One, if I crit I get back 5 rage on the critical hit. It is not ncommon for me to crit on all three swipe targets for essentially a rage free attack. Wonder how thats gonna get nerfed If I can crit swipe on 7 targets at once and be up 20 rage for the attack? Can you verify this in beta? Throw on your cat gear and go tearing through BRD ;)

Also, In regard to my other comment, while the mobs DO spread out around you, this is only if you stand still. Bear tanking multiple mobs is likely going to be a positional thing, as neil mentioned, but the main trick is gonna be to basically walk backwards slowly to keep all mobs in front of you.

If they drop ALL damage from swipe, make it a threat only attack, and keep the threat scaling on AP, about where it is now, this would still be an awesome tool. If they scale back the threat as well as damage though, then we run into trouble staying ahead of healer threat. triple swiping multiple mobs in SH still risks the healer now, (that is 7+ mobs at once in kara/badge gear) if I get even a couple of misses/dodges/parry’s then healer threat is gonna pull em.

How many tanks would cry bloody murder to lose all damage on swipe for an increase in threat? (Id bet 2/3 ;))

So to see this looked at by blizz gives me a nice warm feeling inside.
Now i know that this wont make us multimob gods (As swipe dmg aint that great) but any improvement is better than nothing!

Wonder what will replace the minor glyph that was supposed to increase the number of enemies that swipe could hi???

In a tight situation in a raid, where a fraction of a second makes the difference between a downing or a wipe, that could make all the difference.

You also have to consider the buffs that Paladins got re: single-target threat, and the fact that they’re now using conventional weapons means they can now equip 1H weapons with mitigation stats.

The players who pay too much attention to the numbers and the function/properties of abilities are more appropriated to play text-based games, since that’s what they’re reducing it to.

I would be happy with that trade off, if it means that I can continue to be a strong single target tank.

To me, this means that I can focus my intentions on one or two single targets, the primary first kill targets, while still laying the smackdown on more than three mobs with Swipe to keep them concentrated on me. I can once more bring skill into the equation, looking at threat generation on single and multiple mobs, but not have to skip laying down threat on one mob that people are killing in a frantic effort to tab-target or mouseover-target and hope I’m spreading my Swipe around enough.

What range of arc in front of us? If I turn 90 left will the cone shift to the left or will it stay behind my targtted mob? Will my current swipe macro shift the cone around me with a mouseover swipe, or am I literally going to be spinning circles to keep mob aggro? ( keep in mind large mobs spread out around you, you are still gonna have to move around to hold large crowds )

Pallies have a big advantage still in AoE tanking behind them. We are stil gonna have to have some skill to make it work.

Druids are stil gonna rock :) But skill is still gonna be the defining factor, we just get new tools to master :)

btw, I just read over the beta threads: damn they’re depressing: for every druid that’s excited, there’s 15 complaining that its not enough and pallys are still the aoe tank of choice.