These changes to mountain thane fury are actually really good. This will put Thane 12% or higher above slayer in aoe which will likely make it my main spec to run for keys. The AOE profile is less burst but more sustained damage. It feels better to me personally. While tyrannical is a factor, the number of trash mobs will outweigh the benefit of slightly lower boss damage.
The missing change to offset the AOE nerfs is still missing… still very low single target damage for fury warrior. The tier set bonus is a straight buff which seems nice, but it’s completely offset by the continued nerfs to slayer.
I’m personally excited to run thane for keys. It’s nice having good damage for every pack rather than every 4th pack.
The offset is they’re buffing both MT lightning bolt damage and all our core abilities when we go MT, therefore our sustained AoE is going to be much better, and I actually think ST might end up being quite strong with buffs to all our core abilities in MY as I said. I still disagree with the soft cap, but these buffs to actually make up for it. On top of that we did just get buffs to our tier set so our ST and Sustained AoE will be slightly better just from that.
So Archimtiros already did the math for us.
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Some Preliminary Numbers on Upcoming Live Hotfixes This is without considering any potential action updates as a result of these changes.
Slayer Arms down -1.3% in single target, down -0.9% vs 5 targets.
Colossus Arms up +0.9% in single target, no change in multi.
Slayer Fury neutral change in single target, up +0.6% in multi.
Thane Fury up +9.2% (still ~7% behind Slayer in single target, ~2% behind in single target with a multitarget build), up +6.6% in multi (though it takes longer to deal its damage).
This does not include other previously announced PTR changes, including reducing Overwhelmed to 10 stacks, buffing baseline Bloodthirst/Raging Blow, or reducing Odyn’s Fury/Thunderous Roar soft target caps.
TL;DR Very small nerf for Arms single target, and a big increase to Thane for Fury, though it is still behind Slayer in raid. Thane may pick up some in high density M+, though Slayer still has much faster burst and better single target vs bosses.
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His words copy/pasta right from the Discord. Hope he doesn’t mind. It’s on WoWhead as well. Food for thought.
So basically nothing changes other than Mountain thane slightly coming upwards but 7% behind in single target and 2% behind in multi. other than making slayer fury go up in 0.6% for multi. “Totally a good change.”
Basically it’s making Thane Fury more viable in M+. It’s not going to shake things up too much, but at least close the gap in use. Other than that, I have no positive or negative views on it.
Ironically, it’s actually the best part. I hate hitting Whirlwind as a maintenance, since it doesn’t deal real damage. Meanwhile, Thunder Clap does, and Thunderous Blast actually deals damage. It just sucks that Thane’s ST isn’t competitive on the top end. I’ll try it out in some keys post-buff, though.
Arms keeps catching strays, but at least Protection gets some damage buffs out of this. I lament the nerf to rage, but given how Thane is overflowing compared to Colossus Prot, I don’t think it’ll feel it very much.
-2% single target for upwards +12% in multitarget is a pretty good trade, and those numbers will probably only increase as we refine the rotation to account for new changes. There will be some further nuance as Thane’s damage profile is very different from Fury (takes longer, ground target shenanigans, etc), but it could breathe a little life back into M+.
I still believe Fury (both Slayer and Thane uniformly) could use a small ST/cleave buff to compensate for the upcoming target cap reductions and help keep ST out of the gutter, especially if the Overwhelm nerf also goes through. It’s not quite clear if the PTR buff to Bloodthirst/Raging is still coming, but frankly I think it’s a bad adjustment, because making RB even stronger is only going to encourage gaming Bloodcraze.
If Thane becomes the de facto Mythic+ build, then it’s completely reasonable that Slayer remains slightly better suited for raid. Thane also has a small advantage on 2 target and a much larger advantage vs 3 targets, so it’s very possible that future raid encounters could favor it regardless.
It always feels better to me to use my actual weapons and not my feet to do damage lol. Instead of thunderclap to thunderblast it could have been whirlwind to “superwhirlwind?”… that would have felt much better to me personally
What’s all this talk about lightning? I’m not a wizard.
Seriously though, my favorite thing about warriors is literally minimizing the magical abilities available, because nothing is more impressive than downing dragons and gods with skill and grit. Inner strength, not strength from the earth.
I switched to MT today to start practicing a bit. It certainly feels different than Slayer. I like that there is more uptime, but the abilities are less fun and the loss of single target is rough. Overall I’m excited about the MT buffs and intend to use it as my main specialization going forward, but the nerfs to Slayer seem incredibly unnecessary. I also understand there is quite a bit of concern about how this patch will effect us in PvP.
Well then you’re in luck because that’s exactly what Colossus is. Also the main ability is getting a 20% damage buff to its first two strikes next month.
Admittedly I have been willing to play Arms in the past when I’m part of a raid team and they need me to perform, but lately I mostly just do mythic dungeons and only raid heroics with a rando group of friends and pugs, and I have never found arms as fun as fury. Different strokes for different folks…game is better when arms is good, but, I want fury to be good, too (and I don’t wanna be discount enhance shaman throwing lightning).