Fellwraith

It's not the same. You're forgetting a windfury proc from the totem also added 445AP to the extra attack. The change from extra attack to haste isn't that big of a deal, but losing the bonus AP is bad.

 

Shha

And getting 20% faster OH speed, offsets it with ease.

To elaborate.

You lose 448 ap (actually with buffs i guess its ~500) on 20% of MH attacks.

You gain:

Sharpening Stone - using lvl 70 examples it would be adamantite one - 14 dmg on a 4.2 speed TG weapon = ~51ap. 12 crit ~ = 24 ap using spreadsheets SEP. So stone alone adds 75 ap on EVERY attack instead of 500 on 20% MH ones. That 75 ap applies to yellow and OH damage as well so stone alone gives you more then WF extra AP.

On addition you get 20% more OH damage simply - with 62.5% modifier its 12.5% extra MH damage. So the WF totem change for TG seems to me as it actually buffs the totem to give you extra ~8-10% white damage.

EDit #2.

Remember also that imp WF totem used to give 30% extra ap (150 20% of the time - meaning less then 30 on average), while now it gives 4% more haste - a lot better then 30 ap by all accounts). In fact taking the imp WF totem into account and assuming 15% haste you will get 1.15x1.25.x1.24/1.2 = 1.49 weapon speed increase with TG penalty - meaning that if you have weapon faster then 3.7 (most likely always the case it seems), you will want to take some points OFF TG, as they will probably provide no real return. That assumes haste of course - without it you should be fine with even 3.2 weapon. Still amount of TG points I guess will be varied for warriors, depending on speed of weapons they have.

 

Dooknookem

Windfury breaks you having 4 "virtual" charges if you have matching weapon speeds.. having a flat haste increase would mean even better flurry up-times too.

 

Gruntle

Why would it affect yellow damage? That just depends on how it's implemented, the +19% DW miss rate only applies to white swings for example.

However, an increased miss rate would be exactly the same as it is with dehaste. Both will cause rage to be very spiky (maybe even worse for the -hit case), and both can be countered by gear (with the same item budget cost and combat rating as far as I know).

 

Fellwraith

I was referring more to the "for most other builds its the same". For dual-wield it's a benefit, for Arms or Prot, it's a downgrade.

 

suicuique

ShieldSlam does not share the same CD as BT I can say for sure.
Tanking with a 2H and Shield in DPS gear (TG Build) lets you Shieldslam and BT on independent CDs.

 

Noura

I didn't read the entire thread (overwhelming) but you kinda need to include the fact that TG build beneficies of the stats and enchants of 2 2H, which is really significant in my opinion.

 

kaellie

On a post, saying that in some case Sunder Armor could be better than Devastate, it was confirmed that:

In WOTLK Sunder Armor will have part of its threat come from AP so devastate will have a huge boost in threat (AP will boost its damages as part of the 50% weapon damages and something like 10-20% of the AP will be add to the threat bonus). And will have a lot more AP than today will all the raid buffs and the fact that our armor will have more strength that we have today.

The threat formula for devastate will be:
Stance_Bonus * (Devastate_Threat_Bonus + (AP * Sunder_Armor_Percatage) + 50% Weapon_Damate + (Number_of_Sunder_Armor * Devastate_Damage_Bonus))

At level 70 (let say 1000 AP and a 10% threat bonus from AP to Sunder Armor) will have a 145 threat bonus per Devastate so on a dev/dev/SS/revenge cylce it is a 48 TPS boost.

The question will be: what will be the impact on prot "dps" since we don't have any talents that reduce aggro.

Also since revenge doesn't scale with anything, in an infinite rage environment, I don't think we will still do it when our strength (and AP) passes a certain value (to be defined).

 

Zaroua

It's definitely an upgrade if your Prot Warriors can't be given a Shaman for a specific encounter.
And I certainly know that the rare times where I'd get a Shaman in my group, it when I was with 2 Hunters, the Feral Druid and the Shaman was Resto and not twisting. Might be different for other Warriors, but I know that not every guild or every tank has had a pet Enhancement Shaman for every fight in T6+ content.



Edit: In response to kaellie's post: expect Revenge to be tuned before LK goes live if it's vastly inferior to our other abilities. Also the extra Devastate threat is indeed frightening when it comes to Prot DPS - again something that will hopefully be addressed.

Dogma also claims that God has a sense of humor and at times presents Him as a joker of sorts, thus again lowering Him to human level. While I am certain God has a "sense of humor" since He gave it to us, I find it most difficult to believe He finds humor in sin since He will cast the unforgiven sinner into the lake of fire for eternity. Not very funny at all.

