Warrior self-healing

[Galefury]

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LGZhfhbbrhksbo:0LG

Would this be a viable leveling spec?
I will be running Gutbuster/Frostgiants cleaver both enchanted with blood draining.

Im going for the big quests asap as I hate grinding. So I will be dungeoning and doing group quests alot.

It provides me with tons of healing, and even more from blood draining and glyphs.

Seems really interresting.

I know weapons are gonna be replaced around 81, but I just want a really good start.

[Katzazi]

If you are doing dungeons you probably have a healer so your self-heal should not be expected there. If you are doing group quests with a group the same should apply. If you try to solo group quests it is a good idea to have a tank specc. At least in WotLK one could solo nearly every quest without any problem as a tank. That could just be your second specc for the big ones.

I do not know how the quests will look like in Cata. Since now they seldem implemented big quests without pre quests that needed some grinding. So I doubt that we will be able to level well without grinding (dungeons will help there like they did in WotLK).

Anyway, I think that all the healing stuff is best for grinding. It can drastically reduce your down time to heal your self up with food or bandages. In most cases you do not die while questing. You just wear your health down so that you need some break. Your self healing capabilities can help you there.

Tanks do not have that problem, they normally can ignore their health bar while leveling. They do not have such downtimes. But their dmg is lower so that they kill stuff slower.

[Goins2754]

I'm loving the new warrior self-healing talents. And I might say, it's about damn time! I hate the playstyle of paladin but I have been addicted to self-healing ever since I rolled my first prot paladin. Coming back to warrior is a grueling, painful process now. These new talents and abilities won't make warriors = death knights, but it's nice to have something.

Just to recap:

Last Stand + Enraged Regenration + Field Dressing + Glyph of Enraged Regenration = 75% heal every 3 min.
Victory Rush + Field Dressing = 40% heal
Field Dressing + Impending Victory = 25% heal after every Shield Slam when mob is below 20% health
Blood Craze + Field Dressing = 27.5% heal after 10% of damaging attacks

This is ridonkulous! I love it. Warriors seriously could be the new old-content solo class if Impending Victory goes live. The strat will be to get the boss to 20% and then spam your 25% heal Victory Rush every chance you get! I wish someone could test this out for me because I'm giddy over the implications!

[gacktt]

I'm loving the new warrior self-healing talents. And I might say, it's about damn time! I hate the playstyle of paladin but I have been addicted to self-healing ever since I rolled my first prot paladin. Coming back to warrior is a grueling, painful process now. These new talents and abilities won't make warriors = death knights, but it's nice to have something.

Just to recap:

Last Stand + Enraged Regenration + Field Dressing + Glyph of Enraged Regenration = 75% heal every 3 min.
Victory Rush + Field Dressing = 40% heal
Field Dressing + Impending Victory = 25% heal after every Shield Slam when mob is below 20% health
Blood Craze + Field Dressing = 27.5% heal after 10% of damaging attacks

This is ridonkulous! I love it. Warriors seriously could be the new old-content solo class if Impending Victory goes live. The strat will be to get the boss to 20% and then spam your 25% heal Victory Rush every chance you get! I wish someone could test this out for me because I'm giddy over the implications!

The 20% is multiplicative, not additive.

[Goins2754]

Can anyone in beta give some numbers for this? This is the feature I'm most excited about. I'd love to hear about how much these abilities heal for in a normal fight. Or if someone could do the math, that'd be awesome, too!

[Karnax]

I'm was level 82, geared in 251-264 gear, fury spec still with my WotLK glyphs. I have field dressing and blood craze. I never run out of health and was able to solo all the quests rather easily even in Deepholm (level 82-83 mobs, still using Shadow's Edge and Ramaladni). Without replacing much gear I was at around 50k health, so Victory rush would heal me for about 10k, plus Bloodthirst and Blood Craze which would tick almost constantly.

