Five Talents You'll Wish You Could Have

[Lobo]

Has Devastate been fixed in this build?

[Ciderhelm]

Yes. On the other hand I can put 3 points in Deep Wounds. Or take Charge, Vigilance and Concussion Blow. Or Safeguard. Or Improved Disarm or Revenge.

Old Impale builds wasted points on filler like Deep Wounds. The new Impale frees us from that and allows us to take Justified Killing and/or a much better Deep Wounds talent. Admittedly, I currently use Improved Demo Shout and I am reluctant to give it up.

Why would you take other points?

Simply saying you can take other points doesn't help. I can take points from any talent at all and put it into the utility talents; I choose not to.

Cruelty would still, point for point, provide better returns in far more situations than Charge, Safeguard, Concussion Blow or Vigilance. Even if Impale and Deep Wounds turned out to be wonderful, that would only make finding room to get utility talents worse, not better.

[veneretio]

Last night, Kavtor and I were chatting over these changes and one thing that came to mind was... why Devastate?

IF weapon throw is 100% AP and Shockwave is worth it and you're Shield Slamming and you're using Revenge ... when do you get to Devastate? Or more to the point, do you have to? Can we consider a spec without SnB? Without Devastate and Puncture?

I know you love SnB Cider so you're going to think this is insane, but with so many abilities to use instead of Devastate and what looks to be SnB only procing off Devastate. Is SnB worth it once we aren't farming?

[Ciderhelm]

Last night, Kavtor and I were chatting over these changes and one thing that came to mind was... why Devastate?

IF weapon throw is 100% AP and Shockwave is worth it and you're Shield Slamming and you're using Revenge ... when do you get to Devastate? Or more to the point, do you have to? Can we consider a spec without SnB? Without Devastate and Puncture?

I know you love SnB Cider so you're going to think this is insane, but with so many abilities to use instead of Devastate and what looks to be SnB only procing off Devastate. Is SnB worth it once we aren't farming?

Nevermind that we have no idea how much Threat will be gained on Weapon Throw and Shockwave: Two abilities you can use, at most, 3 times a minute don't replace Devastate.

[Arold]

Nevermind that we have no idea how much Threat will be gained on Weapon Throw and Shockwave: Two abilities you can use, at most, 3 times a minute don't replace Devastate.

What about dropping Devastate for more Heroic Strikes? The old arguments on this were way before my time, but now that we'll have +15% crit on it (plus cruelty) and can easily obtain Impale, might it be worth a try use SS and Revenge only, hitting TC and that new AoE Bleed and Throw Weapon and Shockwave a lot, maxing out improved Heroic Strike and hoping for a lot of crits on it?

I'm not advocating this idea (I'm not in beta and I'm way too n00b anyway), just wondering what you gurus think.

[veneretio]

What about dropping Devastate for more Heroic Strikes? The old arguments on this were way before my time, but now that we'll have +15% crit on it (plus cruelty) and can easily obtain Impale, might it be worth a try use SS and Revenge only, hitting TC and that new AoE Bleed and Throw Weapon and Shockwave a lot, maxing out improved Heroic Strike and hoping for a lot of crits on it?

I'm not advocating this idea (I'm not in beta and I'm way too n00b anyway), just wondering what you gurus think.

This may have been their worry and why SnB is now 15% because 15% crit on HS doesn't seem like it'll translate to more threat than a 15% chance of Devastate adding a free Shield Slam. (who knows 10% might have... but that's not the case anymore)

Cider's right though. I was thinking too short term and getting overwhelmed with all the choices in the first 10 seconds of the fight... they won't be up for the next 10 seconds of the fight after that unfortunately. Those gaps are where Devastate will be sure to out pace other routes in the long run.

[Aldragoriad]

One thing I notice nobody is taking into account on SnB is the fact that this isn't a free SS. You're still replacing a GCD with it, which means a Dev or a Rev so you aren't getting the full benefit out of it, not including the occasions when you're replacing a SS itself when the RNG comes up just right, and just benefiting from the rage savings. I still really don't like this as a 5 point talent, I honestly believe it needs to be a tier 10 single point talent linked to Dev.

[Kavtor]

I'm still not sure how useful it is too invest a lot of time and thought into the new talents. It's exciting to see Blizzard's new ideas, but on the other hand, we very well could be just looking at the middle of a number of changes, and our thoughts are irrelevant, but I can't resist! :P

In my conversations with Venny I'm not saying Devastate is obsolete, just that puncture and sword and board become more optional talents. Which isn't nessisarily a bad thing.