 

Liar

I read the same post with "gems" such as

makes you wonder if that guy who posted this even has a rudimentary grasp of how Warriors work. :/

Source

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Nezralix

Those claims are pretty dubious. Strength is about the last stat I'd go for right now for threat, following Expertise, Block Value, Hit, Crit, and Agility. The dodge change... well, there seem to be some okay reasons for it; PvP-oriented or leveling warriors can grab a pretty useful talent in the lower part of the Prot tree, more useful than the extra Defense was. But the Defense cap certainly doesn't have anything to do with why it's probably a good change.

 

Borodin

I can only think that the reference to Strength being "the best Threat Stat" was specifically your basic "Ability Score" Stats (Str, Agi etc) and not itemized stats like Expertise, Hit and so on.
I am being generous as the alternative is that he is completely clueless (as he demonstrated by his comments about Defence and Dodge).

 

Stardawn

We saw some tanks actually spec out of Anticipation at the T6 or so level because it just stops being as useful as your gear improves.

Pardon my ignorance, but I fail to see where that specific part is false. To me defense gave diminishing returns after 490, and I often found myself hoping for a bit less defense on T6-level gear, and a bit more blockV, dodge, hit, exp, whatever... and I actualy dropped a point or to in Anticipation because of having plenty on gear...

 

Stylle

My understanding is that 1 point of def rating gives you almost as much avoidance as 1 point of dodge rating at 70. The difference in avoidance is TINY. However, part of the avoidance from def comes as parry which is marginally better than dodge because of the parry haste effect. Part of it also comes as "chance to be missed" which is MUCH better than dodge because it's uni-directional and works even when you're stunned. Hence def rating at 70 is the best avoidance stat to stack even past 490.

 

Nezralix

Since INT, SPI, and STA do absolutely nothing for threat, we'll just exclude those. So you're left with STR and AGI (we'll exclude attack power, because it's just a worse version of strength that no plate gear has anyway). Out of these, I would argue that AGI is preferable, as it not only gives you critical strike chance (which is more beneficial for modifying all of those fixed-damage or mostly-fixed-damage skills like Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Heroic Strike), but some extra avoidance as well.

So basically... that part of his post was just plain wrong.

There is some truth to this for the expansion, though. Block Value from strength is huge, especially given the 10% increased damage on Shield Slam. More skills are scaling with attack power, and Incite means that your Heroic Strike is actually benefiting from your base damage (i.e. increasing your average swing damage by 15%).

Heck, maybe they'll even fix some of the garbage talents like Sword and Board to even further increase the value of attack power.

 

◊ Birdemani

...Until Sunwell Radiance, then warriors were picking it up again. Glad I wasn't the only one scratching my head at some of those comments. I thought I was just having a rough morning when I had to go back and read them a few times.

I have to wonder if you can keep a prot warrior in your raid if you sub in another tank for a particular encounter. Will there be enough reasons (debuffs/dps) to not sub him out for another pure dps class? Most of the debuffs are currently shared with other classes and all of the dps spammables will still produce high threat even if we are in zerker stance. I really need to agree with Fellwraith here that making BT/MS trainable for all warriors would solve a good portion of our problems when it comes to scenarios like these.

edit: just wondering, has anyone pulled together the full set of stats from the level 75 blue blacksmith craftables? It's nearly a full tank set using the new itemization paradigm for tanking. Just looking at the shield, it seems like it would be on pace with Illidan level loot. It could give us a good idea of where they are going. I'd do it myself but I don't want to open up mmo-champ while at work.

 

Shha

To clarify the defense with some math:
2.36 defense rating = 1 defense
18.92 dodge rating = 1% dodge
18.92 defense rating = ~8 defense (almost exactly a bit more).

8 defense = 0.32% dodge
8 defense = 0.32% parry
8 defense = 0.32% chance to be missed

Total avoidance = 0.96% or 96% of defense from dodge.

Additionally defense adds:

0.32% chance to block
0.32% chance to avoid attack when incapacitated
0.32% for parry haste
reduced crits etc if for any reason your defense is reduced (unbalancing strikes and such)

In all honesty defense > dodge.

Having said that, anticipation change is a buff since they exchanged 20 defense (~47 rating) for 5% dodge (~95rating), so its just a lot more stats (even if in shape of a "worse" one).

 

norikk

This is a pretty disappointing statement to hear from a blue poster.

There was never good a reason to remove Anticipation, and I'm sure 99% of warriors kept the talent 5/5 during all their progression. Removing anticipation was an idead that might have crossed the mind of some tanks when they couldn't generate enough threat due to rage starvation and lack of better threat-generating mechanics except heroic strike spam which empties your rage. So, if getting hit more was good to get rage and thus threat, removing anticipation and putting the points somewhere else could be a good thing, right? Well, not exactly... gearing for the encounter, removing your shield and going dual wield, rage potions, sit briefly when rage starved... From all creative ideas to fix that, changing an important talent was always the last resort, and that's why few people did that.

At some point it was known that Kungen from Nihilum was experimenting with the talent, and that certainly influenced people towards the idea much more than pure logical reason.

