[Radhja]

I've read over the warrior patch notes and didn't notice anything that would change the original UA build on this threat, but not sure if there's any hidden changes I may have missed. Is this going to be a viable build in 3.2, and will it be usable in the new raid instances at the Argent Tournament grounds, or will the drop in survivability going to make it to much of a liability to bother with?

I'm gonna try this build out anyway... been looking at it for a few weeks now and the concept seems fun, and I could showcase it in our weekly naxx25 farm run.

[Vankrys]

Source: Radhja I've read over the warrior patch notes and didn't notice anything that would change the original UA build on this threat, but not sure if there's any hidden changes I may have missed. Is this going to be a viable build in 3.2, and will it be usable in the new raid instances at the Argent Tournament grounds, or will the drop in survivability going to make it to much of a liability to bother with? I'm gonna try this build out anyway... been looking at it for a few weeks now and the concept seems fun, and I could showcase it in our weekly naxx25 farm run.

with the buff of devastate, UA build may lose some of its attractiveness, although, i haven't seen any quantitative study about the new devastate.

[Qiubai]

Hello,

I was trying out this specc today, but I'm not sure if I've missed somethin or not. True I can spam Revenge now, but my crit is so low that I think I'm doing this wrong. Any suggestions, info on what? Or is it a change with 3.2 that has done it?

EDIT: Ok, found out why concerning the crits, was missing the glyphs. But I'm not seeing the greater improvement in DPS, I'm only putting out 1200 DPS according to recount. What kind of gear is everyone using for this spec?

[Calintara]

Source: Qiubai Hello, I was trying out this specc today, but I'm not sure if I've missed somethin or not. True I can spam Revenge now, but my crit is so low that I think I'm doing this wrong. Any suggestions, info on what? Or is it a change with 3.2 that has done it? EDIT: Ok, found out why concerning the crits, was missing the glyphs. But I'm not seeing the greater improvement in DPS, I'm only putting out 1200 DPS according to recount. What kind of gear is everyone using for this spec?

I am still using this build a wide variety of boss fights. I have not noticed any real difference in my damage intake switching between the traditional prot spec and the UA spec.

I am not sure on your gearing but you may want to look at your hit, exp, crit, and strength in your UA gear. To be honest I have avoided most all of the T8/T8.5 gear to maintain my hit/exp ratings. I usually use the Last Laugh and/or Titanguard depending on what gear i switch out (orc warrior) for the little bit extra expertise from the racial.

With a non-tier set pieces I have maintained my 8% hit and i hover between 27 and 34 on my expertise rating. I did drop a few EH pieces to maintain my avoidance with my buffs i sit around 14% crit, which i think is a little low for this spec. In the tens i can do around 3-4k dps and spike for around 12k tps. In the 25s my tps is around the same but for my DPS is usually around 2.5k-3.2k.

Just ensure that if you are using the UA spec you do have someone there to handle sunders, or sunder effect abilities. This is crucial for both your melee dps and your own personal tps/dps.

I cannot see any gear at work but it my just be some gearing issues (not hitting soft/hard caps), potential "rotation" issues (Revenge isnt the only thing to hit in this spec), Raid debuff/buff issues (debuff balance and buff balance).

I truly love this build for its single target fury but i do miss my mobility and cooldown speed. The spec does take some practice as well. I didnt get it down the first day or week either. This is not really something you get without some practice. For our raid tank team i only have myself (orc warrior), and a druid. My OT for the few fights we need a third tank is usually another DPS warrior that has a prot off-spec.

My point on this is that our AE is not the greatest and this spec makes it a little worse but with some practice and quick targeting you will be able to do pretty well. I would take a team of friends into some heroics, let them know what your doing, and practice the spec. After a few heroics of trying to control 4 mobs, with single target tps, against your group of AE monsters, you should have it down pretty good! When you go hitup a single target boss you should be in good shape. XT (heartbreaker) is good practice for this spec as well due to the limited movement from the tank; aside from picking up the life sparks.

It lets you fall into a rythym pretty quick.

From a glyphing perspective i use the block, heroic strike, and revenge glyph as majors. Hope some of this helps.

I beleive that i am still in my UA gear on the armory you can get an idea of what works for me. Just look for Calintara on Drenden server.

[mistersix]

After extensive use with the UA spec I will say this that differs from the advice above. It's still best for you to provide the sunders. Having your rogues handle it is a bigger drain on their dps and overall raid damage then it is for you to do it.

[Calintara]

Fair on that, i usually have 2 rogues and 1-2 DPS warriors to fill those slots so I usually do not worry about it.

