Seriously. wtf is the point of class wide abilities if they arent useable by 2/3 of the class?
Class wide abilities should be something all characters of that class should be able to do inherently. Shield Block and Shield Slam cant be used by fury/arms at all as we cant equip a shield any more incombat for some reason… I for one think itd be amazing to be able to equip a shield and taunt the boss to save a tank’s life or prevent a full wipe. (possible as arms with dbts, but only for 8 seconds) Similarly to how a druid can switch to bear in an emergency. Why this change was made is already stupid but here we are.
Had to test this cause I thought I was going crazy. We absolutely can swap weapons mid combat.
Shield block is actually a really good defensive cooldown in pvp. It’s basically a 1/3 damage mitigation against physical damage specs. With how strong MM hunters have been, you bet I was getting a ton of value out of that. I’m sure it’s way less desirable in any kind of PvE setting.
It would be nice if shield slam got the old magic dispel back.
Unpopular opinion I guess, but I really would love to see stance / weapon swapping be more of a supported option for at least arms. Obviously not a 1:1 version of the vanilla version, but something that captures that same feeling.
I’m very curious where you get this valuable insight from.
I can certainly see it being less frequently valuable in arena, but if you’re sitting in a root getting pounded by rapid fire, there is no reason not to use shield block.
When you’re in a BG and half the enemy team is MM hunters, as it has been for most of this expansion, being able to mitigate a third of their damage while waddling around the battlefield is extremely valuable. Your healers will love you. It will save your life.
This is more analogous to Defensive Stance than a shield, the major difference being that shield swapping requires you to obtain and maintain extra pieces of gear that don’t normally drop on your specialization’s loot table.
Yeah, there might be a greater fantasy element to putting on a shield, but there’s a point at which that increased fantasy becomes invasive. A better way to bridge this would be to just add a glyph that presents a cosmetic shield graphic while in defensive stance.
As stated, this is not something that is done on a practical level. Yes, there’s some theoretical benefit, but even if you aren’t using Fyra’alth/Gavel/etc, it requires a GCD to swap, costs rage, cripples your damage, cripples your rage generation, and doesn’t really provide much in return since Arms & Fury lack the increased block benefits that Prot Warriors have.
There’s a fairly high likelihood that if you’re getting ganged up on by Hunters in a BG with no capability to fight back, you’re already dead regardless. Not the least of which because Shield Block doesn’t work against ranged attacks (apparently it does work against many physical ranged attacks now).
This is an entirely understandable mistake for you to make, given that any reasonable person would assume the wording on the tooltip to be correct.
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This is something I’ve tested quite a lot in duels with a friend, but I just found a nice hunter in durotar to help me grab a quick combat log to share.
The top rapid fire is with shield block up, and the second rapid fire is with no shield block. You could MAYBE argue that the first one was just my 10% block chance really coming in clutch and I won the block lottery, but I implore you to go do some extensive testing yourself if you (understandably) don’t want to take my word for it.
In my extensive experience wading through countless hunter stacked battlegrounds as a warrior throughout this expansion, this simply is not true.
MM damage is quite bursty, and living through the initial damage usually means you have an opportunity to recover and turn the fight around. It also takes pressure off your healers
There is indeed a trade-off. Which is why it’s something you only do when the trade-off is worthwhile, aka when you can not maintain uptime and are being targeted.
Please keep in mind that my original post was primarily from a pvp perspective. Obviously this is far less relevant, if at all ever, in any kind of endgame pve content.
Throughput is, of course, very important in pvp. But there are times where you have to make tough choices about whether survival or damage is more important. Your damage isn’t really being crippled if you are sitting in a tar trap root with zero opportunity to deal damage.
It is also very occasionally worth using against other melee. Usually when they have some kind of defensive up that makes attacking them pointless. Rogue evasion, monk touch of karma (rip), enemy warrior die by the sword, etc. But sometimes you also just need to desperately hang on to life for just a moment to buy time for your healer to get out of CC or a big cooldown.
Oof, I took too long to reply.
Anyway, knowledge is power. Even extremely niche knowledge that only helps .1% of the time.
Also, am I crazy or did my block value as arms double? I’m pretty sure it was only about 33% last time I looked (late last season).
Yeah, it’s nice to know that changed at some point.
There have always been specific scenarios in which you can make a case for blocking, but the fact that virtually nobody does it is still pretty cut and dry. Partially because of the extra gear requirements, partially because of the extra steps you have to go through to take advantage of it, partially because the best weapons in the game don’t allow you to swap anyway.
Most stat values on gear increased w/ the Pre-Patch. I’m not 100% sure if Block was included in them, and they didn’t double regardless, but this might be at least part of what you’re seeing.
This was my first thought. But I started stripping down until I had nothing on but a shield and my finest goblin négligée, and the block value never moved from 65.88% (iirc it was about 75% when I was in pvp combat with a training dummy).
My guess is that they doubled it, and it will slowly reduce back down to 33% as we climb to 80, similar to how armor values got totally bungled.
I have been able to take off the Fyrakk cantrip weapons in combat with the exception being Fyr’alath. I believe weapons that have use effects cannot be swapped because there have been some in the past that have no secondary stats due to having a on-use effect. Gavel for example. Meaning if you could swap them, you use the on-use effect, wait for it to run out then swap to another weapon that has secondary stats. Then swap back when the on-use cooldown is over. Rinse and repeat. Iirc druids found a way to do exactly that but it was jank.
It’s great for Protection. Kind of inefficient for the other specs, though. Like, maybe in some niche situations one could maybe try it if they weren’t too concerned about counter-pressure and really just needed to further midigate physical goes but Arms is already pretty good at that with disarm, parry, intervene on ally, duel, etc.
Yep.
Conceding too much output for too little reduction.
I think there’s a solid argument to be made that if you have ever died to physical damage without blocking, you probably would have been better off blocking.
I was literally doing that on a training dummy when I posted that. I’ve even done it with Ashkandur and a weapon I use for my speed set. However I could not do it with Fyr’alath.
iirc there are some unintuitive restrictions on when / where you can actually swap weapons. I assume to prevent players from doing weird cheese that abuses weapon procs or enchants or whatever.
I don’t know if there is. Going sword and board to maybe take slightly reduced physical damage at the cost of also doing no damage just puts you into a really bad spot in recent metas.
Like, conceding damage just makes you fall further behind. Enemy team is topped and you’re just falling apart due to no output.
It’s like how we can’t sit dstance like we could in a lot of SL comps because you’re trading at a deficient, albeit an even worse one now.
Just feels like a bit of a desperate hail mary play when you’ve been insta losing to the same physical team again and again.