Divining the Future
March 2nd, 2009 Posted in Bosses, Theorycrafting, Wrath of the Lich KingThere’s a few things of note in the upcoming patch notes which we can use to divine what the as-yet unseen bosses in Ulduar will be like.
For a start, Last Stand is having its cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. When glyphed with Glyph of Last Stand, this suddenly means that Last Stand could be up all the time. I don’t believe for a second that will be attainable, but by nerfing the glyph to a 2 minute reduction, the minimum I expect to see, we’ll still see the ability available once a minute to boost health by 20% for 20 seconds.
Add to that the new glyph – Glyph of Shield Wall. It’s a similar deal to that of the Last stand glyph:
Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.
When properly talented with Improved Disciplines, Shield Wall too gains a 1 minute cooldown. This suddenly means that the 4-piece set bonus for Tier 7 gear (an extra 3 seconds on Shield Wall) means a lot more than it did.
There are two things that this could mean.
The first is that these are just the first iteration of testing and they’ll be nerfed back down to an appropriate level. Fine, I say. That isn’t too much of a problem – PTRs are for testing, and by making extreme changes and then gradually moving them back to a point where they’re comfortable, Blizzard can be sure to get them to a point at which they’re much better balanced against other tanking trees.
The second, and which has been partially borne out by the Hodir fight on the PTRs (melee strikes of 25k), is that we’ll be seeing a lot more encounters in which we take a lot of damage, like Patchwerk and Brutallus. It will mean that it’s not complete suicide for a warrior to tank an encounter such as Sartharion with all three drakes up. And, most importantly, it will make the decision to use panic buttons so much easier.
Of course, dual specialisation will be our saviour here too. A strict survivability spec might well depend on these two glyphs. Adding a full set of threat glyphs in the second means the choice is always there.
2 Responses to “Divining the Future”
By Wukki on Mar 2, 2009
I have no doubt that Ulduar will be having a lot of encounters where you will have periods of dangerous burst damage. Testing on Hodir alone showed me that his frost enrage can nearly one shot a Warrior / Pally tank (The DK just did icebound fort and anti magic shield respectively everytime :().
By Daagaak on Mar 3, 2009
See, I have two thoughts. Either they want to go this route for mitigation but they haven’t decided how to do it for the other classes, or it’ll get nerfed. They seem to be banging on about how they want to equalise the heal pools of tanks for Ulduar, this doesn’t seem the way to do it.
Can’t even get glyphs to do this on a paladin unless they can glyph to shorten the length of forbearance :(.