It's ridiculous because Glyphs were never supposed to be massive class changers nor were they supposed to be strictly required. The Shield Wall Glyph has the potential to be both.

Have to agree with Jayde ... It's pretty ridiculous - it's going to be mandatory for any warrior who spends most of their time Protection. Some simple math:

Lets assume a fight will last 10 minutes and in that span of time you are taking an average of 2500 DPS. The total damage received is 1,500,000. Lets also assume you are wearing the 4 PC dreadnaught bonus and you have 2/2 Improved Disciplines.

With the Glyph: You will mitigate 1000 damage every second for 150 seconds of the fight or 150,000 damage (10%) using Shield Wall on every cooldown

Without the Glyph: You will mitigate 1500 damage every second for 37.5 seconds of the fight or 56,250 damage (3.75%) using Shield Wall every cooldown

I dunno - a 6.25% buff to overall damage mitigation seems pretty awesome to me. Not to mention Shield Wall tends to be a vastly underused resource for Warriors currently who still save it for those 'Oh Shit' moments. Having been removed from the GCD makes this even more amazing.

Well I don't think you can assume it will be used every cooldown unless it lines up perfectly with every burst. Or the fight itself has no burst which would just be boring.

For example Patchwerk, I save shield wall for enrage, but since I cannot be certain when that will happen I would likely skip it once to be safe.

it is obviously different than DK who can basically cover the entire minute with their cooldowns

Do we have any preliminary results on how Armor Penetration is affecting armor on the PTR yet? Bloodthirst should be ideal to test with due to the fixed damage.

Shield wall (specced, glyphed and t7 bonus), 15 seconds
Valor Medal of the first war, 20 seconds
Defenders Code, 20 seconds
Shield Block, 10 seconds
Shield Wall, 15 seconds

This rotation would get you thru the minute, but not the next one. With this setup, it makes warriors appear even more gear reliant than pre-bc.

Has anyone heard anything regarding the rage generated through dodge/block/parry? The spell reflect glyph would be more promising for pvp if the rage was readily available every cd. A shield block glyph, increasing duration, would have been much more sensible.

Fuck yes! Titanium plating also reduces disarm effects by 50% as well as the block value, in your face rogues!

Wowwiki 3.1<---documented and undocumented.

Sidenote: Anyone notice they are changing the looking for group tool?

That is the idea though - with the CD being reduced to 1 minute why wouldn't you use it every time its available? Even with your patchwerk example the average guild kills him in around 3 minutes give or take I think is fair to say... You would be able to use to use it a total of 4 times throughout the fight (1- 0:00", 2- 1:00", 3- 2:00") and still have it available for enrage. Whereas without the glyph you would simply save it for the enrage and get 15 seconds of 60% compared to 60 seconds for 40%.

There are always going to certain fights and situations where you will need to time it's use but for general tanking purposes it would be spammable and greatly shallow the curve on incoming damage.

Edit: 3 times is probably more likely as it may still be on cooldown when enrage were to hit, but it would still yield a damage reduction

I'm happy to see the change and hope it signals a change to the HS mechanic. Nonetheless, Xav has posted links on Tankspot and in these forums on how the Devastate Glyph is nearly the same amount of TPS as the current HS Glyph but may be an overall rDPS increase due to the faster application of all 5 sunders. Also, if the rage gain from parry/dodge does make it into 3.1 there is a high chance that most warriors would drop this for any of the new protection glyphs. In fact, in light of the promised changes, I think the crit bonus could still make the glyph viable or at least worthy of comparison to the new ones.

To be honest, I think the HS glyph is a terrible choice for a Prot Warrior in 3.09 because either the boss is hitting like a truck and you are swimming in rage so you can spam HS making the glyph useless or you are rage starved and you won't be able to rely on HS crits to keep up HSing (even in combination with the revenge glyph). 5% crit on HS is actually going be to be useful in both cases now.

