Colossal Dragonplate; LFR

Warrior Tier 13:
Protection, 2P -- Your Revenge ability now also grants a physical absorption shield equal to 20% of the damage done by Revenge.
Protection, 4P -- Your Shield Wall ability now grants 50% of its effect to all party and raid members.

Just wow. Two things: The beginnings of active abilities that affect mitigation makes me very excited. And for the first time since Strength stopped affecting Block Value, Warrior tanks will have a mitigation contribution from damage stats.

I can't wait to see what the EJ theorycrafters do with this-- at what avoidance DR point Expertise will be better point for point than Dodge/Parry. Or whether the always helpful "damage smoothing" effect of absorb shields over RNG avoidance may even be considered absolutely better in the same way Mastery was considered better even when avoidance was providing more overall damage reduction.

Shield Wall has been one of my favourite Warrior abilities since you could glyph it down to a 2-minute CD, and I'm certain that the fact that all tanks are getting a similar version of "apply tanking CD to the whole raid" means that this was designed with specific fight mechanics in mind.


I am so, so curious to see how "hard" the 25-man LFR raids end up being. On one hand, you have the massive raid-incompetence of the general WoW populace, combined with the massive co-ordination clusterfuck of twenty-five people who don't know and don't care to know each other being forced into a small space together; and on the other you have Blizzard's intimate knowledge of how simple these people require things to be in order to succeed. It really could go either way here.

I just keep thinking about how often you get a single jerk in a 5-man PuG who is intent on ruining the run for the other four... and then multiplying that by five. I wonder how many votekicks we will be restricted to per group-- and if you get booted, whether you would get any chance to recover your lockout for the rest of the week.

The more I think about this the more I remember why raiding is something that only works with an organised group.