#1 - Jan. 30, 2016, 10:59 p.m.
General overview
I was quite happy to see the idea of going back to the roots of the class and spec itself. First impression of the talents/skills was good, but it had to end shortly after when we had an explanation of how our new/old ability works. The day I was able to test it myself was a grim one..
Rage Generation
I will go straight into most delicate and most hated change so far, which is how we gain rage right now. We all have seen that design in past and it was said already that it is not worth/it bad idea. Our rage comes from two abilities right now - Shield Slam and Revenge and in about 80% from damage taken. How does it looks like in real life situations? Let's put this that way..
- Our SS has 9 sec cooldown and can be reduce by Haste or reset by Devastate (30%). Generate 6 rage.
- Our Regenge has 9 sec cooldown and can be reset by parry/dodge like we do now with a slight change of 3 sec internal cooldown (I understand this is done because of new model of how Revenge works). Generate 4 rage.
We could live with the above, I'm sure of it. The problem starts when we get into Damage Taken rage generation, which is a different story. Best examples are done during leveling where you basically don't generate anything. To have fun of the way damage increase talent which is old Heroic Strike (cost 30 rage) you got to pull a big pack of mobs and acquire the rage there to use it on next pack. Not fun at all. With the another thing I will chat about in a second, we just steadily goes down with HP and slowly killing things around (about that later too).
During the dungeons the rage flow is mediocre, usually not good enough to keep yourself with IP or (again) to have any use of HS. On boss fights that hits really hard (which is generally just one - Shade of Xavius debuff) you will never keep up with rage to survive.
The raid testing was a similar story. Not enough rage to fully survive for few seconds (alone) a single dot from boss (Ursoc) and forcing us to have a 100% healer attention all the time. If we move away/healer has to move, we will mostly die (there can be another aspect that IP is just not strong enough for current raid test tho). On another 2 it was okish to maintain ourselves alive but we have no window inside to use anything beside SB refresh if neded/IP to make sure we live.
Now the situation that worries me mostly. What about more gear, higher ilvl, better stats? We gain nothing from it, as we wont take suddenly more damage than the ability is set for. This just break the fun of acquiring better more fancy gear to be a better tank if I cannot generate more rage because of it. This isn't an issue when you gain damage from damage DONE or abilities.
Making it short. Rage generation from damage taken is just a worst model we could have. I would rather have our abilities being tuned up to gain enough rage for starter and have synergy from Crit / Haste to gain more with gear. That would be easily obtainable if we gain more SS from Dev Crit, additional rage from SS/Dev/Block Crit (aka enrage now). This model works.
Playstyle
How this looks now? VERY BORING sadly. To have something to do we have to gain Haste (not everyone is happy about it afaik) and be lucky with procs. You can have a time of (assuming you got leveling gear - 106) around 7 seconds (if unlucky with parries) of doing just blunt Devastate spam. It feels like (compared to live) I hit that button twice more often waiting for that bloody light to pops up on my another two abilities or wait for their 9 sec cooldown to go off (with Haste it can go (SS) to 7 sec). In addition to above, without another hitting ability like Heroic Strike, I really feel like hitting 3 buttons and sporadically TC (guess till artifact trait?). I would more enjoy it if there is always something to hit OTHER than Devastate. As much as I love all new animation, all our abilities hit with the same one each time, which makes them feel odly boring.
Shield Block/Ignore Pain? With Shield Block, this is where I say.. I love it. Idea of reducing cooldown with Haste, low amount of rage needed and chance of refreshing the cd with new HR talent for 2 sec each SS? This is where we should aim for. Our shield and everything linked to it, is the way of making us fun to play. More synergy with other abilities would be great. The whole situation of IP is something I don't enjoy so much. Feels bit clunky and it won't give you enough to survive till you can be topped up from damage you take (talking about bosses that hit actually). The rage for IP is way too high with our rage regen - this could be the issue..
