Warrior Changes - 12942 and T11 Bonuses

#0 - Sept. 9, 2010, 11:51 p.m.

Note: these changes aren't confirmed but given Boub's track record these should basically be them. I'll try to confirm as soon as the beta servers go back up if I'm not raiding or anything silly like that.

Arms
Heroic Strike is now trained at level 14. Up from level 12.
Sweeping Strikes now lasts 10 sec with a 1 min cooldown.
Improved Hamstring now immobilizes the target when you reapply Hamstring. Still cannot occur more than once every 30/60 sec.

Fury
Heroic Leap now has a 8-40 yards range, up from 8-25 yards.
Commanding Shout now gives 20 rage, up from 10 rage.
Battle Shout now gives 20 rage, up from 10 rage.
Execute is now trained at level 16. Up from level 14.
Single-Minded Fury now also let your Heroic Strike hit with both weapons.
Bloodsurge no longer procs from Raging Blow. Proc chance increased from 7/14/20% to 10/20/30%. Duration increased from 5 sec to 10 sec.
Meat Cleaver no longer increases the damage of Cleave and Whirlwind by 10/20% at all time. Proc chance increased from 30/60% to 50/100%.
Booming Voice is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 5. Reduces the cooldown by 15/30 sec and increases the rage generated by 5/10 of your Battle Shout and Commanding Shout.
Improved Execute has been renamed to Executioner and revamped - Your Execute hits have a 50/100% chance to improve your melee attack speed by 5% for 9 sec. This effect stacks up to 5 times.
Intensify Rage is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 2. No longer reduces the cooldown of Bloodrage.

And Tier 11 set bonuses:

Warrior T11 DPS 2P Bonus - Increases the damage done by your Bloodthirst and Mortal Strike abilities by 5%. / Instant
Warrior T11 DPS 4P Bonus - Each time you use Overpower or Raging Blow you gain a 1% increase to attack power for 30 sec stacking up to 3 times. / Instant

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Basic thoughts:
Arms
Sweeping Strikes change is pretty necessary since it was beyond OP in the previous form.

Fury
Heroic Leap just got more useful, I like it.
Good changes with shouts, and I like that Intensify Rage is higher up since it gives Fury faster Zerker Rages compared to Prot/Arms. I can only hope it's now a 3 point talent with 2 minute DW and 20 sec Zerker Rage.
SMF just sealed the deal in which is better at the moment. There's no way TG can compete at this point.
Imp Execute to Executioner is f'ing fantastic. Bloodsurge change is necessary, as is Meat Cleaver tbh.

Tier bonuses
Pretty simple ones. The 2pc seems basic enough for both specs, nothing too fancy but a solid bonus. I'm interested to see if the 4pc refreshes each time you use RB/OP, since that basically equates to 3% AP at all times once you've got the buff fully ramped up.

Also, it seems the new talents should be getting icons maybe if Wowhead's changes are correct. They're up over there, too lazy to link to those.

Ghostcrawler

#35 - Sept. 10, 2010, 3:18 a.m.

Heroic Strike doesn't interact with either Bloodsurge or Single Minded Fury.

Bloodsurge can only be proc'd by Bloodthirst. SMF only affects Slam (and damage). The latter just has some goofy tooltip bug in your build.

Not everything needs to scale with haste (or crit for that matter). They just need to scale well enough that A) the stat isn't viewed as garbage on gear, or B) that Fury (in this case) doesn't blow past Arms at high gear levels.

Ghostcrawler

#45 - Sept. 10, 2010, 4:26 a.m.

Haste does not affect Rend ticks. Our general philosophy is that melee dots do not need to be sped up. Melee benefits from haste by generating more resources. Thus, there should be no Taste for Blood losses with haste. Rend can crit however.

Since I can probably guess the question that will get asked next, Slam also won't scale with haste. However, we have changed Blood Frenzy from being passive haste to a chance that your autoattacks will generate extra rage. This should help Arms scale with haste a little better, as well as give Arms a slightly less predictable rage income (in the way that crit used to deliver, but without the crit scaling problems).

We're not worried about Heroic Strike ever beating Slam. If that happens, it's just a tuning problem easily solved.

Ghostcrawler

#54 - Sept. 10, 2010, 5:51 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Please let us know if this applies to Garrote and Rupture as well. Assassination is reliant on these for energy regen not just damage and haste not applying to them is going to make a considerable difference. Not QQing btw, as I'm sure you'll balance our regen in some form or another, would just be good to know for theorycrafting purposes :)

Garrote and Rupture are not affected by haste. I am not aware of any melee dots that are.

We want haste to apply to as close to 100% of your damage as possible. For casters it always applied to cast time spells. Now it also applies to dots. For melee, it improves your auto attack damage but also grants you more resources, therefore improving your special attacks as well.

Ghostcrawler

#131 - Sept. 13, 2010, 8:18 p.m.

