To me safeguard seems exactly the opposite of what you say and is only limited to fight-to-fight minmaxing. Vigilance I can make a case for, it just seems to me like half of its effect is pretty useless. The 10% reduced threat is pretty nice. Going to go check out Sword and Board myself, I hope you are right about the 5/5 being SS and Devastate, although I'm still not sure if it manages to even provide a bigger TPS increase then than say, a point in Cruelty.

EDIT: After a quick respec on the beta realm I can confirm that 5/5 S&B indeed says it procs from both SS and Dev. The talent seems to be broken however. Doing some further testing on a training dummy.

EDIT2: I couldn't get S&B to proc from SS in about 100 performed slams. Devastate does proc it but it's not resetting the cooldown on SS, only making the next one cost no rage.

EDIT3: Imp. Defensive Stance enrage also seems to be broken and doesn't proc at all.

I don't have a warrior in beta but some guy I met just now mentioned the new Charge talent makes it usable in combat, you should verify this.

This is exactly right, it does make it usable in combat. Still requires Battle Stance.

Seems that Druids got what I like to call Def Stance Mach II.

I'm still hoping that our stance penalties(-10% damage done/+10% damage taken) are removed before beta ends, and Battle Stance is buffed. Since they don't seem to have a problem giving other classes buffs that were unique to Warrior stances before.

Still waiting on the supposed changes to alleviate "rage starvation" while tanking. I don't think anything in these changes really does anything about that (except the 6-rage-on-parry talent in Arms, which isn't new).

As of now Enraged assault can be used by consuming rampage. Therefore a GCD does not have to be used to "prep" enraged assault. THis alleviates a lot of GCD cluttering when optimizing a rotation.

MMO-Champion updates (Borodin covered the Prot changes and the new ability, so this is just Arms/Fury stuff):


Not mentioned, but in the calculator: Unrelenting Assault has moved from T7 to T8 in Arms (swapping with Strength of Arms).

Regarding rage from dodge/parry: Blizzard removed Stalwart Protector deliberately, so I'm pretty sure it's not coming back, at least not as a talent. Here is the link, as promised. (I think it's ironic that people are missing it, considering a week ago half of the people in this thread were ignoring it as a potentially useful ability for some reason and calling for things like a "take 25% more damage" button, but whatever.) The quote does mention the possibility of "baking in" rage on dodge/parry, I assume by way of a baseline ability. Who knows whether that will pan out or not.

The Blessing of Sanctuary change is nice, but it really doesn't mean much, since a Prot Warrior will never have a Prot Paladin in a five-man, and maybe will have one in a ten-man raid. Only in a 25-man would I say that BoSanc might be something you can be reasonably assured of, and probably not even then, all things considered.

That's my point really. He was asking how the rage starvation problem would be addressed, and I was suggesting that a warrior will most likely get something with very similar numbers to the sanc blessing.

How they will implement it doesn't really matter*, but I'm of the opinion that it is reasonable to assume that something as important to class scalability as this (especially in situations where you won't have a prot paladin available to tap for the buff.. which you should never need to rely on given the whole concept of tank equalization and interchangability) should be provided by the class itself rather than a 3rd party buff.


*Well, not entirely true. They need to implement it in some way that doesn't stack with the paladin buff. Otherwise, they would simply be reinforcing the paladin's currently unbalanced pre-dominance (which I won't get into a rant about) as a wotlk tank. Mabye a slightly stronger rage gain of 1 or 2 rage per event would be alright from the blessing vs the class' own effect would be alright, but an extra 10 is way too much. After all, one reason a lot of people were overlooking the old talent was that 1/2 rage per event isn't a big deal... when you take a decent concept and ramp it up to 10 rage per event, then that is very significant.

The Prot Warrior talents are still extremely underwhelming and boring so I hope that was no out real pass yet.

First the good stuff:

- Talent Point reduction on most of our skills.
- The Toughness change is nice (albeit expected from seeing the other Toughness talent changes)
- The ranged high threat move. I am really happy about this.

The bad stuff (will try to address them one by one):

So all they increased was the proc chance by 5%? It still isn't addressing clipping issues with GCD when it procs in your rotation at all or the fact that it's just a glorified free SS in the worst case. Even when it's fixed, it's still a "meh" style talent because it relies on procs.

