Warrior Tier 15 (T15) Set Bonuses

[ragebarr 153]

T15 Arms/Fury 2P Bonus - Your melee auto attacks have a chance to trigger Enrage.

T15 Arms/Fury 4P Bonus - Activating Skull Banner now also increases your critical strike chance by 35% for 10 sec.

T15 Protection 2P Bonus - Your Shield Slam and Revenge have a 10% chance to activate Victory Rush or Impending Victory as if you had killed your target.

T15 Protection 4P Bonus - Your abilities generate 50% more Rage when used against targets afflicted by Demoralizing Shout.

Ok, so this is my first attemp at trying to analyse something like this, but I do believe I know enough about warriors to get a good opinion on those set bonuses.

T15 Arms/Fury 2P Bonus - Your melee auto attacks have a chance to trigger Enrage.

This set bonus looks super good on paper. Sadly it is very overwhelming. With a 0.6 rppm rate for Fury, and a 1.7 rppm rate for Arms, you're looking at a barely noticeable Enrage uptime increase for Fury, and a very marginal gain for Arms. If you have your T14 4p bonus, hold on to it until you gain the T15 4p or until you have a huge ilvl upgrade (around a 20-30 ilvl gain for a given item).

T15 Arms/Fury 4P Bonus - Activating Skull Banner now also increases your critical strike chance by 35% for 10 sec.

This is awesome. It is like getting a free Recklessness every time you use Skull Banner. There is no great secret in using this set bonus, just get it ASAP. And use it with Recklessness every single time you can. I know I have a post below that says that DPS you won't lose much, however considering the 6s Colossus Smash window, you'd be better stacking all your cooldowns inside it, especially now that Reck+Banner won't make you go over the crit cap too much with the changes to Recklessness in 5.2. If you can, get this 4p ASAP, it is simply awesome. Just note and make mention to your raid leaders that if you have multiple DPS warriors in your raid, it is more beneficial for the raid overall to have the warriors stack their banners and do individually more DPS. The raid DPS increase you get by staggering multiple banners won't offset the gain that each warrior gets. It's that good of a set bonus.

Looking forward to getting those on my warrior

Any toughts from anyone else?

Edit: Updated with current patch 5.2 information.

[Decision 7]

I think these bonuses will make rather major changes to our class. For example the 2set bonus, will it be preferable to get haste instead of mastery for more procs or should we rely more on BT crits as we do now? And for the 4set will it still be valid to Dragon Roar during Skull Banner or will it fall in priority due to other attacks having larger crit chance?

EDIT: Will it be mandatory to get the Recklessness glyph for 65% crit stacked with banner? And will it be worth taking Avatar instead of Bloodbath to benefit from the longer Recklessness?

Edited January 20, 2013 by Decision

[Captanmurdoc 0]

I'm really liking the new 4 peice for my raid's setup since we run with a prot warrior, I can pop my skull banner, go to town then once mine ends call for his skull banner and stack it with my reck.

[Damien 1,514]

I've modified the original thread (added the set bonuses as I did for other classes) and make it a sticky.

[ragebarr 153]

I've modified the original thread (added the set bonuses as I did for other classes) and make it a sticky.

/target Damien

/bow

Also, Decision, whereas this 2p will probably make haste slightly more valuable for Fury (and remember that haste gets a 50% buff across the board for warriors in 5.2), it's proc chance is only 0.6 RPPM (or 1.7 RPPM for Arms). That means we're talking of about 1.2 procs every 2 minutes for fury, and 3.4 procs for arms (on average), of course modified by haste. This is nowhere near the amount of procs we're getting currently only with our crits. In summary, if you have the 2p, haste shouldn't ba as bad as it is right now, but it will never be an amazing stats for warriors, unless we get dramatically changed.