In any case, we'd have to see how they are changing other, similar glyphs like the revenge one. If my theory is right then they might replace every glyph that effectively gives -rage into something that adds damage. At best that means they have an idea where to go with our rage mechanic to avoid both extremes of swimming in rage and being rage starved. At worst it means atleast these glyphs will be useful on infinite rage fights.

The thing that bothers me about the TG nerf is that it was discussed at the very start of Wrath and Developers said they wanted you feel like you were swinging two 2handers. The damage reduction looks like they ran out of ideas, which worries. Also, the more warrior changes coming doesn't fill me with hope but fear for more lackluster changes. No glyph change for fury and a complete nerf to HS glyph. I wouldn't be surprised if the big buff to zerker stance is the removal of the increased damage penalty. As it is Fury is so reliant on raid buffs and gear that this will really end up effecting leveling warriors and people unable to get into raiding guilds.

Two things:

1) Warrior changes have yet to be actually implemented so don't freak out yet.
2) Is the HS glyph really a nerf for Fury? It's 5% crit vs ~5 rage less per HS (assuming 50% crit rate) when a HS already can cost upwards of 50-60 rage. I'd say it's a buff or at the very least wash. But someone has to do some more serious math about that.

The HS glyph is a small nerf for fury atm. Believe it or not the 10 extra rage off of heroic lets us do a lot more. 5% extra crit on heroic strike is just like a drop of water in a large bucket of water. The 10 rage HS glyph was compounding in a sense that more rage allowed you to do more HS which also gave you more rage, which is slightly better than the 5% crit at this stage in the game. Maybe in Icecrown the 5% crit would be better since we would be capped on rage generation, but for now that's not the case.

Everything that has to do with rage for a warrior has a compounding effect on DPS.

Rage is something that worries me with the 10% damage decrease. On its own the decrease isnt absolutely huge, but the decrease in rage generation that will result probably will be, meaning that this is much bigger than a 10% damage nerf. I dont think its great to jump to conclusions yet, but so far we have one of the biggest nerfs in a long time, to a class/spec that in my opinion didnt need it. I dont think its the case that we were ever doing that much more dps than other classes, with exception of some of the gimmic fights (malygos, thaddius, loatheb). Even in those situations other classes with skilled players are capable of perhaps more dps (ive definately seen it in combat log parses).

I hope they have big changes that can counteract this, though the loss in rage generation through the 10% damage decrease is going to have a big hit, regardless. I'ts early days yet, we shall see how this pans out.

It's also a potentially interesting change for PvP, as it increases the flexibility we have with regards to turtling and requiring less healer babysitting.

I'm very interested in seeing how the Glyph of Shield Wall will work out. I'm not quite sold yet on its 'essential-ness', despite some of the numbers spun above as average damage reduced isn't necessarily the key.

To take something of a practical example: I'm the MT of a smaller 10-man guild and my OT happens to also be a warrior. We're working on Sarth10 + 3 drakes and we use one of our players' Death Knight alt as the Sarth tank, while I take the drakes and my OT takes the adds. If 3.1 were to hit tomorrow and we weren't going into Ulduar I'd consider Blocking/Last Stand/Shield Wall so that I can string a few cooldowns together for when I've got multiple drakes on me and my healers are having to move during a flame wall. Meanwhile I just don't see my OT going ape over the same glyph/spec combo that would get him a one-minute Shield Wall since there's only one major survival situation he faces (whelps up with armor pen stacked, two drakes on me); if anything the Shockwave glyph seems to shine given the roles he normally takes (although they're certainly not mutually exclusive).

Anyway, I don't want to make this sound like, "Here's my anecdotal story so believe me." I just see the glyph/spec pair for Shield Wall being very strong if you're usually placed in raid main tanking situations, less so otherwise.

