They upped our crit because of the new diminishing returns on ratings. It might not be a balanced counter-balance (huh?), but I've read somewhere that this was the idea.

I definitely think that at least going into "turtle" mode in PvP if you get concentrated on won't be as much of a hit to your dps as it is now. Shield Slam should still be hitting for a significant amount with all the Strength, and it should have a fair crit chance. You might even start squeezing in Revenge if you're being focused by melee.

No one knows yet exactly how it will all look at 80, but from reading on these forums and looking at the talents, personally I don't think TG will be a competitive spec in PvP because of the lack of hit, and the lack of mobility. (Exception might be 5v5?)
Some kind of 38/33 build for 5v5, and some version of the Vanilla 31/5/15 (with wep chain) build for 2v2 and 3v3 look extremely hot to me.
Last Stand, Toughness, Imp SR, Concussion Blow and Gag Order gives a lot of utility in the lower brackets, I was thinking something like this with a weapon chain.

Edit: I'm thinking Shield Slam baseline is great dealing with priest shields and such as well, macro equip shield -> SS -> equip 2 hander and pound it the second you see the shield go up. Imagine this with a 3 second Silence from Gag Order, then Concussion Blow at the right moment on a priest. Think he might panic a little? Will be fun to try it out.

Prot is definitely awesome dps at the moment for pvp.

My warrior (Timeor) has pretty much all s1/s2 gear and TG nets around 700dps for me. (My gear sucks)

Prot was netting last night around 600 dps with 10x the survivability. I tanked 6 mobs at once and killed them all at equal lvl (71) without any backup. I pvped a mage into a dirt nap due to conc blow being unreasonably awesome and in combat charges also being super sweet. I spell-reflected a fireball into his face for good measure while the hole time shield slamming him for 2k. The 51 point talent is just icing on the cake as another awesome stun. Prot feels amazing for pvp.

Compare that with my experience as a TG warrior (utterly owned by pretty much anything that wanted to kill me) and I can tell you right now that if they don't fix TG and/or nerf the crap out of prot... I'm going to be leveling and PVPing as prot come the patch/expansion.

A build with Gag Order / Concussion Blow / Improved Revenge (very nice btw) will be great...in certain situations. I played that way on the PTR for a long time, and beat most classes one-v-one. HOWEVER, it's terrible sustained damage. You sacrifice a ton of damage (and a lot of burst, as well) for survivability, and even then you sacrifice survivability because you can't have Blood Craze.

My conclusion was: a great bg spec, not arena-viable. UNLESS you do something odd like 2v2 with a hybrid ret paladin or elemental shaman or something.


Edit: To further my point, here are the 'survivability and utility talents' I would like to pick up, roughly in order of usefulness: Mortal Strike > Second Wind > Blood Craze > Concussion Blow > Weapon Mastery > Gag Order > Last Stand > Improved Revenge. Notice that I'm rating the prot talents pretty low--and these talents have the additional problem of all being tier 3 or tier 5--and tiers 1 and 2 are completely worthless for PvP...yes, especially incite.

I guess we're going to be forced into the bullshit of using Weapon Chains when nearly every other melee (Ret Paladins, Enh Shaman) get -50% disarm reduction from talents.


Oh, and by the way: Fuck dismantle. Thrice the benefit of disarm, none of the downsides (defensive stance, high cost).

If you clicked the link I posted you'd see I had Blood Craze included. (And not Imp Revenge)
I'm not a very experienced arena player, but I believe the extra survivability in the link I posted will help a lot against double dps teams that warrior/healer have struggled so much with in TBC. I agree the lack of DPS talents might be a bitch vs healer teams though.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.

What do you guys think is a better TPS/DPS for prot, AttT or Impale? I don't care about the budget just want to know which gives more when both are fully talented.
Assuming 24,000 armor and 33% crit on talented specials (I.E. SS, Tclap, HS, Dev) raid buffs.

Shivas we were just talking about this over the course of the last few posts even.

Not to completely dodge your question, but a better question would probably be to compare builds with AttT and Impale. An Impale build is going to include Imp. HS, for example, which a 5/8/58 build wouldn't. A build like this (12/5/54) is clearly going to put out more threat than this (5/8/58), no matter how Impale and AttT compare to each other directly.

My overall impression (though I'm not in beta) is that threat is not that big an issue, and you're better off setting aside points for things like Improved Spell Reflect.

How did they up the crit? additional base crit %? or agility/crit change?

