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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms tears off limbs in 4.1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. I promised it last week. This week, I deliver: How is arms doing in patch 4.1? Pretty darn well. I raided as arms Tuesday night and did respectable DPS (I was third for the evening, spiking between 17k and 19k DPS, depending on the pull), although I still fell short of my fury DPS. (I even managed about 17k DPS in a ZA run that same night.) For a 10-man raid, it was certainly a valid showing. On a dummy, arms seems also to come in second, but a close second to fury for me, with averages of around 14 to 15k. What does this all mean? Well, it means if you're more comfortable as fury (which I am), you'll probably want to stick to it. But if someone who does not fully feel at ease with arms and the rotation can still put out valid raid and heroics DPS numbers, then for those of you who prefer the arms playstyle, I can't see a reason you shouldn't be able to do better. This means to me that arms is definitely raid-viable in patch 4.1 as of right now.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms talents
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Time to talk about arms talents. Patch 4.0.6 has probably made arms as close in raw DPS to fury as it's been in quite some time. At the same time, some of its PvP bite has been pared away. I would vociferously deny that arms is broken in PvP; I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's definitely the case that the arms rotation suffers in fights in which it becomes harder to maintain time on the boss. (I saw a rather significant DPS loss on Omnotron, with its rather constant target switching.) But if you can keep face time, arms has a lot more teeth than it did even a month ago with Slam hitting much harder and Mortal Strike costing less rage. I will say that with health pools so huge now, the 10% healing debuff on MS seems completely pointless. Actually, let me rephrase that. It's not completely pointless; it's close to absolutely useless. A 10% healing debuff doesn't even make a paladin blink, a druid squirm, a priest groan or a shaman shudder. I spent a Twin Peaks match this week trying to help a death knight burn down a paladin healer in the crafted PvP set, and we could not do it. With warrior stuns now so much less effective (thanks to charge adding to diminishing returns on stuns), Will the hotfix buff to arms this weekend help even it out? MS barely even slowing them down and pummel on a 10-second cooldown, arms really does feel pointless against a healer in comparison to its glory days. There are discussions about the future of arms PvP going on right now on the official forums, and some of them make interesting promises for the future. Daxxarri - Civil Discussion, Juggernaut nerf We understand that you need to be on your target to do your jobs, but it didn't really make sense to allow close to 100% up time either. On the other hand, we understand that without high up-time warriors might not bring as much to an Arena or Rated Battleground team, and we're adding new utility in a future patch to help address that, though we're not yet ready to share details. source While you contemplate what that will be (a new gap closer, a root, what what could it be?) let's look at arms talents.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms and the 4.0.6 patch notes
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Last week, we saw patch notes for the PTR and patch 4.0.6. Since then, we've seen updates to these notes. These updates mean that some of the things we talked about no longer apply. And then they went and updated them again. It would be fair to say I kind of groaned when I saw Blizzard do this, knowing I'd most likely have to basically spend another week talking about the notes. I was especially annoyed because I finally have my tank set to the point where I can tank in a raid or a heroic without feeling painfully undergeared, and I've gotten my DPS up to where I think it should be at the current gear level and talent spec design. In general, I think warriors are almost where they should be right now. We may be slightly weaker than I'd like as tanks, and arms is frankly pretty bad as a DPS spec right now. It's still good for PvP, although that's mostly due to its ability to chain stuns, which it will be losing somewhat in 4.0.6. With Slam still not scaling at all with haste, arms is going to need flat-out DPS increases to go along with the nerfs it's taking. Fury will probably be all right -- not the absolute top DPS, even among hybrids, but it will deliver in fights where melee is unduly punished for being melee. So let's go take a look at the cards we're going to be dealt in patch 4.0.6 as of the most recent update. If I had to sum up the entirety of the remainder of this post, it would be, "Okay, but why not buff arms for PvE?"
