Colossus Smash as a talent.

**Uoyredrum** · 2014-05-11, 07:09 PM

Originally Posted by Archimtiros

Because no other class does that. I would see it being removed from one, honestly Arms as it needs a significant rework anyways.

In terms of pvp, warrior damage revolves completely around dumping everything into CS windows. If CS gets dodged or parried (you can't always help that), you have to pray for a proc or wait for it to come off CD. That's bad design. You CAN do damage outside of it but obviously your effectiveness drops like crazy.

In terms of pve, lots of bosses spin and even if they didn't, it really sucks having to pool all of your cds and rage into attacking during this one window, having to change your entire rotation based on whether or not it got parried or if you got a proc (arms) or whatever may be happening. It just feels clunky, I've never liked it. I preferred BC/WoTLK dps because it flowed better. I played arms all through Hyjal/BT/Sunwell except on certain fights and it was a very fun rotation. I played fury for most of WoTLK and again fun rotation (I prefer arms and always have but WoTLK fury was the most fun it's ever been) where it flowed well and didn't require me to think "oh CS is coming up I better play with my dick and wait for that".

**CollisionTD** · 2014-05-11, 07:10 PM

After re-reading all the comments I think you are concerned with the wrong thing. You've mentioned that people in lower ilevel are punished more by colossus smash, when that's not even true. If anything, more powerful gear actually makes colossus smash even more important.

Now, with the following pictures you'll have to ignore the dps numbers. Unfortunately, the ability to add in custom reports for simcraft wasn't added until our WoD-branch, so I can't make them appear in MoP. However, our rotation is effectively the same, so the percentage of damage done inside of CS will still be accurate.

First, an example of someone who is fresh out of leveling, 460 ilevel.

http://gyazo.com/372de524d801ee10bf998a98a2c4e706
% Damage done inside of colossus smash: 46.28%
Enrage uptime: 66.01%
dps: 5150.19

500 ilevel, effectively what ilevel new players start at with timeless isle.
http://gyazo.com/01ef35ade1f3666bd0d5aa9418bf13a9
% Damage done inside of colossus smash: 48.18%
Enrage uptime: 70.88%
dps: 6964.51

540 ilevel, which is what flex will give you
http://gyazo.com/ef05449472d3e8b3a93f77d50af48d42
% Damage done inside of colossus smash: 48.63%
Enrage uptime: 77.60%
dps: 10323.40

Finally, BIS heroic:
http://gyazo.com/3ce9156ddeb42e5fcb0c3cbd343b4152
% Damage done inside of colossus smash: 52.24%
Enrage uptime: 88.33%
dps: 18372.26

The next set of pictures are what happens when I lower the skill level of the player. What simulationcraft does is it will randomly misfire on the action list, skipping lines, ignoring others, resource capping, etc. I've set it at "Average" skill level, rather than elite. This shows how much dps is lost when the player is new/bad/lazy/etc, and also helps us when considering how important colossus smash is. If it were more important at lower ilevels, then there should be a larger percentage of dps lost from people mismanaging it.

460 ilevel: http://gyazo.com/7f02efb5f858eafb4e9a9fd3757cf749
4666.21 dps - 9.3% dps lost

500 ilevel: http://gyazo.com/dae1b173882538b4551f355aa89727ca
6291.76 dps - 9.6% dps lost

540 ilevel: http://gyazo.com/d9758271fde301f4c817481c4b91d8a8
9285.55 dps - 10% dps lost

BIS: http://gyazo.com/802c54829b16e67ab540f466bae65658
16483.40 dps - 10.3% dps lost

If anything, colossus smash only becomes more important as ilevel goes up. The amount of damage that is forced inside of CS increases, and the amount of dps lost from mismanaging parts of the rotation goes up as well. Why is this? What changes with more gear that makes colossus smash more important?

What difference would more gear make with colossus smash? More gear gives additional crit, haste, mastery and strength. Strength, mastery and haste do not change our rotation whatsoever, with strength/mastery making numbers larger and haste being nearly invisible.

