I find I have the upper hand when facing Druid/Warrior teams when I'm playing 2s with my paladin due to very aggressive application of Judgment of Justice. The Druid will try to slowly run away and keep far from the paladin for the reasons you descibed, but a good Paladin will also be slowly bringing the Warrior's health down with seals, shocks, judgments, etc. forcing the Druid to come and heal his partner and usually getting himself JoJed again in the process. Don't get me wrong, it's far from an easy fight. I just find we win them more than we lose. They're almost always really close battles.


Wait what? You can't get a mace stun off a Sweeping Strike, can you? I don't think the mechanics work like that. Granted I've only recently picked up maces but I would be really surprised if a stun effect 'bounced' with sweeping strikes to another target.

I don't think it's a case of the stun effect 'bouncing' to another target, it'll be a case of the stun effect proccing off the actual sweeping strike, independent of whether the main hit procced a stun.

I've gotten it off of a whirlwind, so I don't see why not.

I'll go try it out.

The problem with this strategy is that if it doesn't work you have no hope of winning a mana fight. The inherent mobility of Druids makes this strategy difficult to execute on the gladiator-caliber bracket. They will almost always outrange you, and if you do manage to JoJ them, they know what to do in that case as well, which is generally to tank in bear form and have his warrior peel yours off of himself with a intercept/hamstring/disarm chain. His counter is extremely mana-efficient, whereas your strategy is generally not, meaning you're basically relying on the opposing druid to make a mistake, which tends to happen less and less as you move up.

quick tangent, searched and didn't see anything on this:

It's listed as a "known issue" for 2.3.3 ...

Not correct as in not working or working too well? I'm thinking about trying ER and not sure I want to if its not going to be an accurate representation of the talent

The talent pretty much blows and should never be specced by anyone, ever, barring some very strange MS/Prot pvp spec at 41/5/15.

Youre correct, I had mistaken ss for whirlwind and cleave accounting for the aoe stuns sorry.

Whether it's a spell or not can be tested by popping Recklessness. It gives you +100% melee crit, so if your sweeping strikes are not all critting, then there's grounds this could be the case, unless it 'pulls a SoCom' and uses your melee crit rate, in which case it should be critting at the normal melee 200% (220%?). With regards to how big the crits are, I don't know if they resolved armour being counted twice and other associated strangeness, so if anyone can point me to a Blue or patch-note line, it would be handy.

I'll test this when I get home from work if no one has beforehand - both SS critting and mace-stuns proccing off it. Those servants of Razelikh are in trouble now!

Aye, over-pursuing the druid generally leads to getting caught with a cyclone or bash way away from the action while your paladin gets widdled down.

It makes more sense to have the pally pillar kite while you dps whichever target is nearby. Just have to always be mindful of cylones and try to los or reflect them. Pally can usually sneak a few drinks in if you get a hamstring proc at the right time.

You'll be hard pressed to make Sweeping Strikes actually crit. If you crit someone for 2k with SS up, that 2k will bounce over as 2k noncrit to the next target. If it were to crit, SS would do 3k which is sort of a double crit if you think about it since both the melee and the spell portion would have to crit.

Well, I can say with pretty reasonable certainty that SS doesn't crit on warriors. I've never seen one crit, even off of a crit hit, it always shows up as a "Hit" Sweeping strike. The spell theory is actually pretty good for this, as you'd assume that a warrior would have a base of zero spell crit, and the felwood buff would go pretty far towards explaining that theory.

Now of course, the next test is to put on some paladin gear (Spell crit ho!) and see if we can't get SS to crit that way.

ummmmmm ok thanks for the heads up you've solved all the problems of the warrior pvp thread.

Even MS/Prot is no excuse for speccing Endless Rage. 35/5/21 is a lot stronger, and probably one of the strongest 1v1 specs for any class in the game. Concussion Blow will absolutely win fights that a warrior would otherwise lose.

I am very surprised that Blizzard allowed for warriors to get two great 21-point talents for PvP for the price of one with the Deathwish/Imp. Intercept to Arms swap. Even before that, it took a major gear advantage or serious luck for most classes to stand a chance against a 35/5/21 who was willing and able to blow Last Stand and use Concussion Blow.

Now, you can do that with Deathwish and Imp. Intercept. Endless Rage just cannot compete with forcing someone to use their PvP trinket early or die, or locking down a healer with Pummel --- Concussion --- Pummel.

