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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Raiding Gear III the Gearening
And at last we finish our look at raiding gear, including emblem of valor and emblem of heroism gear. Last time while covering Naxxramas, we forgot (well, I forgot) to cover capes, so before we move on to Malygos and Emblem gear, we'll take a look at tanking and DPS capes for warriors in Naxx.Naxx 10 provides three options for warriors: the Cloak of Armed Strife for tanking (dropping from Maexxna and Gluth, as we're by now used to), the Cloak of Darkening from Razuvious and Gluth as a DPS option, and finally Sapphiron drops the Cloak of Mastery for DPS as well.Naxx-25 gives us the Shadow of the Ghoul, a very nice tanking cloak from trash, and the Cloak of the Shadowed Sun which drops off of four bosses. For DPS, we see the Drape of the Deadly Foe off of KT himself and the Aged Winter Cloak off of another quartet of bosses. This pretty much shuts the door on Naxx, allowing us to move on.Before we get started, though, I should admit that I'm having one of my usual mood swings on the Horde/Alliance axis lately, so if I start posting a lot of pictures of a tauren here don't be alarmed. The fact that I'm done with raid content as a player and Ulduar is a ways away is also making me want to spend time Horde-side as well. Maybe get back to my prot roots. Maybe not, who knows? Anyway, on to Malygos and Emblems.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 3.0.8 makes death less sudden
If you're paying attention to the saga of Warriors and patch 3.0.8 on the PTR, you saw the following exciting patch notes, which I will reproduce in their entirety from here. Warriors Bloodthirst: Charges have been decreased to 3, but the effect has been raised to 1% per charge. Fury: Bloodsurge: Now has a chance to trigger from any hit with Heroic Strike, Bloodthirst, or Whirlwind. Fury:Titan's Grip: The hit chance penalty has been removed. Taunt: Range increased to 30 yards. While these are not a lot of changes, on the whole they seem fairly positive, yes? Well, what's not in the patch notes is of some concern to DPS warriors. Namely, the incoming nerfs to Deep Wounds and Sudden Death, two warrior talents in the arms tree. The Deep Wounds nerf is aimed at balancing fury warriors since their damage should be going up with the change to Bloodsurge and Titan's Grip. Since there hasn't been an announcement of how much Deep Wounds is going to be changed, all we know is that the DPS will decrease. The Sudden Death change, however, is at least simple enough, in that when a Sudden Death execute lights up, it will only use up to 30 rage.
Behind the Curtain: Take a look back
Brace yourself for the obligatory 'New Year' post. I'd resolve to lose weight, tone up and be kinder to my fellow man, but I'd be lying. Not because I'm weak and won't follow through on them, but because I don't need to. I'm practically perfect in every way. Except not really. I'm lying. I also hate Mary Poppins with a cold, implacable hatred. But that's neither here nor there. It's been a year of ups and downs in the MMO world. We've seen World of Warcraft go from strength to strength with an expansion pack which knocked the socks off of Burning Crusade. Say what you will about Blizzard, but it's always good to see a company that's willing and able to learn not only from its past mistakes, but its past successes. We've seen the long-awaitied launch of Warhammer Online, but we've also seen some downers, with Tabula Rasa going down the tubes, and Fury falling over. Although, not as many people were upset about Fury, given that it was terrible from start to finish.
The Queue: Plate, plate and more plate
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.Good afternoon, WoW Insider! I have nothing useful to say in my preface today, because I need to go put my new power supply and video card in my PC so I can actually play WoW again. Man, have you seen some of the newer video cards these days? If I had enough of these things I could build a fort capable of surviving a nuke out of them. This thing is a beast.Trech asked... A couple questions regarding DK tanking... How much Defense rating am I going to need at level 80 to hit 540 defense skill. How much base defense skill will I have at 80? I'm levelling Unholy with a DPS build. If I throw on a few pieces of +def gear can I safely go tank Nexus or Utgarde Keep at level 72?
