[Tonypablos]

A couple of changes were made to our Fury and Arms tree that I'd like to do some mentioning. This thread's really mostly for people to talk about the changes and what you'd like to see happen. Also this would be a nice time to talk about what stats people should focus on while leveling their warriors and while raiding. Feel free to comment, but this post is long as I tend to rant and muse about a few things that these changes make. Hope you enjoy.

Source: Ghostcrawler, WotLK Developer
Arms: We are going to change Sudden Death to be based on a chance per hit and not a chance per crit. That shouldn't adversely affect their dps, but will also hopefully keep them from stacking nothing but crit. We do want to see warriors with swords and maces after all.

Fury: We are lowering the cooldown on Bloodthirst to 5 sec (from 6) and lowering the penalty on Titan's Grip to 12% (from 15%). Our hope is that with more BTs and more yellow hits connecting that the excess rage will drain away. The net dps increase will also help Fury catch up to Arms.


To the Arms change, they are trying to make it so you will use your other trees such as sword and mace and as such, are downplaying the importance of crit by change the mechanism of which Sudden Death works. Right now, it just seems that Axe spec is just absolutely amazing and that the extra damage that deep wounds is causing is astounding damage with it. By changing it to chance to hit, they are effectively reducing what people should stack: crit. It's kinda of a weird offset when the Arms tree has always been our large bursty tree. With the times that change, we're seeing more of a middle line idea that Blizzard is trying to implement: Both good for PvP and PvE?

Will this change our damage? Nah, you'll get as many procs as you would before. They didn't change that at all. But this now raises the viability of swords if it can proc off the extra attack. Granted, the sword proc was given a 6 second cooldown, but it makes the tree allow extra procs over the axe spec which just gives you crit.

Mace? I'm not sure really if you would want to go mace to be honest. On one hand, you have ArP that'll help Execute go through defenses and do more damage..on another...axe and sword are a lot more likely to do a major DPS upgrade over Axe due to ArP changes. I'm just not sure 25% ArP is as good as either. Tests will have to be done. But if the ArP is as good, you could see a viable mace spec due to it directly increasing Execute's damage.

So in the end, you either have a hard hitting Execute, more chances for Execute due to sword proc, or an all around higher execute due to armor ignore. It's trying to do it's job by normalizing all three weapon trees and it's always interesting to see.

Onwards to the Fury tree, where we were announced that BT's going down to 5 seconds and TG's penalty's down to 12%

Now, I'm going to start with TG, because it's a subject most of you know I've been doing extensive research on. TG as a whole is really weird in our Fury tree which is based on crit procs so you can keep flurry up. However haste works out at the end to be more beneficial for our sluggish two handers but if you're missing your specials, this will not allow you to even keep your upkeep time. 15% was a hefty toll on our last talent and many people, including myself, were disgrunted with it.. Huh, just had a small relevation.

Why not stack crit for Fury? If the attack table is true, and Hit will not get rid of the chance to crit, why not just take the hit and suck it up, and go with crit and str instead? It would make real bursty rage but when you got the damn rage, which I had a surplus a lot of the times with the imp berserker + bloodrage abilities, missing wouldn't be as bad. (Granted, seeing a miss on your yellows would cringe.) Crit naturally is the stat you want for flurry upkeep, and if you can crit more often, why not just work on getting the hit on the gear, and just gemming still for crit and str? More thoughts on that will have to be elaborated.

Anyway, I got off track. Blizzard decided that 15% was a lil exceesive and brought it down to 12%. It is a welcome change, that's for sure! It allows us to worry less about doing the whole hit stacking and sets us up quite nicely and in line with the gear? is 12% a lot? ..well yeah, I dislike it as much as anyone else as it's still not the way the class was designed to play...is it better than 15%? Well we'll take anything right now that's a decrease to the penalty.

Now, let's go over BT and it's one second reduction. I was noticing that people were complaining about how Bloodsurge wasn't doing as much damage. Most of you know that I'm conventionally against the old style of queuing up HS and instead weaving slams while your cooldowns were active. But lets' for a moment go with the masses who still do the whole Incite build queuing up HS. The biggest complaint right now is that Bloodsurge really doesn't do much of an impact, being around 1-3% of total damage. What people fail to realize is that by lowering the CD on BT, you're offering more chances for BS to proc as you're hitting BT much more often. Yes, it's on a RNG, which the skill no matter what is, but this should show a slight increase in damage. And again, I'm going to have to argue two things here:

1) Crit should not be ignored anymore. The core functions of the warrior class are still there and that crit is more important as it now shows up to be needed for skills to activate. This is not saying it has been ignored, but a lot of people have been pushing to put more hit and I'm still not convinced that's the best way to go due to so much of the core mechanics of the class being around our critting ratio keeping up Flurry or now proc'ing BS. Granted, not missing with your whites and yellows will always be the best DPS upgrade. I'm just not sure anymore that hit's the only stat to gem and get anymore. I guess this is where prioritizing will go Hit (till cap) > Crit > Str > ArP or something in that line.