Five cycles of four GCD's every 30 seconds.
Assuming Shield slam and revenge every cycle.
Worst case with buffs, assuming the new talents are -really- high threat like they're advertised, you're doing Demo, thunderclap, shockwave, weapon throw, and conc blow every cycle. (ignoring a shout every two minutes)

So you're using 5 devastates every 30 seconds. Which isn't a bad thing, it's still a great ability. But I'm not sure if Sword and Board is going to wind up to be much of a threat increase (since the tool tip right now has it only procing off devastate, unless it's still procing off shield slam). On the other hand, it's pretty easy for the designers to sit down with what ever the optimal threat rotation is supposed to be and tweak the numbers to where they want them.

I'd love to see the threat modification taken off devastate, and allow it to do full weapon damage plus what ever appropriate bonus. On the condition that a shield is equipped in the offhand. I enjoy the fury style dual wield devastate on live, but if I'm going to put so many talents into buffing shields, and shield slams, I'd like to see them re-balance things such that a protection warrior is encouraged to use a shield at all times, and is better off for it. That's if I've got enough rage to be effective while not tanking, or being hit. It seems a lot of the fun talents like Imp. Def stance and the proc on critical block won't be active if I'm DPSing, or trying to do some casual PVP. It'd be nice if the talents were reworked to be more widely active, rather than giving us buffs only to tanking.

Shield slam gets tons of buffs, but is it enough to forgo dual wield devastate DPS? Would we have the rage, while swinging just a single one handed weapon to put out reasonable damage (and PVP utility?)

The prot tree is going to be good at tanking. It has to be. But it would be nice if some of the new talents made it easier for a prot warrior in other aspects of the game as well as tanking.

I'm really not sure what the charge talent is all about, but it seems so silly that I'm assuming it's a mistakenly included place holder. I'm still very unenthusiastic about Vigilance though. Since the talent was modified in this patch, I'm assuming they are actually serious about it. But either I can do enough threat to be a viable tank, or I can't. Being able to give a 10% reduction to one of my DPS (and only one, what happens if I've got two good warlocks? one can't attack?) doesn't seem to meet the ideal of making every one able to tank. 10% is huge chunk of threat. As for the taunt refresh, is that so I can taunt mobs off an AOEer? I would hope that I had the abilities to actively tank a number of mobs, rather than needing a fast refreshing taunt to keep clothies alive.

And again, it's a talent that isn't useful in a lot of aspects of the game. 5% dodge to a healer is OK in PVP, but only against melee classes, and the taunt refresh is useless. And it has no benefit to a warrior who's questing alone. I still don't have a reason to convince people that they should try to kill the the guy that can spell reflect wearing plate rather than the guy in the dress in PVP. And until that happens, a prot warrior stays an after thought. Mildly annoying, and you just kill him last.

There are things that vigilance can be really good for, but looking at the game as a whole, it doesn't seem to be an especially exciting or useful talent.

95% of my play time is raid tanking, so if they just buff the tanking aspects, I'm fine with that. I can respec for arenas. But if they want to increase arms and fury's ability to tank (and fury's ability to PVP) hopefully they've still got a lot of plans in the pipeline for the prot tree to help it out across the board, rather than abilities that only help tanking.

[SoaD!]

Yes, it is true that revenge has very high innate threat for its rage cost, but it also deals additional threat based off of the damage just like any other ability would, I guess that is the point I'm trying to make. I've seen revenge crits before for nearly 1k, and that will only improve with gear now that it scales with attack power. Would you rather have say full cruelty for a 5% crit gain or 3 points in cruelty for a 3% crit gain and 2 points in improved revenge for a 20% damage bonus to revenge that also applies to crits. I personally think the choice is pretty easy, but different strokes for different folks I guess.

It's a matter of synergy. If you replace Revenge by Devastate in a normal situation of tanking (good rage generation), you have more chance to proc SnB.
But Revenge is particularly useful in low rage situations.
And so, is like Vigilance / Puncture. We do a choice now, that has to be confirmed with real nulmbers in real situations.

I think these four orientations are justified currently. Tests will say the true in different situations. Anyway, I don't think doing any of these builds change a tanking from a good TPS to the worst TPS.

[Ciderhelm]

SoaD, you bring up something I was going to look at once I get time to play with numbers. In high rage situations, will it make more sense to always use Devastate for the chance to proc?

[Machus]

Regarding rotations, I doubt we can conclude anything at this stage by reasoning about the talents from their descriptions. When WLK goes live and we reach 80, some optimal rotation will emerge. Or maybe it won't and that would be better. If the aim is to have less of a fixed rotation and more on-the-fly use of abilities in response to the situation, that will make tanking more fun in my view.

The best I can divine about the intent of Vigilance is that it's a talent to make DPS warriors, paladins, and shamans, more desirable in PuGs. These are currently unpopular because of perceived threat issues and lack of something like CC to help the tank. Put Vigilance on one of these and you have synergy with the tank.

