Titan's Grip and SMF in MoP

#1 - Nov. 9, 2011, 9:58 p.m.

So I asked this question today:

How do you plan to balance Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury in 5.0? Will Wild Strike now hit with the main-hand as well, and if Deep Wounds is still available to Fury warriors (or all warriors in general and not an Arms-only ability), how do you plan on making that not so not-terribly-great for SMF warriors?

I was hoping for maybe a little something, even some recognition that they know there's a gap between the two specs that isn't just related to itemization issues, but this was the answer that Xelnath gave:

It will activate the appropriate effect based on the item you have equipped.

... which wasn't really even relevant to my question.

So, uh, if this is read by a CM or something and gets passed along to the appropriate people, some kind of answer would be super duper. Or something.

Kaivax

Community Manager

#2 - Nov. 10, 2011, 1:40 a.m.

Sorry for misunderstanding the question. We try to read everything quickly in order to respond to as many questions as we can, and sometimes we don’t realize the actual intent.

We feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of balancing Single-Minded Fury and Titan's Grip today. In 4.3, they are very close together. The mechanics are complicated by things like Slam, which is hard to adjust without also having ramifications for Arms warriors. In 5.0, that is fixed by Fury not having Slam. We think there is enough to consider with Raging Blow using both weapons and Wild Strike using the off-hand weapon to keep Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury fairly comparable, to the point where the answer is usually “what weapons dropped for you?” and not “which is theoretically 3% higher in dps than the other?” Single-Minded Fury will continue to swing more often, generating rage faster, and Titan's Grip will swing slower, but for bigger hits. We also want to change a lot more melee mechanics over to being a combination of weapon damage and attack power, which will make scaling balance easier.

At the moment Deep Wounds isn’t in the game. It is mostly “plus damage” and doesn’t drive a lot of interesting rotation decisions on the part of the warrior. We think we can make crit valuable by it driving enrages (which in turn will generate more rage) and make haste valuable by generating more rage by swinging more often. If warriors end up missing Deep Wounds, we would consider adding it back though.