Given that Weapon Mastery will be taking the place of Improved Intercept in the talent tree come 2.3, does anyone have any thoughts on its place in a Fury build?
I am not overly familiar with the mechanics of weapon skill, but my initial reaction is that it (the talent) would need a substantial buff to be worth taking, as previously the value of the talent was the disarm immunity.
Edit: And as no one else seems to have mentioned it in here yet:
Warrior
* Charge will work more often when targets are up against unpathable areas like walls and poles.
* Defiance (Protection) now also grants 2/4/6 weapon expertise.
* Devastate (Protection) now combines the effects of Sunder Armor into its effect. It is also now affected by all talents and items that affect Sunder Armor.
* Disarm is now subject to diminishing returns in PvP. * Improved Berserker Stance (Fury) now also reduces all threat caused while in Berserker Stance by 2/4/6/8/10% * Improved Intercept and Weapon Mastery have swapped locations in the talent trees.
* Intervene will no longer place you in combat.
* Hamstring now has a 10 second duration when used on PvP targets.
* Mace Specialization (Arms) now has a reduced chance to occur but generates 7 rage instead of 6.
* Pummel: Interrupting a channeled spell with this ability will now always properly prevent casting spells from the same spell school for 4 sec.
* Shield Bash: Interrupting a channeled spell with this ability will now always properly prevent casting spells from the same spell school for 6 sec.
* Shield Slam (Protection) now always tries to dispel one Magic effect on the target. * Sweeping Strikes and Deathwish have swapped locations in the talent trees. * Sweeping Strikes (Fury) now lasts 10 seconds and affects your next 10 swings.
* Tactical Mastery: This talent also now grants greatly increased threat from Mortal Strike and Bloodthirst when in Defensive Stance.
* Weapon Mastery (Arms) now reduces duration of Disarm effects against you by 25/50% rather than giving you a 50% chance to avoid or full immunity to Disarm effects. * Whirlwind: This ability now strikes with both weapons when a Warrior is dual-wielding.
Edit again: HOLY HELL! I thought people were kidding about the Deathwish change on the warrior forums! That's not cool!
Edit yet again: Another gem!
General
...
* Expertise: We have added a new stat and associated rating called expertise and expertise rating. Expertise rating converts to expertise at the same rate that weapon skill rating formerly converted at. Each point of expertise reduces the chance for your attacks to be dodged or parried by 0.25%.
Last edited by Korlong : 10/11/07 at 6:58 PM.
Reason: Added patch notes as a conversation point.
I have seen a couple of things on Gorefiend that might account for DPS oddness.
Gorefiend loves to kick the shit out of WF totems. They need to be redropped a lot.
Also one time my DPS was just terrible on him and I could not figure out why at first glance. I went back and looked at the WWS more, and me and one of the Rogues (whose DPS was also way below average) were getting parried like crazy, as if we were attacking from his front, which we definitely were not. I have seen subsequent parses where he has parried me multiple times as well, its like when he casts shadow of death or incinerate on folks, he is actually turning to face them or something. I mean I see him do that visually on my client but I figured he was not really supposed to be facing them for melee purposes.
Yes randomly targeted abilities that require a facing does that.
Its a actually a really big problem because those parries cause increased attack speed for the boss and if you are really unlucky they can cause unpreventable one-shots.
I'm not going to lie, these new patch notes have me pissed off.
I'm not worried about Death Wish, I raid as MS, but it still sucks.
I'm not worried about Weapon Mastery (disarm part), it'll be in my spec anyway.
What really gets me is the weapon skill changes. I don't remember having heard anything about this until these PTR notes went up, and it means that human and orc players straight up lose 3% to hit, which is HUGE.
Now maybe I've misread... There's nothing specifically saying the human racial is being changed, and the wording for it doesn't include racial abilities outside of the ones listed. I've got my fingers crossed, but if it ends up knocking it off that's just that much more gear I need to swap out for hit towards end-game.
- Sweeping Strikes and Deathwish have swapped locations in the talent trees.
- Improved Intercept and Weapon Mastery have swapped locations in the talent trees.
I do not understand this...
