Ballistae, at the moment all glyphs are ridiculously simple to craft. They are consumable,with a one hour cooldown for application. It would be trivially simple to reglyph, and is expected of everyone.
To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.
Naturally we all realise that it's still beta and all the changes are not implimented or finalized and balanced. But that is the whole point of this thread is it not? To allow us to speculate and analyse what we know and how it may or may not work.
Serennia posted a Titan's Grip vs Dual Wield Arms video, with,surprisingly Arms pulling out ahead, mainly due to the non-stop Sudden Death procs I imagine.
One thing is for sure, unless Heroic Strike's innate threat was greatly modified, or modified by AP to the point where even if you could use it for DPS you wouldn't want to, even if Arms is pulling ahead in damage...spamming Execute without even Imp Berserker would start causing more harm than good wouldn't it? Even so, it seems that at the very least Arms personal would be equalling Fury, which is of course not even considering the two buffs. That's on a lvl 1 dummy though.
It's a shame the video listed only the overall DPS values rather than having a Recount Pie Chart or similar to break it down. With the exact % of HS and Execute DPS we could have a better notion of the relative threat differences between Arms and Fury. I'd imagine that there'd be at least a good 20% difference irregardless of actual damage, but that's a very rough estimate.
Some of this depends on just how much Blizzard is easing up on Threat mechanics. They said they didn't want it to be as much of an issue as before, but what that means in practical terms is yet to be seen. It may be that that extra threat from HS and particularly Execute is entirely irrelevant, or it may be that both it and TG builds will be heavily threat capped.
The level 1 dummy, however, does throw things off considerably. The vast increase in rage generation from the level difference is likely to favor a build that can dump rage more effectively (i.e. the Arms build). The video proves the build has potential, but we need examples of how that plays out in a more practical environment.
I looked back over the last few days and I didn't see anything relating to this, but if I missed it please excuse this post.
After revieing the latest "categorization" of buffs and debuffs I'm really starting to wonder how much use any of our shouts will be. Surely with the grouping of buffs like Battle Shout and Blessing of Might, the new min/max will be all about buff DURATION. No one will want a 2 min BS when you have a 30 min BOM available. Likewise, if you had an Affliction lock with Improved Imp and Improved Curse of Weakness you would essetially removed the need for Commanding Shout and Demo Shout.
Don't get me wrong... i don't mind not renewing shouts, but I wonder if this will essentially mean that as a Tanking warrior we will be able to focus even more on Threat and Threat generating talents.
Any input from someone in the beta regarding this?? or maybe it's too early yet to tell.
It really looks like developers have no ideea what to do with the protection tree.
While we like to poke fun at the term "bloated" if there was ever a tree that was truly bloated, it was Prot warrior IMO. I say that because so many of the talents were so mandatory that variation in builds came down to decisions like whether that 6% spell damage reduction was really, really worth it, or who was going to get Imp Demo Shout if the dps warrior didn't have it. (To be fair, other talent trees do have this problem.)
Sooo many of the talents just improved mitigation. Useful? Sure. Fun? Not really. In an ideal world, there would be very few "mandatory" talents period (though I am sure Cruelty will always have its special throne). Instead talents could be more about customization.
Is charging in combat necessary to handle Patchwerk. No. But what if you could take it without having to give up Shield Mastery or Imp Shield Bash? What if the choices were X vs. Y not X vs. survival?
I know it's natural to compare yourself to other tanks, but the goal is that all 4 tanking classes will have roughly similar numbers when it's all said and done.
One of the designers mentioned the movie Gladiator the other day. Watch how Maximus uses his shield -- he isn't cowering behind it -- he's bashing people in the face with it. Shields should be a viable form of combat, not the option to avoid combat. It would be awesome if some day Arms was the 2H tree, Fury was the DW tree, and Prot was the sword and board tree. Prot has a long way to go before it's more PvP viable, but maybe, just maybe there could be a tree where control and survivability were an alternative to just bigger damage. It may not happen this expansion, but it's a step in that direction.
