Nerf Battleshout Spam

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I’ve ranted about this on multiple threads, thought I’d start a new topic, hey it beats the 100th layering thread.

NOTE: I wasn’t in the Beta, looked at beta forum and didn’t see anything immediately relevant. If this has already been fixed, I’ll be glad to withdraw.

Background: I was in a raid guild that took a while to get itself organized. We got our first shot at Nefarian the night before the 2.0.1 patch. The hard part was supposedly phase 1 when a bunch of draconid adds ran in, more than you could normally tank. Fortunately, a rogue in our guild had the solution: load up the MT with a party consisting of only pet classes, then have him stand in the middle of the room spamming Battle Shout. Magically, all the mobs stuck to him. And with that, our casual guild had killed the final boss of BWL in three tries.

https:// www.reddit. com/r/classicwow/comments/a7ebp4/was_battle_shout_tanking_as_good_as_it_the/ has the numbers.

According to most sources I could find, BS generates 55 threat, divided evenly among mobs on threat table, per target it buffs. With just with a regular 5 man group this is already more than sunder (275 vs 260) assuming it hits all targets. Just adding a single pet makes it considerably better, and cheesing it with four pet classes would give 9 targets for 495 threat per battle shout which is better than revenge and getting close to shield slam iirc.

So it basically means that a single warrior can hold threat on infinite mobs forever, which is EXACTLY what I hate about retail dungeons. As long as the healer can keep up with the incoming damage (and unlike things like cleave spam, this can be done in defensive stance and wearing a shield, AND it has infinite range and doesn’t break CC), CC is irrelevant as is focus fire and similar techniques. You can just zerg AoE - just like retail.

Why wasn’t this used in vanilla, well, most people didn’t think of endlessly spamming a party buff, let alone that it would cause more threat based on pets. After our casual guild killed Nef using it, I talked to a guy from a somewhat more hardcore guild that had killed Nef a month or two earlier. He had no clue you could do that and was pretty angry. However, NOW I’ll bet everyone knows. Or if they didn’t, they do now, lol.

This was fixed in pre-TBC (2.0.1). I’d prefer to see this as a bug that just didn’t get fixed in the vanilla timeframe, and have them fix it.

However, if they don’t, I’m gonna roll a warrior. Always worried I couldn’t hack it as a tank, but if I only need one button on the bar, then I’m all set… :wink:

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#NoChanges

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Imagine thinking tanking was only about holding threat.

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In vanilla, where tanks had far fewer active mitigation abilities, it primarily was.

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Thunder Clap - Demoralizing Shout - Shield Block - Sunder Armor

But, hey, you could just rebuff battle shout over and over and make everything worse overall.

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I spammed Battleshout all the time in vanilla. It wasn’t like it was some secret thing I found on my own either, I knew to do it because people talked about it on the warrior forums at the time.

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This may fall under the area of fixing an exploit, which is totally ok for #NoChanges

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Im a fan of the entire raid using potion of immolation for the adds. Adds die in two ticks. Ezpz

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I don’t see this as something that’s needs to be changed, the warrior is using his rage to create threat…working as intended

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Battle shout threat is divided among all targets. The more there are, AKA Nefarion add spawns, the less effective it is. Demo shout with booming voice works better on that fight XD.

Depending of course on how fast your raid is taking them down

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To me, the potential exploit is stacking pet classes to increase the buff. Seems unintended and probably not part of the Vanilla meta anyway.

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But for demo shout you actually have to hit the mobs while with battle shout you just have to hit someone on the mobs aggro table. Still, if demo shout spam works, that is BS too.

I’m still seeing people advising people to l2tab sunder. That would be pretty pointless if shout spam worked.

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Battleshout spam was nerfed in 2.0.1.

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Tab sunder gets the mobs killed faster via armor reduction.

I always was 31/5/15, so I tended to sweeping strikes cleave them, as well as demo shout spam. Its easy to hit them all. Just look at the threat meter for the healer with the most aggro. They will all be running to that guy so stand inbetween them and the healer and pick them up as they come.

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Yep, mentioned that in the OP.

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#nochanges

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I mained a warrior on the beta. This is already nerfed. On private servers clicking battleshout causes all mobs to turn to you as long as they aren’t too beat up. on the REAL beta if anyone has hit a mob battleshout is useless. It will literally only turn a mob to you if no one else has healed or touched it. This was nerfed in a vanilla patch and the private servers are wrong.

You can stop making threads now. Case closed.

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Well that’s great news. As I noted in the OP, it was never fixed during the vanilla timeframe, so if they fixed it for Classic without saying anything to anybody I’m a little surprised. Maybe they didn’t want the drama.

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Creative Use of Game Mechanics.

It was used by any guild who could read forums or guides. Our OT used to joke that he was in his “Furry Harem” every time we reorganized groups.

The thing is, the threat generated wasn’t as good as sunder etc, and only really worked because of the AOE nature of the fight and multi-mob threat. No one mob had the full weight of the team targetted on it so the technique was enough to hold threat. All the casters were doing AOE damage spreading threat, and all the rogues were jumping between targets and feinting when they could.

It’s a niche technique, not the main way to hold threat.

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If you nerf this, you’re going to then be stuck at the suppression room. You need to spam battleshout to hold all the whelps.