Vinexia

On the Revenge topic:

"--Glyph of Revenge - Reduces the rage cost of your next Heroic Strike ability by 100%. Lasts 10 sec."

I am reading this one as "Your Revenge reduces the rage cost of your next Heroic Strike ability by 100%."

It seems like Rev is becoming the rage budget tps move. From an efficiency stand point thats using 2 Rage, 1 white swing worth of rage, and a GCD to net you all the threat from Revenge + Heroic strike. That seems good enough to me to float your tps numbers until you get hit again to go back to Dev > SS spam.

This would be compared to just waiting for 12 Rage for Devastate + 30% chance for a rage free, not gcd free, Shield Slam.

My only thought would be if they let the Revenge Glyph'd heroic strike generate rage as if it were a white attack we'd be back to 'interesting' mechanics and that would alleviate the concerns some prior posters have about tanking being boring again because of Sword and Board.

 

• Jamor

How is it possible that TC hits for less than it does on live? Mine hits on live (in full tank gear) for like 150 or so. In full tank gear on beta it's hitting for well over 300 (average is probably 325) non-crit.

 

renegar

Here is some rough data I got from beating on a test dummy.
Dummy had 5 sunders, I tried to make sure there was nothing else adjusting its armor but there were a lot of debuffs up.
I had no talents spent in Improved Thunder Clap.

Test 1
Paper Doll auto-attack: 675-812 (743.5 average)
Attack Power: 2186
Estimated Target dummy armor reduction: 27.1%
Average swing hit on target dummy: 542
Average Thunder Clap: 555
Unmitigated Thunder Clap: 761.333

Test 2
Paper Doll auto-attack: 672-917 (794.5 average)
Attack Power: 722
Estimated Target dummy armor reduction: 28.886%
Average swing hit on target dummy: 565
Average Thunder Clap: 388
Unmitigated Thunder Clap: 545.6035

Thunder Clap difference: 215.7295
AP difference: 1464

6.7862 attack power per point of Thunder Clap damage
0.1473 attack power coefficient.

I would feel much better if someone with more experience with this sort of thing did thier own tests.

 

Deathwing

Beta version is only weaker, in DPS, if you have less than 833 AP.

Are you saying in your edit the AP coefficient was changed to 0.06/1.3?

 

Voxx

Most disturbing thing I've seen in the new patch notes is that Unending Fury is still worth nothing. Reduces the rage cost of Bloodthirst Whirlwind and Slam by 5 at 5 points. Weaving 1 Slam per Bloodthirst and a cycle of 30 seconds being 5 BT, 3 Whirlwind that equates to what... 2.166 recurring rage per second. Making it about 1.3 rage per 3 seconds per talent point. So our 45-50 point talent is 30% better than Anger Management? *sigh*

I wish they'd get away from this "reduces rage cost" on talents designed for dps warriors mentality that they have. Generating rage is not the problem, and hasn't been for the past 2 and half years or so, putting that rage to damage is where we're really really starting to fall behind.

 

Graul

Latest "reply" from GC
Ugh...

 

mistersix

I agree with one of the earlier posters. I think in terms of tanking builds the armored to the teeth talent is a no brainer. This coupled with the move of imp tclap makes the drive deep enough into arms to get impale less viable but also less desirable too. Choosing between cruelty and impale seems dubious at best. Why would you want impale but not cruelty Conceptually speaking and not getting into the specific math of it all impale makes cruelty better but isn't more crits (cruelty) better than fewer but bigger crits (impale)?

In beta I am finding revenge harder to use as often but the rider of more damage of it seems to be making up for it in my overall dps and tps. I'm finding it more meaningful to spec more into the damage increasing abilities (imp revenge, sword and board, etc.) rather than the rage management abilities (imp heroic strike, puncture, etc.). Your mileage may vary.

With that all in mind I'm thinking of something like this: 07/08/54 with two points to put into:
- imp demo shout for mitigation
- booming voice for raid utility
- imp spell reflect for the caster protection and encounter flexibility (imagine the new state of spell reflect on a fight like RoS)
- imp disarm for the extra dps boost (can anyone say if this is personal or party/raid wide?)
- imp bloodrage for more rage returns

Still impale, cruelty, armored to the teeth, and even 1h weapon spec are all possible in a build: 12/8/51 you just have to make somewhat harder choices around some of the newer, shinier talents in the prot tree.

 

Voxx

You know, she might have a point if we actually did good dps.

 

• Jamor

Are you linking the correct value there? Both of those are the same to me.

 

Ambika

What's your crit % in tanking gear? Did you notice a hefty drop in tps/dps when you spec'd out of cruelty?

 

mistersix

I'm arguing for still speccing cruelty. On beta right now I'm 71 or so so i simply don't have enough points to be invested into it yet. That means my crit is 4 or 5% less than normal but because of all the other changes my tps and dps are higher than live.

 

Taliafears

Nevermind, wrong thread for this.

 

Nezralix

I wholly agree with this. Rage efficiency talents that may not (often won't) do anything for your performance are frustrating, at best. If they want to merge them with other talents with tangible effects, then great. Right now, it directly conflicts with their recently-stated goal of making all talents roughly equal in power (i.e. 1% power gain), because you're obviously not getting any power on a talent if it's not actually giving you a benefit in the majority of situations. At the very least, don't make them cost FIVE talent points.

I have to say, as much as I sometimes enjoy playing a warrior, Blizzard has demonstrated a shocking inability to make rage a fun mechanic after four years of the game being on the market.

