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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 3.1.3 and Ulduar Tips
This week has been a heady one for me: I got my four piece Conqueror's Siegebreaker Battlegear on patch day, which was pretty sweet, and then in our second night of raiding this week we finally killed the big brain slug squid monster himself. Combine that with patch 3.1.3 dropping (which meant we had fun times like an announced server shutdown just as we were about to pull Thorim, leading to the fastest Thorim kill I've ever been on) and all in all, it's been quite a week. Heck, I even got to go prot and get some prot goodies like pants and a belt.It was a small patch all in all, so I wasn't expecting huge improvement and I didn't see it. I saw a marginal DPS increase as fury (2 to 300 DPS unbuffed, not too much more fully buffed) and I made sure to compare notes with the arms warrior in our raids, and his DPS was very close to my own. We're still below the other hybrids, but not by as great a margin, so that's nice at least. As for the PvP change to Juggernaut, well, it's painful. Before respeccing prot for my secondary spec for good this week I went out on a Wintergrasp jaunt, and I'll probably never do that again.At least with Heroic Fury I can make a choice about how long I will allow someone to kite me to death. To be fair the Juggernaut change isn't really all that bad, but over the years I've played warriors I've moved from prefering arms as my DPS/PvP spec to being a fury warrior so I'm easier to discourage from arms than I used to be.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The strange case of rage generation in 3.1
Since 3.1, DPS warriors (including myself) have been complaining about a lack of rage. To the point where Ghostcrawler himself chimed in recently (in a discussion of the nerf to Titan's Grip and the effect it had on warrior DPS) to inform us that the claim that warrior rage generation was hurt by the changes was a myth created by warriors upset with the nerf. Now we have the following post by Landsoul. I freely admit this is the kind of math that makes my eyes cross and roll up into my head. But Landsoul's well known as a contributor to the EJ forums and frankly, his math-fu's good enough for me. (I should also mention Hellord, the original poster who saw things were hinky.) What this means is, while it's very possible that yes, the developers took Titan's Grip's decreased damage into account when they were making the changes, there was somehow another change made that cost warriors some rage generation. 25% of it, to be precise.Bornakk posts later in the thread that they'll take a look "as we didn't make any intended changes recently to rage generation". So the good news is, for warriors, if this change did happen (and again, I'd tend to trust the math from the people behind the best warrior spreadsheets) then it wasn't a deliberate loss of 25% of our rage generation.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: More Ulduar gear
One of the things that keeps messing with my head as we progress into Ulduar is, loot actually drops here. Gear that I want and, even better, that I actually get. I still look back with horror at our weekly Naxx clears and how, every single week, we could kill everything in sight only to have no weapons drop at all. Now, the danger of talking about Ulduar gear is that it keeps changing. Older items get revamped and newer items get discovered. This is the nature of the beast, so to speak, all you can really do is keep going.As an addendum to last week's post about DPS warriors, I've now switched to fury full time for DPS. My numbers are better now than they were as arms (most likely due to my greater sympathy for the spec and my upgraded dual wield set, 2 Rune Edges) and I'm happier. I do find it somewhat galling that I need two weapons better than a Betrayer of Humanity just to break even with an arms spec that used Sword Specialization, possibly the worst choice for arms DPS in PvE right now. I'm still not quite where I should be in relation to other melee hybrids (after all, their gear is improving too) but once fury gets its incoming buffs I should be very competitive with DK's and Druids and Retribution Paladins. (Now all we need is for shamans to get a health buff.)Rather than pile on more or changed weapons which we'll probably have to go back and update, this week I figured we'd talk about our Tier 8 sets from 10 and 25 man. We'll begin with the Valorous (10 man) Siegebreaker Battlegear and the Valorous (25 man) Dreadnaught Battlegear, then compare the Conqueror to the 25 Dreadnaught. I'm not going to compare the Heroes Dreadnaught because it's never even a question of an upgrade at that point.
