The Cataclysm patch will bring us new skills, talent changes, and new ideologies on rage management, gear scaling, and rotational decisions. Wow news guru Boubouille from MMO-Champion.com kindly and graciously sums up everything from the developer's posts on the official WoW forums. So far, we will get 3 new baseline abilities up to level 85. These are Inner Rage, Gushing Wound, Heroic Leap, and a new Heroic Strike. I say the new Heroic Strike is a new ability simply because it's a redone version of the old one.

Firstly, Inner Rage is the answer to potential damage loss through capping out on rage. Anytime you hit 100 rage, you will get a 15% damage increasing modifier (DIM for short) for a short time at the cost of all abilities costing 50% more rage. A lot of people have mixed feelings about this ability, but I don't. Here's why: If you are at 100 rage, the extra rage cost on abilities won't really matter. The buff will only last a few seconds, so the chance of becoming rage starved (rage dropping down from 100 to sub 30) will only be a function of how much you are spending over those few seconds. Let's think about this.Since heroic strike does not prevent you from gaining rage off your main hand anymore, the only real chance you can starve yourself is if your main hand will become dodged or miss. In raids, even as arms, our swing speeds are sub 3 seconds, or sub 2 globals. If we do two back to back abilities that cost 30 rage, say Mortal Strike and Execute as Arms for example, those costs will be 45+45 rage totalling 90 rage cost. In those three seconds, we are likely to get an autoattack, putting us back up from 10 rage to 20-50 rage, depending on if we crit or glance and what the new rage normalization formulas will be. The skill involved in this new change will most likely amount to keeping high buff uptime by using new rage gaining abilities, meticulous rage management, and rage income increasers like haste, hit for fury, and critical strike rating. The goal will probably be to get a solid amount of rage income to manage keeping the buff up, without waiting too long to recover the rage after the bottom-out. The reason I am leaning towards this is, a 15% DIM is a very large damage increase, and it may be worth sacrificing a perfect ability rotation by using lower cost abilities (think slamming at odd times) to keep the buff going. A good portion of our damage is automatic through our melee swings, traditionally 40-55%. So maybe the gains from a high buff uptime will overcome the DPS loss from some rotation delays. Rage income and management will become much much more important than it is now. I'm afraid though that this ability will be tweaked several times before the final version of the buff gets launched.

Next is Gushing Wound. I do have mixed feelings about this. A bleed that deals more damage if the target has moved will be very situational, but if the rage cost is low I think this will be an amazing ability. The ramped up damage will also have to be high enough to warrant using this ability in greater priority than abilities in a perfect instant rotation. Let's imagine you are at high rage like 80 or 90 and you want to use a low rage ability so that it may be possible to get the 100 rage buff and the target so happens to be moving or will move. Hit gushing wound, get melee swings, get 100 rage, get the buff, the target moves and takes a bunch of dot damage, and your next few abilities will hit very hard. I'm afraid tho if it is battle and defensive stance only (like rend) that this will be an arms or prot only notion.

Heroic Leap is back! If you played WotLK BETA, for a little bit we had this awesome leaping ability which used a selection circle, stunned, and did damage. The reason it was removed is because it had phasing issues (targets would disappear and take too long to reappear) and people were using it to pass impassable terrain. It's back though for Cataclysm, but instead of a selection circle it is target only. It does about the same thing though with it's AoE stun and damage. In addition, it will apply your thunderclap debuff to those targets. However there are a few crippling restrictions to Heroic Leap. It will be battle stance and out of combat only unless you have Warbringer to remove those restrictions, or battle stance only if you have Juggernaut to remove the combat restriction. It also has a longer cooldown, and a shared cooldown with charge. Sorry fury warriors, you won't get to use this ability effectively at all, due to being in combat and being in a different stance.

Lastly is the new Heroic Strike. This new version will be almost exactly like execute in terms of rage cost, will be an instant attack, and will scale with your weapon damage. It is still unclear though if it share the 1.5 second global cooldown, or will have it's own global cooldown (think the 1.0s stance GCD) on a different track. Depending on the scaling, this sounds like it may always do more damage than execute. Weapon damage scales with AP comparatively at a factor of about 0.26 whereas execute only 0.20. Overall though it is a good change from it's present incarnation and will allow rage gains on main hand attacks, making the rage management aspect of a warrior much more interesting.

