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Comment by 318094

Alright, I'm kick-starting the comments on this since no one else seems to want to.

This is what I'm calling The Glyph of "Finally making it easier not to hesitate over Improved Disciplines as a Prot talent."

Why? Let's take a look at the Improved Disciplines for a sec, shall we?

Improved Disciplines, when maxed, shaves off 60 seconds on your Shield Wall, Retaliation and Recklessness abilities. That takes all of their cooldowns from 5 minutes to 4.

For me, early on, that improved my leveling performance greatly because I would often stance dance to use the other uh-oh buttons. So, this gave me three four-minute cooldown "Uh-ohs" to utilize where I'd continually swap between stances then return to defensive.

As time went on, I found myself not using Retaliation as much, opting to utilize Recklessness and Shield Wall. And lately, as I've become more firmly rooted in my Prot role of tanking, I hardly ever leave Defensive Stance. That makes for some problematic issues with the Improved Disciplines talent. It went from being incredibly useful in early leveling to a third of its usefulness as I find less of a reason to dance between the stances. A four minute Shield Wall is useful, but not as non-situational as I'd like it to be.

That's where this Glyph comes in. It effectively makes the single-most useful of the three uh-oh buttons a two-minute cooldown skill for Prot Warriors. This also makes it 3 minutes for any other spec, which is useful since the other specs have easier time building rage offensively meaning that they just got a nice boost to defensive options if they do choose this glyph. This could only have been broken if they'd included even one of the other two abilities in this Glyph.

My Warrior is a Tauren. With this glyph, it brings my total 2-minute momentum skills to three: War Stomp, this, and my Figurine of the Colossus trinket.

So, now, Shield Wall will proc every three Shield Blocks just like my trinket; I don't feel as obligated to save it anymore for when I really feel the pain coming.

Prot Pallies always got the candy while Prot Warriors got to lick the wrappers. If this works as well as I'm expecting it to, then this, coupled with future patches will very likely issue in an era that promotes Prot Warrior candy as well. And I do love my candy...

I am expecting this Glyph to singlehandedly alter several talent choices in the Prot Tree for many Warriors. Unfortunately for me, that makes it harder to choose which talents I'm going to replace, since this effectively removes two points I might otherwise have planned to spend elsewhere. A two-minute Shield Wall is just too tasty to pass up. Mmm... candy.

Comment by 318094

I'm going to continue from here, because I've become even MORE gleeful regarding this glyph.

Awhile ago, I noticed that there were two places where the wording was different on Wowhead. The link to this page and of course the description on this page say the cooldown reduction is two minutes: However, the PTR notes awhile back said that the reduction would be THREE minutes. Seeing as how the actual description here had the 2-minute depiction, I went with that as the legit one and thought to myself "Still good, still good."

But NOW--and I do mean, now--my hopes have been rekindled anew to the point where I'm slapping myself just to make sure I'm not dreaming. The folks at WoW Insider seem convinced in their most recent articles that the 3 minute reduction is the official, and that makes me all kinds of randy, if ya know what I mean.

I didn't do this in my last post, but I'll do it in this post: number-crunching time.

Let's use several states of Shield Wall for reference, shall we? First is unmodified, second is modified only by Improved Disciplines, third is modified only by the glyph, fourth is modified by both.

Next, let's administer a certain amount of damage over a certain amount of time. Because 5 minutes (300 seconds) is relevant to the unmodified version of Shield Wall, the time period will be 5 minutes. For nice, big clean numbers, we'll say that the Warrior takes 300,000 damage over this period of time. That would be 1000 damage per second, don't ya know?

Now, Shield Wall unmodified reduces all damage you take (ALL) by 60% for 12 seconds. Over a five minute period, you'd only get to benefit from an unmodified Shield Wall once. Let's shave off 12 seconds of this protection for inspection, shall we? The 60% reduction would mean that over 12 seconds, you'd have eliminated 7200 damage from the relentless onslaught you're undoubtedly taking, right? Appreciated, but nothing stellar, correct?

Now, let's try this with maxed Improved Disciplines only, setting the cooldown at 4 minutes. Assuming you start right at the beginning of the onslaught, you'll get to use this twice. That's now 14400 damage mitigated over 24 seconds in that 5-minute period.

Now, how about just the Glyph? You now have a 2-minute cooldown, down from 4-5. But you lose 20% of that protection in exchange for the convenience. However, if you start off just like with the Improved Disciplines Shield Wall, you'll end up with 3 periods of protection during the 5 minute period. During the total 36 seconds of mitigation, you'll have mitigated 14400 damage, the same as a Shield Wall modified only by Improved Disciplines. If you had to choose one or the other, the glyph by itself is better than the maxed talent by itself. Why? You're paying for a longer and more frequent period of protection with just the glyph. Though I do have it set at a nice clean ratio of damage per second, we all know that damage isn't that neat and tidy. It'll come fast at some points and slow at others, sometimes in bursts. The glyph allows you to cover more of these fluctuations, and without spending two talent points that could be used elsewhere.