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Cataclysm 101 guide for DPS warriors
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. In short, if you remember our Arms and Fury 101 posts from earlier this year, we're going to do a roundup for the changes Cataclysm has brought to each spec. Since the changes have actually debuted before Cataclysm has, we've already had a chance to get familiar with what we're going to be seeing in the next few weeks. So let's go over what a DPS warrior is and isn't. Specifically, a DPS warrior is not a tank. This does not mean that the warrior class does not have a fully functional tanking spec. It does; it's called protection, and we'll be talking about it next week. But while DPS warriors (be they arms or fury) probably think tanking is great and love tanks to death, they would much rather be unleashing bloody murder on things, if that's all right with you. So let's talk about what the DPS warrior specs are, how they work in Cataclysm, and what you're signing up for when you sign up as a warrior to murder things and take their stuff.
Ghostcrawler shares DPS spec design philosophy for Cataclysm
From time to time, we find an interesting forum discussion that manages to elucidate how the past informs the present and future -- specifically, how the design of Wrath of the Lich King has inspired Cataclysm's systems. Poster Klissa asks an interesting question about four specs known to be the bottom-of-the-barrel DPS specs during most of this expansion: the arms warrior, frost mage, subtlety rogue and beast mastery hunter. Klissa asks why, since Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) has posted on the forums that Blizzard has known for a while that these four specs just weren't cutting it, that they weren't buffed to be made competitive. As we've come to expect him to, Ghostcrawler responds with a fairly in-depth answer. He covers the difficulty of balancing two or more specs in a class that fulfill the same role and how this experience in Wrath of the Lich King helped guide Blizzard in its systems overhaul for Cataclysm.
Ashen Verdict strength ring in minor content patch
Bornakk popped onto the forums late Thursday to confirm that Blizzard is planning to add a +strength version to the Ashen Verdict rings in an upcoming mini-patch. The appearance of the four current rings with patch 3.3 caused a minor furor on the forums, with plate DPS being left out in the cold. While there are +strength DPS rings available elsewhere in Icecrown Citadel, there's no replacement for a reputation ring's valuable proc. One of the interesting things about the +strength ring's initial absence wasn't its absence per se, but the reason for omitting it. Apparently the Ashen Verdict choices were a reproduction of older reputation-linked quest items (e.g. Violet Eye and Scale of the Sands rings) that allowed only four choices, and Blizzard wasn't able to get past the programming issues to add a fifth option before 3.3 went live. Well, that's going to get fixed in the upcoming mini-patch, which will also see a few other class-related changes. The date of the patch is still anyone's guess, but we'll keep an eye out for you.
Class Q&A: Warrior
Just days after the Druid Class Q&A, the blues have seen fit to post the Warrior edition. Look for in-depth analysis from our very own Warrior expert, Matt Rossi, soon. This purpose of this post is to get the news out there to you, dear readers, as fast as possible. Here's my very brief summary: Historically, Warriors have been dominant in tanking and competitive in DPS and PvP. Balance is in a "fairer place" now. Arms and Fury need a "hard look." They are happier with the Prot tree. "Arms is supposed to be about weapons and martial training and feel 'soldierly.' Fury is supposed to be about screaming barbarians in woad." They still want to get rid of stance penalties (like increased incoming damage in Berserker) eventually. In the future, Prot warriors will generate more rage through doing damage. Long-term, they need "a better solution to rage generation." "Block needs to be a percentage of damage blocked in order for the stat to do what we want" (though the frequency of block, and avoidance in general, would probably have to come down to compensate). They want tanks to not ignore DPS stats quite so much. Warriors have too much downtime when leveling. Read on for the full Q&A with Ghostcrawler and friends.
PTR patch 3.1.2 build 9889: Juggernaut, Auriya's cats nerfed
A small new build was pushed to the patch 3.1.2 PTR today. The majority of the changes were relatively minor, but one is headline-worthy: the Arms Warrior talent Juggernaut now gives your next Slam or Mortal Strike an additional 25% chance to critically hit if used within 10 sec, down from 100% chance. Forum posters have been asking for a Juggernaut nerf quite vocally recently; they ought to be pleased with this one. Warriors also got a second small nerf: the Glyph of Rapid Charge is being changed from a 20% cooldown reduction (3 seconds) to a 7% reduction (1 second). Other changes included some small tweaks to the Ulduar encounters Iron Council and General Vezax. Auriya's cats took a good hit from the nerf bat, with the damage from their Savage Pounce ability being cut in half. Finally, Priests' Divine Hymn, which was completely reworked in patch 3.1, had its bonus healing to affected targets nerfed from 15% to 10%; I never use the spell, so I don't much care.