There's really no reason to spec that deep into prot for 2s or 3s at all. That's far more of a 5v5 spec for the anti-instagib protection from last stand. As for 1v1...it's debatable whether 33/28 or 35/23/3 are better, since one offers slightly more utility/constant dmg (+4% from BF/tm), and the other has a little more burst (flurry).

Let's also not forget that concussion blow has an unreasonably high resist/dodge/parry rate for its cooldown and talent pre-requisites, whether real or simply anecdotal, I don't feel that speccing conc blow for any bracket is really a good choice when there are simply better offensive talents to take in its place.

*Edit* Regarding mace stuns off of sweeping strikes: looking through my logs, mace stun always seems to proc off of whirlwind or cleave in combination with SS, not the actual physical secondary 'hit' from sweeping strikes itself. I think that it's probably safe to say that Loderunner is correct, and that macestun will not proc off of SS, but instead the abilities used while it is active.

To wrap this topic up nicely, I can anecdotally confirm (through hours of farming with an MS build) that sweeping strikes either does not crit, or so rarely crits that I don't remember it happening. As a side note, do Blade Flurry extra attacks crit? Or is it a different mechanic?

I will say that Sweeping Strikes *used* to increase as a percentage if Enrage/Death Wish were up. Like if you hit someone for 1000 with Enrage on, then the sweeping strike would be 1250. Not sure if this is the same anymore, but it could be.

No way is 3/5 flurry worth losing TM. You dont often get consecutive auto attacks on a target and if the they are stationary you can just slam them.

I kinda like having imp execute over bf. It just feels better having a 10 rage execute in those clutch moments rather than a passive debuff with low uptime.

Giving up enrage, ss, and slam for ER seems crazy. 1 sec off MS and a talent which has no use when youre being attacked doesn't seem to justify the losses.

Are you seriously promoting imp slam for a pvp build? Forgive me for this but: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? While your point about flurry<TM is certainly arguable, imp slam is wasted talent points. Period.

I don't play 5s enough to really argue about ER, it seems pretty garbage to me even for that bracket, but it's certainly not worth taking for 2s or 3s, I'll agree with you there.

Regarding Imp-Execute: I've got it, it's situationally useful, I feel that anytime I have over 10 rage it's a complete waste of talent points though, due to the heavy mitigation it recieves, no-rage refund on misses (frostmages), cheat death rogues, etc.

The extra 5 rage is converted into damage the same as any other execute. Your 10 rage execute on the cheating death rogue for 11 would of hit for even less without imp execute and he'll be cheating death regardless of your talent choice. Imp execute is a very nice talent and if it's situational, that situation probably occurs every time your enemy is close to dying.

No, it's not. Yes, it takes time to learn to use Slam correctly and yes, it's situational, but it's way better than any alternative if you're going for 3/5 Flurry. I used to not have Imp. Slam, but after a while playing around with it, I wouldn't give it up for anything.

I play with a 180 ping and rarely have trouble weaving slams into my rotation. I can think of many reasons to take it for pvp..

It hits just as hard as MS and costs half the rage. Slam spam is the quickest way to dps a single target when you have spare rage. It's invaluable for taking down pw:shield. And whats the alternative? I would always take a gameplay altering talent over the small percentages 2 points will net me.

For reference, just like any other spell if you start to cast it and your target just creeps out of range it will still land. So there is some leeway with slam.

I currently don't have points in imp slam, but there are places where you can use it. You can get off an imp slam if positioned right on a snared target (any stunned rooted target it is easy to get off on). Also many people like imp slam for PVE damage and don't want to respec constantly. But Imp slam is situational, like many talents are and it is all a matter of choice/playstyle.

I'm going to preface this again with the qualification that this is a 2v2/3v3 perspective.

I won't deny that imp slam can be a great druid killer, especially when paired with a shaman/macestun. But I cannot reconcile the possibility of all DRs maxxed-->snared druid impslam/Stun combo with the passive amazingness that is Weapon mastery (your other choice for getting flurry). Short disarms, lower dodge rate? Am I seriously going to give up 5 critical seconds of not-disarmed dps time for a marginally useful castable swing? Just doesn't seem logical.

As for imp. execute, of course its good, it just feels like a forced talent is what I'm saying. Yeah it's awesome for people under 10% and clothies wearing blues, but it's not a game-winner like it might have been in season 1, nor is it even comparable to its PvE usefulness. You take imp. Execute because it's the least shitty fury talent on the way to ss/wm/flurry, not because it's super awesome like WM or piercing howl.