Liar

Please clarify these two points for me. When did Berserker Rage ever cost rage to activate and Intercept is already usable in combat?

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

 

Ballistae

Intercept is available in combat, but only in Berserker stance. And thus, if we want to utilize it while we're tanking we need to stance-dance which means it costs us a bucket load of rage. Thereby it shares in-combat Charge's main disadvantage.

Regarding the rage cost of Berserker Rage, I seem to have mis-remembered. Point still stands though.

 

Dots

I disagree, when you are done, you can switch stance and deal the same damage. This way abilities can be balanced at doing 100% damage instead of 90% or 110% part of the time. The only real problem like I said is building threat as an off-tank which appears to be a design of the past.

 

Liar

Let me rephrase it then: I'd rather have a new Prot talent that increases our damage regardless of stances so we can contribute meaningful DPS after we are done tanking. Staying in Defensive stance for anything but Intervene was out of the question to begin with. The problem about "balancing abilities at doing 100% damage all the time" is that Prot does not have any unique abilities that other DPS Warriors don't have (you could argue Devastate but then again a Prot Warrior doing DPS in tank gear and one in full DPS gear are two completely different beasts altogether) so they cannot just buff WW or whatever without affecting other specs. Prot needs something unique that gives us more DPS after we are done tanking and Improved Defensive stance is not it.

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

In general, I think Blizzard needs to consolidate their rage gain mechanics. The existence of things that make little tweaks to rage afforded by various abilities might seem to the designers like a natural thing to attach to talents (i.e. if I were trying to come up with talents to fill space in a warrior tree, it's probably one of the first things I'd think to do), but ultimately you're guaranteeing a situation where rage is a more difficult to balance, and potentially frustrating for players who don't have those talents (as they imply situations where a player want to have rage to do something but just doesn't). I'm specifically referring to things like Tactical Mastery, Improved Bloodrage, Endless Rage, Intensify Rage, Improved Berserker Rage etc., probably not so much special-case things like Second Wind. Furthermore, given the extreme variability of rage gain under different circumstances, these all really kind of suggest some perceived level of precision in rage gain and use that I don't think exists (certainly not to the degree that it exists for something like energy).

I think all of these really just make it more difficult to arrive at a coherent vision of warrior resource management. And it's particularly significant to me since most of them seem to be leading towards a situation where Prot warriors are screwed on rage generation.

 

Ballistae

I agree that as it stands, we usually kill our feral's tanking target first before our warrior's (and the warrior's before our paladin's, I suppose) as the feral contributes to much more when not tanking compared to the warrior and paladin.

I'm not sure we need another talent to change this, though (and it should definitely be under the condition of a slimming of a already bloated tree ). I think 1-handed specialization is already a very elegant solution to that problem. If we need more damage that talent is easy to tweak. 15% more? 20% more? You could even make it stance-dependant if we're worried about warriors having too high a tps.

Also, I assume the much greater amount of Strength on tanking gear will at least reduce our handicap of being in our tanking gear after our mob is dead.

 

Darmon

I always found extremely useful to have 1 point in TM, for 15 rage kept after stance change, making easy to drop a TC or SSlam immedeatly after.

I just found something on beta forum. It seems that shield bash lost the daze component. Is there any other daze generation mechanics? Piercing howl daze never counted for HS dmg bonus, so it seems kind of strange to have a skill that does extra dmg to a dazed targe, but the warriors can't inflict daze on targets.

 

Cranium

I don't see people on her discussing the WW changes, and honestly I'm a little mad. I don't like how in one patch they remove our new major instant attack (which I was planning to get in on avg every 13-16 seconds) and reduce WW. Yes, reduce.

In the standard 17/44 build getting that 1 pt in WW allows us to use WW 1 extra time every 36 seconds. This has to do with, as I am sure you all know, the way WW and BT come off of cooldown at similar times. Now that we can not put that point into it, we lose 25% of our WW ability in a given 36 sec block of our rotation. But congrats on the need to spend an extra point to get only 20% more effectiveness!

WWWHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 

PSGarak

Cooldown clipping is why they're changing it, so that the second point actually mattters and so that the damage increase is linear. It may be a damage nerf (for now, they could adjust the numbers), but it's a better-designed talent.

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

 

Rule

I like these changes.

For one, look at enraged assault, you had a choice between keeping the enrage effect - and all enrage effects increase damage in some way - or burning it on an instant attack, which also was more damage. Is that a really tactical decision? I can get either more damage or... more damage. By making it so you have to sacrifice damage to gain a heal effect, you have a more interesting choice: more damage via keeping the enrage effect or more survivability by burning Enraged Regeneration. Furthermore, there are enrage effects to get in all three trees, making Enraged Regen a very accessible ability.

