So - I just looked at the new talent trees for warriors. It doesn't feel like I'm making any choices at all with my talents - just making another cookie cutter build. Knowing that my expected threat in encounters is based around having certain talents (Improved Rend, Armored to the Teeth, Cruelty, Incite) leaves me no additional points to take something like Gag Order or Safeguard.

Putting points in Improved Rend and not in Gag Order isn't a choice, it's a necessity now for aoe threat. If I don't take it, I'm gimped - so I'm out additional points that I could have in Gag Order.

A choice would be the decision between Gag Order and Safeguard, not "put points in necessary talents so I can be on par with other tanks or have some situational tools".

As it stands, I have more choices in my current talent setup right now in Wrath than I do with the new talents.

It's silly to have two separate talents that both increase selected abilities by 5% (Incite, Cruelty). If you're going to do that, then just make it one 3 point talent for 5% improved crit on everything - but the plan was to get away from that. Get rid of Incite and Cruelty altogether and let us have those talent points to actually make choices with.

Just as a note, the talent tree tool a lot of you seem to be using doesn't seem to have prereqs. Some of these builds wouldn't work. Shield Mastery requires 3/3 Shield Spec for instance.

That said, some of these builds might inspire us to pull those prereqs though. :)

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Q u o t e:
I thought we established this last expansion that dodge+Parry streaks shouldn't be unlucky occurrences that drain rage pools?

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They don't. Per our rage normalization announcement...

2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will be based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

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Q u o t e:
The problem with Deepwounds is that if prot "can" reach it, then it's always going to be part of the optimal threat build. When all this talk about the removal of mandatory passive talents came along, I immediately figured Attt, impale, and deepwounds were all headed for the chopping block.

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On damage talents -- it's almost impossible to make an Arms and Fury tree that don't have damage talents accessible to Prot. Our hope is that a Prot warrior doesn't feel that they have to take every dps talent accessible or you aren't going to have any flexible points. You probably feel like you need to do so now because your dps is lower than tanking paladins, but we see very few tanks on single-target bosses lose threat to dps characters after say a few seconds.

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Q u o t e:
No, you don't understand. I'm not saying Sweep and Clear won't be good. It so happens that think it will be terrible, I think it's trying to solve a problem that's already solved by Shield Specialization, and I don't think anyone will actually put points in it. But actually that's sort of beside the point.

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On rage generation talents -- again our hope is that you don't feel you need all of them. You might need some of them, and you can have a choice in which ones fit your play style best. Talents like Toughness, Devastate, Shield Mastery and so on are talents we assume every warrior tank will have, but we hope there are choices elsewhere in the tree (and the other two).

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Q u o t e:
The problem is that our damage will be balanced around War Academy, Deep Wounds, Improved Rend, Cruelty and ATT...yet our survivability will be balanced around Field Dressing and Blood Craze.

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Q u o t e:
We've already limped through an entire expansion balanced around two mutually exclusive talent build assumptions.

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Talent builds are supposed to be decisions. You aren't supposed to be able to take everything you could possibly want, and we don't balance assuming you have every talent available to your class. You are referring to an urban legend that cranky tanks like to propagate. As I recall, there was a concern voiced by some warriors that their threat was too low. I asked if they took dps talents or just grabbed up every survival talent and imagined threat wasn't supposed to matter. That's like a caster avoiding +mana or clearcasting talents and complaining they lack mana. If your threat is low, grab some threat talents instead of survival. If your threat AND survival are low such that you can't do that, then you are undergeared for the content.

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Q u o t e:
It's just odd that (a) so much is packed into such a small amount of points, and (b) so much is so early in the tree. Other tanking classes feel like they have interesting capstone talents (like, for example, WotN, or a much-better-implemented-than-currently Ardent Defender) that are sort of the hallmarks of their defenses. The warrior tanking tree, on the other hand, gets all of its defensive stuff early. You are less than halfway down the tree and literally nothing else you take will impact your survivability.

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This is a fair point. The classic Protection tree felt weird to have all of the good stuff so early (to the extent that you could tank with 31 points in Arms). We could move Shield Mastery deeper. You won't miss it at low levels.

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Q u o t e:
The problem currently is that prot warriors are indeed deciding between either damage vs. damage or damage vs. utility. We aren't picking between, say, Blitz and Blood Craze - two minor perks. We're picking between which talents give us the most damage - whether that's Sweep and Clear or Deep Wounds or War Academy isn't that relevant. Someone will produce math showing which is better and that'll be the one that's right to take. Similarly, getting both Safeguard and Gag Order currently "costs" you damage (or rage, which is damage) someplace. So those won't get picked up.

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My quote that you referenced was in the damage-dealing forums because it was relevant to damage dealers. Tanks won't choose dps talents to the extent of all else. They will typically choose survival talents (or at least enough survival talents to where they aren't dying any longer). Beyond that they can choose dps talents if they are having threat issues, but once you can get a sizable lead on the rest of the group, then more dps isn't necessarily going to help you. More dps will always make the dragon die faster of course, but considering your damage contribution might only be 50% of a warlock, then some of those utility talents might be a better investment.

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Q u o t e:
Which, again, is a separate issue from "I'm 'balanced' around talents X, Y, and Z, but I can't get all of them in the same build". If you try to make that argument, the only answer you'll get (if you get one at all) is "you're not supposed to be able to get every talent you want".

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Yep.

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Q u o t e:
As Zarko has said before, it looks like we're going to have the option of heavy survivability builds, high threat builds, and utility builds. As long as all tanks are able to (and required to) make these choices, I think the system could work out beautifully.

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That is the idea. You could even (heresy!) have a hybrid build that combined a few aspects of each one, if for example, you weren't trying a new boss that night.

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Q u o t e:
Well after a day of looking at this talent tree, I can only say that I am not a huge fan. Since we cannot generate rage or lower rage costs with our attacks beyond Unbridled Wrath on single target, I can see an OTs having the same problems of not being able to revenge and trying to build rage so that they can dps / tps as other classes can off-tank.

I can only see shield specialization being interesting if the gear was based on it. I'm not talking about mastery because critical block is most likely a part of the block on the attack table. I want to know about block itself. If there is no gear (such as tier bonuses) to support this mechanic to make it better, I am not much in favor of it. It would need parry to go along with this if block is going to stay. In the light of being incorrect on Sweep and Clear, Shield Specialization is the only talent now to increase our rage regen in our tree on Single target bosses.

Hold the Line is a nice concept, but we now have 5% less parry. Is the DR on parry still going to remain? And once again, its critical block. So it's an rng on top of an rng on top of another rng. First you have to parry (lets say 15%), one rng. If my block is 30% (second rng) and my crit block is now 50% because of this proc. My chance of crit blocking (third rng) is now 15% (0.3*0.5) for 4 seconds. The probability of these things happening though in succession, is 0.15*0.3*0.5 which comes down to 0.0225. 2.25% chance that first swing will be effected by this talent. Do we really need this much rng. This talent does provide survivability, but does it have to be this convoluted.

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Vigilance on the other hand is now a fantastic off tank talent, and a steal at 1 talent point.

Shield Spec is intended to be optional. If you don't need the rage, pass it up (or only take 1 point). It was tied to Shield Mastery, but we think now we'll put the latter deeper in the tree anyway.

Parry still has a DR, but it has the same DR and budget as dodge now.