What builds do prot wars like so far?

[Bigbad]

I did some calculations between 2/3 and 3/3 incite and got to about 7,2%-7,8% damage increase on HS depending on crit. Correct me if i made any mistakes but it seems better then war academy.

Raidbuffed i have 9% crit (including battleshout/kings and +5% crit buff) rounding this up to 10% to make it easier. Average HS hit=5k average HS crit=10k. Grabbed those numbers from my latest WoL and rounded them a little to make it easier.

2/3 incite no hold the line, 20% HS crit: 15HS will have 3 crits and 2 free crits, total 12 hits 5 crits 51 secs, 110kdamage/51secs=2,16k dps
3/3 incite no hold the line, 25% HS crit: 4HS will have 1 crit and 1 free crit, total 3 hits 2 crits 15 secs, 35kdamage/15secs=2,33k dps
2,33/2,16=1,078 so a 7,8% damage increase

2/3 incite with hold the line, 30% HS crit: 10HS will have 3 crits and 2 free crits, total 7 hits 5 crits 35 secs, 85kdamage/35 secs=2,36k dps
3/3 incite with hold the line, 35% HS crit: 20HS will have 7 crits and 7 free crits, total 13 hits 14 crits 81 secs, 205kdamage/81 secs=2,53k dps
2,53/2,36=1,072 so a 7,2% damage increase

Edit:Misses will hit the incite procs twice since its a 2roll system, but the numbers are correct assuming no misses.

[Katzazi]

I don't understand all the discussion about Incite vs War Academy. Because most prot warriors will never have to make a decision between those two.

If you want to go for HS increased threat you probably take 2/3 Incite with your first 5 points in prot. It's easy to use another point out of the 26 remaining points that you have to put into prot to get to 3/3.

You only can take War Academy with your last 5 points (speaking about a lvl80 build). So you have to compare it to everything else that you may chose with this points. You can use those 5 points to get your self-healing. Those are two of the few survivability talents we actually can take. So most (raiding) prot warriors don't want to use the points for anything else.

I doubt anybody out there would ever consider to spend 2/3 additional points into Incite if they did not take the talent with the first 31 prot-points. So basically you either have already Incite after spending 31points into prot or you will not spend any points to get it.

So Incite competes with Blood and Thunder or any utility talent out of prot, and War Academy with Cruelty, Field Dressing / Bloodcraze and Blitz.

As soon as you get more points to spend, it's more about if you want to reach anything in the second tiers of arms and fury. If you are interested in Piercing Howl or Rude Interruption you probably don't take War Academy. If you want to get Second Wind you have to make a decision between War Academy and Blitz.

[Sapphidia]

I've actually changed my mind on Blood and Thunder - they buffed Rend in the recent hotfix.

I'm seeing about 750 damage rend ticks, which can crit, which is actually MORE than my thunderclaps tend to hit for. Rend does 6 ticks of that (one is dealt on the initial swing), making it almost twice as much damage per rage as Devastate (and definitely more damage per global cooldown) on single targets. Probably less threat though due to Devastate's high threat sunder component.

That said, I'm finding that Blood and Thunder has made a HUGE difference to my AOE capability, it feels like the talent doubled my aoe aggro. I'm definitely keeping it now - the one GCD to apply rend after a charge doesnt seem as bad as it used to considering the TC you do after it hits basically twice as hard. This build (with thunderstruck) definitely points at using both the Resonating Power and Thunderclap range glyphs (and cleaving probably).

I doubt it's a threat boost to keep Rend up via 15 second thunderclaps on a boss instead of 30 for the debuff but it feels like it could well be a damage boost.

It seems to me that this recent Rend buff now gives us two primary builds : an AOE build that takes 2/2 BnT, 2/2 Thunderstruck and probably 3/3 war academy for maximum cleaveness, and one which takes 2/3 incite and either maxes out incite/shield spec or grabs impending victory or somesuch.

One extra thing to throw into the mix: at 85 I'm considering going 7 Arms for Second Wind. It always felt to me that being Stunned (and thus losing all our avoidance) is the major time when a warrior is in risk of death, and this talent helps that, as well as giving us random boosts of self healing and extra rage on various encounters.

It would mean dropping 2/2 Cruelty but in a build that's focussed on Survivability over threat, 2/2 Second wind really feels like a much better choice (despite it being useless on encounters which have no stun/immobilise mechanics). We'll have to see what Cataclysm bosses do, but I can certainly see second wind being an absolute godsend on trash as there's bound to be snares/stuns all over the place.

Perhaps Second Wind is the best choice for Blood/Thunderstruck AOE builds and Cruelty the best option for single target boss builds.

