Considering that they've made aimed shot not clip auto shot, one would think that they would do a similar thing for auto attacks and slam. Personally, I think the optimal solution is to make it a ~2.5 second cast affected by melee haste which pauses the swing timer rather than resetting it (perhaps pause the main hand and reset the off-hand to encourage 1 x 2H fury). Swing timing would no longer be a problem for everyone except dual-wielders (assuming my bracketed suggestion is implemented), however it would require being stationary for a much longer time on average.
Of course, this is assuming they get the rest of their priorities straight. As I see it they don't even have a clear concept of what they want each non-tanking tree to do. There's just too much filler in both arms and fury, and the concept of tying weapon types to trees is glaringly deficient in many cases. I think the suggestion that they should rebuild the trees with the objective of unlinking specs with weapon types is a cognent one, as I'm sure many people enjoy the thought of being a 2H DPS'er, if not the execution of it.
And now for something completely different:
Slam is very hard to work into a DW rotation, I've been toying with dual-wielding without flurry on live as a pvp arms spec to see whether a rotation can even be maintained, and it isn't too pretty. Your weapons are prone to becoming unsynchronized and force you to clip an attack to bring them back into line. I need to do some more sound testing, as I haven't found a good way to solo test this without isolating parry haste, but my hopes aren't too high.
I'm curious what their philosophy is with warriors regarding tanking. If a baseline warrior should be able to tank everything, then prot spec as it stands trivializes content. If prot spec is required, then no other spec can tank; it's quite the catch 22.
If it was me, and I was trying to change the philosophy of the warrior class from:
Arms = PVP
Fury = PVE Dps
Prot = Tanking
I'd at most give each tree 2 functions, maybe like:
Arms = PVP or Tanking (with emphasis on avoidance)
Fury = PVE dps or PVP
Prot = Tanking (with emphasis on mitigation) or Shield-based PVP
To do this, i'd make some changes to how things are currently.
1. Make a weaker version of MS trainable and put a talent in arms to bring it up to current levels.
2. Move all the avoidance talents from protection and put them in arms somewhere. (Anticipation, Stalwart Protector)
3. Roll together some of the current prot talents to make room for some new ones that work at increasing damage while using a shield. (shield mastery + imp def stance maybe?)
4. Add some talent in arms that gives a nifty effect after a parry or dodge that's useful for tanking. (optionally useful for pvp as well.)
I think there's still some cool things you could add to prot as well, like something along the lines of the Bladed Armor talent that DK's have, but instead of AP, have it add strength. Put it fairly far down in the tree, and have it be something like:
Weightlifting: You gain 1 strength for every 300/200/100 points of armor. (3 point talent)
Or, along the lines of Titan's Grip in Fury, you could have a dehaste effect but increase the damage per swing, that would make prot more useful in pvp. Something like:
Focused Attacks: Increases the delay between your attacks by 9/17/25%, but also increases the damage per attack by 11/22/33%. Also increases your chance to get a critical strike with your Devastate and Shield Slam abilities by 2/4/6%. Requires a Shield.
Unless i've done my maths wrong, this would make 2.6 speed weps attack at 2h wep speeds, and also increase the damage per swing to 2h levels. So you have the damage per swing and rage gen per swing of a 2h, but get to carry a shield and your white dps is unchanged.
As for a way to improve Titan's Grip, what about an indirect change? Like what if you had a talent that had TG as a prerequisite and improved your slams:
Super Slam: Your Slam ability now strikes with both equipped weapons, but the bonus damage is decreased by 50%. (So, at lvl 80, your Slam with this talent would strike with both weapons for weapon damage + 125 instead of both weapons for weapon damage + 250).
Here's hoping they use some imagination when they do their "pass" on warriors.
Formerly of Immortality on Skullcrusher
Formerly of Lost Anarchy on Ner'Zhul
Currently inactive, but might try out WOTLK, but then again...
Let's talk about Expertise. We lost 6 Expertise skill after Defiance got made baseline. Now the problem we face is this: Blizzard will not give us Hit or Expertise via talents according to Ghostcrawler because at some point we cap out on that with gear so they do not want to put us closer to the cap via talents.* I strongly disagree with this line of thought because we lose out on gear flexibility and even Prot DPS (6 Expertise is nothing to sniff at) but let's pretend we can overlook this for now. Now, Paladins, Warriors and most like Death Knights will share the same gear so it's only natural to assume that they will not add more Hit/Expertise on the gear than it will be necessary to get all three tanks capped.