Enraged regen was at 30-40% a couple days ago, but when we still had the old talent trees, it was healing for 50-60% with the fury mastery. Not sure if those masteries are coming back, but it would be awesome if they do.

All in all I had no need for health regen glyphs and I'm guessing I'll need those even less once they push cloth drops and first aid on the beta.

[Goins2754]

So, I was thinking more about this today now that more information has come out & the new has worn off a little. A soloing prot warrior has 5 heals as I see it:

Last Stand + Enraged Regeneration
Victory Rush
Impending Victory + Victory Rush
Blood Craze
Second Wind

Only two of these would be worthwhile if you were trying to solo old content. I was using Gruul as an example. You won't get healed from Second Wind & you won't be using the standard Victory Rush (unless a prot warrior can somehow proc VR mid-fight). Blood Craze will be minimal healing compared to the damage that you'd be taking. The only two left are LS+ER & IV+VR. Odds are, though, if you can get a soloable boss to 20% so you can start using IV+VR, there's really no point in having it. You've already proven that you have enough self-healing to handle the fight.

So, I'm kinda bummed again. I've always dreamed of doing what paladins & DKs can do with a warrior. But it seems like it may never happen.

Now, those other abilities will make a prot warrior a terrible juggernaut in BG PvP. Using VR over and over on your dying foes will ensure that nothing short of divine intervention will kill you.

[Katzazi]

I don't get your point. Warriors will never have a self-healing like DKs and paladins. But not being able to heal themselves are / were one of the weaknesses of warriors. Warriors have other strenghes so it's interesting that we get so much tools for one of our weak spots. Every class has to have weaknesses. But the new healing tools are decent if you think at self-healing as our weak spot.

Second Wind is situational and if it heals you depends on the encounter in PVE and your enemy in PVP. But I doubt every prot warrior will have it (there are nice utility tools in fury, too). Since it depends on your enemy you have no chance to initiate it itself.

You cannot steer Blood Craze, too. But it is a chance getting dmg. If you never get dmg you don't need it and the enemey is no thread to you anyway. If you solo old content you probably get hurt by comparably low dmg per hit. So you should live long enough to get multiple small hits and those should proc Blood Craze now and then. If it procs you get 9% of your HP (assuming you have Field Dressing which you definitly should have if you are interested in (self-)healing). For old content this should be enough to counter some of the incoming dmg at least. Same for soloing actual solo content. It gets better in multi-mob situations.

Victory Rush is nice between kills, it can be used in Def Stance at the moment, which is a nice improvement. But it does not help you if you try to solo an old boss.

Last Stand + Enraged Regeneration + Field Dressing gets only better compared to what we have in WotLK. If numbers do stay as they are that's 48% of your normal life (and the temporary 30%). That's nearly half your life and 5 * Blood Craze proc.

Impending Victory + Victory Rush is not much, but it may be just the little bit you need to not die before your enemy dies. (Your example Gruul hits harder over time, so you may need the healing at the end more dearly than at the start.) That's about 6% every 4.5s at least (if you only use Devastate and IV) and more or less controllable by yourself.

Don't make the mistake to think about Blood Craze and IV-VR as only small numbers. They can happen multiple times during an encounter and add up at the end. That's unimportand against single solo mobs at your level. But for soloing old content or grinding multiple mobs (and doing bosses in PVE) that can be sum up to more than the only heal we have now LS+ER.

[Brage]

I view the IV+VR combination as a raid tool rather than a solo tool.
Raid boss.... sub-20%'ish soft enrage... we can now help the healers with the added required healing.
It's my understanding that healing will be alot less about spamming a few buttons and more reactional, centered around a few core spells. Healers won't have an abundance of "extra" heals to throw at you in this situation, which is why we got said talents.

As someone allready mentioned; if you're soloing and you successfully brought the enemy down to 20% health, there's a good chance you can go all the way aswell

[Akolon]

I think it could be a good idea, to let impending victory not work against targets below 20% health, but when YOU are below 20% health.

