Furor is terrible!

I have a feeling I have written this before (or maybe I just thought I did when lissanna wrote something about it) but

The biggest quality of life issue since ulduar, FUROR! Until Ulduar came out you almost never saw a feral druid with improved mark of the wild and thus would always have 5/5 furor. So what a wake-up call it was when suddenly improved mark became a required talent for feral druids and we have to stand there and shift 5+ times to get the 10 rage proc. Do the math all you want, what the odds of a 60% chance not happening 5 times in a row, and I could care less, I have seen it happen time and time again. Waiting before Anub one I had to shift so many times just to get 10 rage I ran out of mana and had to drink.

Now granted this was a much bigger problem in the past, and since the buff to enrage and bloodrage it is not nearly as big a deal, but it is still a royal pain.

1) Make it a 3 point talent at 33/66/100% chance to grant 10 rage.

2) Leave it at 5 points and make it always a 100% chance for 2/4/6/8/10 rage.

3) Make it 3 points and make it a 100% chance for 2/4/6 rage.

4) and probably the most radical idea because it is my favorite. Just remove furor completely, make natural shapeshifter a 5 point talent and move it to tier 1 where furor is right now, and make it 6/12/18/24/30% mana reduction and a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to get 10 rage.

Nothing pisses me off more than when I am shifting for rage as DKs are using army, and the retards' armies pull the boss when I have shifted 4 times and still have 0 rage. What really upsets me about furor is bosses that you start an event and it starts in x-seconds and you have a limited amount of shifts to get a proc.
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After reading what GC said about removing talents that buff buffs, and kalon for sniping a post I was in the process of writing, improved mark will probably be gone. But what does this mean for the passive stat increase it provided? Will that be made up somewhere else or will everything I just wrote about above be completely pointless because we will need 5/5 furor to advance to the next tier anyway?

Which brings up point 2: Naturalist will probably be gone too, with vengeance making up some of the difference for bears and the cat mastery is just straight up damage. Same with MSS, and as a bear there is really no reason to go that deep in resto just for that.

So I guess what I am trying to get at is, will a bear tank have any reason to not spend every single talent point in the feral tree (or all but the 5/5 for furor). Should furor be made up somewhere else in the feral tree, since that is where it really belongs anyway, and just give moonkin something somewhere else to make up the stat difference?

Bring back fun trinkets in Cata!

(read more here)

I as a tank no longer feel like a tank, I feel like someone who just DPSes from in front of a boss instead of behind. Here is why (thanks kaz):

Our survival is rarely within our control, outside of standing out of stuff, and blowing our cooldowns on scripted fights, survival is all in the hands of our healers,

THIS needs to go. So in the comments either leave your thoughts on this idea or create your own idea on how to give tanks more "tank" buttons as opposed to "DPS threat only" buttons. While it is agreed this is a problem, where is the balance between having to many situational buttons (see below), avoiding the old shield block "spammy" scenario, and just making the 4 tanks carbon copies of each other (which actually may not be a bad thing, again see below).

Trinkets used to be a key part of tanking, especially during the days of spammed shield block, no barkskin in forms, and no last stand for druids, trinkets were one of the only real cooldowns we had.

I am sure this is something we can all agree on, trinkets with on use effects are being wasted in LK, especially avoidance trinkets. Back in BC, when you hit the use on Moroe's, you felt like a god, a true 15% dodge was so good for locking in kills when healers were on fumes and you were out of everything else. If blizzard wants to go the route of making healers choose between regen/haste/crit, and make tank average damage taken matter for healer mana, than things like trinkets are going to be a big part of that. Choosing an avoidance trinket over a stam trinket in today's game is just unjustifiable right now, and avoidance clickies are completely wasted making things like the 25 TOC trinket use so good. A trinket that is supposed to give me 10% dodge on use is giving me one, MAYBE two percent.

