Nezralix

For anyone who's interested, I put together a quick utility for calculating how much rage you get from outgoing damage:

http://krom.x10hosting.com/misc/rage-calc-level80.html

It's based on a similar calculator created by bagelbite that I found linked here:

Warrior Rage Generation and Haste - TankSpot

Updated with level 80 values, and with a slightly different interface for calculating weapon damage: Attack power, weapon damage, and a generic multiplier (which can represent 1H spec, the damage lost to armor, or various other group buffs).

For what it's worth, having more attack power does seem fairly positive. And maybe more importantly, rage gain doesn't appear to scale back going from 70 to 80 as much as they could have made it scale back (although that's all subject to change). I'd still really like to see larger "base" rage values (i.e. the rage you get from hitting for a minimal amount of damage), and a mechanism for gaining rage on dodge/parry. But still.

 

Arazan

Hey guys, I've been really intruiged by Sudden Death ever since I first saw it (and Execute was changed to scale with AP), and I'm glad to see that the testing has shown that it performs well. The basic jist of SD seems to be either berserker stance and whirlwind vs battle stance and overpower, but my question is why can't you have both?

I've always loved stancedance macros, and on my warrior, before I stopped playing, I had loaded him with plenty of "/cast Berserker Stance /cast Whirlwind" and "/cast Battle Stance /cast Overpower" macros, and used them to great effect. Anyway, my idea is this:

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

Use this spec (if you *really* want bladestorm and there isn't another arms warrior who can provide 2/2 blood frenzy in the raid you can go 2/3 tactical mastery) and dual-wield axes.

Reactively switch between battle and berserker stance as you wish. Keep stancedance macros for both whirlwind and overpower active on your skillbar, if Taste for Blood procs swap and spam overpower, if TfB is down then use the whirlwind dance macro and stick in berserker stance until TfB procs, all the while spamming execute as you please (and using heroic strike if you wish).

What you lose from this build from 51/20 is 3/5 DW spec, what you lose from 54/17 is bladestorm and 2/5 imp MS, but you gain the ability to seamlessly move between overpower spam and whirlwind/zerker. To me it sounds pretty nice... what do you all think?

 

Frederic

Keep in mind that most testing for Sudden Death was apparently done on the level 1 training dummies, resulting in massively inflated chance to crit.

 

Grymm

Hmmm. I've been digging up what I can in regards to the warrior changes and from a DPS perspective, I'm kind of lukewarm on the ideas.

TG is an excellent style gear talent. It's also a dps increase (2 hand weapons doing roughly 130% of the damage of the equivalent 1 handers with high normalization values for WW), but AP tends to dwarf weapon damage in the end game. In my sunwell setup, TG would up my white damage by only about 7% for a total dps increase in DPS of 5-6%? The 45-50 talent needs to be reworked to be better than imp zerker rage and (hopefully) almost as good as wrecking crew. It would be nice if, as mentioned before, it was 1 rage off BT/WW and 1% increase to flurry to get the old 30% flurry back. 5% more flurry is not game changing, but it would beat out an arms weapon spec.

The change to WW I don't actually like. You used to get 6.67 WWs/minute with a nice weaving of BT. Now it's clumsy with 1.0 second gaps, interferences, and general GCD waste. You would prioritize WW over BT if you had TG. So, in a minute, you get 6 WWs for 7.2 WW damage (20% increase damage). This is actually only an 8% increase in WW damage due to the slower time. Then, you get a BT every 6.67 seconds due to every 4rth BT interfering with WW. That's a 10% decrease in BT damage all for 1 extra skill point. So 2 skill points get you 8% more WW damage and 10% less BT damage compared to the old 1 skill point. That's probably close to a wash in damage making the extra skill point cost in fact a nerf. I guess you can save that point by not speccing rampage which in a raiding environment with a feral is no longer a benefit.

The changes to how slam and deep wounds perform I like though. In the last couple blue posts I've read, they seem to be playing with prot and they consider arms unfinished but I haven't heard where they intend to fix fury.

