I m following this thread for quite some time now. Looks like the def-tree is quite fine now, and I like it. Tho I m still not sure about everything and as i can t test it out on the TC I ll ask you guys for some advise.

First of all, I got a "basic build" which I d like to keep.

Basic Build

As you see, I allready spent 66 Talentpoints and got 5 left over. Now I got several Talents which I might take or not, since I m not fully sure if I ll need them. So I ll list them up with my concerns and hope you can point out what I didn t foresee.

iHC / Puncture: As the DPS increases very well for a Def-Warrior (a lot more AP on white hits, don t count the special ability damage since it doesn t increase the rage), I m curious if I ll need those talents. Currently I can run around with def stance and perform devastate all the time with revenge on CD. Now Sword and Board will fill some WCDs with no-cost-SS and stronger white hits will even improve my rage-generation. Hope there s someone out there who can tell me about that issue from a lvl 80 def warrior's point of view.

improved spell reflection: As far as I know SR will reflect ONE spell directed at your group and will give the threat towards the one, at which the spell aimed at. In my point of view, this is a bad thing. Personally, I love SR to keep agro againts casters whie tanking a melee target (e.g. Hyjal waves). With this change, this would be impossible. Someone focussing a caster, reflecting a spell -> he ll gain more agro. Fine so far, as he focuses the target. BUT I won t be able to reflect a spell right now -> I can t keep agro on other casters. Really bad, especially for the healers. Not to mention if a healer reflects a spell gaining even more agro (perhaps on a non-tauntable mob?). Personally I d like to see the talent with something like "reflects another cast" or "increases your resistance against the reflected spell's school by xx).
As for the 4% spell miss chance against you: hope it's not counted up before SR, which would decrease the viability even more...

vigilance / saveguard: If I remember it right, it was mentioned that those 10% agro loss should be +agro for the tank. Tho it never made it to the talent tree, so i guess it s still not there. Will it appear some day or did blizzard threw that idea away? As it stands right now, I don t like this talent at all. -10% agro is fine, but what for are those 5% dodge?
In addition, intervene (+ saveguard) works the same way, -10% agro and -30% dmg. That -10% is a HUGE nerf for me. I was used to intervene the other tank in a raid to reduce the dmg, when a dmg spike was acuring (bear in ZA for example). Now I can t use it on tanks (would be lovely even with that nerf on saveguard), therefore I ll be advised to charge around while being offtank (can t wait for rogues or warlocks crying around "INTERVENE ME!!!!111" - "NO, INTERVENE ME!!!222"). I really dislike the way it s going. I d like to see the -agro removed on intervene, perhaps lowering saveguard once more, but make it available on all raid targets, would be much more usefull. What do you guys think?

impale / deep wounds: If i d change my "basic build" a bit, i could reach those talents as well (anyone else dislike the moved-TC-to-deftree-thing?), but I would have tot drop cruelty. Would that be worth it? Thanks to the itemisation changes on tank items, we won t receive any more crit% as we get out of our talents and raidbuffs, dropping cruelty would be counterprodactive. And further more, I don t know how deep wounds is working now (I saw a fury video with a huge bleeding debuff), did anyone make the maths for a def warrior?

That s it for now, hope someone can help me out with my concerns (or even understand what I mean, didn t use my english writing for quite some time now *g*).

Vigilance is a threat reduction of the target by 10% which means you are now 10% higher vs that target than you were previously. Since it is not an oh shit button, and lasts for duration, this implies that while you have vigilance on a target, you will always have 10% more threat than that target given that you are outputting equal TPS, ceteris paribus, in the ratio x:y(9/10), or am I missing something fundamental here?

Obviously in game TPS is never equal, but I believe that this rationale is how people came up with the 10% 'transfer'?

I m pretty sure there was the idea to add the agro to the tank, which was reduced by vigilance. E.g. the vigilance t arget creates 10k agro -> got 9k agro due to vigilance and 1k agro goes to the tank who castet vigilance.

Spells cannot resist if they hit you under Spell Reflect. Ever. I agree with the fact that if SR works like the way you said, that taking it will be detrimental for our threat. It should either give us the threat from the spell reflected off of a party member or it should reflect one spell on us AND one on our allies per SR charge.

Thunderclap is a topic that's near and dear to my heart (and maybe kind of annoying to everyone else). There's a lot of talk about it on the beta forums, and how to fix it; most suggestions are just "make it hit harder!!", which might seem appealing, but unfortunately it breaks some of the expressed constraints Blizzard has for the skill. Here are the ones I've observed in various blue posts over the last few months:

1) Blizzard doesn't want Thunderclap to be a part of the "single-target cycle". Implication -> has to do less threat than Devastate and Revenge in single-target situations.
2) Blizzard wants Thunderclap to be the primary component of AoE threat, since it's the only such skill available to Arms and Fury warriors, and Blizzard wants Arms and Fury warriors to be competitive at AoE tanking. Implication -> Neither Damage Shield nor Shockwave can be major components of AoE threat.
3) Blizzard doesn't want Thunderclap to be spammable. Implication -> Cooldown will remain at six seconds or higher.

If Thunderclap is going to do less threat than Devastate and Revenge in a single-target scenario (which are fine abilities but not *that* strong), *and* is going to be a primary component of AoE threat, *and* is going to remain on a 6+ second cooldown, *and* is still going to be useful for anything other than barely staying above healer threat in a scenario that's *not* healing-intensive, then this basically implies that it *must* scale its threat based on the number of targets it affects, by a substantial margin (i.e. 25% or more threat per target). I can't picture any other solution that's going to maintain the expectations that Blizzard has laid out.