Pretty sure it's base crit. They still seem to shy away from the idea of letting us scale better. (for good or bad)

Edit: Shaman Flurry nerfed to 5/10/15/20/25% just like ours now. Guess there goes all hope in them reverting the change to our Flurry.

Demo is usually covered by the resident DPS warrior, no reason for the tank to have to worry about it.
And after patch 3.02, depending on how many warlocks you bring, the DPS warrior won't have to worry about it either, as it won't stack with Curse of Weakness.

I've used a dps war to do it as well, but atleast for 10 mans?

If BC-style boss AP trends continue....You only need 1 point in Improved Demo Shout to zero-out all of a boss's AP. It becomes trivial without Recklessness's AP boost.

Chances are you'll either have a DPS warrior OR a warlock, no? If not, you can respec for Imp Demo on the rare occasions none of your DPS warriors or warlocks are available, and IF you feel it's needed. (double healer setup, or maybe you just plainly don't trust your healers)

New to this forum i tryed to read up on this thread about what you people have experienced in PTR/beta and it was a lot to "take in" all at ones. Aiming for PvE DPS myself i´m curious of the builds you have in mind at the beginning when we/you still are at level 70 and couldnt really find as much builds for that, as for what you have in mind later on. I presume that much depends on what gear you have to start with but i would appritiate your thoughts around how to start in WOTLK. Is TG worth it or do you need the "hit rating gear" that comes in the expansion later on? An arms build and bladestorm would perform well in early instances or even regular DW with some points here and there? I´m trying to cover all possebilitys with badgegear/ZA and up to early Mt Hyjal stuff to be able to perform as much dps as possible with priority on 10-man raids rather than going solo. So every thoughts and builds is appritiated as much as the work you all have put in so far in testing and sharing it with us who read this.

I just wanted to ask a question to those of you in the beta about some of the talents that don't really look all that hot on paper but might have some usefulness in Wrath.

First would be Imp Disarm: I was curious if anyone has reported a good amount of mobs / bosses in WotLK that can be disarmed.

Imp Disciplines: Do you find yourself having to use Shield Wall/Retaliation/Recklessness a lot more to warrant getting the cool down reduced?

Puncture: With Revenge now proc'ing S&B does that just completely obliterate the usefulness of this talent or does it still shave off enough rage over the duration of a fight to carry its own weight?

Safeguard: *ducks incoming volleys of tomatoes* I've read a lot of you are pretty much leaving this talent for the wolves with the latest intervene changes, but I was wondering if there might be fights where this would be worth it, i.e. Claw Rage in ZA where someone is getting focused on by the boss for a period of time.

Vigilance: I was just wondering if anyone has developed particular strategic uses for this? Or is it basically find the highest DPS'er, throw it on them, and when/if they pull aggro they get 3% extra survivability to scream in terror.

Thanks in advance for the help.

The only strategic use of Vigilance I've thought of is to have your offtank put his Vigilance on the main tank in hurtful strike fights (Gruul, etc). Since the main tank has more ability to generate threat, it should help even things out and ensure dps don't beat 2nd threat. And the main tank gets damage reduction to boot.

I could also see Vigilance being useful in fights where 2 tanks have to stick together in threat. Have a 2nd tank start off tanking and put Vig on them, this will automatically bring up the warrior a little bit so they don't drop so far back at the beginning of a fight. Some good examples would be Gurtogg, and Twins.

Edit: Obviously this would take some very good work on the part of the warrior to know when to have it up and drop it.

Wouldn't it be more sensible of the OT to put Vigilance up on a high threat DPS class like a Balance druid or a Elemental shaman?

The tooltip says it 'transfers' the threat over to the warrior. Vigilance - Spell - World of Warcraft
The way I understand it is that it makes the target generate 10% threat less, and the warrior gaining that 10%, so putting it up on the MT would be a bad idea.

That's finally correct now, Gink.

Agramat... I'm personally not sure that's true. The rage efficiency talents don't seem to pack as much clear-cut benefits to tps vs. damage enhancers like attt and imp revenge.

Of course I'm just speculating here, but it could be pretty cool to put it on a high DPS class that drop aggro to help you catch up. Like putting it on rogue and having him blow cool downs to catapult you above the tank with the higher threat and then vanish.

But then again, looking at the huge boosts we're getting and the general consensus that threat wont be that much of a problem. Coupled with our independent DPS getting boosted (and with it OT threat) I don't know if this will be much of a concern.

Thanks for the feedback so far by the way, any ideas on the others?