Ok, I don’t play wow for a good half year now, but I watch wowinsider regularly. I’ve just read planned changes for patch 2.3:

[Warrior] While arms/fury warriors aren’t meant to be as good as protection warriors at tanking, we do plan to make an additional to Tactical Mastery that may help them out. This talent will grant greatly increased threat from Mortal Strike and Bloodthirst when in Defensive Stance.

It’s like Blizzard saying “oh yeah, we said before Tactical Mastery is a choice, we were lying, and we are going to buff it even more to make it more must have then it’s now”. Why do you people still keep playing that shit when people like Kalagan officially state that Warlocks are designed to dominate 1v1. Get a grip.

Oh, I’m in Warhammer closed beta, it’s great :).

Terhix

No, I’m not going to make a comment about 2.1.0 changes, if you have half of a brain, you know why we are getting nerfed. There is nothing to cry over, it’s a major bug fixing and class balancing patch, and as always - if anything will be wrong with our class - it will get fixed. Anyway, Meadows got onto PTR and gave us the following information:

Here are some changes that might be of interest to warriors.

# Many epic weapons were slightly nerfed. Blacksmith tier 2 weapons lost 0.7 DPS, gladiator 2h weapons lost 0.7 DPS too (mine went from 114.7 - 114.0). Gladiator 1hs lost a bit of damage too.

BS tier 2 weapons: http://esko.planetaclix.pt/tier2weps.jpg
Gladiator 2h sword, old stats: http://surl.se/akhy
Gladiator 2h sword, new stats: http://surl.se/akhx

# Savagery now has a glow. If your weapon has no base glow effect then savagery will be red, while at the same time amplifying a weapon’s base glow effect if there is one Looks pretty funky. See screenshots below but keep in mind that the gladiator sword glows a bit already:

Old glow: http://surl.se/akhy
New glow: http://surl.se/akhx

Glow without any base weapon glow: http://esko.planetaclix.pt/WoWScrnShot_041307_170441.jpg

# Mongoose has a bright, green glow:

http://www.worldofraids.com/news/roguet5ptr.jpg (right side)

# Spell reflect now fades after you unequip your shield, plus it also has a really obvious animation, impossible to miss:

http://surl.se/akhu

# Revenge had its damage increased by 400% or so. Mitigated by armor, not effected by AP:

http://surl.se/akig

Old: 99-121
New: 414-506 damage

Effected by armor. Not effected by AP.

# Devastate has been reworked. It now strikes with both weapons when dual-wielding:

http://surl.se/akoc

# Heroic Strike causes 62 additional damage to dazed targets.

# Enrage is still the old 25% damage buff, not some haste/flurry thing

# All ability tooltips now say "melee range" instead of 5 yards. Whether this has any effect on abilities is doubtful:

http://surl.se/akig

# Warrior tier 4 was slightly changed:

Warrior Def: no changes

Warrior Off:
Chest:
-4 STR (why?)

And last but certainly not least:

# Sweeping Strikes no longer gets a second bonus from %-damage buffs:

http://surl.se/akhv

So, there goes that. Damn it, Blizzard.

So here dies my idea for instant shield -> spell reflect -> 2h macro :p.

Terhix

So, we were promised to have Charge/Intercept/Intervene breaking snares (for all the idiots out there - frost nova is NOT a snare, snares are slowing effects ONLY), this was supposed to be in already, but…

The published version on the website will be accurate. However, the notes pushed out that will appear on completion of downloading will have an inclusion that did not make it into this patch.

“Charge”, “Intercept”, and “Intervene” now remove all snaring effects.

The technology for this has not been completed, so we are holding off implementation to a future patch. We are still working to get this functionality into the game, but simply couldn’t finish it for this patch’s cut off date.

…Tseric explained why it didn’t make it into the game. Now that we got new PTR patch notes online for quite some time, it doesn’t say a squat about snare breaking. Will we ever get rid of Intercept bug?

Terhix

From European boards: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=263836810&sid=1

The following changes to cleave have been made for the 2.1.0 patch.

–Cleaves will only hit people in front of the creature.
–Cleaves will have a chain length equal to the combat reach of the creature.

We still don’t have an exact estimate on when this patch will be ready but development is wrapping up and the test phase should begin relatively soon. As a reminder, the patch undergoes internal testing before public, PTR testing.

Note this does not seem to be something that will affect our cleave, but rather something that will make melee dps more viable in a lot of encounters. Currently the amount of 360 degree cleaves in the game make it tough to use rogues, enhance shamans, ret pallies and dps wars. This change will allow you to stay out of cleave as long as you are behind the mob, thus an indirect buff to arms (and fury) warriors!

Veritas

While arms warriors are generally creatures of the pvp world, most of us at some point in time get involved in pve at least a bit. Many times you will have to tank - it sucks, but often that’s the only way to get a spot in the group. However there are two exceptional instances that came in the expansion where the arms warrior absolutely shines in 5-man groups: Black Morass (caverns of time), and Shattered Halls (hellfire citadel).

Most don’t think of arms as being an AoE class, but effectively that is what we boil down to in pve. The big fat 2 hander with sweeping strikes, cleave, and whirlwind is how we pump out our highest damage. Most of us are spamming MS and Whirlwind even on single targets. Toss in a secondary target and we get more out of our whirlwind and can toss in cleave as another damage boost when rage is in excess.

Unlike a mage, where getting hit while AoE’ing is often disastrous, for an arms warrior its pure goodness fuelling our dps with more rage and enrage procs. While I don’t recommend trying to get hit in most heroics, in non-heroics the damage is low enough that the mitigation of your plate actually makes it not a bad idea.

Why these two instances in particular?

Black morass feels like it was built for an arms warrior specifically. There is NO crowd control involved in this zone. It’s a balls-out dps battle from start to finish. The reason you shine as an arms warrior is that 1 person needs to contain the adds that head for Medivh’s portal - and that 1 person is you. You can grab the trash with piercing howl, keep it next to the elite, and go to town with sweeping strikes, whirlwind, and cleave thus maintaining your dps on the elite AND the trash at the same time.

The main piece you want out of here is [hourglass of the unraveller]. There are also the [pauldrons of the crimson flight] which sadly are worse than [sylvanaar champions shoulders] (or at best a sidegrade).

Shattered halls is home to a lot of 5 and 6 mob pulls. You’re never going to CC them all, so the tank will be holding 2 or 3 mobs (sometimes 4). They hit weak enough that even if you end up with the agro of 2 of them its going to fuel your dps without putting a big strain on your healer. If you take on the adds on the final boss (kargath bladefist) you can again get them close enough to him to be able to whirlwind/cleave damaging both.

There isn’t much in the way of dps-war loot from shattered halls. The main thing you are doing this for is reputation to get you into the heroic hellfire instances. Some goodies to look forward to in those heroics include: [crimsonforge breastplate], [bloodlord's legplates], and [spaulders of slaughter]. There’s also [doomplate gauntlets] which can be good if you’re using them to get the set bonus.

Veritas