Day 2 of Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone

Last night our guild dipped it's toe back into ICC to see what it was like.  Mind you, none of us had beta accounts so we  really only had our experience on the PTR as preparation for this patch, and since we raid pretty solidly during the week, we really didn't have a lot of time on the PTR even.

I ended up tanking, but I would have done that by choice, as I'm not entirely happy with the general "feel" of the fury rotation anymore.  I don't know if it's the ability queue system interfering with my ability to capitalize on procs, or the fact that we have so much more of our rotation linked to unstable procs than before, but one way or the other, I've found that even when the RNG swung my way and the numbers were good, those "good feeling" rotations didn't last more than one or two stretches.  It's a strange combination of having a very tight rotation (BT every 3 seconds, means one button press in between, which is supposed to be one of Raging Blow, Instant Slam (both procs, and uncertain) or WW for multi-target situations, and hit Heroic Strike or Cleave when you have 50 rage or more -- yet another proc) along with having so many parts of that tight rotation that can't be counted on to be available.  On the PTR I ran once through Heroic UK and literally only used Raging Blow about 3 total times.  Not because I didn't want to, but because I never enraged.  Admittedly, I could have used Berserker Rage or Death Wish to patch over some of that, but I wanted to see what the rotation felt like without having to resort to using cooldowns.  I would go into combat, hit BloodThirst, and by the time I got another button to press (usually Bloodthirst again) most of the pull was dead.  I lost count of the number of times I  finally enraged and had the opportunity to hit Raging Blow at just about the same time that everything died.  I normally am a huge fan of warriors sundering just to help, and I've made MANY posts and comments to that effect, and suddenly I find that I don't want to sunder any more.  It doesn't help as much as it used to, and more importantly, I don't have the gaps in the basic rotation to slot it in any longer.

Tanking, on the other hand, was great.  I did not find it to be tougher than it was Monday, just slightly different.  I definitely had to go into it with an open mind, but once I was comfortable, it was really very much the same as it had been.

If I had any complaints at all about tanking, it was that I occasionally felt like I was made of tissue paper, but I found myself wondering if this was a bug or something.  I would go for long stretches of time and be perfectly fine, and then all of a sudden, I'm dead with no warning at all.  I went back through my combat logs and  I only see evenly spaced hits coming in ranging in the 6-8k damage and not even too frequently, so since I'm reasonably sure I was being healed at the time, I really can't say what happened.  I don't see any huge spikes, nothing.

But so much of that kind of thing will happen, we encountered at least 3 bugs just getting up to halfway through the blood quarter that we're glad we only decided to bring a 10 man group to raid with.  As an example, during the Gunship battle, one of the Alliance sailors (that should have been dead) apparently went invisible and came onto Deathbringer's Rise with us.  All through combat it was attacking some of our ranged dps, and we couldn't figure out where it was coming from.  It also kept putting us back into combat after we wiped making it impossible for us to rez or even take the transport to the rise (which we can't walk to).  Finally someone found the spot that the invisible sailor was in and we killed him and things went smoother.

But all in all, things went much smoother than I'd have thought.  Bosses went down very quickly, which had me a little concerned.  Damage numbers weren't really "higher" than usual, but our 10 man was setting speed records on every boss we downed, and half our dps were really not our "best" dps.  No one was over 11k, including our lead Fury warrior who usually sits pretty comfortably at 18-20k sustained average with the ICC buff.

If you're worried about the 4.0 patch and it's effects on the game until December, let me caution you to wait.  They're going to fix all these strange inconsistencies, because the last thing Blizzard wants to do is tick off everyone who plays one particular class and lose that richness of uniqueness that makes the game fun.

I can understand if Fury warriors are having a tough time right now, I am too.  They've already announced that they're buffing our numbers, but for me it's more of a feel issue.  I'm just not happy with my basic rotation yet, and until I can get comfortable there, I don't know that having bigger numbers will help as much as they might think.  I know when I was dpsing I was seeing melee damage at 30%-38% of my overall damage, and that just hurts my feelings.  At that point it almost feels like I shouldn't bother even hitting buttons, since just standing in place does almost as much damage as trying to accomplish something.  But, this is now common knowledge, and they're already fixing coefficients and adding to baseline damage of abilities and doing everything they can to make this right for us and ret pallies and kitties.  I don't know if rogues are suffering at all, and I know that DK's are still seeing massive numbers, so those all seem ok.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to welcome little Perppy to my 80 club.  In addition to my two other plate wearing alter-egos, I now have a fun loving little rogue of my own to play with.

