New tanking order

[Upfen]

found this on US BC forum

really interresting

http://beta.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1860361&sid=1&pageNo=1

[Nikodemus]

Guess why I'm probably rerolling priest :P
There's gotta' be someone around to heal all the bear tanks.

[Veth]

Guess why I'm probably rerolling priest :P
There's gotta' be someone around to heal all the bear tanks.

are you serious? when will we get you to play a pure dps class i wonder. :rolleyes: :p

[Nikodemus]

DPS class? so I can stand around for a few hours getting repair bills while waiting for healers and tanks to sort out the fight? hell no :D

[GuardianAnge1]

DPS class? so I can stand around for a few hours getting repair bills while waiting for healers and tanks to sort out the fight? hell no :D

/signed.

dps doesnt make or break a fight (edit: other then in some fights). Healing and tanking does.

[Derekian]

and healers always suck \o/

[Chamuel]

/signed.

dps doesnt make or break a fight (edit: other then in some fights). Healing and tanking does.

DPS isnt only doing damage to the max. Its also watching your aggro and you get other jobs like sheeping, banishing etc. But I agree on it being duller then tanking or healing :rolleyes:

[Dojun]

Not really worried about the future of the warriors. I think that if it turns out that warriors are worse then 2 hybrids when it comes to tanking Blizzard will fix that. Esp with that rage normalisation its kinda clear that warriors aint meant to be best DPS class around. So what else is there we can do? only tanking, if Blizzard decides to take that away they will also have to delete the warrior class since it have no uses.

[GuardianAnge1]

So what else is there we can do?

apply Mortal Strike once ever 15 seconds.

[Omniel]

Not really worried about the future of the warriors. I think that if it turns out that warriors are worse then 2 hybrids when it comes to tanking Blizzard will fix that. Esp with that rage normalisation its kinda clear that warriors aint meant to be best DPS class around. So what else is there we can do? only tanking, if Blizzard decides to take that away they will also have to delete the warrior class since it have no uses.

actually blizz has always stated that it was trying to get a system going where no 1 class can hold pure monopoly over a role.
Atm the situation is more or less like:

DPS - Mage, warlock, (shadow)priest, rogue, druid, hunter, (elemental/enhancement) shaman, DPS-palla's, DPS-warriors

Healers - Priest, druids, shaman, paladin

Tanks - Warriors, and a rare breed of tanking-druid.

Add the fact that most guilds only want warriors as tanks, and add the fact that giving the right specc and gear DPS-warriors can easily whore the top-3 of the damage-meters so by that logic warriors are very OVERpowered in terms of PVE-viability.

Now in TBC the paladin is also available for horde so Blizz could give the palladin some more tanking features (as they originally intended). They couldnt do that before because then there would be an serious imbalance between horde and alliance. They also beefed druids up abit but thats also because druids we're perhaps the shittiest class (IMO). Now warriors actually have to prove their spot in the tight 25-man raids..just like all the other classes have to do.
Warriors arent nerfed tanking-wise, druids and palladins ahve just been buffed. And u cant really say who's better because all 3 of them have different qualities that u must use at different situations.
They're all 3 tanks, just different types of tanks. Like the healing of a druid is different to that of a palladin.
Catch the drift? see their logic?
I for one agree with the blizz-standpoints.

PS: no this wasnt just me speculating my ass off, i browse wow-forums hours/day so im very well informed.

- omniel out

[Nikodemus]

I completely agree that warriors have had it sweet, automatically being the tanks (how many times haven't we picked a poorly geared and poorly playing warrior over Bud or Gnu?) and at the same time having insane DPS potential.

About DPS first:
The problem has always been scaling.
Warrior gets better gear -> does more damage -> gets more rage -> does even more. It's easy to see that with those mechanics, rage would eventually go from being a constraint to being a plentiful resource - in particular from a sustained DPS point of view. Look at some of the abundance of Patchwerk fury warrior DPS videos. Loads of them are spamming BT and WW on cooldowns, using heroic on over half their main hand swings yet still don't manage to dip below 40 rage at any point during the fight.
Blizzard couldn't let warriors keep functioning like this; it made us scale too damn well.
Thus, the new rage normalization makes sense.

