Don't know if I messed around somewhere on the calculations - if I did, please correct me:

Assuming STR as the STR you get from gear and other classes' buffs:

Shield of Righteousness:

1 STR = 0.5 BV

Base dmg with no talents/gear/etc: 1 STR = 1 DMG
W/ SHIELD SPEC+META: 1 STR = 1.4 DMG
W/ ONE HANDED SPEC: 1 STR = 1.47 DMG
W/ SHIELD OF THE TEMPLAR: 1 STR = 1.6905 DMG
W/ DIVINE STRENGTH (+15% STR) 1 STR = 1.944075 DMG

THREAT: 1 STR = 3.6937 THREAT
Considering 20% crit chance (or +10% dmg): 4.063 threat/cast for 1 str in their gear/other classes' buffs.

Shield Slam:

1 STR = 0.5 BV

Base dmg: 1 STR = 0.5 DMG
W/ Mastery+Meta: 1 STR = 0.7 DMG
W/ Def Stance: 1 STR = 0.63 DMG
W/ One Handed Spec: 1 STR = 0.693 DMG
W/ Imp. Shield Bash: 1 STR = 0.7623 DMG
Assuming Sword & Board is an effective 10% increase in SS DMG: 1 STR = 0.83853 DMG
W/ Vitality: 1 STR = 0.93
Assuming boss mitigation as 15%: 1 STR = 0.784 DMG (using this)

THREAT: 1 STR = 1.1368 THREAT
Considering 20% crit chance (or +20% dmg): 1.364 threat/cast for 1 str.

SS base dmg is 775 dmg. With all modifiers (+10% spec, +10% imp bash, +10% sword and board, -10% def stance, -15% armor, +20% crit): 947 AVG dmg/cast
Base threat: 1373 threat/cast

So we are looking at:
Shield Slam: 1373+(1.364*STR) = threat/cast
Shield of Righteousness: 4.063*STR = threat/cast

Basically, at 509 STR Shield of Righteousness passes SS in threat, with absolutely no other block gear. With block gear, it's significantly sooner.
Apart from the higher base damage, they have absolutely no negative modifiers in their damage, and a higher threat multiplier.

Considering ONLY the lowest-level epic shield there is:
Nax 10 Badge Loot Tank Shield
211 Block

For paladins:
211*1.4*1.05*1.15*1.9*1.1=745.5 threat/cast
For warriors:
211*1.4*0.9*1.1*1.1*1.1*0.85*1.2*1.45=523.3 threat/cast

So, yeah, a 222 threat difference on the shield. Makes up for.. almost 80 of the 509 STR.

I know it's early beta and they might change that and stuff - but shield slam is considerably higher threat than our second highest. And with what looks like will be average tanking gear in LK, it sure looks like we'll get 1k+ STR quite easily.

While I didn't calculate the whole rotation threat (do the other abilities in a prot pala rotation generate that much less threat than ours to make up for this difference?) - I don't see how they'll balance that without considerable nerfs to either righteous fury or shield of righteousness. If they buff Shield Slam, it might deal too much damage, since our threat modifier on damage is a lot lower, and bosses in general have higher mitigation than cloth users, for example.

Hmm, just brainstorming here again, but for those looking to add damage to the arms tree for pve dps, what about a talent like flurry, but that applies to abilities?

Something like:

Arms Race
10 rage
30 second cooldown

Reduces the cooldown of your next Mortal Strike and your next Whirlwind by 20/40/60% and the rage cost of your next Heroic Strike by 33/66/100%. This ability can only be used after scoring a critical hit.

With something like this, you could do more often MS and WW, and have a no rage cost (but no rage generated on the strike) HS. It also wouldn't really be overpowered in pvp, since no one's going to stand there for all the gcd's of 2 cycles worth of abilities.

The other idea I had was more of a pvp toy I guess, inspired from the Fire Mage talent fiery payback.

Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D. get it? Warriors? Rage? Damn i'm funny )

When your total health drops below 20%, your melee damage done increases by 7/14/20% for 8 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 30 seconds.

So they get you into execute range, but someone's going down with you, heh.

What needs to be done is the removal of mortal strike and blood thirst as talents. They should become stock abilities like shield slam. MS is great for pvp and and lackluster for pve, blood thirst is great for pve and its newly added 1.5 percent of total health healing makes its a requirement for lvling up at any type of decent rate.

They need to give a reason for someone to be in arms stance, so it needs some type of bonus as others have already mentioned. I kind of like how arms is being given all the bleed effects, maybe they can work something else off that. Maybe a personal increase in DPS to a bleeding target.