A few other notes on new versions of old abilities are as follows: Whirlwind will now have no target cap, but will only do 50% damage. This will make it where whirlwind will do single target damage just behind a bloodsurge slam. Depending on how much heroic strike does, whirlwind may still be viable in a single target rotation as a filler for fury. This is a much needed change for fury warriors because of our poor 6+ target aoe damage and our poor ability to do good single target damage while avoiding hitting other mobs. An example of this would be on heroic Lich King, where you don't want to get aggro on the ghouls so that you will die from Infest because the ghouls would have eaten your Power Word: Shield. Removing weapon specs will also be a great convenience for us when obtaining new weapons with different types. Our shouts will be much improved and give us rage instead of taking it away. Shouts will have a short cooldown to prevent us from spamming them to get rage. Also, sunder armor is capped at 3 stacks instead of 5 to make our lives easier. Prot warrior tanks (at least Grafarion lol) don't like to put up sunders right away even if they get tricks to pad their starting threat. SO not only does the maximum stack go up faster, you will have to spend less globals getting there. Also if you wish you can pick up the new sunder talent which will attach some damage to each sunder done, so that it's not a completely wasted GCD in terms of DPS.

Along with our talent and ability changes comes our talent tree masteries. Both Arms and Fury will get increased Melee damage. Arms will get Armor Penetration and increased chance for bonus swing. Remember Armor Penetration Rating is going to be removed, so the low level exponential scaling of armor pen may or may not pan out too well. Fury will get melee haste and Enrage Intensity. Melee haste might not seem that great now compared to armor pen, but think of the new rage changes and how the Inner Rage buff will work. Melee haste may be a very powerful stat depending on how it helps you increase the viability of maximizing Inner Rage uptime. Enrage Intensity may also work the same way, giving you much more potent rage management abilities to help you keep that buff up, as well as a stronger death wish. How it scales though will make or break these masteries for fury.

Another change for Fury is the possibility of dual wielding one handers again. Instead of Titan's Grip, we will have the option of going Single-Minded Fury which is a talent that increases our melee damage with one handers. DW-ing one handers provides a much more fast-paced style and may have different implications for rage management and ability usage. Again, this will have to be meticulously balanced so that it is within viability distance to Titan's Grip. I prefer the notion of one handers, but if TG is any more than 5% better than SMF, I would probably stick with TG due to my desire to maximize my damage. This option will also give fury warrior many many more dilemmas in gear choice as well. Players may be inclined to follow the spec that matches the weapons dropped in the instance they are working on, whetther they drop first, if one set of weapons has better itemization, etc.

For PvP, Arms will get a CC in the form of a physical fear attached to their disarm, and also a talent that will add damage to charge based on distance traveled. Fury will get a talent that will give rage on a successful pummel. Also, MS will be scaled back to only a 20% buff. This opens up the chance that Fury will be as viable as Arms (Furious Attacks never stayed up) for PvP. Fury will probably be more oriented around burst and sustained damage than pressure and control that you get with Arms. I'm afraid though that Fury will still be more limited than Arms due to lack of mobility and much less survivability which are extremely important for warriors in Battlegrounds and Arena. I'm really looking forward to how rated battlegrounds will work, because arena gets stale very quick.

Overall, our changes are kind of underwhelming and stale compared to other classes, but they do solve a lot of previous problems as well as introduce new ones, so we'll have to see how they pan out in the beta. Look for me there if you get in and we can brainstorm about stuff.

Landsoul wrote:Hit gushing wound, get melee swings, get 100 rage, get the buff, the target moves and takes a bunch of dot damage, and your next few abilities will hit very hard. I'm afraid tho if it is battle and defensive stance only (like rend) that this will be an arms or prot only notion.

Won't you want to "get" intensify rage before and reapply rend once you have it for increased damage, especially in a situation where you can predict the boss will move/be moved and following him (or having to run away like on marrowgar) will mean that the seconds of increased dps from intensify will be (partially) wasted, while the dot will refresh itself with the 15% increased damage buff?

Also do you see blizzard implementing anything like threat of thassarian on 1h DW - where one or more of our attacks (say HS) hit/have a chance to hit with both weapons? Even if 1h DW will get a big damage bonus - say 20% to TG penalty of 10% it's hard to imagine it becoming better without any other improvements. Though it is a very interesting prospect D:
Also eagerly waiting to see what new ability they'll introduce to fury rotation.

Well the way debuffs work is you cannot reapply a bleed that is weaker. So once you are without the intensify rage, you won't be able to refresh one with intensify rage. You can notice this the same way with rend now. If you apply rend with a strength proc per se, and try to refresh it without the strength proc, it won't apply.

No, I don't see a kind of "hit with both weapons talent" coming for warriors. Single Minded Fury talent should work as long as the correct damage increase is applied to it. Of course they have to balance it so that it does not buff abilities like Bloodthirst too much, while bringing weapon damage abilities and melee damage up to TG's level.