For the people complaining that you can't get TM in a "pure min/maxed" tanking build, why would you want to? Do you really think it would be good to be able to spend 51 points in any tree and get all the good pve (tanking or dps) AND pvp abilities?

To me it seems clear they want you to make choices in each tree. For arms it seems they want you to spec into the overpower-related talents to do pve dps, and to get all the bleeds/2h for pvp. It sure doesn't seem to me like there's enough points to do both. For fury it seems like many more of the talents are dual purpose, but then it remains to be seen what they do with Unending Fury with the change to enraged assault. For prot it's a choice between the deep pvp talents like Warbringer and Safeguard, while skipping Vigilance, or getting Vigilance and getting more of the avoidance talents.

I agree they could still do some tweaking/consolidating in the prot tree, and I think incite would be a lot better if it also affected shield slam and devastate, with them doing something else with critical block, but that's just me.

Overall I think they're heading in a good direction.

Formerly of Immortality on Skullcrusher
Formerly of Lost Anarchy on Ner'Zhul
Currently inactive, but might try out WOTLK, but then again...

 

Gruntle

It's not a damage nerf. As Shha has already shown earlier in this thread the BT/WW cycle we've been using is no longer the optimal one when WW hits significantly harder than BT. It may be a nerf for DW 1h builds, but that is not really interesting.

Just a speculation, a somewhat balanced nerf to TG builds would be to change the normalization of WW to use the onehand values when using TG (or change WW back to be MH only). No idea if it's needed or not, or if it's enough balance, but it would keep TG intact without messing with haste or similar scale-affecting properties.

 

mistersix

Actually, it was a tactical decision. The general mechanic in beta atm is that bleed effects do even more damage to enraged mobs. If you're squaring off against a rogue, druid, warrior all of whom have plentiful bleed effects burning the enrage via enraged assault is very much a tactical decision. It's not different from the notion of overpower and consequences with dodging warrior attacks.

Bleeds (despite my example above) are definitely not just the domain of pvp. It's actually pretty easy to spec to get both the overpower enhancing skills and all the bleed skills.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...00000000000000

 

Cranium

Honestly, in regards to WW/BT I am hoping that they add a glyph to BT to make it a 5 second cooldown. That would help a bit, since then you could stagger BTs and WWs and have some gaps between the two, for odd rage dumps or popping of other cooldowns or recouping rage, instead of needing your 55 rage available at key points.

And in regards to the optimal cycle changing, I have not yet read that post (I'll have to go find it), but with the way itemization is scaling to be more than double (ie, 22 crit rating = 1% now being 45) I'm guessing there will be a lot of AP end game @ 80, which should still make BT do some amazing damage over WW on single target. Like I said though, just my guess since I have yet to read the post.

 

Duranthor

Okay, I will start of by saying tanking does not concern me. I understand many of my warrior brethren like it, I will leave that to them and trust that their laments are enough and they don’t' need me to add my voice to their chorus.

So without further ado I will plunge into the topic at hand, viz warrior dps.

I have been reading accounts and opinions about the state of warrior dps and talents and TG and this, that and the other thing, and upon reading the most recent changes and the justifications therefore, I feel like throwing a few of my cents into the fountain.

I will first bore you with my theory of warrior dps as it is central to the conclusions I will draw about other aspects of wotlk.

Warrior dps is all about Rage Conversion. What I mean by this is that your dps will be directly reflective of how effectively you are able to spend your rage. Further, anytime that you lose rage, are capped with rage, or have static rage; you are in effect losing dps. Unlike Energy or manna, Rage is dynamic and the timing of when you get rage is as important as how much you are generating.

With that out of the way, here is what I have to say about wotlk.

Arms:
Until Blizzard does something to increase warrior dps in battle stance, increasing how often you can use Over Power is meaningless. The logic behind this is simple, not only do you lose the ability to use such moves as WW, but you also lose 3% crit AND the ability to generate 10% more rage from damage taken. But the importance of crit goes beyond just the damage added; it's also means that you lose at least 3% more potential rage which could be converted into other damage. Unless they make Over Power a great deal better than HS, switching out of Bezerker stance to use it will also result in a loss of dps as that rage you lose when you stance dance could probably produce 2-3 Heroic strikes.
One could then question, well why not just stay in battle stance? To this I would answer, everything in the arms tree with the exception of Rend and Overpower which you can’t' use in zerker stance, you can do better in bezerker stance for PVE purposes.