About tanking:
There's one thing here that quite annoys me:
A protection warrior honestly isn't very good at anything but tanking stuff. Rather useless in PvP, horrible grinding and little potential for raid DPS. A protection warrior is a PvE tank and nothing else.

Now have a look at a feral specced druid.
It's the tanking build.
But it's also the best grinding build.
And definitely a viable PvP build.
and even though a full feral druid obviously doesn't match a full resto, the druid will still be able to heal quite ok as long as he's got a set of good healing gear to equip for the task.

Now compare the two of them from a tanking point of view.
Aggro: In aggro generation, there's not even a competition. The druid wins hands down already at level 60 ... and at 70, the gap is huge. Warriors practically stand still. The new ranks of sunder/heroic/revenge are pathetic, devastate is disappointing at best, shield slam gets a little bit better while overall attack power goes down. A level 70 warrior hardly even outputs more aggro than a level 60 warrior and thus has a really hard time keeping aggro off DPS.
But for druids? their aggro output is mainly based on multipliers on damage rather than on static amounts of innate threat. Their base damage in forms goes up by a fair bit, their crit stays around the same and their AP goes through the roof. A level 70 druid outputs insane amounts of aggro. Have a look at the beta forums. Warlocks are reporting that they are unable to pull aggro off druids even with their best crit/nightfal strings!
And this is just talking about single targets. On multiple targets, warriors now have no other option than to tab target and spam sunder and cleave. Druids have swipe which has had its innate threat increased and now scales with AP.

Damage mitigation:
In current retail, there's a gap between warriors and druids in overall damage mitigation (in favor of the warrior). By the looks of it, this gap is pretty much gone in beta. Druids gain so much more armor and more importantly dodge that they're as good as making up for the lack of def. stance, parry and block.

This is comparing a full prot spec warrior to a druid. They overall seem to come out about even - druid winning on aggroholding, warrior having a slight edge in panic tools and versatility (last stand, shield wall), and a tie in damage mitigation.
If you compare an offensive warrior to the druid, there's no competition. Druid wins hands down.

Overall ... there's just no point in playing a tank warrior. Why play a gimp character which has no other function than PvE tanking (though it looks like even getting groups for that is going to be tough since druids make 5-man runs so much smoother) when a feral druid is just as good as the same job while still being solo and PvP viable and even having the option of healing stuff?

And don't even get me started on 15 / 30 / 16 paladins.

[Dojun]

actually blizz has always stated that it was trying to get a system going where no 1 class can hold pure monopoly over a role.
Atm the situation is more or less like:

DPS - Mage, warlock, (shadow)priest, rogue, druid, hunter, (elemental/enhancement) shaman, DPS-palla's, DPS-warriors

Healers - Priest, druids, shaman, paladin

Tanks - Warriors, and a rare breed of tanking-druid.

Add the fact that most guilds only want warriors as tanks, and add the fact that giving the right specc and gear DPS-warriors can easily whore the top-3 of the damage-meters so by that logic warriors are very OVERpowered in terms of PVE-viability.

Now in TBC the paladin is also available for horde so Blizz could give the palladin some more tanking features (as they originally intended). They couldnt do that before because then there would be an serious imbalance between horde and alliance. They also beefed druids up abit but thats also because druids we're perhaps the shittiest class (IMO). Now warriors actually have to prove their spot in the tight 25-man raids..just like all the other classes have to do.
Warriors arent nerfed tanking-wise, druids and palladins ahve just been buffed. And u cant really say who's better because all 3 of them have different qualities that u must use at different situations.
They're all 3 tanks, just different types of tanks. Like the healing of a druid is different to that of a palladin.
Catch the drift? see their logic?
I for one agree with the blizz-standpoints.

