RAAAGE!

[Perinon]

Ok, so they finally announced how they're fixing rage. They're doing rage normalization. This is unsurprising, and not unreasonable assuming they balance the numbers appropriately.

(This info is posted on all the usual places, feel free to look it up).

Intial thoughts:

I don't know if I like battle shout going horn-of-winter style where it creates rage / has cooldown. I don't (as a general rule) really like "maintenance" buffs/debuffs, but we'll see what the cooldowns are. (And depending on how rage is balanced and it's status as on/off the GCD, it may be not that annoying.).

The "rage from damage taken ignoring all armor, absorb, block, avoidance, etc." while scaled to the HP of the warrior/druid will be... interesting. It MIGHT mean we still rage stave in lower-level content, since we'll be taking smaller hits compared to our larger HP pool, but that'll be a numbers-balance thing. I suspect we'll want to keep some "dps" pieces to switch out for rage income, but the nature of those pieces will be very different then they are now, due to the next part:

Standard rage income from swings, with all rage-income scaling come from haste and crit. I suspect that'll have *REALLY* drastic consequences to what stats are good to look for on gear. While I expect significant changes to our class/talents, right now crit's generally a very good stat, and this only goes to inflate it in comparison to strength. A lot of this is dependant on certain talents continued existance (like flurry, deep wounds, impale, etc.) but I'm actually sort of looking forward to the theorycrafting that this change will cause in gear. (Haste ends up doing exactly what bliz has said they want haste to do, let you do "more stuff").

Between the above 2 points, I could see a really crit/haste heavy piece of gear being a *very* useful tank swap for lower-end content. (That's just an example, of course).

The change of heroic strike to a variable-rage-instant will be entirely dependant on final numbers to see how useful it is. I expect to be *completely* GCD locked in Cata, however. (I'm not sure if I like that or not, I didn't like it in current arms gameplay, so I will be taking a wait-and-see approach here).

[Kit]

It was funny how we were talking on Vent about this and one of your ideas, Perin, was to grant a set amount of rage per auto and that was what Blizzard did.

With rage gain on each auto-attack, hit / expertise rating are boss just like for dps till hit cap.  Funny how we were talking about this as well.

I thought damage taken will no longer be a factor in rage gain.  Instead, it'll be based of the warrior/druid’s HP pool.  I could see being rage staved at low gear due to low HP but not due to lack of damage taken.

I would assume the rage gain multiplier will be different for warriors and druids or else the latter will get much more of it.  I don't feel that it's a great change since it makes stamina even better than it is now since it becomes a thread and survivability stat.  I would like to see avoidance stacking being viable.

[Perinon]

A bunch of posters are actually interpreting the "tank health to rage gain" in a reverse manner to how I thought of it, where as you got more stam you'd get *more* rage from damage taken, which would certainly fix gear scaling but would mean "STACK STAMINA YOU SLACKER" even more hardcore then now, which I'm not sure bliz wants to encourage. I'm waiting to see blue clarification on that one.

[Kit]

Yea, more clarity from Blizz on this would be nice.

[Wye]

Health pool being tied to rage means they'll nerf warriors even more to balance for Arenas, a plague upon this game.