Liar

They are talking about the Paladin talent Shield Specialization - Spell - World of Warcraft which is equivalent to our Shield Mastery - Spell - World of Warcraft. I am quite scared to think of what sort of Shield of Righteousness crits Paladins will be able to get it if/when it gets fixed for both classes.

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

 

Kire

Like everyone know, they want to make fury warriors more aviable in PvP. More burst dmg, heroic leap, and then if you look at the talent tree, some talents like piercing howl, bloodgraze, enrage etc.

I am playing a fury warrior myself, all the way from karazhan level till now 1/6 sunwell. And I've always prefered the fury warriors playstyle ontop of arms.
When doing pvp though, I have to respec, whatever the sittuation, battle grounds or arena. Not just for MS, but also for the higher survival.

Warriors are supposed to be the renegades in WoW, but I usually find me, rooted, stunned or frozen firmly in place. And with WotLK coming we will have absolutly nothing that will brake these effects.
One day though when I was leveling an alt I came across nagas and scorpids with an ability called Thoughen. What that ability does is that it acts like a stackable buff on the mob. Each time you couce dmg to the mob it will gain 1 stack or if you crittically hit, it will gain 2. What these stacks are doing are reducing the dmg incoming by a certain amount.

What this buff would do for a warrior is that it would become active as soon as you lost controll of your character.



What will this do practically?

First of all it will help warriors from getting doted and feared to death. But also in other scenarios, when stuned by a rogue or a paladin, or rooted by a mage or druid.

What I like about the mechanics of it is that it leaves the attacker with a choice. The mage for example would benefit more from casting a frost bolt then an icelance while you're frozen, it's of course harder to cast a frostbolt then icelance and easier to reflect, but that would be a part of the cake, more thinking by the mage. Also wouldn't make it as easy for priests to dot and fear us to death and more cases.

Also, with the buff stacking 2 times on a crittical hit works with the resilience philosofy.



How could this ability be implemented in the game then? My first idea was to put it as a talent in the protection tree, as it would help tanks aswell with mobs that stun etc (since you cannot parry or dodge then). But to make it aviable to fury warriors then would also make it aviable to arms. And to have both second wind and Thoughen would possibly be too much. So the last option is to put it rather deep in the fury tree. I know some people think it's a PvE dps tree, but obviusly blizzard doesn't think that way, so why not take the full step?


I post it here to get some serius feedback of wether this ability is something that would work ingame, or something that really doesn't fit the warrior class.

 

norikk

Blizzard mentioned in a blue post they want tanking to be FUN. There is a very interesting discussion on "What is Fun?" going over at Tankspot. I'm posting the link here for reference:
WotLK: What Is Fun? - TankSpot

 

Zegai

That'd be quite hard to balance.. we don't have skills aimed at using two weapons, and we'd probably need some kind of talent that gives ~+45% of our armor when dual-wielding.

Double the parry rate wouldn't be even close to balanced either, your shield isn't worth that much avoidance.

Unless, of course, you stay without the bonus armor and just the bonus parry, but then we'd need a severe overhaul of a lot of talents to avoid: a) close to 100% avoidance and b) rage starvation.

If anything, it's far more likely that Blizzard will do something in this style for DKs...

 

Uglesh

The problem as always is that "FUN" is very subjective. Some of us love the current set up where we have to try to manage a good rotation between sheild blocks... others find is too hard or tedious. The idea of Dual Wield tanking just doesn't fit the "tank" mold in my mind. Kind of like having a rogue evasion tank.... it's really just gimmicky and would require massive balance changes to prevent it from becoming too strong or too weak.

In my mind, all the current tanking changes are based on making it EASIER and not necessarily more FUN... but again this is all personal opinion.

My suggestions would be to create a better system of rewarding "smart" play. In other words, give me more moves that build on eachother or require quick reaction. Revenge is a good example of this type of skill, however the abilities need to be good enough to be worth using a GCD on (or perhaps be removed from GCD altogether). If you ever played EQ2, I really enjoyed the "Heroic Opportunity" design that actually rewarded smart group play and not just flat 2-3 button mashing.

