mistersix

Latest tooltip does not mention the cooldown either.

 

Gruntle

That comparison is hardly fair. Warglaive+Mounting is quite a lot higher in item-lvls than Cat's and BoH. Also, BT is not the ability you should be prioritizing with TG, WW hits a lot harder (as you yourself showed a few posts back). While these tests are certainly better than the target dummy tests I still think it's quite different from a raid setting.

 

Graul

BT is prioritized for Bloodsurge, or else why even bother speccing into it if you aren't trying to maximize it's useage? Honestly, looking at the DPS lost for having to wait 2 extra GCD for WW if it procs does seem almost like a wash. And I know they will be different in a raid setting, but usually the servant is a good enough comparison between specs, not the actual best scenario outcomes. It's usually off up or down disparity wise, but not by that much.

 

Liar

I think you are right on your SS theory because it works the same for Rogues but I doubt you can "exploit" Mace or Axe spec like this. Remember, Blizz already tracks Expertise per Weapon so I think they can apply a crit/ArP aura for each Weapon as well.

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

 

mistersix

You mean weapon skill per weapon right? Expertise isn't weapon specific.

 

Liar

Maybe I was not clear enough, but there is exactly one Expertise bonus that is in fact Weapon specific: The Human racial for Maces and Swords. That bonus was a global aura before so you could wield a Mace in the MH and a Sword in the OH (and vice versa of course) for a whopping 10 Expertise skill. They had to fix that by making it Weapon specific so each hand gets 5 Expertise skill only. So yeah, they know how to seperate MH from the OH even if Weapon specializations may still be global auras on the Beta (and if Wowhead is right, they are). I don't really see a way to exploit those anyway so it's a nonissue or am I missing something really obvious?

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

 

Machinator

This is a serious problem then if blizzard is the only one that sees the issue and has not communicated it to players. All we know is "Being able to use a second two-hander will be too much of a dps increase." and some vague comments that dont address the feedback they are getting.

I am going to try to make a quick spreadsheet soon so playing with numbers is easier to find this scaling.

"Information is ammunition."

 

Nite_Moogle

It's worth pointing out that the increased crit percentage you're seeing on Bloodthirst from the level difference is skewing your results in that it is providing a lot more instant slams. I highly doubt that when you are around 30% crit that Bloodsurge should be prioritized over Whirlwind when using TG unless they change the hit penalty to not actually apply to Bloodthirst.

 

Gruntle

Well, even factoring in the chance of a Bloodsurge proc WW hits harder (certainly in damage per rage and very likely also over a full cycle, but it does of course depend on crit). Not that I think that will make much of a difference. If those numbers hold true for lvl 80 raiding I think Devastate is over the top in terms of dps in the latest build. Is it really supposed to do better dps than core fury abilities? Maybe it should have a cooldown when used while dual wielding (or TG have it's hiht penalty removed/lessened). Have you had the time to test 25/46 yet?

 

Gink

Only Rank 5 mentions the cooldown for some odd reason.

And just to confirm what Liar said about human expertise; I have a sword main-hand, and a fist off-hand, and my main-hand gets 5 more expertise than my off hand. Expertise 16/11

Gink

 

DarthGreg

It does not matter whether you prioritize BT or WW anymore. With WW coolodown @ 10 sec, the optimal DPS cycle is 5xBT/3xWW over 32 sec. You get the same thing whether you start with BT or WW.

 

• landsoul

A lot of strange numbers in this thread over the past few hours. Again its all mindless speculation and napkin math from hell. Are any of you actually in the beta and testing out the builds at level 80, with level 80 blues and level 80 raid gear?

Well for one thing, I think I have an idea of what is going on... I am expertise capped and I have 550 hit rating. My DPS is just fine and there is plenty of hit gear. Not all of my pieces have hit on them either. Getting to the hit cap I speculate would not be a problem inside of 25 man naxx, maybe even 10 man naxx, for I am almost there. My crit raid buffed is at ~30% with kings and rampage.

Once you reach that yellow cap... you have a really good scaling beyond that point. The white damage of this build including slams and heroic strikes is just huge.

GCD use also seems very cluttered at times. When a paladin is tanking (quite the norm in beta atm) I have to keep up sunders, demo shout, battle/command shout, keep my rotation, and also try to fit in a deathwish-recklessness and also hit zerker rage so I dont run out of rage. You run out of rage a lot also, and rotation gets very cluttered and clipped when you are performing your job in the raid.


I also hit on the boss level and 80 level target dummies in all of the questionable builds. 2X/4X, devastate flurry, 20/51 TG, sword and board shield slam spam, the only two that were worth a shit was the devastate flurry build and the TG build. At 80 simply the ratings were too low to be able to flow hits in like back at 70 when we had the good gear. Tg at least had a powerful mechanic behind it that we were swinging with huge weapons, regardless of stats.


As far as 70 builds go, Its not fair to tell at this point and it should not matter, because there's no way that these are the complete talents, mechanics, or viabilities that we will have to work with once the 3.0 patch goes live. There a lot more tweaking to be done. They do more and more each time as they get the feel of how they want the talents to play. Play and feel comes first, then the balancing.

