Irky about the usefulness of gushing wound in pve content - will we want to ask the tanks to keep kiting the target/boss for our dot to be refreshed? Is it meant to be a fury-only thing and is fury supposed to be more about keeping said dot and sunders up on target as part of normal rotation?

Inner rage seems an interesting concept, i'd personally be very happy if they'd implement a lower cap for it as well (i.e. if attacks put you beneath 20 rage the buff falls off as the 50% extra rage cost of abilities enhances the risk of being rage starved). At this point it just seems fairly easy to backfire due to the extra rage cost.

Heroic leap seems a bit pvp and tanking oriented, though it will have it's uses in aoe situations - not much to comment.

With the removal of WW from fury single target rotation it does seem it will still have a much more lenient rotation (HS, sunder, slam?) while arms will still seem a bit too clunky with a total of 5 (MS, OP, HS, Slam, execute) abilities to choose from at any given time, though i do think that removing HS from being on-swings makes arms rotations much more entertaining

Also not sure what to think about giving fury the option of being DW 1h and DW2h and how they'll keep both specs in balance while essentially having (from what i can read) only 1 end-talent different than the other, sounds very interesting.

All in all i really hope more dynamic will be brought into fury rotation in the near future.

I'd suspect that removing HS from on-swing would actually bump slam way down the priority list. The rage cost of slam is less, but I'd probably pick HS over slam to not pause the white swing timer which over the course of a fight would end up being more DPS (depending on the damage of each attack, rage normalization, etc). It may actually make the arms rotation more like a rotation and less complicated (i.e wack-a-mole priority list) - the current need to make the split second decision of if to queue up HS will be gone.

This means 10rage HS will have to hit harder than 0.5s delay slam to ensure slam stays out of arms rotation. At the same time if that happens will slam have any part in fury rotation at all, even with 10% damage bonus it gets from fury talents (Unending Fury - Spell - World of Warcraft). And DW 1h fury will be even less competitive if that happens unless that talent that makes 1h DW possilbe gets an addendum similar to Threat of Thassarian - Spell - World of Warcraft

I wouldn't mind slam taken out of arms rotation at all as i think it's too keyboard-mashy currently while fury is too simple. Also curious how HS will scale depending on available rage vs Execute. If they don't want people to ignore execute in their rotations it will still hit harder than at least some abilities at 30 rage while HS will possibly be the low-rage option (unless you want to delay a gcd and use a shout of/c)

Between the functionality of rage generation from damage taken and the Vengeance buff, it seems likely that they are trying to tie a tank's health pool to his threat output.

Vengeance is a buff which increases attack power proportional to the amount of damage taken, and is currently intended to cap at 10% of your health pool. If this were in effect now, a stam gem would give something like 36 AP per gem when the buff is fully stacked (which they stated it should be, during boss fights).

In addition, if they choose to make rage generation be affected by your current health as a % rather than as a value, then having a higher health pool might allow you to have a larger threat generation. As stated above in liar's post above, healers will likely strive to keep you at a "wounded" state, due to the newly introduced mana constraints, but the value of health they intend to hold you at is independent of your health pool (a larger health pool simply allows them more room for error). For instance, let's say that your healers aim to keep you around 20k health for the duration of a given fight. If you have a 60k health pool, this is 30% of your life, but if you have a 70k health pool, this is 28.57% of your life. This affords you extra rage, provided that the rage generation scales on health as a % rather than as a value.

It's far too early to tell the relative value of anything, but the thought that Stamina is likely to have a threat component in Cataclysm is certainly unexpected.

The more I think about it the more it feels like the on swing nature of HS is the only thing truly separating dual wielding from say arms purely from game feel perspective. In the end they'll make the damage numbers the same anyway and if the game fell will be the same then why burden yourself with having to get two weapons anyway.

Which also brings me to the one handed weapons thing. I don't get that part at all why would they want to get into a mess like this? It's bad enough to have to balance a spec against other spec, here they're basically adding a talent that produces a spec in its own right to balance. In one talent point. They've been complaining about how tough it is to balance TG as a talent and now they've elected to add another talent to balance out just like that.

Personally I think they should just make TG baseline. I doubt prot would want to go there anyway with the damage hit on revenge and shield slam for some extra stamina. And I don't know, do something with arms to make it undesirable, not that hard.

@Belltoll I doubt HS would ever hit harder than slam. Since you still can gear for rage gen you could invest enough into crit and haste to remove slam from your keybinds. That also means talent points for arms and fury.

@Casstor Stamina has had a threat component for paladins for a while, I'm not really surprised with that.

With the introduction of Inner Rage I can see pre-potting Mighty Rage Potion to start with the increased damage being quite an option.

In general the changes aren't half bad really.

