This is just me speculating but I'm wondering if some of Blizzard's hesitation to unlink the "no brainer" talents as we tend to think of them is an unwillingness to have so few linked talents in the warrior trees. I think they like the whole talent linking deal and what would be left if they broke Enrage-->Flurry? Sweeping strikes to Bloodthirst?

Also the Weapon Mastery talent is growing on me. If it really will be -4% to dodge that will be very nice for those dodged specials that plague all of us. I'd still really hate to lose Death Wish, though.

If they like the idea of linked talents then why not give us a useful 5 pointer to replace enrage. That would make the most sense, something like chance on hit to gain 200 armor penetration, stacks 3x lasts for 15 seconds. It wouldn't be that OP, but it would also make fury alot more viable for PVP.

As it stands, arms is the best in PVP by a mile and not to far behind PVE wise, which isn't really fair.

Well 'destroys' is hyperbole I suppose but at the end game level of gear its relatively small gains everywhere. What I meant by 'destroys' is that the gap between the leather Illidan hat and the next best option is larger than with other gear slots. To put it another way, it is the biggest upgrade over other T6 armor choices.

Enh Shaman have their melee crit talent linked to their 30% Flurry...WTB that.

I've been biting my tongue the last few days waiting for the dust to settle before i weight in on the changes coming up, and i won't have a full grasp of the difference until i actually play with it in a raid, but here are my opinions so far.

DW and SS swap....<sigh> On demand burst...gone. Really nice when you were in execute range, or the mob had a "vulnerable" phase (demon form Leo is a good example). I can see the SS and new WW combo being deadly in some multi-mob situations, but again, mostly trash. We don't raid and have issues with trash though, it's bosses that you want all the real hitting power for, and what we gear/play for.

I've got to say that I'm eagerly awaiting the new WW though, even on single mobs it should be nice (I know the math shows it's only going to be a 2-3% increase in DPS, but i run slow/slow, so i should get the most out of it). It will be especially nice for improving the rage efficiency of WW in low rage situations. A good example of this is Vash'j, I was assigned a quadrant and nothing would suck more then when i dropped 25 rage on a whirlwind that hit for around 550...such a waste of rage.

Weapon Mastery. Sounds good, but I have no idea where I'm going to get the points for it. Which leads me to my next point, Enrage and Flurry. UNLINK THEM, for the love of god. Spending 10 talent points for a 25% haste is nice and all...but shaman spend 5 for 30%, getting better then double our return per talent point in a PvE situation.

BF moving into fury would be nice, but i could live with just enrage/flurry unlinked.

I really don't know what blizzard is thinking with these changes. All the cries about warriors up until now have been "Arms is over powered in PvP, Fury is okay as it is in PvE and sucks in PvP".....then the pseudo-buff arms and nerf fury? What's that all about?

The official reasoning behind the deathwish and imp. intercept change is to open up 41 arms talent builds for pvp warriors.

Kalgan stated that he would not be buffing 41 arms to the point where it was better than those 2 talents so the alternative was moving them or giving them for free to all warriors. I think they're gonna see how the current changes will work out and continue to tweak untill both specs work well for their purpose (fury being the pure dps tree, and arms being the pvp/utility tree).

Are there any talent trees of any class that have only one linked set of talents? Any with 0? Even if there aren't good talents to link they might just have this internal model of "MUST BE AT LEAST 2 LINKED SETS OF TALENTS PER TREE". There might also be a completely different reason they're not telling us. They're most certainly aware of the situation and I sure as hell don't understand their reasons for not changing it.

I find this a bit of a funny conclusion to draw. Yes, Shaman's get better than double the return per talent point for THOSE talents. But we have to take Ancestral Knowledge or Shield Spec in order to get access to those. Points which are every bit as ineffective as Enrage.

I would say 5% more mana is better than 25% more damage when dead in a pve situation albeit marginally. For me, enrage is actually a tanking in my DPS gear talent which is generally bad idea anyway. If I'm tanking in DPS gear, the mob I'm holding is either a complete joke and I'm just waiting for it to die so I can swap back to DPS or our tank went down, I'm filling in, and I'm going to die when my shield wall runs out anyway.

@Hamiburg; It's a flawed comparison, but it is somewhat accurate. Shaman start with less and logically have to get more out of their talents to be competitive....but it really pains me to see better talents, easier to get, lower in the tree.

I don't want to get into a "Well unbridled wrath sucks as much as the +5% mana talent". "Well you get your 5% crit talent before we do!", type of discussion. It just seems like there's very little waste in the enhancement tree (Other then the awful 10-15 gap with only 2h spec and enhancing totems really being helpful) compared to fury. You aren't stuck with a 5 point "LOL Arms PvP talent" as a pre-req for your flurry, you get 9% hit from 6 talent points compared to our 3% for 3 (Mainly because of itemization issues i'd assume...we dont need int/spirit/mp5) and the rest of our talents pretty much match up other wise.

And there is almost NO case that can be made for enrage being useful in PvE...the only time i get crit and NOT 1 shot is usually AoE trash like solarian packs, Solarian herself and tidewalker...and it's a token increase in damage in the long run because of that. If it had a chance to proc when WE crit (like 5% chance when we crit or something...1/2/3/4/5% chance on crit to increase damage by 5/10/15/20/25% for 10 seconds or something...of course criting would become insane when stacked with flurry then) then it wouldn't be COMPLETELY worthless and we wouldn't be whining as much as we are. I mean, if there wasn't anything else to take we wouldn't care as much either...but we are missing out on Weapon Mastery, Imp whirlwind or points in dual wield for....utter crap.

