Started a thread on Battle Shout, got too involved, realized I didn’t really have that much time to validly spend on these arguments any more. So I’m just going to summarize, then move on.
Upshot:
-I think Battle Shout causes too much threat, and with too long a range. The current mechanic as of end of vanilla was 55 threat per target buffed, including pets, divided by number of mobs. Also, it did not matter where the mobs were so long as the buffed targets were on the mob’s list.
-This would allow warriors to hold a large number of mobs, especially in raids but even in 5 mans. It also utterly trivialized fights where the difficulty was supposed to come from large numbers of uncontrollable mobs such as Nefarian phase 1.
-It would be one thing if this had been well known in vanilla, but it wasn’t. This isn’t like ret pally dps or the 16 debuff limit. When something is overpowered, it takes a while to filter through the community, and when the absurdity reaches a certain point, it gets nerfed. In this case, knowledge that warriors could generate stupid threat with Battle Shout had only percolated to the top of Blizz’s priority by the end of 1.12, which coincided with the end of vanilla.
-I am afraid this will break the CC-focus fire method of doing dungeons that was worked out over the course of vanilla by making AoEing elites a viable strategy;
-I know very well that Blizz doesn’t care about my opinion personally, and most other people don’t seem too hyped about this;
-So my secondary purpose is to make sure that everybody knows: if you roll a warrior and you have some pet classes in your group, you can hold a lot of mobs forever by spamming Battle Shout. Go to it! That’s what I’ll be doing. If we get too annoying, then Blizz will have to fix it. Otherwise we’ll just look cool.
To you. In another thread, I provided a 2006 video detailing the method. It was known back then to people who were trying to do their best. The difference is that there weren’t standout strategy sites, we mostly got our strategies from different forums posts on different fights. Information didn’t travel as far as fast.
Classic is not “fixing” Vanilla. It’s what we had, and its what we’ll get.
As I posted in the other thread, spamming battle shout won’t hold mobs off AoE casters unless you wait a LONG time before starting AoE. You will just end up with dead mages and warlocks if the mobs are elite. It’s too much damage. And if you wait the needed 10-20 sec., you are draining your healer’s mana and risking the tank dying, and slowing the pulls down anyway.
It’s not going to be a very good strategy for pulling packs of elites in dungeons. Using cc and focusing fire will still be the safest and best option in most situations, especially in dungeons where you will likely have 1-2 pets at most and often none. And when you are focusing fire, you don’t want slowly building threat spread evenly on all mobs. You want most of your threat focused on the one being attacked, and just enough threat on the others to keep them off your healer, and that means Shield Slam, Revenge, Sunder, Heroic Strike… the old fashioned way.
Playing on a private server, hypothetically, nobody just spams battle shout. Nobody.
It will be another tool in the bag that will be useful in certain situations, like Nefarian, but it’s not going to significantly change or trivialize tanking.
IDK I seem to remember battle shout being a well known threat ability about halfway through Vanilla. It’s still not as powerful as swipe so what exactly is the problem?
Spamming battleshout was the main tactic for the suppression room in BWL, and the bug tunnel in AQ 40. They should not nerf it just because you don’t like it.
It can technically work against anything, but against a single target, you may as well build up sunder stacks. Sunder is a raid wide debuff that adds considerable damage to the fight.
From what people are saying, battle shout produces 55 threat per ally “hit” at rank 6 (70 for rank 7). No source says if that is in defensive stance or not and put those numbers alongside other unmodified abilities. So that’s 82.225 threat per target in defensive stance with defiance (104.65 rank 7). Because it is a buff, the threat is divided between all targets. Demoralizing shout needs to hit at least 7 targets to be more efficient than a 5 party member battle shout (9 targets for rank 7). If defensive stance doesn’t affect it, it would be a minimum of 5 targets (6 rank 7).
In single target fights, you should be using it over sunder after you get your 5 stack when you can as it will do more threat unless it is unmodified by defensive stance. Which requires 7 targets to be better than sunder.
At maximum 9 targets:
495 unmodified
630 rank 7 unmodified
740 defensive stance?
941 rank 7 and defensive stance
This thread is funny because battle shout threat was bugged for the entire duration of the beta.
So the OP is basing his analysis entirely on either guides from vanilla or private servers. . . and not making a positive statement and instead making a normative one.
We are getting 1.12 mechanics. We are not getting Classic+.
This is false. Not sure where you heard this but it is incorrect. Battle shout was doing TOO LITTLE THREAT when multiple targets were being buffed. But reapplying the buff still caused threat.