In Ulduar, glyph of taunt is definitely a huge deal. On Algalon specifically, a missed taunt basically means you just wiped on an encounter where every wipe counts. My standard 2 glyphs that were never unequipped were Last Stand and Shield Wall. The third slot started out Blocking, then drifted towards Devastate with the need for target swapping on so many fights (Guardians on Yogg, Freya adds, etc...). Taunt replaces Devastate for fights where the taunts simply must land.

In keeping with the thread title: In order to continue balancing tanking classes, a secondary taunt that establishes threat would need to be given to feral druids and prot warriors. Death Grip and Righteous Defense are of course the secondary aggro establishing taunts beyond the traditional 8 second cooldown taunt. This would reduce the need for the glyph. Apologies in advance if this appears to be wish-listing. It's more identifying tank class disparities, though the glyph currently is more reliable than a second taunt.

Vigilance the active MT? You got 4 chances to taunt then and you'd have to have ridiculously bad luck for them all to miss. Then swap it back to whatever other DPS you had Vigilance on.

This only works if you aren't using a DK with ridiculous avoidance streaks. I started out just using Vigilance, but after not getting a taunt reset, I swapped over to the glyph. Devastate does very little on that fight for me in any case, since I'm not initiating the fight. I can just use my first 5 globals for it.

Has anyone checked the numbers for dodge vs parry rating yet? Bliz said they adjusted to set them roughly equal. If this is true this could change the red gem up a bit.

Since most of us have more dodge then parry (commonly 24-26% dodge to 17-19% parry) with diminishing returns as well as the new buff I think parry might give more avoidance per point where most tanks are atm. The other thing about parry, unless I'm mistaken, it gives 50% haste to the next melee.

That is a significantly low amount of haste when looking at it since most of are running 1.5ish weapon speed and the parries will rarely be applied to a fresh swing so it will give less than a .75 sec of haste. I would still be interested to see how high parry rating would affect threat through it in something like Hodir.

Another problem with the protection tree is the tier 4 talents: Imp Spell reflect, Imp Disarm and Puncture. Since WotLK went live, the only talents in this tier I've ever taken are the 2 points in Imp SR for Malygos. Far too situational to be worthwhile in any end game build.

The more I think about, the more I think the problem isn't so much the talent (Imp SR) as the base skill. Improve that and the talent could become worthwhile again. Even if you can't reflect the spell at least let it provide some sort of spell mitigation (either a flat % spell damage reduction or a temporary increase to resistance's to incoming spell damage, that could scale based on Defense to stop it being OP in PvP)

Puncture's rage efficiency scope is too narrow at just Sunder and Devastate. I don't see this being changed to a wider base as it would just mimic Focused rage. This could be the ideal talent to tweak with regards to cleave rage efficiency and it's AoE (make it comparable with a druids Swipe).

Improved Disarm. Funny. Improved from useless to crap. It's still crap. Usable on how many bosses of consequence? Zero. I think this "talent" just needs to die. Probably won't as it's useful to the tens of thousands serious Prot PvP warriors out there (sarcasm off).

I like the rage funnel idea on Vigilance. My main bone of contention is I hate the fact we have to have Vigilance to do comparable TPS to other tanks. If I forget to Vigilance someone before the fight, it's readily apparent inside 15 seconds that I don't have it on someone (we've all forgotten to put it on someone at some point).

Agreed. Like the puncture aspect being rolled in if it remains 5/5 also.

There's a number of situations where it will protect your party. It was a lot better before they made it not work on Iron Council, but it's still very good for Mimiron (plasma ball and hand pulse can be reflected), Freya (stormbolts that get missed and detonating lasher explosions), and Yogg (any of the debuffs from corruptors as well as psychosis in p2, that saves you a fair amount of sanity when you aren't using Freya). 4% less spell hit is also a small amount of spell damage reduction. I've seen lots of spells miss me, I'm sure part of it is because of this talent. My biggest complaint about this ability is that it's not immediately obvious what spells can and can't be reflected. Things that you wouldn't expect can be reflected (frostbolt volleys, explosions, etc.), while stuff that you would expect (lower damage, single-target attacks) can't be.

It's not going to be a make or break talent like some of the others, but neither is 2 less rage per attack or 2% more block in a lot of fights. Rage efficiency is pretty situational too, it's all a matter of how much aoe damage is getting thrown around in that encounter.


