New: Devastate!

Devastate: Weapon damage and bonus per Sunder Armor on the target increased by 100%. This ability now requires a shield to be equipped.

So... if I got that right, that is a base 100% weapon damage for the Devastate ability, and another 500% with a 5-stack Sunder on the target, which adds up to... 600% of weapon damage for one Devastate! Not to mention the threat it would provide. I guess in lieu of prot warriors' low damage, I can settle for this. Time to start thinking about a slow tanking weapon if you haven't already got one! Broken Promise from Gluth or 4HM in Naxx25 rates to be pretty good, if this is really implemented. Here's to looking forward to patch 3.2!

The pace is reckless and getting us killed

The bunch of us just finished a Naxx10 to celebrate Z's priest hitting 80, and also to gear up my rogue for reasons that won't be discussed here. Along the way, we've had someone in our group who, despite having been to Naxx countless times, was still clueless about the various aspects (tank, DPS, heal) of some boss fights apart from what he was used to playing. This brings me to the point that the people in those progression guilds striving for world first, are so good, that they even bother to familiarise themselves with the other aspects of a boss fight, other than just knowing their job scope alone. It is these people that are really really good. Hats off to them!

Anyway, we cleared the Plague Quarter first, and was stuck for quite awhile at the gauntlet before Loatheb, due to some... reasons. Other than that, it was fine. Then we headed to the Arachnid Quarter, and, other than a few mishaps, managed to kill everything. Just before our Maexxna kill, however, we lost our offtank to real life issues, and B replaced him with a prot pally who seemed competent enough. Proceeding into the Military Quarter, and the trash immediately after Instructor, we lost our main tank to a dinner appointment, and had to replace him too. The pally now pulls two packs of weapons (a total of 4), which we handle okay. Sticking to the left wall, our new tank, the druid, pulls two more that I marked before hand (I had a total of 6 marked at this point), and to the horror of horrors, the pally uses his Avenger's Shield to pull 2 more, and naturally his shield jumps into another pack, so we had a total of 6 weapons on us. Needless to say, we wiped. This is what the pally said in raid chat afterward:

I mean, we're moving along at a very slow pace by my standards, and you pull an extra 4 mobs, AND you spring this on us? -100 points for the mispull, -3900 points for that remark. Gothik was ok, but the trash on the way to 4HM was marked by many many Misdirections from K, and many many Tricks of the Trade from me and B, because it seemed that both tanks' threat were very very low. Surprisingly, 4HM went fairly well too. However...

We now come to the last wing, the Construct Quarter. At this point, I start noticing that the paladin is pulling with his taunt, Hand of Reckoning (WHAT!?). Does this mean he knows he was at fault earlier, and is afraid to use his Avenger's Shield to pull, lest he overpull?? Patchwerk and Gluth seemed ok, but again, there was an overpull in the corridor leading to Thaddius' room with all the pats. We had 2 of the big pats that do a ground slam thing, and a shade. The best part? After these 3 mobs, said pally planted a Fish Feast on the ground, smack in the middle of the corridor. Naturally, being curious creatures, the second shade and the pack of small jumping mobs came to visit, and B died almost instantly. Well done, pally, well done.

Everything seemed fine up until... Kel'Thuzad. In phase one, said pally went to melee a Soul Weaver. FYI, thats the banshee type mob that does large Shadow AoE damage to people on a melee hit. So, as you can guess, we wiped again. The pally, claimed it was "the wife waking up" that distracted him, and so he "forgot" and went to "hit skull on instinct". Bullshit. He died twice to the void zone on the subsequent attempt (and kill). Pure bullshit.

Conclusion: DO NOT emulate -4000 points in any way, manner, or fashion. We are still laughing at him to this day.

I think I am better than you

So my shaman is now level 62 :P. Was LFG for Ramparts yesterday when a warrior invited me. His gear was above average for a 61, some items with 24 stam socketed, a waste of cash, but hey, if you have cash to burn, why not, right? There was also a priest in similarly outfitted gear, with 24 int in most sockets, and as they both had BoA gear, I assumed they had to have some standard. Our last party member was a hunter in pretty average gear.

This rated to be pretty easy, so we went in, and we started clearing. I found that I was pulling aggro pretty easily, and the warrior (prot), didn't even Taunt the mobs off me the first few times it happened. Even the healer pulled aggro with healing spells. It seems that this warrior rated to be pretty bad at AoE tanking. Naturally, not wanting to be an insufferable know-it-all, I didn't say anything, but I did check his recount. 4 Shield Slams over 7 or so pulls, a few Revenges, and Thunder Clap as his highest damage done skill. Still, I thought it was pretty ok, with the exception of the hunter (BM) who wasn't putting out much damage.

