First of all, you can’t take the Beta as solid information as they were level capped at 40. Warriors for all intents and purposes aren’t a proper class until 60.
We’ve talked about this before in detail, Earnil. I don’t care that much either way as I never relied on it as my primary AOE tanking ability and don’t imagine I would literally only Battle Shout spam if it works as people think.
The private servers are busted on this (among other things). Depending on the server it either works, or it is overpowered, or it doesn’t work at all. We can’t use them as a valid resource for this discussion.
As a note, Thunderclap is in Battle Stance in Vanilla/Classic. Even with 5/5 Tactical Mastery, you have just enough rage to use it and then swap back to Defensive Stance. This ability was moved to Defensive Stance partly to overcome the loss of Battle Shout/Demoralizing Shout spam in TBC.
Demoralizing Shout “spam” should continue to work in my opinion along with a proper AOE tab target rotation either way.
We have talked about it, and I appreciate it, I just wanted to bring it up to the larger group.
I can live a little better with Demo Shout. It doesn’t have the biggest possibilities for sheer cheese that I see with Battle Shout.
Eloraell claims everybody knew about it - I would have to investigate, but I suspect it simply was not appreciated how OP this was, especially cheesing it with pets.
Here’s a two minute investigation, went to classic wowhead and there’s a guy describing his guild’s strategy and says:
https:// classic.wowhead. com/npc=11583/nefarian#comments
“The warriors in the teams will mainly use cleave/retaliation/sweeping strike/whirlwind whenever available to get as much aggro on them as possible”
Hmm, something’s missing there.
Honestly, I’m much less worried about this working on Nef than I am that it becomes a means to trivialize dungeons.
For instance, tank stands 60 yards from the mobs. Ranged dps run up, and each take one single pot shot at a group of mobs from 40 yards out. Then they turn around and run behind the tank. Tank immediately starts spamming Battle Shout. Every time he does, he’s gaining 495 aggro - from mobs that are 60 yards away. By the time they get to the tank, he could /afk auto. (granted he’d run out of rage unless he used a potion etc).
A lot of Warriors including tanks in those days when BWL came out were Arms. My first raid tanking job I was 31/5/15. So that comment in context makes sense to me and it would be more threat. Before the Warrior revamp Fury wasn’t considered to be that good so both DPS and Tanks ran Arms builds somewhat common.
I remember Battle Shout spam being common knowledge but it had limited usefulness like Nef trash
It’s not better than Revenge on a per rage basis, so you will still probably want to use Shield Block for mitigation, and to proc Revenge.
Also, from what I remember, most AoE packs are non-elite. The tank is not supposed to hold aggro on everything forever. The mage usually pulls aggro at some point, which is why they freeze everything in place and you spam heal the mage if needed. As non-elites, they die quickly.
For regular pulls of multiple elites, usually no more than 3-4 unless you have NO cc, you don’t WANT threat spread evenly. You want most of your threat on the 1st mob being DPS’d, while tabbing and adding enough threat to the others to keep them off your healer. Full on AoEing packs of 4+ elites while battle shouting is still probably a bad idea vs. single target kill skull, then X, etc. It’s risky for the mage, who could get 2-shot. It’s risky for the tank because he’s taking damage from ALL mobs for longer rather than the 1st and 2nd dying quick in succession, reducing incoming damage.
I don’t think it will be that big of a deal. Like I said, non-elite packs die quick anyway and the mage can be spam healed if he pulls aggro. And it’s risky for elite groups, for the reasons I mentioned.
It will be one possible tactic to be used in certain situations but tanks won’t be able to just use one button to tank everything, especially in 5-mans where you typically only have 1-2 pets and often none.
But if they want to nerf it, I’m fine with that, too, because it was apparently not intended to be used that way and “fixed” at the very end of vanilla.
Legions Of Valhalla on the Eu Azjol-Nerub server blitzing through the Nefarian phase 1 drakonid zerg using the throne battleshout tactic.
Hunters and pets ( pets passive and taunt off) are grouped with the main tank to gain battleshout. This creates a high amount of hate directed at the main tank who spams battleshout for the duration of phase 1. All other dps stay safely on the throne platform. Few deaths are attainable, drakonids go down fast. Sweeeeet!!!
I’m not really sure I see what the issue is here. The Warrior needs to be in combat, taking hits and dealing hits in order to gain Rage. Or he could use a Rage Potion and Enrage, I guess.
Regardless, he needs to be in combat. Then his job is to mitigate damage and hold threat while keeping his teammates alive. Why is it that him dumping his rage in favor of threat vs dumping his rage in favor of survival an issue?
The throne technique was used before 1.12 too. Just by better guilds. Our earliest attempts using the Throne had two tanks not one, split on either side, to reduce damage. 1.12 just made it easier to do the AOE.
Personally I still think a tank near each door is better, but the Battleshout of which ever tank has all the pets, will often outweigh the other tank at the far door.
I was a Healer with one group from MC all the way to Nef + Skeram before returning to MC with that group’s bench plus others to lead a third Raid group in the raiding alliance. I got very familiar with the first two tier’s fights.
Fair enough, but all that proves is that SOMEBODY knew about it in Oct 2006, not that EVERYBODY did. Obviously my buddy learned about it somewhere, so the info was out there. But it wasn’t universal. These guys are bragging about this strategy - in October of 2006 - a year after BWL came out.
The only glimmer of light I see is this:
That is indeed the case, and it could be all that keeps Classic dungeons from turning into retail AoE zergfests of boredom. That, and I think AoE damage was pretty weak in vanilla. It could be that even without any need to worry about aggro, it is not worth it for a 5-man group to AoE down elites, at least a 5 man group with reasonable gear relative to the instance.
But people were saying elites were being AoEd in lower level dungeons on the beta. I would really hate to see that in the 60 dungeons.