In the mean time, it would be awesome if we heard fewer conversations like: "Man, once I tanked as a druid, I never went back to warrior" to which the other guy says "Oh yeah, wait until you try paladin." We think part of that is tanking is a lot of work for a warrior and not as much fun as it should be. (I'm not saying any chowderhead should be able to tank Naxx -- tanking can be less work and still require a lot of skill.)
Q u o t e:
Our mitigation got gutted (1 min cooldown on shield block? Really?)
If there are tanks out there that thought mashing Shield Block was a fun, challenging and interesting decision, please speak up. We thought giving you some choice about when to hit the button might make tanking more enjoyable.
Q u o t e:
Our survavibility got nerfed
That's a legitimate concern but also a trivial fix. We could make Defensive Stance grant 90% damage reduction and then just about every talent in the tree would be optional. I exaggerate but I hope you get the point.
Q u o t e:
Our aoe tanking tool got nerfed (thunderclap's cooldown)
We don't want AE tanking to be mind-numbing either. We want all tanks (you too, paladins) to do something besides hit the same button over and over. We want to make Tclap hit hard when it's up.
Q u o t e:
Our devastate rage cost got increased
That was a consequence of trying to have fewer points in the tree, not an intentional attempt to make Devastate weaker.
Q u o t e:
Our scaling is still lackluster
Totally agree with you here. However several abilities (Hi Revenge) either now do have scaling or will get them in the near future.
Our goal: you get to keep your mitigation but have more fun talents.
Thoughts?
Awesome thread. Please keep going.
1) I have strong suspicions that death knight dps is completely OP, but I think we can tame that without redoing their trees.
2) We are trying to combo some more of Prot's mitigation talents so that you have room for some of the more optional ones. I realize to some extent there will always be mandatory talents and there will probably always be cookie-cutter builds. But the more we can improve that situation I think most of you agree the better the game will be.
3) Well what did you use the Decapitator for?
4) We are trying to have more viable tanking classes but it would be a travesty if we ended up pushing tanking warriors out of groups. That is not our intent and if we see it happening, we'll take steps to correct it. It pained me to see people say in BC 5-mans "Let's just get a paladin. The run will go faster." That sucks and we're trying to improve that situation, not make it worse in 10 and 25 player runs.
5) I know I tend to neglect healing and dps classes specs in the interest of tanking discussions. I apologize for that. I can't be everywhere at once and to some extent we think tanking needs the most help. We know some classes and specs (in various roles) are relatively pleased with how they look for LK and some aren't. We're not done yet.
6) As you can see, making Protection viable for dps and / or PvP is controversial. Some people would love to see it and for some it's a wasted or misguided effort. That's the reason we want to continue to explore the issue and take baby steps without totally burning down the warrior trees and starting over.
Blizzard should normalize instant attacks... again. The formula I envision would be as follows:
Normalized Damage = (Weapon DPS + [Attack Power / 14]) x Weapon Normalization Factor
Where Weapon Normalization factor is the same as it is now, give or take a little tweaking. Probably increasing the values to numbers reflective of near-ideal weapon speeds, perhaps giving AP and weapon damage different factors:
The idea is to have weapons of the same white (tooltip) DPS put out the same yellow DPS as their faster/slower counterparts. This would have the effect of making abnormally slow weapons less desirable, but conversely would have the effect of making fast weapons entirely viable. The caveat is that Flurry mechanics would still encourage slow weapons to some extent.
The only potential problem is slam mechanics (being un-normalized as it is). However I personally think Slam is a relic of some really bad pre-TBC thinking (not that TBC was a beacon of enlightenment either) and should probably be revisited. Ideally, I think it should be normalized, should delay your white swing without a reset, and should have a ~1.5 second cast (minimum) and possibly have Imp Slam include a high proc rate stun effect.
There is one simple thing that holds the protection tree down and thats rage gain. Sword/Shield is awful for rage gains, as long as it remains that way, any cool "tricks" they put in, or try to apply will be squelched by "not enough rage.". Unfortunately this is hard to balance because of being able to swap weapons. However, the tree loses its meaning if someone has DW to gain rage only to sword/board to spend it.
The easiest solution would probably be something like sword/board making rage gains with a shield equipped more significant, closer to whats experienced with a two hander, how they could go about this? I'm not sure, they could have the shield serve as a separate auto attack, with a static damage value relative to the its Ilvl (Without the DW penalities, obviously its damage would be lower.) or even just up the rage gain via the talent.