Something like:

"Using shield slam while you are under 20% of your maximum hitpoints has a 50/100% chance to allow the use of victory rush"

while that reduces VR Healing component could be wiped away, because this scenario would be more rarely than a boss under 20% HP but this heal could be very useful.

[Katzazi]

In a raid situations where your health bar floats up and down quite faste it's hard to hit one button when you are below 20% and know that you need to hit another button 1,5s later to heal yourself. Even when the healing is more important when you are low yourself I think it would be hard to get it working. It's another thing to just hit something when you are low (enought) but your suggestion needs two buttons with a GCD in between. (The last time I checked IV is triggered by Devastate, now.)

I see IV as a raid tool, too. Maybe it could also be good in organized PVP. However the question and the example I addressed was soloing old raid boss content. Normal VR cannot be used there but there may be the danger that you drop low before you can finish the boss with one to three strikes. If you want to do such stuff it can be usefull, too. I don't see much more usefull alternatives to spec into for soloing old content, anyway.

Before we see how everything will be balanced we cannot really tell how usefull IV will be.

[Akolon]

Well, I understood the upcoming raid environment as much less fast paced in regards of hitpoint fluctuation than it is now. I could imagine, that you will not go up and down that fast in Cata. And if you give IV a time window of some seconds, you won´t use it, as long as you shield slammed when you were under 20%.

[Katzazi]

Your health will change with every hit and every heal. The fluctuation will häve a comparable frequence. The amplitude is just less extreme. You probably will get more hits because of less avoidance but the heals may be a little bit slower sometimes because of changed healing strategies. Overall your health bar will not be stable a long time. So priming a hit at just below 20% should be hard in normal situations.

[Airowird]

The thing about IV is not the healing, it's the fact that it's 45% AP and it's FREE!! And it should do about the same damage as a Devastate.

[Kojiyama]

And since it requires the target to be below 20%, requires using Devastate to proc, cannot proc Sword and Board, and gets beat by a slow DPS weapon Devastate due to crit rate (SnB bonus) it's basically garbage.

No way I'm specing Impending Victory in its current form on live unless there is some particular boss that really, really needs unreliable healing at a massive TPS loss. :P

[mistersix]

I'm confused about the comments in this thread that imply warriors aren't great "old world solo content" types. Block mechanics in old content on live currently cause us to shine. The upcoming changes to block will have a negative impact on that but ostensibly the larger health pools and higher dps output should offset that somewhat. We're fine at soloing old stuff today and we'll be fine at it in the future too.

[Katzazi]

I'm confused about the comments in this thread that imply warriors aren't great "old world solo content" types. Block mechanics in old content on live currently cause us to shine. The upcoming changes to block will have a negative impact on that but ostensibly the larger health pools and higher dps output should offset that somewhat. We're fine at soloing old stuff today and we'll be fine at it in the future too.

The comments were not about if warriors are able to solo old stuff (they are able to solo at least most of old stuff) but if they can solo stuff other classes were at least better in soloing because they have more heals than the warriors. (I'm not sure what can be solod by whom at the moment.)

Classes are different, different classes can solo different stuff in different ways and are different efficient doing so. One of warriors weaknesses is that warriors cannto self-heal well, at the moment. The discussion is about what will be changed (for soloing old stuff) by all the new self healing options, prot warriors get with the cata.

[Mauro Rosati]

If you're soloing (questing, etc.) The self healing spec is quite good, but as someone has already said if you're in a dungeon it's supposed that you've a healer to do the job.

[Bowen]

Can you either take Sword and Board or impending victory or both but the proc each offers will only work for one :S

[Nez]

I do not have any exact numbers, but with the most of the healing talents I was able to plow though quests non-stop. Never once had to bandage or eat. I have decent gear, but I was pulling everything in sight.

Note - The quest mobs are sorta spread out, so it is fairly hard to get a big enough group to really have fun. =[ Groups of 2-4 same level mobs were about the norm. I have not done any instances yet.