For Dragon Roar, remember it is our biggest DPE skill (except of course execute). My bet is (this is just some toughts, haven't done any testing) that TG fury will want to give a bigger priority to Raging Blow (a RB crit with skull banner will hit slightly more than DR) during skull banner, but still find a GCD to fit in Dragon Roar. 20% increased damage on roar is too good to still pass up. For SMF, a RB crit and DR will do around the same amount of damage, so still worth casting DR. For arms, no skill comes close in DPE to Dragon Roar, so definitely still worth casting during Skull Banner.

On your second point, I believe that glyphing reck could be a valid option for arms, but I do not really see it happening for fury, because even with the glyph, Banner+Reck will crit cap our Bloodthirst (remember that bloodthirst has x2 the usual crit chance). Maybe if you get to really higher crit levels where you have a very high crit chance (maybe 30+% or so) then just glyphing overall becomes worth it. But I really see fury chaining CD's instead of stackings, a bit like combat rogues with their new 4p.

Also, I'm still always gonna take Storm Bolt or Bloodbath, simply because they are easier to line up with everything else. (Remember that reck will be back on a 5 min CD, so Avatar you line up with Skull Banner, but not always with Reck).

-Rage

[Decision 7]

How will the stat prio look for arms then? With haste being buffed will it be preferable instead of mastery in terms of proc rate for the 2set?

[ragebarr 153]

With the last few changes to arms warriors (Sudden Death proccing 10% off autoattacks and 10% off mastery), it'll buff mastery a bit and nerf haste very slightly. The priority will probably look somehting like Str > Hit (to cap) = Exp (to cap) > Crit > Mastery >= Haste.

Overall, it will probably stay close to the same, only with haste being much closer to mastery, maybe even slightly ahead with the 2p.

Still, these are just assumptions, I'll try to find (and quote) some more extensive theorycrafting to confirm (or infirm) my theory. :)

-Rage

[ragebarr 153]

Ok, I've been out of this for way too long. However seeing how I couldn't find any evidence of my claims or anything, I decided to play with simcraft a bit. However, as you may already have guessed, the big change to Recklessness made all my previous analysis kind of pointless. Still, I tried playing with 4 different set-ups for my dps rotation (always assuming T15 nomral gear and T15 4p bonus):

-Stacking Reck+Banner without glyph of Reck;

-Stacking Reck+Banner with glyph of Reck;

-Chaining Reck+Banner without glyph of Reck;

-Chaining Reck+Banner with glyph of Reck;

As suprising as this may seem, all these setups were within 800 dps of eachother (with 50000 iterations and stuff).

I suppose results would've been more interesting had the old version of Reck still been around, but hey, at least now I know that the setup won't matter as much.

-Rage

[ragebarr 153]

Edited with current information :)

[FadiHedzh 0]

I have a bit weird question here. I have the 4 set bonus, but it's mainly with LFR items, besides the leg armor. Since I recently started raiding again, I have had drops on various items, which are upgrade on ilvl, but with which I will lose the set bonus (Tortos shoulders being the first example that comes to my mind). In our guild we use EPGP system, which kinda limits my rolls on items as "main spec". So the question-shall I get these ilvl and decent stats improvments, or stick with the lfr set items, untill I can get my hands on normal set items? In other words, is the dps burst with the 4set bonus during SB use worth enough the overal dps loss with the lower stats my current items have?

Well, that's two questions

[ragebarr 153]

I would not keep the set bonus if the ilvl increase for the said item is more than 12-15 or so.

It's hard to say exactly how much of an increase the set bonus actually is (though for me it seems to have increased my burst by ~50-75k) but overall I think good itemized higher ilvl pieces (à la Tortos shoulders) will do better in the end.

Of course, if you want to know exactly which one is better and by how much, you can just run simulations of your toon on Simulationcraft with both sets equipped and see what is in fact better.

So in short, use the piece if it's a 12-15 ilvl increase or more from your current piece, but try and get your normal 4-set again as soon as you can.

[FadiHedzh 0]

Thanks :)

Yes, it's big upgrade in ilvl, 502 to 522. So I guess I will shoot on the items.