After we killed the first boss though, and wiped on the next trash overpull (by the warrior), the warrior suddenly remarked in party chat (this is non-verbatim, can't remember the exact words he said): [InsertHuntername], spec BM properly, and not have some scrubby spec. At this point, I inspected the hunter's spec, and sure enough, his talent points were a mess. However, it was extremely untactful and blunt and rude to say that directly to someone's face in the presence of other people. And, if you really want to criticise someone, please examine yourself first. You are hardly any more pro than that hunter from what I can see.

"Superior ability breeds superior ambition. When a group of people start thinking they're better than anybody else, the outcome is always the same."

You, my friend, are hardly superior, in more ways than one.

Class Q&A Series: Warrior

Warrior Q&A with Ghostcrawler (GC), which can be found here or here. A definite must-read! Go check it out. Now!

Making the adjustment from DPS to tank

If you, like many other people since 3.1 and dual-spec, are newly DPS-turned-tank, and are at a loss as to what to do, look no further! There is a wealth of tanking resources out there, as I have already mentioned; Reading widely + lots of practice will help see you through your initial tank phase. It could take a while before you grasp the basics, so practice, practice, and practice more. Be self-aware, and don't be afraid to approach others for help/assistance/advice, and above all, remember that there is no substitute for practice, nor is there a shortcut to tanking.

We (by we I'm referring to K, B, Z, and I) did a Naxx10 today to help B gear up his rogue (like it needs it anyway, judging from the number of BoE Ulduar items it already has) who has recently hit 80. Not surprisingly, we had to PuG, as it was roughly an hour just past noon. Since I highly distrust PuG tanks, and it would be irresponsible for me not to tank, I did, saying that I would be better served in a tank role than a DPS role anyway. Out comes S, warrior number 3, who is in very very average gear, with 952 block value, 28k HP, and roughly 48.8% total avoidance unbuffed. B found a PuG tank, who also happened to be a warrior. We form up, and we head in. Upon inspection, this warrior's gear happened to be slightly better than mine, but with some enchants missing here and there, but he had the coveted The Undying title (which H still does not have!), so I expected an easy run, given that half of the raid comprised people who knew their class well, and given that this warrior rated to be a pro.

Starting off with the Plague Quarter, everything seemed ok up until the first pull of the 2 gargoyles with another gargoyle patrol. Warrior grabbed all 3, I had 0 rage, and Bloodrage was on cooldown. As an aside, I have a quirk of never taunting a mob that someone else is tanking. It shows contempt for the other tank, and reflects badly on me (see -2000 points). So, I just meleed a gargoyle that wasn't marked with skull, and threw out threat moves when I had the rage to afford them. To my (small) surprise, I was able to pull the other two gargoyles off the warrior, and keep them on me. Alarm bells start to go off in my head. B (who was leading the raid), asked the warrior to solo tank Noth and me to DPS (in my scrubby DPS set). Having done it myself on my warriors and druid, I knew it was totally possible to be able to generate enough threat on Noth and his adds to hold them to me. The result? I ended up pulling aggro from at least 2 adds, and was subsequently "tanking" the 2 other skeletons that spawned immediately after Noth teleported.

The situation was exacerbated at Heigan, where the warrior (who was tanking) ate quite a number of the green lava thingy due to improper positioning, causing some of the melee DPSers to eat extra damage too. Finally, B called for me to tank Loatheb and it went without a hitch.

At Loatheb, I inspected the warrior's DPS gear, and was quite surprised to find that he was Arms, with 4/5 T7.5 (his tank gear was 2 T7), which led me to conclude that he was relatively new to tanking. Naturally, not wanting to appear to be an insufferable know-it-all, I refrained from any "friendly advice".

Quite a few times throughout the raid, however, this warrior also seemed to have slow reflexes. Imagine me going AFK awhile after we downed Gluth to restart my WoW client. Now, when I come back, I move towards the raid, who is just past the entrance of Thaddius' room. Somebody is calling out in raid chat that there is a Shade, so naturally I assume the warrior would pick it up. As I am almost reaching, out of habit, I charge the Shade, only to find that the highest on its aggro table is Z, who was healing. I press Taunt, we kill the Shade without any problems, and the warrior claims to be "lagging." That was probably the 5th or 6th time that the warrior has failed to pick up a Shade, and had I not done so all those times, someone would have inevitably died.

