Warrior Changes 3.3.3

At the time of this writing, there are currently seven changes coming to warriors for patch 3.3.3, four of which are for protection warriors. I'm not sure what the Blizzard developers were thinking this patch, but there is certainly more AoE love for us. Perhaps they heard all the forum whining and wanted to help without turning us into paladins, and not making our AoE capabilities as dull as a druid's (see: Swipe). While I've never been one to complain about our AoE threat output, a buff in that department will never be turned down.

So, let's take a look at the relevant changes:

Revenge: Damage done by this ability (base and scaling) increased by 50%

Thunder Clap: This ability now counts as a ranged attack, granting it double damage on critical strikes instead of 150% and ranged miss chance, and still cannot be dodged or parried.

Improved Revenge: This talent can no longer trigger a stun, increases damage of your Revenge ability by 30/60% (up from 10/20%) and instead causes Revenge to strike an additional target for 50/100% of Revenge's damage.

Vitality: Now boosts Stamina by 3/6/9%, up from 2/4/6%. Strength and expertise benefits have not changed.

I've had a chance to test out the changes on the PTR and I am quite happy with all of them. The Vitality change is nice, though dull. The health it provides isn't really very noticeable and probably won't net more than a thousand hit points, but extra free health is something I'd never say no to.

The Thunder Clap change is very interesting, and I can see how changing the critical strike damage would add to extra threat, provided a critical strike happened at all. The biggest change here is changing it from a spell to a ranged attack. This is extremely valuable as it will allow for a greater chance to hit, as the ranged attack hit cap is significantly lower than the spell hit cap, thus the net change is to provide Thunder Clap with an extra hit chance. More importantly, the change will also keep the ability from becoming unusable when you become silenced, something I particularly get peeved about whenever I run something like Nexus. Now if only my paladin tank had something similar. Overall a nice change, a little help, but nothing earth-shattering. Only with extended play-testing will I be able to see it's effects.

The biggest (and in my opinion the funnest) changes are to Revenge. Not only is the base and scaled damage of Revenge going way up, but best of all it is becoming a new Cleave-like ability! I won't miss the loss of the stun one iota. A lot of warrior tanks had complained that the recent changes to Devastate had left Revenge in the cold, dropping it off the "rotation" completely. I never found this to be the case, and kept my points in Improved Revenge. Now I'm happy I did since it's coming back in such a big way. The new Revenge I tested on the PTR was a powerhouse of damage, I was able to not only gain massive threat on two targets at once, but also to contribute to dps in a meaningful way. My damage per second increased anywhere from five hundred to a thousand, depending on the mobs and situation I was in. The overall damage put Revenge way at the top by a large margin. This should also alleviate a lot of people's worry that warrior tanks are too low on the damage meters compared to other tanks. Even soloing an army of mobs at once didn't take a year. I doubt the change will affect the way I play much, I won't be taking Cleave off my bars just yet, but it will passively help every group I pull.

As a whole, this patch is looking fantastic for protection warriors, and if all these changes go through (which they may not), we will be much better off. I'm excited!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned next entry for: Add-Ons, Mods, User-Interfaces And You.