If they do reduce 1h spec to 3 talents, what I'd really like to see is a talent that adds a residual effect to the ground where you thunderclapped. Something like a mini-consecrate or DnD (20-30% of the initial tclap damage for example). For an event where you're dealing with waves of adds (Thorim's arena), having your only real aoe threat moves on such a long cooldown is a pretty big liability, especially if it misses. Since tclap uses spell hit mechanics, the misses happen more frequently than I'd like.

I think you make a completely valid point, especially with the "avoidance streak" comment. This is the real issue if we are going to talk seriously about rage starvation.

Up until this point Bliz's strategy in Uld raiding has been to pit us against bosses that simply hit very hard; giving us the rage we need. But, if you got a boss that hits hard only once in a while, then sometimes you can be cursed with a lucky streak of avoidance, leaving you without the rage. In this situation the 5/5 shield spec shines and provides what we need, when we need it most.

From looking at the stats you provided for Steelbreaker and Hodir, a 3/3 focus rage would have saved you more rage then what the 5/5 shield spec would have given you back.

A point can be made that, when you are hit hard a few hits in a row, your rage hits max, and can overflow with more then we are able to use (like overhealing). 3/3 Focus Rage could save you more rage when you can use it, but 5/5 shield spec provides you with more opportunities to use that rage. With 5/5 shield spec you get rage on avoidance as well as what you get normally when you have the opposite; taking damage. Overall you have a more reliable and constant source of rage.

What I have noticed, but will need verified in stats, is that 5/5 Shield spec seems to give more opportunities to use all your global cooldowns. Avoidance no longer leaves you with gaps in using all of your GCD's. I totally agree that it just feels like you're rage starved far less because I dont remember not being able to use a GCD very much at all.

Ive since tried different ways of speccing into shield spec.

When you are getting hit hard you have the infinite source of rage, but when thats not happening, like MT Freya, Trash or Avoidance streaks, you will find yourself floating at a around 15 rage with 5/5 shield spec. I cant verify this, but it seems that in this situation, shaving the few points of all your offensive moves can make the difference. Because you are able to use nearly all your GCD's, this shaving allows you pass over the threshold to use those GCD's more often. Just.

I guess what Im advocating is this, a spec with 5/5 and 2/3 focused rage makes rage issues seem almost non existant. But at the same time it doesnt seem like overkill, like a 5/5 SS with 3/3 FR spec is like.

I dont see any other points being more valuable then those spent in 2/3 FR, unless you really need the survivability. I was able to achieve this without sacrificing dmg shield or my 2/5 in cruelty. Holding threat is absolutely not an issue. Here is the spec i have been using:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I guess you could swap the two points in Cruelty for Improved Disciplines (with the glyph of shield wall); taking up vene's proposal for a 2min cd, 40% reduction shield wall, which could have better use in an end raid situations, but the 2/5 cruelty keeps a nice threat going with both Heroics and Raids.

edit.

On the other side, I did start the patch with a 2/5 shield spec with 3/3 FR. The huge difference I recieved in rage without changing spec after the patch was noticable. But a 5/5 Shield spec is insanely better. 100% chance > 40% chance of getting 5 rage. This is a VERY noticeable difference when you use moves like 'shield block' (practically gaurantees 5 rage for every hit you take for the next 10 secs) or a dodge on use trinket.

In this situation I can even justify using Demo Shout on trash, adds and soft-hitting bosses (like Heriocs and Naxx) because I am receiving the rage I should without gimping myself, giving my healers the the well deserved break they should have. I am also using berserker rage less now, so much so that I am considering moving its action bar position.

(edited again and changed the spec promoted).

Ill be trying a 5/5 SS with 0/3, 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3 FR again in the next 2 weeks. but I am sure you can sit comfortably with 5/5 SS 2/3 FR.

Yea I've been discovering this as I've been running different encounters after the patch, the ability really isn't as good as it was. I haven't pulled Freya or Yogg yet, so I have no idea if it's going to continue to work vs their abilities. It no longer works against quite a few abilities in heroics and Ulduar that it used to.

A "rage funel" Vigilance sounds interesting, but also too radical a change to be happening anytime soon, imo.
"Splitting" the talent on to the avoidance talents (Deflection gives rage on parry, Anticipation on Dodge) sounds like something Blizzard´d be more will ing to implement short-term.

On a different note, we still have HS spam to contend with. I´d like to throw out one suggestion that I haven´t heard before (which by no means noone made it before): Make HS like Arcane Blast, i.e. give a stacking debuff that lasts for maybe 4 seconds and increases rage cost by X (about 5, I guess?) and damage and/or threat by Y% (10% damage, 40% threat? can´t give it too much damage or it will unbalance DPS, esp. Fury).