I propose remove rating from "on-use" effects on trinkets and make them straight %, thus giving the user the full effect from it and not the DRed value which is next to nothing right now, to make gearing more interesting. Older trinkets will still be kept in check by passive stats THAT ARE rating still for avoidance or stam or armor. Personally I have a love/hate relationship when I think that a drop from the first instance, a 10 man even, was still the best trinket in the game even on the last boss of the expansion. Love it because it proves that iLvl =/= best which in LK the only thing that matters for tanks is iLVL, but hate it because if it never drops you are left at such a huge disadvantage.

So hopefully blizzard can improve on trinkets in Cata because in LK they are just another armor piece that you pick whichever has the most stam or armor. And hopefully interesting effects can trump the iLvl=better mentality that LK has forced us into.

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After talking about this on tankspot for a bit I realized there is something I failed to consider, I am a druid, we hardly have anything to push, but some warriors already feel like they have to many situational abilities that another one would just be problematic, things like spell reflect, disarm, intim shout, etc that druids do not have equivalents of. After discussing it a bit I realized he was right, but we both agreed on the fundamental point of my post: tanks, regardless of class, are just people who stand in front of the boss and position it. Tanks are not tanks anymore, we are DPS who DPS from in front and do less damage. Bring some of the fun back to tanking, we as tanks have almost no control over our own survivability anymore and that is not fun. Obviously shield block was way to spammy but tanks want more tank buttons and less DPS buttons. We should be rewarded with increased survivability for pulling off a perfect rotation not simply just helping to kill the boss faster. Earlier I said there is no reward for doing a perfect rotation as a druid because maul is literally so much of our threat we could probably get away with hitting nothing but maul and still never lose agro. Well what if the penalty for not doing a perfect rotation was not a DPS pulling agro but instead we did not gain a bonus to survivability we could have gained by doing a better rotation.

Another thing that was brought up was homogenization. Making 3 than 4 viable tanking classes that operate in such a different manner really was bad for the game. Either go all the way with homogenization or get rid of the other tanking classes. First, it limits the encounter design team by making sure all fights are able to tanked by any of the 4 tanking classes. Things like shield blocking shears or spell reflecting deaden or even shifting stances to break fears are what made warrior tanking fun in the past. Sure it would be unfair to the classes that cannot do those things, but those things made you feel like a tank and not just a person DPSing from in front.

(credit Veneretio for his input on this)

Blue posts:

We do want to make sure that 10 player raids can get all of the major buffs a little easier. You should feel like most reasonable comps (3 warriors and 7 rogues is not what we'd consider reasonable) give you all of the major buffs and several of the more minor ones. There will be a little more consolidation than what we've described so far.

We are scaling back the magnitude of some of the buffs, as we did with Sunder Armor. We want you to feel awesome when you have strong good synergy, but we don't want the buffs to overwhelm say your gear or skill. We're also planning on getting rid of any talent that buffs a buff. Any buff that is earned solely by talent needs to have a selfish component thrown in so that you don't feel like you should respec if someone else with that buff comes along.

Obviously things like Rebirth can't just be handed to out to more classes unless we did something like a second exhaustion mechanic for battle rez or whatever. For now we're going to try the cooldown at 30 min again. In Icecrown's world of limited attempts, a 30 min cooldown likely meant you just cooled your heels until the cooldown was available again. In Cataclysm the hope is sometimes you'll have the benefit available but not every time, which scales back on how much of a game-changer it is.

I really really really what some talent trees are going to look like. At this point it seems like can spend every single point in some trees and not have enough to unlock the 51 point talent. But on a serious note I wonder if this extends to things like Feral Aggression, not having to spend 5 points to buff our debuff to be equal to a paladins would be nice, but at the same time "Any buff that is earned solely by talent needs to have a selfish component thrown" sounds like we are being punished because paladins do not have demo shout as a base ability.

And battle rez at 30 minutes is going to suck, 15 would be the most realistic option.

My thoughts on the druid changes: (full notes in the post below)

http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.php?65720-Druid-Preview&p=400730#post400730

Thrash (Level 81): Thrash deals damage and causes all targets within 10 yards to bleed every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. The intent here is to give bears another button to hit while tanking. Talents will affect the bleed, such as causing Swipe to deal more damage to bleeding targets. 5-second cooldown. 25 Rage.

