Quick question about Bloodsurge. Does the GCD from BT eat 1.5 seconds of the 5 seconds available to cast the instant slam? I'm assuming it does.

EDIT: Shha in response to your post above, don't forget that LoTP also affect ranged crit for hunters as well. Currently LoTP is superior to Rampage in all aspects.

The ability isn't live yet, and it's explicitly intended to be an adequate replacement. I expect both the range, and whether it can affect hunters, to be resolved by release (or T8 at the latest), with the difference between the two being uptime (including ramp-up time on movement fights), and iLotP (marginal).

Not to mention the fact that LotP is an form associated aura, versus Rampage being activated off of a warriors crits, so you get the 5% crit from Leader for a larger duration of a fight, not to mention the healing component. Ideally they will balance this, perhaps add something extra to rampage, or just change the mechanic/effect to better balance with LotP.

Yes it does, so it makes Unending Fury even worse. Even assuming you perfectly time enrage effects BEFORE using BT, to follow up with enraged assault - if you proc instant slam, you have to basically forget the extra BT.

The "ideal setup" would be

0.0 - WW
1.5 - berserker rage
3.0 - BT
4.5 - Enraged Assault
6.0 - Instant BT
7.5 - Instant Slam (its already pushing it - any lag and you lose the slam)
9.0 - WW

However this is the ONLY scenario when you dont have to ditch either instant slam or BT. Ironically enough it cant even happen with 9 sec WW rotation.

0.0 - WW
1.5 - BT
7.5 - BT
9.0 - WW
13.5- BT
18 - WW

- at no point in rotation WW precedes BT by exactly 3 sec - Either its earlier (in which case you have to drop instant slam or extra BT, or you lose WW instant, while not gaining more in return), or Later - then you cant use berserker rage before BT , and using it after means you again need to drop one instant off.

With 8 sec rotation there is a possibility of "close match" - where you only lose 0.5 sec on the rotation but:

- it has to be done BEFOREHAND - meaning you lose 0.5 sec on rotation whether or not you get procs
- its 8 sec rotation meaning you lose another 1 sec after - making it useless.


The last option of doing enrage effect before WW , followed by BT right after, sounds promising at 1st - but then a preceding slam proc on previous BT can get in the way.

Either way for every Unending Fury proc, there is a 30% chance that corresponding Bloodsurge proc will get in the way. Effectively reducing the UF procs by 30% - to even lower level. The change from BT to lighting up victory rush gets rid of the problem, since you can wait until NEXT BT , before using it - so while still a DOUBLE bloodsurge proc can in the way (not always), the chance goes down from 30 to 9%.

Yup that's the problem i was running into trying to work out a good rotation, you just can't do it. Also when your using enraged assault, the amount of free GCD you have available pretty much disappears, and bloodsurge procs only excerbate the problem. If only we had a 1 sec GCD :/

One thing that people seem to be forgetting about the copycat buffs is now we don't have to worry about losing the buffs when a player bites it. The redundancy for that condition alone is going to be valuable. Buff/debuff balancing isn't worth worrying about in the near-term. We know they're on it. Give 'em time to work it all out. We know it's a design priority now.

We also know that prot polishing is coming up (potentially even in the next build). What are people hoping to see out of that pass? Personally, I think the issues are related to the above -- I'd like to see deep prot get an interesting raid buff and debuff in the same way many other classes have. Maybe a copycat haste and/or health buff. It also seems with the tweaks to tclap and the concerns about aoe tanking that I'd wager we'll see an interesting single target debuff take the place of the 51 point talent (maybe an unbalancing strike?). I'd also like to see sword and board reworked to be more like imp mortal strike or unending fury but that might just be because I'm being overly systematic.

Thoughts?

Has anybody the breadth of view to see how the non-stacking of buffs and debuffs affect warriors overall?

-TC negative haste debuffs won't stack with similar effects
-Demo shout won't stack with Demo roar /CoW
-Sunders won't stack with EA
-Enrage won't stack with LotP
-Commanding Shout won't stack with Blood Pact
-Blessing of Might won't stack with Battle Shout? Expose Weakness?
-Pain Suppresion won't stack with Shield Wall / Imp Intervene?
-Blood Frenzy won't stack with?

I'm not sure how much it needs to change. I believe it is intended to be a replacement for a LotP (as Trauma is expected to be a replacement for Mangle). Take the following situation: there are 2 raid spots available, one for a healer and one for a DPS'er. There are two raiders available, a feral druid and a fury warrior.