Q u o t e:
We lost gushing wounds with no reasoning why. Heroic leap was nerfed before even tested and completely gutted out of all it's functionality (i.e. jumping to the top level of WSG etc) and now it is possible we're losing inner rage.

So other classes are getting these interesting abilities like Camouflage, Dark Similacrum and unholy pet revamp, warlock pets getting bladestorm and the soul shard revamp, paladins are getting holy power and multiple new abilties, mages are getting heroism, smoke bomb for rogues etc etc. Several of which seem like complete traps as far as balancing goes, yet they're trudging forward with them meanwhile we're losing previewed abilities before we can even test them without so much as an explanation. Not to mention several of the skills listed above add a new layer of depth to pvp as well as pve.

What am I supposed to be looking forward to going into cataclysm? The rage generation nerf? A crippled heroic leap? Nope, nothing new or exciting. We're stuck with a cast time on slam, so it gets worse as we get more haste. No word on un-nerfing warbringer despite the fact that protection spec classes are now dependent on vengence for their damage output. We're still forced to deal with GCD delay and stance swapping in order to be effective. Yet Death Knights are getting spell reflect on crack with no restrictions on use, and because of its long cooldown the developers are going to try to make it work on as many boss abilities as possible, meanwhile spell reflect basically works on some trash mobs. Not to mention spell interrupts now handed out like candy, yet again we're the only class with stringent restrictions on the use of ours, yeah that makes sense.

There's literally been pages and pages of constructive feedback discussing why slam having a cast time is a terrible idea, and their only response is a muted disregard. Yet GC chides us for the removal of the TC effect on heroic leap because we didn't provide enough positive feedback before it was even testable.

It just completely boggles the mind to be honest. And the only conclusion I can draw, based on the lack of interest in our feedback and the minimal changes in the last three beta patch cycles, they've moved on and are concentrating on other things.

This is QQ. Don't do it.

Ghostcrawler

#133 - Sept. 13, 2010, 8:48 p.m.

Q u o t e:
You realize blood frenzy giving a chance on attack to grant extra rage on an autoattack will in fact make slam's scaling worse, not better right? Since you're losing progressively more auto attacks from slam as you gain haste, you're losing more chances to proc blood frenzy, making slam worse.

It's not important to keep Slam scaling with haste so long as Arms scales with haste. It's only a problem if you'd get to the point of dropping Slam from your rotation or something, which we think is unlikely. We'll make sure Heroic Strike never eclipses Slam. Heroic Strike isn't supposed to be a button you're ever excited about pushing at the expense of something else. It's just there so the rage doesn't go to waste.

Q u o t e:
If you want to continue tuning HS/Slam damage so that Slam always stays ahead, while not scaling Slam with haste, all you do is guarantee that haste will be a crap stat for arms. That may be fine as long as there is always a perfectly arms itemized piece of loot, but as soon as there's not, the difference will be noticeable.

That Blood Frenzy changes lets us give Arms as much rage as needed from haste to make sure that haste is valuable from the resource-generation side. It's already valuable from the damage side -- it is not the case that increasing haste is a dps loss for Arms. I realize you might have made this post before mine in the beta forum. The challenge of communicating in two places at once. :)

Q u o t e:
Considering Fury is one of the worst spec dps wise atm on beta, when the number pass will go, it would be a good opportunity to remove the penalty on TG (and change SMF to 30% so both spec keep their 30% dmg difference based on 1h <-> 2h dps difference) to buff up the spec

Do you have evidence of current beta dps comparisons that you can share? Or are you just fishing for buffs? :)

Q u o t e:
I'm kind of wondering if Windfury (12% attack speed) and more importantly bloodlust will increase rage generation. I could see windfury not increasing it since the comparable buff is wrath of air at 5% so they would both increase damage by the same amount. Lust on the other hand is 30% for everyone so if it didn't affect rage(or energy) regen then it is significantly more powerful for caster than melee.

There really isn't a way for them not to increase rage generation, since rage generation is a function of swings. We'd have to give you less rage per swing while under Windfury or something.

Q u o t e:
All I'm saying is no theorycrafting has been done on overall dps, no simulations, and no stat equivalency numbers generated. There is no way you can definitely say that "blizzard is simply ok with haste being a terrible stat for arms"

Agreed. That's overselling it to the point at which we aren't going to take such claims seriously. It's fine to raise haste for Arms as a concern, which you all have done. We addressed that concern with the Blood Frenzy change. Now we need to see some actual beta numbers to see if the concern is still valid or not. Theorycrafting based on made up numbers isn't theorycrafting.

Q u o t e:
Just wondering, but can we get a developer description of what role/niche Slam is supposed to fill for Arms? I'll be the first to admit I don't agree with how Slam is implemented, but I don't think I have a clear picture of what Blizzard intends it to do.

The Arms rotation is Rend, Colossus Smash, Mortal Strike and Slam, with Overpower and additional Colossus Smash procs, and Heroic Strike as a rage dump.