Gladiator rune is 1h+shield but shield slam is too weak

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

So with the new gladiator rune it seems it is preforming far far better going arms/fury spamming devastate and abusing deep wounds rather than deep prot to get shield slam. Gladiator stance and Shield mastery runes are buffing deep wounds damage. While not expecting SS to do the #1 damage it feels it needs a bit more than simply doubling the block value damage, (raid only has 100 block value and no gear outside of the raid has any BV), on SS itself. An extra buff in the sword and board rune to allow SS a damage spike when the ability procs would be nice and/or something extra in the shield mastery rune.

It’s great there’s a build that doesn’t need SS to do damage but it feels weird that SS build is so much lower when Gladiator was all about 1h+SHIELD. The iconic shield damage skill should do a lot more for it than just extra threat.

Could even make one of the runes give you SS as an extra ability so you don’t need to go full prot to get it. If you can make melee hunters top damage and shaman amazing I think being able to slam a shield in someone’s face should be just as harmful.

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2

yeah sad that they made it just fury spec and the shield has zero interaction.

3

are you stacking shield block value?

4

No gear has extra block value outside of the raid currently. So can’t stack anything pre-raid to see how well it would do. The best shields in the game have 29-34 block at most so it’s also very difficult to judge how much of the extra BV damage gives with a tiny difference between shields.

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5

oh true, my bad

6

I dunno, I found shield spec to be very good and fun to play, but way too high threat for damage.

Keep in mind, 1 str = 1 shield block damage as well.

7

I think in classic it’s 20str : 1SBV

idk the AP to damage ratio tho

8

Oh, right - I was thinking WotLK SBV changes.

Still, SS was critting for 1k in ZF - it can hit hard with all the modifiers you can get.

9

I fought a Glad Warrior in Tanaris. I thought they were Prot. Anyway I accidentally hit them and he started going off on me. I got disarmed, popped Evasion, he crit me with something for 800, not sure what it was, almost killed me, but I popped Coldblood and killed him at the last second, we both almost died.

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