People also mention that overpower needs somewhat of a change. Id like to propose a mechanic change that could be pvp and pve, maybe turned into a talent but basically, while in arm stance your attacks from behind have a ?% chance of "dazing" the target causing it to move some percent slower or have its mitigation abilities debuffed for a small amount of time, during this time you would be able to use your overpower vs the target. This would make the ability pve and pvp usable.

It would also be a good idea to consolidate the weapon type masteries into 1 talent, it just seems silly for a master of arms to not be a master of all arms. If there is fear of people abuse this in dual wield make it work with the mainhand weapon only.

Also being as people say that a lot of the upper tier talents suck and i agree, how about putting a talent in the upper tiers of arms that allows them to equip a 2 hander in their off hand slot with the purpose of only getting the stat bonuses of it and maybe the cool visual effect of having on your characters back. You would still be swinging the mainhand only but would get the benefits of both weapons stats. This would also work as a way of using furious assault and whirlwind to thier fullest ability.

Right now protection spec has been getting the most love, they have been given some amazing talents that are good in pve and pvp. Their talent that reduces an intervened party members damage by 60 percent for six seconds and allows their charges and intercepts to break root and snare effects is actually a decent pvp skill. That along with shockwave and concussive blow doing some okay damage and stunning the shit out of someone make for a possible protection specced arena combatant.

It's trivial to force a Revenge since it effects everything but miss. Should probably make Counterattack passive and we are good to go with a slightly different mechanic than the Revenge mechanic. Plus, it makes for a great AoE ability if it's passive.

As long as we are brainstorming:

Brother in Arms
requires 30 points in protection
Links your health with another warrior, 20% of direct damage against you is transferred to the linked player.

MT and OT talent in one

Seperate weapon masteries might be important for PvP balance, so a warrior can't pull out his mace for stuns when fighting certain classes, and then switch to a sword or axe when he'd rather have the extra burst potential. Making the player choose between being able to control, do burst damage, or do potentially really high but less reliable burst, is a valid reason to keep them seperate.

It also doesn't have much bearing on the tree's overall performance. It wouldn't matter in the slightest for PvE beyond upgrading to a different weapon type being less obnoxious.


It kinda feels like blizz has painted the Arms tree into a corner a little bit. In the past, the tree has been excessively powerful in PvP, and so good as raid support dps that it has arguably displaced the more traditional PvE dps spec. Their hesitancy to make deep arms powerful and appealing probably has a lot to do with the developers not wanting either of those things to happen again.

I'm fairly confident that Blizzard can tweak the numbers until threat output is competitive. I'm not as confident that they'll update the mechanics in a way that some of the long-standing issues about playing a warrior tank are resolved. Specifically, the extraordinary unpredictability and often-unsatisfactory rate of rage generation (an issue that currently affects DPS warriors somewhat less, but may return as an issue with the loss of Windfury giving extra attacks).

Here's what I'd like to see:

(1) Modify dodges, parries, misses, and even resists to yield half the rage they would have provided had they connected (adjusted for armor reduction, defensive stance, etc.). The 2-rage on dodge/parry talent is admirable, but it's horribly inconsistent across situations; when tanking AoE packs I'm sure it'll end up with warriors having far more rage than they can spend, but it does virtually nothing for single target tanking, which is where rage starvation is the biggest liability anyway.

(2) Naturally higher rage gain from damage when a shield is equipped. Essentially just to bring it up to what you'd expect with a two-hander or when dual-wielding. There's no really good reason to be suffering a penalty in the rate your core resource regenerates just because you've got a shield on.

(3) Modify Bloodrage to yield more rage, say in the neighborhood of 30 (and possibly remove the 10 rage after-effect trickle, not to mention the health cost). The 10 rage it currently provides really isn't useful in most situations; making it provide enough rage to actually *do* something makes it more useful and more strategic, as opposed to another step in the out-of-combat Battle Shout refresh process. It's on a fairly long cooldown for what it does, so there's no need for it to be so anemic. And just scrap the improvement talent, since nobody takes it (or alternatively, modify it to restore 5-8% life on use, to make it more useful to PvP-oriented specs).

They could tack on some AoE threat if they wanted to, but I'm not particularly concerned about that aspect of it right now.

Those are basically the three main points. In general, I think rage needs to be more abundant, as much with DPS warriors as with tanking warriors. In fact, I'd be fine with them normalizing rage generation even moreso than it is now, so long as the "baseline" rage gain increases very substantially. They seem too overly cautious about the threat of "infinite rage", and in their hesitancy to increase rage gain, they're substantially handicapping warriors in many situations: undergeared or underbuffed warriors in a raid scenario, PvP warriors who aren't being focus fired, and tanking warriors whose gear is "too good" for their particular environment.

They need to relax their restrictions. In a PvE scenario, "infinite rage" is roughly equivalent to being a rogue without combat potency, or a paladin who's actually taking damage. And with that said, they can still increase rage gain rate and consistency quite a bit without really approaching infinite rage.