2) TG again mystifies me in the fact that due to how slam is changed now, and the fact that TG uses the best weapon for slams, people still don't use it in their rotations nearly as often as I think it should be. Probably the core reason would be is that it stops both weapons from swinging. And in the end, the two white crits could outdo the single yellow crit Slam could produce. The better option would be to just queue up HS and have it possibly miss or crit, and then have your OH still hit. A suggestion that I had read would be to make slam hit with both weapons which would solve not only the lack of an attack that people are desperately asking for, but it would also not penalize using slam with two weapons so much. Food for thought, of course. Hell, slap a 50% oh damage penalty on it if need be to lower it, it'd still probably do more damage in the long run and may quite possibly put fury more in line with the rest of those high numbers we've seen.

Anyway, those are my thoughts and I'd be more than happy to see people talk about our new changes. As a whole, they're changes and buffs, no nerfs. But they do still not answer a couple of questions: What do you wanna prioritize? How does blizzard want us to DPS due to how Fury is crit based but our 51 point talent is hit based? What could we do with extra rage like we have?

[Rishkkin]

nice post !

I do still thank that Axe > Sword due to the rolling ticks of Deep wounds. Higher chance to crit, better uptime.

For comparison's sake I spent 2 chunks of 20 minutes beating a lvl 70 dummy in UC with my freshly copied warrior (I have a mix of S3, T5 and T 4 gear, nothing to be considered wonderful)

My first test was using [item]Singing Crystal Axe[/item] (enchanted with savagery) : I did 1199 DPS self buffed (only BS up)

My second test was done using [item]Lionheart Executioner[/item] (enchanted with Executioner) : Came up with 1249 DPS

That's a 50 DPS difference, which I can quite safely assume comes just from the huge ilvl gap of the 2 weapons.

Another interesting note : on the 1st test, I managed to get Deep Wound ticking for as much as 948 dmg, on the second, I couldn't get past 632. which leads me to believe that Axe > Sword if you want to have your Deep Wound tick very hard.

It also bring me to think, what if I Dual-Wield axes ? I guess I could crit so often that Deep Wounds would never fall off. Yes, it would start lower than using a 2-hander, but criting so often could lead to bigger ticks

[Tonypablos]

Also you would wanna use two one handers if you really wanted to optimize the Rage generation when it comes to Sudden Death. Not only would you have stronger chances for higher Execute hits due to having more rage, it wouldn't feel as spikey. It'd be an interesting test to try out instead of the two hander. The one problem with two one handers is MS is really bad with one handers.

Also, you're gonna miss out on the Dual Wield by going that deep into Arms for Sudden Death, which really hurts your offhand. Nothing like seeing about 200 damage on your OH with a damn near 100 dps weapon =/

[Kazeyonoma]

I think it's a toss up between Axe or Sword, I think reliably Axe will be better, but I think for burst (ala pvp) swords is gonna be great still, or in short duration pve situations sword will be dominating when the sword procs fire. It's not really a nerf anyways, like others have stated, chances of back to back sword procs were rare anyways.

[shiz98]

Personally, I will always prefer Sword as a spec for almost any Arms spec I use - the Rage generation is smoother. It's good to see that axes are viable now though

[Meeks]

As long as sword retain their cooldown they will never compare to axes in pve. You swing a lot more then once every 6 seconds(i think that is cooldown) so you are going to get 3 times as many chances for axe spec to "proc" then sword.

[shiz98]

Assuming a 3.0s swing speed (not out of the question with Flurry) and no lag, you can get 2 white hits and 4 yellow hits in 6s. There's a 30% chance that one of those will proc a sword hit. The chance of getting a second sword proc is 9%. I'd say Axe and Swords are fairly even in terms of DPS.

[Rishkkin]

anyone had time to try 2 1 handed axe version ?

I was out of town until this morning so didn't get the time to test it properly.