[Takethecake]

Seems like this spec has lost it's usefulness with the buff to devastate. Your talking about a possible 200-300 dps gain, at the loss (even if it is marginal in some areas) of survivability (Longer cooldowns), mobility (no warbringer), and EH in gear?

If your having a dps class maintain the sunder debuff then the dps they lose is going to be just under your dps gain for a rogue, and possibly equal dps loss for a warrior due to the loss of 5 GCD's at the start of the fight and 1 every 30 seconds. Rogues will get 1 less rupture every 30 seconds in a perfect rotation and warriors would get one less heroic strike every 30 seconds in a perfect rotation. So you've effectively weakened yourself for a gain of nothing. In the days where prot was doing 1200 dps sure I maybe could understand it, but now I don't really see it.

If it's something you truly have fun running with then sure have at it. But I would see it as a hindrance to any fight that isn't trivial. Specificly the heartbreaker fight you mention, your dps on the heart would be horrible due to revenge not being up at all during the heart phase wouldn't it?

[mistersix]

That's correct. Heart phase dps and really any cast moment loses dps with the UA spec.

[Lautoa]

i've mostly been using this spec for pvp, and modified it a little bit for that.

right now i'm using [this]. and probably gonna drop glyph of mocking blow for command or something since i don't use it much for pve, but there's not many minor glyphs that are a big deal for this spec.

still having trouble deciding exactly what to gem for. what's warrior GCD? i thought about dedicating half a gem to a bit of haste for mega spam powa. and it's hard to take expertise over strength but i got a little of that. agility and crit seem like good stats for this spec in pve, but crit rating loses some of its glamour for pvp so i'm satisfied with some agi enchants... maybe i'm wrong, but it seems like resilience on an enemy would make the HS glyph less effective.

only problem in pvp is sometimes in a mob of people you gotta wait til somebody actually targets you to get your revenge on, and it's also not great on rage.

not sure what advantages its really got in pvp over regular arms spec though, except i guess that the tank gear and def. stance makes you pretty tough to bring down...

[mistersix]

UA is a toss up in pvp. For classes/specs we're already good against (e.g. rogues) it makes even faster work of them but for classes we're already terrible against the lack of mobility and versatility are outright killers.

[Magnuss]

UA is not a spec I would recommend at all for PvP. You are about half as effective as an arms warrior and half as effective as a prot warrior, which really doesnt put you ontop of much of anything. Looking at the spec you have there you have a whole bunch of talents you put into the arms tree to obviously get UA and MS but you dont pick up Juggernaut which will be your ONLY improvement to mobility since you cannot get warbringer. This means you have 1 intercept and then you are completely rootable for 30 seconds. Any class in the game with any kind of snare will destroy you.

UA sucks against casters, which pvp is full of. Every healer, every warlock, mage, and shaman will not give you a chance to light up revenge which is your core ability here. This means you are relying on your shield slam and mortal strike to do enough damage to kill them (of which you dont have sword and board so you cannot get multiple shield slams). This means that you can effectively create absolutely no pressure against anyone who isnt melee.

With melee, you dont have the stuns and mobility that full prot has and are also not quite as high on survivability. Also, you cannot keep them slowed easily because you have to swap stances out of Dstance (removing your ability to revenge) to apply hamstring and then swap back. Given the fact that you already have rage issues and only have 1 point in Tactical Mastery, you would spend more time and rage trying to keep the melee player next to you and slowed than you would be able to put into harming them.

Finally, the two stuns that you bring to the table to act as your CC in UA spec are on the same DR. So if you get 3 revenges in a row on a rogue and get a Revenge stun proc each time, your concussion blow is now useless for 15 seconds (and more likely, always with how often you spam Revenge).


Oh and as an afterthought, do not ever gem for haste in this gearset. Haste does not speed up the GCD at all, it will only increase your white swing speed. The only warrior spec that gets some real benefit from it is Fury due to the increased rage generation from your offhand weapon, even then they dont gem for it.

If you want to pvp with a spec that has MS and some prot stuff the best I can offer you is this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Which is still not very good consider it is not a prot spec, but an arms spec that picks up some nice defensive ability in last stand and revenge. I also hope you dont think I am being harsh to you, simply attempting illustrate how ineffective UA is compared to other very viable options.

[Lautoa]

no i appreciate it, i'm just playing around with it because it's weird.