Rogue, cat, arms warrior DPS to be buffed
As of WoW 3.0, all DPS specs are supposed to be providing competitive DPS; this is one component of "bring the player, not the class." Overall I'd say this has turned out pretty well, although within class it still has some issues - almost every mage seems to be Frostfire right now, for instance, and Mutilate rogues are far and away out-damaging other rogue specs. To a certain extent this is probably by design; Subtlety's strengths in PvP, for instance, might make up for its lower raid DPS. However, there are some melee that Ghostcrawler has just said are "a little low" in DPS: Rogue Cat Druid Arms Warrior The more awake among you may have noticed that "Rogue" is not a spec. However, I'm reading that as "Combat (and possibly Subtlety) rogue," since the blues have said in a few other places that they're pretty happy with where Mut is right now and that Combat is underperforming. Ghostcrawler goes on to say that changes are coming to these classes/specs, although of course we don't have specifics to share with you at this time. When we do, you know where to find us. But until then, what changes do you think would help even out the low DPS? And no, "reroll Death Knight" doesn't count (as much as I love mine).
Insider Trader: Armorsmiths vs. weaponsmiths
I received a question over the tip line from an armorsmith this morning who is considering switching to weaponsmith because he is dissatisfied with his profession. Player regrets surrounding a chosen specialization, or even profession, are common and happen to almost everyone at one time or another.JDT writes that he is "extremely disappointed" with armorsmithing and what he is able to make, and that one of his reasons for possibly switching to weaponsmithing is that he theorizes it would be helpful to be able to pass down weapons to his alts that cannot wear plate. Unfortunately JDT, anything that you craft as either a weaponsmith or an armorsmith is not only bind on pick-up, but it also requires you to have that specialization in order to wield/wear it. That being said, there are blacksmithing plans for weapons and armor floating around that are bind on equip and can be passed along, but those can be made by any blacksmith regardless of specialization. This week I will begin comparing the various armorsmith and weaponsmith pieces to the first non-crafted upgrades in order to illustrate the value of each item and help each class and spec come to an informed decision when it comes time to choose blacksmithing specialties. Next week I'll finish out the comparison, as there is more than I can fit into this week's edition!
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Karazhan DPS gear continued
The Care and Feeding of Warriors returns at last to its guide to DPS gear to get your fury or arms warriors ready for Karazhan. Matthew Rossi, seen above on one of his many warriors taking a wine and fish break in Kara itself (hey, the food's pretty good considering that it's served by the walking dead) realizes that he took a lot longer than he expected to write this column, but in his defense, Titan's Grip. You understand.And so we return to DPS gear for Karazhan in the form of boots, bracers and belts. If we get past that, we may shoot for rings, necks and trinkets, but let us see how far we get first. The problem with the slots in question... the belt, bracer and boots you need for your DPS kit... is that there are often not all that many options outside of PvP or crafted epics to meet or exceed your needs, and worse, there's really not much you'll get in Karazhan in terms of DPS plate either. As a result, expect me to be extremely flexible in terms of what I recommend here, and if you can think of a suitable offering I've missed for some reason, feel absolutely free to mention it in the comments. I'll probably be forced to mention the most readily available PvP options: there's really no way around it with the paucity of gear inside Karazhan to meet your DPS needs.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Gearing for Karazhan, Fury/Arms pt 2
Once more into that there breach what with the dead already filling the walls and suchlike.When last we left our intrepid band of heroic warriors (that's you guys) they were about to head into Karazhan and hit stuff. We've already covered what to wear if you're one of those warriors who hits things and gets hit back in return, and last week we did an overview of the main slots (head, shoulders, legs, chests and hands) for your aspiring breaker of limbs. Whether it's arms or fury you intend (or some weird hybrid of the two like the spec I'm currently playing with on my tauren) you need attack power, crit chance, hit and other good things on the armor and other gear you choose to help you achieve your aim of wanton re-slaughter. I assume it's re-slaughter. I mean, most of the stuff in there has died at least once.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Gearing for Karazhan, Fury/Arms pt 1
