/5 Sword spec comes out over 3/3 Imp Zerker stance. But you're spending 5 points vs 3. When DeathWing gets all the talents in and the bugs worked out, if you have the 5 points to spend, I'll bet that 2/5 Sword spec and 3/3 Imp Zerker will be more damage under raiding conditions.

 

Deathwing

The talents are in! Not sure about bugs, that's what you guys are for.

I don't like the new talents because battle stance/overpower STILL beats berserker stance/WW. Yeah, you can stance dance, but that's not the easiest thing to model. So far, I've got my money on 36 fury/25 arms for best single target DPS, ~42 fury/17 arms for probably best AE dps or if you don't like restricting your weapon choices, and 30 protection/31 fury for quite good dps and really good offtanking(or main tanking, who knows!). I really think that last spec will be more important with raid sizes shrinking. If the predicted DPS holds up under scrutiny and real testing, I know I'll be speccing that way. As much as I like to DPS, I hate even more tanking for my guild AND feeling like a liability because I have no points in protection(be carefull how you read that, I don't hate tanking).

 

Carnitine

And I don't know about you guys, but I have to throw away about 5 points on imp charge and 3/5 iron will to get up to 20 in order to be able to get a weapon spec, so for me that 2 points in a spec actually costs me 7 points. I'll wait before judging, but I'm actually leaning toward 25/36 not being so hot. I'd rather get TM, rampage, imp ww, imp zerk stance and some points left over for imp zerk rage/imp intercept/imp cleave/whatever than a weapon spec.

 

Darke

I sincerely hope raids do not have to bring 6 Warriors out of 25 for 25 man raids.

 

Carnitine

The only reason I'm happy about vitality is because they gimped it enough that it's not required. If it were 10% hp, that would be enough to require a MT to have it, since encounters would be tuned around it. At only 5% stamina, or roughly 3% hp, I will still have more hp as a tauren than our orc tank will with vitality.

I would assume that warriors will still be stacked to a certain degree, but 6 sounds excessive. What with paladins, druids, shamans, and rogues(!) all getting some nice tank talents, it seems that 4 warriors should be plenty.

 

Darke

Doubtful. I don't see more than 3 of any one class being necessary. With all the new skills and abilities available I think you will see far more difficult raid content that will demand a greater degree of flexibility from the raid. I think we'll see additional tanking that will demand Druid, Paladin, maybe even Shaman tanks that will also be needed to heal/DPS at the same time.

 

grimjack

I'd like to try this one out -
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...50020000000000

 

Rule

TM really needs to be trainable. I find it insulting that this is the main thing warriors have asked for since release, and that they haven't gotten it yet. Mages got evocate and IAE as core abilities, and druids got innervate. All of those abilities are far less vital to those classes than TM is to warriors. Yet we're still asked to burn 5 points by taking it. Why is this necessary? Why is it so bad to give us another 5 points to spend in other things? I just don't understand.

People who post here, and on FOH, since those are the only 2 places blizz employees seem to read, really need to get behind making TM trainable.

Also, can we please get rid of the crap that no one takes because it sucks? Imp rend, imp tclap, imp disarm. Anything in their places, even move up some of the new stuff, or rearrange some of the old stuff.

-Why is there still imp shield wall? Make that innate, like the other disciplines please.

-Why do we need 15 pts to max out demo and battle shout? Couldn't we consolidate those talents?

-Why doesn't booming voice affect piercing howl, int shout and challenging shout? And how about having it affect commanding shout?

-Why are there so many 5 pt talents in prot? Shield spec and toughness are mandatory, and with TM (grrr) being there, you now need 15 pts to get both of those instead of 10 from before. Prot tree needs this to be fixed please. This comes back to making TM trainable.

-Why is vitality so low in the tree? For what it does, it shouldn't be where it is. A 41 arms 20 prot build with vitality should be an option.

-Why is rampage so poor? lvl 60 trinkets are currently more powerful. Add in .5% crit and 20AP stacking 10 times at lvl 70. Crit synergizes with flurry, and AP synergizes with bloodthirst.

-Why does the main melee class in the game have no +wep skill talent? Pallies get this, rogues get this, why not us? The glancing blow mechanic is bad enough, but STILL giving us no way around it other than racials and a lvl 45 purple item with no stats is pretty BS.

-Endless Rage has potential, but the cd and duration are what holds it back. 15secs and 3 min cd would be much better.

There's absolutely no good reason not to fix the aspects of the class that need fixing before the xpac is released. Fellow warriors, if we don't get them to do it now, it won't get done.

Formerly of Immortality on Skullcrusher
Formerly of Lost Anarchy on Ner'Zhul
Currently inactive, but might try out WOTLK, but then again...

 

◊ Kasi

Rule, I think you might find that some warriors think we are overpowered now. I would like some consolidation of talents, and perhaps making 10 rage of the 25 in TM innate would be nice. But I'm glad vitality is lower. The fact that people could spec for pvp and proudly proclaim that 15 was all they needed to tank was a bad choice. People should have to make decisions. Glad there won't be anymore pvp/tank spec like the current 31/5/15, although that 0/31/30 once is a nice offtank spec, however they are still going to suffer serious agro talents that full prot will have. Still its not that bad. We're getting a lot more dps upgrades than rogues are. Afterall their 41 point combat talent lowers their dps. I would like a couple tweaks, but overall I'm happy with the changes. It makes sense that warriors changes aren't as exciting or powerful as some other classes, because right now warriors are the best class. I find it interesting that the current weakest classes (druids, warlocks) have the most interesting and powerful changes. Yay for balanced raids Blizz. :) Keep it up.

 

◊ Kalman