Finally, let's combine the maxed talent and the glyph for an amazing 1-minute cooldown. You now have 5 chances to use if you use it from the start, not to mention a whopping 60 seconds of protection granted by this combination. This allows you to mitigate a potential 24000 damage over that 5-minute period. 24000 taken out of 300000? That's 8% of the damage you would have taken that you now do not have to. More if you're using it during burst periods. Plus you now have the ability to block up to 5 different burst periods. You now also have something else to use when your Shield Block is on cooldown. This. Is. Beautiful. I'm gonna be bold here and assert that for warriors, damage mitigation has never been so simple.

As I said before, this glyph will singlehandedly make people reconsider their lack of talent investment in Improved Disciplines. It's just that good.

The only other glyph competition this one has from the new batch would be Glyph of Enraged Regeneration, and that's because being able to heal yourself better is just sexy in and of itself, especially when you're lacking healing options from the getgo. But, when you think about it, the extra 10% healed from that glyph will never be able to provide the same amount of effective health that this one can. I'm gonna assume that Mr. Supertank is probably working with 30k health optimally, right? 10% of 30k is 3k. This is in addition to the 30% (9k) that any other tank with the same health would get without the glyph. Now, let's also assume that the tank took advantage of the fact that Enraged Regen can be used twice tops during a five-minute period. You're only gaining 6k extra health from two uses. Even if the Warrior was pushing 40k health, that would still only allow for 8k additional health, a THIRD of the mitigation potential provided by Glyph of Shield Wall in this scenario. In fact, in order for Glyph of Enraged Regen to become worth it, you'd actually have to tone down the amount of damage you're taking during the 5-minute period to a third of what I initially proposed. If you actually have to go to pains to take less damage so that this might be worth it, then what business do you have tanking? Glyph of Enraged Regen doesn't even work better for DPS than just slapping on Glyph of Shield Wall without the talent. So, it comes down to this: Heal for 6000 of the damage done to you over 5 minutes, or prevent up to and possibly more than 4 times as much from happening in the first place? I know where my money's going.

Comment by 96881

I don't plan on picking up this glyph or the Improved Discipline talents, because while I haven't been able to get into an Ulduar run since the servers came back up (and went back down), I don't see the benefit of relying on Shield Wall for consistent mitigation. I don't think it does a lot of good to sum up numbers and claim a skill or talent or glyph is good because of an aggregate amount of damage that it prevents, while not focusing as much on the fact that it is not going to provide you with reliable damage mitigation.

After dual specs, I took the extra points I had in threat increasing talents (Deep Wounds, Impale) and put them into Improved Demoralizing Shout. I've given up trying to compete with druids, death knights, or paladins on trash tanking, so might as well focus my tank build on tank stomping bosses. Because of that talent redistribution I may find my threat a little lacking, so I have kept my Revenge / HS / Blocking glyphs intact.

While it's not comparing apples to applies, the fact is that my glyphs depend on my talent points, and my talent points depend on my glyphs. So I'd argue that having a mitigation talent like Improved Demoralizing Shout (4/5 talent points spent) is gonna benefit me in the long run more than having a combination of Improved Disciplines (2 talent points) and this glyph of Shield Wall (1 major glyph). If I don't hit Shield Wall fast enough, I've lost all benefit of this glyph, unless I'm hitting it religiously. Whereas Imp Demo shout is very easy to maintain 100% of the time on a boss.

If I have no threat problems at all in Ulduar, I will consider backing out probably the Revenge glyph for the Shield Wall glyph, but I would be hard pressed to shift over talent points to pick up Improved Disciplines.

Comment by 318094

Well, I'll certainly thank you for arguing your stance unlike others who'd rather downrate and run under the cover of anonymity (gotta love the internet), and I'm sorry to hear that your stance is founded in such cynicism. I speak so favorably on glyphs like this because one I'm a fan of survivability just as much as if not more than offense and threat (something that used to be covered only by our several but infrequent uh-oh buttons, which Blizz is finally starting to make more frequent so that they're more like ah-hah! buttons), and two, I honestly would like to be the optimistic warrior and assert that something like this is a sign of good things to come in upcoming patches even if we have to wait an age and a half for the next one. I'd like to believe that at least as far as tanking is concerned, Blizz might finally be treating Prot Warriors like they aren't the little retarded brother with the padded helmet running into the walls while DKs, Pallies and Druids do the chores. I'm not tired of competing with the other three, not yet. As long as there's people out there who leave the role of tanking to their armor, class, and/or race but not their own personal abilities, I'll be honing mine in the hopes for the day raid leader assigns my noble warrior the MT icon, not just because of my class, but because the person behind the name is known far and wide as a tank of pure badassitry.

