PTR warrior changes

Ok, so I didn't post anything before, becaus there was one, count it ONE change to the warrior tree and it was a DUH good thing, with nothing to say.

I'm concerned a little because all of a sudden I'm seeing a lot more "good" things in our tree, and the last time I saw nothing but good things in the reported changes they snuck in and bit us pretty good on the UNreported changes.

So here are the current reported changes to warriors according to the PTR test notes as of today, July 7th, 2009:

Warriors

• Talents
• Fury
• Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor.
• Bloodsurge: Notification that Slam has become instant now appears in floating combat text.
• Protection
• Devastate: Weapon damage increased to 60% and bonus per Sunder Armor on the target increased by 20%.
• Shield Specialization: Now provides 5 rage on a block, dodge or parry instead of 2 rage on a block.

Notice, all good things. I heard some people saying that the change to Armed to the Teeth was strange, but as my own way of pointing something out, notice that all this change does is put this in line with the DK's similar ability in that the DK's can take up to 5/180 points of armor in bonus Attack power which is exactly a 1/36 conversion factor. The 3/108 is also a 1/36 conversion. The only thing I would expect to see them do otherwise is to either make the DK's ability also a 3 talent point or to make ours a 5 point cost. Personally I'm hoping for the former rather than the latter. We have so many talents we have to invest in, regardless of which spec we're playing, and even though for Fury/Arms, I could easily spare the extra two talent points, it would hurt my Protection spec to have to find 2 extra talent points to invest in extra attack power. As it is, (and you can look this up) my spec is 12/3/56 so you can see that the Fury tree would basically eat 2 points from somewhere else that I can't really spare. I'm already pretty lean and mean on the Arms tree with what I've chosen, and I'd have to lose utility points on Protection tree to be able to afford it.

I suppose, though that there's nothing preventing me from simply taking only 3 of the 5 points, but then the intented purpose is lost on tanks, who, let's face it, need it the most. While I've seen DK's, Druids and even Paladins to some extent tanking with 2K to 2.5K dps, I have yet to see any warrior tank do significantly better than about 1.4K dps and even then, that's only fully 25 man raid buffed. With the number of dps races that they've figured in, I'm not a bit shocked that recently I've done more dpsing than tanking in my raids. Simply switching my position leaves our "intentional" dps about the same, but raises our tanking dps by nearly 1K.

Ok, so the Bloodsurge change was badly needed. Way back when the talent procced 100% off a crit from one ability in our rotation, we could just watch for that to crit and then throw the slam. Now that it has a slim chance on a bunch of abilities' crits, and since hopefully you're critting most of the time, the only thing you can do is (a) watch for the buff to appear and hopefully hit the slam before it vanishes (also hopefully not end up in a void zone while you're trying to watch the buffs way in the other corner of the screen), or (b) use a lot of addons to basically do exactly what this change is doing, notify you or bring the things you have to watch closer together.

You can't go wrong pushing devastate higher in the priority queue. Devastate is a nice ability and I use it frequently. Because it doesn't generate a lot of rage for it's cost, however, it generally gets shoved into the "if I have nothing else ready to go at the time, then throw that" column. Although the increases aren't significant, it could bring the threat up to something comparable to some of the other abilities that you might be using over Devastate for now.

You also can't go wrong with giving a warrior more rage for doing his job right. So many warriors use the "stack stamina out the @$$" method of gearing because they want to get hit to generate rage. I believe that we should be mitigating as much as possible. I believe we should have 30% dodges and possibly 25% parry chances. I believe we should have 20% blocks and that the block should play SOME part in boss fights as well as trash pulls. It would be great if they could figure out a way to make that possible without making block basically another version of parry.

The ONLY suggestion I've ever had in this regard is to make block value a percentage instead of a hard number. This would lessen the impact on trash pulls (since sometimes blocks can completely block incoming damage, instead of only a portion) but would make it significantly more desireable on bosses, (taking even 25% less damage on a blow that would have done 36K is still 9K damage you don't take).

I've noticed that Blizz has gone to a lot of percentage based values instead of hard values because of how difficult they are to keep up with. It causes some problems, but eliminates others. For example, notice how obnoxious it is to have your abilities cost a certain % of your total mana pool. As you level up, your mana pool increases, but the only benefit you see from it is that it takes LONGER to regenerate the mana needed to cast the same spells, and you can't even cast them more often. (not that we have any issue with this, mind you :D but some of my friends with a "drinking problem" have mentioned it.)

I think this may be one of those situations that might benefit more from being made into a percentage than it is losing. Of course, they don't read my blog anyway, so I doubt it will ever happen.