Q u o t e:
Seeing as how you've visted the mages and answered some of thier burning questions, I got my own batch for you.
1. Regarding Tactical Mastery, many view that moving this talent into the Protection Tree was a nerf in order to prevent the MS/Flurry build. Is there any truth to this? If so why not change the talents so this won't be as overpowered as it seems to be? If it was to make it more available to Protection warriors, why not just switch it with deflection in the arms tree, as right now, a Protection warrior will still have to invest 5 points into arms, where as if it were switched with deflection, they could need to invest only 3 for TM.
2. Regarding Endless Rage and Spell Reflection, since Spell Reflection doesn't have a cooldown, that makes for Spell Reflection spam a viable tactic against casters. Is this under consideration for change or does the need for a 1h and shield and the global cooldown make this balanced? Also will this reflect the seemingly uncounterable Death Coil?
3. Will Intervene and Intercept share a cooldown? And if so, will they both be affected by the Improved Intercept talent?
4. And another Endless Rage question. How will this ability work with execute, provided the opponent is below 20%?
5. Are there any plans at the moment to normalize rage generation?
1. The change was definitely made in order to ensure that there were viable DPS alternatives to MS/Flurry for an arms warrior. I'm certain that without that change, MS/Flurry would have been the only way to go. Don't think for a second that the idea of having TM as tier 1 arms and Deflection as tier 1 prot didn't occur to us, but the reality is that all it would have done is lower all dps warrior's parry percentages by 5, but every arms warrior would still be looking at 31/30.
The other obvious ways to approach it are either to have extremely powerful talents beyond 30 for arms (but this causes huge problems the next time we raise the level cap and you can get those new overpowered talents and still get flurry), or to nerf flurry (which I'd rather not do, since I feel it's a tree-defining talent).
I very much feel that having TM at tier 1 prot opens up a ton of new possibilities, including builds that don't take all 5 points in TM, builds that use the 5 points in TM to make it worth continuing down to Last Stand (which = hotness in arena combat btw, while also keeping you pretty well balanced for raid tanking if you do that too since you probably scooped up toughness on the way). These examples, along with the possibilities for arms-heavy builds and all of the typical fury heavy builds become realistic to expect with this change.
2. Actually, we're in the process of trying out spell reflection with a 10s cooldown. Generally speaking, we try to avoid cooldowns whenever we can, and honestly this is a case where the cooldown is pretty important to have in PvE rather than PvP (smart players can react to spell reflection by casting a relatively meaningless spell to knock it down, but the mobs aren't quite so clever). It's still super-cool in pvp even with the cooldown, and has a lot of potential to distinguish skilled players from unskilled (if you time it well, spell reflect can win a fight for you). Yes, it can also reflect Death Coil.
3. No, they're on seperate cooldowns.
4. It reduces the base rage cost to 0. It'll stil consume any rage you have to deal extra damage, but the base cost is reduced to zero.
5. Yes, rage generation has been normalized somewhat (although it's difficult to notice with current gear for most players, it's more of a protection against continued scaling off into the future). It also benefits the sword & board case, allowing tanks that aren't dealing/taking a ton of damage to generate a little more rage (again, it's not a big difference compared to before, just a bit better).
rayer: "Arise, my champion!"
imagine the amount of buffs that would push off a flask or so ><
0/50/11 looks ok. 0/45/16 as well. /shrug