 

Shha

I responded to that in a few posts, some pages ago so let me just get stuff together.

You get 2 WW every 20 seconds and 3 BT every 20 seconds now, vs the same amount in 18. Thats 90% of BT damage and 108% WW damage. That ends up being about even , you are right - in fact its a slight buff (WW hits more or less 30% harder then BT) but indeed it costs a talent point. Consider following though:

a) Thats less rage used. I proved in yet another post, that heroics with 2h arent really too bad when it comes to efficiency and usage - something maybe counterintuitive now - but remember that we have 3-4 years experience of "if its with 2h, we dont have OH" which completely changed the use of heroic. With new WF, full flurry etc, TG warrior OH will generate rage in large quantities and smoothly. Anyway the rage decrease is 10% for the rotation - considering if you spec Unending Fury (you shouldnt !), you spend 5 talent points to get less then 20% reduction - thats not that bad.

b) Its not more clumsy as it is with 9sec WW. With the changes, you WILL be using berserker rage, and you will use it on cooldown. There is no reason to not get 20 rage every 20sec. You clip BT a bit, but you stop clipping your berserker rage, deathwish etc. In fact most people completely forget any cooldowns OTHER then WW/BT when thinking about clipping. Truth is 20 sec WW/BT rotation is just the same (and who cares if you clip or not, just go with the same rotation you always did, let the game do the rest), but weaving in other cooldowns is easier.

c) Its helpful in situations when following rotation isnt perfect - trash aoe, boss fights aoe etc.

d) Its simply more burst - less useful in pve i guess, but even there it can be handy.

e) Fury is really light on talents. Unless you take pvp talents like the jump/healing debuff/blood craze etc etc, you have plenty of points, and its harder to find good talents to get to 51 then to spend too many. So this 1 extra point is meh... not a big deal.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...12253120501301
What else you could possibly want in it? If they make Unending Fury worthwhile (and since they changed Enraged Assault its inevitable to see SOME changes to it), then we will have some slight decisions to make - but still it wont be too hard to find a decent build.

Overall its a slight dps buff, and LESS clumsy rotation.

 

Liar

Emphasis on this. Also, using less GCDs means you can use non-damage abilities without sacrificing DPS which is really really awesome. I mean, if you we are honest, who of us would use Demo on trash mobs? I'd say only a tiny minority because we can use that GCD for DPS otherwise. With the new WW we don't have to choose, we can do both (same applies for PH and Hamstring etc).

It may be subtle, but it's a great change.

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

 

Zegai

I was running some local tests here (assuming a bunch of things, but looks close to reality from what I see - nothing I'd release to others, tho), and it really looks like Devastate is in pretty bad shape. Even without the 1.75x, TC does a lot more threat than dev, taking the place of one of the two devs in a rotation - and eventual shockwaves in place of devastates are better as well. Puncture doesn't really seem worth it in this state. Maybe I'll try pushing devastate up in the rotation and see how the earlier procs work in its favor.

Has anyone done any real beta tests on that subject?

Also, considering TC+Shockwave+Damage Shield and a 1.45x threat bonus we are at ~370 aoe TPS for every target. If TC does 1.75xdmg threat as it's today, things go up to almost 500 TPS (TC also gets to be a lot better than revenge if the 1.75x is in as well, for single target threat). I have no idea if that's near enough, but it looks like it should be, locks did around 3-4k DPS in Hyjal trash last I remembered..

 

DarthGreg

I think a bit much is made of Imp. Berserker Rage right now. The only reason it can be fit into TG Fury builds at all is because the Enraged Assault change broke Unending Fury, and I've got to believe that talent is going to get fixed at some point.

After reading your comments about Whirlwind cooldowns Shha, I decided to bang out the timings in notepad:

We know that the traditional live 3xBT/2xWW cycle is 18 sec long. The cycle restarts whenever a BT and WW are up consecutive non-overlapping GCD's. For a WotLK rotation, we're looking at a 62 sec 10xBT/6xWW cycle. Using a little more math here, it looks like it takes 9 min 18 sec (558 sec) for these cycles to sync up, so a direct comparison can be made. I can't think of a fight off the top of my head that calls for 9.3 straight minutes of nothing but all-out DPS, but this is math and we can extrapolate a bit.

