Titans Grip
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Warrior changes in patch 3.0.3
With 3.0.3 going to the live servers today, we have a nice batch of Warrior changes to look at. First and foremost on everyone's mind are the changes to Titan's Grip.Prior to patch 3.0.3 Titan's Grip had a 15% miss penalty. That penalty has been reduced to an astounding 5%. What does this mean? It means that you're pretty much going to hit 10% more then what you used to when you have Titan's Grip talented.10% more means 10% more crits and 10% more yellow damage. Of course, these numbers end up being a bit different in practice than in theory crafting (and some will even correctly say that 10% more chances for damage is an oversimplification - and they would be right, and that's another article), but they're still a good base to look at when talking theoretically about the class.The simple jist of it is Titan's Grip just became a whole lot sexier.Continue reading on after the break for more changes to the Warrior class in 3.0.3.
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.
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.
Shifting Perspectives: Moonkin in 3.02 and beyond
Every Tuesday, or possibly Thursday when the writer realizes that nobody writing about moonkin DPS on the internet agrees with each other, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week Allison Robert, having Hibernated John Patricelli and run away as fast as her laser-chicken legs will carry her, examines the new moonkin talents and glyphs in 3.02 and Wrath. I do apologize about the wait here, folks. There's been a lot of contradictory information from both the beta and an array of Druid bloggers on how moonkin are shaping up for Wrath. While a lot of this is just the normal ebb and flow of changes in the alpha and beta, most of it is fueled by a few new talents and the set of glyphs that will become available. All of these have the potential to seriously impact your gameplay and rotation choices, so Balance DPS is going to be (at least, from current appearances) a lot twitchier and more proc-dependent than its counterpart in the feral tree. In addition, you'll probably have to make a few hard choices that will be affected by what your raid's going to need from you (although there is a truly amazing talent deep in the balance tree that, no matter what else you pick, is going to be a significant raid DPS contribution). As Balance is the only spec that I haven't gotten to raid on, I didn't want to go live with this until trying to figure out which pieces of information were accurate and which ones weren't. Bear in mind that Blizzard is still tinkering with Balance as I write this. For the guide to feral in 3.02, head here; for the guide to resto in 3.02, head here. You'll probably want to be familiar with the resto changes, as balance has traditionally depended on a few key talents in that tree, some of which have changed. Otherwise, read on for a comprehensive look at balance's new talents, updated skills, and glyphs!
Warriors gain super buffed Titan's Grip and passive Mortal Strike
Have you ever wondered what the collective sound of every warrior's jaw dropping to the floor is like? Tonight you can experience it first hand by logging into vent and listening to them as they read about the latest changes in the beta.The highlights: Heroic leap has moved from Tier 11 to Tier 9. You now can get it at level 50. Titan's Grip is now a Tier 11, instead of Tier 10. Titan's Grip is now only 1 rank, and does not have any speed penalty. Furious Attack – New Tier 8 fury talent. Normal melee attacks have a 50%/100% to reduce healing done to a target by 25% for 8 seconds. Stack up to 2 times. Shield Mastery in the protection tree increases block value by up to 30%. These changes are quite simply amazing. A friend of mine found me in vent and began the conversation by screaming about how over powered Titan's Grip is now. At first glance it looks like nearly every fury DPS warrior will be using Titan's Grip, hands down.More analysis on all this later. Stay tuned. Lots of great changes coming out tonight!
Is Titan's Grip that good?
I'm noticing a disturbing trend in perusing the Wrath blue posts. Well, disturbing for me, and possibly for any other warriors out there. All that awesome we seemed to be getting? It doesn't seem that the warriors are finding it quite so awesome. A case in point is Titan's Grip. The Wrath forums seem to indicate that's it's not all wine and roses. There is a lot of math going back and forth in that thread, so I'll simplify it (probably too much, but that's what comments are for): At present, the white damage of Titan's Grip does not exceed that of dual wielding one hand or off hand weapons. This means that the damage increase of the talent must come from specials such as Bloodsurge hasted Slams, Whirlwinds and Bloodthirsts. However, since Titan's Grip slows the weapons down considerably (fully talented, Titan's Grip means you swing 20% slower, so a 3.5 speed weapon can be over four seconds between swings) any miss streak can be crippling for rage generation. No rage generation means no rage to use those specials, so that you're dependent on white damage that's actually inferior to what it would be without the talent. It seems a little counter-intuitive that so evocative and exciting (on paper, anyway) a talent would actually lead to a DPS decrease.I find myself wondering if the issue is not with the talent itself, however, but with the itemization of all 2h weapons in the 60 - 70 game.