Vigilance is the wrong design to help ranged DPS, even if they're a moonkin or shaman, because by the time the mob hits them the ability you want to use is Intervene. If it was me I'd design a 31-point talent like this:

Guardian: Reduces the minimum range of your Intervene ability by 4/8 yards and reduces the cooldown by 10/20 sec. In addition when you are attacked as a result of intervening, your taunt cooldown is refreshed.

[Armstrong]

I have to say that Impale has becomes VERY attractive now with 15% more crit on SS and Heroic Strike and no Deep Wounds requirement.

At the moment I'm thinking that if (big if) it turns out that the raid content doesn't make Shockwave a "must-have" talent and Sword & Board no longer reduces the cooldown on Shield Slam, freeing up those 6 points allows for picking up both Impale and Justified Killing.

Basically when you're looking at a 25% crit chance on SS and HS, it doesn't make any sense not to pick up Impale.



"Sans-Shockwave" threat / rage efficiency build:

3/3 Imp. Heroic Strike
5/5 Deflection
1/3 Iron Will (could also be 1/2 Imp. Charge I suppose)
3/3 Imp. Thunderclap
1/1 Anger Management
2/2 Impale
2/2 Justified Killing

5/5 Cruelty

5/5 Shield Specialization
3/3 Incite
5/5 Anticipation
1/1 Last Stand
2/2 Imp. Shield Block
5/5 Toughness
2/2 Puncture
2/2 Imp. Shield Wall
2/2 Imp. Shield Bash
3/3 Shield Mastery
5/5 1H Weapon Specialization
2/2 Imp. Defensive Stance
3/3 Focused rage
5/5 Vitality
1/1 Devastate
3/3 Critical Block

[Lore]

Since you're all talking about Justified Killing a bit, I'm going to be the annoying Paladin that pops into a Warrior thread and point out that the new Blessing of Sanctuary (21-point Protection talent) is absolutely broken for Warrior tanks. 10 rage every time you dodge, parry, or block, in addition to 3% reduced damage intake. It doesn't appear to have any internal cooldown either, though I can't get on beta at the moment to check. (EDIT: Maintankadin says there is no GCD, with video footage)

It's really good for Death Knights as well. In fact, I'd say Prot Paladins benefit the least out of all the tanking classes from their own blessing.

[Urhan]

Wow. That's a good couple of hundred extra rage a minute. I can't see them leaving it at 10 rage per, though.

[AnvilDK]

Is it just me or are we getting some sick stacking talents?

If we look at shield slam.

First of all it scales well with strenght so Vitality helps 10% more block value.

Then there is shield mastery that gives us 30% more shield block value ontop.

Then there is Improved shield bash 10% more damage to shield slam.

Then there is the classic old 1H sword specialization that gives us 10% more damage.

Improved defensive stance gives us another 10% damage every time we block parry dodge.

Critical block gives us 15% crit chance extra on Shield slam.

Sword and Board gives us free shield slams more often then every 6 seconds.

Then there are the situational

Improved Disarm 10% more damage

Shield Block 100% higher block value.

If all these things stack we are looking at some sickening shield slam hits. Not very often but should be fun to get all the things to happen.

The new shield block apparently lasts 10 seconds but does it still block only one attack ?? I am really curious since I read somewhere they wanted it to act like a mini shield wall.

The new charge sounds yummy and quite powerfull compared to what the other talent specs have. Charge every 15 seconds (In combat). With improved charge thats 25 rage in very mobile combat. Charge someone in pvp stun em. Intervene back to your healer and then intercept to that annoying hunter thats unloading un the priest stunning him and showing him the errors of his ways.

Can not wait to learn the pvp game as protection spec.

[Ciderhelm]

Current Shield Block lasts 10 full seconds and does not expire.

[Pitbully]

I specced Prot last night on the beta realm and played with the new talents a bit. Shield Slams are absolutely ridiculous now. My high last night was 3971, they probably averaged around 24-2800, (crits) with ALOT over 3k. This is in mostly T6 lvl gear, WITHOUT stacking SBV, just my normal tank gear. Rage generation is still complete ass, (probably having something to do with me tanking lvl 72-73 elite mobs though, I'm lvl 73 on my warrior). Imp defensive stance is still broke and the Sword and Board talnet seems to have been nerfed. Since last patch, it dosen't seem to proc nearly as often as it did before. Critial Block seems to be broken as well. I had around 600 SBV and the highest block I saw with it up was 800, not nearly double, like the talnet says.

[Scargoth]

Critial Block seems to be broken as well. I had around 600 SBV and the highest block I saw with it up was 800, not nearly double, like the talnet says.