Over 558 sec (9 min 18 sec), we get:
- 31 pre-WotLK 18 sec cycles (3xBT/2xWW)
- 9 WotLK 62 sec cycles (10xBT/6xWW)

Giving us, over the course of said fight:
- pre-WotLK: 93x BT + 62x WW
- WotLK: 90x BT + 54x WW

So we lose 3x BT globally, but with:
- 1 point in Imp. WW: we can say it's like hitting 10% more WW's, for 59 total. Down 3x BT, down 3x WW.
- 2 points in Imp. WW: we can say it's like hitting 20% more WW's, for 64 total. Down 3x BT, up 2x WW.

tl;dr The Imp. WW change is a strict downgrade in PvE DPS, unless you have no other DPS talents to spend talent points on. It's a small difference, probably under the margin of human error, but it does exists. Please correct me if I've missed something!

 

Rustik

We still haven't confirmed if Improved T-clap increases the AP contribution, so I will leave it out for now.

T-clap gains 12% of your AP.

Devastate gains 3.57% of your AP contributions.

Even including the 75% threat of T-clap, that's 9% of your AP in threat.

T-clap scales a lot faster than Devastate. The only benefit Devastate has is it gains 50% weapon damage and additional damage per sunder. However, weapon damage of a 1.5 speed weapon is smaller than the base damage of t-clap, and the flat damage and hidden threat don't scale at all.

Doesn't take much testing to see that T-clap is going to pull ahead at certain AP levels.

Unless I've forgotten an important factor somewhere. T-clap still does physical damage, right?


For reference, I used Slayer of the Lifeless as the model for a 1.5 speed tanking weapon. It doesn't even reach 300 damage max, before taking the 50% cut from devastate.

EDIT: I DID miss something very important. I forgot to multiply Ap contributions for Devastate by 2.4 for normalization.

That brings Devastate to 8.57% AP contribution. That changes things(just a bit). NOw it's more important that we figure out whether improved T-clap affects AP contribution or not. If it does, T-clap wins. If not, then devastate wins, but not by much.

RE-EDIT: I suck at math. T-clap is 9% with 75% threat scaling. So T-clap still wins just barely over devastate. The difference is small though.

 

Nezralix

How did you arrive at that calculation?

If Devastate is normalized at the rate of a standard 2.4 speed weapon, then it should receive (2.4/14) = 17.1% of AP from the normalized component, which is then divided in half (i.e. 50% weapon damage) to get 8.5% attack power coefficient (feel free to correct my math). This also doesn't include the contribution from weapon damage, which *would* probably about double the damage in a non-raid-buffed environment (significantly less in a raid), except the tanking weapons are typically fast, meaning that it'll contribute around 40% relative to a 2.6 speed weapon.

Now, it is true that Improved Thunderclap yields a 24% coefficient (18% as far as threat). That's pretty considerable. It also has a pretty competitive base damage (600 with Imp TC, vs. 5*65=325 for Devastate, plus some amount of added threat). But on the other hand, it only has a 1.5x crit multiplier, and won't proc Sword and Board.

 

Rustik

I've got some edits in there. It was rushed, as I am on my way to a raid. My apologies for the sloppiness. I arrived at that 3.57:

100/14 = 7.14% of your AP becomes DPS

Half that is 3.57. As the edit says, I forgot to include the 2.4 for instant attacks.

I also stated near the end that I used a 1.5 speed tanking weapon as my model, and its damage is 150-280. T-clap without talents is 300 at level 80.

 

Gruntle

Well, the talent did get slightly worse, you can see that immediately from the fact that 10s -> 9s cd means a 11.1% increase in dps, while the new talent gives only 10% increase. Then again, it might be a way to make sure we're not doing too much damage since TG WW's will hit a lot harder anyway.

