Liar

If Blizzard decided to have two different rage generation calculations for PvE and PvP exactly one thing will happen: We will end up with two different rage generation calculations for PvE and PvP. You are thinking way ahead here and assuming stuff that isn't logical because changing the rage generation so it stays the same for PvP and compensates for avoidance in PvE is not going to harm anyone. You can argue about not wanting such a rage generation for PvE but for all intents of purposes it does not harm PvP balance. This isn't Diablo 2 after all.

Another thing: If Blizzard calculates our projected TPS without the inclusion of Heroic Strike it will be too easy for us to hold aggro on fights where we can use it. If they expect us to have a near 100% Heroic Strike rotation then it will be too hard. They need to find a middle ground here, one that doesn't punish high avoidance tanking.

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

Also, can we please stop talking about the rage situation while tanking Sunwell? It's the absolutely fucking *LAST* place you'd have have rage issues while tanking, so obviously if you base all of your arguments around that then "rage is fine L2P".

 

Nyel

The problem with this argument is that most people look only at the high-end raiding part of the problem, which is really irrelevant.

I understand most of you are raiding sunwell, or at least BT/Hyjal. But this represents maybe 35% of the lvl 70 player base. You have to keep in mind the other possible contexts that most other tanks will be put into, and that is 5-man tanking heroics and future 10 mans.

Personally, i think Stalwart Protector - Spell - World of Warcraft is a step in the right direction, it just needs to be tuned a bit.

One other possible solution would be to give an extra attack counter in the form of Reckoning - Spell - World of Warcraft upon a dodge or parry, would solve both threat issue and rage at the same time, might be OP, but it can be tuned.

 

PSGarak

Blizzard has explicitly said that they don't like separating mechanics for PvE and PvP, because it makes the game feel inconsistent. However, since rage mechanics are already under-the-hood to a large extent, they could probably get away with it so long as the game 'felt' the same. Being able to intentionally rage-starve a warrior in PvP in a way that doesn't jive with their PvE generation would contradict that. Being able to be rage-starved in PvP but not PvE might be too big a contradiction, but maybe not if your PvE generation is noticably smaller but still viable.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Fellwraith

You realize that it's kind of silly to say you don't have a threat problem based on your own personal experience but on the other hand, you aren't spec'd for optimal dps, right? A 2/48/11 build is what most people talk about when they're referring to mage threat issues. Our mages can put out 2500 avg dps on Brutallus and they have threat problems if we get unlucky with misses. They easily do as much or more dps than our warlocks for single-target fights.

Our hunters have problems in other fights because FD gets resisted or it's bugged. Shadowpriests have serious problems on Felmyst and the Twins if they're using imp VE to supplement the raid healing. There isn't some class balance issue causing things to be out of wack, the game is currently tuned for us to use heroic strike frequently when we're tanking for most dps classes.


You'd get less rage from incoming attacks in PVP with an unmitigated, unavoided hit calculation because the damage per attack would be far less (bear in mind, an unmitigated hit from some mobs in PVE is north of 30k right now, no one hits that hard in PVP). It would change PVP strategy so that you wouldn't have a problem hitting the warrior. I guess I don't see why that's a problem. I usually get most of my rage in pvp from hitting the other guy anyway.

 

Densor

Well, given 25% spell haste and 1639 spell damage after buffs, the maximum* TPS a fire mage can put out in the first burst of the Brutallus fight is 3175.78. A frost mage can put out 3177.52 in the same situation. That's assuming ignite damage gets applied instantly, which it doesn't, and that both specs crit 100% of the time, while frost has a higher crit rate in practice.

* This assumes standard raid buffs, trinket usage, destro pot usage and a few other things. There might be more TPS possible, but only through the application of more buffs/debuffs that would affect both specs equally and as a percentage.

So, I don't see how my statement that "Granted, I'm specced Arcane/Frost, which isn't the highest DPS spec, but I can't imagine I'd be doing much more TPS as Fire at the start of the fight (since Fire does a lot of its DPS at the end of the fight, due to Molten Fury)." is correct. There is almost no way that fire TPS is going to pass significantly above frost TPS at the start of a fight, which is the focus of this whole conversation about rage starvation, warrior TPS, the inability to use Heroic Strike in some situations, and what Blizzard might be doing to fix it.

Once the fight has gone on for 2 minutes, nobody should be caring about a drop in the TPS of the tank due to a series of misses because the mages will have used invisibility, the rogues will have vanished, the warlocks will have soul shattered (the worst threat wipe of the 4 classes with a threat wipe, btw), and the hunters will have gotten a successful feign off. At that point, a slight dip in your TPS for 10-15 seconds isn't going to have much effect on anyone except the warlocks, who we've already covered as doing too much damage, and the classes without threat wipes.

 

Liar

I don't think our Mages stop DPSing at all on Brutallus. No Invis and no Evocation because we need that DPS so yes, overall TPS is important as well. I admit though, I am not too worried about avg TPS of Warriors because we usually do fine in that department in SW (disclaimer: only seen the fights til Twins and in the one night we were there, we had some serious threat problems because we tank Sacrolash in mitigation gear and there is still alot of moving around to do because of various things so it's not just a simple tank and spank - but I assume this improves when we get the hang of it).