[Kojiyama]

One thing to keep in mind is that it's really unlikely that all of the hotfix adjustments on live will actually translate to release Cataclysm. It was obviously a very quick across-the-board tweak-up for level 80 DPS deficits on live.

[swelt]

One extra thing to throw into the mix: at 85 I'm considering going 7 Arms for Second Wind. It always felt to me that being Stunned (and thus losing all our avoidance) is the major time when a warrior is in risk of death, and this talent helps that, as well as giving us random boosts of self healing and extra rage on various encounters.

I think there are a bunch of interesting choices to be made at 85 in those last 10 points, but that it almost all depends on content. If there are lots of times when you are getting stunned (or just a few but very critical ones) then second wind would be great... if not, it's a waste. Piercing howl is an awesome ability in certain situations (the ability to assert some control without damaging or holding threat on a target) but if we aren't in those situations, it might not be worth going 5 into fury. I expect to go through a variety of different variants in the early 85 end game, tuning those floating talents first to suit the heroic and then raid encounters.

[icantfindone]

Blood Craze and Cruelty on their own are worth the 5 points in Fury, and I imagine most prot warriors are going to spec 5 points into those 2 talents anyways. Piercing Howl in that case is pretty much a freebie.

[Airowird]

I did some calculations between 2/3 and 3/3 incite and got to about 7,2%-7,8% damage increase on HS depending on crit. Correct me if i made any mistakes but it seems better then war academy.

Raidbuffed i have 9% crit (including battleshout/kings and +5% crit buff) rounding this up to 10% to make it easier. Average HS hit=5k average HS crit=10k. Grabbed those numbers from my latest WoL and rounded them a little to make it easier.

Here is how I did the math:
1) Assume you HS atleast once ever 5s
2) Get your chance to connect (=100% - miss, parry & dodge on the boss), call this Conn
3) Get your 'normal' crit chance = Crit

The chance to crit on a HS connect is based on 2 parts:
1) Crit
2) Incite proc

Thus the total chance per connect to crit is those 2 together or ...
1) Crit
+
2) (1 - Crit) * ( Conn * Crit) * 50%

(2) exlpained:
(1 - Crit) chance you don't crit anyway, 'wasting' the Incite buff
(Conn * Crit) chance your previous one was a crit
50% is the odds you are in Incite CD

With 10% crit and say ... 85% chance to connect your total is:
Crit + (1 - Crit) * ( Conn * Crit) * 50% * Incite_chance

2/3 Incite: 20% + 80% * 85% * 20% * 50% * 66% = 24,49%
3/3 Incite: 25% + 75% * 85% * 25% * 50% * 100% = 32,97%

3rd Incite point gain is 6,813% over the previous one.
First point in WA is 5% gain.

Remember:
If 10% crit = average connect is worth 110% of your hit dmg.
Adding 5% to that is not a 5% increase, it's a 115/110 increase, which is only 4.545%
So the more crit you have, the less useful Incite becomes.
Not to mention that the gain from Incite is relative to (1-crit chance) so the more crit you have, the less crit chance overall you get. (Absurd example: if you have 99% crit chance, Incite will give less than 0,5% crit overall)

Edit: Made a mistake, 2/3 Incite should be lower, making Incite actually worth it over War Academy! (Thanks to Bigbad for pointing it out)

[Bigbad]

Took me while to get through your math Wartotem since you do it in a completely other way. I didn't take into account that an incite proc would replace a crit that would happen otherwise but i don't think it is relevant since it will replace hits as well with the average between hits and crits being the crit percentage of HS.
To put it another way if you have a string of hits/crits and you remove random points in that string, the string and the string with gaps should have the same crit percentage on average provided your string is long enough. Incite procs will give extra crits while leaving the rest of the string at the base crit percentage.
Not completely sure about factoring in miss percentage but doesn't 1% miss result in 1% less dps regardless of 2/3 or 3/3 incite? Or does miss just push hits of the combat table?
Think you missed that 2/3 incite only has a 66% chance to proc. The 50% odds to be in incite look strange to me as well as applying 85% hitchance to the incite procs but not regular critchance.

[Airowird]

The point is that if you would've crit anyway, the Incite buff didn't do anything.
The miss percentage is there because of how 2-roll tables work. If your HS can't connect, it cannot crit, thus it cannot proc Incite.

50% is the chance you're inside the ICD of Incite (this event can not occur more than once every 6 seconds). Basicly it makes 'sure' that you the HS after your Incite HS only has regular crit chance.
85% is the connect chance.

I'll edit the 66% in, it seems I forgot it indeed.