It was quite amusing throughout the whole raid, however, to see the other warrior struggle to grab some mobs of his own to tank during trash pulls. He tried taunting mobs away from me a few times, only to have the mobs turn back to me at the end of the Taunt duration. His low threat output only became really apparent as I inspected his damage breakdown (via Recount) at the end of a few trash pulls. No Cleave, no Heroic Strike, and no, his valiant Devastate spam wouldn't be enough to secure a mob for him to tank. Furthermore, to my horror of horrors, he used Taunt to pull the first pack of trash in the Military Quarter. That was... very very bad.

It was even more interesting at Patchwerk, where B stated (for assignments), and I quote: "Whoever's threat is lower will be the hateful tank." At that point, we all knew among ourselves that it most definitely wasn't going to be me, and so it was: Me serenely pressing buttons, him desperately trying to chase my threat (and failing).

The crux/most interesting part came only at Thaddius. K was complaining throughout the whole instance that the warrior's threat was very low. It only occured to me how low it was when, after the first Tank Throw, Stalagg went for K before I landed on the platform, forcing him to Feign Death, and me to Taunt, immediately after I landed. When both sub-bosses were down, the other warrior got the first few hits on Thaddius (his sub-boss died 5% before mine), but the boss came to me after a few more seconds (!!!), and when he Taunted the boss halfway through (I have NO idea why), Thaddius of course refused to stick to him, preferring to hit me instead =P.

The whole point of that story, people, is that there is no shame in asking for help or advice. It will not make you look like a fool, nor will you be labelled a noob. Shelve your pride, and ask the better tank how he manages to do what he does so well, and you will be well on your way to becoming like him. As I have said, I am a sucker for politeness and humble people, and will gladly take someone with low DPS/lousy tanking skill but willing to admit it and to learn, rather than that mediocre DPS/tank who thinks he/she knows it all and insists on erring time and again, with no inclination to learn or self-improve.

0/71/0, or any variation of that...

...is almost certainly a very bad idea, no matter what class or spec you are playing. Whenever I see someone sporting a 0/0/71, I have a strange urge to give them a piece of my mind on why that is such a waste of talent points. Simply put, no matter what role you wish to fulfill, whether it be a normal tank/heal/DPS spec or a gimmick spec, there will always be talents in your main tree that are useless to you, and the talent points spent in those talents would be better served in another tree.

Especially when it comes to warriors, nothing irks me more when I come across such a thing. It only takes mere common sense to understand the futility of a 0/0/71, and apparently common sense is hard to come by nowadays. Of course, there are all sorts of people in this world, and I have seen warriors that included those who:

1) Had Spirit in their gear (post-level 60)

2) Socketed AP instead of Strength (raiding warriors, both before and after the buff to Improved Berserker Stance)

3) DPS'ed in Battle Stance for a Fury spec

4) Socketed Agility

5) Didn't socket their gear at all (plenty of those people of all classes running around, actually)

And I really really felt like bashing hitting some sense into those people. You want to play a class, fine; so learn to play it properly!

In my own words: Warriors are a tough class to learn to play, and even tougher to master.

Challenge yourself today by learning how to play one!

More 3.2 goodness

"Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance" (Source)

Gasp! Tank avoidance is going to be lowered while block is now going to be more of a mitigation stat. This may be good, or it may not. We will have to see how it pans out. You can also read more here.

In the meantime, I've been levelling my level 13 shaman that hasn't felt any love for the past year or so, and it's happily sitting at level 51 now :P

As a side update, "tanking" in the aforementioned DnD game last Saturday was kinda fun, and successful to a large extent. Lots of status effects to befuddle enemies with =D

Paper tanks

No... not model tanks made of paper (is that kind of origami even possible?), but tanks who are squisher than normal.

Couple of weeks back, I was bored, and decided to PuG something that was easy to heal, since I wanted to fine tune a new healing style (HoTs instead of direct heal). It worked very very well in conjuction with Bob, a paladin friend of mine since BC times. In the two test instances that I ran with him, and K, namely heroic Violet Hold, and heroic The Culling of Stratholme, which is notoriously difficult to heal, I was *gasp* complaining that he wasn't taking enough damage, since all I had to do was to keep up Regrowth, Rejuvenation, and Lifebloom (1) on him, and I could happily fire away with Hurricane. Bob's pally isn't uber geared; he's roughly in 2T7 with a smattering of heroic gear, and same goes for me, with a smattering of 25man gear. He wasn't taking huge spike damages, and by the time I wanted to Nourish him, my HoTs already did the job for me. Previously, all I did was cast Regrowth, Nourish, and Wild Growth, which was a more hectic way of healing heroics, IMO.