Unspecified Warrior damage buffs in the works
The devs have been promising some buffs to warrior DPS for a while, but there haven't been any specifics. Today is no change. There are "buffs planned" for Arms and Fury, but there are no details announced yet. Ghostcrawler does mention that "there is almost no chance of a Titan's Grip change at any time in the near future," so don't hold your breath about that. My guess would be they're simply tired of making changes to that talent. The only other piece of new information in the post is that the impending DPS buffs "might come with PvP nerfs," since they're seeing a ton of Warriors in the arena right now. The Juggernaut nerf that went live today might address that some, as well. What do you think Blizzard should do to buff warriors in PvE, without making them (more) overpowered in PvP?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Warrior DPS Blues
If you've been reading this column over the past few weeks you know I've been threatening to rant about fury DPS being too low. I've stopped myself because I dislike mindless griping and rant posts (I've done them in the past, that doesn't make them any more palatable to me) and I wanted to wait and see how things shook out with better gear.By now I have some of the best gear you can get before hard modes in 25 man, and my general opinion is that both arms and fury DPS is too low. I linked to that post because, despite the fact that it states that fury and arms will see buffs, it not only has no specifics to offer yet but it also fails to address why such staggering nerfs were implemented in the first place.
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.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Weapons from Ulduar
Ulduar has brought over 800 items within our grasp. While toying with specs (I'm actually raiding switching between arms and fury depending on the fight, although last night I actually tanked clearing up to Vezax) to try and squeeze the most DPS out I find myself wearing the half-and-hald set you always get when content is progressing. Naxxramas gear tends towards a screaming skulls motif while Ulduar gear has a more construct simulating appearance. As you can see in the screen shot, I've ended up looking somewhat like the gothiest Power Ranger ever. I don't mind the look myself, although I know some people really do. Then again, as I've said many, many times, I'd wear the Conqueror's Clownshoe Raiment if the stats were right.This week we're going to discuss the weapon drops for warriors in Ulduar - 10 and 25. This basically means tanking 1handers and 2 hand weapons. While I personally love fist weapons myself, The Masticator is not a tanking weapon, although it's certainly true that you could tank with a 2.7 speed weapon with no defensive stats. Heck, I tanked with a 3.4 speed weapon last night. I'm going to try and keep focused on the drops with the most utility first.Of course, more loot is being discovered even as I write this. So please keep that in mind.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Luck Of The Drop
It's been a remarkably grueling month for me, so I can't say I'll be sorry to see April finally end. As much fun as the new content is, a lot of personal issues (including a sick rabbit,vet trips and the like on the top as a kind of panic frosting to everything else) have made it hard to squeeze in the time to do anything but raid nowadays. I fell asleep trying to do the Argent Tournament dailies. I picked up the saddest ring ever last night (let the search for a sadder ring commence) and got to thinking about the peculiar way warriors have to rely on loot luck. (Yes, I'm aware all classes have to rely on luck for drops.) Since frankly I don't want to write the often threatened nerd rage post over fury (and I'm starting to be discontented by arms' performance, as improved as it is) I thought talking about gear less from a 'here are the stats of every drop you want in Ulduar' way could be interesting.We all know eventually I'll be doing that, too. But since the instance still hasn't revealed all of its goodies, Ulduar loot discussions are always an exercise in finding out you missed something. It seems worth it to me to wait for more things to be discovered before tackling that job.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Dual Spec Salvation
Another week, another series of raids into Ulduar.I'm not going to talk about it this week... I'm waiting for more T8 level gear (just got my pants last night) but in general, I'm moving from 'mild discontent' to 'frothing nerd rage' at the state of fury right now. The main reason isn't even my own DPS, which is going up... it's that other classes and specs that aren't 'pure DPS' are now bumped up to where my spec was before patch 3.1, when the reason for my spec's nerfs was stated as that level of DPS being 'too good' for a class that had options besides DPSing. If a class can tank, heal and DPS why is it okay for them to do the damage I used to do when I can only tank and DPS?But that being said, I've discovered a unique joy in the past week, and that's the Dual Spec system. Ironically, I still respec about twice a week. In fact, I may even respec more now than I did before dual specs were available.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Three nights in Ulduar make a strong man humble
