This is so cool! Warriors are really weak compared to any other class (DPS by a lot, Tanking by 100 miles) but to have this new, cool, complete MEME OF A SPEC makes a world of difference!
Please, explain the point. A cool, fun, pile of garbage? Why bother?
I can give 100 suggestions to make this better, but it’s so freaking obvious if you spend 1 second playing this game that warriors cannot be anything other than a 2h build until we’re beating C’Thun. WTF
Gladiator Stance is designed as a sword and board DPS, not a tanking thing. The problem is they copied the stance from WoD but forgot that WoD Warrior abilities were all dramatically different to support it. ie, Revenge is a well scaling high damage cleave, Shield Slam actually hits hard, etc.
Also the single largest failure of planning is that, by WoD when Gladiator became a thing, rage was normalized and entirely generated by attacking. In Classic Warriors get some from attacking and some from taking damage. However the attacking part scales with damage, so when using Gladiator Stance a Warrior is doing very low damage which means very low rage AND they are not tanking so they get 0 rage from taking damage
All in all a massive flop of an idea without any forethought, trying to ape on some peoples intense nostalgia for Gladiator Stance but missing the entire fundamentals of what made it work.
Its ok, but solo it takes ALL our sustain rune slots. Which makes it suck real hard.
It also sucks for dungeons because the ramp on getting 5 sunders is LOOOONNGG. Most stuff is dead long before that, also no wf/wild strikes depending on group.
O did i mention a long ramp? CbR means no pressing buttons for the first 5-6s of combat also.
So yeah is completely trash open world solo, cos long ramp no sustain. Its completely trash dungeons because of long ramp. Its OK on a 6 minute raid boss.
Weird.
I broke the seal and logged in. Hit 50 on my warrior in about 5 hours from 40 (incursions OP, at this point - why even have us level at all?) A few more hours to gather a few runes and off to the races.
As a deep prot spec, not even well geared (just thrash blade, the level 50 incursion set, and a few level 39ish greens and the Blackstone ring). I was doing pretty good damage in our ZF run. 9 rage sunders and 2 rage revenges to proc shield slams that crit for up to 1000 damage. I had tons of rage to use whirlwind or cleave for packs and never felt like I was out of buttons to press. In fact it felt like I almost had too much rage at times.
Only downside is that this still put out so much threat that our fury/prot tank basically gave up trying to keep whatever mob I was shield slamming off of me.
Ran shield mastery, sword and board, flag, Gladiator stance, consumed by rage, focused rage. 0/10/31.
How are you using revenge if your not tanking?
Gladiator stance let’s you use all abilities while using a shield and one handed weapon
i mean if you block parry or dodge you can revenge (which does like 20 damage?) but unless the mobs are attacking you your not gonna proc revenge.
Glad stance ok aoe if you take furious thunder, you can WW as well. But its not arms sweeping strikes damage.
I know Revenge does no damage, it’s the low cost (2 rage!) to proc shield slam. And again, this was putting out a lot of threat with the sunder and shield slam spam, that I did often pull aggro. On trash this was fine enough, and just triggered more shield slams because now revenge would also be on CD constantly.
Furious thunder isn’t needed (and in fact probably a bad idea since that also increases threat), Glad stance already let’s you tclap as is. So I could tclap, cleave and whirlwind fairly regularly.
Funny enough, sweeping strikes doesn’t work in gladiator stance. I was going to try a deep arms build with it but it actually did less damage than full prot.
I mean it doubles the damage of thunderclap which is pretty solid on 4+ targets.
Yeah, the downside is the threat change. Given how rage flushed I was, consumed by rage actually was going off fairly consistently.
I might try it though, give my next tank a heart attack.
Im listening
I think the best use case in SoD is to actually use it while tanking.
Threat and mitigation are obviously both lower than defensive stance… but, as long as you can put out enough threat without the D stance modifiers, then it fills a niche.
Glad Stance w/ shield has similar mitigation to dual wield fury BUT you still have a shield equipped in glad stance… which means you can shield block… which means you are immune to crits and crushing blows. Dual wield is obviously vulnerable to crits.
Which means glad stance could theoretically be viable in situations where 1) you actually want the extra damage, and 2) a crit would kill a dual wield tank.
You probably won’t use it all the time. But it’s a rune so it’s easy to swap in or out.
With a full shield slam build, I was spamming sunders and shield slams so fast my tank couldn’t hold aggro on me. I think I could legit tank in this stance which to me is insane. If it’s meant to be a dps rune it’s going to need some tweaking.
I don’t think it’s a DPS rune. I think it’s mostly a PvP rune, but the side benefit is it’s an aggressive tank style (similar to dual wield fury tanks) that can also handle hard hitting bosses.
Dual wield tanking does not work if bosses can kill you in a crit. But glad stance tanking would work in that situation b/c you can still shield block.