The View From Down Here

Further Divination

As I expected, the Glyph changes on the PTR I mentioned in my last post have been nerfed back. When glyphed and talented, each of Last Stand and Shield Wall now have 2-minute cooldowns. I can live with that. It’s sufficiently short to make the decison easy but long enough not to make it automatic.

But – there’s yet more changes on the way! Defensive stance’s damage penalty is being reduced to 5%, down from 10%. That’s quite a serious increase in threat, and I think it’ll help a great deal. I wouldn’t say that Warrior threat is inherently bad, but when compared with other similarly-geared tanking classes, I’ve found I have to work very hard indeed on occasion to keep up with them, all other things being equal.

Of course, all things are not equal. But it’s nice to get a buff that will help wit threat as much as that one. And as gear increases, the threat game is gradually coming back into force. Rumours of its death, I always thought, were overstated.

I’m still wondering what will happen with Heroic Strike – an ability which requires a ridiculous number of keypresses at present, and one which the developers have said will be improved. I, and my RSI, await the solution with interest.

As for the oft-promised changes to how rage decays when shifting stances – they’ve been dropped. This doesn’t affect me so much because I rarely PvP, and I tend to use Battle Stance once in a blue moon to spam Execute on a boss while tanking it, or Beserker Stance of I really, really need to Intercept something. The extra tools that the changes might have afforded us might have been nice, but you can’t miss what you’ve never had. Maybe they’ll resurface in a future patch – we’ll see.

As for the patch date – it has to be within a month, because of the changes to Noblegarden. There’s still a lot going on though, so I’d wager on it being nearer April 7th /8th than any other time. Plenty of time for even more changes to make my current thoughts obsolete!