For PvP, it's a different story of course, and you will definitely be doing tons of stance dancing, but PVE dps is another story.

As for Blade Storm, Personally I think this talent makes more sense in the Fury tree which is the home of ALL of our other aoe attacks. The Get out of jail free cards should stay in arms, but the skill itself should be in the fury tree linked below WW in my opinion. But anyway, As long as you cannot break CC with it, you can be disarmed for the duration, and you can generate rage during the duration, this ability will never been taken over Death Wish. Blizzard made a mistake when they though for a second that the only reason that pvp warriors took death wish was for the fear immunity. The reason that death wish is amazing is because you get a controlled 20% increase in damage done for 20 seconds. That is so powerful it's ridiculous. So I guess I would say the biggest problem for Blade Storm is that death wish is now once again in the fury tree. I also want to point out here that with the removal of mace stuns from the arms tree and the addition of furious attacks, Blood Thirst may indeed become better for PVP than MS if Blood Thirst really heals for as much as people are saying it does on the beta. But that's an aside.

Fury

The Fury Tree is right now, Beautiful. The change to deep wounds, the unlinking of Enrage and Flurry, Blood Surge, Death wish coming back, the change to rampage, these are all things to write home to mother about. I'm a little cheesed that incite is in the prot tree since this would make way more sense in either the arms or fury tree, but I digress.

The main thing that I want to talk about here is Titan's Grip and Blizzards conception that it will need some sort of counter balance.

I will say that right now it does not concern me that other dps classes are doing more damage than us at the moment. Our dps mechanic is better than theirs and as we get gear we will catch up and surpass them, which bring me to my thoughts on Titans grip.

Unless they do something drastic to the Rage Generation formula, Titan's grip is a dead Skill. How can that be you ask? Well simply put it comes down to Heroic Strike. We will come to the point in WOTLK where it takes very few white hits to fill our rage bar. With the advent of Haste Gems the change to WF, the change to WW AND the change to rampage, we are going to be looking at a rotation of BT every 6 seconds, WW every 10, a Free slam every 12 or so seconds. What this amounts to is that we are going to be looking at a ton of rage that is going to be needing to be dumped and very few moves other than HS to spend it on. Heroic Strike gets better the faster your weapons get. No, I am not advocating daggers here, but if you can grab a 2.8 speed main hand and get enough haste to make that puppy a 1.5 speed, your heroic strikes are gonna hit for a truck ton. And the Beauty of HS is that because it's an on next swing attack, something unique to warriors, it does not take a GBC. What this means is you can macro HS to all your other moves and just pound away without worrying about losing dps to gbcs, as long as you have the rage. How does this relate to TG? Well, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that since Two handers generate their rage by lumps instead of frequency, a next swing attack coupled with the high miss rate involved from duel wielding is going to lead to rage starvation. One can already see this problem when one wields two slow weapons. It is well documented that 2 slow weapons generates streakier rage, I can only see this being more true with two two handed weapons. Honestly, I see Hit and Expertise being two of the most important stats for a Titans Grip Build, but I digress. 100 rage is 100 rage for sure. However the question is and I believe this highlights the weakness of titans grip, is is it better to generate that rage in 3 seconds with one swing, or is it better to generate 100 rage on several swings in the same 3 seconds? As far as cool down are concerned it doesn't matter either way, even if you miss one swing with your 3 seconds, since your shortest cool down is 6 seconds, you should be able to recover in time to perform your dps cycle. However, it does matter in terms of how much you can then do addition on next swing attacks. You never want to not have rage to do your cool downs. The more swings you have in the same period of time, the less chance you have of this occuring. I will say that stead rage is always better than Streaky rage because you can rage dump with more confidence. Unless the damage increase from wielding 2 two handers + the damage from your yellow attack cycles > the damage of 2 One handers+ The damage from your yellow attack cycles+ the damage from your next swing attacks, I think TG is going to have a hard time keeping up as it is, and if you try and counter balance it, it won't keep up at all at end game. Sure the stats on two handed weapons are awesome, but hit and expertise are stats you are never going to be free from, meanwhile your one hand duel wielding counter part is going to be stacking more haste and more crit because hit will become less and less important with the increase in weapon damage. TG is cool, but Blizzard is going to have a very fine line to dance between the skill being functional and being a joke, IMO.

I think all of this amounts to Blizzard’s philosophy that given gear and the mechanics of rage warriors will scale well regardless of what they do to our talent trees. The problem with this is that if this statement remains truer for one handers than two handers in any way, Titans Grip will never see play. Blizzard said that their intent for Titan’s Grip is that it should be a no brainer, and really I think that is hardly the case now let alone if they nerf it’s dps.