The Queue: Punching our way to greatness
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Yesterday we were talking about the Bros Before Ho Ho Ho's achievement a bit. Specifically, do you need to be level 77 to get it if you're a Horde player? Most of us thought yes, you do, but stacy (one of our readers) popped in with some pretty creative instructions on how to do it. Check that out, then we'll get on with the Q&A!Classy asked...Anyone know a good place to fall to get the "Going Down?" achievement?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Transitioning your role
Well, I've been thinking about doing this for almost half a year, ever since Titan's Grip was announced, and now I have. I'm a raiding fury warrior again. My job is to hit things until they are dead, or in some cases to hit them until they are dead and have the common decency to stop moving around like that.It was a decision made harder by the glory of prot spec in its current form, but as Adam's post this week pointed out, fury is getting some nice changes that will make it even more viable, and when you come down to it, I have wanted to dual wield 2h weapons for years now. When an old friend of mine 'put the band back together', so to speak, and told me that the guild I'd raided all the 40 man original raid content with was back and that they were looking for a fury warrior for Wrath, it took a lot of time for me to decide what to do. Changing guilds was hard, as the guild I'd raided with in TBC was an excellent one and i know they'll have lots of success in Wrath, but in the end I felt like this was a move that would help keep the game fun and interesting for me.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Wrath specs for leveling Fury Warriors
And so this week we conclude our leveling specs discussion with talk of fury. When I started this discussion, I mentioned that I was respeccing quite frequently, and that hasn't changed. Since I hit level 80 I have respecced twice a day. Not out of any specific need so much as out of boredom and a desire to play around with different specs, as I tend to try learning by doing as much as possible. I'm also trying to decide which of my characters to level up next, as I have the Death Knight starting at me but also several warrior alts I'd like to roll through Northrend with. I'm interested in seeing the quests from the Horde perspective, and grinding up on a warrior is cake nowadays. Every spec is solid for leveling, with Protection combining good damage and ridiuclously high survivability, arms bringing a nice mix of proc based pain and AoE damage, and fury?Fury is for killing and killing and killing while the world runs red in ruin around you. Sorry, but while I am a tank and I love tanking, I've discovered two facts in the past week. I can tank pretty much any five man or group quest in my tanking gear as fury and holy heck I enjoy chopping things heads off. My warrior raided throughout vanilla WoW as a DPS build, switching between fury 2h slam and Arms, and it's been nice to get back to that as a Titan's Grip build. I often don't even tell people I'm fury when they ask me to tank, I just show up in the tanking gear and use a 2h weapon and a shield. What it lacks in AoE tanking capacity (no shockwave, no damage shield) it gains in pretty solid single target threat, thunderclap still hits multiple targets, and with the right talents you can even get some solid threat from Bloodthirst. This week we'll be talking about a fury build that allows for some tanking versatility: it's not a raiding DPS build but is oriented towards letting you grind and tank or offtank when needed. If there's room, we'll then discuss a pure DPS build for five mans and leveling if you have absolutely no desire to tank or offtank.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Weapons between 70 and 80
Unfortunately we ran out of time in our Care and Feeding of Warriors series on gear for Wrath of the Lich King ;ast week, just as we were about to cover the weapons to be looking to acquire. This week, post launch, here's a concise list of blues to be had in the 70 to 80 Northrend instances. We've already covered rep rewards, but we may go over some of the same ground here for convenience.We'll be covering tanking and DPS weapons of both the one and two handed variety. Not all warriors will be taking Titan's Grip, after all. Oh, stop looking at me like that, you know it's true. I stated a fact, I didn't kick a puppy, you can turn off the big sad eyes now. Yes, of course I specced fury for leveling. Oh, I'll go back to prot once we're all 80 and raiding again, but there was no way I wasn't going fury. I've written ballads about this talent, you think I'm passing up the chance to use it? Oh my word no.What follows is all pre-raid gear. 5 mans, quests, heroics and badges, but no raids. It's light on PvP gear, because I figure you know how to get that stuff. (Hint: you PvP for it.) Sometimes I mention it if it feels like a category of weapon will be very empty without it, though. Axes, I'm looking right at you here.