A persons knowledge of his class improves as the person plays and study. In time, the tanks of the world learned that to generated threat you need hit rating, block value. Expertise was eventually introduced and is now the best overall threat stat, with block value coming close behind, but providing mitigation utility as well. Builds with anger management were born and became popular, devastate was buffed, and in the lastest act, Sunwell Radiance came. There's no reason whatsoever to take points out of anticipation.

Also from a technical point of view, defense for a warrior is superior to dodge in all situations except in one fight. (Reliquary of Souls, first phase)

The blue poster justifying the change to Anticipation how he did is just sad and shows me how he really need to read more EJ and Tankspot.

 

norikk

Are these ratings valid for wotlk, and do they consider lvl 80 characters?

 

• Morsexy

I mean, excuse my french here, but I want to know what the fuck he is talking about.

Does he mean that people did 2\2 improved bloodrage and 3\5 anticipation? I'd love to know how in the wide world of sports that means we "specced out" of that talent IRREGARDLESS of crazy builds. Do these people even know the talent trees they talk about? The most mobile fight in sunwell for a prot tank still allows intervene to be used everytime you need any help with movement.

It'd be nice if he had at least read one of the warrior threads around here.

edit: was posting as norikk was, but we're both trying to make the same point.

 

Liar

I don't think you can even build a proper FR set for Illidan Flames without Anticipation. And even if you could get one, why even make it harder on yourself and drop Anticipation? It's free avoidance if nothing else.

Noone can smelt Saronite Bars (which you need for the blue set) yet so that set is currently out of our reach.
EDIT: That's the set:

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Fellwraith

A lot of those pieces are just slightly worse than T6 (once you factor in sockets on T6), and definitely not as good as the Sunwell items for that slot.

For example with the Legs vs T6: +57 str (23.5 bv, 114 AP), -4 Stamina (assuming you're using an agi/stam gem), -0.96% to -0.46% to crit (from the base agility), +6 effective armor (factoring in an agi/stam gem and base agi on T6), +15 defense rating, -41 parry rating (1.73% to 0.83% depending on your level), -~14 base block value (before talents)

Similar to TBC, I'm not seeing a lot of pieces with hit rating and expertise on the "leveling" gear so far, so you may end up using pieces that are slightly inferior point for point, but better for you because of the correlation it has with your other gear (i.e. hit rating/expertise will become more valuable as your block value, crit, and AP increase). Also, because a lot of these pieces are blues, they'll only have at most 3-4 stats. The epics will generally have more stats but at smaller values.



The value of defense relative to dodge was always variable based on how hard you were getting hit. 1 point of dodge rating at level 70 is 0.053% of pure avoidance, defense was 0.05% of pure avoidance (miss, dodge, parry). If you're able to fully absorb a hit with a block, then defense gives 0.067% damage avoidance, otherwise the mitigation value of block was variable with the incoming damage and your block value. Defense was the second best "uncrushable" stat (block rating was the best) and the second best avoidance stat (Dodge was the best). Stacking defense past 490 was not counterproductive. I think I have about 560 defense on my pure avoidance set (mostly because I can't get dodge rating instead) defense isn't a "bad" avoidance stat, it's just not the best. The parry component of defense doesn't really change my mind as to which stat I'd prefer.

I don't think I ever spec'd out of anticipation for tanking. There were fights where I wanted to maximize my avoidance and fights where I wanted it really low. Usually that just meant I'd wear a lot of dps or hybrid pieces (ZA ring, dps shoulders, etc.) in the first half of BT and swap to the pure avoidance gear by the time we got to Illidan or Gurtogg. Anticipation let you get away with gear swaps like that and/or re-gem certain pieces.

I hope they don't have another elemental tanking fight in this expansion (Flames of Azzinoth or Hydross v2.0), or we're going to find that Ferals are the best tanks for it by a wide margin.


Edit: Curses beaten by liar

 

Roywyn

The ratings are at 70, but it doesn't matter since the "required rating for 1 point or 1%" scales the same when you level up.

5% dodge is always about twice as much value as 20 defense skill points, regardless of level.
So the change is a fairly good deal for you.
The things in the Blizzard post are quite distressing though.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Rub

While anticipation helped a ton for these special fights and for gearing up, I hope they actually move away from resist fight tanking in general, I never found it fun to have to strip off all of my good gear and put on a bunch of blues/greens to meet the current resist req for some boss fight, on top of all the crafting that had to be done from the rep blacksmithing patterns and the JC rings.

If they do keep them in, I think these will be the encounters where deathknights will shine the most as part of their tanking niche moreso then a feral.

 

Darmon

Isn't this against what Blizzard wants about tanks? They want all tanks to be viable. For me that excludes the notion of niche. Sure, a DK tank might take 10% less dmg than a warrior tank, but anything more extreme would mean 'do we have our DK tank online tonight to do xxx fight? Nope, let's call the raid'.