Rude Interruption

[Firedexx]

With the upcoming change to War Academy I'm wondering where to move those 3 points too. I'm sitting at 5/5/31 atm (http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LGZhbZIzGdRRRzbu) and wondering if anyone has every tested out the talent Rude Interruption? For 5 mans it seems decent but I don't think it'll have much utility in raids(?). What do you guys think?

[Reev]

I think I'd rather have the points in Shield Spec, Blood and Thunder, Thunderstruck, or Safeguard.

[Andenthal]

I rarely use Shield Bash in 5 mans. Spell reflect as much as I can, stun otherwise.

For me, it would only give a DPS increase in raids.

[Kojiyama]

It's worth considering that a 15% buff to Devastate isn't terrible to have either.

[Kazeyonoma]

that's assuming we even pick up 3/3 war academy, 3 points to gain 15% on our lowest priority skill?

[Katzazi]

I've had Rude Interruption for a while for 5man heroics. At the moment I'm playing around with another spec.

I interrupt a lot in 5 mans. It's even quite good for some boss encounters. For this encounters 5% too all can be alot. It's hard to give it a value though, because it scales with all your other dmg (and the number of interrupts you can land).

Interrupting is quite important at the moment. Some bosses cannot be done without it. There are quite alot of dds who either cannot interrupt, did not skill their interrupt/use another pet, actually don't know how one interrupts (this is especially a sad one), screw it up all the time or just don't care about it. Chances are high that you can interrupt alot in 5 mans. It it's of any value for raiding hugely depends on your group composition. But even if you are one of the core interrupter there, there are probably better "default" specs.

The main problem with this talent is the cost to get there. You have to spend some points to quite bad talents in t1 of fury, while they could be used for very good other things. However if you already have 5 points in fury it may be something to consider.

@Andenthal: I often have both on CD, interrupt and spell reflect and stun above that. Most times you can use them inbetween each other. Anyway, there are many casts that you can interrupt where spell reflect dose not help. That's all heals, all rdm casts (at least if you are not sure that you will be the target), some of the casts that hit multiple people and some special abilities (like the grip of the final boss fo stonecore).

[Kojiyama]

that's assuming we even pick up 3/3 war academy, 3 points to gain 15% on our lowest priority skill?

Devastate is still pressed fairly often, so it's probably still worth considering a 15% increase to boost it up to more respectable levels. (Not saying it's the best use of points, but it isn't terrible either.)

[klausi]

It's terrible, devaste buff is at max a +850 damage increase while decreasing my heroic strike hits by roughly 3-6kish (depending on fight/vengeance stacks).

[Kojiyama]

It's terrible compared to the current version given that Heroic Strike is overpowered. However, we knew Heroic Strike would get nerfed in beta, they just took a while to get around to it.

That doesn't mean the new version is terrible in the context of post-nerf Heroic Strike, especially considering that Devastate is still a heavily-used ability. I will run some numbers on it later tonight, but I'm guessing the new version is still a fairly respectable threat talent. Not amazing, but not terrible.

[Andenthal]

That doesn't mean the new version is terrible in the context of post-nerf Heroic Strike, especially considering that Devastate is still a heavily-used ability. I will run some numbers on it later tonight, but I'm guessing the new version is still a fairly respectable threat talent. Not amazing, but not terrible.

That's pretty much what I'm thinking. I picked it up because it increased my DPS. I don't see any other talents that would fill the gap.

[Kojiyama]

Ran some numbers. A bit surprising results.

All numbers were run with the 2-set Shield Slam bonus, which gives an advantage to Cruelty but is easy to get so I included it.

If using Revenge in your rotation, War Academy is about 15% below Cruelty in terms of DPS per talent point. Cruelty is better, but only by a small margin. Deep Wounds still remains much better (almost double) per point than either one of them.

However, if you drop Revenge from your rotation with War Academy and use Devastate instead, you gain a significant amount of TPS just from dropping Revenge (about the same value as both points in Hold the Line or all 3 points in Cruelty) but War Academy then adds more TPS per talent point than Hold the Line, Shockwave weaving, or Cruelty by about 10-20%.

If you are single-target tanking and do not need the AoE splash from Improved Revenge, this then frees up two points in the primary Protection tree for use in utility talents or increased Rage flow from Shield Spec. Also, as War Academy buffs Victory Rush it makes Impending Victory much less of a TPS loss should you choose to take it in addition to more reliable as you are replacing Revenge with Devastate. (I don't love Impending Victory, but this route does make it better.)

My personal feeling is that Revenge needs a serious buff, but with these changes it actually seems sensible to still maintain War Academy and drop Improved Revenge and Revenge from your rotation unless you are rage-starved. If you do this, War Academy is actually only about 10-15% worse than it was when it affected Heroic Strike even with a Heroic Strike frequency of 90%.