The Arms aspect of your talent build before you swapped out for Imp. Demo Shout sounds very similar to mine, and ironically I actually thought about Imp. Demo first before deciding on Impale and Deep Wounds instead. My reasoning for not going Imp. Demo is because of the cap associated with the debuff on bosses (a limit to how much you can actually shave off). Frankly, I'd like to bolster one of the few AoE perks I have than be redundant in buffs or debuffs.

The potential I see for this skill is not limited to damage numbers, but I number crunch when I get giddy, so there you are. What I saw in addition to it was a Warrior with very few and far between moments of vulnerability. Shield Block lasts 12 secs with 40 second cooldown; Shield Wall fully supported lasts 12 secs with 60 second cooldown. Used the way I envision, a Prot Warrior wouldn't go 20 seconds without having some kind of protection up, and I'm of a firm stance that when you don't have to worry as much about how well you're taking hits, you can focus more on other things... like damage and threat. But that's just me. Thank you for your insight. I'd still like to prove you wrong, though, so that maybe you would have so much confidence in your Warrior's ability to compete that you actually tell the other big three to shove it. Sometime down the line. I believe good things are coming to those who have waited, and who has waited longer than the Warrior?

Comment by vandroy

I'm fairly certain that Shield Wall on a 2 minute cooldown will save me and my casual 10-man raiding guild alot on trash in Ulduar. I will also be able to use it more often while learning encounters to ease things up for the healers.

I want to believe that nothing in Ulduar (10-man) is designed so that I as a MT need a 60% damage reduction skill.

Comment by 182403

fieryshadowcard tl dr, sorry

great glyph for progressing, when you're NOES! buttons are needed and spammed more

Also it's a glyph that takes tanking seriously, not as a tps contest, but as migating incomming damage, less taxing your healers.

Comment by 75419

While this was an absolute no brainer to me if this hit a one minute CD (glyph+talents) I'm a bit on the fence.
Just turning 80 I popped in here to get the final word, and it appears that one minute SW isn't going to happen.

I don't have a lot of other (gear) tricks in hand (at least yet) so matching up/rotating 2min CD tricks isnt applicable.
So I'm not entirely sold... 2 minutes isn't 1-minute spammable, and if I'm saving for 'oh-nos' anyways... /shrug

Gonna play with some build remaking, but at this point I think my Shield Wall, early 80 at least, remains 5 minutes.
Unless I'm using the frequency advantage, I'm actually losing mitigation - net net seems a bit expensive to roll out.

Comment by 367882

Ive been visiting Ulduar constantly lately, and this glyph seems to be more and more valuable. Mobs there are not like the ones in Naxx, they hit very, very hard (Even trash), and Shield Wall can save your life. As a tank you need to do as much as possible to stay alive, Healers play an important part,, but you should be able to play your role to ease their job as much as possible. Fights like Mimiron, if the tank doesn't have cooldowns, Spells like "Plasma Blast" will squish you regardless of your 7.5 tier or you 213/226 level gear.

In my own opinion, if you are a tank and still farming Heroics/ Naxx 10-25, you can get away with not having this glyph, if you are done doing that, and you are an Ulduar "Regular Raider", this glyph does help, and will increase your survivability, which means less wipes.

:)

Comment by Freedo

Glyph of Shield Wall of Text crits you for 52,503 physical damage.

Comment by hippossa

really.. that is a ton of text shadowcard but the problem with this glyph is what its replacing
so we know that everything holds aoe threat better than wars, but we are topline when it comes to single target threat
additionally while this helps with trash tanking mitigation its not really necessary
the use of shield wall is more along the lines of 'oh.. we just got feared and aggroed 10 more peeps, lets see how this goes' or more often the boss is casting a 20 second spell that will END you

this glyph and the talent will make you into a better trash tanker, but itll hurt just that much more on the fml boss moves
however, there are a just so many other ones you could take (were gonna go ahead and make the assumption that any war tank with a brain will have revenge) so with two glyphs left u can have dev, SA, blocking(which should really be a permanent anyway), HS is more like free rage which is kinda eh since you shouldnt be lacking it, vig or the three or four other ones that are a bit more situational

its kinda up to you, but then it really isnt. they all beat out a frequenter albeit weaker sw (though SA is dubious). id rather kill them quicker and maintain my own threat then be able to outlast while just hanging on. theyre called 'uh-ohs' because someone failed at doing their job

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Glyph of Shield Wall

Item Level 45
Major Glyph

Requires Level 28
Use: Permanently teaches you this glyph.

Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 2 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.

Max Stack: 20

Sell Price: 1

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