I wonder if this is the same issue we saw with the SBV meta gem where the multiplier is being applied to your base value instead of the full talented value. If so, then that kinda sucks

[Pitbully]

I wonder if this is the same issue we saw with the SBV meta gem where the multiplier is being applied to your base value instead of the full talented value. If so, then that kinda sucks

The gem has actually been nerfed on Beta. Its at 5% on beta, instead of the 10% on live...

[Schleppy]

We don't know whether the latest build is the more-finalized Protection build Blizzard has been talking about or whether it's still in progress. It's better to be safe and make our concerns known rather than wait without giving feedback.

My biggest concern? If the current build goes live, you will never see the following talents in common Protection builds:

Safeguard, Charge (Protection), Concussion Blow/Vigilance, and Justified Killing.

I must be missing something here, these listed talents all look like heroic/pvp/10 man talents with the exception of justified killing, why would a raid tank still want these? Charge seems to be a pvp talent not a raiding talent (unless they are removing BoF and I missed it) same goes for safeguard. I mean, no fury warrior will complain that furious attacks is worthless in pve because it's an obvious pvp talent, why should the obvious pvp talents in prot be treated any differently? Vigilance is a 5 man talent, and admittedly underwhelming at it stands but it works to help a warrior run with a rogue/enh shammy/huntard/ret pally. Conc blow is a 5 man/trash/pvp talent until bosses can be stunned by it, always has been, always will be. Justified killing is the only talent that hurts not being able to get as even with a 15% parry chance you are still missing out on a decent amount of rage every minute just fighting a boss.

Of those five talents, four of them are new in Wrath of the Lich King. Justified Killing is particularly painful to lose. Those talents are dedicated tanking talents, nevermind the bonuses tanks might receive from other talents they also can't reach such as Anger Management, Impale, and Improved Charge.

Why not? Because there are more than five points too many spent in non-utility talents that will affect us at every point of progression, from solo'ing to 5-mans to 25-man raiding. Even if this were gutted a bit in Protection, too many points would be at the bottom end of the tree, which would still prevent Justified Killing.

The plus side is that the rest of our talents are just that good. Hopefully some will become even better. To get a quick overview of which talents I'm referring to:

some of the prot talents need to be whittled down, I would like to give a few suggestions about that below added after the talent you listed.

Arms (11)
Improved Heroic Strike
Deflection
Improved Thunderclap- Like to see this become a 2 point talent giving the same bonus it gives as a 3 point talent.

Fury (5)
Cruelty- Tough to say how much of a "must have" talent this is, that will depend on how our threat scales, but currently I cant dispute it's "must have" status.

Protection (55)
Shield Specialization
Incite
Anticipation
Last Stand
Improved Shield Block- Make this a 1 point talent again, more wasted points...
Toughness
Puncture
Improved Shield Wall
Improved Shield Bash-Another lackluster talent they made good simply by adding a bonus to shield slam to, it's a recurring theme in the prot tree, and I hate that theme. Seperate the SS bonuses from these crappy talents so they aren't "must haves".
Shield Mastery
One-Handed Weapon Specialization- This needs to be adjusted to a 2 point talent that gives the same bonus 5 points currently gives. This talent alone accounts for a decent percentage of the bloat in our tree.
Improved Defensive Stance
Focused Rage
Vitality
Devastate
Critical Block- Another SS talent, with our ability to keep shield block up constantly again, would this talent be worth getting if not for the 15% bonus to crit with SS? Doubtfull. The 30% chance to block double damage is just a talent to induce overhealing since it is controlled by the RNG.
Sword and Board
Shockwave- I'm not sold on this as a must have talent for 25 man raiding unless you don't run with a prot pally. This is a "if you dont have a prot pally" 51 point talent. How about instead of giving us talents to make up for the chance we dont have a prot pally, you stop making fights with 5-8 pulls of mobs that can't be CC'ed. That makes more sense since they seem to be giving prot pallys most of our core abilities. This just in, we only want to AoE tank like prot pallys because we are resigned to the fact that blizzard takes the easy-mode of instance design by equating difficulty of an encounter to how many mobs we have to kill.

While we can theorycraft and talk about the neat situations where these utility talents we won't have room for might be useful, the situation is the same. All of the above talents help us everywhere in every situation, and that's good, but the utility talents we're getting are going to get lost the moment players min/max their builds.

This tank wants more active mitigation talents along the lines of shield block, last stand, shield wall. I also want SS talents to be unlinked from the otherwise lackluster talents. I want proc chance talents to be unlinked to damage increasing talents (see imp revenge). I want instance design to be about "how challenging can we make this fight with game mechanics"? And not "how many mobs can we add to this fight to make it challenging"?