Prot Warriors have Demoralizing Shout and Thunderclap, which more than even things out for 5 mans and heroics. While Paladins do have a 20% speed reduction through deep Prot talents, it's single target only. It's really obvious when you compared Prot Paladins and Warriors in identical gear in an heroic: the Paladin will take a lot more damage from trash/bosses because he lacks an aoe -AP debuff and and aoe -speed% debuff.

People seem to be talking about tanking at lvl 80. Honestly it feels incredibly easy in a prot spec. I ve been wearing the crafted lvl 80 purple dps helm/boots + the lvl 80 arena gear and pvp items. This gives a large amount of resilience and hp. I have about 22k buffed not using commanding when i am tanking. I have tanked all the instances minus cot strath and heroic nexus. But i can tell you its been rather easy tanking oculus and pinnacle in arena pvp gear (380 resilience). You get 2500 crits of shield slam and shockwave. You do not take much of any damage, you get to chain cleave or HS while spamming devastate, and its really nice to see all the pretty crits. If i die its been to my healer not healing me. I should be running heroic nexus tonight and i doubt ill have to actually toss on tanking gear.

5 man's have gotten easier and more enjoyable due to their shortness in duration.

I don't think extra AP solves the rage starvation problems we run into. Heroic strike is going to see a much higher implicit rage cost and everything I've seen in Sunwell and BT basically requires a pretty liberal use of it (depending on your dps classes' damage output). Scaling instant attack threat moves help, but it really depends on how they tune things.

The dilemma they run into is that if they tune content expecting us to use Cleave or HS, then all the extra AP in the world doesn't really make that much of a difference for our rage generation. You'll end up with a very micro-management intensive meta-game where you Heroic strike on some 1.7-1.4 second swings, but not on others (with haste effects and gear, that's a nightmare). If they aren't expecting us to use those abilities while tanking, then incite isn't that valuable as a talent.

Looking at tanking at 80 right now in the beta isn't necessarily a good guide for what to expect 6 months to a year into the expansion. If I look back at early TBC 5 man's they were usually pretty easy to tank in blues and kara epics. As I started getting SSC gear, it got progressively harder to keep up with the threat output of my dps (I needed to start weaving in more heroic strikes, etc.) The scaling of our threat is important but so is the scaling of our mitigation and avoidance. Comparing a sunwell-geared tank to an early TBC tank, you probably take 1/2 to 1/3 (or even less!) of the net damage you took back then. It's the relative scaling of our threat vs the relative scaling of a dps classes threat and what tools we've been given to cope with it.



Separately, if you look at how DKs and Druids work, both of them take an armor/defensive hit to shift to their "dps form". I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with zerker stance for warriors. Instead of 10% extra damage taken, change it to an armor penalty (or no armor bonus from your shield) and an inability to block, increase the bonus so that it's a percentage damage increase. Then you have defensive stance for survival, battle stance for a "balanced" attack where you can still defend yourself and zerker stance for pure offense.

I also think warriors need a less clunky fear breaking mechanism. If you want arms to be a pvp-viable tree it really needs something you can use in battlestance to break fears.

I was under the impression that Resilience was being changed to no longer provide crit immunity in PvE situations, has that changed? Were you crit immune via defense, did you just not notice being crit at all?

Source: WoW Forums -> Warrior Update

Most of those things are already in the latest build. The in combat charge is nice but I'd like to be able to use charge in Defensive stance,

It was established in the WOTLK Paladin thread that this rumor never materialized. Resilience still works inside instances.

More blue replies from that thread
For one thing, if Vigilance goes like they say, it looks to be a good ability in all tank situations: 5man put it on a dps and get 10% of his threat, 10-25 man put it on MT/OT and give him 5% dodge and transfer 10% of his threat to you, which is not really a bad thing - see all tank rotation fights.

Considering that a rep vendored blue 2H was equivalent to ZA/T5 level 1H weapons it's not surprising that TG is going to get a nerf. I doubt they'll go the haste route again given the sentiments that might dig up; they're probably taking their time to find a solution that has a significant effect but doesn't feel like someone licked the frosting off your birthday cake. That'll be hard, and I'm sure no matter what they do some warrior will act as though Blizzard has burned their house down.

The loss of EA reduces the complexity of Fury's rotations notably. Between that and Bloodsurge it was looking very engaging. It'll be interesting to see if Blizzard adds another attack to replace EA, or if Slam via Bloodsurge is the only significant addition to Fury's rotation.