[Nibbles]

The build suggests using poleaxe spec, this is obviously due to the crit strike % and crit strike damage % buff, im currently using shiver (mace hodir 10 HM) i assume that mace spec isnt ideal for maxemising the dps output of the build? so is it really axes or nothing as far as maxemising the damage output, maybe ill look into a frostblade hatchet (Anub Arak 10 man N/Hc) as the 2.6 speed would greatly improve the damage or a super fast speed axe like the one off lord jaxademonface (2nd boss ToC 25) in order to achieve higher numbers of special attacks? (i think its a 1.50 speed) *Edit* 1.5 speed axe is called Blood Fury

similar to the discussions AEONS ago about taking a slow weapon for tanking to improve deeps wounds i can only assume that a faster weapon would allow a greater rage gen, greater heroic strike damage accumulation. so would i be better looking for a dps weapon from ToC? as i dont have a problem being defence capped in my current gear setup.

Regards, Nibbles

***First post ***

[mistersix]

Conventional wisdom expressed earlier in this thread is that the weapon's dps was really the thing to focus on and not the weapon spec. Plenty used maces with UA spec just fine (the arp boost isn't a slouch in the tps/dps department anyway).

[Chromazone]

I used this spec on 10man Onyxia last night in case she still dropped her threat from P1 like she used to. As it turned out it didn't really matter because she's tauntable now but the increased damage over a traditional prot spec was very nice to get P3 over and done with faster.

[Darmaul]

Tried out the Unrelenting Assault build last night in Trial of Crusader and thought I'd give some feedback on it. People with experience on build may already know some of this stuff but this was my first time trying the build and I failed to grasp a couple of the nuances at first. However, I *do* think with the new emblem gear getting adequate gear to use this build is nowhere near as hard as it used to be. So I would expect others like me to try using in ToC10/25.

Beasts of Northrend
Gormok - Amazing threat per second while tanking. But felt very idle while OT was taking stacks, taunted back as soon as he'd gotten his two stacks.
Acidmaw & Dreadscale - Here's where I failed to understand something. I was on Dreadscale and when he's mobile, no problem. But when he comes up stationary all he does it fire spit so there were no revenge procs, hence no tps, hence I lost threat. So the UA tank *needs* to be on the mobile worm to have any sort of effectiveness.
Icehowl - Seemed fine but I felt rage starved a good bit, not sure what was up with that. Also, need to make sure you tank him against the wall since you don't have warbringer to charge back after knockback.

Lord Jaraxxus
I stayed on boss full time and it was *mostly* fine (never felt I was going to lose aggro), however he spends a lot of time casting instead of hitting so there were several dry spells on revenge procs that lasted longer than a shield slam & concussion blow GCD. When I do this again, I think I'll have me tank the first mistress along with boss which should help alleviate that.

Faction Champions
I didn't even try it on this encounter. Shockwave and Warbringer are (imo) to valuable to give up, especially since you could spend a LOT of time not taking any physical damage at all.

Twin Val'kyrs
Oh man... this fight ROCKED. I loved it here and I probably won't use any other build for tanking this fight. The ONLY time I had any downtime on revenge procs was when my target was casting Twin Pact and that just lasts a few seconds. I didn't even get the Empowered Darkness buff and I still did my highest dps ever as a tank (3.6k) and TPS was above 10K.

Anub'arak
I liked the UA build on this fight as well. I was on the boss and it felt mostly fine when tanking him. I did feel like I was kind of a 3rd wheel during the submerge phase with no Warbringer and just concussion blow to stun and shield bash to daze. While on the boss, there are several times you get frozen and that drops the TPS down a bit, but that's going to happen no matter what spec you are using.


Then, since we did it next I'll mention about tanking Sartharion 3d.

Sartharion - OS10 3d
We did this with full zerg mode where obviously high and fast threat is crucial and I felt like the extra dps from a UA build would be nice to have. We ended up having to do 6 attempts before we downed him because we had a couple low dps we were trying to carry. But it allowed me to try typical deep wounds build a few times and compare it to the UA build. The UA build had a couple of problems, one specifically was the long cast time of Flame breaths meant a significant amount of time with no revenge procs. This seemed to negate a lot of dps & tps benefits. Second, the way I normally position Sartharion is to just stand on the rocks perpendicular to him and in charge range and just charge in to start fight. It's still doable to charge in and change stance or just ride in on mount and dismount (which is what I did), but without a noticeable benefit in dps, it didn't seem to be worth it. In our first tries I was averaging 2k dps in UA build and 1.8k in deep wounds build. On our successful attempt I did 2.1k with deep wounds but we had brought in several melee buffs to the raid.


My two cents. I really like the build a lot, but absolutely have to know it's limitations and the biggest one is when you have periods of time that you're not taking physical damage.