*note: I would like to say that there will come a point when you will generate more than 100 rage in a swing. This point will occur sooner for 2 handers than it will for 1 handers and without the ability to dump this rage effectively, that additional rage will simply be potential dps lost.

 

Cranium

If I remember correctly from the days of BC coming out, Blizz normalized rage generation to account for this, and I'm guessing they would just do something similar again.

As far as your thoughts on HS and TG, it is totally true. HS works best the more you use it since it is based off a bonus each use. The more uses then the more bonus you get. But right now there are times in the rotation when I can't use it due to saving rage for BT + WW. If I was getting so much rage from the slower swing timers, perhaps my OH will give me enough rage to make for more overall uses of HS.

In addition, the bonus of the free slams will serve as the extra rage dump. Granted they will not happen nearly as often but when they do it will not only eat up rage, but it will do a ton more than HS ever will.

Also with the removal of BoS, I've been seriously thinking about improve cleave and ditching HS. If rage gen will be so great with 2h weps that I am capping while spamming HS then using imp cleave will eat more rage (instead of wasting it), help out on trash dps, AND not give me threat on bosses. You might want to consider that switch if you believe HS will not dump enough for you. Even if not, you might want to consider moving the 3 pts in imp HS to something else as well? *shrug*

 

ikevlari

It's not strictly true that heroic strike is better with a faster weapon. The skill does more than add some damage; it turns a white hit into a yellow, hence it's more likely to hit (up to 20% more likely) and it crits for 20% more. Both of these scale with damage per hit, so a slower weapon gives you more damage for your rage when you use heroic strike. Now, if your offhand rage generation is so good you can heroic strike every hit and still use your other dps skills on cooldown, rage efficiency is a non-issue; but until then, HS favors a slow weapon.

 

Gurro

I am not sure where your other 3 points would go. The bottom 2 Arms talents are lackluster already.

Regarding the Enraged Assault change. I was very disappointed to see this change. I was getting very excited about the ability to eat enraged effects while dealing an all out attack with all weapons. It seemed very much in line with what a fury warrior is. This ridiculous 3 minute Regen has me totally scratching my head. It is so far off and so different. It almost seems like a defensive skill that you will use when your being focused in PVP... and thats it. As others have pointed out with the changes to bleeds and if they do in fact do 2x or 4x more damage on an enraged target, we will be using this to survive. But the 30% over 10 seconds will probably barely counteract the bleed effects if they are doing that much damage.

Somebody mentioned down time. 30% health every 3 minutes if your NOT a fury warrior, big deal. Your still going to need to bandage or sit down and munch on one of those 16k health foods. For PVE, this is not going to help my survivability if I continue to take 10% more damage. An AOE intensive fight, even if I do pop this at exactly the time my healer is stunned or distracted or whatever will probably not save me. 10 seconds is a long time. Can you imagine what the AOE ticks are going to be in level 80 content? Hell Felmyst is doing 4k+ now.

I am praying they add something else to the Fury Warrior line up. Slam is no longer an option since they moved it and with EA gone it is going to be same game with less HS and WW with the occasional free slam.

We will scale better then most classes true, but I don't want to spend the first 3-6 months in WoTLK getting my ass handed to me by other DPS. Oh guys please keep me in the raid, my trash DPS is awesome!

 

Darian_TruBlade

It's not a nerf, but it's also awkward. With a 9 second WW it didn't really matter which you hit first so long as they were always separated by n1.5 seconds (where n is odd). If WW remains at 10 seconds there isn't a way to avoid collisions besides letting one or the other rest off of CD for a couple seconds. The 20% DPS gained by WW you lose 10% BT DPS. It's a clear but awkward DPS gain.

 

Cranium

Well they will need to do something with unending fury since it can not still work with EA. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for something more worthwhile, maybe an improved rampage? I'm not going to be mad if we have to keep less attacks going to do solid DPS. Having to keep track of DW + Recklessness + BR + BT + WW + Slam + BS + Trinkets + .... it gets cumbersome. Some improvement to rampage or even to BS that would give us the bonus to DPS without more attacks would be a good call, and double trouble if it also went raid wide.

 

Xav

In response to Jabez about S&B from our other prot warrior thread: (The Protection Guide)

Some of your stuff is wrong, and your reasoning isn't really the best. Have you tanked in Beta, using Sword and Board? Fully utilizing S&B procs for the extra threat by using them earlier (ignoring the cost reduction on your next), is difficult for an experienced tank that was already doing SS/Rev/Dev/Dev for months (years?). It takes intense micromanagement on an already overly micromanaged class. That's one reason why S&B is a hassle to truly utilize beyond "on paper" math.

