Legion Alpha Warrior Discussion

[Estarriol 167]

This topic is for discussing warriors in Legion alpha. Please keep in mind that nothing is set in stone yet and much is likely to be changed. Many things may be broken at the moment. Let's try to keep a positive outlook even if some of the changes made seem drastic or unpleasant.

As usual, I'll be focusing more on the changes and feel on protection. Saj or Rage will likely give their thoughts on the DPS specs at some point. However, this us meant to be a discussion, so please feel free to add any comments or questions.

At first, I was upset by many of the changes to protection. Several abilities have been removed and bars look and feel very empty. The loss of Dragon Roar, Bladestorm, and Ravager felt huge especially. We also lost Deep Wounds. With all this combined, I feared for our AoE pickup and retention. However, we have gained far more than we lost in the form of Revenge. Our beloved Revenge is no longer a 3 mob cleave with the radius of a rat's pubic hair, it is now a frontal cone that hits all mobs within its area of effect. And it hits hard. And it procs. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the new Revenge. It really fills the gap between Thunder Claps that has always been a massive weakness in our AoE pickup.

Heroic Strike is gone and its replacement is, well, pretty much the same thing with a slightly different name. Focused Rage is the replacement and it really is essentially the same thing. Instead of having Heroic Strike hit for around 100% of AP off the GCD, now Focused Rage ads about 100% of AP to your next Devastate or Shield Slam. Focused Rage can be used off the GCD still, so the only real difference is when you're getting the damage and that difference is trivial. This change also means that you can store up a bit of extra damage if you have excess rage and nothing to hit (or you need to pause damage) because it stands up to 3 times and has an unlimited duration. This also means that if you, for example, end a trash pull with 76 rage left and you know that rage will decay before you pull next, you can use Focused Rage twice for 60 rage, saving that extra damage for the next pack and thereby only lose 16 rage instead of the full 76. You do lose a bit of cleave, but the loss is negligible, especially with the changes to Revenge.

Heavy Repercussions was a juggernaut and an essential glyph in Mists and became an okay talent in WoD. In Legion, it's better than ever and I'm quite excited about it. Shield Slam does an extra 30% damage while Shield Block is up as a baseline. Heavy Repercussions gives it an extra 30% and also makes Shield Slam add two seconds to the duration of your active Shield Block. I'm absolutely ecstatic about these two changes.

This brings me to one of the things I really wanted to talk about: Shield Block now has a maximum duration of 10s. This means that you can have a maximum of 10s of Shield Block stored and any extra added duration after 10s is lost. This does not mean 10s total before you lose the buff. I'm not sure if I'm making this more confusing than it is, so it's example time. If I use Shield Block once, then immediately Shield Slam, I have 8s of Shield Block. I have one charge left of Shield Block, so I wait for the GCD on ability. Now I have 6.5s after waiting for the GCD. I use Shield Block again. 6+6.5=12.5, but I can have a maximum of 10s, so I lose the additional 2.5s of uptime. If I had waited another 2.5 seconds instead, I would have had a total continuous uptime of 14s, but instead I only got 11.5 seconds of uptime. This may not seem like much, but a second or two of uptime here or there will add up significantly over the course of a fight and will have a major impact on your survivability and effectiveness as a tank. It will be something I will be checking for when I do logs analyses next expansion.

With the change to how we generate rage, we lost a bit of complexity of game play, but this change to Shield Block gives it back while also avoiding some problems that monks and paladins have. Because there is a maximum duration, we can't just site up 2 minutes of Shield Block and scratch our armpits fir the rest of the fight. We must take care in how we use Shield Block and Shield Slam in order to maximize or survivability and damage (more Shield Block uptime means more opportunities to benefit from heavy hitting Shield Slams). Although we no longer have complexity in how we generate rage and how that effects maximising our benefits from rage, we still have the complexity of how we use rage. Overall, I'm surprisingly happy with these changes and I find myself looking forward to them.

