I have to agree on the change being a step in the right direction. One thing that has already been mentioned though is that our choice of good rings/neck/cloaks/trinkets is somewhat narrowed by it, AND it's another nerf for us as of yet.
The other thing that has already been mentioned is that the darkmoon card, being the BiS trinket already, gets another ~5-15% buff in relation to the other trinkets. We know that full ulduar loot is supposed to give us an ~8% overall stat upgrade. Is it only me or can it possibly be that the darkmoon card will stay BiS through all of ulduar?

It's looking to be that way, after all remember our good friend the Dragonspine Trophy from Burning Crusade, who remained best in slot for many classes until M'uru, a good year after the expansion was released.

This change made darkmoon card even better. (1.15 X 90 + 1.15X300 on proc)

On any other forum, this post would have made me do a long and angry Dr. Cox style rant on the topic of stating the obvious. I will hold back for the sake of not adding to the pile of BS.
Instead I will ask whether anybody has already done the math on the value of FotFF. Yes, I know; its value will drop by 10%. What I want to know is how far down the list of trinket awesomeness it will fall, particularly with regard to MoT and GT.

That is what the simple questions simple answers thread is for.

As has been stated this change is going into the right direction and I partially agree with that. I don't play Fury as my main spec though I still collect gear for it and I always refused to wear leather because it felt weird (when you are not pushed for performance you can go with such bad reasoning).

Though I see a few problems with how this locks us into Strength itemization. For rings/neck/cloaks/trinkets as well as flasks, procs and enchants this creates a funny situation, where a Strength item (which are generally a little bit scarce on these slots compared to the Agi/AP counterparts) of the previous tier could push ahead of a Agi/AP item of the next tier, which would previously only seldom be the case. In an extreme, this could be a situation reminiscent of feral druid tanking itemization where bonus armor items were more valuable than anything else. And we all know what happened with that. This time it might not be as pronounced, but still it's a step away from gear homogenization.

Please consider that paladins and afaik also DKs already have a similar talent. Also, a +15% multiplier on strength is not quite in the same scope as the +350% druid armor multiplier.

One other thing that comes to mind: the +15% str. change increases the value of blacksmithing and jewelcrafting over leatherworking, alchemy and inscription (as far as personal dps go).

what I meant was that it increases the difference EVEN MORE, almost to a point where BS/JC becomes mandatory.

Very true! After doing some maths this is a minor upgrade really, going from 4434 AP with kings in zerker stance (with the 10% AP as it is now) to 4459 AP with kings and imp zerker stance with 15% str. It will certainly mean fury scales better the further people get into ulduar, and I for one am very glad I just picked up BS as well as my JC and not forgetting the darkmoon trinket of leetness. TBH I would expect Blizzard to change the stats or proc to make it less of a "must have" for warriors. So this change is very welcome, and although it dosnt amount to much here, it will make the difference between arms and fury DPS a few bosses in I think.

One thing about professions is that they don't scale. The difference between 64 ap and 32 str will be 16 ap. I wouldn't call 16 attack power to be something mandatory. And this new change to Berserker Stance is only a 5% buff to strength but a 10% nerf to ap.

So recollecting the changes for 3.1:
- 10% physical damage penalty
- 5-7% loss of Attack Power in raid setting and average uptime of MoT, DC:Greatness, berserker enchants.
- Loss of 2% dodge reduction or 66 expertise rating

- "Only" +5% damage taken penalty, as the good thing.

All together hurts rage generation quite a lot too. Are we looking at a 15-20% damage reduction?
I haven't followed other class changes but if they dont get changes to reduce their damage too it wouldnt surprise me to see fury warriors sitting out for encounters where dps matters.

That's assuming there will only ever be 16str / 32 ap gems.

I've seen gems on Wowhead (from the ptr) for 20str and 40ap. The ap difference there between 2x20str and 2x40ap gems goes out to just over 20ap (in favour of the str gem, of course)

Unique-equipped - you can wear only one at time!

I'm aware of that, but let's not get bogged down with specifics. The point is that +16 str gems are not going to be the best gems available forever, there will be higher level gems (the unique ones appearing shows that), and we will be able to use more than just one of them.

This means that (in response to the comment about the profession benefits not scaling) they will scale, and they'll scale better than they used to (I'm talking BS / JC specifically now).

Everything that's happening points to something quite clear. Arms will be the better spec as you start off entry level raiding (the current raids), with fury becoming the better scaling spec at the top level.

Thanks, I missed that. I only saw the aforementioned unique-equipped ones, but the existence of the gem in that link only goes to further emphasising my point.

Just as a quick reference...