Wrath of the Lich King class changes roundup
Over the last two days, the WoW Insider team has been busy reviewing and gathering all of the still-current class information to bring you up to speed for your first steps into Northrend. You've probably had a chance to get a handle on your class since most of the changes were pushed through in patch 3.0.2, but you have an extra ten levels ahead of you, an extra ten talent points, and a whole bunch of new skills and abilities you're going to need to learn. Don't know what to expect? We're here for you. If you do know what to expect? Well, I guess you can keep reading if you want. We'll let it slide just this once. Death Knight - Being the new class on the block, there's certainly been a lot to talk about in the recent months. Daniel Whitcomb points you toward much of it, including leveling builds, in-depth looks at their core abilities and mechanics, as well as some sage advice from Allison Robert. Druid - Speaking of Allison Robert, she'll be your guide today if you're looking for more on the Druid class. Talent builds, a glimpse at raid healing as Restoration, the rise of the Moonkin and much more can be found within.
Wrath of the Lich King: Warrior roundup
Wrath of the Lich King. It's here. You're ready. At least, you think you're ready. You recall the last time we all went off to a new place to kick some butt, some guy said something about not being prepared, and you don't want to be unprepared. So let's go over all the coverage we've done on the site that might be of interest to you.Talents and Skills The Most Recent Changes - What do your skills and abilities currently do? Here's the skinny. Protection - how will the spec perform in Northrend? Pretty dang well, it turns out. DPS warriors - If you like to smash things we covered how to go about doing that. Skill Mastery covered Damage Shield, Shockwave and Bloodsurge, three new warrior abilities. Leveling Builds Try out a Prot Grinding Build - 0/8/53 for soloing groups of mobs as well as tanking. This Fury/Prot build brings Titan's Grip with a touch of Improved Thunder Clap and Incite for moderate tanking viability and damage. Here's a heavy Arms build - substitute your weapon specialization of choice. Gearing guides We've looked at where to get gear for your warrior - parts one, two, three, four and five. Hopefully this will get you started in Northrend. Have fun killing things and taking their stuff!
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: That's a wrap
The Burning Crusade is effectively over.If there's anything you were intending to do that you haven't done yet for one reason or another... killing Kil'Jaeden, perhaps, or maybe something simple like finally picking up that Shard of Contempt that's been refusing to drop for you... you've got six days before Wrath of the Lich King effectively ends the current expansion's life cycle. The content will all be there, sure... eventually you'll see videos of groups of players blasting through Black Temple in fifteen minutes or what have you, but the zones will cease to matter in the same way that all the original raiding content did: fun for a trip back, but not relevant anymore.As a result of this impending wave of change coming to wash away all the raids I've gotten so accustomed to, I've gone and respecced my human and tauren warriors to fury for the final week of their TBC lives. I've tanked my way through content up to Sunwell itself, now it's time to sit back and enjoy what I never really got to see before due to my intense focus on where someone's giant crotch is at the moment. Seriously, tanking Illidan is all grunts and his ten foot high crotch hanging threateningly above my head, it's quite disturbing if you think about it too much. So the past few days, I have been dual wielding two hand weapons like I always dreamed I would. Oh, and it is glorious. Glorious.
Are all MMOs just extended vaporware?
Massively multiplayer online games can be a difficult industry to break into and succeed. For every Blizzard or Sony Online Entertainment, there are several smaller companies brimming with ideas about how to inject change into the MMO market. Some succeed by breaking from the World of Warcraft paradigm. Most do not. Writer James Matson writes about these titles that begin full of promise but ultimately meet a chilly reception by MMO gamers, in an article at Atomic. He touches on the fact that the sometimes high price of the box sale paired with monthly MMO fees, sustained over some months, leads to some serious disappointment when the MMO fails and the servers go dark. Matson specifically cites the examples of Auran's Fury and (what is currently Namco-Bandai's) Hellgate: London. "This would appear to the be the first tendrils of a new kind of gaming plague that's arrived with MMOs, games that can be rendered useless due to mismanagement, poor sales or just bad luck," Matson writes.