Overall they need to obviously make a system that appeases the masses, but I really wish they would still allow enough room for talented players to excel above the masses. I just tend to believe that Blizz is mistaken if they believe that suddenly more people will want to tank now. The new changes will make it easier to tank, but that won't matter to every person who I have seen apply to countless guilds as "Warrior: dps only"... and there's PLENTY of those.

 

Zegai

And there is the fact that they are doing everything they can to improved DPS warriors tanking (even going to the point of saying a 51-pointer shouldn't be that powerful for ONE aspect of tanking) - while prot tanking is largely unchanged. That looks.. weird to me, even more so with fury and arms rather lackluster as they are (or appear to be) now.

I'm not in the Beta and can't comment how Shockwave compares to Thunderclap and how both of them compare to Consecrate/H. Shield/Ret Aura/B. of Sanct, but I'm sceptical if it is even close..

All in all, I agree with Uglesh. While I don't mind not having to mindlessly press shield block every 5secs, more stuff that relies on awareness, attention and overall skill is good. If revenge scales as badly as it looks, you could just spam Shield Slam/Dev using shield block on every CD and heroic strike when possible. Maybe even use a do-it-all macro..

Sure, not all that different from today - and that's probably exactly the point.

 

Nezralix

I added my own contribution to that thread.

I really think that rage starvation is the primary obstacle to making tanking "fun" for the average player, and the solution to that is to (duh) give players more rage. Given that the class is safely limited by GCD's and skill cooldowns, they need to stop worrying so damn much about infinite rage.

If I had to pick *one* change that I'd enjoy more than any other change in Wrath, it would be dodges and parries (and potentially misses and resists) giving some percentage of the rage you would gained if you'd been hit (and Stalwart Protector is no solution at all). I really hate this broken notion that avoiding damage is bad, and that you should substitute in DPS gear if you want to have enough rage to press your buttons.

 

renegar

What I hate is how they've dispersed all of our class defining abilities amongst all of the other tanking classes, and yet when somebody brings up the fact that thunderclap still only hits 4 targets and Shockwave still has a pitifully small area of effect, the default response is "Well we don't want to step on the Paladins toes, do we?" I find the whole double standard issue very disconcerting. The idea that they have the right to be just as good as us at what we do best, but we still have sub-par tools to do what they do best. That's what bothers me the most right now. I only wish I had a beta key so I could post this somewhere that is likely to actually be seen by Blizzard.

 

JamesVZ

Personally, the state of the warrior *currently* is the best it has ever been in WoW Live. I enjoyed playing the beta warrior a bit more due to the overall flexibility and ease of use, but the system now does allow for smart play, and a good warrior is a night and day difference to a bad or even mediocre warrior. I wouldn't change a thing except the little shit -- our tricks that we use should definitely be on a shorter cooldown, props to the reduction on Shield Wall's cooldown. Potions generally don't do it for me, and my timer is usually used up by Ironshields. Gurgthock mentioned somewhere before that a 'good' change to these would be for them to give like 4k armor for 10 seconds on the same 2 minute cooldown, I disagree. They should be a flat reduction damage or enough armor to generally cap us out for those 10 seconds to give us another reliable trick.

The hardest part about playing a protection warrior right now is keeping a watch on your HP flow and knowing when to use those oh shit buttons, and which ones to use. I might use Moroes' pocket watch before I use last stand if I'm expecting a string of blows, or I might use Last Stand if my hitpoints drops below the average hit that's been coming in. Giving us more oh shit abilities, both in number and variety, would certainly make playing a protection warrior a lot, lot more fun and less stressful. We don't need any new abilities for the most part, and in fact I'd wish they'd stay away from them because they always seem to be implemented in the worst possible ways for the first year of the expansion and end up making my life a lot less fun as a protection warrior.

