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[Pacobird]

Also, Shinra; forgot to mention this before, but the reason Warriors aren't going past 2-piece t10 is that the offset tank gloves and chest via badges and the crafted legs are all much better than t10, thanks to the bonus armor.  Tank chests and gloves are getting bonus armor to compensate.  Notably, none of these offending offset pieces have block value.

[Shinra]

No, because nobody cared about tank damage before zomg paladins.  I sort of see DW tanking as a trap for the unwary, anyway, but I am open to someone disavowing me of this notion.

Apparently DW is better effective health/avoidance because they can double up runes, but the threat is decidedly worse. DW's improved as a tanking spec since launch, but threat's still an issue, so the spec is only 'good' on fights where threat does not matter and in raids where the DPS are slacking (any pug, 'casual' guilds etc)

A bit too overspecialized IMO; I'd really like to see them do away with the abortion that is death knight dual wielding altogether. It still feels like an afterthought, and the various DW specs - be they tanking or dps based - aren't competitive on any serious level, and are at best for fucking around with on off nights and in heroics. Granted, DW Frost DKs have icy talons, but an enhancement shaman is going to do more DPS and take less gear from your serious dps contenders in the process.

[Envy]

Well, the problem with the one handers are that dw DKs sorta need slow dps weapons to keep up threat, where everyone else (even bears?) use fast tanking weapons.  Are there any tank one handers over a 2 sec swing timer?

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40345

[Pacobird]

Well, the problem with the one handers are that dw DKs sorta need slow dps weapons to keep up threat, where everyone else (even bears?) use fast tanking weapons.  Are there any tank one handers over a 2 sec swing timer?

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40345

Oh, yeah; good old Broken Promise.  Totally forgot about that; also there are a handful of blues, most notably the sword off Keleseth in HUK and a quest reward in Zul'Drak.  Nothing to write home about, though I see a lot of new tanks using the quest reward.

Anyway, getting back on topic, can you see the point I'm trying to make here, Shinra?  That whatever the itemization issues, options exist for sustained Prot DPS, those options never favored stacking Shield Slam damage, and the current round of changes provide some breathing room for getting away from over-reliance on Heroic Strike?

[Envy]

I love the reason it's called broken promise. They promised they would never make another slow tank weapon. Therefore it's the broken promise. Or I'm just reading too much into blizzard.

[Envy]

So they fixed the blowing off bloodbeast on saurfang. Fun.

[Hraedon]

Anyway, getting back on topic, can you see the point I'm trying to make here, Shinra?  That whatever the itemization issues, options exist for sustained Prot DPS, those options never favored stacking Shield Slam damage, and the current round of changes provide some breathing room for getting away from over-reliance on Heroic Strike?

There are indeed options available, blizzard just chooses to deliberately avoid them for various reasons. Some sort of talent that, say, converted stamina into strength, or allowed for some sort of passive arp based on another stat, or even a deep prot talent to tweak heroic strike (yes, I know they are planning on getting rid of it, but it exists now and should be taken into consideration).

Baking in threat to shield slam is a clumsy way to work around a clumsy and pointless nerf. I also think that you don't give people enough credit re: sbv, either; the massive buff and subsequent focus was originally blizzard's "solution" to block being horrible, along with prot dps issues. Analogous to arp, but without any postbuff adjusting. Paladins, though, blessedly remain free of any sbv tweaking.

as far as these changes allowing us to move away from HS:  they don't. if you're actually tanking content that matters, the threat from devastate is still inconsequential compared to the threat generated from heroic strike. It won't even be that much of a damage buff: the 20% is only to half of the damage of the ability (weapon damage vs sunder bonus damage), and devastate makes up charitably 20% of a typical prot warrior's damage. So, we'll still need to hs every swing and still be more or less forced into fast weapons for progression content, but we'll be doing about 4% more damage (before taking the damage nerfs into account)!

The buff does win us something, though: it gets us away from an over-reliance on...revenge

sweet

[Shinra]

Yeah, if you were using revenge before the patch, you probably won't be using it after. "It's such a rage bargain!" is pretty irrelevant when your incoming rage is huge on every ICC boss.

[Shinra]

Well, the problem with the one handers are that dw DKs sorta need slow dps weapons to keep up threat, where everyone else (even bears?) use fast tanking weapons.  Are there any tank one handers over a 2 sec swing timer?

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40345

Oh, yeah; good old Broken Promise.  Totally forgot about that; also there are a handful of blues, most notably the sword off Keleseth in HUK and a quest reward in Zul'Drak.  Nothing to write home about, though I see a lot of new tanks using the quest reward.

Anyway, getting back on topic, can you see the point I'm trying to make here, Shinra?  That whatever the itemization issues, options exist for sustained Prot DPS, those options never favored stacking Shield Slam damage, and the current round of changes provide some breathing room for getting away from over-reliance on Heroic Strike?

I get what you're saying - I've understood that the entire conversation. But what I've been saying is any nerfs for Prot DPS at this point are shitty and diminish Warrior raid viability, which is just as true. It might not be doing a lot of damage, but it's taking away options for situations that Prot is very poor at.

Stacking block value wasn't an ideal situation for anyone and stepping away from Shield Slam as a major source of damage is a good thing, but when the nerf initially came to the front and no alternative was posed other than "increased threat", it looked bad. Any guild that has to have the tank do more damage to make an enrage timer is in trouble, yes, but having the option to stack SBV to up your damage on a fight that does not require heavy tank mitigation, or only requires you to be an offtank/soaktank was nice - now SBV only adds to damage reduction once you get into decent gear, which makes it virtually worthless because of how much damage enemies are actually doing now. The Devastate change is nice but it's still not going to fix the problem of Prot warriors doing so little damage. It's a bandaid fix being applied over a sucking chest wound. We'll probably get a few hundred DPS out of this, still be behind everyone else, and become broken in PVP in a different way now.

In Cataclysm I'm hoping that the new stat simplification will help, and hopefully someone at blizzard will have the sense to fold some DPS into late prot over new survivability talents.

[Pacobird]

Stacking block value wasn't an ideal situation for anyone and stepping away from Shield Slam as a major source of damage is a good thing, but when the nerf initially came to the front and no alternative was posed other than "increased threat", it looked bad.

So no, you didn't get what I was saying.

[Shinra]

Then what are you saying? It's fine when we get nerfed for pvp reasons and get nothing to counterbalance the nerf?

Because if that's what you're saying, I'm going to have to say you're fucking stupid.

[Pacobird]

The Shield Slam changes are a net threat buff; a substantial one at that.  This allows people to not rely on Heroic Strike as much for threat, thus allowing a switch from a 1.6 to a 2.6 speed weapon, which would itself be a buff of a few hundred dps before the Devastate buff is even factored in.

And there is still absolutely no reason to believe that anyone will see a decline in Shield Slam damage in a real-world PvE situation because, yet again, nobody stacks Block Value; indeed, past a certain threshold it is in fact impossible to do so and still get gear upgrades, as I have attempted to demonstrate.  So the threat buff to Shield Slam comes at absolutely no price, unless you can link me a few 245+ non-shield pieces* with a lot of block value and show me the math that puts a Warrior using said gear over 2k.


*Hilariously, not even the ICC10 tanking shield has bonus block value!

[Shinra]

ICC25 tanking shield has bonus block value.

I've seen lots of posts on Tankspot and E-J that, prior to the nerf, encouraged shield block stacking for threat and DPS.

We're not talking about threat - we're talking about DPS contribution - and prior to the announcement of the devastate change all we were getting out of this was a nerf to our DPS. A SMALL nerf, I will grant you, but any nerf to the worst aspect of our class is a bad nerf all the same!