Crit? Now that's a completely different story. What ends up happening with high levels of gear is that management of raging blow charges becomes more and more important. At lower ilevel, you honestly get a free pass on raging blow because it's near-impossible to not use all of your charges efficiently when there are so many open globals. Higher ilevel grants more raging blows, which means less gcds and more opportunities to screw up by wasting procs.

At lower ilevels, you can hold on to 1 rb at all times to ensure that it's usable inside of CS, as the likelihood of getting multiple bt crits back to back is low. With 90%+ crit on bloodthirst, that's just not possible. You have to make more difficult decisions, such as delaying BT or chancing that colossus smash will crit when you already have 2 rb charges. Especially if you want to make any use of bloodsurge, which is still semi-important.

Mastery is a part of this as well, berserker rage goes from "Eh, just use it to make sure that colossus smash is enraged" at lower ilevels to being an incredible dps loss (Relatively-speaking) if used for any other purpose than ensuring maximum enrage uptime. When enrage is a 60% damage increase, not being enraged is big deal compared to 10-30%.

I think that the issue here is that players are placing too much emphasis on colossus smash, when 55% of your overall damage is done outside of colossus smash. Maybe this is an issue with guides around on the internet, as colossus smash IS important, just not as important as it's made out to be.

Anyway, back to my original point. I think what you should be concerned about is crit itself, and how at low ilevels it feels like nothing is going on, and that there are open gcds everywhere. That feeling is compressed when you feel as if you need to save resources for colossus smash, and that you really don't have any resources to use in the first place. This is actually a legitimate concern--as much as I hate to admit it to fatalfuror (<3)--and has been something that blizzard has already made a lot of subtle changes to fix in WoD. The playstyle of fury starts out relatively boring/stale, and over the expansion becomes more and more "furious" due to the amount of crit that is added on gear.

The changes that you are suggesting would do nothing to fix this, as rend would use 1 global every 20 seconds (Similar to CS), lambs to the slaughter doesn't fill any globals, and would become less useful as more crit is acquired for more raging blows.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Uoyredrum

In terms of pvp, warrior damage revolves completely around dumping everything into CS windows. If CS gets dodged or parried (you can't always help that), you have to pray for a proc or wait for it to come off CD. That's bad design. You CAN do damage outside of it but obviously your effectiveness drops like crazy.

In terms of pve, lots of bosses spin and even if they didn't, it really sucks having to pool all of your cds and rage into attacking during this one window, having to change your entire rotation based on whether or not it got parried or if you got a proc (arms) or whatever may be happening. It just feels clunky, I've never liked it. I preferred BC/WoTLK dps because it flowed better. I played arms all through Hyjal/BT/Sunwell except on certain fights and it was a very fun rotation. I played fury for most of WoTLK and again fun rotation (I prefer arms and always have but WoTLK fury was the most fun it's ever been) where it flowed well and didn't require me to think "oh CS is coming up I better play with my dick and wait for that".

The boss spinning thing will not happen in WoD, they're adding in "tech" that even when the boss turns to case a spell, you are still considered behind him.

**Archimtiros** · 2014-05-11, 07:26 PM

Originally Posted by Uoyredrum

In terms of pvp, warrior damage revolves completely around dumping everything into CS windows. If CS gets dodged or parried (you can't always help that), you have to pray for a proc or wait for it to come off CD. That's bad design. You CAN do damage outside of it but obviously your effectiveness drops like crazy.

In terms of pve, lots of bosses spin and even if they didn't, it really sucks having to pool all of your cds and rage into attacking during this one window, having to change your entire rotation based on whether or not it got parried or if you got a proc (arms) or whatever may be happening. It just feels clunky, I've never liked it. I preferred BC/WoTLK dps because it flowed better. I played arms all through Hyjal/BT/Sunwell except on certain fights and it was a very fun rotation. I played fury for most of WoTLK and again fun rotation (I prefer arms and always have but WoTLK fury was the most fun it's ever been) where it flowed well and didn't require me to think "oh CS is coming up I better play with my dick and wait for that".

