I had similar concerns with Inner Rage. Without knowing how long the duration is it's hard to speculate on just how good or bad it may end up being, especially in a scenario where raid damage is high, but sporradic, not medium and constant. Spikes would be completely fine if the duration of the ability was not longer than 5 or so seconds. This would allow a few abilities to increase in damage for a short period without having to worry too much about rage starvation. I can't see them adding a new ability that you would be better off simply not even training due to any possible downsides. At least not by intent.

I was also mostly curious about the HS rage to damage conversion as well. It would have to scale much better than 50% weapon damage for 15 rage, or else we would just be using Sunder (and possibly Whirlwind). And unless I simply misread, isn't Cleave supposed to become an instant attack as well? If there is no damage and glyph adjustment, this seems like it would still be the "go to" ability for anything less than five targets with the Whirlwind change. I also don't really see shouts being used as part of our rotation outside of how they are currently used. It is however nice like you said that they will no longer cost rage, and will be nice if they do go ahead and add Demoralizing to the list.

It's not something that needs to be answered at all. It's completely pointless to look at these changes and try to extrapolate that we "need" vengeance to cover the gap left between heroic strike or what not. When Cata hits our slam or devastate might cover that gap with Inner rage. It doesn't matter what the numbers are or what covers what at this point. I think too many are still stuck in the mindset of WotLK numbers when they try to theorycraft balance for Cataclysm.

I mostly agree with every point, and I'll just add few things:

- Gushing Wound may still be worth a gcd for steady fights. It's a low rage/small duration bleed that will compete with lowest rage HS and not vs Rend (supposing they will stack). If it is weapon based and bosses armor is high enough there may be space to use it with an average-low uptime.

- Heroic Leap/Blitz: HL should do "massive damage". Is Blitz intended to do the same for Charge or is it just to bring it on par with Intercept (low damage) and if the latter what's the point?
Apart the cosmetic change HL seems really not intended for Arms despite being a baseline ability. Getting it at highest level removes the "fun" from using it during the levelling experience and in PvE is very situational. In any case it's quite redundant regardless of its damage.

- Weapon spec and Bonus swing are both passive and redundant. Further iterations may differentiate the 2, but what could make both worth it is still too dependant on 1. our new rage mechanics, 2. the nature of the bonus swings and 3. the tuning of Inner rage since multiple procs may easily give a burst rage income and grant no sustained rage generation in the few seconds later.

- The new Sunder seems lackluster and given the changes to armor ranges and arp I don't see why it needed this nerf. In fact it needed a qol change rather than a nerf to make it less mandatory. A fury talent to improve Sunder Armor damage and threat reduction seems a misplacement: it's and arms issue, unless the spec drastically changes its pace or unless it's early in the tree.

Conclusions
Inner rage and Gushing wounds are "cool" at first sight, but they can only be judged once we can see some number.
Sword spec/Bonus swing, Heroic Leap/Blitz, HS/Cleave/Execute, for different reasons are a mimic of an already existing mechanic and actually we don't know enough to understand if they will be meaningful abilities (regardless of their usage).
We don't know yet enough how will work our rage, and as we all know it means how everything else will work. This makes the preview a bit disappointing for any seasoned warrior.

If anybody is interested I posted something more on EU forums here


Slightly OT
One thing that concerns me is that they are implementing the execute mechanic to other moves. Actually execute has a bug never confirmed nor looked at since at least 3.1 where if you hit with both exe and a swing in a short timeframe, it is possible to completely lose the rage provided by a swing.
This may be due to how it works (execute drains first its rage cost and then the remainder from leftover rage up to 30-cost) and then restore 10 rage if following a SD proc. Or this simply may be due to having to calculate rage after a swing dealt damage thus making the occurance much more likely to happen.
If it wasn't overlooked since like 1 year I wouldn't worry at all about a not-so-evident bug, and in current rage scenarios you refill your bar in a swing. However with efficiency meaning something in Cata and the new rage dumps, this could be a big issue for a long time.

I've seen a few people comment on this now. As much as we would like to believe that we will still be able to use HS in conjunction with our other abilities as we do now, I find it hard to believe that they would allow White + HS + BT within the same GCD. It's quite likely that I'm wrong here, but that strikes me as an abusively high amount of burst to allow. Obviously anything is possible, and maybe the devs will feel that if we are willing to part with half our now normalized rage bar in a single GCD, they'd allow us to (at the cost of efficiency). I'm remaining skeptical for now.