Before the change to Rampage and not counting personal DPS, the Feral druid would provide a 3-5% increase to physical DPS, while the Fury warrior would provide 0% increase to physical DPS. The Feral druid could also spec Resto and fill the healing spot or you could just call the raid for lack of healers. Assuming the fight is a Brutallus-like encounter where high DPS is necessary, bringing suboptimal raid DPS due to not having a feral druid could be a waste of raid consumables and time. Calling the raid from lack of healers sucks.

After the change to Rampage and not counting personal DPS, the Feral druid still provides a 3-5% increase to physical DPS, while Fury now provides a 2-4% increase to physical DPS. Now, having the Feral druid spec Resto while the Fury warrior provides DPS is a viable solution, since the loss to physical DPS should be only ~1%, which shouldn't be too hard to overcome with luck.

In a similar situation, say you again have a feral druid and a fury warrior. There are two DPS slots in the raid. You can choose to bring the feral druid and warrior and get a 3-5% increase to physical DPS or tell the druid to spec balance and get a ~2% increase to raid DPS, a 6% increase to nature and arcane damage, a 3-5% increase to caster DPS, and still get a 2-4% increase to physical DPS.

And in a 10-man, of course, not having a feral druid to bring is a much more likely occurrence, so Rampage is just a straight up buff.

So, overall, while Rampage might not be the best buff of its type, it is a very good replacement, since you have to compare Rampage AND whatever the feral druid/raid slot could bring otherwise vs LotP. If there is only 1 raid slot, though, you'll just be in the same position that any other DPS is currently in, where your total DPS contribution is going to determine how useful you are, rather than just your personal DPS or buff DPS. And Rampage is a good thing in that situation, too, since you would almost definitely not replace a feral druid without it.

I'd also be interested in seeing expertise rolled into incite, rage perks rolled into deflection and anticipation, imp shield block and shield wall bundled, critical block and shield mastery budled, and maybe some armor penetration rolled into puncture (it would be very interesting to see arena builds that have good reasons to toe-dip into the prot tree plus the added benefit to pve tank threat). In the same way the arms tree has it's wound flavor and other tanking trees have their niches I'd be interested in seeing the prot tree be about something... maybe armor/defense reduction style abilities.

It's been my experience that DPS spec DPS because they do not want to heal or tank. Having a player who players who chose to play a DPS spec respec to be a healer usually doesnt work. I also don't know any druids who proficiently play all 3 specs of their class and have gear for all 3 specs while doing progression content.

1. Hybrids (warriors hybrid too) should be ready respec, especially in situation "we call the raid, or you respec". If he wont, he suck and/or dont care about the guild, end of story. If you absolutelly hate healing/tanking - play "pure dps's" aka rogue or mage.

2. Druids in guilds, farmed Illidan 9 month befor SWP release, had gear for all spec.

It's all offtopic, thought.

Back on track -- i would like to see cd of shockwave shortened. It's sounds logical after they incresed cd of tclap in last build. Protect warriors really should have more options (and stronger one) for aoe-tanking in 5-man's/10-man raid's. Aoe-tanking just should be easy for us. Not because i want paladins spot in the raid, but because i won't work hard in some stupid heroics or Naxx-10 after 6+ months after release of WoTLK.

Recent blue posts suggest Blizzard doesn't want to make warrior aoe tanking dependent on talents though. I fully expect them to remove shockwave and just make cleave and thunderclap more aoe friendly.

I would expect Trauma to not stack with Mangle, as well, even though it does so now on beta.

Most DPS-oriented Feral druids would also most likely not take Imp. LotP, and possibly not bears, either, so that benefit over Rampage will most likely not be there. Should take into account that DPS warriors still have their unique buff in Battle Shout, which currently doesn't have any other equivalent from another class. So, the differences would be that an Arms warrior would provide BS and Blood Frenzy alongside a Feral, and a Fury warrior would just have BS. Personal DPS would probably be the defining factor in that choice.

BS/CS may not be that great in WotLK; I'm referring specifically to a recent blue post:

Obviously, Battleshout is going to be a lot more RDPS than a lock using another pet, but what if BS "shares its slot", so to speak, with Blessing of Might? Clearly, the buff sharing/overlap isn't fully implemented and tuned yet, but if there are indeed other spells or abilities that minimize the usefulness of warrior shouts, feral druids become even better for an offtank/dps spot; as far as I know (which is mostly what I've picked up off MMO-champion) there are no other classes that bring Innervate and/or battlerez to a raid, making feral druids utility unrivaled in melee DPS.

Edit: Not really sure where I'm going with this post. I think just agreeing with Fallacy that warrior personal DPS will need to make up for quite a bit, otherwise we need some definite, clear cut "this is a buff that only warriors bring" type of talent/skill.