 

mistersix

fixed in the post. thanks for pointing that out.

 

Darmon

Got the same experience from PTR. Been testing protection vs BL servants, because test dolls are lvl 80/83 now. Rage income from dmg taken is next to none, in T6+ tank gear, yet by spamming devastate and shield slam my rage bar kept filling up. There was enough to throw a HS from time to time. And there is no rage gained from dodge/parry, as i tested again after last patch.

Until some threat numbers are up, most effective 1 mob tanking seems to be devastate + SSlam spam, with HS when swimming in rage.

PTR went down for a while, going to check less rage efficient builds. At max lvl 70, only puncture i can remove, the bloat of prot tree seems to make other choices difficult.

 

Ambika

thanks for testing that.

 

Darian_TruBlade

The fury changes are somewhat understandable, but they don't seem to accomplish much.

I understand why they removed Heroic Leap, but Heroic Fury is the least exciting talent I have seen to date. From a purely utilitarian perspective it's a decent PvP ability, but it lacks flavor. It doesn't feel furious or heroic, so I hope its effect is just a placeholder until they can come up with something more exciting.

I can understand adding Armored to the Teeth and I like the concept. In practice the only reason to take it is because Unyielding Wrath is so bad. Could easily be 2 points for 2/4.

Unyielding Wrath almost didn't change. I had been hoping for some interesting effect to replace the Enraged Assault proc so that the rage reduction was more of a secondary benefit over the primary one. Reducing rage costs simply isn't interesting, and in this case it isn't even worthwhile. It's neither unyielding or wrathful. What would be interesting is if it also increased your maximum rage by 5 per point, or if it allowed your Whirlwind critical strikes a chance to increase the damage of your next Bloodthirst by 25% of your AP, or if it gave you a 25% chance on enraging for Victory Rush to light up. There are any number of interesting things Blizzard could do with the talent.

 

Gellor

On the PTR my human weapon racial's are only granting 3 expertise now as opposed to 5. I assume this will be true for other races weapon racials as well?

 

Gruntle

As several others have mentioned, the change to Unending Fury feels very disappointing. What's more, it makes me quite pessimistic about the fury tree as a whole for WoTLK. It just feels like they don't really know what they are doing. I really hope they will add something else to the talent, right now it just makes me want to stay arms, and the coolness/added dps(?) of TG be damned. I hate useless talents, and at tier 10! Redo it it and get it right for the next patch.

The comments about arms doing too little dps also sounds a bit strange. Every test I've seen so far (mind you, I haven't had the time to do any testing of my own, but some tests have been done by people I trust) have indicated the opposite. Are we doing something wrong when playing with TG? Not using an optimal cycle or something? How can they get the complete opposite result from what the beta/ptr-testers do? Again this makes me feel like they are not really on top of things.

They removed Heroic Leap because of problems with making it work. I wouldn't surprised if TG disappears as well for the same reason.

 

renegar

That would be the result of me not having me played much on live since I got a beta key :P

 

mistersix

I really wouldn't either to be completely honest. They've wanted to do it before and it never saw the light of day. I do think they're much closer this time out though. I've still got some hope for it.

 

Graul

They never reveal their testing methods, but many assume it's practically in the best stat setup possible and fully raid buffed, aka near the end of the expansion. As you have noticed Arms *is* doing more damage right now, but that's at 70, and no one can really say what it will be like compared to TG when TG gets to dump another 10 talent points. Arms will be able to as well, but it seems like the 10 TG will be using will give it a much bigger boost in comparsion. And sadly I agree that they may likely just say "screw this, we are tired of having to deal with it", scrap TG and replace it with something utterly boring like Improved Bloodthirst.

I've been playing a Warrior since the end of Dec 2004, and I've stuck with it through all of the problems and it's almost always been worth it in the end, but right now I am just not seeing the silver lining, and each consecuitive patch just seems to hit everything but Protection harder and harder. They have around six weeks to do whatever numbers pass needs to be done with all of the classes and get Arms and Fury at least to look like they are trying to make progress towards something specific, even if it's going to take them another month or three to fully realize them after release.

 

Writhe

pft, Graul testing in production is the way to go didn't you know?

on a new note with this armored teeth thing, Has anyone done the math/simulation of Impale vs AT?

Who pulled the surger with the core hound?

 

renegar

Here is some more reliable data than before. I used Bloodthirst instead of autoattack to determine armor reduction since it has static damage. I also kept a very close eye on the damage done in my samples to make sure that there were no debuffs giving me funky data. Anyway, the data:

Attack Power: 2344
Bloodthirst
Tooltip: 1058
Damage: 615
TC: 339
Armor%: 0.5813
TC (no armor): 583.1756

Attack Power: 3034
Bloodthirst
Tooltip: 1365
Damage: 796
TC: 387
Armor%: 0.5832

TC (no armor): 663.5802

A difference in attack power of: 690
A difference in TC damage of: 80.4046
An attack power coefficient of: 0.1165

This sample was taken without Improved Thunder Clap.

Keeping rounding errors in mind, I think 12% would be a safe estimate. What was the coefficient pre-patch? I know I've heard 12% before, but I'm not sure if that meant before or after talents. If it was after talents, then this change is a considerable increase in Thunder Claps scaling.

I'll be back in a few minutes with the same test results with Improved Thunder Clap.

Edit: Before somebody calls me on it, my armor percentage is backwards.

 

Deathwing

Renegar, it was 12% base scaling before as well.