In any case, it looks like they are trying to go back to the old "vision" of protection being a "spartan" type warrior, defensive, but not meek, using the shield as an additional source of damage...In order to pull that off well though they would need to toss the mitigation talents around the upper levels of the trees though, more like how DKs are designed and focus the lower trees on DPSing with your specific set up (Arms=Two hander Fury=DW and Protecting=Sword/Shield.).
As ghost said though, a shift that profound probably won't happen this expansion.
While I appreciate most comments/thoughts in this thread, I find it disturbing how much this thread went off track.
I thought it was to be about discussing WotLK warrior talents and skills? Surely this includes mechanics which are deeply rooted in the warrior class since WoW started (stances e.g.)
But the repeated individual imagination of new/changed warrior skills and talents (and how the warrior class as a whole should shift in their direction) in every third post gets really tedious.
I know I'm a rogue and so don't have any real insight into what warriors want or what makes them balanced, but if using a shield does make rage gain a problem, then is it possible that allowing prot warriors to autoattack using their shield is an option? Maybe tie it in with Defensive Stance so you're doing less dps by default (it wouldn't really be balanced to have +10% dps, with the armor of a shield and extra dps/rage as well).
It's just a thought.
--edit--
Or have a deep Prot talent that allows you to gain the rage you would have got from a white swing when you use your Heroic Strike ability. It always seemed a little counterintuitive that in using your threat-generating skill, you actually limited your ability to use other threat-generating skills later by slowing your rage generation.
Last edited by hannigaholic : 09/01/08 at 6:54 AM.
While I appreciate most comments/thoughts in this thread, I find it disturbing how much this thread went off track.
I thought it was to be about discussing WotLK warrior talents and skills? Surely this includes mechanics which are deeply rooted in the warrior class since WoW started (stances e.g.)
But the repeated individual imagination of new/changed warrior skills and talents (and how the warrior class as a whole should shift in their direction) in every third post gets really tedious.
No offense.
The post was in reference to a philosophical design post that Ghostcrawler (A dev) was quoted as saying just a few posts above...
One of the designers mentioned the movie Gladiator the other day. Watch how Maximus uses his shield -- he isn't cowering behind it -- he's bashing people in the face with it. Shields should be a viable form of combat, not the option to avoid combat. It would be awesome if some day Arms was the 2H tree, Fury was the DW tree, and Prot was the sword and board tree
There was really no "imagination" in the post, just a comment on the deep rooted mechanics which prevent the fruition of the intended design goal of the protection tree. The "opinion" of sword and board wasn't any notion on a new, imaginative talent but rather how it could be tweaked to meat this design philosophy of sword/shield being a "combat style" rather than a "tanking thing." Its fairly obvious the current iteration of the talent is supposed to provide "more" output in terms of both damage and threat, though as is now its clunky (For reasons mentioned already) and doesn't really aid in meeting the philosophical goals that were mentioned.
I fail to see how discussion about blue specific philosophies and how talents aid in achieving, or fail in helping to achieve, those mentioned philosophies isn't relevant..
Regarding the Charge Talent: Charge in Combat is fine but it will need to be available in Defensive Stance as Liar said - I don't want to have to change stance and lose some of the Rage anyway (I can't afford to spec Tactical Mastery). But since there's also a "Pull Shot" now I wonder if really this charge was intended more as a PvP talent allowing us to PvP in Battle Stance / Defensive and not have to use the Berzerker stance to get about.
I read Ghostcrawler's quote-and-response with interest but got the distinct impression he accepted that the latest round of changes was lacklustre from a Raid MT perspective; I also noted he seemed to be inviting ideas.
I can't access the US forums but surely this is the chance for people with solid ideas to present them in that thread.
Hopefully some of the informed posters from EJ have taken the opportunity to make their feelings known.
For my own part I've always felt a "Bladed Armour" (Armour based) or "Counterattacks" (Defence based) talent would be suitable - being a talent which gave a slight improvement to your Defensive Stance threat modifier as you improved the value. Nothing massive but a few % as you approached the gear cap in whichever stat was chosen.