Problem:
Paladins have Combat Expertise - Spell - World of Warcraft
Death Knights have Nerves of Cold Steel - Spell - World of Warcraft and/or Will of the Necropolis - Spell - World of Warcraft.
Warriors have nothing.
If we are to share the same gear, which everything is pointing at, then this either means Warriors will have to waste more itemization points on getting capped on Expertise and Hit than Paladins and DKs or they will be just a few % short of the cap. Or it could also mean that DKs and Paladins get more Hit and Expertise shoved down their throats than they need because the smallest common denominator is 0% Hit/Expertise thanks to our unpolished Prot tree. Frankly, I'd hate to see any of the 3 options come true and I'd love to see Warriors getting just as much Expertise and Hit via talents like the other tanks (even Feral Druids get their Expertise talent in Wrath - only Warriors, it seems, took a step backwards).
So I ask you, is there anyone who would disagree with this? Anyone who thinks it would make us overpowered? Anyone who thinks the game is more fun by losing gear flexibility?
*
Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler
Defense is usually a pretty easy stat to max out with gear, whereas you can't really do that on dodge. 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. Hit is another stat we don't really like to hit in talent trees, since it's possible to hit the cap with gear alone.
The point I was trying to make is that putting strength on tanking gear solves a lot of problems in the game -- it can improve dps and threat (and mitigation if we build the talents correctly) without us having to worry about whether plate-wearing tanks are already capped in some other stat. Defense means something different for warriors and paladins than it does for death knights, and unless we build different gear for each class we can't count on defense as always being desirable above everything else. The last thing we want is for some classes to feel that they don't have access to the gear to do their jobs properly. Make sense?
Minor nit, druids are also a tanking class; there are four tanking classes, not three. However, druids do have Primal Precision (increases expertise by 5/10), though this seems more aimed at catform damage since the second half of the talent is 'refunds 40/80 energy from missed finishers'.
Um? Weapon Expertise is a Rogue ability in the Combat tree, and Precision has been absent from Paladin talent trees since the first Beta tree came out. Paladins do have Combat Expertise, which is five expertise for five points (and a stamina boost too, of course). In the interests of completeness, Druid talent is Primal Precision - Spell - World of Warcraft, 5/10 expertise for 1/2 points. I also think you should discount the hit DK's get, because it's just a fairly standard dual-wield talent. It's the only +hit talent available to any class in a serious tanking build (Warriors can get Precision, but obviously that's a horrible tanking build), and the fact that it has anything to do with tanking is only because DK's are the only class that might reasonably be expected to tank while dual-wielding.
So, Paladins get max 5 expertise from talents, Druids get 10, DK's get 12 (if they go deep Blood, which may not be mandatory for tanking). Should Warriors get some expertise tacked on to an existing talent again? I think that would be just fine, all things considered. On the other hand, I wouldn't worry about the gear concerns all that much. All tanking classes should have similar use for +hit, and similar use for +expertise. As it stands, there are racial bonuses for 5 expertise; does this terribly screw up anything? The idea that certain classes will end up with a ton of stats they don't need or vice versa is perhaps overstating a bit.
tl;dr- All other tanks have access to expertise talents; Warriors would benefit from one too, and this wouldn't overpower them or bloat the tree if implemented correctly. However, if they don't get one, it is not the end of the world either.
Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:
Originally Posted by Malleus
Unless there's a reason to save it for a specific point in the fight, someone should be getting laid every single time it's up.
Um? Weapon Expertise is a Rogue ability in the Combat tree, and Precision has been absent from Paladin talent trees since the first Beta tree came out. Paladins do have Combat Expertise, which is five expertise for five points (and a stamina boost too, of course). In the interests of completeness, Druid talent is Primal Precision - Spell - World of Warcraft, 5/10 expertise for 1/2 points. I also think you should discount the hit DK's get, because it's just a fairly standard dual-wield talent. It's the only +hit talent available to any class in a serious tanking build (Warriors can get Precision, but obviously that's a horrible tanking build), and the fact that it has anything to do with tanking is only because DK's are the only class that might reasonably be expected to tank while dual-wielding.