Just a couple things, I completely recognize what you are saying though.

1) PvP:
Will always be an outlier. On that note, pvp is designed that way. Take CS out of the equasion entirely, pvp still relies on burst. What happens when you hit all your CDs with a high rage bar, go to town and bam you get poly'd or they get bubbled, whatever. You now sit on your thumbs until CDs are up again. Sure you can apply pressure and do things here and there, but that is at its core the very nature of PvP.
It is also something the devs have recognized time and again. Lowering CD's in WoD will help immensely I am sure but it is still going to rely on burst, however you get it. I keep coming back to WW Monks because they have the very same problem in Tiger Eye Brew. We will have to see what other WoD changes may help with this but IMHO PvP will always be the outlier on this, and no single change will help.

2) Bosses Spinning:
I brought this up back at Blizzcon with the (at the time) Lead Encounter Designer, and have stated it in numerous threads, I have since spoken to a couple devs 1 on 1 about it. It is very much a recognized bug. From my understanding the boss "casts" then targets-spins and executes the ability. For some reason the entire time from starting the cast until executing is supposed to count as "cast time" meaning the boss cannot dodge or parry.
However, the "bug" is that the boss "casts" THEN targets-spins and executes and that time is not being counted as "cast time". This is being fixed.

As for your tanks or your own bad positioning, that is not a problem with the ability. I agree the ability could be less punishing (CD reset on parry perhaps) but it is still a player issue, not a design one. It isn't a reason to remove the ability by any means.

3) Wrath:
Don't even start. This comes up constantly and I can't be bothered to talk about it anymore. Wrath rotation was a complete joke. CS was added because Wrath rotations were a complete joke. You could literally make a macro and auto hot key it to do it for you with near 100% effectiveness. Yes it was easy. Yes players like that. Developers do not. They want you to think and make decisions that effect your performance, not play whack-a-mole with whatever button lights up first.
You said it yourself, the rotation didn't require you to think. At all. You can say it flowed but it really didn't. No ability had any interaction with the other, the only "flow" was that none of the abilities CD's ended at the same time, which yes does create a rotation, but it certainly doesn't create flow or even fun play imo. The only reason it was fun is because it was so over tuned and we were so powerful, especially in ICC. Had we instead been undertuned and weak it would have felt absolutely terrible, because no matter how fast we smashed our buttons there would have been no possible way to perform better.
Now you have to think to perform better. You are rewarded for lining things up, you are rewarded for fitting CS in with cooldowns instead of simply blowing them whenever they are up as in Wrath. You are rewarded further if you can line up those cooldowns with trinket procs or +damage phases, or other mechanics. The game went in that direction for a reason, it will not revert.

**Eranthe** · 2014-05-11, 07:46 PM

Originally Posted by CollisionTD

The boss spinning thing will not happen in WoD, they're adding in "tech" that even when the boss turns to case a spell, you are still considered behind him.

jesus christ that's awesome

**Kei01** · 2014-05-11, 10:05 PM

I generally don't understand the hatred towards CS, I think its an amazing ability(OP in some respects). As someone who's been a warrior since vanilla, warriors in general and fury especially are in the best place they've ever been before.

If it's the fact that you "have" to use it at a certain time... oh well?... it's called a rotation... doesn't every class have one? I realize we mainly use a priority/timing/CD system but even so. A 6 sec rotation in the midst of a priority system to me is amazing and makes fury game play feel amazing and fluid.

Personally if you don't like it... play arms? or another class?

I for one hope they change as little as possible with fury cause in my opinion MoP has surpassed all other versions of WoW and a large part of that has been the fury game play they've managed to build this expansion. Raids have been pretty good too.

**sjsctt** · 2014-05-12, 02:34 PM

Redacted. Thanks!

**Pua** · 2014-05-12, 02:44 PM

Suddenly, there's a lot for me to get through here. I'm going to have to be brief, but bring up anything I've not commented on that you feel should be.