Justification for Imp Berserker Stance Nerf?

1) We want warriors to wear plate. We balance around warriors wearing plate.

2) Because of the way certain warrior mechanics work, leather is attractive.

3) One of these mechanics is AP being overvalued compared to Strength.

4) This change was to try to shift more value back to Strength.

5) Warriors are balanced around wearing plate. When warriors wear leather and do too much damage, then they end up getting nerfed. But really this is a symptom of #3, not anything players are doing wrong.

6) If you wear plate and don't do enough damage, we'll buff you.

7) We realize this change lets Arms off the hook... for the moment.

8) We like both the logic and gameplay of classes being able to wear armor besides "theirs." It's nice if a paladin uses healing cloth that is an upgrade for them and might otherwise be sharded. It's nice if a warrior can use a rogue item if they have nothing better. But honestly, sometimes we are pretty close to just restricting classes to "their" armor and not "their" armor plus all "lesser" armors.

9) I know you might drool over stats on another character. But that's not the way we balance. If we gave you plate with Spirit and Stamina on it, we would change warrior mechanics to make those numbers useful. You may say "If I wear the gear I am supposed to wear, I'll be terrible." We say "If you wear the gear your'e supposed to wear, you'll be balanced." We made a similar change to Feral druids lately, because they stacked AP at the expense of everything else. It was too good a stat and led them to make choices based solely on what gear maximized their AP. Sound familiar?

10) If you think your damage is low, bring that up in these forums. But say "Our damage is low." Don't say "We need leather."

There is a good chance we may change the Improved Berserker Stance effect from 15% Strength to 20% Strength to make up for all the AP that gets thrown around in buffs, enchants and consumables.

There are also more rings etc. in Ulduar with Strength, and more leather with Agi instead of AP.

Adding 2 more ranks to Armored to the Teeth is also possible, but that would probably be too big a change for 3.1.

We want plate to be the best in slot for warriors, not leather.

Q u o t e:
Why is there a narrower distribution of stats on plate? We're drawn to leather because the stats have a better spread. Why can't this approach be adopted for plate? What's the concern?

The root issue is that on the leather we tend to add Agi or AP as that additional stat. The problem is that armor with both Strength and AP is a little silly, and plate with Agi isn't that useful for warriors. So we don't actually have another stat to split.

The alternative is to shift some of the Stamina into Strength. That is just a straight buff to warriors though, and we might have to rebalance all of the damage abilities to make up for it. Long-term this is something we might do. Short-term it might push warriors farther away from being balanced. That might be a fun thought if you are of the mindset that Fury dps is low, but it's not going to do anyone any favors if it ended up overshooting the target by a great amount.

Q u o t e:
How does shifting Stamina to Strength a straight buff to only Warriors? Correct me if I'm wrong but Paladins and Death Knights also have use for Strength in which it increases their attack power? Paladins also have a talent that increases their STR % too? Not just with Kings but a T1 Prot Talent? You could also make Strength cost less item points on our gear, so it balances out with all the free stats given to Leather.

That is actually part of the problem. Just changing all the plate in the game to have more Strength is a very big change. It affects all of the plate-wearers. As a player, that may sound fun. Free buffs! As a designer, it may be destabilizing.

Plate has stamina because that's how we designed it. As a player you are probably looking at every opportunity to increase your dps. That just makes sense. But that's not how we design. Imagine for a moment that we put Spirit on plate. That doesn't mean that plate-wearers would just suck. It would mean we balance around that as an assumption. This may be hard to understand, I know. Consider
Retribution paladins. They can wear pure plate dps gear now even though they technically use a lot of spells. We balanced around the assumption of them using what used to be "warrior plate." If warrior plate had all stamina and no strength, that wouldn't mean your class does terrible dps. We would increase the numbers in other ways (like talents or base damage numbers). The only potential problem might be if you didn't scale with gear at high gear levels, but even that is fixable.

Now all of that aside, we do think it's a problem if leather is attractive to warriors. (I realize it is attractive to some extent to DKs and paladins too, but to a much smaller degree just because of the class mechanics.) This is a problem we want to fix, and it should be obvious we have been trying to fix for some time. I am just trying to explain that the cause of the problem is not "lol Blizz doesn't know how to itemize plate." However, changing plate may also be part of the solution. Make sense?

Q u o t e:
I could be rolling around full Ulduar gear rocking 712 int and 17 strength and i'd still do whatever amount of damage was intended if those stats are what are balanced around.

Plate itemization is terrible..comparatively, leather is better. This change makes plate better for us...take it or leave it. If we can get us away from wearing leather we'll stop seeing patches where warrior dps takes a 1300dps hit...its the most basic reason why our numbers always need tweaking. This change fixes all of that.

Psychologically 4 stats is less than 5. That's the issue. Again, we could be balanced with three stats and it wouldn't matter. I really would like to see a way to bump plate items (and strength rings/necks/cloaks) up to 5 just so we can get past this, but we'll have to see on that.

Well said.

This is a good thread. PLEASE do not fill it up with junk posts. If your reply has no new information to offer and is just being funny or angry at Blizzard, you are wasting the time of people who want to read the thread as well as posting space.

We will look at sacrificing some Stamina for Strength on the dps gear that has both stats for 3.1. We can't make any promises.

Plus, if we end up doing this, we may have to end up nerfing plate dps in other places, but we'll see what the numbers look like first.

Q u o t e:
While any improvement has to be a good thing GC, you seem to have almost an unholy addiction to buffing Strength :)

Like I said, we want warriors (and DKs and paladins) to want Strength. Warriors wanting those Agi / AP rings that drop is a problem. Why? Because now half your raid wants those rings when they drop, and you probably won't get enough of them. Meanwhile, the Strength ring is wasted. We get a lot of bang for the buck out of having most groups share gear with someone else. But we also don't want to get to the point where any single item is best in slot for every dps class (or even every melee dps class).

Q u o t e:
Most of Sunwell's plate gear was perfect for the plate wearer.

That is by design. I suspect the Icecrown gear will look a lot sexier too, because it will be the final round of gear and we can afford to go nuts on it. If your T8 gear looked exactly like your T7 gear but with +10 or whatever to the stats, that would be kind of boring. We pretty much have to do that for PvP, where you all could sit down today and figure out what the S12 gear will probably look like. But we don't want to do that for PvE as far as we can help it. It just makes those loot drops slightly less exciting.

Believe it or not, we don't want every single piece that drops for you to be an unquestionable dps increase. We like the gameplay that goes along with evaluating when you can afford to break set bonus, meta gem stacks, when you have to regem hit because you are upgrading your hit trinket and so on. Don't turn that into me saying you should pass on all your Ulduar gear because your Naxx stuff is better. We don't want that. But we don't want the opposite extreme either, where you automatically covet anything that does drop. Like much of the game, which gear you choose when is supposed to be a choice.