I can only agree here. Imp Spell Reflect is a bit too situational to be used in an every-day spec. for me. The other tier 4 talents just feel like "erhm, let's fill this with something…".

- Scrap puncture. Add it too one hand weapon spec which would further improve our low-rage situations on 1 talent we can now use a lot more or make it as someone state here a cleave booster. An issue with the later is where would you get 2-3 points to place in this talent from?
- Make imp. disarm useful in PVE if you even want to keep it as is. Disarm is a 1 min CD so making it semi-strong isn't to me out of the picture, given if warriors could add a 10% damage increase to a boss 15% of the fight we'd be quite "welcome" into raids as tanks. Still, looking at what Premonition has found regarding tank DPS in "progression gear and specs" a warrior is in the middle of the pack where druids output about 10% more and paladins 15% more with death knights falling about 5% behind us. Given this, Blizzard is OK with a level of diversity and this 10% boost wouldn't be crazy esp. if it only was a personal buff to the warrior him self. But at the moment the talent is useless in PVE.

This actually isn't true I don't think. According to tests done my Premonition on the 3.2 PTR - Warriors, Druids and Death-Knights are very comparable at generating threat. Protection Paladins out-scale us by a healthy margin however. The values where in the lines of:

Prot. Pallie: 9.5K TPS
Prot. Warrior: 7.5K TPS (8.0K TPS with Vigilance)
Druid: 7.5K TPS
Death-Knight: 7.5K TPS

From their testing vigilance is simply a bonus we have as a threat tool to the raid. This test was however done a hard-hitting boss with zero movement, thus I can imagine we're talking very optimal rage-situations. Low rage is what situationally can break Warrior threat and is something of a "key area" for Blizzard to sort imo.

Agree on this. I'm not sure where to place such a talent but it could be a tier 2+ follow up on Improved Thunder Clap. Tier 2 and 3 are packed with more or less "must haves" where teir 4 is more or less crap talents. This I reckon also should be over-seen.

Not really a quote but it seperates the other text quite neatly. Is 2/3 Focused Rage actually more effective in the end than 2/2 Improved Revenge? On the entire raid-night I had tonight Revenge stood for almost 12% of my damage output. Not sure lowering that by 20% and having a bit more rage (which is situational if it's effective rage or not) would compensate for the loss do this damage.

I don't see anything really radical, complicated or over-powered about it. In my arms gear I might generate 25-50 rage per hit. Say the protection warrior syphons 10% of this to him self. An extra 2-5 rage per 3 seconds won't do that much, but it will help. It would remove the low-streaks as with rage on avoidance. The whole rage mechanic if anything needs a radical change, but this would be a simple mid-term solution. It would also help out when not taking a boss as a protection warrior slapping this on the current MT. Even if he's hit for large amounts you won't see more than about 10 rage / 2 seconds in normal events. The talent could even have a cap if it would feel over-powered in certain situations (I can't see where seeing if we're hit we have massive rage and if not, getting 5 rage per second won't really make us over-powered).

Aye, this is also a problem. I'm not sure how to deal with it. We've already got a lot of things to think about as a warrior but I've juggled the idea you bring up with some kind of stacking de-buff system.

To avoid messing up Fury and Prot-specs they could just add an alternativ talent for protection warriors in either the tier 4 level that's we know is pretty weak OR add it too our tier 6 level, say a follow up for one hand weapon spec. We get 3/3 one-hand weapon spec. and 2/2 devastating heroic strike or something like it.

I wouldn't mind heroic strike being buffed but on a certain cool-down, given we do have the issues of infinite rage and rage starvation. Thus say a "devastating heroic strike" would use a % of our available rage but as today will be place on the next melee swing (or even next devastate attack furthering the use of that ability).

I agree that puncture have to be revamped as it's fully useless talent and I probably think that imp. SR or imp. Disarm should go to tier 2 to help for Prot PVP spec (atm Prot PvP have to take dodge or imp. thunder clap that is not good).

Imp. SR is not very bad talent and it helps on a lot of bosses. But you can't say this talent is very situational, you then should say same about Focused rage then (it's pretty useless on Thorim, Council, Algalon encounters for example), but you don't do so.

And considering new buffs to devastate/shield block value on items to help shield slam + demoralizing shout from retridins I prefer to go spec like this:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
It's not perfect for all bosses and ofc for specific bosses you can change some talents.