Finally, druid-thunderclap w/o the slow. Will suck for things that need to be CCed if they intend to get rid of the AOE game but that is nothing those of us who tanked in BC are not used to already.

Stampeding Roar (Level 83): The druid roars, increasing the movement of all allies within 10 yards by 40% for 8 seconds. Stampeding Roar can be used in cat or bear form, but bears might have a talent to drop the cooldown. The goal of this ability is to give both bears and cats a little more situational group utility. 3-minute cooldown. No cost.

WHAT...THE!!! This is amazing. This probably will not go live as is, hits way to many targets, will probably be reduced to 5 yard range or at the very least party (physical 5 man party) only.

Wild Mushroom (Level 85): Grows a magical mushroom at the target location. After 4 seconds the mushroom becomes invisible. Enemies who cross the mushroom detonate it, causing it to deal area-of-effect damage, though its damage component will remain very effective against single targets. The druid can also choose to detonate the mushroom ahead of time. This is primarily a tool for the Balance druid, and there will be talents that play off of it. No cooldown. 40-yard range. Instant cast.

This 100% will not go live like this, unless it costs like 5K+ mana. Will be an amazing pulling tool (thinking back to the days when the druid would have to be in caster form in heroics and use a hurricane on the pull to get initial agro).

Haste will also benefit Energy generation while in cat form.

We knew this already but good to hear it again.

Unlike the other healers, Restoration druids will not be receiving any new spells. They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation.

DID NOT expect that. Very surprising revelation. Almost as surprising as the lack of a druid healer "cast on person to reduce damage taken" spell. Maybe it will be a new talent.

We want to add tools to cat form and depth to bear form. If a Feral cat is going to fill a very similar niche to that of a rogue, warrior or Enhancement shaman, it needs a few more tools -- primarily a reliable interrupt. Bears need to be pushing a few more buttons just so the contrast between tanking and damage-dealing is not so steep.

Good to know, maim was terrible as an interrupt because it needed combo points. Not sure what they mean about the bear thing, difference between tanking and damage dealing as a bear? (see the bottom)

We will be buffing the damage of Mangle (cat) significantly so that when cat druids cannot Shred, they are not at such a damage-dealing loss.

Not what I wanted to hear, REMOVE THE POSITION FROM SHRED!

We want to make the Feral cat damage rotation slightly more forgiving. We do not want to remove what druids like about their gameplay, but we do want to make it less punishing to miss, say, a Savage Roar or Rake. The changes here will be on par with increasing the duration of Mangle like we did for patch 3.3.3.

This is good, increases in the duration of even rake would be HUGE for rotations but if they do more than that it will probably be too good.

We plan on giving Feral cats and bears a Kick/Pummel equivalent -- an interrupt that is off the global cooldown and does no damage. We feel like they need this utility to be able to fill the melee role in a dungeon or raid group, and to give them more PvP utility.

YES YES YES YES YES !!!!!!!!!

Savage Defense is the current bear mechanic for converting crits into damage absorption and will be improved for bears.

good, it is pretty weak right now.



Negatives: No furor change announced, no new bear tanking cooldown although maybe that is what they meant about "bears needing to be more tanky not just DPSing from in front as a bear"

Listening to a podcast right now so not giving it my 100% focus. Will have better, more complete thoughts on this after that is over.

Druid Preview

Second or third, who wants to play!

I WIN!!!!!!!!!! SECOND

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm we’ll be making several changes to class talents and abilities. Here you will get a glimpse into some of the changes we have in store for the druid. The information you’re about to read is certainly not complete, and is only meant to act as a preview of some of the exciting new things to come. Let’s kick things off by checking out some of the new druid spells and abilities!

New Druid Abilities

Thrash (Level 81): Thrash deals damage and causes all targets within 10 yards to bleed every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. The intent here is to give bears another button to hit while tanking. Talents will affect the bleed, such as causing Swipe to deal more damage to bleeding targets. 5-second cooldown. 25 Rage.