Slightly retro as this idea predated even TBC but it probably still has a place now given none of the new changes properly address our Rage generation issues (though I accept the Improved Defensive Stance "Enrage" was an attempt at this). So if we are not getting significantly more Rage - increase the % threat modifier.
But Blizzard must know one of the key talents we want back is something equivalent to Stalwart Protector so we don't have to get a chunk of our rage from a specific Paladin Blessing - or we risk a repeat the current paradigm where Prot Warriors uniquely remove or downgrade gear to be viable in previous content. I don't want to have to downgrade 1-2 Tiers of gear to run a Dungeon (even Heroic or lower Tier Raid) when the rest of the group is in their top +Damage gear seeing how fast they can kill monsters.
If they want to reduce button mashing, how about just making shield block passive, i.e 100% shield block rating with a shield on, always. Paladins have 100% shield block uptime already, so this is hardly overpowering.
Another thing they could do, give Devestate a cooldown, but making it more effective. For example, applying 2 sunders, deals weapon damage, 3 second cooldown.
P.S. yes, this isn't an idea thread, but some of us can't post on the beta forum, so we can only provide feedbacks via proxy.
The post was in reference to a philosophical design post that Ghostcrawler (A dev) was quoted as saying just a few posts above...
One of the designers mentioned the movie Gladiator the other day. Watch how Maximus uses his shield -- he isn't cowering behind it -- he's bashing people in the face with it. Shields should be a viable form of combat, not the option to avoid combat. It would be awesome if some day Arms was the 2H tree, Fury was the DW tree, and Prot was the sword and board tree
There was really no "imagination" in the post, just a comment on the deep rooted mechanics which prevent the fruition of the intended design goal of the protection tree. The "opinion" of sword and board wasn't any notion on a new, imaginative talent but rather how it could be tweaked to meat this design philosophy of sword/shield being a "combat style" rather than a "tanking thing." Its fairly obvious the current iteration of the talent is supposed to provide "more" output in terms of both damage and threat, though as is now its clunky (For reasons mentioned already) and doesn't really aid in meeting the philosophical goals that were mentioned.
I fail to see how discussion about blue specific philosophies and how talents aid in achieving, or fail in helping to achieve, those mentioned philosophies isn't relevant..
First of all, my reply wasn't directed at you or someone else specifically.
I just see too many "lets design warrior talents on the fly"-posts in the last 20 pages of this thread for my liking.
Granted some have valid points, are presented in an elaborate fashion und are contributing to this thread as a whole ... but many are just wishfull thinking out of thin air.
As for your point of "sword and board" as a playstyle just like DW and 2h.
It already is a viable playstyle. In the film Gladiator which you mention as a inspirational reference the shield is still used primarly for protection reasons. Secondary as a means to deal damage.
How is this different from the status quo of S&B playstyle?
Shield Slam does provide formidable damage, shield bash utility.
But primarly a shield provides protection in the form of blocks and armor.
DPSing with a shield and 1h does certainly not compete with DW and 2H and some tweaks might be justified, but should it go head to head with the other playstyles you mention (DW and 2H)?
I for one dont think so as it would open up a whole can of worms with more problems than solutions. Therefore I dont see the talent trees of the warrior three fold "2H - DW - S&B". I do not think these three playstayles are comparable at all.
But as a Blue once said (I'm paraphrasing here): stop designing the game or talents, tell us whats wrong with the existing ones and we will find a solution.
Whats wrong with the S&B Style in your eyes now?
Not competing in PvP? I'd go out on a limb and say that a mix of offensive and protective talents might be just the fotm to come.
Not doing enough damage? Devestate was quite an ingenious idea IMHO and weaponswitching is still an option midcombat.
Not blocking for a significant amount? Unless you make it a fixed portion this inequity is a direct consequence of the different play context in game (5man, 10man, 25man, soloplay).
The protection tree was quite bloated and got cut a few points.
If they removed vigilance, changed shockwave and reintroduced the "Stalwart protector"-like talent (I still dont get why it was presumed a bad talent ... it helped a lot on AE pulls, ESPECIALLY in settings you outgear as so many lament) I'd be quite happy with the tree as it is.
