I don’t see Warriors having more than 1 spot in any ideal setup because unlike in classic/tbc, they don’t have an outlet for their massive advantage on specifically 2-4 target cleave, many other classes now also have good cleave and some have vastly superior AOE. I still see Warriors having 1 spot in ICC, maybe 2 if you run a Prot Warrior + Fury.
Warrior will be competitive in T9 and really competitive in T10 on single target/cleave, topping some fights probably, but Shadowmourne is going to be a big part of this discussion because it’s a massively limited item that has a massive impact on your performance, maybe you will see guilds split-raiding to create Shadowmourne Fury Warriors for speedrunning, but I remain unconvinced.
Fury does more dps and scales better than Ret, but I dunno I think you should just give it to your most deserving player, it’s a reward item since in any progression guild the LK is long gone before you get SM.
Ret is decent in T10 and it’s not a bad idea to give them one in my opinion. Giving it to a DK would be less desirable, tho. For speedrunning I suspect guilds will favour Warrior over Ret, but not to a massive degree.
Shadowmourne is a trophy. It goes to the most deserving player regardless of class. For one, you will likely have LK25HC already on farm by the time you make one, but also the weapons from LK25HC aren’t really a significant downgrade to it dps-wise.
That being said, giving it to a DK is borderline trolling, but ret/war it doesn’t matter much. And if your DK is the most deserving, it’s really whatever
Everyone knows that first ones to get shadowmourne will be all those 4k warmane XP pvp swipers, so they can sit with their legendaries on top of dalaran well and never move past 1400 rating …
Thank you for the replies. I suspected that was the case but I keep seeing Fury Warriors DPS potential in ICC being strongly linked with Shadowmourne.
I haven’t found the predictions made for MM Hunters to be bourne out so far in Wrath, where it was originally forecast their performance would improve every phase. Personally I started in p1 being at least in the top 5 dps in every fight, by now i’ve dropped to bottom 5 dps in most fights, and this seems backed up by wider logs.
As originally posted I found the old post about Armor Penetration changes, and wondered if that could be the reason why comparing across multiple classes which use that stat & seem to be underperforming.
Would you say if ArmPen were reverted to the original Wrath levels it would only have a minor affect on Warriors?
dks carried the dps for the whole expansion, while warriors and rets were borderline useless dps wise, only bringing utility. giving it to any of the 3 is fair, but u dont give it for the potential dps, u give it for what that player brought to the guild for the expansion.
and remember, warriors will need like 3 months of gear and shadowmourne to become top tier dps, at which point their dps is already moot because u are close to cata and way past progress
it would improve classes that are already doing better than warriors more than it would boost warriors, like feral druids, combat rogues, even frost dk, therefore it would not put them in a significantly better position than now
I’m not that experienced with Death Knights. Sorry, random question, do you happen to know the proportion of physical damage to magical damage for Frost DK’s?
I’m asking because Frost seems to be the highest performing spec of the ones being discussed, so i’m curious if ArmPen changes would have an unbalancing effect.
like 60-70% of their dmg is physical, kinda like combat rogues
edit: and they already have a lot of armor pen naturally, i have almost 30% for example and i didnt go out of my way for armor pen items
MM does become good, it scales really well with ArP and benefits from the absolute perfect itemisation available in ICC. I have screenshots from July 2010 with Hunters competing in the upper part of the damage metters on Rotface and Putricide.
It’s hard to compare exact numbers because there is a lot of context missing when looking at 13 year old screenshots. SV does suffer on single target as it lacks scaling, while ArP is a weapon for MM because it provides incredible scaling.
My Warrior in Ulduar is just about closing on the ArP soft-cap as of last week and the week to week dps progression has been huge, over 8k on Ignis and Thorim, over 9k on Razerscale, 7.5k on Mimiron, 7k on Vezax. It’s already becoming clear how strong ArP will be for physical specs in the future when the full cap can be achieved.
That said, I think the top of the meters in early ICC will be held by Rogues, Warlocks and Death Knights, with Fury Warriors and Fire Mages coming in after 4-6 weeks. I could be completely off with the prediction but if you look at videos from the period you can get an idea of what I mean.
That’s how I felt for the entirety of Naxx. But SV is still decent, arguably it’s one of the better dps specs because it’s really good at Firefighter, Algalon and Yogg Saron while only being bad on Hodir, that’s 3/4 of the big fights. A guild can afford to carry you on Hodir for the value you bring on those other fights.
We have to speak relative terms, SV is still very decent overall and the main worry comes perhaps in T9, the cross-over period for SV/MM where there isn’t quite enough ArP to make MM really good and SV falls off more on single target. Beasts of Northrend and Jaraxxus does have some multi target elements that could be utilised tho, Faction Champions has an AOE damage reduction forcing you to single target focus so not as good, Twins are a pure cleave fight and Anub has 4 adds to cleave/aoe so the raid bosses themselves should lend themselves well to SV hunters who can maximise explosive trap.
In T10 you’re gonna want to be MM and bully your raid leader into giving you Deathbringer’s Will, which will be the biggest item drop of the expansion for physical dps.
I guess I feel that classes should have more than one raid viable spec, this isn’t vanilla any more.
Survival are mid tier, but are kept there with some very strange interactions. 434 is the most obvious- Explosive shot has a dot component which is overwritten by another dot of the same rank. However is you fire a lower rank shot after the first the two dots stack which I believe isn’t normal for WoW. On paper the damage increase is minimal, only a couple of hundred dps but it does make gameplay easier as you can spam a macro rather than time out the two seconds as was done before the stacking dots were discovered.
The bigger boost comes from the 3 point talent Lock & Load. The talent gives you two free Explosive shots with a 33/66/100% chance if you trap a target with freezing/frost trap (not that useful on raid bosses which are normally immune). The tooltip also states you have a 2/4/6% chance of proccing LnL with each Explosive Trap/Immolation Trap/Black Arrow tick. The actual proc chances are 2/4/21%.
Blizz are aware of these bugs (the second actually existed in original Wrath), but it doesn’t feel good for a classes one viable spec to be propped up bugs.
not possible, but blood dps will reach frost on some fights in toc potentially. unholy will not be caught by frost unless on specific fights, and early on during progress when unholy cannot snapshot to full potential