Ask a Beta Tester: More Titan's Grip
We're back again with today's round of Ask a Beta Tester questions. I tried to answer as many as I could, but time is a fickle mistress and I was going to write some sort of metaphor here but I can't think of one, so if you would all be so kind, come up with one for me. If I didn't get to your question today, don't worry, we'll be doing these for as long as there are questions left to answer. Just post it in the comments section below, and we'll try to get to it as soon as we can. Jamesisgreat asked: How much gold are you getting rewarded per quest on average? I mean is it worth us saving up our gold for Wrath or are quests going to reward 100g a pop or something? Most quests throughout the starter zones give around 5g each, though group quests offer more. On top of that there are the green rewards you don't use that you can vendor, so you don't need to save a lot of money. I advise saving up a little bit though, because questing to 80 is not going to get you the (roughly) 8,000g you'll want to buy the ring that ports you to Dalaran. You won't be totally broke at 80 if you don't save money now, but you won't be able to run around and buy whatever you want either. Northrend is a big place, so that ring will be nice even if you only use it for the portal. You can be free to set your hearth elsewhere.
Ask a Beta Tester: Wyrmrest Temple and the dragon shrines
Elizabeth is off having grand adventures at the airport today, so I'll be filling in for her on Ask a Beta Tester today. You may know me from such WoW Insider features as Know Your Lore, Ask a Lore Nerd, Hybrid Theory, and Bad Pop Culture References. Hm, wait, I think I imagined that last one... Anyway! I'll be fielding your questions today, and I apologize if I didn't get to yours. I had to pick and choose questions I actually knew a thing or two about, so I couldn't really answer class questions about classes I don't play or don't know very well.If I didn't get to your question today, go ahead and ask it again today, and hopefully one of the other WoW Insider staff in the Wrath Beta will be able to answer it for you. Thanks, everyone!juicyjuice asked: As I understand it, the Argent Dawn is making a reappearance in WotLK. Will players who spent a lot of time with the Argent Dawn pre-BC have a significant advantage over people who may not have much or any Argent Dawn rep when WotLK hits? The Argent Dawn and parts of the Silver Hand are now operating as the Argent Crusade. I won't elaborate on that so we can avoid any spoilers on the front page here. So no, high Argent Dawn rep from WoW Classic will not give you any advantage in Wrath of the Lich King. However, it will probably play a role in an achievement or two, though it is a bit too early to say for sure whether that will be the case when Wrath hits retail.
Breakfast Topic: New Wrath talents
It's definitely too early to tell, but since some of you lucky readers actually got into the Beta after Blizzard sent out invites yesterday, I might as well ask -- what new talents stand out for you? Even if you didn't get into the Beta (or haven't yet... don't give up hope!), I'm pretty sure you've read up on the new talents and gotten excited about some of them. I know I'm pretty stoked, specially since Paladins got so much love. Matthew geekasmed all over Titan's Grip so much that he wrote an entire Warrior column dedicating his undying love for it. Then there's Christian, who thinks Frostfire Bolt can change everything.Personally, I'm really excited about The Art of War, just because of the name (it's one of my favorite books, after all). It's also currently bugged in Beta, with crazy reports of over 20k damage on a Judgement. It'll be fixed pretty soon, of course, but I can't help but geek out over that. The Death Knight talent Infested Corpse looks particularly gruesome! And then I want to spec for Haunt to complement SL/SL. If you haven't looked at the new talents yet, you can check them out over at Wowhead's talent calculators or Blizzard's official one. Did anything catch your eye?