Landsoul wrote:Well the way debuffs work is you cannot reapply a bleed that is weaker. So once you are without the intensify rage, you won't be able to refresh one with intensify rage. You can notice this the same way with rend now. If you apply rend with a strength proc per se, and try to refresh it without the strength proc, it won't apply.

I think it's possible that they will overhaul dots in general so that you can't clip them. We already read from some reply that dots will scale with both crit and haste and we don't know if the damage buff on the first application will "roll" on the following ticks or not. I wouldn't be surprised if they remove the chance to clip dots entirely from the game, but I'm not sure how will they deal with this refresh.
For ex refreshing rend when it's 1s from last tick would bring its duration to +19s (so 21s total minus last tick of the previous) or will bring the duration to +21s and will only NOT tick when the effect fades?

I really hope SMF is dominant. I really do miss the fast paced aspect of fury. Though I am still unsure how our dps will stay competitive. Also unsure how useful Execute will be if Heroic Strike is basically the same ability but able to be used all the time and hit harder. Will execute become another unused ability? Unless ofcourse Heroic Strike isn't on the normal GCD but I don't see any evidence leading me to believe it wont be on the normal GCD.

It could be possible that execute would be a more powerful ability than heroic strike through talent modification in Fury, to the point where you would actually use it after 20% instead of heroic strike. For arms on the other hand, I'm speculating heroic strike will be overpowered (due to how weapon damage scales as arms) compared to other filler abilities like slam. If heroic strike has no cooldown, why would you slam ever? My guess is talents will have to be implemented where other abilities are buffed in a setup fashion so that they will scale better and hit harder than heroic strike. Think flame shock -> lava burst, or immolate -> conflagrate. Think heroic strike makes your next slam hit really hard, or put up some kind of new debuff.

I really wouldn't mind slam taken out for good out of arms rotation unless they somehow change it pausing swing timer or hitting harder/having a higher chance to crit (a la overpower) to make it a more worthwhile mechanic, especially given that you'd actually feel the void in rage generation due to that 0.5 sec pause a lot more with rage normalization - not to mention loss of opportunity on 3rd mastery bonus (weapon attack proc).

Landsoul wrote:. Think flame shock -> lava burst, or immolate -> conflagrate. Think heroic strike makes your next slam hit really hard, or put up some kind of new debuff.

Hmm, that would be cool to have. Maybe a talent in fury to make Gushing Wound similar to that? Or maybe deep wounds? I think it would be nice to have something like deep wounds getting 10-15 "stacks", and do a big bit of damage, then start deep wounds stacks over. Because i feel that its a boring dot to have. And you have very little control over the dmg it does, and unlike most classes, it doesn't have the ability to crit. On that note, i wouldn't doubt if they made rend crit in cata for arms.

For what we know so far it's nearly impossible to understand the palce of HS in our rotations as explained in Blizz vision. They want us to use HS as a rage dump where its damage should be great at 30 rage and with excessive rage we use it "more", but they didn't share a view if they want to make HS replacing your skills or simply going to fill more gcds.

There are a lot of variables to consider before even trying to "see" the possible scenarios:
- common weapon speeds
- amount of haste from raidbuffs
- amount of haste/miss/crit in the entry level gear
- amount of haste/miss/crit in the top level gear
- cost of every spell and relative dpr
- amount of rage per swing

Then we need to know what talents they want specs to share and if they want all 3 specs to manage rage in different ways. If we try to setup a scenario where both fury and arms are able to consume the same rage, either arms generates less rage but spellcosts are lower, or costs are similar and arms' bonus swing is tuned to contribute as much as an OH. It deals 50% damage, but may grant a 100% rage swing (being a MH attack) and the weapon spec proc may not be arms-exclusive.

Currently there are a wide variety of ways to make the specs interesting, they just didn't realease any useful information yet since everything is completely dependant on our rage generation system and the target they will tune it for.
Another key factor imho is haste affecting or not GCD. For what they said we will need increasingly higher crit and hit in higher tiers, so the only stat that will scale rage at any level will be haste. It has a direct effect on rage generation, you can't "tune" it to give x% rage per y% haste unless there are diminishing returns (that doesn't seem clever in an attempt to normalize rage).

They didn't release any number because it seems they are doing some overhaul of the buff system aswell.
While they were clear about having crit ratings in the 30% ballpark, they didn't say anything similar for haste, so I won't expect a very narrow scaling between start and end tiers. The real rage values are probably something we will know just few weeks before beta release, because they need to know the stat ranges before tuning both spellcosts and gains. In a few words we actually have a blank paper to work on as theorycrafters