[Bold Cardinal Ruby] versus [Bold Stormjewel]. The former is your standard Epic gem (which, it seems all the standard epic gems are available, the scope of the cuts may not be finalized as of yet), the latter is a unique-equipped gem of equal value, with more restrictive cut avilability, comes pre-cut, and I believe is available as a (rare) result of a fishing daily. They may drop off of bosses, a la Burning Crusade.

The epic gems appear to be available in the upcoming 3.1 patch, which will impact gearing choices.

I like this Str/AP change. I was hoping for this almost exact change the other night. Well, hoping for it instead of the TG nerf. Do you think they may be dissatisfied with the TG nerf and are trying to come up with something else? It seems like the 2 combined would be a little excessive. Maybe if they made it only 10% strength. It lowers our current raid buffed AP and limits our gear choices in some cases to less than optimal pieces (relative to now). At first glance seems like an effective way of controlling fury dps. I wouldn't know where to begin with number crunching, does anyone think with some tweaks this change would be enough to bring fury dps in line, without the TG change?

At the moment, the 15% str increase instead of the 10% ap increase is an actual nerf imo. already with just berserking and mirror of truth, that's 80ap from double proccing berserking and 100ap from mirror of truth... and other enchants of course. So with that, and the 10% dmg reduction, I dunno if it'll set us back that far.

I just saw on MMOC that GC has responded to feedback to the 'zerker stance change:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Justification for Imp Berserker Stance Nerf?

At least they are considering giving more than 15% strength from the talent. I look forward to wearing all plate again... hopefully.

Edit: forgot to mention the part about more rings etc. are going to have strength on them in 3.1

at 32000 Armor (which is attainable for any 4 Min fight) you gain 240 Strength without Kings which again is 120 BVL (132 with Kings) before Talents/Glyph/Meta, which is more than 10% of the current amount. And the fact that Prot Warrior already Blocking the highest amount of Damage it would be to powerful if Prot stays like it is and to bad if Bosses get adjusted by that, Prot will be easier killed if you are fully hit for several Times.

Please just read this comment and focus your Posts back on Topic.

How is commenting about AttT not on topic in a fury thread?

But, yes, AttT cannot go back to awarding strength because of the prot issues. However, GC did mention adding extra ranks, although not in time for 3.1.

Personally, I think that if they want to address the whole fury wearing leather/mail issue then it has to be done through deeper fury talents than AttT anyway. Adjusting the strength percentage on Improved Berserker Stance seems the way to go for me.

The other issue they need to address is the fact that a majority of important enchants refer to attack power instead of strength. There aren't many strength equivalent enchants for the attack power ones so we lose out on. The only issue I foresee here would be scaling. We already know fury warriors scale well with gear, so a 20% increase in strength while not a major issue right now (since most BiS items for warriors don't come with strength) could play a major issue later when we begin gearing up in plate ulduar gear which will be stacking strength for us. Until we start seeing how the gear pans out there is no real estimate of how low/high warriors will end up on the damage meters.

I agree that our talents which focused around attack power should go back into strength. This talent was a necessity for warriors because it basically went with our 10% AP buff. However, since we don't have that AP buff anymore I would like to see AttT going back to strength so that we continue to have that synergy between talents. Also - more plate = more armor. More armor = more AttT = more strength. More reason to stack plate instead of leather imo. But I am a biased warrior so I guess I don't really consider how this will place us on the damage charts, it could very well be OPed lol.

I didn't know that they had brought up the idea of adding extra ranks. If they are having an issue with prot, however, wouldn't a simple fix be to change the talent mechanics based on stance? They've done it to other talents before such as Bloodthirst does extra threat when in defensive stance. Wouldn't it be possible to make it so AttT gives less str contribution in defensive stance?

The enchants that grant AP couldn't be changed to strength because it would make them bad for rougues, hunters and shamans. The other factor is that DKs and paladins like to have strength too; if you start giving them access to more strength, then all their numbers have to be adjusted.

If Blizzard are working on warrior itemization (plate instead of leather for fury) then the changes have to be made within the fury tree or else other classes could end up needing to be balanced needlessly. Concerning what you said about changing the AttT mechanics with defensive stance: GC already said that changes to that talent aren't going to make it for 3.1. Why bother making changes to a tier one talent, which would also inpact on arms DPS, when you're trying to fix a fury-only issue? If prot and arms were using leather, then maybe, but they're not.

I think they've got the right direction, they just need the right numbers now.

I didn't mean replace the AP enchants but have strength equivalents of some sort, if we look at all the enchants warriors currently use for AP and AttT, this movement to str bonuses instead of AP bonuses is a nerf to warriors imo. But you have a point in that paladins and DKs would be striving for those enchants.

As for the AttT I meant that if they were going to change the talent to reflect str instead of attack power, an easy fix to the prot warrior issue would be to have less str contribution for warrirors in defensive stance. That solves the "prot issue" that people were saying prevents the movement of the talent to str.