I am a tank first and foremost. I tank on my human warrior, I tank on my tauren warrior, I even tank on my paladin and baby druid. Tanking is what I do in game nowadays. I even tried tanking on my shaman yesterday and achieved passable results. (I successfully tanked Captain Galvanger and Drek'Thar. Good healing on that one, boy.) But nobody can tank all the time without going bloody insane, and so I make sure that my tauren is an off-tank, that he gets as many chances to DPS as is possible without making raiding impossible. In the process, I'm learning the strengths and weaknesses of a non-prot tanking warrior in Burning Crusade at tanking raid content - yes, Virginia, an arms warrior can tank Nalorakk in just the gear that drops in Karazhan. If his healers are insanely awesome, thank you so much Vito, Tear and Veks. I'm sorry I didn't respec for that fight, but a man needs to hit things from time to time.I geared my tauren for pure DPS all the way back in pre-Burning Crusade content. I ran LBRS and UBRS constantly for gear upgrades, PvP'd for the epics, collected an assortment of dps rings and trinkets. I was fortunate to be playing horde side with a talented and well-practiced undead warrior who primarily wanted to tank, and so I could work on being DPS in my own unusual idiom... I've always preferred two handed weapons over dual wielding, even though I don't dispute the incredible damage potential of the DW builds. It comes down to two things: can you still do significant damage with a two hander, and what looks cooler?To me, the answers were always yes, and a big honking sword or axe smashing down in a tauren's gigantic armored hands. I'm glad to say it still holds true, especially when that great honking sword or axe is Jin'rokh, Now that my human has progressed beyond Kara it's still fun to come on runs in DPS gear, spec arms and crush things into paste. We don't always have the luxury of coming to Karazhan massively outgearing the instance, however.
Priestess Delrissa, bringing a little PvP to your PvE
A brief glance at the Dungeons and Raids official forum last night was a bit of a surprise. The third boss in Magisters' Terrace has inspired a lot of hatred and arguing. Why is that a surprise to me? Well, it's becoming one of my favorite 5 man boss encounters in WoW! Either the QQ is going strong on the official forums, or I'm a complete and utter masochist. I'm leaning towards that second one, considering Blackheart the Inciter is my former favorite.If you have never seen this encounter before, or don't know how it works, Eliah touches on it a bit in his Magisters' Terrace guide. Basically, it's a 5v5 arena match. You can't tank it, there are no threat tables. It's a game of control and survival. Priestess Delrissa, who is a Holy Priest, can spawn with four random friends, chosen from a pool of eight.
Is Mortal Strike the new black?
What's up with Mortal Strike? And why is it, when Blizzard feels that a class or spec needs to be made viable in Arenas -- and let's face it, the game is all about Arenas now, isn't it? -- they give them a Mortal Strike-style debuff? When the developers were figuring out how to raise Hunters' representation in Arenas, they changed Aimed Shot in Patch 2.3 to give a heal-gimping debuff similar the the Arms Warrior's bread and butter ability. Enter Patch 2.4 in the PTRs. When Kalgan finally descended upon the Shaman forums, he said that Shamans were definitely getting buffed just in time to quell the wake of an uproar to the nerfs made to the Elemental spec. Along with the reversal of the Nature's Swiftness and Elemental Mastery shared cooldown, the current iteration of the progressive patch is seeing a change to the Shaman's Flametongue Weapon and Totem, which happens to be -- surprise, surprise -- a Mortal Strike-style debuff. Yawn.While it's certainly a welcome change, considering that Shamans get so little love, frankly it's getting a little boring. Allie mentioned calls for putting the buff on every class (Mortal Sheep or Mortal Portal for Mages is a classic), so this begs the question... is a Mortal Strike-type ability the only way to make a class or spec viable in the Arenas? Aside from the fact that Mortal Strike Warriors are conceivably the most popular class & spec, healing debuffs are clearly one of the game-breaking abilities in Arenas. With Resilience making crit-based and burst damage specs less and less viable, is there really a need for another Mortal Strike? Can't Blizzard make another buff to make a spec Arena-viable without using the same old trick? What do you guys think? How much more creative can you be?