 

Shha

Yep you missed some stuff.

a) 1st of all the 62 sec cycle is not optimal. Its in fact far from it. You prioritize BT over WW which is wrong (WW is a lot harder hitting attack , and you lose more time). 20 sec cycle is a lot better. In fact you even miscounted the amount of attacks in your cycle. The one you posted on the left - its 5 WW 10 BT actually. The last WW is a "new cycle" if you look at it closely. The true cycle is exactly the same for both 9 and 10 sec WW.

10 sec WW 9 sec WW
0.0 - WW 0.0-WW
1.5 - BT 1.5-BT
7.5 - BT 7.5-BT
10.0 -WW 9.0-WW
13.5- BT 13.5-BT
------------------------------------------------
20.0 -WW 18.0-WW
21.5 -BT (8 sec after previous one)


This 10 sec WW cycle over 60 seconds does 6 WW 9 BT, which already outperforms your 62 sec cycle of 5 WW 10 BT (which is less overall damage even though you spend 2 more seconds dpsing)

Shortest time with both 10 and 9 sec cycle overlapping is 360 seconds then (6 minutes).

10 sec WW cycle = 36 WW, 54 BT
9 sec WW cycle = 40 WW, 60 BT

considering WW hits for 1.2 damage the 1st one can be changed into 43.2 WW .

3.2 WW gain 6 BT loss. Assuming a TG ww base hits for 40% more then now (and they are about even for me with sunwell gear), that means you lose 1.5 BT of damage.

At the same time you save 280 rage. That rage converted into heroic strikes gives you around 60% more damage per use from your MH swing (math above). The average heroic will cost in realm of 55 rage. 5 heroics = 3 MH swings with 2h, vs 1.5 BT. Thats a clear dps gain to be honest, although in a 360 seconds "realm" its indeed hardly significant.

Either way there is no dps loss from it, its a slight gain , although probably hardly justifying the talent point.

2) unending fury was an useless talent even before Enraged Assault nerf. It was analyzed by me and a lot of other people and it simply wasnt worth it at all. Even with using Enraged assault once per 15 sec (which wasnt even possible with the 9 sec rotation) at best you could hope for 6 procs over 5 minutes. Every proc would at best give you half a BT (gcd from using enrage ability+gcd from using enraged assault), sometimes less because of lack of free gcds. But even counting it that way, it was 5 talents for:

BENEFITS *PER TALENT POINT IN UNDENING FURY*

3/5BT over 300 second
approximately 83 rage.

Improved zerker rage alone over that long fight would give you 300 rage. Was a pretty easy call to take it over 2 points in Unending fury. The other 3 was sort of personal preference. However all in all, a very doubtful benefit of resetting BT cooldown, wasnt worth the rotation failures that would follow in my opinion. That and imp execute was a better rage gain anyway. What Im getting at is that UF wasnt worth taking even with old enraged assault - like i said IF they change the talent to be worth it then some choices will have to be made.

However try to look at it from a wider perspective. Fury warriors right now are about only class that can get EVERYTHING that increases our pve dps, with only 51 points into the tree. We can go 20/51/0 and take basically everything except for weapon specs in all trees that would increase our dps. Doesnt it strike you as a bit boring? I mean some CHOICES arent bad, and if you will have to choose between 2-3 extra points in 2h spec or 2-3 points in fury tree - im fine with that. 17/44 build right now is boring enough with absolutely no room to switch any talents to personal liking - I wont mind if it wont happen again.

 

Machinator

I see more than 51 pts increasing dps in fury, and many other classes have the same general 51 pts a tree too. Im not saying there shouldnt be choice, just that warriors arent unique in this. Its just a consequence of long(deep) talent trees and min-maxing. I dont think real choice will come without wider trees and/or more prereqs or a limit on what talent combos you can get.

"Information is ammunition."

 

DarthGreg

Pardon me, but I'm pretty sure my 10 sec WW cycle includes 6 WW, and not 5, making it better than the cycle you proposed. Over 620 sec my cycle fits in 8 more BT (and a few Slams with it) and 2 less WW. It may be that it can be improved upon even further by prioritizing WW, as you said (I didn't think when I chose BT as first attack).