So, Paladins get max 5 expertise from talents, Druids get 10, DK's get 12 (if they go deep Blood, which may not be mandatory for tanking). Should Warriors get some expertise tacked on to an existing talent again? I think that would be just fine, all things considered. On the other hand, I wouldn't worry about the gear concerns all that much. All tanking classes should have similar use for +hit, and similar use for +expertise. As it stands, there are racial bonuses for 5 expertise; does this terribly screw up anything? The idea that certain classes will end up with a ton of stats they don't need or vice versa is perhaps overstating a bit.
tl;dr- All other tanks have access to expertise talents; Warriors would benefit from one too, and this wouldn't overpower them or bloat the tree if implemented correctly. However, if they don't get one, it is not the end of the world either.
Woops, my bad. I must have mixed up Combat and Weapon Expertise there. I also didn't realize that Precision was gone (I searched for Precision in the WotLK WoWhead database to find the link and since it was there, I didn't question it ><). I'll fix my previous post, thanks again.
Oh, and the reason I did not mention Druids is simple: They do not share the majority of their gear with us (only jewelry and trinkets) while DKs, Paladins and Warriors will share all Plate drops.
EDIT: Just to address the bolded part: It's a tier 2 talent for 3 points with a dual purpose. It increases your hit chance and adds offhand damage. You don't have to play DW to get benefit from it and considering that tier 1 of the same tree contains Toughness it would seem really stupid (to me, from a Warrior's PoV) to skip that talent in a serious tanking build.
I'm curious what their philosophy is with warriors regarding tanking. If a baseline warrior should be able to tank everything, then prot spec as it stands trivializes content. If prot spec is required, then no other spec can tank; it's quite the catch 22.
If it was me, and I was trying to change the philosophy of the warrior class from:
Arms = PVP
Fury = PVE Dps
Prot = Tanking
I'd at most give each tree 2 functions, maybe like:
Arms = PVP or Tanking (with emphasis on avoidance)
Fury = PVE dps or PVP
Prot = Tanking (with emphasis on mitigation) or Shield-based PVP
For me i always wanted them to think of the trees this way and include some pvp pve and tanking in each one.
Arms = Swing at stuff using one massive weapon at a time.
Fury = Swing at stuff using of two weapons at once.
Prot = Swing at stuff using a weapon and a shield.
EDIT: Just to address the bolded part: It's a tier 2 talent for 3 points with a dual purpose. It increases your hit chance and adds offhand damage. You don't have to play DW to get benefit from it and considering that tier 1 of the same tree contains Toughness it would seem really stupid (to me, from a Warrior's PoV) to skip that talent in a serious tanking build.
Well, it says "Increases your chance to hit with one-handed melee weapons by 3%," so unless that's blatantly wrong, it's only useful for dual-wielders, either as tanks or DPS. Dual-wield tanks will take it, 2h tanks won't. My point was that all dual-wield classes have access to some sort of +hit talent since they need so much more, and a dual-wielding DK tank is actually in a worse state with regard to hit than any other tanking class/spec by far. Hence, I don't think it's valid to say, essentially, "the rest of us don't get +hit talents."
Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:
Originally Posted by Malleus
Unless there's a reason to save it for a specific point in the fight, someone should be getting laid every single time it's up.
Out of curiousity, has anyone else noticed that with Death Knight talents, each tree tier has talents geared toward a different play style? For example, the first tier in the blood tree has 2 talents that are dps/pvp orientated and 1 that is more tank orientated. Same with the second tier of blood and so on in the other trees. It's like blizz is giving deathknights 6 talent trees instead of 3.
I only mention this because it is my hope that this kind of design philosophy is placed into the warrior tree (if not all classes). In a way, this supports Rule's idea of 2 functions per single tree. Here's to hoping
They like the idea behind Bladestorm/Heroic Leap abilities, and want to tweak them to be useful/powerful, hardly done with either.
They want Titan's Grip to be a no brainer, if you're that deep in Fury, you should have 5/5 TG.
All trees have crummy talents they want to eliminate(obviously).
Blood Frenzy will be dealt with later when they sort out all raid buffs/debuffs.
Slam will be looked at now that the RNG extra swings(Windfury/Sword Spec) have been neutered.