Assuming it is on the GCD, it could remain a rage dump for prot, assuming the 30 rage version hits notably harder than devastate but is less efficient. It will have a strange window to hit to be useful at all. I think this will prove a sizeable challenge for the devs if they want prot to use the ability at all. Assuming that this is the case, it must be higher threat than devastate at some point or we'll probably never use it. It must be less efficient or we'll never use devastate. It must be more efficient, though, than using Devastate with Inner Rage up, or we'll just use that as a rage dump instead. And of course, this must be true at all gear levels, or either we'll never use it or we'll never use devastate. It's a strange spot to put HS in for tanks.

One thing I don't see anyone talking about regarding the Whirlwind change is the potential benefit for us in a new "CC is needed again" world - which the developers have implied will be the case in Cataclysm. Back in vanilla and tbc, it was a major positioning headache for a group with a Fury Warr in it to make sure the CC'd mob wasn't nearby, given a) how mandatory whirlwind was in our rotation no matter if we're dps'ing single or multiple targets; and b) the increased range of whirlwind vs normal melee attacks. If the mage/rogue/hunter/etc wasn't skilled at getting the CC target away from the group, or the tank couldn't pull the group away from the CC'd mob, our dps took a major hit. Similar thing happens today on Deathbringer Saurfang when the adds pop out, for groups whose ranged dps aren't uber at immediately pulling enough aggro.

Changing whirlwind so we don't want to use it on single targets (or at least have other options just as good, like the 50% weapon damage sunder) means CC positioning isn't as much of a problem for us.

I think the issue is simply that Warriors are seem to be the "average" tank that encounters are balanced around. So in WoTLK all of the other tanks ended up with a copy of the swing reduction of thunderclap, the damage reducing bonus from defensive stance, etc. The fact that druids (for example) have fewer buttons to push than a warrior tank seems more like a knock on the druid design than a complaint about warrior balance to me.

The other class previews aren't out yet, but if history is any guide, I think they're going to try and push the other tanking classes to be more like warriors: DKs are getting a spell reflect-like ability and all of their tanking talents pushed into one tree, Paladin tanking probably will be about the same as it is now, and Druid tanks may get some sort of ranged silence ability (weak "Gag Order" maybe).

What I don't expect to see is a large amount of fiddling with Warrior tanking as it's pretty much the way Blizzard wants it to be in terms of having a large number of cool abilities with a core "rotation" that isn't too difficult to master. Most of the tweaking they've been doing is under the hood in order to solve Tank DPS and threat scaling issues.

Maybe I'm the one reading it wrong, but the description of Inner Rage ("Whenever the character reaches a full 100 Rage, he or she will gain a buff that causes attacks to consume 50% more Rage and do 15% more damage for a short amount of time.") sounds to me like it won't increase all damage done by 15%, but only abilities. Assuming this is true, then...

If rage matters, and that is Blizzard's goal, then there will never be a point where spending 50% more rage for 15% more damage is better than hitting 1.5 abilities at 100%. I imagine this is how we will start out in Cataclysm; we'll never want to hit 100 rage and we wouldn't be able to unless we allowed ourselves to hit 100.

Eventually there is a good chance that our rage gain will be enough that we're hitting 100 occasionally. At this point though, it won't be difficult to burn back down to 0 rage, as we were just barely getting to 100 in the first place. If we do reach 0, we are now at a DPS loss over the last few seconds of the buff because we are no longer able to use an ability. My belief is that the best option for this middle ground will be to /cancelaura Inner Rage when we are down in the 40-60 rage range, then let the buff hit again when we're back up to 100.

Late Cataclysm, gear might be powerful enough that we have 100% Inner Rage uptime and we never bottom out on rage, but I don't believe that Blizzard wishes to go that direction, as we'd be back to where we are now where our damage no longer scales with our rage generation. This could be prevented by making Inner Rage last no more than 2 GCDs; it would be very difficult to even use 60 rage in 2 GCDs and then further bottom out without natural regen bringing us back up.