Another thing that would help would be to remove Improved Thunderclap and make it base 20% slow 100% more damage 175% threat or whatever it is talented now, and then lifting the stance restriction. Allowing our DPS warriors to cover demo shout and thunderclap would go miles towards lowering overall stress in raid environments. In fact, I'd just much rather Shockwave end up replacing Thunderclap all together ala Devastate/Sunder Armor. Stun component to it means we won't have to use it on bosses if our DPS can, and if it just opens up the max targets it can hit it would be miles better than the positional, guaranteed to be extremely frustrating Shockwave. Imagine how much of a pain in the ass it's going to be having to not only tab target your devastates/shield slams/revenges as you Thunderclap, but now you have to Shockwave as well, which you'll also have to watch the diminishing returns AND longer cooldown for maximum effectiveness. Just a pain in the ass.

Other than that, just minor tweaks in the numbers. Our taunts won't be resisted provided they don't fuck up itemization and value strength a bit more than it's worth and actually let us cap hit/expertise in a reasonable time frame (say, towards the end of the first tier). I'd prefer to see strength give a greater benefit to Shield Block Value as well, since block rate seems to be moving more towards the mitigation side of things, rather than avoidance. The recent change to Shield Block is nice since you'll definitely notice a string of blocked hits for 5 seconds rather than just the next one in the heat of battle.

SUMMARY:
More Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free-Tricks ala Moroes.
Less abilities that will ultimately be only a pain in our ass.
Don't fuck the itemization up.
Tweak the numbers to put is in the right spot regarding Strength.

Viola, the perfect raiding warrior. Levelling as protection would be about 20x easier with Combat Regeneration, since we'll generally lose roughly the same percentage of life, if not more, but bandages only heal a fixed number of hitpoints that's a drop in the goddamn bucket to our HP pool. If bandages healed say 40-50% of your life, that would be a much better change. In fact, why the hell hasn't that been done already? Chop, chop Blizz!

EDIT:
Disagree completely. Rage management is what sets the great tanks apart from the good tanks. It's not hard to put out a respectable amount of threat simply by facerolling your threat keys, but properly managing your rage to the point that you can maintain the maximum possible threat rotation AND any needed mitigation abilities like Shield Block or Thunderclap or what have you, is where the proverbial mad phat skills comes into play.

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In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Uglesh

The problem is that under the current build, as your gear improves your rage generation becomes less and less consistent. Its a matter of why punish people for having good avoidance stats.... it's also why when someone asks me to tank a 5 man Heroic that I have to do the gear juggle to try to loose enough avoidance or I will often sit at 0 rage for 4-6 swings EASILY. Changes to rage generation won't make raid MT'ing any different, but it would vastly improve the smaller man content.

 

JamesVZ

Again, I'm going to have to disagree. When you overgear an instance to the point that you get rage starved, you simply change your gear. I still haven't run an instance where my gear is 'too good' or some jazz, and I'm usually running around with t6 pieces in every, or near every, slot.

Maybe if they streamline the gear such that it heavily favors avoidance and there's little to no threat oriented pieces, then we'll have a problem, but as long as there remains multiple pieces for same slots with different tanking focuses, then I think we'll be fine.

Official Slackie Fanclub. The dude gets ALL the ladies.

In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Bregonn

What really irks me about the whole arms/fury warrior should be able to tank thing is that at the same time we'll be getting 2 specs to switch between. Unless they make the cooldown between switches so long as to make it virtually useless that will mean that 95+% of all warrior will only tank in their prot spec. So why even bother trying to make DPS warriors able to tank 5 man content? It seems a huge waste of effort to me and most likely only cause the class to be less focussed. Am I the only one worried about that?

 

Nezralix

Well, we're going to have to agree to disagree then, because I thoroughly disagree with both of your points. Something that "separates good tanks from bad tanks" isn't implicitly positive; chugging mana potions every two minutes separates good healers from great healers, but few people argue that willingness to throw consumables at a problem is a good quality to be emphasizing. And in your case, I believe that what you're suggesting is not an attribute of "mad phat skills" but rather a high degree of obsessive compulsive disorder. Micromanaging a frustrating, finite resource should be the realm of turn-based strategy games, not a tanking class in WoW.

