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WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Warrior changes
I want you to try and remain calm, okay? I know as warriors you're crazy excited for all the twists and turns for the class on the PTR. While I can't hit all of the highlights, I can give you a taste.Warrior ARMS Blood Frenzy improved to 2/4% increased damage. Heroic Throw missile speed increased. And we're done.Now's a good time to remind everyone that these patch notes are not in any way, shape or form complete, and that there will almost certainly be more changes. We've already seen posts from Ghostcrawler indicating that a lot more than this was in the works, so we can consider these changes just preliminary.So why just roll these two out for warriors? Both are good changes, it's true, but when some classes are seeing major overhauls these look rather paltry. What's going on?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Hit and Expertise for DPS Warriors
And so we finally return to our discussion of hit and expertise for warriors, in this case DPS warriors. Having finally gotten around to leveling my tauren warrior to 80 I've taken him arms for grinding reputations and running instances (I need a new weapon and several gear upgrades before he's ready for 10 mans, although he'll probably end up in a couple before he's geared enough to do much) which means I'm now looking at these stats from both a fury and an arms perspective.It also means I'm back to my old "you have how many max level warriors?" days. It's a shame I'm currently working on my DK and shaman horde side or I could level another warrior. Yes, I'm aware that with Dual Specs coming having more than one warrior per faction per server is kind of ridiculous. Luckily, this means I can have two warriors per server! Look, I don't love this class because I'm sane.So, we now have hit and expertise to discuss for Arms and Fury warriors. How much do you need? The short answer is enough to ensure you don't miss your special attacks and push dodges off of the attack table. The short answer is also remarkably less than helpful in terms of telling you how much you want on your gear.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Dual spec madness
Dual specs. What will they mean for warriors? The short answer is, we'll all have two specs. However, I'm fairly sure if I try and stop there and go get a sandwich that Dan will come to my house with an army of trained marmosets. I don't want that, you don't want that, and Dan doesn't like to travel with the marmosets, so let's just spare everyone the trauma. It is my opinion that when dual specs are implemented, almost all warriors will be expected to spec prot for one of their specs. We don't really have a tank shortage anymore with tanking generally more fun for everyone and there being four classes that can do it, but since warriors have one tanking tree and two dps trees, it's unlikely (possible, but unlikely) that we'll see a lot of deep arms/deep fury dual specs. Those of us with more than one warrior might try this on one of them, mind you. Of course this is all complicated by the state of warrior talent trees at the moment. Since protection is one of our strongest talent trees for both PvE and PvP content and arms is underperforming in both, it changes what specs you might select. I'm going into this analysis of the feature and its uses assuming that arms will be buffed to be a valid option for a dual spec.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Lament For Arms
Hi, I'm Matthew Rossi, your host for The Care and Feeding of Warriors. Unfortunately for my plans to talk about Hit/Expertise for DPS warriors this week Blizzard went and dropped a huge mess of news on upcoming changes to every class in patch 3.1, including warriors. I analyzed the changes yesterday and I was more or less positive when I did so. After all, this is hardly all the changes incoming (they even say things like We are also adding increased damage to Arms, possibly through Overpower or Slam) so obviously not everything is finalized yet.But in the cold light of day, I'm frustrated. Fair warning: this is not going to be a fair and balanced overview piece. This is an opinion, an editorial, of the way Blizzard keeps underestimating what the warrior class needs. Why is arms still broken in PvE months after the beta? Why is one of the biggest changes to warriors in this patch a change to the shielding mechanic we can't even choose to apply to ourselves?
Analysis of Warriors changes in 3.1
Hello, my fellow warriors. Change is at hand. How does it affect us, you may ask? Well, let us break down the changes. WARRIOR Changing stances now has a much reduced cost: you lose a maximum of 20 rage (10 with Tactical Mastery). For example, if you have 100 rage and change stances, you will have 80 rage remaining. If you have 10 rage and change stances, all of your rage is lost. In addition, we may change the penalties associated with some stances. You now gain rage when damage done to you is absorbed, such as through a Power Word: Shield. Blood Frenzy now causes 2/4% physical damage done. Sunder Armor (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 4% per application, and is now a single rank. Creature armor has been globally reduced so that debuffed targets should take about the same damage from physical attacks that they did before this change. The net effect should be that this debuff is slightly less mandatory in PvE and is not disproportionately more powerful against cloth targets in PvP. We are also adding increased damage to Arms, possibly through Overpower or Slam. We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries. We talked about stance penalties this week, and frankly, this one change is the biggest and best news for warriors in quite some time. The rest of the changes are either positive or sort of neutral.
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).
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.
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 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: To Arms
The endless respeccing continues. Oh, dual specs, why won't you arrive? Why? Last week we talked about protection, which I said (and stand by) was the the best leveling spec in the game for warriors, being fast, fun and powerful. A lot of people took umbrage, saying that I was ignoring how strong Arms was as a leveling spec. I'm not going to take back my statement about prot... it's a wonderful, versatile, almost unkillable leveling spec that can do a lot of damage to groups and takes a beating and a half. I'm in love with how Blizzard has revamped the spec, making it strong for solo as well as tanking. But fair is fair, and since I have plenty of warriors, it's not like respeccing one to arms and testing it out is going to kill me.Well, arms partisans, I admit it. The spec may have been overshadowed by the sheer coolness factor of a TG build, but in terms of power and effectiveness grinding your way through mobs to get your quests done, it's a solid spec. It's so solid that I even respecced my 80 warrior for the holiday weekend and picked up an Argent Skeleton Crusher to replace my De-Raged Waraxe. What it lacks in prot's pure refusal to die it gains in the excellent, underrated (by me) spectacle of unleashing a bladestorm in the middle of a three mob pull. I'm now eyeing that titansteel I have in the bank and mulling over the merits of making myself a Destroyer.A caveat: if you do not like watching for procs, you won't like the new arms. I leveled back in vanilla WoW as an arms warrior when MS was the top of the tree and you could raid tank in the spec. It still bears the stamp of that time (and MS is still the heart of the tree) but you'll find overpower and execute have moved up to be equal damage dealing instants once they proper talents allow their use.
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.
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.
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!
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.