Stampeding Roar (Level 83): The druid roars, increasing the movement of all allies within 10 yards by 40% for 8 seconds. Stampeding Roar can be used in cat or bear form, but bears might have a talent to drop the cooldown. The goal of this ability is to give both bears and cats a little more situational group utility. 3-minute cooldown. No cost.

Wild Mushroom (Level 85): Grows a magical mushroom at the target location. After 4 seconds the mushroom becomes invisible. Enemies who cross the mushroom detonate it, causing it to deal area-of-effect damage, though its damage component will remain very effective against single targets. The druid can also choose to detonate the mushroom ahead of time. This is primarily a tool for the Balance druid, and there will be talents that play off of it. No cooldown. 40-yard range. Instant cast.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

In addition to the new abilities listed above, we intend to make changes to some of the other abilities and mechanics with which you’re already familiar. This list and the summary of talent changes below it are by no means comprehensive, but they should give you a good sense of our goals for each spec.


* All heal-over-time spells (HoTs) will benefit from crit and haste innately in Cataclysm. Hasted HoTs do not reduce their duration, but instead add additional HoT ticks. Haste will also benefit Energy generation while in cat form.

* Unlike the other healers, Restoration druids will not be receiving any new spells. They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation.

* We want to add tools to cat form and depth to bear form. If a Feral cat is going to fill a very similar niche to that of a rogue, warrior or Enhancement shaman, it needs a few more tools -- primarily a reliable interrupt. Bears need to be pushing a few more buttons just so the contrast between tanking and damage-dealing is not so steep.

* Barkskin will be innately undispellable.

* We will be buffing the damage of Mangle (cat) significantly so that when cat druids cannot Shred, they are not at such a damage-dealing loss.

* Druids will lose Abolish Poison with the dispel mechanics change, but Restoration druids will gain Dispel Magic (on friendly targets) as a talent. All druids can still remove poisons with Cure Poison and remove curses with Remove Curse.


New Talents and Talent Changes


* Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

* We want to make the Feral cat damage rotation slightly more forgiving. We do not want to remove what druids like about their gameplay, but we do want to make it less punishing to miss, say, a Savage Roar or Rake. The changes here will be on par with increasing the duration of Mangle like we did for patch 3.3.3.

* Balance druids will have a new talent ability called Nature’s Torrent, which strikes for either Nature or Arcane damage depending on which will do the most damage (or possibly both), and moves the Eclipse meter more (details below). The improved version of Nature’s Torrent also reduces the target's movement speed. 10-second cooldown.

* Restoration druids will have a new talent called Efflorescence, which causes a bed of healing flora to sprout beneath targets that are critically healed by Regrowth.

* We plan on giving Feral cats and bears a Kick/Pummel equivalent -- an interrupt that is off the global cooldown and does no damage. We feel like they need this utility to be able to fill the melee role in a dungeon or raid group, and to give them more PvP utility.

* We want to make sure Feral and Balance druids feel like good options for an Arena team. They need the tools to where you might consider a Feral druid over an Arms warrior, or a Balance druid over a mage or warlock. Remember that the PvP landscape will probably look pretty different for Cataclysm with a focus on rated, competitive Battlegrounds.


Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Balance
Spell Damage
Spell Haste
Eclipse

Feral (Cat)
Melee Damage
Melee Critical Damage
Bleed Damage

Feral (Bear)
Damage Reduction
Vengeance
Savage Defense

Restoration
Healing
Meditation
HoT Scale Healing

Eclipse: We are moving Eclipse from a talent into a core mechanic of the class and making it less random. Balance druids will have a new UI element that shows a sun and a moon. Whenever they cast an Arcane spell, it will move the UI closer to the sun, and buff their Nature damage. Whenever they cast a Nature spell, it will move the UI closer to the moon, and buff their Arcane damage. The gameplay intention is to alternate Arcane and Nature spells (largely Starfire and Wrath) to maintain the balance.

