We were just talking about the state of protection warriors in the Beta, and lo and behond, not only do we get a new prot-heavy beta build to try out, but we also get those long sought warrior glyphs to drool over. So what are the big changes? Well, MMO Champion and World of Raids have the lists but some of the standouts are worth mentioning here.
For starters, warriors get a variety of changes aimed at tanking: Warbringer allows a prot warrior to charge in combat, in any stance, Thunder Clap's damage is increased by 50%, and Damage Shield, a new ability, causes warriors to deal damage whenever hit by a damaging attack or when they block an incoming attack equal to 10/20% of block value. With the new way strength adds to block, this is an indirectly scaling with AP ability. Improved Shield Block now is folded into Shield Mastery, Vitality now adds expertise in addition to strength and stamina, and several abilities have had their threat reduced but their direct damage increased to compensate. A change that surprised me greatly was seeing Sword and Board now adding yup to 15% critical strike chance to Devastate in addition to resetting Shield Slam's cooldown and reducing it's rage cost by 100%. This could make devastate a very attractive DPS option in the right gear.
And Shield Wall is back up to 60% damage reduction for 12 seconds. The Improved Shield Wall talent is gone, replaced by Improved Disciplines, which lowers the cooldown on Retaliation, Recklessness and Shield Wall by 60 seconds max.
Arms and Fury see smaller changes: Bladestorm now whirlwinds every second for six seconds, Weapon Throw is now Heroic Throw, does half AP instead of 100% of AP, and has a minute cooldown. Enraged Assault is changed, it now consumes an enrage and prevents you from being enraged while it's up, but regenerates 30% of your health over 10 seconds. Nice enough (and the thunderclap change is big for tanking) but clearly this was a prot pass for warriors.
There are some nice glyphs in this build as well. Tanking warriors will go nuts for the Glyph of Resonating Power - it allows your thunder clap to hit four more targets! Combined with the new DPS of the ability and the new talent Damage Shield, warrior AoE tanking should have just gotten a very large boost. The Glyph of Cleaving, which reduced rage cost on cleaves by 5, should be good for AoE DPS and tanking, but while quite a few of these glyphs will be awesome for tanking (Glyph of Blocking, Glyph of Devastate, Glyph of Sunder Armor, Glyph of Revenge to name but a few) the ones aimed at pure DPS or PvP abilities seem lackluster in comparison. Glyph of Mortal Strike, for instance, increases the ability's damage by 10% but cuts the healing debuff in half: I don't know many PvP warriors who'd make that trade.
Some big changes for tanking warriors all told. I'm very anxious to get online right now and try them out, in fact, so we'll end this discussion here. Don't forget to check out all the changes yourselves.
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