This brings me to Shield Barrier, I mean, Ignore Pain. Yeah, just like Heroic Strike and Focused Rage, they are essentially the same thing. I don't really get why we needed the name change, but I'll go with it. At first, my jimmies where thoroughly rustled by Ignore Pain. It actually gives you less per use than Shield Barrier currently does! But it costs less. And it only absorbs 90% of the damage, why!? Well, this helps it last longer, the 10% you'll take is fairly negligible, and it better fits with what the developers are trying to accomplish with the tank-healer relationship. With Ignore Pain, the healers don't get to ignore you while your absorbs are up then get surprised when you suddenly take damage. You're taking damage at all times, but sometimes you take less. It makes beakers more attentive without really taking anything from us. Additionally, Ignore Pain fixes a lot of the problems that Shield Barrier had. It has a much longer duration, leading to less over healing due to expiration and it stacks, which means we can build up a buffer while not tanking. I actually really like Ignore Pain and I think it does a lot as far as fixing some of our issues. I've also found that I have plenty of rage and I've only been running around questing.

Anyway, there are some preliminary thoughts. I'll talk more about talents and such at a later time.

[Estarriol 167]

I should mention that haste now decreases the CD of Shield Block.

Ignore that thing about losing Ravager. I shouldn't post at work. >.>

[Hostik 0]

Personally I like the warrior changes, ignore pain in particular and few animations.

BUT, and it's a big but... Shadowflame Shield http://legion.wowhead.com/spell=203524/shadowflame-shield

I think it's a horrible class design to make a CHANNELING ability, for prot warrior (and any tank for that matter).

I love my mobility and being able to change positioning at all times. I think this cast will feel terrible.

 

What do you guys think? This is like the only bummer for me, as far as I can see.

[Estarriol 167]

I think warriors having a cast in general just feels wrong. The other tanks are all melee+magic, but not warriors.

[Sajakain 104]

Arms Warrior

 

 

With the latest update to Alpha, we have finally received the Arms specialization in game! (Yay!) For minor questions and such throughout the thread, I will most likely answer them in a separate post. For major updates and changes, however, I will keep this particular post updated as I experience and test things in game. Feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

 

 

Talents:

 

At first I didn't really get into each talent. I chose things based on personal preference rather than functionality and usefulness. In the midst of streaming my testing, I had some users question various talents and I really started looking into them. With these two experiences in mind, here are my thoughts:

 

Impending Victory seems to be broken. For those that of you that don't know this no longer replaces Victory Rush. Instead, it is now a passive on Slam that has a 40% chance to heal you for 10% of your HP. I killed several mobs (some exclusively with Slam) and not once did I ever receive a 10% heal so. . . for the time being it appears to be broken.

 

Dauntless is the only Tier 3 talent (level 45) that I have chosen to use so far (which excludes Overpower and Avatar). 20% less rage is really nice - especially if you talent Heroic Strike and macro it with Slam, for instance.

 

Second wind has changed. It no longer requires a 35% HP to activate. Instead you now gain 6% HP every 1 second when you haven't taken damage in the last 5 seconds. To the extent that I've been playing (leveling) - I'm always taking damage within that 5 seconds unless I'm moving from one quest area to another. With that in mind it does have it's usefulness for questing if you simply want to pull a lot of mobs, take 5 - 10 seconds to heal, repeat. Alternatively (for healing) you could take Imposing Roar which, in addition to the increased health you gain from Commanding Shout you would also gain 20% leech. The last talent here (which is something I most often defaulted to) was Double Time - x2 uses on charge.

 

The biggest change I was really taken back with.... Rend is now a talent instead of a given ability. With the current level 75 talents as they are - it's pretty straight forward. Rend on single target and a choice of either Fervor of Battle or Bladestorm for your AoE stuff. Fervor of Battle is a new talent that allows you to generate 2 rage for every target hit by Cleave and Whirlwind (essentially allowing you to spam the abilities if you hit enough targets).

