Gladiator Stance - Bringing Back the Hybrid Spec?

During Blizzcon, they showed off many of the level 100 talents. I was glad to see that a lot of them were passive abilities or ones that would replace existing abilities - a way to combat button bloat while also adding some new functionality (Necrotic Plague is exciting for Frost DKs, for example, because it means we can take Pestilence off our bars.) I also liked that many of the talents change depending on the spec, rather than forcing wildly different specs to cram the same ability into their rotations.

But no talent surprised me more than Extreme Measures for Warriors, specifically in the Protection version.

Protection Warriors who take Extreme Measures have their Defensive Stance replaced with Gladiator Stance. What this does is crazy. It causes Shield Slam to consume the Shield Barrier effect as damage dealt to the enemy, with an increased critical strike chance based on your critical block chance, and it increases all damage by 20%. It does not, however, provide bonus threat or damage reduction.

This, boys and girls, is a talent that turns Protection into a DPS spec.

Now, here's the disclaimer: this could very easily never make it even into the alpha test. It might not actually be possible to get a fully-fledged DPS spec out of Protection with this change alone. After all, most of the passive abilities and cool downs that a tank tends to have are based around survival.

At the very least, as it stands, this talent would be a great way for Warriors to switch to when they wanted to do some soloing. A warrior tank would have plenty of great gear for his or her sword-and-board set, and given that tanks will also be using crit, haste, and mastery, it will all be appropriate to a damage-increasing strategy.

But, if they can fully tweak this ability, it does two major things:

One is that it makes Shields a lot more attractive. While many Warriors (myself most likely included) will probably stick to Fury or Arms, just the fact that a Strength Shield will now be available to multiple roles means that we could see a bigger market for them.

The other, far bigger implication is that Blizzard is apparently playing with the notion of allowing specs to change roles based on talent choices.

Admittedly, going from a tank role to a DPS role is perhaps not so terribly difficult. Tanks have, before Active Mitigation became such a big thing, always played kind of like a DPS spec that just focuses a bit more on AoE (to keep things off the healers.) Making a Prot Warrior go to DPS is largely just an issue of tuning their damage output, whereas making a Warlock into a tank requires giving them a pretty substantial revamp of their toolkit.

It is easiest to allow DPS to have their own style, because downtime and gaps in their toolkit can always be made up for. If a Death Knight does 450k in 5 seconds but only 50k for the next five, and a Rogue does 500k over ten seconds, ultimately that's pretty much ok, because on a boss fight, it evens out. On the other hand, a tank needs to have a little bit of snap-AoE threat to deal with incoming adds, they need a cool down to survive the boss' big blast attack, and they all need to start the pull with sufficient threat to keep the DPS from pulling aggro. Tanks and Healers need to be tuned far closer to one another than DPS, which is why a tanking or healing toolkit has to be so similar across the classes.

We don't know if Gladiator Stance will make it through (though I really hope it does, because a DPS Sword-and-Board spec sounds awesome,) but if it does succeed, we could actually be opening a door to far greater diversity among specs and roles. This is an ability to keep your eye on.