To give you an example of how much this sucks...Imagine if imp ghost wolf was 5 points and was needed for you to get flurry.

You mean other than the 12.5% damage shamans are missing on every offhand hit from your version of improved DW?

Enrage is horrible in raid situations, but it's extremely good while leveling and grinding and in non-arena PVP. The real truth is the rest of the talents in the tree are extremely good and scraping for points simply accentuates how much Enrage is bad in raids. If there was a dead zone in the tree but enrage sat there (like there is at 6-10 points, and I'm not suggesting to move it there), nobody would complain because it was just something you had to take to get Flurry anyway.

You obviously didn't pull out a calculator to figure out what 5% mana is for a shaman that has *maybe* 7k raid buffed mana, and has a 2min cooldown talent that can refill that mana bar faster than we can burn the mana, did you? We also are almost forced to take 3 points for 3% dodge to get to lower in the tree. Its painful for everyone. Stop comparing class trees, its an exercise in stupidity.

This is what scares. Blizzard's "official" explaination shows such a lack of understanding it's actually scary.

Do they really think this will get PvP warriors to spec the 41 pt arms talent? Hell no it won't because right now PvP warriors are all wanking off to idea that they will be able to pull off a DW->SS->Intercept->WW combo without stance dancing.

41/20 can still get enrage. Though I don't really want to give up TM so that is an issue.

The point though is that not taking imp. intercept for arena was downright insane, Death Wish actually is not as important after they made it not stack. The patch tries to fix the fact that no sane warrior was ever gonna spec beyond 35 arms, I'm not really sure if it's gonna be successful, but I'm at least gonna try endless rage and improved MS and see how they play before deciding, further changes may be necessary to make them really viable though.

Note: I'm not actually arguing that deep arms will be superior after 2.3, just that it will be possible to spec without getting laughed at.

No, they'll be bitterly mocked for giving up a buffed Sweeping Strikes. I'll do my share of mocking at least.

Buffed SS? I'm not sure how 2H warriors are going to pull 10 hits per second out of their ass, but I'd be impressed. SS in Arms was good because you could pop it when you had a ton of extra rage and lay waste to a clumped up group of enemy players (or mobs, depending on the circumstances). The new SS will let you get off one good BT hit, some mediocre WW damage, and break every sheep/shackle within a country mile.

It seems like (unless expertise is as powerful as pre-TBC weaponskill) the gap between Fury and Arms has been closed even more for single target raid DPS.

What, is WM confirmed as 4 points?

I don't know about other warriors, but BF is the only reason I raid as arms.

10 hits in 10 seconds? probably not. More than 5 hits? definitely, especially since we don't have to switch to berserker stance to whirlwind now

hamstring won't be a waste of a charge now, either. This is definitely an overall buff to the ability.

Fury is supposed to do a lot more single target damage than arms and BF is supposed to bridge that gap. The problem is that the current pre-2.3 iteration of fury doesn't do enough damage

No I made a typo. I meant to convey that assuming the loss of Deathwish is offset, on paper, by 2/2 Weapon Mastery and the new WW (of which talented costs 2 points) then we would need to spend 4 talent points to get the same DPS we could formerly get with 1.

I'm not too sure why you felt the need to tell me that. All I meant was if BF moved to fury and my guild no longer wanted an arms warrior in their raids I wouldn't care since I'd be following BF to fury. I suspect the same would be the case for most raiding arms warriors, certainly those who specced it to help their raid rather than save on arena respecs.

Hozz: Oh, ok. It was just you were the 2nd person in 2 pages to refer to WM as a 4 pointer.

I think I meant to reply to someone else, but my point was that moving BF would be dumb. Right now both arms and fury are competitive in PvE and I think that's a good thing. I'd much rather see fury get PvP buffs to make it more desirable in that facet than see Blizzard try to make the two specs more specialized than they are now

Blizzard doesn't want to have all goodies in one tree because they wan't the talent allocation to be something special to every character. For example, look at the Rogue talent trees. After the patch they'll be able to go every tree for their PvP spec but it'll still be different to a PvE spec because of all the small talent choices, and even with a spec like 41/20 you have to choose around 15 points from many useful talents. All this results in a near impossibility to find two totally equal specced Rogues who didn't copy someone else's spec. WoW would be boring if talent trees didn't work this way and I'm pretty happy with Arms and Fury Warriors being viable damage dealers.

But this is exactly what they have done now. They put all the necessary talents in the arms tree for PvP so that a PvP warrior can get all the skills he needs with 33 points, leaving the rest to get either sweeping strikes or go for last stand + concussion blow.

I'm totally confused by this change more than anything else, I don't know where they came up with it. No one had issues with arms warriors and fury warriors were ok (threat reduction we've been expecting for a while now) - now they've gimped fury and given arms anything and everything they could possibly want.

I'm hoping they'll revert this sweeping strikes - deathwish change. Most people don't realize how much this will screw us. Every single other class has a burst DPS ability (or more). Now we have trinkets, yay.