I think there will be more viability with hybrid spec's and basic weapons, because originally, warriors only had 1 non talented instant strike "Whirlwind" and you had to spec into mortal strike or bloodthirst to get the second instant strike. (or devastate/shieldslam respectively)

However, in Cataclysm, blue posts suggest our on next hit attacks will become instant strikes. So if you make that change to our current abilities alone, they would definitely have to be changed further, heres why:

Any spec regardless of talents you could use a slow weapon (Specifically a 2 hander) and instead of using the old 30 rage (or 25 rage now) instant strikes that have a cooldown (4 or 5 seconds now ms/bt) for technically less rage (heroic strike could hover at 10 rage if your using a 1 hander)

Again, if your using an instant strike, in lets say, a prot build, with glyphed heroic strike, and 3 incite talented, your running around with a cheep high crit chance instant striking 2 hander, with the capabilities of a prot warrior (minus the shield spells ofcourse) such as the high revenge damage/vengeance, the stun, the aoe stun. This spec might be a bad example, but again, how could you compare something like a no cooldown heroic strike versus Mortal strike? or a no CD cleave in the right situation.

Seeing this, I think theyre going to have to give heroic strike and cleave cooldowns or ms/bt might not necessarily be used as the primary attacks in a single target pve fight.

I could imagine a 2h fury hybrid spec for that using heroic strikes.

Landsoul also talks about how rage generation is going to be completely different with the on-next-hit attacks that would normally prevent our mainhand from generating rage, well now we will have ALOT more to use, but in hindsight, alot less yellow damage coming out~ and while statistically 2 two handers are better than one, will blizzard stay true to that active fun talent tree changes they said they were making? or will there be statistical dps advantages in using a hybrid build like I suggested* (probably not like I suggested)

I will also say, Heroic strike as an instant will make leveling a warrior alot easier and more fun to people.

Also I wanted to point out, about Inner rage~

If your receiving a 50% increase on rage generation suddenly, and your using (Specifically mind you) heroic strike* as your main attack, and your playing a TG warrior. You will instead of spending 30 rage, 45 rage, which will bring you down in 2 gcd's 90 rage, however, the slowest weapons for TG are 3.6, and in fury* you almost always have flurry up, so even without haste, your swinging at 2x 3.0 speed weapons for rage, effectively your getting a 2handers swing for rage every 1.5 seconds, which happens to be how long it takes to use a GCD, now over 3 seconds of 2 heroic strikes, but you can still cast heroic strike at 15 rage (because of inner rage)

So all in all, I dont see it as an issue, as long as we have flurry, and the mainhand generating rage. (As it looks to be right now)'

Never mind that our crits will generate 10 rage and we'll be ticking for anger management, and our heroic strikes will cost 3 rage less... so 7 rage at minimum if EVERYTHING else was the same, which it wont!

With Inner Rage I would think that we would become rage starved very easily. As arms you would have to be careful when you rage cap as Mortal Strike will now take almost half your rage away! As well as the scaling of heroic strike from 10-30 rage would mean that a single heroic strike could cost 45 rage.

On strike rage generation would mean having a fast off hand would be great for rage generation, even with Titan grip weapon swapping your off hand to gain rage might be an option. Fast weapons might be best for tanking when your gear out weighs an instance.

Wearing dps gear for heroics might be a must soon if we only gain % rage vs. our health.

For rage generation, we're still going to most likely used slow MH, but out OH will come down to DPS first, then stats. They said that slower weapons will generate more rage, due to hitting less. With WW most likely being removed from our rotation, we won't care about how hard our off-hand hits. This is fury of course.

As for Arms, you guys will most likely be unchanged in this department.

As for inner rage, it really can't be judged. We don't know how much rage we'll have. We don't know how long it will last. We don't know if 50% increased cost will stay. If for some reason we're hitting 100 rage, then it means we have a lot rage generation while spamming our abilities and means if the buff lasts say 5 seconds, we'll be able to use 3-4 abilities which should bring us back down to 20ish rage, which will start the cycle again. If we're not hitting 100 rage normally, Blizzard screwed us over.

Right now we should be discussing the potential for moves and what mechanics we'll see. Saying Inner Rage will rage starve us is impossible. Blizzard won't let that happen, the current numbers are just to make us happy. Look at Heroic Leap, it was raged over(and still is) because it's numbers weren't released so we assumed weak damage.

Heroic Leap has obvious PvP and solo content applications (the latter being why some would like to see it sooner than 85), but for raiding its current form isn't particularly useful for Fury beyond trash.

It's not really a part of the "rotation" if the ability can only be used once a fight at the very beginning. Combat in boss fights tends to start the very moment after the pull, meaning you have a very small window in which to use this and avoid either preempting the tank/misdirect and pull aggro or entering combat and missing your chance. Moreover, aiming to use Heroic Leap in its current form prevents any concept of hoarding rage before a pull due to stance dancing.

Heroic Leap is essentially a non-factor for Fury DPS unless its restrictions change.