I really think that improving Devastate through Puncture would be a great approach here. I am not sure about Improved Heroic Strike, however. Warrior threat while main-tanking is certainly not an issue at the moment and significant use of Heroic Strike really only comes into play during those times. You won't find a smart warrior using Heroic Strike while Off-tanking as you will have higher threat per rage through the use of other abilities unless it is a situation where you are also taking raid damage and seeing a steady stream of incoming rage.

It's a noticeable increase when it procs, but it's kind of hard to put an exact number on it. It's just shy of a 15% increase in damage when it procs (boss mob armor mitigation goes from 32% to 22%), and it's usually either up or on its ICD. The reduced armor affects your bonus heroic strike damage, your damage shield, your heroic throw (which has a damage to threat modifier), your thunderclap threat, etc. At best deep wounds is maybe 10% of our damage? So it's a 15% increase to at least 90% of our damage for 10 seconds. The problem is that I usually stack cooldowns on a proc to increase my threat and that causes my threat from those cooldowns to increase multiplicatively. If you can fully utilize the hit from it, I'd say it's the best threat trinket in the game for us by a pretty healthy margin.

The problem with making puncture improve devastate damage is that we don't really have the talent points to spend on it. Those points would have to come out of something else like imp spell reflect, imp revenge, armored to the teeth or cruelty. Most of us probably wouldn't give up deep wounds for it. If Blizzard thinks increasing our devastate damage is important to make the class function, it should just be part of the base talent rather than a 4 talent point investment.

This is a very good point. You'd have to make deep wounds less of a benefit so that people could justify not taking it, currently it seems impossible to justify giving up 10% more damage. It also doesn't seem sensible that the trade off would be from other talents that increase your damage instead of being a trade off against talents that improve your survivability. Choosing a spec should be a case of either taking defensive talents or offensive talents, not just taking the offensive talents that are discovered to be the most effective (as it is currently).

That is good to hear... now I just need to convince our DPS classes this is a tank trinket too

Also, in re: to this armor penetration idea, there was a blue post regarding this (Link) that shows they are already looking at increasing Armor Penetration usefullness so these could tie together nicely.

So let's say we live in a perfect world and Blizzard changes Improved Spell Reflect for on-use magic damage reduction in addition to the spell reflection itself. Additionally, let's say that Blizzard addresses some of these remarks regarding Devastate through an alteration of the Puncture talent. Then the question becomes, where do these talent points come from? Clearly, these talents are not in a usual PVE prot spec except maybe for Maly 5 minute where you may take the spell reflection. So this is five points we would need to come up with which is no easy task.

One thing to look at in regards to deep wounds is this. Obviously, DW is great in AoE tanking situations that typify the current content. Now, on a single target boss encounter lasting roughly three minutes, it will account for approximately 10% of our damage. If the proposed Devastate change were to happen, the determining factor is whether or not the three points spent there instead of DW provide more utility (DPS/TPS) in single target tanking. Additionally, the other question then is, what style of tanking will we be seeing in Ulduar? Will it be an AoE-fest like Naxxramas or will it require more single-target tanking as suggested in a blue post a couple weeks back? If a new Puncture showed to outshine DW on a single-target boss encounter, perhaps a tank would then spec accordingly depending on his role in the raid or even use his dual-spec to have a trash/AoE spec and a single-target/boss spec. Unfortunately, I think you are right that it will be hard to address the issues through these talents simply due to there not being enough talent points to go around to get both. If we are assuming we are taking AttT and a new version of Improved Spell Reflect, then we would have to choose between Puncture and DW while leaving 0/5 for Cruelty.... Nevertheless, I think a change to Improved Spell Reflect and Puncture would allow us more specialization and customization in our spec rather than the somewhat cookie-cutter spec we are currently seeing.

I agree but I don't think this is a case of making DW less of a benefit but instead making a warrior have to decide between DW or another talent depending on the situation he is facing. In the current content, clearly it doesn't matter since everything is so "approachable." However, in some of the hard mode Ulduar fights I expect that these small nuances in specs etc. will make a much more noticeable difference. Given the current talents, there isn't much of a need or even any use in changing a spec but if these proposed changes were to occur it would enable us to spec more strategically.

Noone is sustaining 6k tps without substantial TPS gear equipped and a full rage bar. Check any of your parses at Wowmeter, or download Sustainedtps SustainedTps - Addons - Curse

Every time you end combat, it prints your sustained tps in the chat frame. Very simple, very accurate, very useful. It simply takes your threat value from the ingame meter and divides it by combat time.

Remember, we do roughly double our DPS as TPS - so saying you can easily sustain 6k tps means you push out numbers close to 3k easily while tanking, which if it's 1 mob, isn't all that common. Sure, I had a parse from naxx one week where I did that or higher on every boss, but that is with extremely short fight durations and enabling some form of AoE by the tank on some fights.

