What about rage when off-tanking?

#0 - April 5, 2010, 6:18 p.m.

Q u o t e:
1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:

* If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
* Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.

Several things here--
1. The entire expansion, warrior damage/threat when offtanking has been a problem. Since prot has historically had poor crit/haste rates, how will we generate sufficient rage to continue a rotation?
2. Since prot is currently balanced around 100% conversion on HS (and we're still behind on DPS), we'll need to have our base damage buffed drastically to keep us where we are now. How does that play with PVP?
3. This means that every tank will prefer slow tank weapons. Should we expect to see slow tank weapons in the future? What about our current weapons?
4. Why are we still being balanced around heroic strike? It causes so many problems for PVP and PVE. If HS is attractive to press while tanking, then we'll struggle with rage starvation while offtanking.

Please give us some indication that you've thought about off-tanking, as increasingly, warriors are the "offtank" class.

Ghostcrawler

#6 - April 5, 2010, 6:54 p.m.

OT rage from damage will be almost as high as a dps warrior (haste, crit, and any specific talents would be the only differences). Plus you'll have abilities like shouts to tide you over for short periods in which you're not taking enough damage. OTs do often take incidental damage in many fights.

It's definitely something to keep an eye on in the sense that the new mechanic doesn't completely solve the problem, but it should feel better than today.

There will be a little more information when we're ready to share more details on warrior and druid specific changes.

Ghostcrawler

#22 - April 5, 2010, 7:44 p.m.

To clarify on Heroic Strike, it costs a third of your rage bar when you hit the button, but you can't hit it unless you have 10 rage and it will only ever take a max of 30 (since that's essentially a third of your full bar). The intent is that when you don't have a lot of rage, it's not an attractive button. When you are gaining too much rage, then you want to start pushing it.

We debated whether or not to push this story before we talked about all of the warrior changes in Cataclysm. In the end we decided players might not focus on anything but the rage changes if we announced them at the same time. However, some of this will make a little more sense with the additional context of the warrior changes. For example, we have a plan to keep tank damage and threat high and we have other systems to let you convert excess rage into damage.

Ghostcrawler

#27 - April 5, 2010, 7:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
1. You get rage starved on low level content (this isn't going away)

It will still be much better than it is today. You will get more rage per damage done and for damage mitigated or avoided. Compare the amount by which your health increases over time to the amount by which boss damage increases over time. The second is larger and since we're scaling around the former in the future, the delta should be smaller than it is today.

Q u o t e:
2. We're balanced around infinite rage, which hurts us while OTing (this doesn't seem to be going away)

Nobody should have infinite rage, therefore the delta between tank and OT (and dps warrior for that matter) shouldn't be as drastic. If there's a fight where an OT literally has to stay in full tanking gear and spec but then never takes much damage (say for example you just sit there and dps until phase 4 at which point you have to handle adds that never appear again) then you might have low rage, but then we probably made a bad encounter.