What do you think of the new Warrior changes?

[Kuulomi]

        For all practical purposes, my Horde character has become my main. She is a level 52 (alomst 53) warrior. I'm not liking the changes that the new patch recently made to the talent tree. In fact the more I think about it the madder I get.
        First, they switched "Improved Intercept" (which was a great PvP skill) for "Weapon Mastery" (which is a so-so PvP skill). Next - and this is what pisses me off the most - they switched "Deathwish" which is one of the best skills in the whole Fury tree for friggin' "Sweeping Strikes" (which is redundent given "Whirlwind" and Cleave").
        Why did they decide to gimp the heavy Fury-builds? I was gonna go all the way down and get "Rampage", but now I'm totally reconsidering my build. My 17/44/0 build was excellent for solo-PvE, but it was also quite strong in PvP. Now they've made a heavy Fury-build unnecessarily stronger in solo-PvE, while gimping it considerably in PvP. I'm gonna cry.....

[Luise]

Looks like there will be more arms spec warriors with improved mortal strike now.

[LastDyingBreath]

I doubt it, improved mortal strike really sucks.  In fact, deep arms in general really sucks.

This change makes zero sense to me.

Arms is supposed to be the pvp tree, fury the pve dps tree.  As a general rule, a fury specced warrior will out dps an arms one, but lacks the huge burst and heal debuff to be really great in pvp.  Sweeping strikes is clearly a talent geared towards two handers - If you hit an additional target with your one handed sword, who cares, that's not a ton of damage.  Sweeping strikes was great for crowded melee pvp situations - charging into the AV battle lines and sweeping strikes whirlwinding was awesome.  Even though they were bugs, the fact that sweeping strikes + whirlwind and sweeping strikes + execute were USED shows the pvp viability of this ability.  I'm having a hard time thinking of where sweeping strikes comes into play in pve.  Solo grinding... if you get two mobs I guess.  Good luck using it in an instance without breaking crowd control.  Deathwish is a far superior pve talent.  20% damage, yes please.  Here's a handy breakdown of the karazhan fights and how useful sweeping strikes or deathwish would be:

Attumen Trash - sweeping strikes is useless, you'll break crowd control and let a horsie loose.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Attumen the Huntsman.  Sweeping strikes lets you hit attumen and midnight at the same time.  yay?  damage done to attumen doesn't freaking matter.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Moroes Trash - Sweeping strikes lets you hit two mobs in aoe packs.  yay?  mages/warlocks/hunters/druids will still be doing the vast majority of the damage.  congrats, you're slightly less useless on those packs.  Deathwish is 20% more damage on single targets, still sucks on aoe pulls.

Moroes - Sweeping strikes lets you KO vermin on the floor.  Also lets you swipe the mana burn lady out of shackle and gets a healer killed.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Opera Trash - See moroes trash, additionally you're only dpsing down one usher at a time.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Opera - Sweeping strikes is useless on BBW and Rom + Jul.  Lets you spread some hurt on Oz (first actual use of the instance!).  Deathwish is 20% more damage for all of those.

Maiden Trash - sweeping strikes lets you kill doggies alongside guardsmen.  ok, useful.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Maiden of Virtue - sweeping strikes is useless.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Curator Trash - sweeping strikes helps clear up mana leech pulls, useless for the rest.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Curator - Sweeping strikes may occasionally let you land a blow on curator (non-evocating) while you chase flares.  yay.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Aran Trash - Sweeping strike helps clear the imp room in front of illhoof, useless for all else.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Shade of Aran - Sweeping strikes is useless. Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Illhoof - Sweeping strikes lets you hit illhoof and his imp at the same time, or hit something while you kill demon chains.  OMG USEFULL.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Chess Event - lol

Netherspite - sweeping strikes is useless, Deathwish is 20% more damage.

Prince - Sweeping strikes is useless, deathwish is 20% more damage

Nightbane - Sweeping strikes lets you hit two skeletons at once on Rain of Bones.  Deathwish is 20% more damage.


I could go through every pull of every instance with examples like these, but it's a waste of time.  Deathwish is far, far, far superior for PvE applications than Sweeping Strikes, and should stay in the fury tree.  It's not like mortal strike warriors couldn't get it, the most popular arena spec is 31/30 arms/fury or a varient thereof.

Two possible reasons for this change:

1.  Blizzard is encouraging warriors to spec 41 points down a tree.  This is stupid, 41 arms or 41 fury both suck.
2.  Blizzard is trying to get some arms/fury warriors to respec arms/prot.  This is supported by Tactical Mastery now granting increased threat to mortal strike while in defensive stance.  It also affects bloodthirst, so perhaps they're trying to encourage 31 arms or fury/30 prot builds to help alleviate the supposed tank shortage.

moving improved intercept to arms does make sense, pvp skill in pvp tree.