Still a pretty horrible talent but I guess people now will spec it for the increased Shield Slam crit chance. Avoidance is RNG enough so why even add more RNG on a block? Our reliance on RNG is becoming silly.

Vigilance is still every bit as boring as it was in Alpha. They promised us that it was going to be a placeholder because frankly, that talent is pretty unimaginative for a 31 pointer. 10% threat reduction is nice and all but am I the only that thinks it's really boring gameplay wise? You buff it pre-combat and that's that. And what's more, you can't even use it on other tanks on multi tank fights where your taunt getting resisted actually could mean a wipe because no tank will be happy to run around with 10% threat reduction. Also, it goes against everything this expansion stands for: buff-reliance. They removed BoS for a reason but they intend to give us a talented mini-BoS? Seriously?

If Blizzard really wants to keep this talent, then they should sort out what they want from it and move it to another tier and give us a real 31 pointer. Do they want to limit it to DPSers only? Do they want us to use it in multi tank fights? On trash? In all honesty, I would probably spec it anyway but for completely different reasons (to buff it on a tank when he isn't watching on trash >_>).

A threat and DPS nerf? Why? This makes no sense, Prot Warriors want rage efficiency so why would they make our Devastate 1 rage more expensive this patch?

And now for the kicker, the worst talent addition I have yet to see:

Wow. We will do 10% more damage while tanking. Pretty good for threat? Depends; they have other ways to up our threat and my suspicion is that they just want us to do more damage while tanking "because that's fun". But to me, it looks like a really clumsy effort to increase our DPS while tanking while offering absolutely no utility past that. In a multi tank fight you will still do shit DPS when you are done tanking because the latter part of the talent just won't proc when you DPS like every other melee (and you can only intervene so often). So why not change it into a permanent +10% damage buff? If required, change it to only work with a 1h/shield (but I really wouldn't want that, us Prot Warriors need some love when we DPS in DPS gear for farming as well).
This also does not address the fact that DPSing Prot Warriors will not have a reliable way to utilize Enraged Assault either as the only Warrior spec.

So to sum it up:

Part of the protection tree looks like a glorified Shield Slam Improvement Tree to me. They gave us +10% damage, +15% crit chance, +20ish% damage from increased BV, +15% chance to proc a free Shield Slam. Now I understand that Shield Slam is a significant part of what it's like to be a Prot Warrior. But this much? It's getting ridiculous.
We have other skills like Devastate which also define us as Prot Warriors. Where is the Devastate love? Instead they nerf it by increasing it's effective rage cost by 1.
Where are the multi purpose talents like Focused Rage - Spell - World of Warcraft, Vitality - Spell - World of Warcraft and One-Handed Weapon Specialization - Spell - World of Warcraft that benefit us while tanking and DPSing?* Where is our working version of rage gain from avoiding stuff a la GBoSanct?

So I ask you guys this, am I the only one disappointed by they way Prot Warrior talents are heading? Am I the only one that was expecting a new skill/mechanic to toy around with instead of just a Super Shield Slam and the same old Dev/Rev rotation? Am I the only one that was looking forward to less RNG reliance instead of more?

*Late Edit: Prot Warriors need more DK style abilities like these: Unbreakable Armor - Spell - World of Warcraft. How is that for an amazing talent that works for tanking AND DPSing?

If the ability remains like this, wouldn't it make Bloodsurge somewhat of a useless and only filler talent?

So what rank 9 is actually the rank 9 for 80? The last is a significant nerf unless it's a typo and they meant rank 7.

You'll have to explain your reasoning there Graul, what does Bloodsurge have to do with Rampage being an enrage for the purposes of EA? If anything, it would become easier to use the Bloodsurge slams since we would have less gcd clutter.

While we are at the Execute topic. Any chance we'll see it being usable from sub 35% health instead of 20%? I think Molten Fury and Execute are the only 2 health based damage skills that still only trigger sub 20% whereas the Hunter/Paladin execute and even a SW glyph from Priests trigger from a target being at sub 35% health.

3 points about our "relationship" with other classes.

Regarding rage starvation the new Paladin Blessing of Protection will go someways to addressing this but yes that relies on a Paladin in the raid with that Blessing - right now that looks mandatory which is not the way to go.