But as a Blue once said (I'm paraphrasing here): stop designing the game or talents, tell us whats wrong with the existing ones and we will find a solution.
Whats wrong with the S&B Style in your eyes now?
Not competing in PvP? I'd go out on a limb and say that a mix of offensive and protective talents might be just the fotm to come.
Not doing enough damage? Devestate was quite an ingenious idea IMHO and weaponswitching is still an option midcombat.
Not blocking for a significant amount? Unless you make it a fixed portion this inequity is a direct consequence of the different play context in game (5man, 10man, 25man, soloplay).
The protection tree was quite bloated and got cut a few points.
If they removed vigilance, changed shockwave and reintroduced the "Stalwart protector"-like talent (I still dont get why it was presumed a bad talent ... it helped a lot on AE pulls, ESPECIALLY in settings you outgear as so many lament) I'd be quite happy with the tree as it is.
I largely agree with you; there are only a few holes and a bit of bloat that could use trimming, and beyond that, the tree as it stands is pretty good. I'd add Sword and Board as needing some changes (I'm not entirely sure that adding a random proc to watch for is something warriors really need, warrior tanking is already pretty darned engaging), but beyond that I think most of the ideas in the tree are good ones. I'm a little worry about the heavy talent duplication (e.g. incite, improved revenge, and the shield slam portion of S&B are all very similar in terms of what they do, it's just applied to different abilities), but I guess the primary concern is making us effective.
One worry I have is that they seem extremely focused on making protection better at PvP and DPS. This bothers me given that I think there are still some glaring holes to fix in the tanking portion of the tree. I want it to be a good tree for tanking first and foremost, and it feels like we've gained so much less ground in that regard than other classes.
One thing I'm curious to see is how they balance Blessing of Sanctuary going forward. 10 rage on a block/dodge/parry is an enormous amount of rage. Shield Block (with its new 10 second duration) would literally fill up your rage bar and then some against most reasonably-fast-hitting mobs or small pulls, even if you took zero damage during that time. It just seems extremely powerful in its current form, and with 2/2 talented Shield Block (10 second duration, 40-second cooldown, for 25% uptime), a pretty much constantly full rage bar really isn't out of the question. Given their newfound desire for no one raid buff to be required, it seems extremely powerful in its current form. I suppose if warriors and druids both end up generating 3-5 rage per dodge or parry the increase from Sanctuary becomes proportionally smaller, but in its current state it seems extremely high.
It already is a viable playstyle. In the film Gladiator which you mention as a inspirational reference the shield is still used primarly for protection reasons. Secondary as a means to deal damage.
How is this different from the status quo of S&B playstyle?
Shield Slam does provide formidable damage, shield bash utility.
But primarly a shield provides protection in the form of blocks and armor.
DPSing with a shield and 1h does certainly not compete with DW and 2H and some tweaks might be justified, but should it go head to head with the other playstyles you mention (DW and 2H)?
I for one dont think so as it would open up a whole can of worms with more problems than solutions. Therefore I dont see the talent trees of the warrior three fold "2H - DW - S&B". I do not think these three playstayles are comparable at all.
But as a Blue once said (I'm paraphrasing here): stop designing the game or talents, tell us whats wrong with the existing ones and we will find a solution.
Whats wrong with the S&B Style in your eyes now?
Not competing in PvP? I'd go out on a limb and say that a mix of offensive and protective talents might be just the fotm to come.
Not doing enough damage? Devestate was quite an ingenious idea IMHO and weaponswitching is still an option midcombat.
Not blocking for a significant amount? Unless you make it a fixed portion this inequity is a direct consequence of the different play context in game (5man, 10man, 25man, soloplay).
The protection tree was quite bloated and got cut a few points.
The thing about the way shields were used in "gladiator" or "300" or any other combat movies where the fighter used a shield is that it was fluid, it was elegant....Protection, as it stands now, is only like that *if* you're taking damage, when you're not the main target, the abilities become disjointed, forming combinations, or cycles, becomes an effort in watching a rage bar hoping you don't miss, not about deciding whether you would rather intercept for a stun or dev a few more times.