[Shadowwolf]

They did say that they were making adjustments to Warriors to allow different specs to tank to help with the shortage they created making Prot not so good at dps in solo play. I guess maybe those changes they were hinting at last month were the talent adjustments.

Honestly, for my 1-60 grind, Sweeping Strikes was nice because I could kill 2 mobs at the same time once I got it, I think in the 40s. Even now, at 60 on my Warrior, im missing the fact that I can kill 2 things at once speeding up questing and grinding. I like the Arms tree so far, but I have to agree, down at the bottom is kinda lousy. The only thing I do seem to like tho is Endless Rage, its actually really good for grinding and leveling. Everything else at the bottom is eh. Im probably going to start shifting some points into Fury or Prot and see how things go. It was always my intention to go back to Prot once shes at 70, but I learned at around lvl 40, leveling Prot spec is a painful and mind numbing experience unless all you ever do is instance. Trying to solo quest just took eternity to kill things.

[khader]

In addition to the sweeping strikes/deathwish swap, I don't see the logic behind the change to devastate.  It now will apply sunder armor affect or renew timer plus some added damage(note that its very little damage).  Threat is increased as the sunder armor effect.

So basically this 41pt talent merely allows me to replace a button on my hot bar.  While its nice to now only have to use one button(excluding macro's), this seems like a 41pt talent that needs a bigger buff than simply replacing a trainable skill.

As to the lack of tanks its really simple
Many have gone arms/fury to PVP to get the rewards there.  Due to warrior mechanics its rough to tank in PVP gear at or near the level of the gear - tanking Kara/Gruul/Mag in arena gear will work but step it up to SSC/TK/Mount Hyjal/BT its gonna be rough on the healers.  Of course as the next season opens it may be possible to tank in the higher level instances with the increased gear.

Another tank issue is that as your gear improves it becomes harder to tank in lower level instances.  This is due to the mechanics of warrior rage generation based largely upon damage taken vs damage dealt.  More mitigation  = less damage = less rage = less threat.  This can be hard for tanks in pugs as too many don't understand threat anyway.  Not that I have uber gear but its enough for me to notice the difference in lvl 70 dungeons between the first few times and now.

For solo'ing/leveling as a prot tank, dual wielding was a better way to go for me than 2-hander or sword and board.  Rage generation seems better so I can use sunder armor(now devestate) liberally which helps increase the damage dealt.  I will use sword and board occasionally for spell reflection on some mobs.

 


 

[Arcdelad]

I understand completely about lack of rage generation in non-heroics...i tanked a non-heroic bot run the other night, and my rage generation was so sloppy i was losing aggro becuase i couldnt use any of my aggro gaining attacks....my T4 set bonus gives me more rage sporadically, but still, you almost have to take off some armor to tank a normal run (and even some lower end heroics) now....i feel your pain khader lol

[Shadowwolf]

Yea Blizz has stated many times, they dont want people using the Arena's or PvP to get gear to work through PvE. Thats why you dont see any arena gear or pvp gear with +def, or any other tank like stats on them. They didnt want people to take any shortcuts and skip over some of the PvE encounters simply by doing arenas. =/

[Lynette]

Another tank issue is that as your gear improves it becomes harder to tank in lower level instances.  This is due to the mechanics of warrior rage generation based largely upon damage taken vs damage dealt.  More mitigation  = less damage = less rage = less threat.  This can be hard for tanks in pugs as too many don't understand threat anyway.  Not that I have uber gear but its enough for me to notice the difference in lvl 70 dungeons between the first few times and now.

I got my priest into a pug in Shattered Halls recently where the tank, who was in full t4/t5 gear, could not hold aggro for this very reason.  It was odd, but we had to refrain from doing dps for a bit while he got some rage generated.  Of course, I barely had to heal him during the entire run.

[Kuulomi]

           There are several reasons why I think this hurts my warrior in PvP. First, Deathwish didn't just give me a +20% to damage...it also gave 30 seconds of immunity to fear effects. This alone helped me "get in the face" of warlocks and other warriors without worrying about Intimidating Shout and Fear spells.
           Maybe I haven't had enough experience at PvP, but one-on-one conflict for me was far more frequent than fights involving multiple enemies (if for no other reason that I often avoided multiple enemies unless I had back up). So Sweeping Strikes just doesn't have the same PvP appeal to me. Maybe I'll learn to like it.
           Losing Improved Intercept was a big PvP hit as well. Intercept was absolutely one of my most used abilities, and I need it to cooldown as fast as possible. Dang. I need to stop talking about it, because it really just gets me pissed.

[Trismus]

edit: I take back all I said, feel free to delete this post, I need to think about this.

[LastDyingBreath]

Dear Tanks who are overgeared and can't get rage:

take your pants off.

I'm not kidding.

signed,

dps.