What can I say, I enjoy musical theatre as long as I don't actually have to go to it. (Did you know that was Murray Head, Anthony Stewart Head's older brother? I didn't.)So for the past few days I've spent my in game time divided between 10 and 25 man Ulduar. I've almost moved into the place, really: save for the first day the patch dropped, I pretty much only log on to pick up consumables and flasks and head back to Storm Peaks. In part this is due to my personal life, as I actually have slightly less time to play now than I did before so almost all of that in game time has to be concentrated, and partly it's just been for the fun of seeing new boss fights. My guild is a 'learn as you go' kind of guild, so we're not worrying about PTR runs or prepared boss strats, we're going in and seeing what works for us, which so far has killed the four bosses in the Colossal Forge section. Razorscale died with three people up, but hey, a kill's a kill.So far in Ulduar from a warrior perspective, I can say certain things.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Waiting for the patch
I had originally intended to talk today about changes to protection in patch 3.1, especially since we're coming closer and closer to it (I wouldn't be surprised if it dropped this week) but then I actually stopped and thought about it, and honestly there's really not all that much to talk about. Last Stand gets a reduced cooldown, which is good. Defensive Stance reduces the damage you do by 5% instead of 10%, which is also good. Glyph of Shield Wall will let you use Shield Wall every 3 minutes instead of every five (every 2 minutes with Improved Disciplines) which again, is nice. But none of this is going to change the way tanking works, so it seemed kind of odd to try and go in depth with so little to go in depth on. We could talk about how Deep Wounds will no longer gain bonuses from effects like the enrage from Improved Defensive Stance, but it still doesn`t change the fact that a lot of prot warriors are going to take Deep Wounds for the DoT when their Damage Shield, Cleave, Thunder Clap or even Shockwave crit. In the end, protection saw the absolute least changes of any warrior spec and for the most part, there`s almost no reason for prot warriors to alter their playstyle or gearing significantly.So then, if we`re not going to talk about that (well, I guess we just did) then what are we going to talk about?
The Queue: Somebody has a case of the Mondays!
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. Adam Holisky will be your host today.<Insert witty opening remarks here.> Boltzmann asked..."Has Blizzard ever said anything about the prospect of allowing Bind on Account items to be transferred to different servers? It'd be sweet to be able to level a Death Knight on a friend's server and start out with the good gear."
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: PTR Arms
I wanted to do an April Fool's column. The fact that this column is being posted three days after April Fool's isn't the reason I decided not to do it, though. No, I ended up not doing it because I couldn't think of anything particularly funny to say about the class. Not that it isn't a funny class at times, because it is. Any class where you spend a lot of time trying to get trolls to give you teeth, elementals to give you lucky charms (they weren't Marshmallowy Delicious, either) and finally get a fine 2h weapon just in time for everyone to get mad that you're not a tank is comedy, of a kind.Anyone who remembers when warriors were rage starved due to us being bugged so that we were being given way too many misses, or when a missed execute ate all of your rage, can attest to the warrior class being really funny sometimes. My wife used to laugh and say that Blizzard had done a wonderful job of transferring the sensation of building rage to the player. Your character might be rage starved, but you? Oh, you'd be screaming at the computer as if you could yell your rage bar into red.That's why I've decided to move away from talking about fury in 3.1 and to spend the next two or three columns discussing tanking and arms spec, especially as they're going to be. This week, we'll talk about Arms as PvE and PvP.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: You Will Be Forced To Conform
If you've been paying attention to the latest PTR changes, you know that among them is a change to fury that alters the talent Improved Berserker Stance. Instead of providing 10% of AP, it now will provide 20% of your Strength. (It's been buffed since it was first introduced, it was 15% then.) When I saw this I thought it was the greatest change ever... until I remembered there are no strength enchants to gloves in Wrath level content, but just AP. Massacre? AP enchant. Berserking? Provides AP. Blessing of Might? AP. What about most of the rings and almost all of the cloaks and neck pieces available in current Wrath raiding? AP. And of course, what about leather gear you may have been wearing because it's the best in slot, like say the Frosted Adroit Handguards? No strength on those.In short, I went from ecstatic to that sinking feeling you get when you realize that lovely Everglades condo is in fact just swamp. I'd just told everyone how awesome this change was, and here I stood on test with less AP than I had on live. Was it a huge loss? No, about 70 AP or so. But I still felt that lovely combination of chagrin and slight anger that comes from not only being wrong, but being wrong and finding yourself worse off than you'd been. To be fair, the change to 20% has brought the AP back up to close to where it was. My warrior on test is lacking a couple of best in slot items that I've picked up since transfering him, which means that to compare them I have to take off bracers and neck and look at the AP from there, but we're talking a 20 AP drop now. The real issue is buffs like Blessing of Might/Battle Shout and procs like Berserking. On the other hand, Blessing of Kings, Gift of the Wild and Horn of Winter/Strenth of Earth just got better for us.Now Ghostcrawler has waded into the fray, and what he says confirms it: this change is purely meant to force warriors away from wearing leather.