And not only does rage generally come at a trickle rather than a wave (which is distinctively un-rage-like, based on concepts that most people conjure up in their heads when they consider the word "rage"), but it's generated extraordinarily inconsistently, both across different types of tanking situations *and* within the span of a single tanking situation. That's not fun or intriguing; it's another RNG headache.

You may feel that WoW is entirely about managing rotations and optimizing your resource usage, but I think that should be a small part of it. It's much more important to have an engaging action-response flow built into game mechanics, which is the part of tanking that I find most enjoyable, and which is often lacking in DPS or healing classes. To that end, I think they've probably hit the nail on the head with feral druids, who have what typically amounts to a much more liberal flow of rage.

Since the "warrior" image appeals to me a little more directly, I hope they can make it work. If not, then I get enough micro-managerial bullshit in my professional life, so I'll be playing a different class and leaving the masochism to people who are better suited by it.

 

JamesVZ

I don't understand how shifting the entire paradigm of the warrior tank class to that system, which may end up either being good or bad, will do anything to alleviate the pressures of high end raiding as a warrior tank. What you're proposing is almost an entirely new class, not an upgrade, or a fix, or an evolution of the current one, which is just fine to those of us that have been playing one forever and a day.

EDIT: I should also point out that comparing the raw skill involved in playing a class (call it obsessive compulsive disorder all you like, but the bottom line is it IS a skill) to consumable management is a bit asinine at best.

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In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

gia

Itemizing for STR might fix that if they get it right. The reason druids have better rage generation is mostly because they have much better DPS in bear form and have stats on tanking gear (agility) that actually improve it. They also don't have to spam shield block every 5 seconds which is effectively draining 2 rage per second.

Both of these things are getting changed.

 

Nezralix

Are you seriously claiming that being severely rage starved is "just part of playing a warrior"? I can't imagine that's really what you're trying to say. But if that's what you are trying to say, then it's probably still a little less bizarre than your statement that improving rage generation is tantamount to changing the entire class, because that's just really out there.

Yes, they're very different. I was pointing out that your assertion--that something is inherently good because it separates exceptional players from mediocre ones--is wrong. There are numerous artifacts of questionable game mechanics in WoW that prevent players from being as competitive as they could be. For each one of those, an argument needs to be made whether that result is making the game more or less enjoyable for players, all the while presenting a reasonable challenge. While struggling against insufficient rage may be challenging, I argue that it's most definitely not enjoyable.

 

Liar

Their rage flow is not just because they have better DPS in bear form. It's because they use a 2.5 speed 2h for rage calculations whereas Warriors will be stuck with the 1h rage formula.

That is what it might boil down in the extreme cases though. What are you going to because RNG punished you on the pull of a mob and you are avoiding hits for 10 secs straight? I have seen it happen at Illidan even in a non-avoidance set and all you can do there is exactly that: pop a friggin Rage pot or pray to the RNG gods to get hit already. And while sitting down or eating a crush deliberately on trash/Teron is no news to me, I am wary to do that on a boss with high burst potential such as Illidan. And we all know how fun those "Umm, sorry guys, I avoided some of the bosses attacks so you got aggro and died" wipes are, right? What are we going to do, scold our DPS for our RNG streak? They are not to blame, neither are we.

But just maybe we are talking about two different things here. It may be possible that you think that Warriors who faceroll on their HS key deserve getting rage starved, fair enough. What about those of us that get screwed by the RNG and avoid hits at the start of fights/after aggro resets? Are we to blame for wearing T6 gear in a T6 instance and rage starving ourselves with it? We have to gear for specific fights by downgrading, that's how it is nowadays and I got used to it. Most of the time it's even fun but I still feel sort of weird because tanks are the only ones that have to do it.