Why are they making arms even better for pvp while nerfing fury?
Granted the DW works on WW thing is a buff but WW damage is a fairly small portion of our DPS.
I do not understand this...
Why are they making arms even better for pvp while nerfing fury?
Granted the DW works on WW thing is a buff but WW damage is a fairly small portion of our DPS.
It's a BS change and I hope to god it's reverted before 2.3 goes live, being able to sweeping strikes trash mobs is NOT the same as having Death Wish for single target DPS on boss fights.
What really gets me is the weapon skill changes. I don't remember having heard anything about this until these PTR notes went up, and it means that human and orc players straight up lose 3% to hit, which is HUGE.
I'm not sure if the racials ARE being changed. Is skill still going to be around some some items or will it all be expertise? But -dodge(and parry for tanks) could be good, since untill now we've had to way to avoid 5% dodges while we can always lower miss with +5.
Luckily I raid as either 33/28 or prot, so the talent swaps don't really affect me. The loss of DW seems likes a major nerf to dual wield fury though, and makes 2h fury more tempting.
That is very strange. If they had changed enrage and sweeping strikes I could understand that, but deathwish? It just doesn't make sense.
First they give us a nice boost, 10% less threat, and the imp intercept to weapon expertise is nice. But why on earth give a primary fury talent to the arms tree?
I hope theres been some sort of mistake and it was actually supposed to be enrage that was swapped. That would have made alot more sense.
Some of that looks like they threw Arms and Fury into a blender and turned it on just for a second. WTF? What they should do is free talents of requirements like enrage>flurry and fix Deep Wounds to work like the mages' Ignite.
I'm pretty sure they were looking at a way to prevent Fury from being OP with threat reduction. That tree winds up nerfed no matter how you look at it. Either lose Rampage or Death Wish... unless they buff Rampage 21/40 looks like a decent alternative. Probably not entirely as efficient but it depends on what you make of your DW cooldown. Also the Whirlwind and Sweeping Strikes changes only promote slow offhands further, to which extent we'll have to see.
Playing around with a talent calculator for a bit it changes almost nothing to how I'd spec Arms DPS. With the talent point from DW I could get Sweeping Strikes or max out Battle Shout, probably prefer the latter since the new swing-only SS looks weak for 2h and it's more of a trash gimmick anyway. So losing SS is not that tragic, but it has been very defining - and changing the "character" of the trees like that leaves a very sour taste... like intercept to me has always been more Fury than Arms, when you think about context. And a talent with Weapon Expertise belongs to the Arms tree...
"You are better than I am," Inigo admitted. "So it seems. But if that is true, then why are you smiling?"
"Because," Inigo answered, "I know something you don't know." "And what is that?" asked the man in black. "I'm not left-handed."
I just don't get the Death Wish change. You can already make a decent argument that 33/28/0 is superior to 17/44/0 for PvE. I mean is this a change that basically kills Fury?
I'm curious, since I haven't seen it posted yet... but will Rampage actually be better than taking Deathwish in it's new location? My math skills aren't at the point where I could begin to think about how to approach that problem.
Sorting through the raging anger of the WoW Warrior board I noticed an interesting discrepancy. Hortus (Blue) post of the 2.3 patch notes curiously has the Sweeping Strikes/Death Wish change absent and has been edited. Perhaps it's already been recanted?
There are a lot of people on the WoW forums claiming that the Deathwish change isn't a big deal, and that the change to Whirlwind makes up for it.
What these people don't seem to realize is that Deathwish applies huge scaling, you pop Deathwish, Bloodthirst Brooch, a Haste Potion, and Recklessness, and you're looking at much more than a 20% dps increase, as it scales all of your other buffs by 20% as well.
In addition, Deathwish is an amazing ability in any PvE fight where you do not spend all of your time on the boss, as your "out" time gives it time to cool down (whereas your upgraded whirlwind is wasted).
Finally, the other problem with the Whirlwind change is that in order to maximize its effectiveness, you need a really slow offhand - of which there are essentially none in PvE. There is basically the [Talon of Azshara], [Netherbane] (urk) and the Arena epics.
10/11/07, 6:43 PM
