Thursday, February 4, 2010

Revenge: the Cold Dish

Or something like that. There's a clever title in here somewhere, I'm sure. Short story: revenge is off my actionbars for now, and I've taken points out of improved revenge for my prot spec on Radish. I'm playing with glyphs for the time being, but I'm pretty sure the setup I want is Shield Wall, Cleave, Devastate. I'd kind of like the glyph of blocking as well, and I think I'll probably carry a few in my bag to swap out for cleave situationally (cleave for heroics and AoE tanking, blocking for raids and high-damage single-target stuff). Even then, the blocking glyph isn't all that hot, 10% block value is nice but it's a few hundred extra damage off of incoming hits. If the boss hits you for 15k or more, that's a drop in the bucket anyway.

The big deal, though, is that after patch 3.3.2, devastate has been buffed in an attempt to "improve prot warrior DPS" and overcome the annoying warbringer/shield slam nerfs. Granted, from my perspective (not PvP, and raiding as fury), I don't notice most of those high-falutin' nerfs. But what I did notice was that after the patch, the expected DPS output of devastate has gotten to the point where it's more-or-less the same as the talented DPS of revenge, before you factor in bonus damage from the multiple sunder stacks. In terms of TPS, devastate comes out even better, especially glyphed, because you get two times the sunder armor bonus threat per devastate (even if there's already a 5-stack up).

So for snap and sustained TPS and DPS, devastate edges out revenge. Not so much that you'd be a fool to use revenge, but definitely enough that you can take two points out of imp revenge and put them elsewhere (I put them in imp disciplines instead, hence the shield wall glyph). The only thing revenge has going for it is the fact that it costs 10 less rage to use (meaning you could maybe get off an extra heroic strike now and again). But that's simply not enough of a benefit to make me watch my cooldown timers for when it's up and when it's lit (because you have to block/dodge/parry before you can even qualify to use revenge, and then it has to be off its 15 sec CD).

One less button to press. That's kind of a bummer, as I like the complexity of tanking with a warrior. But if I can get away with shield slam and devastate as my only two real threat moves (besides thunder clap and shockwave, of course), well, I can live with that.
Posted by at 10:43 AM
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2 comments:

  1. I personally think that revenge is going the way of sunder, and will be incorporated into another skill, kind of like the reflective damage shield talent.

    Two things though. First, the warbringer change was improperly discussed while it was on the PTR, many non-ptr players believed that charge and intercept were being removed off warbringer. All they really did is remove the 'they also break roots', you can still use it for it's main function, getting to a mob faster. And a small second, due to glyph of block being up near 100% in a pve-raid situation, that's also essentially extra threat per block as well and DPS due to damage shield/SS damage, so I think single-target it definitely performs better then, say, cleave.
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  2. Yeah. Warbringer is still great, although I do miss the root/snare removal in certain very limited situations (Forge of Souls mainly, and even then I'm usually rooted right near the mobs anyway).

    Glyph of Blocking is definitely better than cleave for single-target threat and damage reductions, since it's always up (the buff lasts longer than shield slam's cooldown). But for heroics, I'll take cleave. Unless I've got really, really good DPS who don't watch their targeting, I can usually just cleave / tclap and hold aggro in group pulls in heroics and not worry about anything. I only tab-target and apply more devastates when there's a lot of single-target DPS and they're all on different mobs.

    But then again, heroic tanking with all this t9 gear is pretty simple no matter how you slice it. It's only really HoR that gives me any trouble these days, and that's a skill issue rather than a gear / glyph one. As in, I need more practice in using my cooldowns and selecting targets and using LoS blockers to get people closer to me.
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