Warrior changes in Patch 3.1 PTR build 9722
Well, the changes, they keep being incremental, but they are happening. This latest PTR patch has one change that proves even in these times of nerfing Titan's Grip damage that, some times, just some times, good things happen for fury warriors. Like what, you may ask? I'm glad you did. Improved Berserker Stance now increases strength by 3/6/9/12/15% instead of increasing attack power by 2/4/6/8/10%I honestly can't gibber at that change enough. It's flatly astonishing. If the change was merely AP to Str and the percentages didn't change it would make the talent twice as good. But by having it increase strength by 15% instead of AP by 10%, it's now nearly three times as good, and will be even better when raid buffed. (Note: without raid buffs, this will be an AP decrease unless you are very lucky with rings to have STR in both slots. Any AP gear you have will detract from the benefit of the talent, making it stronger when grouped/raiding but weaker solo.) I think I had a small squeegasm when I read this change. But wait, there's more! It's not all this good.The folks at MMO-Champion dug up the goods Let's take a look, shall we?
Warrior class changes in patch 3.1 PTR build 9684
From our friendly official patch notes for the PTR, we now have some news on new talents for Arms, which I complained about this morning: Improved Intercept and Weapon Mastery have once again swapped places in the talent tree. New Talent: Juggernaut: Grants the warrior the ability to Charge while in combat. Unrelenting Assault: Now also increases the damage of Overpower and Revenge by 10/20%, and causes Overpower (when used to attack a casting target) to decrease the effectiveness of all the target's non-physical damage and healing by 25/50% for 6 seconds. Tooltip and visual updated. Pretty obviously they switched Imp Intercept and Weapon Mastery because arms will not be expected to use intercept at all now that they'll be able to charge in combat, similar to the protection ability Warbringer. We've basically now seen two out of the three warrior specs given the option to dispense with Intercept altogether. In addition, fury warriors have lost the only 'expertise compensation' talent they had. While for warriors with sufficient expertise this is a non-issue, if you were using Weapon Mastery to fill a lower than necessary expertise stat, get some exp gear fast.Unrelenting Assault sounds like a promising buff. I won't know how promising until I get back onto the PTR tonight, but a damage buff and an anti-caster function? Yes please. It does PvP and PvE duty, can't complain about that. All in all, it's a trickle, but a trickle is better than nothing. Not too thrilled about the loss of Weapon Mastery for fury warriors, but it's survivable. Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
Phat Loot Phriday: Armageddon
Spellpower maces and wands and bows are cute and all. But sometimes you just want a big sword.Name: Armageddon (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDigger)Type: Epic Two-hand SwordDamage/Speed: 554-831 / 3.40 (203.7 DPS)Attributes: First, just look at that thing. This is clearly a sword that, when swung in an arcward manner, brings all sorts of death and destruction. +101 Strength, and +108 Stamina, which is (definitely not the first weapon ever, but) the first weapon I've seen that has two triple-digit buffs. %Gallery-33600%
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms waits and waits and waits
Remember those arms changes we keep hearing about? They still haven't dropped yet on the PTR.In fact, the whole state of warriors on the PTR is pretty static. They've decided not to change stances and how rage interacts with them although I can attest that yes, they've added armor pen to battle stance (I was running around Un'Goro on my tauren looking for the Ravasaur trainer) and they've already fixed the potential TG bug I mentioned so that there's no way you can switch specs and have both 2h weapons equipped. Shattering Throw is indeed fun in mass PvP: I haven't had a chance to test it yet outside of a few melee's