See, with arms or fury, I can do crazy things like Swap>Disarm>Swap>Ham string>Sunder>DD>Back out intercept...I'm comfortable with dumping rage on swaps or extra utility because I know I'm not going to sit there without any for a long time..I'm not comfortable doing that with protection..I'm often not comfortable using shield slam because I don't even know if I'll have the rage to refresh sunder and hamstring if I'm low (Especially if I am saving for an interrupt.)..I can't count on big chunks of rage coming in.
I'm not disagreeing that Sword/board damage and utility wise is right about where it should be..Its got enough defensive prowess that giving it a lot more direct offense would make it the FOTM, you're right..However, the problem is all that utility is wasted when you're not the target because you don't have the rage to use it all. Unless you're DWing, but a lot of the "big" utility comes through shields, like 6 talents improve shields, how come the only viable way to use the broad utility in the tree is to sac..your shield? See, thats the problem with sword and board, its not a self fueling play style..Its utility can't be used effectively with just a....Sword and Board....
I'm not advocating more damage..I'm advocating more rage..There is a big difference there, unfortunately, its hard to give one, without the other.
I agree with everyone's off-tanking concerns. Changing Vigilance to something like "places a buff on a friendly party or raid member that grants 10% additional rage or 10% additional runic power/mana regeneration while in combat while the buff is active. Also, targets under the effect of Vigilance generate 15% additional threat from spells and abilities." would help alleviate the pain of off-tanking on fights that do not deal heavy raid damage.
The additional threat generation may be a bit overpowered but it can be adjusted if need be. The main goal was to create a buff that allows the main tank to help his fellow tanks, which would help create some synergy in a multi-tank situation. Also, I haven't had a chance to fully digest the Death Knight tanking mechanics so the runic power regeneration numbers may need to be tweaked.
One thing I'm curious to see is how they balance Blessing of Sanctuary going forward. 10 rage on a block/dodge/parry is an enormous amount of rage. Shield Block (with its new 10 second duration) would literally fill up your rage bar and then some against most reasonably-fast-hitting mobs or small pulls, even if you took zero damage during that time.
I read on the paladin forums that it only restores 1 rage, not 10. Probably a result of the fact that a lot of internal calculations multiply the actual rage value by 10 (probably to give them more precision).
So it's certainly not as overpowering as I initially thought it would be.
I'm still desperately hoping for some Stalwart-Protector-like mechanism to be put back into the game. Right now, it looks like Justified Killing is going to be almost too good to pass up, from a "fun factor" angle if nothing else.
The thing that gets me about prot as it's currently constructed on live, is I hear so many people say something along the lines of "I wanted to grind/farm for gold/etc. so I put on my dps gear and went DW with devastate." Now I understand the dps gear part, but going dual wield as protection should never be the optimum situation if you're specced prot. Using your shield should always be the best option if you're specced heavy prot, and blizzard should work towards that goal.
As mentioned, the main thing that holds you back from using your shield in general every day use is that you just don't have enough rage to use your abilities enough. The combination of generating less rage from damage taken due to blocking and having more armor and using a single 1h weapon instead of dual wield or a 2h weapon.
But grinding is a pretty small part of the game, and probably shouldn't be the focus of blizzard's efforts, even if it is made less of a chore than currently. In my opinion, the prot tree should offer 2 options to spec towards: PVP and tanking.
For pvp, to be a threat, you need to be able to kill people, or CC/annoy the hell out of people for a good period of time, or heal. Since healing is out the window, that leaves us with killing and CC/annoyance. Since killing is the focus of Arms and Fury pvp styles for the most part, IMO the focus of prot pvp should be annoyance with the ability to kill still there but less than Arms/Fury, since there really doesn't need to be a true CC for warriors.
Things that qualify as annoyances in PVP are: Silences (got one in prot), Stuns (prot has several now), Knockdowns/Knockbacks (Druids and Shaman are getting these, maybe one for prot?) Prot also has the very nice safeguard talent, which is sure to be annoying since there's no way to dispell it. If there truly is an in-combat Charge coming to the prot tree, if you couple it with Improved Charge that's 25 rage every 15 seconds (as it currently stands). That would be pretty damned nice when combined with the slow-clearing effect from Safeguard, and it also finally gives you an in-combat mobility skill for battle stance. I think i'd like a shield-charge-like ability better, but this would be a very elegant solution if it's true.