 

Graul

What does it look like compared to what you can do in raids on live? Obviously your stats dipped, but you shouldn't start out two steps back, and at the very least should be doing comparable, if not the same as a starting point. Also, what is your Heroic Strike useage like when you can simply focus on nothing but DPS? I was extremely suprised at how often I was able to use it, and this was without Windfury helping to generate more rage in between instants. Then again, I doubt I'll have a DST equivalent right when I hit 80 either.

 

• landsoul

NO, none of the trinkets above 78 have stats on them, yet.

When you are just focusing on DPS like when you are on something with a warrior on it, you cant use heroic strike too much, but when you do its like gravy on mashed potatoes its so good. We do start two steps back though. All of our ratings go down. Crit goes down, hit goes down, armor pen goes down (now a rating). Might doesn't stack with battleshout anymore, etc. SO basically you have less of everything.

Comparing Patchwerk 25 to Brutallus on live... I do about the same DPS, maybe 100 or 200 more at level 80 without consumables or the insane raid stacking that exists at 70.

When heroic striking, the rotation cycle is all over the place that there will be times where you have little rage at all, and other times where you have so much rage that you can't spend it, so you can spam heroic maybe 2 or 3 times. Having lots of hit rating means you don't miss your auto attacks as much and that = lots of rage. TG gives you so much when you actually land the auto attacks..

 

Graul

Which reminds me...what are your thoughts on this? I've never actually chased ArP and just took what came with whatever upgrades I ended up with, but given a choice have always prefered crit and AP. It seems like the new system will help on targets with natrually higher AC, yet doesn't it actually get worse per % relative to a fully debuffed raid boss, which is almost the exact opposite of how it works now? It also seems to normalize high AC and low AC targets, which is fine I guess, but AP and crit don't really suffer that same "penalty". It's mostly a moot point right now if you're going to have to focus so much on hit anyway. You'll just be getting whatever stats come with the best pieces of hit gear.

 

Grubsnik

Can anyone in Beta explain/test how the improved spell reflect works currently.

Does it work like grounding totem, where it reflects the first spell that hits any of the protected people?
Does it reflect the first spell that hits each of the protected people?

Can lag issues still cause it to reflect multiple spells? how does this work if it's spread over multiple targets?

Any info would be very welcome.

 

PiousFlea

What I don't get is that the justification for -15% hit is that "TG scales too well". A static penalty only punishes the undergeared, once people get the equivalent of lv80 BT loot, we can overcome any static penalty they throw at us. The only way to actually address scaling is with a multiplicative decrease in damage or haste. Unfortunately, Blizzard has decided that neither "feel cool".

IMO one thing they should do is give a penalty to Whirlwind cooldown. Honestly, WW is the only yellow attack that becomes grossly overpowered with Titan's Grip. Make it something like this:

Titan's Grip - Allows you to equip two-handed weapons in one hand, but increases the cooldown of Whirlwind by 4 seconds while a two-handed weapon is equipped.

With 2/2 Imp WW + TG this would take you down to a 2:1 BT to WW ratio (from 3:2), which would keep total WW damage over time fairly similar to two 1h'ers.

Granted, you could argue that TG would still be "overpowered for a single talent point", as white dps does increase quite a bit considering the stat and DPS gain of 2hers. However, the point of Blizzard's latest balancing effort seems to be to nerf TG's yellow DPS, and a whirlwind nerf would be quite effective in this respect.

The fact that 36-50 points in Fury is profoundly underpowered has nothing do do with the balancing of Titan's Grip, you can't expect one talent point to make up for 15 crappy talent points.

-----
Unrelated point: 80% devastate is stupid overpowered for Prot/Fury hybrid, but even at 80% 1h/shield prot warrior dps isn't great. The other lv80 tank classes do assloads of DPS while tanking.

Why doesn't Blizzard move part of the coefficient increase into Sword and Board, much like how Hemo's coefficient is baked into deeper Subtlety talents?

Devastate - Sunders armor and causes 65% weapon damage + X per sunder.
Sword and Board - Increases the damage and crit chance of Devastate by 15%. In addition, your Devastate hits have a 30% chance to refresh the cooldown of Shield Slam and reduce its cost by 100% for 5 seconds.

 

Qed

From my own beating on training dummies in Orgrimmar and every other parse I've seen, I fail to see how devastate dps builds are "horribly overpowered". Never has any protection build done more damage than a TG build in a statistically significant way. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this becomes a non-issues once reasonable gearing takes back the yellow miss chance from TG. Even if this isn't the case, if you're going dev/flurry, you're speccing for DPS, not tanking: There's no reason why you shouldn't do compatible DPS to a TG build.

To add to the discussion, my numbers were (beating on the boss level but ~1 armor training dummies in Orgrimarr, using a premade warrior):

Sudden death spec: 51/20/0 1776.2 dps
Devastate Flurry spec: 0/20/41 1924.8 dps
Titan's Grip spec: 20/51/0 2054.7 dps

 

Grayson Carlyle

I found similar results to Qed at level 70, though I also tried Devastate Impale, and it came out slightly ahead of Devastate Flurry for me. Sword and Board wasn't bad at all in DPS gear, coming in just behind Sudden Death.