[Kurtosis]

2/3 incite with hold the line, 30% HS crit: 10HS will have 3 crits and 2 free crits, total 7 hits 5 crits 35 secs, 85kdamage/35 secs=2,36k dps
3/3 incite with hold the line, 35% HS crit: 20HS will have 7 crits and 7 free crits, total 13 hits 14 crits 81 secs, 205kdamage/81 secs=2,53k dps
2,53/2,36=1,072 so a 7,2% damage increase

What were the four specs you tried? I'm curious what you did with the extra points from Incite and Hold the Line when you didn't take them.

Also, what's your Parry chance? I just made a new premade war with a mix of regular and heroic ilvl 346 gear (avg ilvl 351 in character info screen), and reforged all possible Dodge and Parry to Mastery. Stats:

Dodge 8% (794)
Parry 13.82% (1721)
Mastery 14.04 (1082)
Block 39.76% (40)

I'm used to Parry in the 20%-25% range from Wrath, but at 13.82% I doubt Hold the Line is worth it. Need to separate the data from several runs and upload it to WoL to check.

I'm running with two prot specs, with HtL (instead of Conc Blow & Vigilance) and without. Both have 3/3 Incite and 3/3 WA. Since Conc Blow and Vigilance change dps by little or nothing, taking points from those two instead of War Academy, Cruelty, or somewhere else helps isolate the contribution of HtL.

Also, regarding Inner Rage, I've found it's too expensive to use in general while tanking. It's a solution to the infinite rage problem of Wrath, but since Cata already solved that problem with rage normalization, it overdoes it. Rage normalization + 10s or so of 50% increased rage cost on everything = rage starvation.

So what I've been doing instead is macro'ing IR to HS with a cancelaura afterwards, like this:

#showtooltip [mod:ctrl] z;[mod:alt] y;[mod:shift] Cleave;Heroic Strike
/use [nomod] Inner Rage
/use [mod:ctrl] z;[mod:alt] y;[mod:shift] Cleave;Heroic Strike
/cancelaura Inner Rage

Then I spam Dev, Rev, SS until 90%+ rage, then hit HS twice, once to proc Inner Rage + HS and again to cancel Inner Rage. That solves the rage starvation problem completely, and with Incite + War Academy, HS is critting around 15k, plus or minus, and is doing about 35% of my dmg (next highest abilities are SS and Dev at around 20% each).

So I think Inner Rage needs a review, unless Bliz intends each player to customize it to their liking using cancelaura macros and the like.

[Unix]

No buffs:
Rend: 6 ticks/rend. 918 damage per tick.
TC: only 1380 damage.
Trash usually last ~30-40s. I think blood and thunder is a strong talent for aoe. In fact I topped damage on the side entrance packs in Bastion of Twilight thanks to all the Rend ticks (other dps suffer aoe cap).


I tried using an inner rage macro, but it does some weird things. Server latency? I dont know. Using /cast /cancelaura under the same spell causes the cancelaura to not work a lot of the time. So no being lazy for me. I got myself a poweraura warning for 75+rage.

Wouldn't it be a lot more reasonable to use inner rage for abilities such as shield slam and not use it for HS? (IRed HS costs 45 rage x.x)

I skip blood and thunder and gag order for my boss tanking spec. I figured almost nothing can be silenced and I prob don't need a 30s heroic throw. Vigilance is still an ok talent where someone else in the raid is taking some damage. I hope they would change it to be more self-beneficial, something similar to focus magic...




Edit:
Blood and Thunder:

Can be even higher if healer dispel pacify.

[Rampart]

Vigilance sounds like a talent designed to allow warriors to OT honestly. And that is pretty much it. I can imagine two warriors being the two tanks and just Vigilancing one another so that their vengeance doesn't wear off during switches.

[Kojiyama]

Inner Rage isn't very great of a mechanic, and macroing it makes a lot of sense. However, why would you macro it with Heroic Strike? Heroic Strike is our most Rage-inefficient ability, and therefore Inner Rage would be the worst to use with Heroic Strike.

It would be a lot better to macro Inner Rage to Shield Slam and (especially) Revenge than Heroic Strike.

Either way, Inner Rage is pretty terrible right now so it's hard to consider it generally speaking. Shouldn't change how we spec, at any rate.

[Unix]

A smart inner rage that falls off when we hit below 25 rage, that doesn't work with cleave and heroic strike or any non-damaging abilities would be nice....

I am always afraid that inner rage would burn away too much rage that i miss a potential heroic strike.
I already feel somewhat rage starved in heroics.

Internal cooldown on shield spec proc makes it a little less useful in tanking multiple mobs since I no longer get "infinite rage".
Both dps classes also feel that they are no where close to having sufficient rage.

[Kurtosis]

Yes, I'm definitely missing the infinite rage from Wrath. Were we actually complaining about that?

And I'll probably experiment with macroing IR to both SS and Rev too. I wonder if it would make sense to macro it to all three and use whichever is off cd when passing the 75 rage threshold. They all hit very hard.