Armed with this newfound confidence, I ventured forth into a PuG for heroic Nexus, with a paladin tank with some pretty nice heroic gear. Alas, it all went awry, when even on the 4-mob trash pulls before Grand Magus Telestra, the paladin tank was taking such huge spike damages that I couldn't even stop for a second to cast my HoTs, but had to use direct heals all the way. This trend continued all the way to the end of the instance. After a minor conference with some people who do know something about healing and paladin tanking, aka B and Z and Bob, I came to the conclusion, that it really wasn't my lack of healing, but rather, that said paladin tank in heroic Nexus was not consistent about keeping his Holy Shield up, resulting in large spike damage.

The point is, if you are armed with an array of abilities that enable you to do your job, use them! There's not much point in shying away from them, such as -2000 points, unless you want to make your healers work harder. Speaking of -2000 points, new evidence has come to light that he actually really does have a tanking macro, and has put Taunt inside it.

Geez... if you want to tank, learn how to take less damage, not more! Since almost all of my friends have healers, they know how irritating it is to come across a paper tank, or worse, be actually healing that paper tank. This actually reminds me of the time I was healing a paper death knight who was tanking 25m Patchwerk, and his HP had the annoying tendency of dropping from 100% to 10% in less than 1 second, and this happened roughly 15-20 times throughout the whole fight.

Moral of the story: Learn when and how to use your tanking abilities, learn to use the correct gear for each individual boss (more on that next time), and above all, if you want to tank, do it properly.

Aggro, and what happens when you have it

Whenever you get into combat, monsters automatically create a "hate list". They will attack whoever is on top of that list (exceptions apply). Everything that you do in combat moves you higher on the hate lists (aggro) of each and every monster in combat, for example, drinking a potion, using Bloodrage, healing, dealing damage, etc etc. Monsters will attack you if you are right at the top of their hate list, unless you are

1) In melee range (5 yards I believe) and at less than 110% of the aggro of the guy the mob is currently hitting (tank)

2) More than 5 yards away and at less than 130% of the tank's aggro.

Therefore, if you are not the tank, you don't want to be at the top of a mob's hate list. Here's a nice list of the threat modifiers of each class if you're interested.

What we should be interested in, however, is what happens when the fit hits the shan and you pull aggro from me (or your tank). In patch 3.0.8, all player taunts were changed such that they not only work in melee range, but work up to a range of 30 yards, like for example, Taunt. What's going to happen when you pull aggro from a caster mob is that I will taunt it back, and continue building hate on it since it is casting a spell at you and wont move out of my melee range.

When you pull a melee mob, however, it will turn away from me, and walk towards you. What happens here, is that I will taunt the mob, expecting you to either 1) stop hitting it NOW, or 2) Feign Death, Vanish, threat wipe, etc etc, such that the mob walks back to me and I can continue hitting it.

I'm sure I speak not for myself, but for every other tank since Wrath, when I say that people who pull mobs away will continue hitting the mob, harder if need be. If you have played a tank and have been in such a situation, you know that the next thing that will happen, is that said mob, will walk back to you for 1 or 2 seconds, and then turn around and look for the DPSer who didn't stop attacking to bash his/her skull in. At this point, there is very little you (as a tank) can do except to move there ASAP and blow a second taunt, right?

Moral of the story: If I taunt a mob back to me, stop hitting it!

Of course, blowing a second taunt is not the end-all be-all solution, since warriors have many ingenious ways of handling such ridiculous nonsense *ahemBahemZ*. I thank the people who have so far managed to do what it takes to have the mob come back to me, such as K. When forced into such situations, however, you are forced to be creative to find ways to handle it...

For warriors:

As always, don't panic. At this point, your Taunt is already on cooldown, and the first thing you should do, is to check for your Charge cooldown. If it's available, Charge that offending DPSer mob, and introduce him to your Shield Slam and/or Revenge. If not, check your Heroic Throw. If it's up, use it. That should buy you a couple of precious seconds to let your Charge or Taunt come off cooldown. If Charge and Heroic Throw are both on cooldown, Intervene the mob, and you will charge towards that DPSer, and now, Concussion Blow or Shockwave it before pressing Mocking Blow to shift the mob's focus back to you, and finally Taunt it back when your Taunt comes off cooldown.