I can't really see how adding the threat transfer component is a nerf, having a permanent mini-misdirect that you can drop onto the twitchy warlock that never looks at his threat meter and grab a boost from him seems pretty damn sweet to me. How about tank switching fights like bloodboil or huhuran? If its coming up to the transition and the lead tank is a little too far ahead you can drop this on him and start eating into his lead with a 20ish% boost(10% less global threat for him + 10% more for you + 5% more dodge for less rage generation from physical attacks).

With Enraged Assault actually doing damage instead of a pseudo Feral Regeneration effect and with the removal of the speed penalty, Titan's Grip seemed almost about right. There is absolutely no reason to nerf it further unless itemization is simply going to be that out of control in the expansion. All this portends to is us going back to the DW one handed specs we were speculating would be superior to the old Titan's Grip. A 51 point talent should not cause a decrease in overall output (or even be equal, it should be an upgrade) and the current version of TG is what, a 10% increase? That's still not even factoring in what we don't yet know about how threat will be and whether or not the DW axes SD build (that is outperforming TG on a lvl 1 dummy) will be viable. Any talk of a possible "counterbalance" smacks soley of PvP.

If Slam gets "fixed", and unless Rampage is boosted so that it's not yet another (now second and inferior) Warrior ability that will not stack with that of another class that may not be there in a 10 man environment, yet will surely be for a 25 man, Arms will remain king for PvE once again and most likely PvP as well.

The "war bringer" talent is actually really amazing for protection PvP and even small instance situations. A protection warrior will be able to gain 25 rage and close the gap every 15 seconds, not including intercept. Combine that with charge, intercept and intervene being able to remove all impairing effects and 50% toughness reduction, well, its going to make prot by far the most mobile PvP melee class/spec. With the extra rage gen, it should also be possible use much more of its utility, much more often, while keeping a shield on..Stacking strength, it might even do decent damage..I can see prot being a decent pvp spec, perhaps not a super serious arena spec, but a decent pvp one.

Unfortunately, much like with arms, its plagued with stance issues. To make any of what I said above work, you need 3/3 TM, which isn't going to be in *any* real tank build, there is still way too much bloat. If they could fix the prohibitive rage losses, and combine some key tanking talents so the bloat lessens, I could see this tree working more cohesively by allowing the warrior to spend in talents like TM, but not as it is now.

As for arms..I feel like arms is going to get lost in the stance-dance frenzy that it needs to do to use all of its abilities. The tree looks like its coming together, unfortunately its hamstrung by rage loss, even if it has 3/3 TM, the switches would need to be done far too much in PvP due to rend/Overpower/Zerk/Pummel. I'm a fan of rage loss to switch, to make things more tactical, but ideally something has to give, because the trees core DPS lies in battle stance but all of its PvP utility (Zerk, Intercept, Pummel.) lies in zerk..So just by the method of its operation, its going to be extremely limited in what it can use.

Fury, though..looks perfect as is, except obviously changing the talents that rely on enraged assault (The refresh talents will need to be changed for arms to.)...I hope they don't go too far with the TG "counter balance", if its damage needs to come down, I hope its not done in a "artificial" and "frustrating" way (IE higher miss, or slows ect.)..

While I agree with your paragraph about prot tree getting *hugely* buffed for PvP play, I think it es naive to assume a real tanking build (without TM) is going to be competitive in serious Arena play.
For this a talent change seems still inevitable.

@Graul: I haven't done any real tests with Titan Grip vs DW on Beta ... past Lvl 75 Dualwielding 1Hers or 2Hers completely loses its impact due to the severe stats loss you experience (IMHO the best setup was going 2H with a Shield, mitigationwise and DPS was still very good) ... but dualwielding 2H without the speed penalty was head and shoulders above 1hand DW.
I cant see where you come up with a 10% DMG increase for titan grip.

I love the Vigilance change I think it makes the talent a must-have for a Raid environment with a Warrior Tank. Where I worried there was little point in removing 10% of the Threat from only Warlock1 (or whoever is your Raid was the top "aggro risk") if I am now getting that differential transferred to me I now have bonus threat over everyone in the Raid.

It's not going to be entirely straightforward to implement though and will require management to ensure it remains active. If Warlock1 suddenly loses the buff due to adds that form part of a Boss fight - suddenly your threat margin over the raid drops 10% and those running close to the wire might overtake you before they can adjust their output.