Example numbers (assume that without Improved Revenge you don't use Revenge):
(baseline), no Revenge: 8623 DPS
2/2 Improved Revenge: 8693 DPS
2/2 Improved Revenge, 2/2 Cruelty: 8893 DPS
3/3 War Academy, 2/2 Improved Revenge: 8932 DPS
3/3 War Academy: 8991 DPS
3/3 War Academy, 2/2 Cruelty: 9191 DPS
3/3 War Academy, 3/3 Deep Wounds: 9614 DPS
3/3 War Academy, 3/3 Deep Wounds, 2/2 Cruelty: 9854 DPS

[Kazeyonoma]

what the fu-devastate?

So post patch, picking up war academy, and completely dropping revenge out of our rotation will yield higher tps and dps? that's... O_o, I feel like blizzard didn't hash this one out enough if "fixing" heroic strike usage means dropping revenge out of our rotation....

if they don't change revenge, i'll probably spec something like this than, get all the utility that I want, try to abuse impending victory if necessary (if not i'll take points out and put safeguard instead.
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LGZhZcfGdRoRddu

[lyd]

the irony is that revenge used to be our hardest hitting attack in days of yore. now they're accidentally incentivizing us not to use it.

[Kojiyama]

Yeah, I have to say that I don't totally understand why Revenge has such a low AP coefficient in Cataclysm.

[Tengenstein]

Didn't we have the same problem in our Tier 9 2pc? That due to the 5% dev bonus and imp rev adding the stun rather than the dmg/cleave you could get away with just Dev spamming?

[Katzazi]

I think this got quite OT....

At the moment it's only on the PTR. The idea of the change was to nerf HS und buff some other abilities. It was supposed to be a change that manily affects fury and arms. They had to add something for prot as well to the changed talent because all talents of the first two tiers should do at least something for every spec.

I doubt that blizz anticipated the effects this change could have to our rotation. They will probably change something before it gets life.

[Kojiyama]

I wouldn't say the HS change was just for Fury and Arms, even if they mentioned that. Heroic Strike was pretty over the top damage-wise for Protection as well.

[Katzazi]

Sure but it's less of a problem. Prot warriors are supposed to have a more or less full rage bar at most encounters that are relevant, because you have a relatively high dmg income there. So it's supposed that prot warriors hit HS more or less on CD, there. Fury and Arms are not supposed to have so much rage all the time, that a "rage dump" could be used more or less constantly during a boss encounter. If the decide to use HS instead of their rotation it's a problem. Tanks will probably use HS beside of their (remaining) rotations in such a situation, anyway.

It's a problem if one ability does too much dmg, but it's a much bigger problem if it's so much that abilities which you are supposed to use are ignored in favor of them. Like it's with arms and fury at the moment but much less with prot.

Hower it's a bad solution if a fix to this problem leads to a problem of the same nature, prot warriors not wanting to use revenge anymore.

[Tengenstein]

Looking over thursday's omnitron kill raid log my HS was hitting on avg for about 15k, with a 33% crit rate; Dev was hitting for 7k with ~20% crit rate, and this was in a non WA. non incite spec with GoDev. Those figures indicate thats its better for me to heroic strike once than it is to devastate twice. That doesn't sound like a rage dump; its too rage effiecient. We get more damage for the same amount of rage than our filler. solutions?

1) Nerf HS damage
2) Buff Dev damage
3) Nerf Dev cost
4) Buff HS cost

Blizz have gone for solutions 1 with the option of solution 2, and as we know the problem with buffing as opposed to nerfing is that it can break other mechanics, like now we don't take Imp revenge. I personally would have gone for solutions 1 and 4, upping the cost of HS to probably around 40, meaning you really don't have much room to HS, and getting it wrong, espeically while IR us up, will penalize you much harder. Dumping 80% of your resource bar means you hare going to have to cancel IR to do anything except revenge unless you have a handy source of rage to carry your rotation onwards.

would this be a nerf, straight up yes.

[Kojiyama]

Yeah, the problem was that Heroic Strike was simply outpacing everything. With a 75% AP coefficient, it didn't take long for it to outscale even Shield Slam--while Devastate and Revenge had no chance from the get-go.

One of the biggest risk factors for Warrior rotational balance is simply that variation of AP scaling vs. base damage ratios across our abilities. Heroic Strike, for instance, is high AP and low (basically no) base damage--whereas Shield Slam was changed mid-beta from similar (it was 100% AP, no base damage for a long time) to lower AP scaling with large base damage.

This means that pre and post-Vengeance and as we get better gear, our rotational balance changed. Shield Slam is fine when you first hit 85, yet by even the middle parts of T11 content Heroic Strike outscales it. Think of if they had left that for T12+ content with our projected Vengeance levels.

My personal feeling is that both Revenge and Devastate are a bit too low... it's nice to see them addressing Devastate somewhat, but Revenge could use some love. Its base AP coefficient is simply too low and it almost completely relies on Improved Revenge to be viable. I believe they felt that its Rage efficiency would still make it strong, but the reality is that Rage is not really a major issue--especially with Shield Spec being so powerful with the common tactic of Mastery stacking.

Either way, Heroic Strike needed to be nerfed significantly.