Certainly I don't expect you to master this overnight, so practice, practice, practice. Encourage your DPSers to pull aggro so that you can practice (within reason of course). Make sure your healer is symapthetic too.

For paladins:

Since I don't play a paladin, the best I can help you with (to my knowledge), is to hope the mob isnt too far from you, and use Hammer of Justice on it to stun it, and you should be near enough by now to bring it back under control. If that fails, use Hand of Protection on the offending party member.

For death knights:

If you used Death Grip to pull, and your Dark Command is now wasted used on that offending DPSer, you can either use Chains of Ice/Icy Touch on it, or if your frost runes are on cooldown and you don't feel like blowing your Empower Rune Weapon, feel free to sit back and watch that DPSer die. No I'm kidding =D. Why are you still reading this!? Chase after the mob and make sure it doesn't kill that idiot who pulled aggro!

And finally, for druids:

There's really not much you can do save for using your Feral Charge on the mob that decided the mage in cloth was juicier. If you used your Feral Charge to pull (shame on you!!) or have no rage for it, there's nothing else you can do except chase after the mob and Bash it while waiting for your Growl to come off cooldown, or use your Challenging Roar.

Hopefully, this will give you peeps an idea of what aggro is like, and how messy it can be when people pull aggro all over the place, and some ideas of how to handle it when it happens. For DPSers, if you are reading this, you now know that a tank's job is not just to sit there and take punishment, so do whatever you can to make his/her job that much easier. He/she will thank you for it.

Tidbits

Had first DnD game on Saturday. My Barbarian was able to dish out an impressive amount of damage, and he hasn't even unleashed his full potential yet.

Still no Nightfall title for me... yet. Am hoping we will get it soon.

S is now 5 achievements away from the Red-Proto Drake. Looking forward to it.

PTR, and what it means for warriors

Or, as we all know it by its full name, the Public Test Realm. No, I'm not referring to the WoW PTR, yet. Having suffered through 2 browser crashes, this is the third time I'm typing this all out. GAH! Anyways, what I'm talking about, is Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed. The last of my DnD group has recently come back from the US, and this means that we are able to restart the DnD game. I'm sure they are all as eager as me to break out their gear and start adventuring again. This new game will feature me as either a DPS Barbarian, smashing the faces of baddies, or as a prot-warrioresque Warden, defending the frontlines while my party reduces enemies to dust. Having met at our Dungeon Master's place for a "PTR" combat round last Saturday, I have gained some insights that will hopefully allow me to maximise my own characters when the real game begins this coming Saturday.

Now that we're done sidetracking, its time to move on to the real WoW PTR. As you may, or may not know, the 3.2 PTR is all the rage nowadays. With a multitude of changes promised, it's quite safe to say that warriors are one of the classes receiving the least overhauls. However, one of the dangers of writing about the PTR is that what is discussed here could very well be old news tomorrow. That notwithstanding, let's look at some upcoming changes that I know you'll all like:

Protection

• Devastate now causes 60% weapon damage (up from 50%) plus 121 (up from 101) at max rank. Lower ranks increased accordingly.
• Shield Specialization now has a 20/40/60/80/100% to generate 5 rage (up from 2) when a block, dodge, or parry occurs. (Old - Only proc from blocks)

Glyph

• Glyph of Command - Increases the duration of your Commanding Shout ability by 2 min.
• Glyph of Battle - Increases the duration of your Battle Shout ability by 2 min.

Item

• Item - Warrior T9 Melee 2P Bonus (Berserker Stance and Battle Stance) - Berserker Stance grants an additional 2% critical strike chance, and Battle Stance grants an additional 6% armor penetration.
• Item - Warrior T9 Melee 4P Bonus (Heroic Strike and Slam) - Increases the critical strike chance of your Slam and Heroic Strike abilities by 5%.
• Item - Warrior T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Taunt) - Decreases the cooldown on your Taunt ability by 2 sec.
• Item - Warrior T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Shield Block) - Decreases the cooldown on your Shield Block ability by 10 sec.