In any case, I am going to second Nezralix when he said that rage generation in SW should be the least of our problems because of Sunwell Radiance and extremely hard hitting bosses. And yeah, I don't think I have to point out the irony that is Sunwell Radiance because it is the biggest band-aid I have yet to see concerning tanking mechanics (in this case, rage generation by artifically screwing over your avoidance).

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

 

Borodin

3 Changes spotted in the latest Patch Notes:

Shield Block now increases chance to block and amount blocked by 100% for 5 seconds. Cooldown increased to 30 seconds.
>>This is significant change meaning for 5 seconds out of every 30 (or 20 with talents) you will at least block every attack for double your Block Value.

Shield Wall now reduces all damage taken by 60% for 12 seconds cooldown reduced to 5 minutes.
>>Up from 50%. This is more significant than it might appear.

The previous version of Shield Wall represented a huge decrease in the effectiveness of the ability from it's original - you were taking 100% more damage than before.

This new version changes this to 60% more damage taken than the original Shield Wall. But useable every 5 mins of course.

All calculations assuming a 60% mitigation via Armour.

Improved Sunder Armour now called Puncture
>>Cosmetic only to remove the confusion for those who only read talent names and can't read tooltips :P

 

Darmon

There is a blue talking about BoS beeing added by default to all tanks.
In this context, i can't see any reason to prevent non-prot warriors to tank 75%+ of the content. 10% more armor and 5% avoidance are not so huge difference, as vanilla wow showed.

 

Mild Confusion

Just to clarify, when they say they are adding BoS to all the tanking classes, that means each tank will do 30% more threat correct?

 

Nezralix

Arms/Fury warriors can't generate enough threat to hold aggro on a raid that's fully salved now; what do you think is changing here?

 

Tornaz

The tanking mechanic?

The change towards higher STR for tanking warrior will make Offspec tanking much easier. Lack of AP has always been the killer factor for Offspec in TBC.

 

Nezralix

There's really not enough information to make a claim one way or the other right now. There will be *some strength* on tanking gear, but evidence so far suggests there won't be *a lot of strength*. It seems entirely likely that Protection warriors will still maintain a distinct edge in threat, if not mitigation. In general, tanking as Prot will still probably be a more enjoyable experience.

But there are changes coming down the pipe for all the specs.

 

Darmon

I'm not very sure what the final number is. Remember that threat multipliers are multiplicative right now. Prot warriors get 1.3 X 1.15 = 1.495 threat multiplier, but in expansion it's simplified to 1.45, which is aditive, and BoS will just add to 1.75. Of course we all remember how bad blizzard and tooltips mix, so can't be sure.

I don't see how an arms warrior who specced TM for MS extra threat, Unrelenting Assault for Revenge each 3 sec, which means a 6 second cycle of MS, revenge, SSlam, revenge, won't produce enough threat. Maybe those talents are not optimum for the best PvP build for instance, but you can't have all.

 

Darian_TruBlade

I think the Arms/Fury raid tanking is really going to depend on what kind of tanking we're talking about.

If we're talking Blindeye-like tanking, then the Warrior will be in DPS gear (and a Shield perhaps). With all the AP/Str scaling for threat moves in WotLK it's likely they'll be able to throw down more threat than an equivalent Prot Warrior.

If we're talking serious offtanking such as Gruul or Nalorakk, then threat might be an issue. It depends on how far Blizzard goes with deemphasizing threat.

 

PSGarak

I noticed an item called "Venture Coin Mitigation Cloak - PH" in wowhead's database. Despite being called a Mitigation Cloak, it had more strength than dodge rating. 27 str, 23 dodge, 45 stam (lvl 74). This could be a leveling-minded tankity piece, or it could be what they want tanking pieces to look like in WLK (plus or minus six levels and a color in ilvl).
I'll admit I haven't browsed through the database very hardcore myself, and this is only one item. What evidence do you mention for the relative dearth of strength on tanking gear?

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Nezralix

I can look through this search: Plate Armor - Items - World of Warcraft

...and I can see that while STR is certainly present, it's not generally a primary stat.

 

Tornaz

Have you looked at the Tempered Saronite set, and considered the ratio of STR to STA in comparrison with the ratio found on current TBC gear?

It's not surprising that STA and Defense remain a high priority on tanking sets.

What's different is that STR now usually has around 80% of the assigned item budget that STA has, compared to an average of 30% on current gear.

 

Fellwraith

If I remember correctly both bloodthirst and MS have a 240% threat modifier if you have Tactical Mastery on live today. Increasing your AP value on tanking plate should help both specs quite a bit.

In the current beta build MS and bloodthirst share a cooldown, but shieldslam is independent. A threat rotation would look something like MS/Bloodthirst, shieldslam, revenge, sunder/thunderclap (both of which scale with AP). It's really rage intensive, but the threat output ought to be decent. I think the biggest difference between prot and non-prot tanking is the amount of rage efficiency talents prot has. A non-prot spec can still dip into prot to grab some of the more essential mitigation talents if they don't mind giving up some dps.

