[Thundershoof]

I've noticed a lot of people have been voicing their concern over most of the new warrior talents and I think it will be fun to think up some ideas that might move the current beta talents in the right direction.

I've been thinking a lot about the new Sword and Board talent. It seems like Blizzard is trying to give us both a threat and a rage increase with the talent, but it looks like it'll be rather unreliable for burst threat and gives us one more thing to manage while tanking. I'd much rather have a passive increase to these things so I'd like to propose the following change:

Sword and Board
You generate 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% more rage from damage dealt when you have a shield equipped and increases the damage of your Devastate ability by 1%/2%/3%/4%/5%.

The first part of the talent gives the threat and damage stats on our gear a greater impact on our rage generation, allowing us to be more self-sufficient in PvP and hopefully counteracting the negative effect avoidance has when overgearing content. The numbers are arbitrary, but the idea is to bring our rage generation with a shield equipped closer to that of duel wielding without overpowering our dps when we switch roles. This may render the Stalwart Protector talent obsolete and I'm not sure what to put in its place.

The part of the talent concerning devastate is intended as a minor threat increase that is hopefully on par with what it does now, but is much more reliable and justifies the talent being linked to Devastate. It also increases our dps while duel wielding, which is in line with the current shift in Blizzard's design philosophy.

Sword and Board is also a somewhat fitting name for the talent now.

Please let me know what you all think (especially any bad repercussions this idea may have) and feel free to post other ideas on how to improve upon what you believe Blizzard is attempting to do with the Warrior talent trees in WotLK. I look forward to some interesting discussion.

[Fladre]

This is a good idea, i am very interested to hear what other people have come up with. Here are some talent ideas i came up with War Tools :: Talent tree my protection warrior dream build(work in progress). i am also interested in coming up with idea for arms and fury warrior that would give them more utility since blizzard wants every spec to be viable in a raid. but i would need ideas and opinions from others since i have spent a grand total of 3 hours as a fury warrior(never been an arms warrior)my entire time with my warrior.

>.< was to tired last night to post the rest of the stuff about my talent tree last night but i will list my ideas for some quick reading.

a talent idea i had was "defenders strike" this ability would strike up to 2-3 targets and would put a debuff on the currently selected target that would increase the damage (maybe threat also)of your next 2 attack you make by 6% this would be a good move to use right before a shield slam or revenge.

another idea i had was a modification to sword and board that would make it a passive/offensive effect. "defenders fury" when ever you block you have a % chance to gain defenders fury. my idea for this talent is that when you gain the effect every time you block you would do a mini shield slam follow up automatically (the mini shield slam would do about 1/4 the base damage of shield slam and threat also so it would not be over powered in terms of damage and threat.)

another idea i had was for Shockwave, my idea was to give shockwave a 10-15 second debuff that would increase the damage of thunderclap by an amount so that after we use shockwave thunderclap would be more effective in holding threat on multiple targets.

The defenders strike is very similar to the new paladin ability hammer of the righteous but hey blizzard gave them our shield slam ability and made it better so i do not see the harm in taking one of there abilities and making it a tad better so i hope i do not get bashed for this >.<. but anyways the abilities i came up with help ease the strain of ae tanking(and carpel tunnel) on us alot, but i also factored that ae tanking is the paladin unique so my goal is to have the talents be good but not paladin good.

[Jasra]

It seems to me that is the devs want shield blocking to be done intelligently instead of automatically on a rotation, with a 20/30 second cooldown the only sensible thing is to have the active version block one entire hit regardless of size. You would still use it automatically against trash and fast hitters, but it would make a good mini-emergency button against very slow hard-hitting bosses. Good enough that you might just hold it in reserve for a bad string like a proper emergency button - and therefore partially satisfy the "block intelligently, not automatically" design goal.

I'm not crazy about the idea of our niche being defined more and more narrowly at each expansion, but this would at least do something productive with the active shield block. Personally, I think the "block intelligently" paradigm is a questionable goal since it implies blocking for spike damage only, and therefore not really being part of our average toughness.