And, the threat/rage gain is still very shallow and minor compared to earlier talents, and cheaper talents - that's where the complaints stem from. It just has to do a lot more to be truly 'worth' it compared to other talents you can pick up. (Especially since single target threat is hardly hurting at all right now on beta!)

Just a nitpick, too: Revenge scales very well with AP on Beta, rather than being static as it is on live.

 

Shha

Im not entirely sure how you calculate that - 10 sec WW uses the same rotation (WW,BT,BT,WW,BT,WW) as the 9 sec WW one. The difference is your total time will be 40 sec to get same amount of WW and BT as before with 36 seconds.

So you will use 10% more time to get same effectiveness with BT, and you will use 10% more time to get 20% more damage with WW.

In short

spend 1 point and get:

9% less damage from BT
9.1% more damage from WW

Its actually something that COULD be regarded as a nerf - since counting bloodsurge procs, the damage ends up being about the same but you spend 1 more point. However:

1) You HAVE spare points with TG build - after Enraged Assault nerf, the Unending Fury talent becames a big no-no. Unlinked enrage gives you another 10 points, Frankly you have all points you want and some more....
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...12253120501301
is just an example - I even managed to fit in some stuff like imp execute in (can be alternatively put into heroic leap).

2) Its same damage, but more "room" - you allign your 20 sec/2 minute cooldowns easily now without any overlapping - so in the end the rotation is actually MORE stable - just a /castsequence of

0.0 - WW
1.5 - BT
3.0 - (reserved for Slam)
4.5 - Berserker Rage
6.0 - Free GCD - trinket+DW
7.5 - BT
10.0 - WW
11.5 - (reserved for Slam)
13.5 - BT
15-18 - 3 free GCD to use Battle shout/demo/Slam
20.0 - WW/rotation reset

However I must say this looks a lot more boring then the old one - With enraged assault being usable and actually forcing warriors to have some skill and quick thinking - especially if they buffed Unending Fury.

 

Future

This may help us figure out rotations and rage-generations, but not yet.
I personally am looking forward to it.


Quote from: Kalgan (Source)

In an upcoming update one of the dummies will be level 80 with normal lvl 80 mob stats, the other will be a "boss" dummy with normal lvl 80 boss mob stats.

 

Frederic

Cleave isn't threat efficient, it actually has a worse damage to threat conversion if it's used on a single target than Heroic Strike, Improved it's slightly better, but it still remains rage inefficient.

Mea culpa, mea culpa maxima.

This is why I shouldn't post in the early morning.

Regardless, you are overlooking the mechanics as well. Slam has a 0.5 second cast, but the GCD is 1.5 seconds currently (a minimum of 1 if what people are saying about haste rating is true). This means you cannot prolong your white attack indefinitely, you can only prolong it 0.5 seconds for every 1.5 seconds of auto-swing time, but at the same time you can chain slams 1.5 seconds after each other due to the mechanic change.

Assuming a 3 second attack speed (3.6 speed with WF totem) you could chain two slams after your auto-attack (provided you have the rage) for a result of 300% weapon damage + 310 given current Slam values and with a resulting swing time of 4 seconds. Given the low cost of Slam I think that is probably quite doable, especially if you drop a Slam here and there in favor of something else (Overpower comes to mind) or pop a Bloodthirst to up your rage.

 

Rule

Forgive me, I mispoke, I meant to say the damage increasing talents like imp MS and 2h spec. In a pvp spec, you're going to get one or the other most likely. That spec you have there wouldn't be very good for pvp, with no imp intercept, second wind, imp MS or imp hamstring. To illustrate what I mean better, I think for pvp you'd have to choose between a spec like this:http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...00000000000000

or this:http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...00000000000000

One has the overpower stuff, the other has the damage enhancers. Personally I think you'd be better off with stronger MS and such since with the overpower stuff to be useful you have spend a lot of time in battle stance, which denies the use of WW and intercept, and makes you more vulnerable to fears. The overpower stuff in the spec you listed would be fine for pve however, since it's likely better to prioritize overpower over WW if you're specced that way.

Formerly of Immortality on Skullcrusher
Formerly of Lost Anarchy on Ner'Zhul
Currently inactive, but might try out WOTLK, but then again...

 

DarkJack

With release 2.5? coming and the advent of L70 raiding with Titan's Grip, has anyone looked at the dps results of replacing one or both of the Executioner/Mongoose dual-wield enchants with Savagery?