They think we're sometimes understandably bitter. :p
They really like TG, and definitely want to keep it around, but they find that it's a 5-point talent odd(I do too, make it a 51 pointer and tweak from there imo)
They still want to make Arms as raid viable as Fury.
They might bring free Expertise back for Protection.
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For the lurking Phoenix Wright faithful.
What is the most important thing to you? Won't you grant me the pleasure of taking it away.
Sorry for my ignorance but the changes were implemented earlier or in the latest build?:
Rend (new ranks) - Wounds the target causing them to bleed for 300 damage plus an additional [ (30% of MWS * AP) / 14 + 15% of MWB + 15% of mwb ] (based on weapon damage) over 15 sec. If the target becomes Enraged, Rend causes four times the normal damage.
Intercept - Charge an enemy, causing [ 12% of AP ] damage (based on attack power) and stunning it for 3 sec.
Sorry for my ignorance but the changes were implemented earlier or in the latest build?:
Rend (new ranks) - Wounds the target causing them to bleed for 300 damage plus an additional [ (30% of MWS * AP) / 14 + 15% of MWB + 15% of mwb ] (based on weapon damage) over 15 sec. If the target becomes Enraged, Rend causes four times the normal damage.
Intercept - Charge an enemy, causing [ 12% of AP ] damage (based on attack power) and stunning it for 3 sec.
They're both old, although I never noticed the intercept one. The only changes in the last build were to battle, berserker, and defensive stance. All three lost their Source: Quest tag. It's either a random reorganization or Blizzard's dumping the quests.
Well, it says "Increases your chance to hit with one-handed melee weapons by 3%," so unless that's blatantly wrong, it's only useful for dual-wielders, either as tanks or DPS. Dual-wield tanks will take it, 2h tanks won't. My point was that all dual-wield classes have access to some sort of +hit talent since they need so much more, and a dual-wielding DK tank is actually in a worse state with regard to hit than any other tanking class/spec by far. Hence, I don't think it's valid to say, essentially, "the rest of us don't get +hit talents."
Oh, I don't know about that. DW needs a minimum of 9% like every other tank at the moment to work well, anything past that is a nice bonus but not mandatory because that is the sweet number where your specials won't miss anymore. And the bulk of the threat is, I assume, going to be from specials and MH hits.
Nice to see they are considering to get Expertise back into the Prot tree anyway, it's a nice step up from "we don't want to give you guys hit/expertise via talents because you can get it from gear".
As Titan Grip seems to be the defying talent in the new Fury tree, I don't see why it shouldn't be moved to be a 51 point talent instead of Heroic Leap as Emeraude suggested. As Blizzard stated it is kinda funny that 1 point in the talent gives you dual wielding, and the rest just improve it.
Heroic Leap is a great concept as a talent though, and perhaps moving it to 51 point Arms talent would make sense. Then you'd have the heroic leaping Arms warriors and Fury warriors using Titan Grip. Those would be spec defying abilities, given that they both would be tweaked so that people would really want to have them in their builds.
If threat is not a problem hit and expertise are absolete. Currently threat is a problem. The biggest issue is that when gearing up the incoming rage decreases since defensive warrior rely heavily on rage when getting hit. Getting rage from doing 150-300 damage white hits simply does not work to keep up a rotation on itself. Additionally glancing blows make it even harder to gain rage from white hits. This is why mitigation warriors will mostly do more tps than avoidance warriors since they get a more constant stream of incoming rage. Sometimes you have to downgrade avoidance to keep up on threat.
But: If there is no need to push tps and dps can give the tank a lead than this is mostly a non-issue. If the incoming rage from damage get is sufficient to keep up a good rotation everything will be fine and the new shield slam talent simply rocks. We can get a chance to get one free shieldslam only consuming a global cooldown (but costs no rage). This sounds really good.
The new talents sound quite ok and I am curious how everything will turn out. Additionally take a look at the new gems: http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/.../jewel/all.jpg. You have gems for every stat now, even expertise. But is gemming expertise worth of losing 410+ health?
If threat is not a problem hit and expertise are absolete.
Not quite true - expertise also works as a mitigation stat by reducing boss parry haste. That's why it's such an awesome stat for tanks. Talking about which - are there any known changes concerning parry haste in WotLK?
If the mob is capable of killing a player under parry haste than this would be an issue, thats true.