around a summoning stone, though. I did get to make that one ret pally very unhappy, so yes that's nice. But all in all, I'm still waiting for arms to get, well... buffs. Yes, all three stances got small to medium buffs, and there's talk of removing the penalties altogether on stances. I won't pretend I won't welcome the day where stances don't have penalties aside from the rage dump aspect of switching, but that's hardly a buff to arms warriors.We've been told repeatedly that arms warrior DPS is too low in PvE. And I know that they can't think that changing Taste for Blood to a 100% chance to proc with a built in 6 second cooldown is going to do it. Buffing Blood Frenzy? Not really enough. There have to be arms changes somewhere at least going internal testing.So when do we get to test them already?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: PvP is calling you home
Zach covered my dereliction yesterday, so let's all peruse his analysis of the warrior changes currently on the PTR. I've tested things on the PTR when and where I could (haven't been on since the new patch, RL difficulties and in game commitments have kept me off) and I've discovered a bug with dual specs that allows a fury warrior to effectively ignore the TG nerf by simply having a second fury spec that doesn't have Titan's Grip in it at all. I'm assuming this will be fixed to unequip your weapons when you switch specs, because if it's not, I know a lot of fury warriors who will pay 1000g to avoid being nerfed. (And yes, I'm wearing leather gloves in that screenshot.)I've been playing in arenas lately with a fully PvE oriented fury build and no resil gear whatsoever. My partner is a prot warrior. We actually win more than we lose, believe it or not, our only significant weak spot being if we hit a team that bursts me down before we can burst their DPS down. If I was to shift three talent points so I could get Heroic Fury and Furious Attacks, we'd probably win a lot more, so once dual specs go live I may go fury/fury instead of fury/prot like I'd originally planned. The fact is, I can count on one hand the amount of times I've not been able to find a tank for runs lately and have had to respec. Heck, I often just tank in my fury spec if it comes to that. So if the future starts to look better for warriors in PvP, I may just focus more on perfecting my fury PvP spec. On the other hand, there's always Arms to consider, especially if it gets more buffs in the future.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Scarce Change on the PTR
Yesterday saw me still without PTR access, followed by a massive cable outage and some computer problems that kept me offline until very late. Logging onto my Horde server (my alliance server was already dead thanks to it being on east coast time, plus I generally prefer Horde now anyway) I found myself needed to tank an Obsidian Sanctum run, which went fine. Then, I was needed to DPS in Naxx, so I respecced, but mistaken specced fury because I respec on autopilot now. So after the raid I had to respec back to arms. So basically, I dropped 150g to raid yesterday. You could argue that were I not an idiot I could have saved myself 50 gold.So for that reason alone, even with the big, big nerfs to fury, I want 3.1 to get here. Let's start the day with a fun quote from Ghostcrawler: "Fury warriors who think their dps will be too low after this change in PvE are probably comparing themselves to classes or specs with inflated dps who are also being brought down (even after the Deep Wounds fix). If you are worried about the PvP ramifications, I think we can probably agree that a 10% swing in dps is not what is going to determine whether warriors are viable in Arenas or not."Yeah, we can agree on that. People would have to be taking warriors to arenas in order for us to determine if warriors were viable in arenas or not. Since they are not... I guess lowering warrior DPS bt 10% (as Ghostcrawler has just admitted these changes intend) doesn't really matter. When no one brings your class anyway, it's unimportant if it gets nerfed or not. Good point, GC. Very good point.