Just throwing out an idea, maybe the time of a single sustained dps rotation is dead. Looking at Shha's post maybe you use the "ideal" rotation when all you CD's/GCD are in alignment.

You can maintain that twice before it all goes to hell. Although with latency i'm not even sure these rotations are sustainable, let alone having the rage to consistently use all of these abilities.

9.0 - WW
10.5 - Zerker rage
12.0 - BT
13.5 - Instant Slam
15.0 - Enraged Assault
16.5 - Instant BT
18.0 - WW

You then use the next 18 seconds to get your rotation/CD's in order so that you can rinse and repeat the above rotation. Then rinse and repeat (Although you pop bloodrage first, rather than Zerker)

I'm hoping they make enraged assault like a single target WW to match it's tooltip description. As it's more of pain in the ass to weave into the fury dps, than it will be for an arms warrior (thanks to wrecking crew), hence us getting more benefit from it. If this is the case then it's obvious that you would prioritise Enraged Assault over an instant slam.

If enraged assault just does single weapon damage as it does in beta atm, then the slam is greater dps, and should be used infront of enraged assault. You can then weave in the enraged assault at your convenience as you would have a 10 second window of opportunity to use it (well 8.5 seconds really).


EDIT: Crap doesn't work out, you can kinda get it working but it becomes to far to complicated to even be called a rotation, alternating which you pop first zerker rage or bloodrage, and popping them early in non ideal phases to get the ideal phases back on track etc. Even then the ideal rotation is at the mercy of the RNG as well. Bugger.

Would those talents be more palatable if instead of refreshing the cooldowns they just guaranteed say a 10% damage increase on the next cast of the appropriate ability (ms, bt, and ss)?

I don't find it likely that BS and BoM will work in this way. BS is only Melee AP, and gives ~57% more than BoM. While having a Paladin with BoM in the raid already will diminish the benefit of the Warrior, BS is clearly better for the Melee group, and doesn't invalidate the Paladin as Hunters will still want BoM. Unless one buff or the other is changed significantly they aren't analogous enough to be consolidated.

You are right that even without iLotP, a Feral Druid does bring lots of other base utility Warriors simply don't have. I don't think we'll see other classes getting a battle rez or Innervate, but the increase in the number of potential mana batteries could possibly reduce the usefulness of Innervate.

I'd *love* it if they did some of that sort of bundling. Prime candidates in my opinion are shield mastery + critical block, improved shield block + improved shield wall. I'm really, really eager to see what the fun talents are.

Welcome to the shadowpriest world.

The naive solution of course would be to just forget about any sustainable rotation cycles and just prioritize your highest available dps abilties. If ww has to stay off cooldown while you have higher dps nukes available, so be it. There's no real need for everything to align perfectly, if you follow the (correct) priorities, your dps will be the highest attainable anyway.

As for rampage - I really dislike its current form, but I guess in a raid with a feral it just frees a talent point, so that's good at least.

Thats not like Shadowpriests work though. We have 2 *procs* that we have to use within 5 seconds (3gcd) from occuring. So basically we have 1.5 sec (gcd after proc occurs) to look into cooldowns of WW/Berserker Rage/Bloodrage/Enraged Assault and count remaining gcds to figure out if we can use our proc, if we should use it right away, or later.

Shadowpriests can just prioritize their abilities in general - for us using WW/Enraged assault is better dps then using instant slam - but then we might run into situation when we wont get to use slam at all - even later , and as result have wasted gcds in next cycle.

Spriests can do valid cycles anyway - as in you can predesign a cycle (longer then 24 secs of SWP though), that will cover up all the stuff. its not an easy short cycle but it can be done.

Yes, I realize it is not nearly the same, but my point was mainly to move a bit from the whole perfect cycle world to a more chaotic world, where some decisions have to be taken on the fly. Yes, several things can proc at the same time, but the solution doesn't change because of it -> you still choose to apply your highest dps nuke.

Say ER refreshes your BT cooldown, you have WW off cooldown and bloodsurge is still running with little time left. Since BT is the highest dps nuke, just prioritize it over the others, even if it means to lose the bloodsurge proc. And if, as you said, this ends up in not using slam almost ever, so be it, 3 talent points will be freed unless the talent is adjusted.

But all those details should be seen it practice, I personally haven't tried my warrior in the beta yet, so I don't want to pose my opinion as a fact or anything. Just happy to discuss what I see as good changes to this awesome class

How does Deathwish work with Enraged assault? Is it deemed an enrage? I'd certainly hope that using enraged assault wouldn't "eat" Deathwish, just that it enabled you to use EA for 30 seconds without having to pop Zerker rage or Bloodrage.

Any beta warriors confirm exactly how Deathwish interacts with enraged assault?