Bleed Damage and Savage Defense: Feral druids will receive two sets of passive bonuses depending on whether the druid is in cat or bear form. Bleed Damage will be improved for cats. Savage Defense is the current bear mechanic for converting crits into damage absorption and will be improved for bears.

HoT Scale Healing: HoTs will do increased healing on more wounded targets. The mechanic is similar to that of the Restoration shaman, but with HoTs instead of direct heals. In Cataclysm, we anticipate druids using a greater variety of their spells so there is a distinction between healing and HoT healing.

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s unbuffed health. For boss encounters we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Feral tree and the druid is in bear form -- these values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Feral tree and are in bear form, so you won’t see Balance, Restoration, or Feral druids in cat form running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today -- there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so the Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is that all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

We hope you enjoyed this preview, and ask that you provide your initial thoughts and feedback on what was presented here. Please keep in mind, what you’ve just reviewed is a work in progress and as we move closer to the Cataclysm beta, you’ll see these changes as well as others continue to develop in response to testing and feedback.


Cataclysm Stat & System Changes: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23425636414&sid=1

Mastery System Preview: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23710210871&sid=1

Have not read any of it yet, it could say druids are being removed from the game for all I know, gimmie a few minutes to comment

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24262387043&sid=1

Warrior Preview

Druid implications in the warrior preview:

Battle Shout, Commanding Shout, and possibly Demoralizing Shout will work more like the death knight's Horn of Winter ability. Specifically, these shouts will cost no resources, generate rage in addition to their current effects, and be on a short cooldown.

Hopefully they do not put a cooldown on demo shout and demo roar. Paladins already have vindication, which is passive, and with blood DKs getting a demo shout equivilent which will probably be attacked to a strike like melee slow is to icy touch, it seems like druids and warriors are being penalized for being the 2 original classes with demo shout. A resist just would not be fair when you compare it to pallies and DKs. Although druids are lacking the "horn of winter" type rage generator they gave to warrior shouts and demo seems like a place to do it, but not at the expense of having a cooldown on it unless they make it not able to be resisted.

Critical Block Chance: As we mentioned in the stat changes preview, block rating is changing to a chance to block 30% of a melee swing's damage. Protection warriors have a chance that the block will be a critical block and block for 60% of a melee swing's damage instead. There will likely be talents available to push the amount blocked even higher.

Block is now a more powerful cooldown than barkskin and on a shorter cooldown. This gives me hope for the druid preview that we as druids may gain an additional, melee-only reducing cooldown, death knights as well (although possibly not since they already have an anti-magic only ability).

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

While not new, something I had actually not seen before was brought back to light yesterday by Kalon: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23710210871&sid=1#8

Ferals will have passive bonuses that say Cat: melee damage done, Bear: damage reduction.

Almost all dots will crit. The exception will be things like Deep Wounds and Ignite because those are already the product of a crit. Rend will crit.

Is primal gore being removed and lacerate, rip, and rake critting becoming a base part of the ability?

Dual-Spec, My take on the future of it.

How great would it be to have a third spec, for most of us it would be amazing, but it would also take a lot of decision making away. Also, Blizzard has said they are not likely to give us a third spec (for what that is worth WoW is an ever-evolving game so things said 6 months ago cannot be held as law).

My gripe with the dual-spec system since it was put in was that you had to use the glyph set with that talent set. What if the talent and glyph options could be selected independently? This would give you 4 talent options without needing to add the option to purchase additional specs.

One thing that comes to mind is I have been using glyph of growl in every tanking spec this entire expansion, despite the amount of bosses that do not require taunts. In my post last week I mentioned that I would probably be using glyph of mangle soon. Wouldn't it be nice if I could do one glyph spec for SI, maul, and mangle and the other Growl, SI, SR? Consider, 25 man raid with a ret or prot paladin on a fight that needs taunts, but my spec without feral aggression has SI, mangle and maul glyphs. I could run the entire night with my ferocity spec and swap only my glyph specs depending on fight instead of having to run a feral aggression spec on taunt fights even though we already have that debuff provided by someone else.