I agree with you that 2 points in Imp. BR are better than the same 2 points in UF, I wasn't disputing it. I had incorrectly overestimated the importance of Enraging Assault proccing Bloodthirst, as you explained, however. I'll want to add it all up myself, but I suspect you're right. I had assumed that with EA's change, an Unending Fury change was on the way, but it may be that it will still not up to par. About to pull Brut may edit in some more later.

 

Borodin

Rustik if your in the beta are you not able to quickly see if Improved TC effecs the 12% AP too?

For example at 2,000 AP it will add either 240 OR 480 damage to the base 600 attack. Attacking mob a few levels under you and Sundering it first you can eliminate a lot of armour from the calc. Should be easy to spot!

I worked up a full list of threat values at 70 today (but using all the new talents) and got some interesting results I will show after significant checking. Devastate was ahead there vs Thunderclap but I can scale that to 80 and see.

But 2 factors to consider in Devastate's favour:
1. It Crits for 2x damage compared to Thunderclap's 1.5 Crits
2. It has a 30% chance to proc a free Shield Slam with Sword and Board.

Neither are hugely compelling facts but they will help me to favour Devasatate over TC vs a single target even if TC has scaled slightly ahead.

What was interesting was that Concussion Blow was definately worth using over even Revenge. Level 70 values of course.

 

acx

Currently the improved thunderclap talent's damage bonus also applies to the scaling damage from AP, so it makes TC do: 600 dmg + 24% AP.

 

Shha

Thats true, I miscalculated here. In fact I just missed one WW in middle - Your cycle in fact is 31 second too.

Copied from your post.
1.5 WW
6 BT
11.5 WW
13 BT
19 BT
21.5 WW
25 BT
31 BT

Thats the whole cycle - later from 32.5 its just repeating itself with WW BT etc.

Well WW-BT-WW-2xBT-WW-2xBT is the whole cycle. Nothing too fancy as easy to macro as any other. Compared to mine they "overlap" after 620 seconds for 100BT 60 WW for your cycle and 93 BT 62 WW for mine - I can see your being superior in numbers. WW hits harder then BT, but definitely 7 BT>2 WW. Now the rotation you proposed does have the problem of low coherence with 20 sec/2 min cooldowns, but thats probably still doable. It also lets you "macro" demo shout and even tclap stance dance and put in rotation (considering hit will give us spell hit we probably can be "capped" on the spell hit for demo/clap and never worry about resists). 1 sec downtime is acceptable for me.

Overall I guess true, I do rate yours higher.

 

Thundershoof

I don't like how Arms dps appears to have become so proc reliant and the rotation so random. It's wonderful that Blizzard wants us to be able to use Overpower and Execute in our rotations, but I feel the implementation is rather clumsy. Having two of our three instant attacks being completely proc reliant is one too many. I would prefer Overpower be more reliably available and suggest the following: (Important changes are underlined.)

Overpower
35 Rage, 5 yard Range, Instant, 10 sec Cooldown
Requires Melee Weapon, Requires Battle Stance
Instantly overpower the enemy, causing weapon damage. The Overpower cannot be Blocked, Dodged, or Parried.

When you train Overpower you automatically learn a second ability appearing in your chat log and the spellbook:

Overpowering Might (OM hereafter.)
Whenever your target dodges, the cooldown on your Overpower ability is reset and it costs 30 less rage for 5 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 5 seconds.

This way Overpower becomes a reliable replacement for Whirlwind in Battle Stance (and for early leveling) while OM allows it to keep it's current function. The greater rage cost counterbalances it's immunity to dodge, parry, and block mechanics and astronomical talented crit chance. Also, Arms talents would require very little reworking to approximate their current effects.

Unrelenting Assault would read "Reduces the cooldown of your Overpowering Might and Revenge abilities by 2/4 seconds." A simple change to reducing the OM proc's internal cooldown from the Overpower ability itself and amounts to the same thing.