Forum post of the day: Too OP or not too OP
The news and analyses keep rolling in for Wrath of the Lich King. We've all got our pet talents and abilities we're psyched about. Everybody's going to get a shot in the arm. While Blizzard will balance and rebalance until release and then even after, some abilities stand out ad more exiting and powerful than others. Issenaril of Blood Furnace is afraid that Titan's Grip is going to be an over powered ability. The ability allows Warriors specced 46 points into the Fury tree to swing two two-handed weapons at a slowed speed. With a maximum of five points in this ability, the weapon speed will be decreased by 20 percent. He believes that this ability will massively increase Warrior DPS and make imbalanced in PvP. Liganu agrees that a 50 point Fury build will be helpful in battlegrounds, but it won't be as viable in arena combat.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Wrath Beta Edition
Well, we were going to talk about other things, but with the Beta coming out I have to admit I've entirely forgotten what they were. There's really no point in pretending that we're not going to be talk about this, is there? I don't think so myself.We learn nothing about any new talents that don't directly replace older talents. Nothing about Bladestorm or Titan's Grip, and talents like Incite are only mentioned because they're directly replacing talents like Defiance. We also don't learn what the big new protection talent to replace Shield Slam is from these notes. (We do have other sources and we will be discussing those talents in more depth, I'm just pointing out what the notes don't specifically mention.) The notes focus more on protection spec than others although we do find out that mace spec and sword spec are being slightly nerfed while poleaxe spec is getting a nice little buff: these changes seem PvP related to my eyes, but I have no idea how effective they'll actually be. The juggling of talents and the alteration of their effects definitely seems to confirm the notion that crushing blows are a thing of the past. On the one hand, this is a huge change to warrior tanking mechanics, as we're noted for our ability to hit uncrushability while druid tanks simply soak the damage with higher armor and stamina (paladins use the same mechanic as we do for uncrushable, they just need more block rating but can stay uncrushable longer than we can due to how their abilities work vs. ours): we've yet to see how this is going to play out. With the addition of DK's as tanks, removing CB's keeps them from having to rely on a gimmicky high parry (since they won't use a shield to tank) to avoid being crushed, but it also means that warriors will need a means to stay competitive with other tanks. Threat seems to be getting entirely reworked, so for now I'm cautiously optimistic about where tanking is heading for protection spec warriors, and indeed, all warriors. I'll go so far as to say that arms and fury warriors will be tanking in Wrath. I don't expect them to be dedicated main tanks for raids, but I do expect to see them tanking in five mans without respeccing, and that is without taking the possible two talent spec idea into account.
Is World of Warcraft really World of Diablo?
So how do you design Diablo 3 anyway? Bargain Bin Reviews has an idea -- just retrofit World of Warcraft. Shift talent points to spells, decrease enemy health and damage and increase the number of enemies by a factor of 10 or so, do away with healing spells and tanking, and you're essentially done. It's a bit silly and a bit tongue in cheek, yes, but it also brings up a good point. In the end, WoW is probably influenced by Diablo 2 as much as it is by Warcraft 3, if not more.
WoW Insider Show, Episode 44: Live from Paris (kind of)
Excellent podcast this week, if I do say so myself. Last Saturday, right smack dab in the middle of the Worldwide Invitational, I took to the virtual airwaves with Duncor of WoW Radio, and Matthew Rossi and John "BigBearButt" Patricelli of WoW Insider, and we chatted about all of the news coming out of the Worldwide Invitational. On this show, which is now live on WoW Radio, you can hear us talk about: What Turpster is up to -- we talked live with him directly from Paris about what he thought of the convention and what he'd seen out there. The announcement of Diablo 3, and what is isn't (an MMO or a console game) All the class changes that we saw on Saturday, including Warriors' Titan's Grip, Shamans' Hex, and Warlocks' Demonform, and what they meant for each class. And finally, what Blizzard meant exactly by that little talent trees comment they threw in on one of the panels. It's a rip-roaring show, and no matter what you love to do in the World of Warcraft, Matthew, John and Duncor definitely hit on a topic that will interest you. Definitely give it a listen, and don't forget to subscribe in iTunes if you want to get the podcast sent to you automatically every week.Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to hit on any email because of all the amazing WWI news, but that's OK, because we'll just talk about twice as much of it next week. If you want to ask a question or have a comment for us, drop us a note at theshow@wow.com, and you might even hear it on next week's show. We do this every Saturday at 3:30pm over on WoW Radio, so tune in next week to hear more commentary and insight about all the news from the last week of WoW.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Titan's Grip!
Titan's Grip is confirmed -- dual wielding 2h weapons. Rossi will love that. - Michael Gray from WoW Insider's coverage of the WWI dev panel.To my mind, the news from the Worldwide Invitational is big enough to push back our discussion of DPS gear for the starter raider. (We most certainly will talk more about it, believe me.) Several statements from the invitational need discussion for us warriors, I think, especially worth considering how they may well change the design philosophy of the class.Also, yay, Diablo III. It's especially appropriate that we get the news about Titan's Grip on the same day as we get our spiritual forefathers, the barbarian class, back. So, you may ask, what exactly was said about warriors that was interesting?Warrior Wanted to make the class feel more like Warcraft III -- put the Bladestorm Shockwave in, and tweaked Arms and Protection. Shockwave will help with Prot damage problem Titan's Grip is confirmed -- dual wielding 2h weapons.
