Warrior Update Incoming

Blue poster Gamnin posted to the warrior forums a list of changes that either came in on the last patch or which are intended for an upcoming patch. Later in the thread he posted to answer questions and clarify a few things. We can assume that we will be seeing the effects of all this when patch 3.0 goes live.

Now, some of these changes are at least potentially very nice... I especially like where the designers are going with the talent Vigilance. I've always believed that warriors should have a form of threat transfer, so getting 10% of target threat with this ability is definitely a step in the right direction. Other changes, such as the ability Warbringer in the prot tree (the ability to charge in combat that's had us all scratching our heads) don't do much for me. Since it's only usable in Battle Stance, you still have to risk stance dancing over, losing a huge chunk of your rage, getting back some rage from the charge and then dumping most of it to switch back to defensive again... it's just an odd ability right now, very deep in prot for a minimal benefit. If you could use charge in defensive, then I'd be more exacted about it, but Gamnin confirmed in his clarification that they intended the current design and don't want charge used in defensive stance.

Arms had the new armor penetration effect of mace spec highlighted (totally on the fence about this, no idea if it's good or not), while Fury's big changes are the removal of the cooldown component of Improved Whirlwind (which is bad, in my opinion, Imp Whirlwind was used to make the ability more friendly to damage rotations, but with the greater number of possible abilities that's no longer as crucial) and the note that they believe Titan's Grip still needs a counterbalance but they haven't decided on one yet.

I'll admit to being mildly underwhelmed: I really feel like Prot has given away most of its best abilities to other classes (Last Stand, Shield Wall, Shield Slam) and hasn't gotten much of anything. The reworking of Enraged Assault to either include or become Enraged Regeneration is a nice step. but if we're going to have parity between tanking classes, then all four tanks need to be able to do the same jobs and that means more love to the prot tree, in my opinion. But go check it out for yourselves, you may love what you see.