Blood Frenzy - 10% attack speed modifier now only affects melee attack speed
Armored to the Teeth - now Increases your attack power by 3 for every 108 armor value you have. (Old - 3 AP every 180 Armor)

There is also this, as quoted from here, by GC:

There are some mechanics we'd like to change with warriors, as I have already stated. Having to spam Heroic Strike is definitely one of them. Rage starvation is never fun (which is not the same as "I can ignore rage.") This is a slightly different argument that whether or not warriors have the stats they need to do the job, which seems to be the bigger concern in this forum at the moment. I am personally not particularly interested in who is the "easier" tank. I don't think any of them are significantly different from each other. You still have to know when to use your cooldowns, when to swap your gear, how to coordinate with your raid and when it's you that's the problem and not your class.

I think it's easy to argue against your point that warriors have not gotten a pretty hefty overhaul this expansion. We changed the warrior Protection tree a lot more than the paladin Protection tree or the Feral tree. We made you press Shield Block less often and Shield Wall more often. We changed Thunderclap and Devastate and Shield Slam and so forth. My point here is: don't dilute your arguments. I hear a lot of players saying that warrior survivability is lower than other tanks. Okay, that is feedback we can use. I hear them saying, as you did, that some of the mechanics still need to be updated. That is feedback we can use. Saying you are neglected or somehow other tanks got more changes than you or whatever... that is hard to use. We don't balance around "neglect." We balance around numbers. Theorycrafted numbers and simulations are valuable. Actual encounters with a boss are even more valuable.

Supplemented by GC with this:

I’m not sure that statement is accurate, but here is the problem. There are A LOT of warrior tanks. They are tanking every fight in Ulduar. If warriors were too low and if we buffed them, I don’t see how that would increase the numbers on the other tanks. I don’t think the conclusion to be drawn is that warriors are overpowered. I think the conclusion to be drawn is that warriors were the traditional tank and lot of established guilds have established MTs who see no reason to reroll the FotM. It’s not actually a goal to have 25% of each tank in Ulduar, but is also seems strange to buff the most popular tank. Won’t that just make them more popular? Again, don’t misinterpret that as GC sez suck it up warriors. It is something we have to keep in mind, however.

Block is a systemic problem. We're not sure we can make it a very compelling mitigation stat in a world where tank avoidance is so high and bosses hit so hard. However I will say that the Coliseum fights should focus less on the blow-your-cooldowns-or-die style of encounter.

Rage starvation is a problem. Frankly, we're not sure a model where you have to get hit in order to tank is that compelling anymore. Something that has come up a lot is changing rage (even for Prot) to damage done. This is a slight nerf to the PvP mechanic of being punished when you hit the warrior, but there are other ways to solve that as well. Again, we're talking a big change here. I'm not sure we're comfortable jacking with such a core mechanic before 3.2. (Source)

However, the most important change that I want to talk about, is this:

• Block Value: The amount of bonus block value on all items has been doubled. This does not affect the base block value on shields or block value derived from strength.
• On-Use Block Value Items: All items and set bonuses that trigger temporary increases to block value have been modified. Instead of increasing their block value amount by 100% like other items, they have all had their effect durations doubled. This applies to Glyph of Deflection, Gnomeregan Autoblocker, Coren's Lucky Coin, Lavanthor's Talisman, Libram of Obstruction, Tome of the Lightbringer, Libram of the Sacred Shield, the tier 8 paladin Shield of Righteousness bonus, the tier 5 paladin Holy Shield bonus, and the tier 5 warrior Shield Block bonus. (Source)

What this means is you'll see bigger Shield Slams (yay!) and more threat all around (from the buff to AttT). What this also means, is that there will be warriors who don't know how to tank, but are now marginally able to hold aggro, with this change. IMO, more threat is good, but this will increase the number of warrior 'tanks' who have no idea how to tank properly in the first place, but claiming they can tank.

That aside, I'm going to agree with Matt Rossi here, that all these changes are starting to feel more and more like a band-aid fix on warriors main tanking cutting edge content. Having been through all that, my warriors feel lacklustre when it comes to tanking Ulduar bosses. Sporting one of the lowest Effective Health (EH) values and lowest avoidance values among the four classes, I would say that if raid content continues this trend, warriors could be effectively dead by Coliseum. After all, if you can't stay alive, you can't tank. All is not lost, however, since "the Coliseum fights should focus less on the blow-your-cooldowns-or-die style of encounter", which probably means that warriors can go back to stacking EH, instead of avoidance like in Ulduar, in order to make them marginally useful. Having H in EH gear for Ulduar-10, I could already feel the pain of each boss hit, and had to swap in some avoidance gear to stay alive. That said, my primary gear set has been, and will continue to be, based on high EH, and maybe, just maybe, we'll see a reversion to EH being better than avoidance for future raid bosses.