The other thing everyone says you need for warrior pvp is a healing debuff. Fury is getting one in some form, and now rogues have a much improved version of wound poison. Even if it doesn't stay quite as good, you can see the direction the devs want to go. Perhaps prot doesn't need this ability, and just needs to be teamed with another class with a healing debuff? I would prefer they added a healing debuff to prot in some form, if not a base ability for all warriors, but maybe the pvp prot warrior could make do without it.
As for tanking, it's hard to say with how things currently are in beta if it will turn out good or bad. As long as they make warriors at least as good as the alternatives for 5-10 mans and equal to the alternatives for most raid encounters, warriors will be fine. I don't know if we need new abilities for improving 5-10 man performance, or we just need to tweak the ones we have, like thunderclap and cleave.
RE: The video with DW arms vs TG fury: Does anyone know if the new overpower-based stuff in the arms tree is functional yet? I'd be curious to see the performance of 2h arms with those talents vs TG fury and DW arms that he already tried. And holy crap at the 13k execute crits he was getting, I can see some big time complaints from people in pvp if you can bust one of those out towards the beginning of a fight, since the numbers i'm hearing for level 80 health numbers is like 19k hp.
Formerly of Immortality on Skullcrusher
Formerly of Lost Anarchy on Ner'Zhul
Currently inactive, but might try out WOTLK, but then again...
RE: The video with DW arms vs TG fury: Does anyone know if the new overpower-based stuff in the arms tree is functional yet? I'd be curious to see the performance of 2h arms with those talents vs TG fury and DW arms that he already tried. And holy crap at the 13k execute crits he was getting, I can see some big time complaints from people in pvp if you can bust one of those out towards the beginning of a fight, since the numbers i'm hearing for level 80 health numbers is like 19k hp.
Taste for Blood is currently functional, but probably not in the intended way. It allows the use of Overpower for the full five seconds the buff lasts, which, on top of dual-wielding axes, is likely the reason for the high number of Sudden Death procs. There's also the level and armor of the training dummy to take into account, and the gear itself he was using, as the PvP armor lacks any hit rating at all. I'd hardly take the video as conclusive of anything right now.
Taste for Blood is currently functional, but probably not in the intended way. It allows the use of Overpower for the full five seconds the buff lasts, which, on top of dual-wielding axes, is likely the reason for the high number of Sudden Death procs. There's also the level and armor of the training dummy to take into account, and the gear itself he was using, as the PvP armor lacks any hit rating at all. I'd hardly take the video as conclusive of anything right now.
Not to nitpick, and I do agree that it's probably not working properly, but the talent currently states: "Whenever your Rend ability causes damage, you have a 10/20/30% chance of allowing the use of your Overpower ability for 5 secs." It doesn't say "allowing the use of your Overpower ability"-it specifically states "for 5 seconds". Going by the tooltip, it sure seems like Overpower should be spammable for 5 seconds. The issue now is that a weapon damage only attack might not be that great, and you might want to use MS or EA if they're up, instead of Overpower (and maybe I'll shit a rainbow later tonight!). In any event, having a talent called "Hoss on your Overpower key like a motherfuck for 5 seconds" doesn't seem like a very good idea for a talent, so it will likely be changed.
It already is a viable playstyle. In the film Gladiator which you mention as a inspirational reference the shield is still used primarly for protection reasons. Secondary as a means to deal damage.
Just to be clear (if it wasn't already) the Gladiator reference was an anecdote passed on by Ghostcrawler not something that spawned from the posters here.
Originally Posted by Ballistae
Even though we still haven't seen a new "toy" for the prot warrior, except Shockwave, of course, I haven't lost faith; the tinkering we're seeing are adressing some of the concerns about bloating, and it seems as if the developers are very much concerned with the mobility of the prot warrior.
The thing is they don't really address bloating per se. They addressed point spend behaviors. The best way to fix bloating would be to bundle and minimize the number of skills in the tree.