Of course, she literally just hit 80 on Monday, so this may be the perfect opportunity for me to take some time and find out how to play a rogue post 4.0.1, since I won't have the pre-patch misconceptions clouding my judgement.

Some Patch 4.0.1 Warrior notes for PvE

Hello. I spent some time testing on the PTR and also researching through information on EJ and others, and here is basically what I've gleaned about how Fury and Protection will work for secondary stats.

Fury priorities in order: 


Hit Softcap (still 5%), Expertise Softcap (26)
Fuzzy area (Hit to a "reasonable" level, not sure what that is, then Strength)
Strength, and Mastery
Crit
Haste

Basically, what most people are saying is a 'good' idea is:
(1) make sure you're wearing plate, wearing only plate adds 5% to all stats.
(2) reforge as much haste as you can to hit rating, at least enough to get a "comfortable level of rage income" whatever that means. If you lack expertise rating, use some of this budget to get to soft cap.
(3) Gem everything you have for Strength, but go ahead and match sockets, i.e. use Strength/Crit to match yellow sockets, or Strength/Hit to match blue sockets.
(4) enchants should stay about like they are, but if you have enchants that add hit/expertise, etc. and you don't need the rating, and there's a better option, get that.
(5) I haven't been able to find any indication of whether mastery is desirable enough to forego Strength or Hit for, but since the only way to get mastery right now is by reforging, and people seem to be agreeing that we need a lot of hit rating, I'm guessing that at 80 we're not supposed to spend a lot of time worried about mastery rating. We may investigate this some and see if we can get a better idea how to include this.


Protection priorities in order: 

Hit rating to soft cap (8%), expertise rating (as much as you can get, hopefully softcapped)
Stamina
Strength
Parry/Dodge (basically the same, but Parry has a talent that edges it out if you take it)
More Expertise until hard cap
Mastery (people are saying that mastery is about 2/3 the value of other mitigation types right now, so this is pretty much last for us until they change their minds)

So the 'basic idea' at this point (from what I've seen and read) is to

(1) reforge to hit expertise and hit caps
(2) any additional reforging that you feel you want to do either put into block rating (I think this is still available) or dodge or parry, and probably parry will be the go-to stat for a while here.
(3) gem for stamina. It "may" still be advisable to look at socket bonuses, but stamina will cause your vengeance to scale, and your gear should have a lot more dodge/parry than before. If you do try to get socket bonuses, use the standard stamina/hit, stamina/expertise, stamina/dodge, and stamina/parry gems, unless you feel you need some crit rating or something.
(4) otherwise we're pretty much the same as before.

I'll apologize in advance to any Arms warriors we have, as I haven't really spent a lot of time looking into your new designs. I will try to do that at some point, but from what I've heard, while Arms is "closer" to being viable in PvE content, it's still behind Fury by enough that most people aren't really looking at it seriously yet.

Some Pre-Cataclysm Warrior Tank Specs (Guesses, but well educated ones)

Last night I had a guild mate ask me for some advice on speccing out his warrior tank after patch 4.0.1 hits and it started me thinking that perhaps it would be easier to put my thoughts here so anyone that wanted could read them too.

To begin with, here are a couple links to "mostly" current PTR quality talent trees:

Wowhead

Mmo-Champion


Personally, I like the wowhead calculator better as it also lists Mastery etc. in the beginning exactly as it will appear in game.

Now to the trees.  I want to point out some specific talents in the protection tree, some good some bad, but all noteworthy.


Must Haves:

• Toughness (Tier 1 3/3) may not be exciting, but it's a must.  Tanking in Cataclysm is looking hard enough without turning down free armor rating. 
• Gag Order (Tier 2 2/2) hasn't really changed much, apart from the reduction in the Heroic Throw CD (an amazing change), but it's still 100% necessary.  Control is the name of the game, and we don't have any other way to control casters.  If it makes you feel better, pretend it's Death Grip for Warriors.
• Last Stand (Tier 3 1/1) is an oldy, but you'll need every cd you can muster, and this is still nothing that can be skipped.
• Bastion of Defense (Tier 3 2/2) is a new talent, and a Cataclysmically original must-have.  This talent takes the place of Improved Defensive Stance, but with some differences.  Among other things, this talent now eliminates the need to worry about becoming defense capped (which is good, since defense is gone).  The less exciting changes here are that it no longer reduces damage taken by 6%, and the enrage chance has been reduced to 20%.  Don't worry too much, though, they've added a new Vengeance mechanic that should be picking up where this enrage effect dies off.
• Warbringer (Tier 3 1/1) in WotLK was a decent talent and very useful, but in Cataclysm you're going to need the ability to react and stay mobile more than ever.  They've still left the restrictions on removing the movement impairments to only with Intervene, but I can see this being something no warrior tank will be functioning well without since our AoE threat mechanics have been tuned down significantly.
• Improved Revenge (Tier 4 2/2) has been moved up in the tree, but still does the same thing.  Threat has been an issue, and this is one threat talent you're going to want no matter what, even though in the past it has been debatable. This will be a mandatory talent for the same reason glyph of Cleave is going to become a staple on tanks in Cataclysm.
• Devastate (Tier 4 1/1) just like before you'll want this key ability.  With sunder stacks being less important than before, your dps will really not be interested in applying this much, so not only is it up to you, but you need the threat building action.
• Heavy Repercussions (Tier 4 2/2) snuck into the talent tree.  This was an ability that was tied directly in with Shield Block back when the damage from Shield Slam came from block value.  Now that they've been separated, this talent will allow you to not lose this important burst threat ability.
• Sword and Board (Tier 6 3/3) will still be mandatory.
• Shockwave (Tier 7 1/1) hasn't really ever been in question, but now that Thunderclap no longer brings with it the kind of snap aggro it used to, Shockwave is the only remaining AoE ability we have to keep large groups under control.  It does good damage, and generates good threat.  In Cataclysm it's a must-have.

Don't Takes:

• Safeguard (Tier 6 2/2) probably looks about the same to you, and it is.  Intervene is definitely a useful ability, but on a raid tank if you're having to intervene people, things are already out of control, and perhaps your two talent points should have been spent getting something to keep things under control in the first place.  Although this talent sounds like it could have so many uses, the fact that it requires distance (although I heard they are removing a minimum distance from cataclysm for intervene, so that may change things) and the fact that there is a taunt associated with it kind of stuffs this into the category of something you'll "use occasionally during tank-swapping fights where you don't have to stand right on top of each other" and right off the top of my head, I can't think of even one from previous content that fit this bill.  Not to mention that when you intervene someone, you also take the next two hits from that mob, and the damage reduction barely lasts longer than the time you're getting yourself hit from them.  Not terribly worthwhile in my opinion.  Possibly more useful in PvP.

Beyond that, here are the way I'd likely distribute talents depending on my intention:

Soak Tank - High Survivability:  Level 80 (2/3/31)  Level 85 (5/3/33)
Additions here include:

• Incite 3/3 - This looks to be a very promising increase threat move for single targets.  
• Shield Mastery 2/2 - big time important, decreased cd's on all your great defensive cd's
• Vigilance 1/1 - Typically Soak Tanks aren't the ones that are being targeted, so their rage generation suffers.  With the change to vigilance, this is now the perfect tool for Soak Tanks and Add tanks.
• Hold the Line 2/2 - This one can probably be traded out if you don't feel it's getting enough use.  It requires being attacked and if you're not parrying anything in your encounters, it may be best to swap these for Blood and Thunder to help the MT with sustaining threat on spawns.
• Field Dressing 2/2 and Blood Craze 3/3 from the other two trees are pretty desirable, at least until you know for sure whether your healers are having difficulties or not.  If it turns out that they're not, you should see if you can swap these for talents like Cruelty or War Academy.

Heroic Tank - All Around Tank for 5 mans: Level 80 (5/0/31) Level 85 (8/0/33)
Additions here include:

• Thunderstruck 2/2 and Blood and Thunder 2/2, and eventually Deep Wounds 3/3 again all intended to make Pugging at least a little less painful, along with Blitz and a couple points in Shield Mastery to help with rage generation and pull control.

Main (Boss) Tank - High Single Target Threat, Moderate Survivability: Level 80 (3/2/31) Level 85 (8/2/31)
Additions here include:

• Cruelty 2/2, War Academy 3/3 for added threat
• Shield Mastery 3/3 for extra rage generation
• Hold the Line 2/2 since you'll be parrying often
• Impending Victory, since you'll actually be in a position to use this more often than the other tanks (except the Soak Tank, who also has it) and the combination with War Academy is just extra nice.