PS: no this wasnt just me speculating my ass off, i browse wow-forums hours/day so im very well informed.

- omniel out

Last raid we had all classes exept for our warriors had a dmg boost. So now we aint really a viable hybrid in any kind. We wont tank good enugh to be worth a spot and we cant dps good enugh to take up a spot. Different types of tanks? I havnt seen the encounters in TBC but unless they put in loads of fear bosses warrior have nothing special since you cant build a encounter on shieldwall/last stand. And yes I do agree that warrior when it came to DPS would need a little nerf. Not really a nerf I guess but make zerker stance/battle stance give a few % more aggro then it did before. So that still on bosses where aggro dont matter you could really press out a insane amount of dmg but on bosses where aggro was a prob you couldnt put out as much as you currently can.

[GuardianAnge1]

maybe blizz should just remove all classes except for shaman, druid and paladins... then the world would be solved.

shaman heal / dps
druid heal / dps / tank
pally heal/ dps / tank

[Dojun]

maybe blizz should just remove all classes except for shaman, druid and paladins... then the world would be solved.

shaman heal / dps
druid heal / dps / tank
pally heal/ dps / tank

Thats where we are headded.

[Ironman]

One thing that I see in all this is that it looks like you are worried that you are going to be obsolete? Well just so you know it warriors are not going to be obsolete in RL because in my eyes it's not so much the class as the person behind the char. So rest assured Niko you'll be in on our raids even if your tank is shite. :D

[Omniel]

if it makes u feel any better niko more classes are also rather crappy in modern day PVP who specc PVE.. but ye Prot-specced warriors are really gimped maybe even more so then other classes perhaps ;)

And dojun the major concern about tanking in TBC i've heard is that alot of mobs stun and shit like hell so keeping aggro on a group of 6 is tuff.. even in the 5-man instances. It mostly seems like alot of hot air farted out by the PVE_hardcore_Prottspecced4life_warriors whining about having to compete :D
Or by ppl who take on a warrior who felt forced to specc prot to get in an group, but only has DPS-gear/experience and hasnt set their minds on it.. ergo he sucks, after that they take on a palladin who has fully devoted himself to exploiting his role as tanking to the limits (think gunhead/budmonkey mentality:D) ergo he rules and then they go the forums fuelling the fire.

ok, so i might have made it look abit too bad :P oh well:P

[Defiance]

I completely agree that warriors have had it sweet, automatically being the tanks (how many times haven't we picked a poorly geared and poorly playing warrior over Bud or Gnu?) and at the same time having insane DPS potential.

About DPS first:
The problem has always been scaling.
Warrior gets better gear -> does more damage -> gets more rage -> does even more. It's easy to see that with those mechanics, rage would eventually go from being a constraint to being a plentiful resource - in particular from a sustained DPS point of view. Look at some of the abundance of Patchwerk fury warrior DPS videos. Loads of them are spamming BT and WW on cooldowns, using heroic on over half their main hand swings yet still don't manage to dip below 40 rage at any point during the fight.
Blizzard couldn't let warriors keep functioning like this; it made us scale too damn well.
Thus, the new rage normalization makes sense.

About tanking:
There's one thing here that quite annoys me:
A protection warrior honestly isn't very good at anything but tanking stuff. Rather useless in PvP, horrible grinding and little potential for raid DPS. A protection warrior is a PvE tank and nothing else.

Now have a look at a feral specced druid.
It's the tanking build.
But it's also the best grinding build.
And definitely a viable PvP build.
and even though a full feral druid obviously doesn't match a full resto, the druid will still be able to heal quite ok as long as he's got a set of good healing gear to equip for the task.