Rend and (hopefully?) gushing wounds being able to crit seems good news (unless we get some improvement on stance dancing I still think that rend isn't really worth for fury in cata),
making sunder hit for damage, even low a bit, is excelent as not every raid has prot tank and in fights with any sort of long-term movement (like marrowgar or any boss with air phase) sunderring as it is now can lower your dps by a few hundred.

Overall I am glad to see we finally got some thoughtful attention, although needs some tweaking (no, buffing/nerfing random things because we become OP or worthless isn't good) and I am curious on how the 1h fury will turn out..

The new stat changes are, in a way, forcing Blizzard to include 1H DW as fury regardless of whether they like the idea or not. With how agil and str affect AP/Crit for different armor wearing classes as well as the recent announcements for Frost DK's, Blizzard has to introduce 1H DPS weapons with strength on them for Frost DK's. I seem to recall that the introduction of an item of this type was stated officially (by a blue). So, with the introduction of these types of items to the game, Blizzard is attempting to get more potential use from these items, rather than having them attached to the same stigma that healing plate has become infamous for.

I personally welcome the flexibility, due to the difficulty I had obtaining 2-2H weapons over the course of this expansion (until ICC). Yet we can only hope that the numbers are tweaked in a way where both are completely viable in terms of DPS.

With the incite build for arms HS already does hit harder then slam because of more crit. But even beyond that the numbers are higher (at current gear levels): World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I think what they tried to do is bland out the spiky nature of fury. Fights like Kologarn we will not be 8 billion dps ahead of the #2 guy on the meter and same with the small mob packs. On the flip side they gave us a little dps boost on high mobility fights like putricide. At least our strat we move him all the time so the improved rend talent (cant remember the name) will put us more in the middle of the pack dps wise.

To me this screams of a pretty boring toon to play. We won't really excel at anything or any specific fight type. I liked that there were somethings we were really good at. It gave us our 15 secs of raid fame. Now i feel like we will be in the middle of the pack...mister consistant...

not sure if i like this..

I do know they need to add something to our rotation to replace WW for single target fights.

Thoughts on changes:

Inner Rage: Interesting concept, but it has the potential to hurt more than it help if the balance is off. If the increased rage cost is worse than the extra damage dealt, you'll have to avoid rage capping even more than before rather than having the downside of rage capping mitigated. It could be useful in PvP if you just wait until 100 rage and then burst even if its an overall disadvantage in PvE.

Gushing Wound: PvP oriented ability mostly. With essentially everyone constantly moving, you can gushing wound every player in a fight, and it's unlikely any of them will be able to find 9 seconds to stand still to let it fade. It also counters stealth classes very well. I don't like that it's usefulness in PvE will depend on convincing the raid that moving the boss a yard back and forth every 9 seconds is a great idea, or its usefulness will be limited only to targets that naturally are moved constantly.

Heroic Leap: Is stated as doing "massive damage" in this post:
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Class Preview: Warrior
Depending on the CD and damage, it could be a strong replacement for charge in PvP and will likely completely replace Charge in PvE considering the extra damage.

HS mechanics: Could be good or bad, difficult to make any conclusions without hard numbers. I'm hoping the extra rage used scales the damage on a percentage basis rather than a flat damage increase like Execute, or it'll fall in the same boat execute did with high rage efficiency at low rage values and poor rage efficiency at high rage levels, effectively working counter to the concept they're going for(wanting to press it when you have a lot of rage, and not wanting to press it when you're low on rage).

Shouts: Don't have to use bloodrage to use a shout, OK. Nice quality of life change, especially after death in a BG or to use just prior to entering combat, but relatively minor. There will be 0 free GCDs to use shouts for rage when sunder is capable of filling in every GCD with a 50% weapon damage attack.

WW: Will still likely be used in single target as long as it hits with both weapons, with priority just above Sunder's for GCD filling. Hits our low target AoE capabilities very hard when combined with losing Cleave spam to the degree it's possible now. I'd like to see the CD on WW reduced to around BT's if the intention is for the ability to be a legitimate source of large-scale AoE damage.

MS: Expected, they've wanted to cut back the requirement for bringing healing debuffs for a while now.

Sunder: Overall decrease for every physical DPS, but will still clearly be a valuable enough debuff that it will be essential to have in any balanced raid. I'd hope to see it eventually being one stack to apply the full 12% rather than 3 separate applications given its reduced effectiveness.

Furious Sundering: Will eliminate free GCDs as fury with sunder capable of filling them all with some decent damage. I have a feeling it will be changed when this becomes the case since it was only intended to minimize the penalty for applying sunders.

Weapon specs: All weapons use sword spec, weapon type will no longer matter for Arms. Goes along with the concept of extra attacks that the Arms mastery bonus provides.