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

 

JamesVZ

I'm saying that you're overstating the frequency at which it happens, and the severity of the impact that it has in the overall course of a fight. I'm not saying by any means the RNG can rage starve you in just about every situation, what I'm saying is that it's just minor enough of an issue that you can mitigate the effect it has by doing simple things like swapping gear out. And I'm not even talking about downgrading to lesser ilvl pieces for the most part here, either. Usually doing something like swapping in a high sta/armor/threat piece for a high avoidance/mitigation piece is enough to do it, same ilvl and everything. Call me out of the ordinary, but the only times I find myself threat capping the raid is when I don't actually have the tools available to me to produce threat -- be it windfury, feral crittage, or just plain old threat gear all around. Sure, I've had the first 10 seconds of a fight go on without me taking a hit, but I pick up and move on, it's just not a big deal. It happens in the course of the fight? So what, your DPS needs to adjust accordingly, it's not a big deal in 9 out of 10 cases.

Don't get me wrong here, avoidance not giving rage is absolutely a problem that needs to be fixed in some way -- just definitely not to the extreme that you guys are suggesting. It shouldn't trickle in, nor should it flow in with the force of ten thousand monkeys on PCP or some shit. Rage management is *the* mechanic that seperates warrior tanks, what else would be left if you could just mash everything all at once and produce all the threat in the world? What purpose would rage serve if that was the case, then?

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In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Liar

Then we are agreeing for the most part here. If there is a way to give us rage from avoidance then that should be good enough. Stalwart Defender is a so-so talent. 2 rage is nice but not sure it's enough to compensate for a hit that would have given you 50ish rage if it landed either. And to top it of, it's a Prot only talent. What about Arms/Fury specced Warrior tanks?
Also, rage starvation via RNG can happen mid-fight, yes. But that isn't as much of a big deal because it evens out over time. 10 secs of rage starvation on the pull or just when you eat an aggro reset? That's just asking bad things to happen.

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

 

Densor

I'd say there's a big difference between generating 300 TPS less (using Live values for TPS, and WotLK talents) because you aren't able to use Heroic Strike on cooldown and actually not having enough rage to use your normal GCD abilities. Between Bloodrage, white damage, and Stalwart Defender, I don't see how you could start a fight without the ability to use your GCDs for at least 20 seconds, probably closer to 30. If you haven't taken a hit from the boss in that period of time, then you are really over geared or really (un)lucky.

You get 20 rage from Bloodrage and 2 rage (possibly 7, depending on how scared you are of rage starvation) from Replenish - Spell - World of Warcraft at the start of the fight. You gain 2 rage per mitigated attack, assuming a boss swing time of 2s, that's 2.4s with a TC-like effect up, which is .833 rage per second. You get white swings for probably 9 or 10 rage per hit, with a swing time of 1.66 on average. That's 6 rage per second. Since GCD's are 1.5 seconds long, you gain approximately 10.25 rage per GCD, plus .375 rage from Replenish. That means only Shield Slam is "costing" rage (and rend if that turns out to be better threat per GCD than devastate). That's also not counting Anger Management.

Obviously if the RNG hates you and the boss parries a bunch of your attacks and you are missed instead of dodging or parrying and Replenish doesn't proc, you might have issues, but that's no different than how it currently is, where having your attacks repeatedly parried hurts your TPS a ton and possibly gets you killed, which has nothing to do with overgearing the content.

As for not being able to use HS for the first 30 seconds, that's what Misdirects are for and intelligent DPS'ers aren't going to pull aggro if you are generating slightly sub-par TPS. It isn't hard for a DPS'er to watch your rage bar and wait until it spikes upwards to burn cooldowns and such.

 

Nezralix

You're looking at this a little narrowly. You appear to be of the mind that against raid bosses that you hit for 8000, you'll probably have enough rage. I think that's generally true. In fact, I'd say that you're even bothering to debate that situation suggests that there's something to my argument; you shouldn't have rage issues in that situation, ever. Getting hit for 8000 means you'll be getting no less than 72.7 rage per hit. It's hilarious to try to compare that to the 2 rage you get from a dodge or parry.

But not every encounter is a 25-man raid. There are 10-mans, there are 5-mans, and then there are even group quests, and presumably you might like to be able to do all of those in your raid-acquired gear. I would. There's no reason why players shouldn't. I've played a warrior for over three years now; I know the benefit of swapping in DPS gear. I don't think I should have to do that.

I'm frankly very surprised that there's so much resistance to what is, in my view, a no-brainer. Life as a tank would be *better* if dodges and parries awarded you some reasonable percentage of the rage you'd get hit for otherwise. You take *some* penalty some avoiding damage, but it balances somewhat with the bonus of not taking the damage! It stops being the potentially crippling situation of only getting rage from hitting for 5 rage per swing (your numbers are off on that, by the way: http://rehfeld.us/wow/rage-test.html).

You've gone to a lot of trouble to sort of hint that you can make up for these dodge/parry streaks, but why? It's very annoying, but in terms of the gameplay mechanics of playing a warrior and in terms of inconsistencies in choosing equipment. You've demonstrated you can kinda-sorta work around the problem a little bit, but why is that sufficient to decide that it's not a problem?

 

JamesVZ

The problem is that you're acting like it's the end-all be-all problem to the warrior class, when nothing could be further from the truth. Rage starvation sucks, no doubt about it, but we haven't been actually rage starved since 1.0->1.2 when they finally fixed the block/dodge/parry->miss bug, and maybe the brief period in 2.0 where they went waaaay overboard with the normalization formula. It's a simple case of learn to play in my opnion, why can't mages just chain cast arcane blast?!?! Why can't rogues use whatever ability they want with reckless abandon?! It's a core part of the class that you have to deal with, and one that's fairly easy to put on autopilot and coast along with for the most part. The areas where it is a problem are so few and far between that I've mostly considered it a non-issue on the whole.

Sure, you should get rage for an avoided attack, but certainly not anywhere near what you would have gotten. I'm not even sure it will matter in the first place with what they're saying will be a large increase to white damage. THAT is actually something I don't think they'll be able to pull off reasonably well. I think our yellow damage will go way, way up but for the most part we'll still be doing dick for white damage. Without Windfury we're going to be in a baaaad bad spot for white damage rage generation. We'll see though.

No, I stand by my earlier statements that the truly hard part about playing a warrior tank is proper usage of oh shit buttons. Using them at the right spot can easily turn a wipe into a kill. Using them at the wrong spots would guarantee the wipe. It's tough to judge something like that when hits are coming in that could kill you every single second, and you don't know what heals are coming and when. It's an ability your best tanks are going to have acquired, but it's certainly not one I would expect your average Joe Blow to understand and implement.

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In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Mild Confusion

I really don't understand why this is being debated so furiously? Tanks are the only class that has to place on weaker gear to do better in a lesser situation. PvP warriors don't take s3 gear off for s2 gear to perform a battle ground. Healers don't have to remove +healing, ect. The real issue isn't even about how big or minor the problem is or even if it can be worked around. The issue is why is it a problem in the first place. It's been like this since vanilla WoW and a creative solution should be implimented to counter it. For warriors, it could be a static rage buff for every parry or dodge that the warrior performs. A similar mechanic could be implimented for pallies, they generate a percent of base mana when they completely avoid the attack.

Seems like everyone agrees there is an issue with downscaling gear, but nobody can agree how much it effects them individually.

 

Dulak

I have to nerf my avoidance by at least 10% to do a heroic or the DPS will be severely threat capped. If I actually had this crazy notion of using CC in said heroic it would have to be more like 20%. I just can't fathom how anyone would think this is acceptable. Could you see a healer going "Hey, I'm clearly healing the group too much, let me switch half my set for damage pieces instead!" I agree that rage management is one of the things that separates good and bad warriors, but it is very hard to manage something you don't have in the first place.

 

DarthGreg

I can't believe the level of complaining I've seen from end-game tanks over their ability to tank obsolete content. We have threat stats: block value, expertise, and hit. In WotLK we will have STR. And that's not all, as Blizzard has stated that the Prot Warrior is not in a shippable state and will be receiving big changes.

I understand the issue, but I get the feeling some of you will be satisfied with nothing short of a switch from rage to energy. Rage generation always has and always will be unpredictable to a certain extent.