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.
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.