Ask a Beta Tester: Lordaeron, epic quests, and other things
Welcome back to Ask a Beta Tester, where we answer your questions about the Wrath of the Lich King beta! Let's get things started with Chris's question...I really enjoy the Epic quest in Nagrand to bring Thrall to meet his grandmother. Is there anything like that in Wrath where you have to complete all the quests in one zone before you get an epic quest to complete?Well, there are a lot of quest chains. Maybe not that long, but certainly not less epic. That doesn't mean the chains are short, either. They just don't necessarily require completing every other quest in the zone. Some of the stories start the moment you step into a zone and last straight through until you're ready to leave it again, but there are plenty of other quests you do on the way. They're less of a prize for 'beating the zone' and more an everpresent story.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Itemization in Wrath part four
No Totem Talk today because I'm going on a raid tonight as an elemental shaman and so I don't want to make my big 'elemental shaman's in 3.0.2' post until after that. Instead, we return to itemization in Wrath of the Lich King.As far as gear that you're earning now is concerned, if you're raiding in T6 or Sunwell content, don't expect to slap on the first greens you see off the boat. While there are blue quest items as good as Karazhan gear in Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord, you won't be throwing your Apolyon out for a long time... the first real blue replacements for that gear aren't until level 78. Comparing the Breastplate of Agony's Aversion to Agin's Crushing Carapace, which requires level 77 to wear, and you can see how the Sunwell drop dominates (and will even more so with the new gems coming into the game. Just look at the various +defense options available to you to extend that Sunwell drop's life. You could most likely walk into Naxx in that gear and, save for worrying about critical hits, do perfectly well. So if you're raiding at high levels right now, don't sweat the gear reset: while you most likely will replace a piece or two on the march (especially if your leveling spec is fury and you raid as prot) you won't start seriously re-inventing your gear selection until you're near the end of the leveling curve. However, if you're not raiding past Karazhan right now, you'll start seeing upgrades early on in the instances.Let's start looking at the gear.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Itemization in Wrath part three
If you are a fury warrior, rejoice. Some of you were wondering where I was during the initial discussion. Frankly, I I was bodily assumed into what I can only assume was heaven. Sorry about that. Turns out it's really nice. I honestly don't have a real lot to say on this score (amazingly) aside from noting that I'm very pleased, it was exactly the change I was hoping they would make. It will be much easier to gear your fury warrior as he levels and when he reaches 80 for prepare for raiding. Admittedly, I'm not thrilled with the increase to armor for bosses, but it hits all physical DPS about the same.I've wanted to discuss gearing in Wrath since we were interrupted a couple of weeks ago. Granted, we've been interrupted by awesome news like the above, but still it seems like a decent time to get back into looking at what gear we'll be picking up as we level through Northrend. And frankly, if we don't start talking about that again, this entire column will probably be me typing "Titan's Grip aarrgh 5% ahmina kill everything gaaaaa" and nobody wants that. Well, maybe you do, I don't know what you're into. But I'm pretty sure that I should try and move past "You will know I am the warrior when I lay my vengeance upon thee" ranting aside and get on with the column.Titan's Grip.Oh, come on, you know I had to!