Blue posts:

This one comes to us from the damage dealing forums: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/24038607788-when-will-hybrid-tax-apply-to-fury-warriors.html

Read the whole thing from a blue-tracker, there is a lot in there about healer mana and how tanks are going to play a much bigger role on tank mana in the expansion, and how healer's having to play with more spells for the sake of mana will make tanks change their mentality.

OT rage from damage will be almost as high as a dps warrior (haste, crit, and any specific talents would be the only differences). Plus you'll have abilities like shouts to tide you over for short periods in which you're not taking enough damage. OTs do often take incidental damage in many fights.

It's definitely something to keep an eye on in the sense that the new mechanic doesn't completely solve the problem, but it should feel better than today.

There will be a little more information when we're ready to share more details on warrior and druid specific changes.

If there are more fights on taunt immune bosses where you are trying to do tank swaps with druid or a warrior offtank, hunters and rogues are going to be very unhappy. WHICH I HOPE THERE ARE BECAUSE LDW IS A LOT OF FUN!!!!!!

Cata Rage Changes

This is to important to wait till tomorrow (it also means I will have to rewrite part of tomorrow's post)

We are going to take the opportunity in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the problems with the Rage mechanic for both warriors and druids. Some of these problems include:

• Warriors/druids in the lowest levels of gear can be Rage-starved.
• Warriors/druids in the highest levels of gear no longer have to manage their Rage when it becomes infinite.
• Warrior/druid tanks lose Rage income as they improve their gear and take less damage.
• The gameplay of warrior and druid tanks loses a lot of depth when massive boss hits means never having to manage Rage.
• Heroic Strike and Maul are effective, but tedious abilities for using up extra Rage.
• In general, warriors and druids don’t have enough control over their Rage.

To resolve these issues, Rage will be normalized in Cataclysm. This will make the Rage gained by characters more consistent and avoid drastic differences between low-end and high-end gear.

The concept of normalized Rage may leave a negative impression on some veteran players, as we tried it once before in The Burning Crusade and it wasn't successful, resulting in them feeling weakened. However, we think that the concept is still sound -- it was just that the previous implementation didn't balance the values correctly, leading to players being Rage-starved. That is not the goal. As part of the change, we want to give warriors and druids a lot of ways to control their rage, so even in the worst-case scenarios they won’t feel like they lack the resource to do their job.

Here are some of the ways the Rage mechanic will change in Cataclysm:

1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:

• If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
• Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.

2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

3) We will provide warriors and druids with more instant sources of rage. For example, the warrior shouts are changing to work more like the death knight ability Horn of Winter. Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown. Both classes will have additional methods to generate Rage in an emergency or bleed off Rage when they have too much.

4) All “on next swing” attacks in Cataclysm are being removed. Heroic Strike and Maul will be instant swings that cost a variable amount of Rage. For example, imagine Heroic Strike costs between 10 and 30 Rage. You must have at least 10 Rage to use the attack, but it will consume all available Rage up to a maximum of 30. Any Rage consumed above the minimum will cause the ability to hit harder, and in some cases much harder. We will tune the ability so that it’s generally not a good idea to hit it when you have low Rage (unless everything else is somehow on cooldown) but becomes a more attractive button the higher your Rage.


We understand this change may be scary for many players, but keep in mind that the constants in the formulas for gaining Rage will give us the ability to make quick adjustments if we feel Rage generation is too low. Our goal is for each character's Rage to not be always high or always low, but rather a resource that needs to be managed properly by the player.

Thinking about this more lead me to some conclusions, mostly that a druid needs only 10 rage per second to do a full 13.5 second rotation with no mauls. Second, warrior HS threat vs total warrior threat when compared to druid maul threat vs total druid threat is so imbalanced that they are going to have to do some serious tweaking to druid threat so we don't just do mangle-FF-hs over and over and over and ov......... Lastly, WE DO NOT NEED a lot of rage unless we plan on replacing every single mangle and FF with maul as well, we needed extra rage because we ALWAYS had something to spend it on, now we still have something extra to spend it on but it is INSTEAD of something else not in addition to our norm.

read here and here for more of my thoughts as I get them.