Most mobs that could do so have no parry haste. Parry haste is dangerous when you are undergeared or you get a crushing blow in the parry haste. In WotLK there will be no more crushings so I think the chance to get parry gibbed is really small, but time will tell.
If the mob is capable of killing a player under parry haste than this would be an issue, thats true.
Most mobs that could do so have no parry haste. Parry haste is dangerous when you are undergeared or you get a crushing blow in the parry haste. In WotLK there will be no more crushings so I think the chance to get parry gibbed is really small, but time will tell.
Oh, I don't know about that. Felmyst under corrosion can hit up to 12k high end with Demo. If you get a parried at the wrong time there, you are in for serious pain (especially since the Corrosion damage doesn't seem to be tied to her swing timer so she can hit you right after casting it). The fact that Felmyst also requires good TPS from the tank makes Expertise the best stat to stack there.
If the mob is capable of killing a player under parry haste than this would be an issue, thats true.
Most mobs that could do so have no parry haste. Parry haste is dangerous when you are undergeared or you get a crushing blow in the parry haste. In WotLK there will be no more crushings so I think the chance to get parry gibbed is really small, but time will tell.
Parry hate is always dangerous, especially if chained (sometimes it happens too quickly to adjust and/or you can't afford to stop attacking, think Reliquary of Souls Phase 3) or coupled with secondary boss abilities that otherwhise affect healing or incoming damage.
And fact is that most bosses in TBC were capable of parry haste. Yes, Crushing Blows were another big factor when getting parry gibbed, but I think that one result of Crushing Blows getting kicked off the table will be more predictable, but comparatively overall higher boss damage. And hasting those hards hits would really hurt.
At any rate, I think we can agree that everyone would like to see some sort of passive expertise talent in the Protection tree, for reasons posted above by previous posters.
Liar you are right but Felmyst is not part of WotLK and I don't want to speculate about something I have little to no knowledge. You now have the opportunity to get yourself a second equip and socket expertise gems if needed, this is a plus imo.
One thing that really strikes me about the current WotLK trees is that we have a massive duplication of stat boosting talent effects.
Deep Protection has Vitality (10% STR, 5% STA)
Deep Arms has Strength of Arms (5% STR, 5% health)
Deep Fury has Improved Berserker Stance (10% AP in Berserker Stance) & Furious Resolve (6% STA)
What's the point of this duplication? Would it not be easier and more sensible to just have a 10% STR talent and a 10% STA talent, easily available in a low talent tier, and then use the spaces for more interesting and useful talents?
I don't have much to add to this thread, however there are a few things to mention about protection warrior itemisation and tanking in WotLK.
The aim of the itemization is to allow more people to be able to run 5 player instances, particular the non-heroic versions. Decently geared Arms or Fury warrior should be able to tank a non-heroic 5-player instance just fine, and Protection warriors should be able to do more damage in return. This for an example means that you should not need to look for Strength for your tanking set, because the way the itemisation is designed, you are going to end up with a lot of Strength on the specific tanking pieces you do pick up.
The philosophy is to make it more fun to do dailies, to play solo, to quest and offtank, and maybe even PvP, while at the same time have a decent damage output. Perhaps not at the same level of Fury damage output, but still decent nonetheless. Threat generation should become easier since you will now be hitting harder, and Rage starvation may also be a little less.
Traditionally tanks have been somewhat stuck in a choice between +threat and +mitigation gear, and many often felt that +mitigation was the only way to go. We are trying to change this, by allowing you to gather tanking gear that doesn't strangle your damage output as much.
The changes we've made for warrior tanking aren't shippable yet; we've still got more to do. When we make a build live on the beta realms, we don't ensure that each changed or new ability is bug free and good to go. So if you've found anything lacking in the current warrior arsenal, please assume it is a bug or perhaps it's just not fully implemented yet.
Vitality will synergize with the increased STR:block value ratio.
Improved Berserker Stance will leverage on all raid buffs (Might, Unleashed Rage) and not just STR buffs (Kings, MOTW)
Strength of Arms will provide better health returns than if it were STA.
And of course, all being deep talents means you can't just crossspec and get a massive scaling talent, which is apparently seen as bad by Blizzard. I guess that is the idea behind them being in all trees, but not shareable. They want deep specs to gain something in terms of scaling.
08/13/08, 8:37 PM
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