The key to adjusting warrior's damage output is adjusting rage; this change totally misses the mark in that regard. Even with about 50% Nax10 gear, I'm swimming in rage every boss fight. It's fairly dull to play at the moment because I can hit every cooldown and still heroic strike about 50% of the time. If the adjustment to TG was a decrease in rage generation, perhaps normalizing it to the level of 1 handers of the same iLevel or removing the offhand's rage generation, it would make rage management more of a challenge as well as preventing a warrior from hitting every cooldown due to rage starvation thereby lowering dps. It doesn't deal with the intrinsic warrior gear scaling problem, but I suspect that comes part and parcel with the rage mechanic. Neither would it deal with burst damage, but I don't think that's currently the dev's issue with TG.

I have to stop you right there... Nfw and yourself are both citing some pretty extreme examples claiming this may not be useful (even though as this change gives me a chubby as my 10 man guild works on Sarth3D being the Add Tank). To give a likewise extreme example of how good this buff could be for all purpose general tanking that increases your time to live and decreases the amount of healing you require:

On our last Naxx 10 run I MT'd and took 4,587,895 damage while being in combat for 4,767 seconds ~ roughly 960 DPS incoming. During that time I had 15 opportunities to use Shield Wall and I used it 4 times (Wow, I suck). 4 x 15 second x (960 * 0.60) = 34,560 (0.75%) damage mitigated out of a possible 129,600 (2.82%).

With the glyph added I would have 79 opportunities to use the SW CD and mitigate: 79 x 15 x (960 * 0.4) = 455,040 (9.92%). Again, these number are the farthest thing from scientific but illustrate a point.

It also brings the T7 4 PC bonus in line with some of the other classes in terms of usefulness. A reduction that significant to incoming damage really makes this a no brainer for me.

Cheers for your math. Even with shield wall only reducing 40% damage, it seems most promising. Keep in mind the dual spec option coming out. If you're going to be switching MT/OT roles or better put going from a boss with burst tank damage to add duty on the next one, you can have 2 tanking specs, one for max avoidance (1 min shield wall included) and one for a more tps focus.

Considering the change to one-hand weapon specialization taking only 3 talent points for paladins, I would expect a similar change for warriors as well. This would at least free up the 2 points needed for improved disciplines.

There's a minor warrior PVP nerf in the new shaman glyphs.

* Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem *new* -- Your Stoneclaw Totem also places a damage absorb shield on you, equal to 4 times the strength of the shield it places on your totems.

It's not a very big bubble(something like 4k-5k), but it's the principle of the thing: Yet another class with access to a rage-starving bubble.

Well Perrin I don't dispute your math, but I do disagree with the assumptions.

One is that I just don't see it feasible to model Shield Wall as an every-cooldown ability. I'm always saving it for certain situations (Patchwerk is enraging, Gluth decimating, Maexxna stunning, and so forth). Just popping it every cooldown seems like a poor decision given that an average reduction in incoming damage isn't necessarily as valuable (especially if the healers have the average situation under control).

The second is that until we see Ulduar we don't have a good feeling for what bosses are going to be like; Naxx is recycled level 60 content and I don't think will give us a good view of what the future will be like. If Sarth, Malygos, and even heroic bosses are any indication of what we'll see I think we're much more likely to see cycles of burst where it's less about macro-ing an ability into a rotation and more about knowing when and where to use them. Some bosses have repeated burst that I'd like to prevent with a one-minute cooldown others just enrage at the end and a more powerful Shield Wall is just what you need.

To be honest I'm expecting them to slash the Shield Wall mitigation further with that glyph to bring it more in-line with other tanking class equivalents. That would also make it a much bigger decision: moving it just 10% down to a 30% reduction would make it more of a trading one tool (long cooldown life-saver) for another (short cooldown buffer) than a direct replacement.

Not only is it feasible, it's easy. Know the average kill time of boss and know when boss hits soft enrage, now backtrack your timing. If it looks like you are off the timing, you just drop using the last cooldown before the enrage happens. Mages have been modeling their cooldowns for years in a similar fashion.

I like the change the glyph brings however it's well outside the intended scope of power we've heard preached multiple times over the last year. Unless Blizzard has changed their intentions, this glyph should be rolled into one of our current talents or dropped entirely. I do not want to see a pattern of balancing classes via glyphs emerge.

TG nerf is for real. To quote GC: