Blood and Thunder

[Anthem]

You've got a much lower chance to crit with cleave than you have a chance to get a sword and board proc with devastate (unless you're wearing DPS gear). I agree that between TClap and cleave you can get a fair amount of deep wounds going, but it's pretty clear that Blood and Thunder blows Deep Wounds out of the water. A part of me wonders how much AoE damage you could do with an 8/2/31 build while tanking heroics etc. Does anyone think sweep and clear is going to be used by anybody?

Blood Craze > Imp Rend.

That said, you don't really understand how Deep Wounds works currently. It'd additive.

THAT said, with Incite (which every tank gets) Cleaves crit on a very constant basis which keeps your bleed dot ticking constantly without having to reapply rend.

[Astray]

When i tank, i would love reliable threat a lot more than a chance for something.

[ShiroRX]

I thought blizzard was more focused on cc rather than aoeing stuff down. this just seems like a way to break cc :\

Why oh why would a warrior be using Thunderclap near CC'd mobs is a better question. Wouldn't you say?

[Shelly]

Regarding Prot Warrior Crit chance.

It's going to stay about the same as it is now as long as our talents like Incite remain the same.

No really.

I mean, how much crit do you have? We've all got about 8% or so baseline, that's just straight up. Then we have 15% extra on most of our attacks through Incite and S&B. So our crit chance isn't changing at all.

Also we aren't losing deep wounds. We'll still be able to spec that far up but there's going to be far more hard choices involved with doing so now.

Oh and we'll begin fights by hitting Commanding or Battle shout + Bloodrage to pump up our rage, then either leap or charge in. It promises to be pretty fun.

My only questions about this talent as far as the usefulness goes is if it will refresh rend on all the targets. I'm also rather disappointed that it will be so high up on the tree that it will be out of reach of Arms warriors.

Really seems like Prot has very few throw-away points after filling in our 31 compared to Arms and Fury.

[Anthem]

Obviously Blood Craze is going to be a great talent, but if you want to lose a little survivability to gain a little damage (say you're wearing T12 gear in heroics which is bound to happen for some) an 8/2/31 build should put out some serious sustained aoe. Saying Blood Craze > Imp Rend is equivalent to saying Apple > Orange, they're obviously talents meant to do different things and in some cases nobody is going to actually care for the sustained 1.5% health per second.

I am fully aware of how DW works, basically it's a warrior ignite.

Cleave crits between 20 and 28% of the time depending on gear and your group makeup. That is not all the time, it is a smaller chance than Sword and Board, just like I said.

Clearly we're not talking about the same things at all. I am talking about progression tanking and you're talking about killing Deathwing, putting on your new gear, and then going back into a heroic instance designed for people in greens.

For progression tanking Blood Craze IS better than 30% more damage on a skill that will primarly be used on trash.

[Fornaw]

Clearly we're not talking about the same things at all. I am talking about progression tanking and you're talking about killing Deathwing, putting on your new gear, and then going back into a heroic instance designed for people in greens.

For progression tanking Blood Craze IS better than 30% more damage on a skill that will primarly be used on trash.

When I was talking about the kind of damage a prot warrior could do I thought it would be obvious I wasn't talking about progression tanking. Many progression tanks would give away all their damage for 5% more health assuming they could still hold aggro somehow. I really do think you're giving blood craze too much credit, in the content 90% of the player base is going to spend 100% of their time on it's not going to matter, ever. I'm not talking about killing deathwing and going back to heroics, I'm talking about 4.1 when heroics can now be used to get raid quality gear.

Edit: The forums are fun today, apparently I haven't even posted the post you quoted yet.

@Shelly. Everyone has 5% melee crit naked. If you have 8% you've either specced cruelty or you have crit rating/agility on your gear. Normal tanking setups have 0 crit rating and 22 agility from the leg enchant, which usually isn't enough to overcome the extra defense skill your target is going to have. Incite brings base crit chance for the relevant spells (Cleave/TClap) up to 20%. A large number of buffs will also affect your crit chance.

[Fornaw]

Blood Craze > Imp Rend.

That said, you don't really understand how Deep Wounds works currently. It'd additive.

THAT said, with Incite (which every tank gets) Cleaves crit on a very constant basis which keeps your bleed dot ticking constantly without having to reapply rend.

Obviously Blood Craze is going to be a great talent, but if you want to lose a little survivability to gain a little damage (say you're wearing T12 gear in heroics which is bound to happen for some) an 8/2/31 build should put out some serious sustained aoe. Saying Blood Craze > Imp Rend is equivalent to saying Apple > Orange, they're obviously talents meant to do different things and in some cases nobody is going to actually care for the sustained 1.5% health per second.

I am fully aware of how DW works, basically it's a warrior ignite.

Cleave crits between 20 and 28% of the time depending on gear and your group makeup. That is not all the time, it is a smaller chance than Sword and Board, just like I said.

[Anthem]

When I was talking about the kind of damage a prot warrior could do I thought it would be obvious I wasn't talking about progression tanking. Many progression tanks would give away all their damage for 5% more health assuming they could still hold aggro somehow. I really do think you're giving blood craze too much credit, in the content 90% of the player base is going to spend 100% of their time on it's not going to matter, ever. I'm not talking about killing deathwing and going back to heroics, I'm talking about 4.1 when heroics can now be used to get raid quality gear.

I honestly don't understand the point of arguing what kind of damage a prot warrior can put out, especially at the start of a complete reset like Cata is providing.

But I really think you're underestimating the new Blood Crazy. A 10% chance to heal for 7.5% of your total health over 5 seconds any time you get hit? That will be healing you near constantly on trash and on fast hitting bosses. Especially when you consider that Field Dressing will be making that heal even more delicious.

[conqq]

The only interesting talent in the prot tree, but it will be a welcome addition. *However* while we are getting this, we're losing Deep Wounds, which was essentially the same thing without any of the work. =P

People actually got deep wounds as a tank? =|

[Thafisker]

In a way that doesn't really make sense. Because blood+thunder=rend on everyone?

[rabbimojo]

To riff on the Blood Craze effect a bit:

HP estimates are still out, but it's pretty clear we'll be over 100k early in Cata.
So, 7.5% per proc = 7500 health. If it's affected by both parts of field dressing, then it's 9540.
10% chance to proc, so vs. a boss, you won't get a lot of refreshing procs. IE, it is essentially (over time) 954 damage removed from every hit. (Yes I realize this is extremely rough napkinmath, esp. re: statistics)

How meaningful is that? Is it OP? The opposite? I can't decide.
In many situations it's on the order of a 1.5-2k HP/S passive, which sounds pretty ridiculous. On the other hand, if we had 100k health pools in LK, then we'd be expecting bosses hitting for 30-40k regularly, in which case a 954hp always-on 'block' seems somewhat trivial. In a mana-tight situation, maybe not. Just don't have enough info right now.

Of course, DKs are looking at some pretty significant self-healing as well, but that's intended to counteract their lack of a block mechanic. (Was the intent for LK too, but didn't fully work out that way). Is it really reasonable for warrior tanks to have this heal, in addition to block and enraged regen?

[Fornaw]

I honestly don't understand the point of arguing what kind of damage a prot warrior can put out, especially at the start of a complete reset like Cata is providing.

But I really think you're underestimating the new Blood Crazy. A 10% chance to heal for 7.5% of your total health over 5 seconds any time you get hit? That will be healing you near constantly on trash and on fast hitting bosses. Especially when you consider that Field Dressing will be making that heal even more delicious.

7.5% of max health over 5 seconds means 1.5% of max health every second assuming it's constantly up (it won't be on a boss). Notice how I described this previously? You're the one making an argument out of it, my original quote was "A part of me wonders how much AoE damage you could do with an 8/2/31 build while tanking heroics etc.". It's piqued my curiosity since it's clear to me that warriors will have a choice between a small amount of damage mitigation and a large amount of sustained AoE damage, which in my mind is an interesting way to setup talent trees, even if the small amount of damage mitigation is the clear winner for progression tanking (not all of this game is progression tanking afterall).

[Fornaw]

People actually got deep wounds as a tank? =|

Ummm, Incite/Deep Wounds is the name usually given to the current cookie cutter tanking build. If you aren't getting Deep Wounds there's no point in getting impale or improved charge, at which point I wonder where you've actually spent your points.

[Shelly]

@Shelly. Everyone has 5% melee crit naked. If you have 8% you've either specced cruelty or you have crit rating/agility on your gear. Normal tanking setups have 0 crit rating and 22 agility from the leg enchant, which usually isn't enough to overcome the extra defense skill your target is going to have. Incite brings base crit chance for the relevant spells (Cleave/TClap) up to 20%. A large number of buffs will also affect your crit chance.

I probably overestimated it, but we do end up with more than just 5% simply because of agility. Drat, it's still got me in dps gear on the armory so I can't quite check it right now.

Also it looks like we'll also have an extra 10% crit across the board if you choose one of the first tier talents, which adds up nicely too.

I will say that there are going to be some very interesting builds going on. I may end up with two different tanking builds, one for max threat and dps and the other for survivability.

Anyway, it looks like B&T is a nice replacement for DW, although I think it underestimates just how nice a passive threat/dps gain is over an active one. Also even if it's a "chance" DW can on many fights (depending on group comp) equal 3% or more of our total dps, I am not sure I'll see rend pulling those numbers on a single-target boss.

@Conqq, where have you been for the entirety of LK? It was only for a short while after LK shipped that people were NOT getting DW. Now days it's the most common tank build with the exception of 10-man utility builds. Pretty much the moment incite was introduced DW became an almost mandatory tanking talent because of the huge threat and dps gain it offered.

[rabbimojo]

People actually got deep wounds as a tank? =|

Are you asking whether people took the talent, or whether it procced reliably?
Either way, yes.

However, I feel that this thread may be overestimating the damage dealt by DW. 48% of the average damage of a fast tank weapon is a pretty small bonus, maybe 600 per crit for an average ICC tank? Closer to 800 with mangle up, but that's 133/sec. Not sure how it interacts with various buffs. It certainly helps, esp. with incite, but it isn't this massive crazy dot.

Rend, for comparison, is currently 100% of your average weapon damage, plus 380. So if we use the same guestimates I used just now, with 48% being 600, then we're estimating average hit to be 1250. So rend would hit for 2119 over 15 seconds, counting mangle. (~141/sec)

So right off, assuming numbers are the same as in LK (they won't be), we're seeing untalented rend being more damage than DW, assuming you crit on average once per 6 seconds. You probably crit more than this on a single target, but AOE-wise I don't think so. Your chance to crit with tclap is maybe 30%, so that would average out to about once per 20 seconds, per target. Cleave plus your ST raise this a bit, but it's pretty clear that that's an enormous gap.

The reliability of B&T spreading rend is another big plus. Altogether, I think it's a pretty nifty sounding talent.

Edit: Adding in a couple minor calcs:
DW from tclap, given the above numbers, comes out to about 40dps per target.
I honestly can't remember if damage shield can crit, but that would improve it. Maybe 10-12% crit chance on that (if it crits) and an average hit frequency of once per 2 seconds for each mob means, again, about 1 crit per 20 seconds, so that would put DW at 80dps per target. Cleave's got a decent crit rate, but hits relatively few, so I think AOE-tanking your average DW dps per target is on the order of 90-100.

Rend, by comparison, is a guaranteed 140 dps per target. If you talent rend, it's around 184 dps. That's pretty significant. (That might even compete with our DW single-target, considering fewer HS to profit off of incite)

[Slasha]

Blood and Thunder seems awkward to me. If it wont be changed, i am not gonna take it.

[rabbimojo]

Blood and Thunder seems awkward to me. If it wont be changed, i am not gonna take it.

It's a pretty standard mechanic if you've played a DK. Doesn't feel awkward there at all, to me.

Unfortunately, given the values I calc'd above, I think B&T may end up being what our AOE is balanced around. You may not really have that choice.

[Hulari]

This is going to be an interesting and fun talent in my opinion. Can't wait to give it a test and use it in instances.

[Shelly]

@Rabbimojo, you're forgetting some very important things about DW compared to Rend. Not only does DW stack, but more importantly it doesn't use a CD. That's a pretty important deal right there because it essentially makes it free damage, especially when you consider that ALL of your other attacks do more damage than Rend, Devastate, Revenge and Shield Slam are all just much more important.

This is why with B&T it's such a big deal to find out if TC will refresh Rend. If it does, since we'll be keeping TC up all the time, we can use that to refresh the rend and it'll actually become an important ability to keep up on a boss again.

Other questions we'll need answers to are things like, will rend work like other DoTs where refreshing them ahead of time just adds more time to the dot? Also how will haste work with Rend and DW? Since I know if a piece drops with haste, mastery and 2 or 3 gem slots it's going to be of equal interest to tanks and dps given that stamina levels will be about the same all around.

[Electromatt]

as a mastodon fan, I approve of this talent name