The expansion has now been around for a month. Can you believe it? It’s only been 36 days since that very cold night stuck standing outside EBGames (Gamestop for you Americans). How have you been enjoying your expansion so far?
I’m still of two minds about the expansion but one thing I’m definitely clear about is that the Protection Warrior is OP; and no, not just the players in this case.
I remember back before Cataclysm came out, patch 4.03 nerfed us by a good huge percentage. We were not happy with the change but there had been reports that with proper gear, we were outdpsing our DPS in raid instances on the beta. So the nerf came and made our levelling rather slow. My first instances were not the most enjoyable either. Threat was a bit of an issue and our damage was low. The Death Knights in our group were doing much better at the time especially with their overpowered self healing.
Oh how things have changed! The warrior, like a fine wine or our almost limitless rage bar, gets better with age and mostly, with better gear. I believe my gear is now about iLevel 350 and the difference is enough to make our guild dps have rage bars of their own.
I’ll give you a couple of examples:
- In Bastion of Twilight. The first trash pull, I did 21k dps, leading the raid in damage done.
- On our Valiona kill, I was doing 11k dps. 40% of that damage was heroic strike.
- I would rarely use Inner Rage and instead kept the rage to be able to spam Cleave and Heroic Strike.
A nerf was most definitely needed and it’s coming with 4.0.6. Here are the current patch notes:
Warriors
- Charge now shares diminishing returns with stun effects.
- Cleave damage has been reduced by 20%.
- Hamstring now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
- Heroic Strike damage has been reduced by 20%.
- Inner Rage has been redesigned. It now reduces the cooldown on Heroic Strike and Cleave by 50% (to 1.5 second) for the next 15 seconds. 1-minute cooldown. It still cannot be used during Deadly Calm. This ability was originally designed to help warriors with rage capping, but the Heroic Strike and rage normalization changes seem to have solved that problem on their own. This new design will still allow warriors to burn off excess rage faster, at their discretion.
- Slam cast time is now affected by haste.
- Talent Specializations
- Arms
- Juggernaut no longer increases the cooldown on Charge, but instead increases the duration of the Charge stun by 2 seconds. In addition, Charge is usable in all stances, however, the talent now causes Charge and Intercept to share a cooldown.
- Lambs to the Slaughter: Instead of granting 10/20/30% damage to the next Mortal Strike, Overpower, or Execute, it now grants a 10% buff to any Mortal Strike, Overpower, Slam, or Execute that stacks 1/2/3 times.
- War Academy no longer buffs Heroic Strike or Cleave. It now buffs Mortal Strike, Raging Blow, Devastate, Victory Rush and Slam.
- Fury
- Bloodthirst damage has been increased by approximately 30%.
- Raging Blow weapon damage percent (at level 80+) has been increased from 110% to 145%.
- Unshackled Fury (Mastery) now grants 5.6% benefit per mastery point, up from 4.7%.
- Protection
- Charge’s stun continues to not trigger diminishing returns for Protection warriors who have the Warbringer talent.
- Glyphs
- Glyph of Rapid Charge has been changed from a 7% reduction to Charge’s cooldown, to 1 second off of the cooldown. This change is primarily to clarify the exact cooldown reduction this glyph provides.
At first glance, I think this looks good. Reducing the damage by 20% and further reducing it by removing the buff from War Academy seems to be the correct way to go. We’ll need to see the results from the PTR but I think this should bring our damage back in line with the other tanks.
I also like the changes to War Academy which will now buff Devastate and Victory Rush. It might be time to see if Impending Victory is worth its cost.
The only change I’m dubious about is the change to Inner Rage. Granted that I was rarely using it now, just reducing the cooldown on Heroic Strike and Cleave, meh. Will it be enough? One thing for sure, Heroic Strike and Cleave are staying on my mouse wheel!
Maybe it’s your higher gear level, but what I’m finding is that when doing heroics with my ~335 level tank gear, I’m massively rage starved a good chunk of the time. I’m having to just remove my left hand from the keyboard at times (Cleave and HS are on “1″ and “2″) so my years of muscle memory from “SPAM HS MORE DAMMIT” don’t take over. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong when I can tank six dwarves in Thundermar Ruins all day long with no rage issues, but get me in heroic HoO and it’s constantly “not enough rage” and struggling to keep agro on pulls.
The changes don’t look too bad. The War Academy change has me wondering if it’d be worth dropping either Impending Victory or Blood Craze for it. I’m fully loaded on +heal talents in the “every little bit helps the healers” department, but now I’m debating if the threat boost from War Academy might be more helpful as we get ready to start raiding soon.
I felt the same way until I got a good 346 weapon and then it got better. I also changed my spec. I started out like you did, with a lot of survival oriented talents. Healing was so hard at first while people remembered how to CC that I needed everything I could. The problem I saw was not that I was taking too much damage (I use my cooldowns even on trash) but that dps or even the healer were pulling and getting killed. I respecced with an eye towards more threat. I didn’t take Blood Craze or Impending Victory but instead went for maxed out Incite and Deep Wounds. The difference in healing was marginal but the threat was completely different.
I agree with you, I think you might want to try it out for now. It might help you in Heroics for now. Like I said, for me it made a huge difference and actually made me enjoy instancing in Cata some more.
I’m honestly kinda glad to see this post.
I’m not one to usually complain about performance in PvP… but holy crap, Warriors are doing well right now. Really well. If I could stack my teams 50% Warriors, I would.
Glad to hear things are going so well with the right gear!
With all due respect your sense of fairness for our class and patch 4.0.6 slightly offends me as a long time warrior player. I have endured multiple years of being out performed by the other tanking classes and i did not see anything wrong in the balance since this has been happening with the other classes periodically. Warriors only rely on gear and should always have the better burst and sustained damage in my opinion. Blizzard has the warrior back to being rage starved and with so-so damage ability. I know I will never get through to a fairness warrior such as yourself but couldn’t help but make a comment.
warrior = damage ability = warrior
It’s a caster’s world in Blizzard land, pity the Warrior and especially the fair types.
Wind
I can understand the frustration of having been underpowered for much of the last expansion. I play warriors and only warriors (with the exception of my gatherer). I have gone through the ups and downs in the last expansion and have rejoiced when they redesigned vengeance to its current form. I too like to not have the crappiest tanking class around.
But even more than that, I want a level playing field. I don’t want the pallies to think that I’m a better tank than they are simply because of my class. Being able to do 30k dps on a trash pull or 11k dps on Valiona is not a fair playing field. No, it was deserved. As for being rage starved and with so-so damage, I still am top dps for tanks and I have no rage issues.
As for it being a caster’s world, you’re probably right. I just love being the underdog.