Titan's Grip hit penalty down to 5%
Titan's Grip, in case there are any of you in the audience who are not familiar with it, is the Fury Warrior 51-point talent. It allows the warrior to wield two 2-handed weapons (or a 2h and a shield, I guess, if they wanted to). Pretty awesome, right? Yes. But as a counterbalance, to make sure Fury isn't doing overly insane DPS, it imposes a penalty in the form of a decreased chance to hit with "damage-dealing abilities that require a weapon" (i.e. most special attacks). That decrease started out at 15%, and was changed to 12% before 3.0.2 went live. Ghostcrawler has now announced that they're changing it again, to only 5% decreased chance to hit with special attacks. This is a massive buff. Part of it is in response to raising raid boss armor by 10%, but this goes well beyond correcting for that. GC says that this probably makes TG a bit overpowered for a 51-pointer. I have, though, seen many, many Warriors complaining about the huge miss chance when the talent is picked up, so hopefully those complaints will be put to rest now. Oh, and the attack power coefficient of Bloodthirst is up too, from 45% to 50% (i.e. it will scale better as you get more AP). But man, TG is going to be crazy good now. Updated for accuracy.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A pile of my enemies' bodies
Welcome back to The Care and Feeding of Warriors. The carnage you see above you is the entire Scarlet Monastery Cathedral (and all the mobs before it, too!) except for the ones who died before we got this far. (I stole this idea shamelessly from a commenter named Brian Arnold.The video he linked is pretty much exactly how it went down for me.) Damage Shield, you complete me. Well, you and Shockwave, and the new limitless target Thunder Clap. This is my build: I skipped over Anticipation because, while an excellent talent, I want to be hit instead of dodged. I'll pick it back up again once we start leveling. A couple of fun screenshots from my character panel: This is my admittedly gimmicky shield block value set. Pretty much every piece on it has block or str, I hover at around 16000 health in it. What I find really fun (and what allowed me to pull the entire Cath as well as both bosses onto myself) was this next trick. Nothing up my sleeve but Shield Block.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Door Swings Open Pt 2
Yesterday we talked about the frankly astonishing state of protection spec in the upcoming Echoes of Doom patch. I then screwed up a perfectly good metaphor by using the word literally in it. And no, I suppose that the patch is not breathing down our necks in a Anne of Green Gables novel, it's doing so in a poorly conceived metaphor that I should have left alone. Wait, did I just mention it again? Rereading previous paragraph... well dang. Too bad I'm too slow to work out that whole backspace deal. (Wow, this is a long way to go to hang a hat on a screw up from a previous piece.)For this piece I want to talk about the changes to our DPS specs. How do they hold up in PvP? How are they doing as DPS for instances and raids? Why am I generally much, much more optimistic about these specs than, say, 90% of warriors on the beta right now?Well, we'll cover that. I'm not going to cover glyphs in too much detail because you won't be seeing them for a bit and many of the best ones will be out of reach until Wrath itself launches.
Skill Mastery: Bloodsurge
While a lot of debate goes back and forth about how much damage Fury is doing in Wrath, and how fun the tree is, there's one fury talent that is unabashedly awesome in my opinion: Bloodsurge. Bloodsurge is a pure delight to use, and is a perfect example of synergy in action: the Fury tree stacking a boost to critical hit with the new Rampage (which we will also be spotlighting, never fear) which causes your Bloodthirsts to crit, which gives you an instant cast Slam with a high chance to crit as well.It's quite possibly my favorite Fury ability (yes, even more so than Titan's Grip, which I am currently back in love with - I know you were all pulling for us crazy kids to make it) just for the fun of hearing the swoosh-bang on a BT crit. That sound means hit the slam button for extra damage! It's like getting all cherries on the slot machine, but without having to sit with all those people feeding quarters into the boxes with that desperate, hardened stare. Those folks scare me. I get the sense they'd like an instant cast slam as well, so as to easily steal my quarters.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Itemization in Wrath part two
Last week, I talked about gear. This week... I talk about gear some more. You may have an entire seat, but you'll only need the edge! Woah, sorry about that. I seem to have gone entirely mad. This week, in looking at options for tanking and DPSing in Wrath, we're going to look first at crafted items and then, if we have time, we'll start looking at instance drops to get yourself up to speed for your chosen role. As always, things can change in the Beta with blinding speed. You never know when they will make a change, allowing Berserker Rage to be used in all stances as an example. However, for now we're going with the notion that you'll need 540 defense to be crit immune at level 80 vs a boss, and that the Titan's Grip hit penalty on specials will require significant hit rating to overcome (roughly 500). Another assumption is that special attacks are using a two roll system instead of the one roll system of white attacks, meaning that you can't just stack a ton of crit to get around the miss penalty on your specials. (Note: I am not a statistician or a mathemetician. I barely understand the math in that thread.) I will say that, having taken my tauren back to Arms and then Fury, that things are not as dire as some comments and even my own past statements may seem: warrior DPS is currently low, yes, but it's not horrible, and you can level with either spec. (My draenei warrior is now 74 using arms as his prefered playstyle and I can say with relative security that the various Arms talents do make for solid leveling.) And while the TG miss penalty makes me cry, it is possible to overcome it, at least at lower levels.