It's actually kind of a handy solution, as it's very useful for larger groups, and starts to scale down in power around the time when the viability of cleave and other multi-target methods kick in.

But anyway, that proposal aside, is there *any* other mechanism that fits all the constraints Blizzard has laid out? It's a pretty hard set of restrictions.

Solifer... I'd agree that in its current state Puncture is pretty weak compared to other talents you could take in its place, unless they add a passive bonus to the talent I might end up skipping it.

In regards to Impale and Deep Wounds... I think it's worth going for the extra points to Impale, but Deep Wounds isn't worth giving up extra talents in the Fury and Prot trees. Something like this would let you keep most of your initial build, get Impale and still retain 3/5 points in Cruelty. Overall, you'd see a few less crits with your white attacks, but your primary threat generation abilities will all be +18% to crit from talents, and you can easily sub in some dps gear to buff that more in situations where you don't need extra stam or avoidance. On top of that, when you need to take a dps role instead of tanking (where you'll primarily be spamming Dev, HS and WW unless Blizz succeeds in making us want to solo and dps with a shield on) with DPS gear you're looking at +18% to crit on top of what you get from gear which means you should easily be seeing 40-50% to crit unbuffed with those prot abilities and the extra 20% crit dmg from Incite will be massive there.

I'm still not sold on Imp Revenge, though I can definitely see where it'd be nice to have in some situations. Everything else I'm pretty much in agreement with you on.

I never would have guessed that English wasn't a primary language for you if you didn't add this in, you have nothing to worry about.

delete

The threat transfer has not been added to the game to the best of my knowledge.

Nezralix, I think you're dead-bang on with your solution (agree with the implications or not as some here do). It's an elegant solution that makes a lot of sense.

@Forel: That skilltree looks like what I expected (except I d take improved charge over tactical mastery), tho without deep wounds it looks a lot nicer thanks to 3/5 cruelty. Oh and I didn t think of being DD in some cases, where impale would be pretty nice indeed.

Improved revenge: weill, i just like it. Let s see if Blizzard tweeks a little bit as it "should be" greater than devastate agro-vise since it s a reactional skill and got a CD. Maybe I ll skip it if improved shield reflect, vigilance and or intervene (+saveguard) get a nice tweek. Time will show.


@Nexralis: Nice idea! But it might be somehow difficult to implement that...


PS: thanks for the flowers, Forel

I love the idea of Imp Revenge, the main reason I don't have it in live is most raid mobs are immune to it (since we don't get the dmg multiplier yet) and in cases where it will work on the mobs I'm already rage starved and would rather keep getting hit. They seem to have fixed both of those issues so now it's more a matter of how well it can fit into rotation with everything else. I'll play around with it when everything goes live to see how it feels to me and see what else turns up when other folks start working the math on it. We'll see how things work for Revenge in the coming weeks, recent blue posts seem to indicate it'll get some buffs (see also: recent news posts on mmo champ).

I'm also still going back and forth between charge and tactical mastery, in the end it's going to come down to if we ever need to dance that much while tanking. I have a feeling charge is going to win out for me since they're removed almost every reason we'd have to leave defensive stance as a prot warrior.

It might be. I can't think of any skills off of the top of my head that work *exactly* like that. There are certainly some that do some pre-processing on nearby targets before doing their effect, like Chain Heal. I imagine it would be implemented something like that.

EDITED to remove redundant redundancy

New build changes (8982):

Vigilance reduces damage taken by target by 3%, instead of giving 5% dodge.

I'm not impressed with Shield Spec now that it's not required for Imp. Shield Block. 5% block is decidedly worse than 5% dodge or parry (from what I've heard shield block rating won't even have DR - correct me if I'm wrong). I'd say in the best case 5% block is worth 3 talent points (stretching it).

So what's left is 2 rage per block for the other 2 talent points. My sheet predicts a block every 9 seconds on Morogrim in 3.0, and (worst case) a devastate every 3.3 seconds. So this is clearly inferior to 2 points of puncture, which we're already considering dropping.

As things stand my build will probably look something like this.

I like Imp. Bloodrage a lot because it allows me to start with Shield Slam (or now maybe Shockwave on some pulls?).

They say they're allowing more Spell Reflection in WotLK, so it could turn out to be a real must-have talent. Imagine if this kind of reflect worked on Shade of Aran or Malacrass' mage phase. I hope they'll fix it so you always get the threat, but even if not it could be very situationally useful.

As far as I can tell that's the only change to any of our skills or talents.

Post removed.

Expertise was added a few patches ago, nothing new.

Ah, i must have missed it when it was added then, my apologies.

I have read on tankspot.com that the spell reflect off group does increase the tanks aggro. I believe he tested it 2 weeks ago?

Hm, I don t get your point here. You are somehow right, cos dodge = no dmg taken, block = no dmg taken up to dmg - blockvalue. BUT you gain rage for blocking (2 from talent, more from dmg), which is pretty important as tank. Further, as you said, blocking isn t affected by DR, so it will always increase the same way with more blockrating, while dodge will scale down. That s why i d prefer blocking over other other "avoidance", tho the 2 rage per block is far more important than those 5% block for me...


vigilance: yay a change! - but still as useless as before

"Sunder Armor now lasts until cancelled."

I have no idea what this means.

Hm, perhaps you missunderstood that?

that s from tankspot ...

Sunder has been changed to read "Lasts until cancelled." I have no idea what this means.