Defensive Stance

[Kevin]

This is in response to both of Darian's posts and Mjdoom I'm being a little lazy and not splitting and quoting like I could. :)

I disagree on Last Stand at least for early game. I've had it help save wipes several times. Sometimes I've died but it was enough to get the healer enough mana to do a prayer of healing which gave the rest of the party enough life to kill the rest of the mobs. That specific case was when were all doing a quest we were unfamilar with and just didn't know how the spawns were going to happen so things got messy and everyone got hurt. I've used it to stay alive long enough to kill off one more mob who's DPS would have killed one or two more party members and caused a total wipe.

It doesn't just help with poor healing. I find it's main use is to help with unexpected situations or to get you through things that you are a bit underleveled for. The extra time of having a living warrior to get the healers mana pot out of cooldown or something else like that is helpful.

All that being said, I still have debated taking those 3 points and using them somewhere elee, improved bloodrage doesn't really matter since blood rage is so overwhelmed by renews or well fed bonus, or whatever else and it seems that Last Stand will have less utility the bigger I get. I've also debated not getting shield discipline at all as I see it somewhat like you guys see Last Stand. It seems to be really only helpful if someone over aggros, however I've never had a chance to use it, like I have with Last Stand, so I can't get a personal feel on it, part of the reason I was looking at getting it.

Thanks for these responses, this is the level of debate I'm looking for on this stuff. I know I can just keep going the way I'm going see how it goes and then change again, the game is pretty cool that way, but I like to get nitty gritty detial opinions on some of it before I see it too.

One of the things I do like about the charge pull is that even with heavy CC (in temple we were 4 manning with 2 mages, a priest and me) we would time it so that I would charge then clap, after that the CC would be applied so we might have 2 mobs sheeped and one shackled. I could then dem shout and not break CC. What this meant though was an unexpected CC break had the mob on me already because the clap and dem shout was hated more than the CC effect. That allowed me to revenge or disarm or sunder or do whatever I wanted to the one or two tagets that were still standing. It was also nice to do with the groups of one or two elites with the 4 or 5 non elites (used it in Uldaman and in ST) it would all the AoE'r to usually get one round off without taking aggro from the non elites. The next AoE would grab them but I would still be able to usually keep the 2 elites on me (unless I had problems switching targets). If I could get a clap, dem shout and howl off I could hold them even better. I didn't have any tactical mastery in Uldaman and things didn't work as well because I generally had to wait in battle stance to dem shout or lose 5 to 10 rage. That had me taking more damage or delaying another AoE aggro generator and it usually meant I couldn't howl at all to help hold them for some of the AoE either or allow a ranged AoE to pull them off while they moved out slower to the mage. But I could still use the tactic, just not as well.

I have no idea if this type of pull will work in higher instances and while I can do it without tactical mastery, TM allows me to be "sloppier" about the stance switches. I do like to use clap when I can, not for it's aggro control, but for it's damage mitigation, as short as that may be as well. Unfortunately you can't use it in a lot of situations because you don't want to break CC. :)

So again I'm trying to give some more examples of how I'm using this so you guys can give better answers as well, should have done more of that earlier. :)

I'm willing to debate any of the talents I have points in or am thinking about putting them in. I'm trying to just get to my final tweak as fast as I can. :)