Sudden Death was by far the spikiest. I could get an overpower crit followed by 2 execute crits with some white in there for nearly 20,000 damage. Other times you have MS on cooldown, Rend is ticking and nothing is proccing while you stare at the screen begging for something to happen. At 70, there is no lack of rage at all. Constant HS usage in any build.

With that last point, the HS glyph could have a pretty huge impact on the Devastate builds. They're pretty close to TG, but would get a pretty big gain from using even more Heroic Strikes.

 

Fellwraith

I agree with your points about TG, but Ghost said the reason they don't want to just have a straight % damage reduction is that you would end up only receiving the bonus stats on the 2h weapons and not the damage bonuses. They think that makes it too similar to dual 1h weapons and it isn't the flavor they're looking for.


I've actually been monkeying around with a sword and board dps layout lately, just to see if there is a good reason to avoid dual-wielding with devastate. I'm really struggling with a reason why you'd ever leave defensive stance if you're going to slap on a shield as prot. The enrage from Imp defensive stance almost fully offsets the damage penalty (and you can use the enrage to heal yourself later on). You take quite a bit less damage and it really doesn't cost you anything other than victory rush and execute. That's partially offset by doubling your block value periodically, imp disarm, and revenge (along with a stun on a different DR if you take the talents) when you don't have the rage to devastate.

The dps isn't quite as good as full-bore DW devasate build, but I'm finding S&B to be really strong as a solo playstyle. The other benefit is that you'll always have a base 20-25% crit rate on your specials and block value won't degrade as your ratings decline in value. The only thing I'd be a little concerned about is that you'll lose some defensive stats as you level, so you may lose some uptime on the imp defensive stance enrage.

 

Shan

A very easy solution to encourage the use of sword and shield for prot could be changing one-handed weapon specialization to affect mainhand only. That allows them to keep the damage on specials high.

 

dr_AllCOM3

Or while wearing a shield, that should solve the DW issue.

 

Darian_TruBlade

EDIT: I've figured out that my version of Recount isn't working entirely properly, the numbers might be well off. I also feel as though the training dummies must be armorless. I did a lot more damage per hit to them than I do to mobs out and about in the world.

I just got off the PTR. I spent, without even realizing it, the last hour and a half beating up a raid boss level target dummy.



For reference here is the spec I was using: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...12253120511351

My gear is identical to what I have on live + 2 unenchanted Merc Glad Swords for TG. That's about 400-500 more DPS than I've ever seen in a raid, except I had no raid buffs. My 2H sword skill is only at 246 as well.

The first thing I noticed is that rage generation is over the top. If you aren't hitting Heroic Strike at least every other swing you have a full bar. This creates a pretty intense rage management issue, but as it stands it's extremely enjoyable, although I can't imagine how incredible it must be with T6 gear (the rage management probably goes right out the window). At my level, however, I frequently found myself sitting on Berserker Rage because I already had a full rage bar which had just been empty a moment ago. I eventually saved Bloodrage entirely for when bad streaks happened, since having it off the GCD is a godsend for .3 seconds before WW comes up without enough rage. Unending Fury contributes significantly to giving leeway in hitting Heroic Strike. If it get a better secondary component I think it will be a very desirable talent.

The second thing I noticed is that when you have 6-7 Devilsaurs, Corehounds and other noisy DPS going on it's really hard to notice that you've procced Bloodsurge. I probably missed at least 5% of my procs because of that.

With my gear Flurry and Rampage did not have 100% uptime. I haven't tried to parse any WWS yet but Rampage was up the majority of the time. It was very noticeable when it dropped.

Overall I like how it feels. I'll probably go at it again when I can get some enchants.

 

Graul

I'm really starting to question hard how they come up with the figures they "expect" or "intend" any given spec to be doing, or if they even realize what is going on sometimes after they think something is fine...

30% - 60% really? I do approximately 80% as Protection as what I can do as Fury now, and the gap will be even smaller, if not exceeded once 3.0 arrives.

 

Voxx

WoW-Europe.com Forums -> A TG update from Ghostcrawler

Take a look at Forlaenu's posts here (sadly Forlaenu is me right now, borrowing a friend's account to post on forums while Blizzard sorts out the details regarding my own account being hacked)

Unless there's something in my math that's glaringly wrong, which could very well be the case and please point it out to me if so, then Titan's Grip itself actually doesn't scale. The white dps we gain from Titan's Grip is the same at any level of AP. The yellow dps we gain from Titan's Grip is pretty substantial at "lower" AP levels, but that amount actually decreases as AP increases. I'm deeply troubled right now with people saying Titan's Grip with no penalty scales too well. It doesn't actually scale well at all. It starts off really really good, and doesn't really get any better at all as gear increases. The only reason it scales now is because of the penalty it has, it scales until it hits the 15% hit needed to overcome it's penalty at which point it starts to scale back down in value.