With Retaliation going onto a 5min CD with no link to Shield Wall, we're getting a decent version of that...

Especially with Challenging Shout going to a 3min CD.

Retaliation scales in reverse with your tanking gear. It does not trigger from avoided attacks, not even (fully?) blocked attacks. Having a Counterattack trigger on Parry scales with your gear atleast.

What needs to be done is to make worthwhile options at the same level so people can actually customize rather than be cookie cutter. Making talent trees deeper has just made an arms race between them. It doesnt matter what a 51 point talent is, it has to beat the 21 in the other trees. Talent trees need to be growing wider as they get deeper. I would like to see talents where if you choose one, you can't choose a certain other one. Put a 31pt talent in arms that, for example, does more damage than MS but no healing debuff. But if you take that talent you cant take MS. And then have both be possible prereqs to things like Improved MS which would affect both.
This would make the trees the choose style of play, and not between PVE or PVP, without having to balance all trees for both. I hope blizzard really doesnt try to balance 3 trees for both because it will inevitably be a mess or screw some specs completely. I would rather they just said Arms=PVP, Fury=PVE than that.

Random, but all three stances now have updated animated 3d icon's when you change stances.

WF is a clear buff to dual wield dps even without taking the predictability into account. 20% haste means 20% more MAIN and OFF hand attacks, not just 20% more main hands. Its easier to control heroics with WF as well. Extra AP is nice, but actually it doesnt even really outperforms the extra sharpening stone you can use. Imp WF was what 650 ap? Thats 130 average ap boost for MH only. An adamantite stone gives 12 damage (with a 2.6 speed weapon around 65ap) and 14 crit. 65 ap 14 crit to both hands and specials, vs 130 ap to MH only.

Wf however kills 1x2h slam build. Thus my idea with orienting arms as tank support/attack from front/bleed+overpower based spec. Noone even as much as flamed it .

There are already screenshots flying around, with prot palas shield slamming for 8.2k
http://www.outlawzpc.com/critaw.jpg

What kind of buff to warrior shield slam you think can balance the two abilities.

I think a more important question is "Why should these abilities be balanced against each other?" While I don't have a problem with doing a comparison between the two, you can't take just those two abilities as indicative of much of anything. The overall threat of comparable threat rotations is going to be the important thing, not which of these two abilities ends up doing more damage. Everyone is well aware that changes to the Warrior tree and base abilities are coming, and I've seen plenty of blue posts stating things to the effect of "We are worrying about getting abilities sorted out first, then we will take care of balancing threat (or DPS, or healing, or whatever) between classes." Please don't panic just yet.

That shouldn't be construed as a slight to Zegai's analysis, by the way, which I found interesting. All I can contribute from a Paladin perspective is that our rotations are clearly changing significantly from BC, and we're incorporating several entirely new abilities as well as a radically different itemization paradigm. There's some data floating around about preliminary threat impressions (here, for instance), but obviously so much is subject to change right now. Also, Shield Specialization doesn't seem to be increasing block value from STR right now, only BV from gear; whether this is deliberate or a bug is not known.

tl;dr- Warriors aren't done, Blizzard isn't even attempting to balance threat yet, please don't worry about shield-related threat abilities too much.

I suspect people are interested in balancing the abilities specifically since blizz has already taken steps to balance other like abilities (shield blocks effectively being the same, shield wall, etc.).

Oh yeah, I forgot about shield blocking to raise SS dmg. That would be.. an extra 20% damage? But only on non procs..

@Aeverius: the main issue is that shield slam is the "flagship" of the prot warrior threat arsenal. It generates a load more threat than devastate in any state (you can't compete really) and even scales better. Unless the rest of the paladin's rotation just plain ass sucks (forgive the terms) and is there just for show, there'll be a major difference in threat unless they balance these abilities specifically.

The problem here is simple: paladin's threat is based on holy dmg, which isn't mitigated by armor. A 15% estimative of armor is a low one - a fully debuffed one usually has from 15-25% (I calculated some of our Teron kills at 18%). Then the threat is multiplied by 1.9x. Since the base damage escales that much better, with even better scaling multiplicatives after it, it scales too well.

There is no ability in the game capable of doing damage on a 2 DMG for 1 STR ratio (well, certainly none that I know of); Shield of Righteouness goes there and beyond. Bloodthirst, for example, is somewhat near 1 for 1, but scales with normal AP as well. And that is a DPS ability, made for that.

About the shield mastery/spec not affecting STR-BV, has it been asked it that's a bug?

