Warriors & the Patch

[Caedryne]

Please correct me if I'm wrong or being reactive here, however after spending few hours reading the WoW warrior forums, it appears that there are a great many unhappy and disgruntled warriors to the point where there is a lot of anger. Apparently the jist of the matter is warriors are being forced to being tanks period. (which in my opinion would make BG's a thing of the past). The people there are saying they will abandon their warriors and maybe the game. If this is true - I would tend to agree, I feel warriors wouldn't be warriors without giving and tanking a ton of damage. I'm not going to abandon the game, but has anyone else read those forums, am I getting the wrong message from it?

[dharq]

I think people are overreacting here Caed...

Most of the issue began when they moved tactical mastery into the protection tree... but honestly, you don't even need that talent anymore. At lvl20, warriors get a passive trained skill that will allow them to retain 10 rage when changing stances. Many non-tanking builds now only put 2 points into TM, and they get the same effect now for absolutely free.

I think flurry (25-30 pts in fury tree) is going to take a hit because criticals are going to become more rare with the introduction of this new resilience statistic, but overall, the dps warrior is looking really good IMO. Still, the 41 pt talents are weak, but I'm thinking of a build like

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/bc-warrior/talents.html?303203211505000200000005500000502521005310000000000000000000000000

Now, why BT instead of MS? Simple... As attack power goes up, BT begins to overtake MS in damage. At lv60, with around 1200 attack power fully buffed, BT outdamages MS. Now, if you want to go at least 36 points into Arms to get IMS, then MS becomes significantly better, but I'd rather have flurry & BT for damage than a 5 sec cooldown on MS.

Also, by going 34 points into fury, you max out your chance to hit against players. Currently, it only takes +3% to hit to max out your to-hit chance (based on everything I've read)... That's +3% hit chance I don't have to worry about picking up in gear. Also, improved slam... This makes slam a .5 second cast, and it's a huge damage/low threat attack for warriors.. Actually, the lowest threat attack we have aside from rend (again based on what I've read).

Weapon mastery in the arms tree gives a 100% chance to avoid disarm... HUGE if you're doing dps. +10% chance to crit when using an axe or polearm... +5% damage if they're 2handed. Oh, and with the way weapons swing now and the universal cooldowns they put in a couple patches back, the long delay on the 2handed axes and poles gives just enough time to get off an improved slam between each autoattack with no delay!!

I may swap out improved execute for improved intercept, but I'm undecided on that one yet... I think for raids improved execute will be better, but for pvp intercept is almost a must...   I hate difficult decisions.

I'm also looking at a prot build, but we've got so many protection warriors now that I think we can spare the extra tank.. not sure though. Also, bears and paladins will be almost as good at tanking as warriors (prot pallies may actually be better, have to wait and see on that one), so we may have oodles and oodles of tanking goodness after this patch.

[Caedryne]

Thank you Dharq, much appreciated. With the 34 points in the fury line, it looks like we may be better in pvp than previously, if I'm understanding you correctly. Although I will still put points into defelection even 2% is huge parry. WM looks intersting, never had much use for BV. However a lot of the talk is about less rage generation, are you saying that won't even matter any longer?  As a lot of the posts in that forum don't go into much explanation, they make statements but go no further I much appreciate your comments. And if the Guild has a lot of tanks I'd still prefer to go the DPS or huge crit hits route. One of the other statements was that to max out you have to be lvl 70, until then as a warrior the person was saying warriors were "uselss" - I'm going to assume that's nonsense

[Genoism]

lemme just say that even though i dont have a 60 warrior, I think that its impossible to be able to see how things will work out until you've actually played it. The only thing you can have a good sense of is which talents you will pick and which you wont.
Lemme tell ya, when i saw that hunters were getting their dps cut in half(literarly) i was so upset and was thinking about abandoning my beloved hunter. But then I tried it on the test server, and you know, it wasnt half as bad because the promised upscaling of hunter gear actually happened and my dps pretty much stayed the same as it was before. In fact with the new abilities it only went up.

You probably have no idea how many hunters were crying over this dps nerf in the forums and it looked like everyone would stop playing a hunter. Well good for me then, those that haven't tried them out on the ptrs don't really know what they are saying.

When i saw the new pally talents they looked terrible! When i actually tried it, it was just totally shocking and it really made me want to play my pally again(if only i didn't have to spend 5g in repairs when my gear was half dead...)

So ya....dont get all upset just yet until you've tried it.

I would HIGHLY recommend people trying out all their 60s on the ptrs and checking out the different builds so that you can get a taste of how they all play out

[voctovian]

I think Geno is absolutely right here.. it took me many tries (from level 10-60) to find a talent build that worked, and was compatible with my play style.  With the current set of Pally talents, I find most of the holy tree fairly weak, so moved over a bunch of points into protection to get Blessing of Kings and Blessing of Sanctuary (30holy/21prot).  Looking at the tree now, I would probably go with something like:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/bc-paladin/talents.html?055031205201325313514000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

My current build is something like:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/paladin/talents.html?05503121521050500051005311000000000000000000

However, I am sure that my opinion will likely change after I have played with the new talents for a while.  If the test of time proves that the new talents are a total disaster, I will bet that that Blizzard will "adjust" the trees to keep people happy.

[magnetite]

When someone gets half their health taken away by a warrior I think it was good of Blizzard to add gear to protect my cloth guys from their critical strikes.