[Pacobird]

Would you be satisfied if Ghostcrawler came in to this thread and said, "Yes, the implication of buffing Devastate to 60% in 3.0 and then 100% in 3.2 was that Warriors ought to use slow weapons for threat; I'm sorry you weren't capable of thinking critically about your class mechanics enough to realize an aggregate TPS increase is a nudge in that direction"?

[Shinra]

I still haven't seen any solid theorycraft showing that using a slow weapon with the new devastate and shield slam is going to be a viable option. If you have some, I'd love to see it.

[Pacobird]

I still haven't seen any solid theorycraft showing that using a slow weapon with the new devastate and shield slam is going to be a viable option. If you have some, I'd love to see it.

Using HS every attack with a 2.6 speed weapon is 190 DPS.  Using it with a 1.6 speed is 309.  That is a difference of 119, and subtract 10% from that because your crit rate with Devastate is 10% higher than with Heroic Strike.  So, Devastate with a 2.6 speed weapon has to add 107 more dps than with a 1.6 speed to win.

107 is not very much dps.

[Hraedon]

dps is not the same as tps, and every bit counts. I'd be more convinced by your argument about the historic inevitability of devastate if blizzard had been at all consistent with using it as their protection spec "knob." Instead, much like titan's grip, it has gone back and forth over the course of the expansion. This late-in-the-day buff (which is very, very minor in pve) doesn't represent any more planning than the doubling of shield block value did. It is something meant to shut up those prot warriors who are easily bought off, and make it look like they aren't simply taking things away.

Additionally, i know that the "no slow tanking weapons after naxx" criticism is a bit of a bugaboo with you, but blizzard has historically been unkind to using weapons not at least nominally designed for the role within which it is used. This implies to me that they do not intend warriors to be using slower weapons, as you'd have to use a rogue weapon to get speeds slower than 1.7. That, along with the relatively large static threat contribution of heroic strike, hints that this was not some long-planned scheme.

[Pacobird]

Not a lot of time, but I would say one thing:

dps is not the same as tps, and every bit counts.

 

I did not say they were, and the hard DPS checks (which are what this is about) typically have gimmicks to minimize the relevance of threat, anyway; see: Festergut and BQL.

[Shinra]

dps is not the same as tps, and every bit counts. I'd be more convinced by your argument about the historic inevitability of devastate if blizzard had been at all consistent with using it as their protection spec "knob." Instead, much like titan's grip, it has gone back and forth over the course of the expansion. This late-in-the-day buff (which is very, very minor in pve) doesn't represent any more planning than the doubling of shield block value did. It is something meant to shut up those prot warriors who are easily bought off, and make it look like they aren't simply taking things away.

Additionally, i know that the "no slow tanking weapons after naxx" criticism is a bit of a bugaboo with you, but blizzard has historically been unkind to using weapons not at least nominally designed for the role within which it is used. This implies to me that they do not intend warriors to be using slower weapons, as you'd have to use a rogue weapon to get speeds slower than 1.7. That, along with the relatively large static threat contribution of heroic strike, hints that this was not some long-planned scheme.

 

all of this, a thousand times this

So basically we can potentially do maybe possibly more dps? then before the patch without sacrificing effective health/mitigation/avoidance by equipping block value gear, but we may potentially be trading massive amounts of threat for it instead by putting on a slow weapon to maximize devastate damage.

And if it is viable, threatwise, to use a slow weapon now, it's only a matter of time before Blizzard does something stupid - like make Devastate do flat damage or something - to placate rogues and enhancement shaman whining about getting outrolled on weapons.

[Hraedon]

I did not say they were, and the hard DPS checks (which are what this is about) typically have gimmicks to minimize the relevance of threat, anyway; see: Festergut and BQL.

Fair, but your argument above was that the devastate changes were essentially engineered to encourage the use of slow weapons for threat purposes. I'm more than willing to concede that it is a dps increase to use slow weapons (it is, even if it is almost imperceptible), but I am almost positive that the dps increase is a) insufficient to actually bridge the gap, and b) does not make up for the threat gulf.