The Thirst for Blood talent would no longer be necessary. At 35 rage and with it's +50% crit chance Overpower will cost less rage-per-damage on average than Whirlwind until the warrior is Hit-capped, Expertise soft-capped, behind the boss, and has a little over 31% crit when in Battle Stance (34% in zerker). I'm not sure how balanced that really is, but it would be fairly simple to increase Overpower's rage cost to 40 or increase it's cooldown a large amount and possibly reinstitute Thirst for Blood as a chance when Rend ticks to proc OM in order to greater control the circumstances under which it can be used.

 

acx

Also, parries and dodges by the target dummies are generating the same amount of rage as a normal hit in the latest patch. I tried testing on target dummies outside the Stormwind warrior trainer and I was getting 10 rage per hit or dodge or parry on the dummy. Misses still generated 0 rage. I don't know if this was intentional change or not.

Just to give an idea of how much rage is generated and the power of sword and board:

I specced into focused rage, puncture, sword and board, and anger management. I removed some of the honor pvp gear to go down to 18% crit and 2k AP. Then I tried a very simple 1x Shield Slam, 3x Devastate rotation. I did not actively use shield slam when sword and board procced. I was able to achieve steady state with the rotation, neither going to 0 rage nor going to 100 rage for about 5 minutes.

My napkin math tells me 5/5 sword and board with this simple rotation results in an average Shield Slam cost of 5.83 rage per shield slam. Sword and board is equivalent to a talent that gives +15% devastate damage +2 rage/second for this simple rotation. I think if Blizzard wanted prot warriors to dps with shield on, then Sword and Board needs to stay at about the same power level as it is right now.

 

Liar

1h/Shield grinding still feels alot different than DW Devastate on the Beta. The former doesn't give me enough rage at all so I have to wait for it most of the time to use my abilities. With DW on live I don't have to do that because DW obviously generates more rage for 3 reasons: 1) I use an OH (doh) for another source of incoming rage 2) I take more damage by being in Zerker stance and not wearing a shield 3) I got more hit/crit on live. I can see how 3) is a problem on Beta but still, incoming rage is not enough if they want us to sustain 1h/Shield DPS when grinding. It just isn't going to work if we rely on white MH attacks only to feed us rage even with all the AP gear (which you can use for DW too anyway).

I really want to like 1h/Shield DPS. It feels nice if I have the rage for it, but most of the time I don't. Fix that, and we'll have two good styles to DPS with.

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

 

Reikki

A little bit Offtopic, but

with the upcoming changes to the Protection Warrior i wonder if the Crusader Enchantment will be a viable Option again?
(60 Strength @ Lvl 70 on procc)

 

acx

With the level 80 premade warrior in WotLK level 1 blue honor gear I find that I get enough rage from my main hand white swings and incoming damage to maintain a 1x Shield Slam, 3x Devastate rotation on level 78 and 79 mobs (I can't find any level 80 mobs?). I didn't grind to 80 at a warrior though I did it on a DK. Are you using the premade gear or the gear that you picked up on your warrior as you leveled from 70-80?

Also for those interested, here are some pics showing shockwave's max angle at close and max range targets.

Max Range:
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/o...008_021614.jpg

Close Range:
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/o...008_021834.jpg

This was done with camera angles set to always follow so a straight line from the center of the screen to the top of the screen represents the exact forward facing center axis of the character. At max range, the maximum angle looks like it is about 90 degrees. At close range the max angle looks like 120 degrees. It looks like the cone area has a fat base so you'll most likely be able to hit everything that is melee you within your front 120 degree arc. You can see that the damage area extends past the smoke animation of the spell in the max range picture.

 

Liar

That's with self-acquired gear because the European CM subtly implied that us EU beta testers can fuck off in regards of premade characters (we will not get any). I am also using a different cycle than you, I try to go with a priority list: Charge --> Conc Blow/Shock Wave --> Shield Slam --> Mocking Blow --> Devastate and I just can't keep up. I don't even remember the last time I got to HS without having to pull 3-4 mobs. :S

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

 

Zegai

The difference is probably the spec+pvp gear.

On that note, resilience is working for -crit%, right? It might be useful on lower tiers to get crit immunity..