Possible ideas for Shield slam:
- Incite affecting Devastate/Shield Slam;
- Sword & Board changed to proc on SS/Dev crits and give an extra 10/20/30/40/50% damage on crits for SS/Dev;
- Critical Block giving a buff when it procs that lasts 5-10secs.

S&B -> chance on shield slam to gain extra attack with weapon and chance on devastate to increase block value by XXX for XX seconds or grants shield slam increased chance to crit by X/X/X percent?

Crit% chance -> increase chance to critical block?

You made me think about S&B giving 10% guaranteed crit on next abilty. The buff shows up and the prot warrior can use it as he wants. Shield block + Shield slam for guaranteed 4xBlock Value threat nuke on the boss, Showckwave or Thunderclap for some nice aoe threat, even when doing dps with dualwielding Devastate spam, the crit on next special is usefull. With some basic math, it would be a 10% extra crit chance to all abilties, and is very deep in prot tree so can't be used elsewhere. Remember that warrior tank gear is very poor on crit chance, and beta itemisation doesn't show much either.

I'd much prefer to see a flat 10% or 15% increased damage on the next (i.e. free) Shield Slam, so that you get some tangible, consistent benefit. It's already of very questionable usefulness, given the low proc rate; I think it would be needlessly frustrating every time your S&B buff failed to actually yield a crit, for a talent that's already fairly random.

In reverse-ish order: Aug 12, Shield Spec not affecting BV from STR; it has been reported as a bug, but no word yet on whether it is or not. The expectation is that it is a bug, of course, but who knows. I haven't seen anything relating to the Warrior equivalent; it would be interesting to know if it's acting the same or not.

I agree that SotR scales phenomenally well, and it may in fact need to be toned down. Balancing scaling between the various tank classes (and we're not discussing Ferals or DK's at all here, but they're in the mix too) is as important (maybe even more important) than balancing threat at the start of lvl 80 raiding. Certainly no one would be happy if Prot Warrior changes made them kings of threat in T7, but allowed them to fall behind after that due to poor scaling.

So, I suppose I see your point with regard to both abilities' power and position in their respective rotations as an indicator of the balance between those rotations. I'll agree that if rotations outside of those abilities produce fairly similar amounts of threat, then Shield Slam/SotR should end up being balanced against each other, and that may well be the case. I'm still not going to be too concerned until a) Warriors get their tree and abilities reworked as planned, and b) Blizzard actually moves into the threat-balancing stage.

As a block-value related aside, the WotLK meta gem is currently listed as 5% BV increase; the BC one has apparently been nerfed accordingly.

[e] To clarify (thanks to Liar for spelling it out) for those who haven't been following the discussion: when I say Shield Spec I mean the Paladin Shield Specialization which is comparable to Warriors' Shield Mastery. The Warrior talent Shield Specialization is not being talked about at this time. Well done, Blizzard, for your completely confusing cross-class talent nomenclature. At least both Shield Specs have the same icon.

Just to be clear: Whenever anybody is saying "shield spec" in this context, they mean "Shield Mastery", right? Because I could quite easily imagine some DPS warriors new to the Shield Slam scene misreading the description of "Shield Specialization" and thinking to cherry-pick it from low-level prot for cheap shieldy goodness.

Block Value from Strength is not adjusted by Shield Mastery for Warriors on live. Here is the data I used to make this conclusion:

BV from gear: 398
Strength: 165
Tooltip BV: 524
(398*1.3)+(8)=525.4

BV from gear: 482
Strength: 182
Tooltip BV: 635
(482*1.3)+(9)=635.6

*BV meta
BV from gear: 314
Strength: 182
Tooltip BV: 448
(314*1.4)+(9)=448.6
XXX (314*1.3*1.1)+(9)=458.02 XXX

BV from gear: 183
Strength: 588
Tooltip BV: 266
(183*1.3)+(29)=266.9

*BV meta
BV from gear: 431
Strength: 182
Tooltip BV: 611
(431*1.4)+(9)=
XXX (431*1.3*1.1)+(9)=625.33 XXX

I got these numbers by swapping out gear on my warrior and copying the values from my character window. I used the mod ItemValue to sum up the Block Value from gear.

Another interesting fact I pulled from this data is that the block value meta gem stacks additively with Shield Mastery, for a total multiplier of 1.4. This was probably already known, but I hadn't seen it anywhere so I thought I'd point it out.

In any case, if they are moving to a Block Value paradigm where you get all (or most) of your Block Value from Strength instead of spending itemization points on it specifically, I would expect this issue to be fixed. Otherwise Blizzard risks making Shield Specialization obsolete, and I'm sure that isn't their goal.

Strength probably just got left out of the calculation because it is such a small factor in your overall Block Value in the original game. It's likely they just haven't got around to changing it in the beta, and they might not have even been aware of the issue before it was reported.