 

Level 90 talents are, by far, the most interesting. These all are useful depending on what you want you're doing. Heroic Strike increases the damage of your next mortal strike by a percentage of your attack power and it stacks three times (currently without a time limit on the buff). Mortal Combo simply adds another charge to Mortal Strike (allowing two consecutive uses on the GCD) and Titanic Might increases the duration of Colossus Smash by 200% but reduces it's effectiveness by 50%. I found that Titanic Might was really useful for questing as, in general, mobs died steadily faster. With the Arms Artifact weapon applying Colossus Smash to all mobs in 8 yards, it was even useful in AoE situations.

 

For the last tier (level 100), It was either Opportunity Strikes or Ravager. Anger Management simply wasn't of use to quest. Opportunity Strikes was default for me but Ravager definitely has it's uses while pulling a lot of mobs. While I talk about pulling a lot of mobs quite a bit, honestly it wasn't that regular that I had 3+ mobs to take on. This is why Opportunity Strikes was default.

 

=======================

 

Currently, for questing, I'm using:

 

Storm Bolt, Bounding Stride (Reduces the CD of Heroic Leap by 15 seconds and increases run speed by 70% for 3 seconds), Dauntless, Double Time, Rend, Titanic Might, and Opportunity Strikes.

 

 

General:

 

I haven't had much opportunity to really test the spec outside of leveling. I hope to get into a raid test at some point or another.

 

The overall play is relatively smooth to me. I can move from mob to mob(s) with little or no downtime outside of running if need be. Downtime is also relevant if Colossus Smash isn't available or hasn't proc'd. It's not necessarily downtime - it's more so that the mobs take a bit longer to die. Though, with the Artifact weapon I can apply it if need be. Typically, though, I chose to save that for multiple mobs instead of single target.

 

Heroic Leap has a HUGE marker now.. that's relatively entertaining and I find myself enjoying the new animation for Whirlwind as well.

 

Aside from this - as mentioned in the talents section - Rend as a talent is just weird. I feel it should be a base ability to the spec as it is now and that talent space can be replaced with something else.

 

 

Artifact Weapon:

 

Strom'kar, the Warbreaker

 

 

 

Alright. So the image is probably a little over the top but - hey - it's an in-game screenshot of the initial weapon when you first obtain it.

 

The equip gives Mortal Strike a chance to unleash a swipe of void energy, causing (150% of Attack Power) Shadow damage to all enemies 6 yards in front of you.

Corrupted Rage is the first talent you get to chose on the weapon. You stomp the ground, casuing a ring of corrupted spikes to erupt upwards, dealing 350% Shadow damage and applying the Colossus Smash debuff to all enemies within 8 yards. 1 minute cooldown.

 

There are several talents available to this weapon but, unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to test them yet. Once I do I will provide feedback on them.

 

Right now the animation is lackluster for Corrupted Rage; literally almost nothing happens. Hopefully this is updated and a bit more epic in a future release.

[Estarriol 167]

Saj, I'm going to need you to format all of my posts and add pretty pictures.

One notable update from alpha that I noticed is that Shield Block no longer has a maximum stacked duration (that I've found at least). I did a bit of raid testing and it didn't feel bad. I felt that I had enough rage, but I did have to be cautious with my use of it.

[Hostik 0]

Estarriol, from watching Slootbag's (who plays all tank classes with Serenity) Legion Alpha stream, I've heard it's 10 seconds cap on shield block. He already tried freestyle-theorycrafting a build with Haste, so that you can have a 100% uptime on shieldblock with a talent that adds 2 seconds on SB when you use Shield Bash (Heavy reprecussions remade, I believe).

 

But it's Alpha, they can change stuff very fast. Also, my information is like a week old, so I could be wrong already.

Edited February 2, 2016 by Hostik

[Estarriol 167]

Yeah, I'm my original post, I noted the 10 second cap. During the most recent alpha raid testing, I was able to get my Shield Block up to a maximum of 16 seconds that I noticed. Therfore the cap had either been removed or significantly reduced. At the time of the original post, I had manned to miss the fact that hate now effects the cool down of Shield Block, which makes the maximum theoretical uptime significantly higher.