I also think the method to increase our threat/reliance on deep wounds is to nerf heroic strike in some way (or modify it), and buff every other ability.

Well currently the trade off between survivability and threat is limited to deep wounds/AttT/Cruelty versus what? Points in disciplines or spell reflect? I think a lot of defensive talents need to be buffed before anyone would consider that, even for hardmode Ulduar fights. It's not inconcievable that you might spec into spell reflect for a specific encounter (though you probably still wouldn't drop DW for it) but it is unlikely that Disciplines would ever be a contender.

Increasing the threat of Devastate through puncture would probably force most to drop cruelty and maybe a point of shield spec, trading a threat talent for a better threat talent. This would make a decent threat template but then you'd really need to buff defensive talents before anyone would consider switching from the threat build - you'd need to make spell reflect better than merely suited to some fights, and making disciplines a worthwhile option would really help too (I think it should shorten duration/effect but drastically reduce the cooldown - a bit like the last stand glyph). I may be wrong but I don't know of any uses for Disarm or Safeguard either.

Currently there is really no trade-off between anything as far as our spec goes. There is a basic 15/5/51 spec and not much of a reason to ever deviate from it except, as stated, for Malygos to get a little extra damage output in phase two if you are close on the timed achievement.

My post is in response to Fellwraith's reply where he mentioned the strain these proposed changes would create spec-wise due to limited talent points. I was looking at the spec implications of Improved Spell Reflect being given a reduced magic damage effect and Puncture giving a buff to Devastate. Thus, a situation would be created where a tank may need to examine the encounter he or she is facing in determining how he or she can get the most out of his or her talents.

We are starting to go off on a bit of a tangent but the main thesis here is that we are looking for ways to reduce magic damage taken and increase OT TPS. These two things could be accomplished via Puncture and Improved Spell Reflect but may require sacrificing something like DW that we have become rather accustomed to. Or, perhaps like Xav said, modify Heroic Strike and buff all of our other defensive abilities to improve our threat across the board.

Tamral, where are you getting your "TPS = 1.5x our DPS...." figure from?

With Defensive Stance converting each point of damage into 2.07 threat then double our DPS + Static values would indeed be more accurate.

I am in agreement with you that it is not difficult to get around 6k TPS even without a full threat suit on something like Patchwerk or Drakes. It should be noted, however, that Xav mentioned nobody is sustaining this TPS without a full rage bar. Certainly, without the nearly infinite rage we will not sustain 6k TPS and I think that may be what Xav is getting at. Still, I am not sure a fight exists at the moment where we do not manage to keep a nearly full rage bar except for Malygos at times when we go on an avoidance string and he hasnt breathed on us for a couple of seconds. Assuming we aren't wearing a max avoidance set for easy bosses, we should be getting hit enough to have steady rage generation and allow for max TPS cycles which are typically in the 6k TPS range on bosses. Either way, it isn't much of an issue as none of us are having single target TPS issues.


I think I read this wrong too. Xav, are you saying you would like to see more of a reliance on DW?

Tamral , Xav stated "without a full rage bar and TPS gear". Sorry but 260 hit rating and 37 expertise IS TPS oriented gear, and it severly nerfs your survivability. With pretty laughable physical damage on tanks in current content its obviously not a problem, but over 500 itemization points in hit/expertise (equal to ~9k hp, or 15% more damage taken in case of investing it in avoidance) is not common in my opinion (even though obviously, I'm not advertising going without expertise or hit at all).

I'm not trying to say your gear is bad - its definitely proper for current content - but should the fights get actually challenging, I doubt we will be able to easily keep such high expertise/hit.

Tamral, it's a bit insulting to reply in the way you did given how thorough we've been with understanding viewpoints in the rest of this thread. You completely took my remark of saying "you don't sustain 6k tps" and retorted with anecdotal references to burst threat situations. Patchwerk is a true infinite rage scenario - not much else is actually like that right now. "20-30 seconds" isn't sustained, either. Sustained meaning over several minutes, I'd say 3, minimum.

That's why I mentioned those short fights but didn't use it as proof. I've got extremely high numbers too, but they're very short fights, using threat gear. Fellwraith was implying a tank can mash their keys vs any mob in any gear and pull 6k tps, as he claimed it was possible without even using Vigilance.

This is NOT the case. I highly suggest you download that simple sustainedtps mod I linked and run it for a few raids. You'll realize 6k tps sustained isn't something you throw out effortlessly - it takes a lot of rage, specialized gear, and vigilance. And yes, you can pull much higher. But the key word is, "easy".

Yeah sorry, I worded that wrong. I meant to say to take some of the reliance away from deep wounds.