Blizzard mention they don't want it being cast on someone who is hit all the time (i.e. 2 tanks buffing each other) but whoever takes this buff will need to be a communicator who warns you when it's been removed.



On the other hand the confirmation that Sword and Board no longer procs off Shield Slam is very disappointing.

Maybe its just me, but I don't understand the reasoning behind the Enraged Assault change? Were Warriors asking for a heal? What confuses me even more are the people rejoicing over it on the Beta forums...

This is just a repeat of what's already been said before, but the upgrade to Heroic Strike at lvl 80 is very significant over what it is now, as has also been previously stated, unless the threat mechanics of it was drastically increased so much that it outweighs the benefit in a DPS cycle, a 1h DW setup "looks" like it would be doing similar to TG now (where before it looked hands down superior to the penalized TG), especially with Incite or if you prefer a weapon spec. I can't possibly see Titan's Grip being able to sustain Heroics once every or every other MH attack and still reliably BT, WW and have the rage needed for random Bloodsurge procs. For straight auto attack damage yes, TG is now a significant upgrade over one handed weapons as it is with the new WW, but aside from the boost from stats, BT would remain moderately close. After that you have Flurry uptime and glancing blows. I really don't see it being much greater than a 10% increase in overall damage in it's current form, 15% at best, but of course that's just a best guess with no hands on experience with it yet.

Just to clarify something, I'm talking about a raid setting, not grinding or lvl 1 test dummies.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...12053120501000

I totally agree, they are screwing up things. The last build was alright, it needed tweaking but the direction was good. When did warriors begin to need a Feral Regeneration effect over another much needed instant, bursty attack?It was better from both fury cicle rotations and pure fun purposes. Also, this supposed counterbalancing thing for Titan Grip is nonsense....Now it's a 51 pointer talent and it's still not overpowered, how can they possibly think it needs a counterbalancing element?
Finally, Slam not resetting the timer is nice but I preferred Enraged Assault as it was before and/or another instant attack. Fury, and the Warrior as a whole, is about instant attacks, not "casting skills".

Now that slam will no longer reset the swing timer, there is a bigger incentive to use a really slow two hander as your main hand weapon over a faster one handed weapon. The dps increase from heroic strike will probably not make up the difference from the slams at level 80 25 man raid level gear.

Also PvE wise, the new slam mechanics seem to make Bloodsurge obselete as it doesn't matter if slam is instant cast since the GCD is as long as the cast time on slam.

The new slam mechanic is just a fix for the problem that you have to cast slam at the beginning of each white swing. You will still lose 0.5 sec of white dps each time you use Slam (in live it's ~0.6-7 if the slam is executed properly and up to the weapon speed if not). The new slam is still not an option for TG builds, losing that 1.5 sec in white dps hurts a lot, thus Bloodsurge is in no way obsolete. It's nice for arms 2h builds though and makes using slam a lot easier in pvp.

To Graul, the build you posted seems a bit odd, for a build that supposedly should do a lot of damage using HS you're including Taste for blood and Imp Overpower? Stance shifting will kill all possible usage of HS, so the 3 talent points spent in those talents are better of used in fury.

I guess it's hard to say if TG will need balancing before people in beta actually start the testing raiding. Maybe the actual counterbalance to TG in this build is the Unending fury in tier 10 that is worse than talents in lower tiers . Perhaps TG can take a balancing hit when we get a proper t10 talent.

Since warriors have plenty of instant attacks to press as is; and can always use Slam anyway what purpose would another instant attack serve really? Unless its alot stronger than our already existing attacks; or applies some debuff or something that makes it useful at least situationally?

A self heal will be really nice though. No need to use food ever if questing as Arms. Wouldn't matter much for Fury I guess. Likely moderately useful in PvP as well. Think its a great addition personally that will make playing a warrior more fun. Not having to stop and eat as often or spend as much inventory space on food = fun.

Another instant attack would just be another button to always press when its up. Warrior DPS can be adjusted using our existing abilities just as well so there is really no need for another single target instant attack.

Ah, I read the change to slam incorrectly.

I agree with you that's exactly how I believe it works: values so far and thus threat margin are intact but if this buff drops essentially the Warrior's TPS output drops.
In an extreme scenario where someone was close to the aggro value and you were only just generating enough threat to stay ahead because of this buff - they might now overtake you.
It's not a massive deal but I think we and the aggromonsters will benefit from a warning that the buff has dropped.