Fury BV: Will still only be valued for the range and duration on shouts and the lack of filler at this level of the tree that has any real usefulness. The extra rage won't be a factor without any GCDs due to furious sundering.

TG/SMF: One will always be statistically better than the other, and because there's no difference in the strengths/weaknesses of either spec with regards to the nature of a fight, there will be no reason to choose the weaker option. Which is better will depend on the bonus damage offered by SMF, the potential value of other talent builds possible by ignoring SMF/TG, and weapon itemization.

Rage vs damage talents: OK. Impossible to speculate without numbers.

Disarming Nature: Turns a good peel against melee targets into a CC against any target. Extremely valuable in PvP.

Blitz: Impossible to speculate without numbers.

Improved pummel: Almost no value in PvE, decent amount of rage generation if fury were to become a viable PvP spec.

Arms Masteries: Armor penetration will be fairly weak without being able to build on it with gear, but it's a reasonable bonus. The bonus swing will depend on the mastery rating conversion, but it should be capable of working well if balanced correctly.

Fury Masteries: Haste's value will depend on its implementation in cata, but they're putting themselves in an extremely difficult position with Enraged Intensity. If they try to balance it as a valuable stat in PvE, it will be completely overpowered in PvP. If it's balanced for PvP, it will be unusable in PvE. Enrage, Frenzied Regen, and Berserker Rage all have very little use in PvE. BR is useful, but is just a drop in the bucket compared to overall rage generation and increasing its value will not make a very significant dent. This leaves the only real damage provided by the talent in increasing the effectiveness of Death Wish.

A 100% increase in DW's strength is only a 5% increase in sustained DPS. Using my gear and current WotLK numbers for perspective, about 220 strength will result in a 5% increase in DPS. Assume Mastery rating is balanced much worse than strength and 300 rating increases enrage effects by 100%(to match the 5% increase 220 points of strength provided), which gives it an SEP of ~.733, around the value of agi/haste. If it were any worse than this, fury warriors just wouldn't be able to make use of gear with Mastery rating on it in PvE, but it would still be disgustingly overpowered in PvP. If we assume it's as prevalent as any other stat and is available on gems, it's quite possible to reach as high as 1500 of a stat if you're deliberately stacking it, which would make DW +120% damage(as in 2.2x normal damage) for 30s, Enrage would be +60% damage when active, and Frenzied Regen would heal you for 180% of your life. Obviously the coefficients on abilities other than DW could be different in this example, but the balance point requirement when considering its impact on DW alone(which would have to be as powerful as stated just to be useful in PvE) would allow for far too much burst in a cooldown.

Prot Masteries: Crit block chance can work quite well with the changes to block and scale nicely if balanced appropriately. Vengeance is a good concept for tank threat scaling, though I think the numbers will likely see changes.

All in all, it seems like a lot of powerful PvP-oriented announcements so far, but most of the PvE information is too vague to go into detail on. Tank information was limited to the mastery announcement.

I'm a little worried about the changes to Heroic Strike. Obviously, like any other warrior tank out there, I absolutely hate spamming this ability all the time, making my small finger (used for hitting my HS key) ache like hell. But it IS a big part of our aggro generation. I didn't see any mention of other abilities getting their innate aggro increased. I do hope we won't be pushed back to Ulduar times, where any offtank was able to overaggro pathetic warriors.
The Vengeance thingy looks like a nice aggro boost, but something tells me that we will end up doing 25% of dps classes' damage again.

On a side note, Blizzard absolutely suck at balancing warriors. We were the first and only tanks in Vanilla. With the introduction of additional tanking classes, I observed a funny tendency. Other classes able to tank had their tanking rotations more and more simplified:
- druids have Thunder Clap "built-in" thanks to a talent
- paladins have Demo Shout "built-in" as well
- death knights aren't really tanking in the strict sense of the word. They use the same set of abilities as while dpsing, with Rune Strike macroed. (I realise I'm simplifying here, but you get my point.)
- all a druid tank needs to do to AoE tank is to press one button - Swipe
- paladin AoE tanking does not differ from single tanking at all
Examples are galore.
Warrior tanking is much more complex and reactive (reactive use of Revenge and Shield Slam anyone?). Don't get me wrong here. I'm not trying to convince anyone that all other tanks need no skill and that warrior tanks are artists compared with others. But the fact is that we have like 3 times more buttons to press to be able to tank effectively, ESPECIALLY in the AoE department. With Cataclysm, nothing will change, because Ghostcrawler said that rage manmagement gives more "depth" to tanking... I laughed my arse off. They produce 2 button tanks, but we need "depth" to what we do? Is it only me that sees a huge discrepancy in tanking philosophies here?
I'm really curious how this all will end come the new expansion.