To give our "average toughness" a boost, if we're supposed to be "the mitigation tank", our passive blocks need to be unique in a meaningful way relative to paladin blocks (right now it's only a token and ineffective way). They have a very high number of blocks, ours should actually scale as a function of SBV/x%, whichever is greater. That way blocks can have a minimum value for trash, and a scaling value for the bigger hits. However, I think in such a case the shield specialization talent needs a far bigger passive bonus (maybe 30% instead of 5%? I'm not sure what's the magic number) so we're not simply trading old problems with paladins and burning far too many itemization points on block rating. That would actually make it worth the five points as right now I just can't see it justify itself at all.

[TomHuxley]

How about a simple increase to Toughness and Vitality? If we are going to be the best single-melee target tanks, then buff our armor bu say 12 or 14% rather than 10.

Especially Vitality should be buffed; others have pointed out how the removal of crushing blows has taken away our mitigation advantager over druids, but druids still have a higher stam scaler. Why not let vitality make a more substantial increase to our overall stamina (making it a deep prot talent won't OP arms and fury warriors)?

It seems like one or the other will need to apply, otherwise this stupid homogenization of gear itemization is going to give warriors the shaft relative to the other tanking classes.

[Fladre]

Jasra i am also very interested in the direction they are taking shield block and how it will effect our mitigation. I really like the idea of block being used on boss that have the one move that is usually a tank killer and blocking it fully or a very signifigant amount this would make tanking alot more interesting(but i hope not frustrating). I also agree that with the way things are looking that our passive block should definetly be pumped up a bit, well i hope the dev's on the beta forums give us some heads up on the beta forums about changes in regards to warriors when they start our "polish".

[protonly]

It would be cool if critical block would in addition to current ability increase your SBV by x% (10%?) for like 5/10 seconds [with no internal cooldown or restrictions].

Just get rid of Vigilance. Replace it with anything...like improved Shield Slam which doubles your shield slam amount and/or reduces the cooldown on the ability by x seconds. Since Shield Slam is they king of warrior tanking abilities it would only be logical for deep prot to have something to kick it up a notch since all wars can have it now.

Just get rid of Safeguard. Replace it with anything...like incrases healing done to you by x% percent. Safeguard is worthless as it is.

Give tactical mastery a threat boost to at least ONE pure protection/defensive talent (like devistate) even if it is minimal.

[Gellor]

I'm not a big fan, that our 51 point talent is something that allows us to AoE tank with a lot less facility than a Prot pally. Give us a new 51 point talent aimed at boss tanking and move Shockwave to where SS used to be and dump vigilance.

We also need a talent that gives us expertise since defiance got removed, every other tanking tree for other classes has them. I think adding expertise to Improved Defensive stance could be a quick and easy solution.

Also Improved Thunderclap and Tactical mastery should swap places, the reason for the TM swap is entirely moot now with the advent of WotLK, and Imp TC is also one of the best tanking talents ingame so it makes sense thematically to put it in the prot tree.

Sword and Board also needs a radical reworking, as is for a 5 point talent investment that deep in the tree its very underwhelming. You get more rage per minute from anger management for 1 point, and the threat gain is marginal at best.

Incite is a very nice talent, although i think it should affect SS as well as the other abilities, then it would go from good to great IMO.

Vitality needs to go from 5% stamina to 10%, else the gap between paladins and warriors health is going ot be extreme seeing as we will pretty much be using the same gear.

Safeguard is a strange talent, it doesn't provide us with anything, it increases the survivability of someone else, not sure what Blizz is trying to do with this talent to be honest. Feel's like more of a pvp talent to be honest and could definitely see it being useful in deep arms rather than prot. I'd even go as far as to say make it a base skill for all warriors, but make it a 2 point talent to improve it be in deep arms. Not sure what i;d put there in its place to be honest.

An idea i came up with is Vaunted Defence - 45 second CD, duration 15 seconds, every dodge/parry/block increases our armour by 5% up to a maximum of 25%.

For our 51 point talent I've only got a vague notion of a talent. I got a cool name, Nemesis I'm thinking something like a 30 second CD, 6 second duration where all abilities cause a significant amount more threat and damage (amount to be determined), and only works against the target you have selected when activated.