The thing is they don't really address bloating per se. They addressed point spend behaviors. The best way to fix bloating would be to bundle and minimize the number of skills in the tree.
Or to take all of the useless and counter-productive stuff out and build it into the class/stances. I.E. removing the defensive stance penalty lessens the necessity of one-hander spec, allowing it to be safely cut down to two or three points along with a commesurate reduction in power if it is needed.
I think probably the biggest problem with the prot tree at the moment is that it is partially upside-down for what Blizzard intends to do. The 51 point is clearly a trash tanking ability, and at the very lowest tiers in the tree are talents designed to increase survivability against hard-hitting bosses. Shield Block, Anticipation, Improved Shield Block, Toughness, and Improved Shield Wall are emphatically not required for anything except the most hard-hitting encounters in the game, and yet we get them before we even have access to our primary instant attacks. At the same time, there is little reason for Fury/Prot or Arms/Prot hybrids because talents that low in the tree do not offer us anything we would actually need for 5-mans and small-scale raiding that such a hybrid would be meant to excel in.
The fundamental problem here is that we are working with trees which were originally designed when you had to spec 31 points into arms in order to maintain decent TPS for Molten Core runs. The basic structure of the tree at low tiers hasn't changed since then, and it shows. What has changed the dynamic is that high TPS abilities have been seeded in high-tier prot, making deep prot the de facto tanking build while simultaneously dwarfing partial tank builds which cherry-pick talents low in prot because there is nothing there that is inherently useful for small-scale tanking while simultaneously being worth the expenditure.
Last edited by Frederic : 09/01/08 at 10:53 PM.
Reason: Grammar, phrasing.
As mentioned, the main thing that holds you back from using your shield in general every day use is that you just don't have enough rage to use your abilities enough. The combination of generating less rage from damage taken due to blocking and having more armor and using a single 1h weapon instead of dual wield or a 2h weapon.
I don't really agree. When I'm soloing stuff doing dailies, I absolutely can put my threat tanking set on and spam an instant on every GCD (standard rotation is SS, dev x3). The problem isn't that I can't generate the rage to do stuff, it's that my base dps is absolutely garbage. In a raid it's really no different, you'll take some splash damage in most fights and you can basically keep your GCDs full. The issue is that you can't use heroic strike when you're rage starved and tanking, instants are still usable, but dps has scaled well beyond what only our instants can keep up with. The only thing extra rage would get me is more heroic strikes. While that's nice when I'm just dpsing, it really isn't going to increase my damage output by a factor large enough to matter.
This is probably common sense, but if you compare a 1h weapon and shield with a two-handed weapon and you're looking at a base dps difference of 30% or more, just from the weapon selection. Compare a 1h and shield vs 2x 1h weapons and the base dps difference is comparable once you factor in the added miss rate. When you've got one hand effectively adding 0 dps for you, it's a serious handicap.
Shieldslam really doesn't need a lot of help, it scales really well and it has solid utility, even in pvp (if it worked like a "real" dispel that could remove BoP it'd be even better). What really needs help are the non-shieldslam instants and/or our auto-attack damage if you really want to see a "sword and shield style" fighter. They could do this by fixing sword and board to be more like windfury (instant, higher proc rate with an internal CD - that will make it much less RNG based and much more dependable) or they could create talents that increase your damage dealt by a percentage when you have a shield equipped.
One of the bigger issues to me as a warrior is that you'll have druids and deathknights able to swap to "dps mode" after tanking and still put up semi-respectable numbers. Warriors and paladins are basically just taking up space and a buff/debuff bitch after their mob dies. I guess from one perspective, that's good since that means we'll usually be tanking the last mob to die.
Just a note about Shockwave, it looks right now like it does absolutely more threat than anything but Shield Slam. At ~1000 attack power it puts out 400 damage + 'high threat', whatever that number happens to be, which makes it already more than revenge. Even if you can only use it once every 20 seconds, it would be a viable addition to your normal, single target threat rotation.
That said, I hope they roll it into Thunderclap and be done with it, personally.
Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler on why the tiered difficulty content model doesn't work
As I have said a million times, good games (maybe good anything) can’t be designed by popular vote.
09/01/08, 1:17 AM
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