Warrior Changes - 12644

by Secondwind | 30/07/2010 04:36:50

That's right boys and girls, it's that time of the week again, and boy are we happy as warriors this patch. Why are we happy? Because we appear to have been the primary focus on the developers this patch, and a lot of the changes are for the better. Let's go through them!

Starting with arms

Q u o t e:
Overpower now has a 1 sec cooldown. Down from 5 sec.
Taste for Blood now also increases your Overpower critical strike chance by 20/40/60%.
Improved Overpower is gone.

Basically this just took Overpower from a huge talent eater to a single talent, and made overpower spam baseline, which is a buff to fury pvp (rogue popped evasion? Hop into battle stance and show him why that's a bad idea against warriors). Also frees up room in the tree for some more fun talents. Definitely a good move.

Q u o t e:
Thunder Clap damage has been increased by ~25%

A buff is a buff, but thunderclap seems to be getting awfully strong here between the base damage buff and all the new talents supporting it. My guess is they intend to lower the threat multiplier on it and let it stand out on its own, to help bring aoe dps up and let arms get more use out of it, which is something I can support.

Q u o t e:
Strikes of Opportunity *New* - 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.

Here we get the new Arms warrior mastery. Expected, still worried about its scaling, but it's in the game now to be tested.

Q u o t e:
Colossus Smash *New* Battle / Berserker Stance - Smashes a target for weapon damage plus 120 and weakens their defenses, allowing your Mortal Strike, Heroic Strike, Bloodthirst and Overpower
to bypass their armor for 6 sec sec. / 30 Rage, 5 yd range, Instant, 20 sec cooldown

Hot damn, can you hear the QQ? I sure can. This gives a new rotational attack to both arms and fury, and the much needed ability to ignore armor from time to time. The duration is timed just right to let both arms and fury get two attacks off not counting HS to benefit from this. But man this attack sounds like a winner for on demand burst damage.

Q u o t e:
Second Wind now is a Tier 2 talent. Down from Tier 6.

And yet another buff for fury pvp. Much love.

Q u o t e:
Sudden Death is now a Tier 5 talent (Down from Tier 4), 2 points (Down from 3 Points) and now is - 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.

What's this? Even more armor ignoring for arms? And a 2-piece ret paladin tier 10 style proc for it? I'll admit, this is more along the lines of what I wanted for fury, but I can deal with it. Getting execute out of the rotation for arms means our execute can start hitting like a truck again, which everyone will appreciate. Execute however seems to be unchanged.

Q u o t e:
Improved Slam now also increases Slam's damage by 10/20%.

Warriors: Slam is bad, the cast time is annoying and makes us scale horribly with haste
Blizzard: Here have a buff to the damage!

This will definitely help offset any damage lost from lost rage, maybe even more than make up for it. But it doesn't solve any of slam's core issues. Hopefully those get solved in the baseline ability.

Q u o t e:
Drums of War (Tier 2) *New* - Reduces the rage cost of your Hamstring, Shield Bash, Pummel, and any shouts which cost rage by 25/50%.

A nice PVP talent, and situationally useful in PVE when you need to interrupt. Not sure what to think of it just yet, it's definitely a nice effect, but will it be competitive with other options? Regardless, more utility talent options in the tree were absolutely needed. This is good.

Q u o t e:
Impale is now a Tier 3 talent. Up from Tier 2.

And moved out of the reach of fury once and for all. Maybe now it can be changed to give the buff to all specials again? Either way this is a solid change.

Q u o t e:
Improved Hamstring is back as a Tier 3 talent - Your Hamstring ability immobilizes the target for 5 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 30/60 sec.

Ah improved hamstring is back, and controllable! Some control back into the arms warrior arsenal.

Q u o t e:
Tactical Mastery is back as a Tier 2 Talent - You retain up to an additional 25/50 rage when you change stances.

While this is definitely a buff, and much appreciated... I'm not sure it's the way to go to make stance swapping less of a pain. I like the direction however.

And we're done with arms. Looks like a lot of really nice stuff, new utility, less mandatory dps talents. There's not a working talent calculator for me to get an overall look yet, but looking at it in text it seems good. My complaint would be that it seems like almost all of the new utility is in the first 2 tiers, which means it's almost all obtainable cross spec, and there's still little to define arms as a unique tree.

Onward to fury!

Q u o t e:

Bloodthirst now has a 3 sec cooldown. Down from 4 sec.
Raging Blow now has a 6 sec cooldown. Up from 3 sec.

Talk about a switcheroo. I was hoping for the opposite of this, but blizzard definitely listened with regards to clipping attacks and giving us a rotation that doesn't interfere with each other. Still no word on raging blow being usable more often, but with bt usable every other GCD, it is 50% of a rotation all by itself.

Personally I'm not sure if I really like that, with BT becoming litterally every other button I push. But it will definitely help the people feeling like there's nothing to do while not enraged, making the difference feel less pronounced.

Q u o t e:
Victory Rush no longer has a stance requirement.

Helps prot leveling, and absolutely needed if they intended to have prot get impending victory. Still hoping they change their minds on this.

Q u o t e:
Unshackled Fury *New* - Increases the benefit of abilities that cause you to be enraged or consume an enrage effect by 80%.

Hey our mastery is back, and as sexy as ever.

Q u o t e:
Booming Voice now is a Tier 5 talent. Up from Tier 4.

Skipped over most of the talents that just changed tiers, but I wanted to emphasize how underwhelming this talent is no matter what tier they put it in. Unless they put it in tier 1 and had tier 1 have only 5 talent points total, we won't want this talent in its current form. 10 rage per minute is simply not worth the investment.

Q u o t e:
Fury in the Blood is gone.

And the crowd goes wild! Now what did we get to replace it?

Q u o t e:
Enrage is now a Tier 2 talent. Down from Tier 3. Changed to - Your melee hits have a 3/6/9% chance to Enrage you, giving you a 3/7/10% damage bonus for 12 sec.

Oh hey, we got the old wrecking crew. I wonder how this is going to work out, what with SMF vs TG and this proccing off all melee hits. SMF seems to gain yet another advantage here in increased uptime.

This also seems kind of weird from the standpoint of it being in tier 2, and thus being available to arms/prot... yet neither has a mention of their own enrage going away, or this not stacking. I have to assume they won't stack, and this is being placed here as an extra low tier dps talent that isn't useful to arms or prot, but still it seems really weird here.

Q u o t e:
Die by the Sword (Tier 5) *New* - Increases your parry chance by 100% for 4/8 sec whenver you are brought to 20% health or less. This effect cannot occur more often than once every 2 min.

Nice, fury gets a defensive cooldown. I wonder if this will work like the hunter deflection, or if it will only affect melee attacks. Either way, this is good, one more step on the road to fury pvp!

Now take away our shields please.

Q u o t e:
Armored to the Teeth is gone.

More cheers!

Q u o t e:
Rude Interruption (Tier 2) *New* - Successfully interrupting a spell with Shield Bash or Pummel increases your damage by 5% for 30 sec/1 min.

Wow, really? This is cool, and basically a 5% passive increase any time you're in PVP (you should be able to get one interrupt in the span of a minute) while in PVE it will swing our dps by 5% whenever interrupting is available. I foresee this causing fights among warriors over who gets to be the interrupter, which will be a nice change from current.

And that's it for fury. Again, definitely heading in the right direction, and a lot of good changes. Some stuff is pretty questionable as far as placement goes, but the talents themselves are a huge step forward from the last build.

[ Post edited by Secondwind ]