[Thundershoof]

Safeguard is a PvP talent, I have no doubts about that. I like it a lot though, since being able to break out of snares and roots to intervene/intercept may be useful in some future encounters. Also, the damage reduction portion gives us some nice off-tank/dps utility. I think it's very fitting and powerful in the prot tree and would probably be overly powerful if put into arms or fury.

I think it would be awesome if Incite effected Devastate. That way it helps our threat and our dps by a ton. (Wait, it already does that because it effects HS...) We already have a lot of talents to augment SS, I'd like to see other abilities we use frequently get buffed instead.

Protonly, I really dislike the idea of having a talent boost just the threat of an ability, especially Devastate since it's also our main dps ability for when we aren't tanking. I much prefer damage increases. However, how about something like this?

Tactical Mastery
You retain up to an additional 5/10/15 rage when you change stances and when you leave Defensive Stance you take 4%/7%/10% less damage for 5 seconds. (does not stack with Defensive Stance) Also greatly increases the threat generated by your Bloodthirst and Mortal Strike abilities when you are in Defensive Stance.

This way the talent makes stance-dancing fears less risky and adds some interesting PvP synergy with the other trees. It's not huge, but it gives us more reason to consider taking it.

On the subject of Blocking. I really don't know what Blizzard can do to fix the problem. Paladins are the only tanks that had a reason to want block rating, but now that crushes are being removed they no longer need it on their gear since they have a ton of talents to increase it. It's their worst mitigation and threat stat now and its even less useful to us since it doesn't even give us threat. I like Gellor's idea of Vaunted Defence for this since if you make it only stack up on blocks it gives us a reason to like the stat, but I don't want another "oh crap button" as a talent. I also don't like the critical block talent very much.

Perhaps if we combine the two...and make it a 10%/20%/30% chance on block to increase our Block Value by 50% and armor by 10%, lasts 10 seconds? This way if you're lucky you can get two SS with 150% BV and a better mitigation increase over time than the current talent.

[ebs2002]

Paladins are the only tanks that had a reason to want block rating, but now that crushes are being removed they no longer need it on their gear since they have a ton of talents to increase it.

Not to hijack, but I don't think that's entirely true. I'm pretty sure that block rating and block value for a paladin are important for AE tanking; blocks = threat for them, sorta like having a shield spike.

On the subject of blocking for a warrior, I think that block rating will be much more popular now that we're not spamming it. A block rating increase of 5% would essentially be like having a talent or item proc that says: "Every time an attack would hit you, you have a 5% chance of decreasing the damage taken by 600" or something like that. While that may not sound that impressive, rewording it again to say "Every time Boss_who_hits_for_6k attacks you, you have a 5% chance to reduce incoming damage by 10%". Overall damage reduction: 5% of 10% = 1/2%, which isn't much, but it has potential.

I'd like to see more done with shield-blocking, to make sbr more valuable as a stat, and I think that critical block is a good place to start. Increase block value by 100% for 5 seconds, or increase blocked damage (as written) and increase your armor for 5seconds, or increase your strength 10% for 5seconds, that sort of thing

[Thundershoof]

You have a good point. The fact that SBR is a threat stat for paladins and helps them in their niche role makes it more useful to them. On the other hand, their Redoubt talent makes the usefulness of the stat on gear questionable as any time it procs while Holy Shield is up they're likely to push hits off the table anyway as long as they have at least 42.6% passive dodge/block/parry/missed. Although Redoubt does proc less the more avoidance a paladin has and is an unreliable proc when not AoE tanking I expect it causes SBR to have steeply diminishing returns once they reach that gear level.

With the Shield Block change for warriors I expect SBR to be a much better stat for us than it used to be. It can no longer only be seen as an unreliable chance to avoid crushing blows when we lose our shield block charges, so we can now evaluate it based on its actual mitigation value as compared to other survivability stats. Unfortunately it comes up kinda short when you compare it to dodge or parry, but if it had a threat component for us it would definately be worth having on our gear.

If the current Critical Block talent actually works in a way that allows us to use that extra SBV for our Shield Slams it'd be just the talent we need to make SBR on par with other tanking stats. The way it's written doesn't seem to lend itself to that purpose and is why I made my suggestions I did.