It would also be helpful to know how healing threat from bloodthirst works. Since you're going to be getting back 1.5% health every hit and you've got tanking gear with high HP on, it could be a pretty big number. 1.5% of 20k hp is 300 hp healed every time you hit. Multiply that by 0.5 (normal healing threat modifier) * 1.45 for defensive stance and you get 218 threat divided among the mobs you're tanking.

 

Darian_TruBlade

Testing for how much threat it represents is doable, but the setup is tricky.

Strip all your gear save a cheap low level sword, grab another tank, and pregenerate some rage before a duel. Then body aggro a nearby mob. Have the other tank generate an easily measurable amount of threat on the mob then ignore it. Hit Bloodthirst on the tank and observe how many hits it takes to surpass their threat.

I strongly suspect that the healing is affected by stance threat modifiers, it's more a question as to whether the healing gets any additional threat from the TM.

That said, you have 5 maximum ticks of healing every 6 seconds (with a tanking weapon it wouldn't be hard to get them all). With your numbers that's at most 1090 threat over 6 seconds, or an additional 181 TPS (assuming no overhealing). That's a respectable amount, even if it's reduced by half through overhealing. Not to mention that it's almost like having an additional HoT on the tank at all times.

Almost enough to make one wonder if a an X/31/XX build wouldn't generate the more single target threat.

 

DarthGreg

He was talking about vanilla WoW, not BC. Pre-BC, I main tanked all of MC and BWL as Arms.

 

Buka

Beta realms going down for new build (8820, according to blue post on euro forum). Let's hope the time has come for some warrior changes.

 

Mild Confusion

Ghostcrawler posted here that arms and fury went through a lot of recent changes, maybe they will show up tonight.

 

mistersix

I have a feeling we'll see arms and fury rework in advance of prot rework based on this comment yesterday from Ghostcrawler:

"The Arms and Fury warriors recently got some really nice work done on them, so hopefully Prot will follow. (But again I stress we won't know if the talent trees offer all of the threat, mitigation, survivability and tools they need to until we compare endgame tanking more.)"

Since we haven't seen recent work on arms and fury I'm hoping she's referring to this new build.

 

Nezralix

Let's talk about blocking for a moment, because I'm not sure if speculating about Arms/Fury threat is really appropriate right now, particularly given that all they'd have to do is modify Tactical Mastery if they think that BT/MS are generating an inordinate amount of threat.

It's incredibly useful for small group tanking, owing to the fact that it scales up very quickly proportional to monsters that do very little damage. Moving past that into 10-man content and then onward to 25-man content, it loses its luster; it becomes a somewhat poor form of damage reduction, at least in the situation where every incoming attack is blocked. This probably won't change, given that anything they do to a fixed-size damage reduction to make it useful against 25-man raid bosses will probably make it ridiculously overpowered in smaller settings. And moreover, warriors can no longer rely on it as a mitigation stat, given the increased cooldown on the Shield Block skill (something that doesn't appear to affect paladins, who are still retaining essentially the same mechanic). The complaint is that, between its inability to function as reliable mitigation *and* the fact crushing blows are no longer an issue, the skill has no relevance for raid tanking.

Now, they've apparently changed Shield Block to block *all* attacks for its duration, and block double the value. That's great, but primarily affects AoE situations, and even at double the value suffers from the same fundamental issue of blocking: that it's an increasingly minor difference as bosses hit harder and harder, and Critical Block probably won't affect that much. Critical Block has its own issues, in that it appears to be adding even more variability to a tanking class that's already possibly relying a bit too much on chance.

I think that offering Shield Block as an emergency button of sorts (rather than another spam key) is probably an overall improvement to warrior tanking mechanics. The problem is that it's not a very good emergency button, for the reasons I've tried to describe.

I'd like to see it be more useful, but I'm not entirely sure what the best method for doing that is. My proposal is modifying the effect so that when it's active, incoming melee damage is reduced by some percentage (say 25%), and then the block value applied to that. This is something that they can afford to do now that they can count on Shield Block not being active 100% of the time. It also partially remedies the classic problem with blocking: Useful against weak monsters, but negligible against hard-hitting ones. Also kind of a "mini-Shield Wall" effect that's universally applicable rather than only applicable in small group settings.

Critical Block is an interesting idea, and it might also benefit from a change like this. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same issue that it already did with the Shield Block skill, in that you have a chance to double-up on the effect while Shield Block is active (4x block value with the current scheme, or -50% with the mechanic I suggested), and I don't think that kind of unpredictability is necessarily a good thing for tanking. I'm not entirely sure what the remedy to that is. Maybe just modify Shield Block such that it just guarantees that the next however many blocks *are* critical blocks, and then have the Critical Block talent basically only apply to time where the Shield Block buff isn't active (in that regard, making Shield Block kind of like a "blocking Recklessness"). Hopefully differentiates it a little bit from paladins, who just block everything.

Anyway, if you've got ideas how to make Shield Block not be totally obsolete, then please share them.