MMO-Champion BlueTracker | Warrior 12664 changes and discussion

07/29/2010 19:03:03 PDT

Gonna let Erika take a break from this one and steal his template.

>>Talent changes

>>>>Arms

Improved Overpower - Removed
Drums of War - Reduces the rage cost of your Hamstring, Shield Bash, Pummel, and any shouts which cost rage by 50% (2 points)
Sudden Death - Your melee hits have a 5/10% chance of resetting the cooldown on your Colossus Smash, and you keep 5/10 rage after using Execute. (2 points)
Improved Slam now also increases Slam's damage by 10/20%
Taste for Blood now also increases your Overpower critical strike chance by 20/40/60%.
Improved Hamstring - Your Hamstring ability immobilizes the target for 5 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 30/60 sec. (2 points)
Tactical Mastery - You retain up to an additional 25/50 rage when you change stances. (2 points)

>>>>Fury

Fury in the Blood - Removed (yay!)
Die by the Sword - Increases your parry chance by 100% for 8 sec whenver you are brought to 20% health or less. This effect cannot occur more often than once every 2 min. (2 points)
Enrage - Your melee hits have a 3/6/9% chance to Enrage you, giving you a 10% damage bonus for 12 sec.
Armored to the Teeth - Removed
Rude Interruption - Successfully interrupting a spell with Shield Bash or Pummel increases your damage by 5% for 1 min. (2 points)

>>>>Prot

Damage Shield - Deals 10/20% of your attack power.
Incite no longer affects Thunder Clap or Cleave. Additional effect - your Heroic Strike critical strikes have a 100% chance to make you next Heroic Strike also a critical strike. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds.

>>Changes and fixes

>>>>General

Masteries have been re-implemented for all trees.

>>>>Arms

Strikes of Opportunity - Grants a 16% chance for your melee attacks to instantly trigger an additional melee attack for 50% normal damage. Chance increased further by mastery rating.

Overpower now has a 1 sec cooldown.
Colossus Smash Battle / Berserker Stance - Smashes a target for weapon damage plus 120 and weakens their defenses, allowing your Mortal Strike, Heroic Strike, Bloodthirst and Overpower

>>>>Fury

Unshackled Fury - Increases the benefit of abilities that cause you to be enraged or consume an enrage effect by 80%.

Bloodthirst now has a 3 sec cooldown.
Raging Blow now has a 6 sec cooldown. Up from 3 sec.

>>>>Protection

Critical Block - Increases your chance to block by 10% and your chance to critically block by 10%. Chances increased further by mastery rating.

Shield Block now has a 1 min cooldown.
Shockwave now deals 75% of AP as damage.

>>Bugs and other issues

>>>>General

>>>>Arms

>>>>Fury

>>>>Protection

>>>>>>Previous builds

12604: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26262576082&sid=2000
12539: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26227722902&sid=2000
12479: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968750055&sid=2000
12319: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25626575834&sid=2000
12266: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25482229105&sid=2000
12232: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25399822599&sid=2000
12164: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25170440936&sid=2000
12122: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24915103713&sid=2000

Redmund

07/29/2010 22:10:20 PDT

Re: Warrior 12664 changes and discussion

We buffed Thunder Clap to make up for the loss of the Imp TClap talent. We buffed Shockwave just because it got caught up in the big AE nerf, but it's really not an AE on the level of Hurricane / Blizzard. We buffed Devastate because we realized we had forgotten to compensate it for reducing the number of Sunder stacks.

All of those changes should bring Prot warrior abilities back to something that feels more normal to a current warrior.

Currently we are looking really hard at AE damage abilities by all tanks. We tried Thunder Clap with no cooldown and didn't like it. We also tried Thunder Clap with a Consecrate-like talent, but I'm not sure we like that either. At the moment we are thinking of nerfing any of the really passive AEs, including Swipe, Death and Decay, Damage Shield and Consecrate. All of those abilities (well, maybe not Damage Shield) would still be usable, but they would be more situational.

The bottom line is that we think all tanks need to be able to trivially handle the massive adds or straggling adds situations easily, or none of them should be able to.

Ghostcrawler

07/30/2010 21:59:12 PDT

Re: Warrior 12664 changes and discussion

One potential solution to Slam for Fury is to make the proc more predictable (like Overpower for Arms). With Enrage -> Raging Blow as the major mechanic Fury needs to pay attention to now, watching for that Bloodsurge proc may be a little too much.

Ghostcrawler

07/30/2010 22:00:38 PDT

Re: Warrior 12664 changes and discussion

Q u o t e:
Also, does anyone else feel like Inner Rage is more or less pointless now? It doesn't really seem to add anything to the class other than unnecessary complexity. It feels like our rage gain is stable and well-balanced enough that the balancing doesn't need to fall back on such an obvious crutch and making the cost of your abilities fluctuate is just annoying.

Nobody is raiding and there isn't a lot of PvP on Beta (yet). Simply using an ability like Raging Calm will probably trigger Inner Rage (which was part of the idea behind it).

Ghostcrawler