I've also spotted that Rogues now have a form of "Misdirect":
Skills
* *New Skill* Tricks of the Trade (Level 75): The current party or raid member becomes the target of your Tricks of the Trade. The threat caused by your next attack and all actions taken for 6 sec afterwards will be transferred to the target. In addition, all damage caused by the target is increased by 15% during this time.

It's good but again it's relying on another class to give us threat. Note it seems to have no timer on it like Misdirect - the Rogue can cast it on you and it lies dormant until the Rogue attacks. Impressed with that otherwise they would have to sync it with Misdirects/Pulls.

Regarding Bears:
Their AP is going to be through the roof and I've seen 2 different versions of Mother Bear now: 12% DR would seem reasonable but the current MMOC version says 5% per Party Member (no max) which is 20% or 25% if you include the Druid.
Bears needed compensation for lack of Parry/Block and an apparent reversal on the huge Armour they were used to but it remains to be seen if Mother Bear is that compensation or if it goes to far. I'd say it's 20% DR which is probably borderline especially as it trumps even Imp. Def. Stance when it comes to magic . I am sure the numbers passes will start soon.

Back to a comment Liar made about Improved Defensive Stance - people often called for Imp Defensive Stance to do some or all of the following:

1. Boost all DR not just Magic DR
2. Reduce or offset the Stance damage penalty.

They've chosen the latter but by linking it to Enrage they are probably thinking about Prot Warrriors in PvP: the Enrage makes us vulnerable to things like quadruple bleeds or dispelling my Hunters.

And that is where they are wrong. They need to fix stances without talents. They are outdated and until they do this, they can't really design talents around it properly.

EDIT: I edited this into an earlier post but gonna repeat it here so it doesn't get lost: Prot Warriors need more DK style abilities like Unbreakable Armor - Spell - World of Warcraft. This ability is pretty awesome, it benefits both tanking and DPSing.

No, you're not the only one. The crappy prot tree is the reason I plan to switch to a DK after playing a warrior since before BWL was released.

Also, I'm saddened that Sudden Death has moved further down the arms tree. It seems there'll be no BT/SD builds at 70 and all Fury warriors will go TG.

I agree as well.
I like Shield Slam - but I also like more new things. If Weapon Throw didn't have a cast time - it might be a nice new tool. But we really need things to justify not simply taking another tank who shines at another area AND is as good as us when single-target tanking.

I know it's not just that we're worse at the moment - itemization isn't done and stuff. But scaling seems to favor some trees immensely. For ex, they added a bracer enchant for LW which gives 90 stam. Being a BS gains you 2 sockets, for a maximum of 60 stam with 2 epic gems. The regular bracer chant gives 16 stam.
Now, when you think about the passive +stam% differences, this kind of item completely shines.

I sincerely hope these are not all the prot warriors changes they had in mind.

For some reason I missed the 10 second cooldown on EA. Also, maybe I just missed it, but what order of enrage effects would EA eat, whatever is the most recent?

In other news, does anyone know if Blizzard might be planning on making 2h weapons under the effect of TG being normalized to 1h weapon levels for instant attacks? Some people are reporting WW doing an absurdly low amount of damage now after the most recent update, yet normal auto attacks are still hitting for 1900+.

Does Weapon Throw disarms you? Oh, and looking at its screenshot, http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/1...8220319tz4.jpg, it doesn't even require a weapon, and have no minimum range, which makes it possible to use while DPSing.

So it sounds like Enraged Assault is actually working now... does it light up from Bloodrage and Berzerker Rage?

Just in case anyone is too lazy to do the math, here is a quick reference for how much attack power you will need for bloodthirst to outperform the new execute at level 80:


Derivation:

EXECUTEDMG = BTDMG
.2AP + 1266 + (BTCOST - EXECUTECOST)*38 = .45AP
AP = (1266 + (BTCOST - EXECUTECOST)*38) / .25
AP = (1266 + (30 - 15)*38) / .25 = 7344
AP = (1266 + (30 - 10)*38) / .25 = 8104
AP = (1266 + (25 - 15)*38) / .25 = 6584
AP = (1266 + (25 - 10)*38) / .25 = 7344


Results:

One thing I noticed - Expose Armor now gives exactly the same reduction as sunder (5 stacks x 5 combo).

Improved Expose only increases duration.

So that's one less thing to worry about, I guess.