Now compare the two of them from a tanking point of view.
Aggro: In aggro generation, there's not even a competition. The druid wins hands down already at level 60 ... and at 70, the gap is huge. Warriors practically stand still. The new ranks of sunder/heroic/revenge are pathetic, devastate is disappointing at best, shield slam gets a little bit better while overall attack power goes down. A level 70 warrior hardly even outputs more aggro than a level 60 warrior and thus has a really hard time keeping aggro off DPS.
But for druids? their aggro output is mainly based on multipliers on damage rather than on static amounts of innate threat. Their base damage in forms goes up by a fair bit, their crit stays around the same and their AP goes through the roof. A level 70 druid outputs insane amounts of aggro. Have a look at the beta forums. Warlocks are reporting that they are unable to pull aggro off druids even with their best crit/nightfal strings!
And this is just talking about single targets. On multiple targets, warriors now have no other option than to tab target and spam sunder and cleave. Druids have swipe which has had its innate threat increased and now scales with AP.

Damage mitigation:
In current retail, there's a gap between warriors and druids in overall damage mitigation (in favor of the warrior). By the looks of it, this gap is pretty much gone in beta. Druids gain so much more armor and more importantly dodge that they're as good as making up for the lack of def. stance, parry and block.

This is comparing a full prot spec warrior to a druid. They overall seem to come out about even - druid winning on aggroholding, warrior having a slight edge in panic tools and versatility (last stand, shield wall), and a tie in damage mitigation.
If you compare an offensive warrior to the druid, there's no competition. Druid wins hands down.

Overall ... there's just no point in playing a tank warrior. Why play a gimp character which has no other function than PvE tanking (though it looks like even getting groups for that is going to be tough since druids make 5-man runs so much smoother) when a feral druid is just as good as the same job while still being solo and PvP viable and even having the option of healing stuff?

And don't even get me started on 15 / 30 / 16 paladins.

Yep the warrior had it sweet on some areas indeed.
However, 90% of this PvE overpoweredness comes from Fury, Arms, wich suffered the hardest blow, is pretty shit for DPS in PvE, either that or your DPS sucks.

So the tree with the most rage defficiency gets hit hardest with their allready extremely lousy PvE Damage, wewt.

However, that's not to say that Fury didn't need a bit of tonedown, but it also doesn't need to be that a druid beartank specced will have more HP/Armour/Full Damage Avoidance then a prot warrior, wich with the known endgame gear, they will.

Add to the surprising fact that Shield Block will in TBC no longer mitigate Crushing Blows, so you've got a tank that has what exactly?
The only advantage a Warrior tank has are it's panic buttons, Sunder Armour and Thunderclap wich has to be used in Battle Stance only, that's it, the druid outshines the warrior on every other encounter, Aggro, mitigation, and hell even in their bear form they will probably be on the top 5 or 6 on the damage meters, i'd personally love to have 35% crit, 2100 AP and 27.000 armour combined with 19k HP as a warrior, but that i'm not going to get, but a full hybrid class will for some reason, boggles the mind doesn't it?

Then again, Blizzard's history with Warriors has clearly shown that they don't like them and as such will allways get the short end of the stick.

You thought warriors were damn good in burst damage? You haven't met the new paladin yet, Warrior burst is pathetic in comparison.

Anyway, i'll see what i'll do come TBC, unsure as of yet.

Edit: The rage norm makes sense as far as PvE goes indeed, but the penalty incurred was too high for any build, especially Arms, Prot doesn't benefit from it either, so what do you do with a class that's THE most gear dependant ingame, cannot fully function without a pet healer, and you take away his capability retaliate by hitting that wich feeds him, Rage?
You get a target dummy, or equal to a pre-2.0 hunter Marksman pet, something that's an annoyance, not a threat, incapable of any way, short of PvE encounters WITHOUT taunt immunity, to protect his healer(s), in short, the only thing a tank will be used for in TBC is Sunder Armour, and even that is replaceable with Rogue version wich is on MANY of the TBC mobs far superior to sunder because of the retarded amount of armour a good deal of them have, so that's simply the thought train of ignorant people thinking Warrior = Auto-tank, no-one's better, whilst in fact a pure class gets owned every single way by a hybrid class.
Good game Blizzard.

[Omniel]

for all u whining warriors :
:D

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=59382934&sid=1

TSERIC BLUE POST

Q u o t e:
There are lots of people sayiing that Bear Druids or Paladins or both hold hate better than Warriors, period...Protection or non-Protection.


If that is truly the case, Druids or Paladins or both will likely see changes to their threat mechanics. Warriors have always been intended to be a primary choice for tanking. That is not going to change, even with Druids and Paladins receiving tanking buffs. Yes, they weren't that good at it before and the devs do want to increase their viability in that role, but it should not be exceeding the capabilities of warriors. If it does, as I said, it'll probably get reigned in some.

Q u o t e:
in the middle of all the posting flurry, it's been really difficult to tell what the real truth is.


Welcome to the World of Warcraft forums. ;)

Concerns of multi-target aggro efficiency have and will continue to be passed on. It is still very much the intent of the devs to have the role of a warrior being primary tank with dps secondary output.

[Dojun]

kinda suspected was it not?

[Defiance]

Please tell me you don't actually believe a fucking of what Tseric says?

The guy should have been fired 2 years ago, he's an ass and proven to be a liar and someone who doesn't give a fuck, just like his nice statement of "You've been buffed, just not as much as others.".

I highly doubt you'll see changes _ANYTIME_ soon, meaning at least another year away.

[Dojun]

I think that it is like he say with blizzard intending warriors to be tanks. If we cant do our job we will get a buff/nerf on others. Might not happend tomorrow but it will happend.

[Defiance]

Yep, but before that we will suffer again for a full year before they "realize" that the other classes have been overbuffed, but they are SURE to fix things like Second Wind within days.

So wait, a beneficial talent that was not overpowered in the least against any of the mentioned counters it doesn't work with now was fixed with lightning speed, but yet they fail to address a bug that's been here since the birth of the warrior skills called Charge and Intercept?

See my point here?

Warriors are not on their "Oh let's actually help them for once instead of cutting off their balls and feed it to them." list, they're on the "Oh let em lie there gathering dust, they are there to being raped as warriors." then when someone does pick it up eventually, instead of actually helping us, they decide to make us bleed even more (Tactical Mastery move anyone?).

Forgive me if i don't have faith in the Devs with their retarded views.

[Nikodemus]

Hey Def, happy new year :D

[GuardianAnge1]

def is an optimist right? :S

[Maurgrim]

Def is a *cough* whiny retard *cough* :3

[Defiance]

Def is a *cough* whiny retard *cough* :3

So are you, but you don't see me saying it :D

Oh wait... i just did :)

[Gunhead]

from TBC patch notes
Druids

* "Swipe" has had its threat bonus multiplier removed.
* "Maul" has had its threat bonus multiplier changed to a flat value similar in threat per time to "Heroic Strike".

See Niko, i told you.

[Dojun]

I who had been hoping that we would get threat that scale better with weps then it do now:(

[Nikodemus]

Quoting myself from off. forums:
Swipe previously:
dmg * 1.75 * 1.3 * 1.15 = dmg * 2.62

Swipe now:
dmg * 1.3 * 1.15 = dmg * 1.495

That's a fairly hard nerf, but I'm thinking it'll still prove to be a good ability. Now it will just be "good" instead of insane.

Maul nerfed to heroic strike style is retarded. Warriors lacking scaling, so instead of fixing that, they remove scaling from druids? bull**%!.

[Gunhead]

Well that's what i told you mate, it's the Blizzard way.
"Why buff something when you can nerf something else?"

It'll be interesting to see how druid tanking will work now that the prime threat generating skill (Maul) has been nerfed to hell. Bear Mangle doesn't have any threat multipliers and it won't be until level 66 that we get Lacerate to improve aggro holding.

What i'm afraid of is that bear is now a mountain of hp and armor made out of threat teflon... But have to wait and see.

[Nikodemus]

As per the forums it seems that the build with this threat reduction has been on the beta servers for 5 days without anyone noticing troubles keeping aggro.

Also, it's worth mentioning that while swipe has lost it's aggro multiplier, it has gained AP scaling (from the old version to the newest version). Old swipe worked just fine afaik? new one doesn't seem to be much worse, given enough AP it might even be better. Guess we'll see.

[Gunhead]

Old Swipe was very low static damage with the threat multiplier - it worked okayish for initial hold on multiple mobs as long as nobody hit the secondary targets before you could cycle Mauls through all your mobs. Usually it managed to override healing threat but if someone lacking target management hit 'em with anything off they went. I agree that the scaling Swipe version with threat multiplier was a bit over the top, depending on encounter it wasn't always necessary to bother with target rotation. Guess the latest one is threatwise closer back to the original except its damage (and through it threat build up to some extent) scales which'll still make it a useful move.

The Maul is what i'm worried about. Bear can't change weapons to increase attack speed and Maul is directly tied to autoattack - Maul isn't a "move" per se, it converts your next (auto)attack to a Maul. I'm guessing the Anyone on beta who haven't noticed much change are 66+ who have Lacerate in their arsenal but how does threat management come together before you get it?

Anyways it's the usual half-arsed way from Blizzard to "fix" things. More sensible solution would've been toning Maul multiplier down and then putting that multiplier on Heroic Strike as well.

Not too fuzzed about the change in any case, bit worried about pre-Lacerate bear tanking. But i'll see for myself, i'm not the one to take the word of the doomsayers for fact.

[Nikodemus]

How does mangle fit in? haven't even looked at how it works, just know it tends to hurt :/

[Gunhead]

Bear Mangle hits heavy yea (130% damage + 136 + debuff component) but since it's on 6 second cooldown and has no threat multipliers it's just an additional punch to damage output and applies the debuff which increases all bleed damage on target - threatwise Maul is and will still be THE aggro move.

I don't know what exactly the "flat" threat value will be but with pre-nerf Maul you would've needed close to 4k Mangle crits for same threat two 1k'ish Mauls would've built during the cooldown. And no, bear Mangle hits nowhere that hard - against raid bosses so far i've critted at best about 1.3k.

Mangle's a single target heavy hitter, threatwise it's nice-to-have addition but since unlike the cat Mangle it has the cooldown so it's not a replacement attack like cat Mangle is to Claw.

[Veth]

mangle is the drood's MS so to say.
similar dmg, same cooldown, also has got a debuff.

[Dojun]

so far so good with the tanking. Not done any heroic instance so far but I think we will start soon.

[Dojun]

Completed my first heroic (battle of hillsbrad) and the tanking went just fine. All you need as a warrior is some skills and it will be just fine.

[Chamuel]

Completed my first heroic (battle of hillsbrad) and the tanking went just fine. All you need as a warrior is some skills and it will be just fine.

Ye, doing fine with tanking as well. Having a shaman as OT and some good CC helps a lot, haven't run into any aggro issues so far. Too bad I cant tank in my dps gear anymore like in scholo/strat :D

[Fusion]

Ye, doing fine with tanking as well. Having a shaman as OT and some good CC helps a lot, haven't run into any aggro issues so far. Too bad I cant tank in my dps gear anymore like in scholo/strat :D Shamans don't get additional threat from Earthshock or Rockbiter, so they are a poor choice as an off tank :p

[Dojun]

and they die from nearly nothing when you reach the harder stuff. what I usually have as a offtank is a rogue for their ability to stun targets.

[Chamuel]

Shamans don't get additional threat from Earthshock or Rockbiter, so they are a poor choice as an off tank :p

Its not hard to keep aggro on a target if the tank isn't focussing on it, and the first mob killed almost always dies within 20 seconds, so the shaman can easily manage.

[GuardianAnge1]

Shamans don't get additional threat from Earthshock or Rockbiter, so they are a poor choice as an off tank :p

frostshock has the aggro now i hear