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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.
Ghostcrawler reveals warrior DPS changes
You remember a few days ago when Ghostcrawler revealed unto us changes for tanking warriors? Well, now she's back with the opening salvo of changes for DPS warriors. Many a tipster mentioned, as does Ghostcrawler, that this is but the first in a series of changes to the DPS warrior in Wrath. So what does this first post reveal? Well, while we'll once again post the complete text behind the jump for those of us who have a hard time seeing the forums, one change goes right into woah, really territory for me. Sudden Death now grants 10 rage, so that following the Execute you have 10 rage left over. In the course of testing this, we also decided Execute by itself wasn't doing enough damage, so it got a buff too (could be around +15%), which will also help the talent. Now this is very, very interesting to me. First off, not only does this make Sudden Death a lot easier to use, but the idea of Execute getting a 15% damage boost, and it's not clear to me if that is part of the talent, or just part of Execute now... I'm very interested indeed to see what happens here.The rest of Ghost's post is behind the curtain. Think about it, won't you?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Itemization in Wrath part one
When I said I'd talk about itemization for warriors in Wrath, I did so fully knowing that it is at present incomplete. New gear comes in with every beta patch, so even if you take every single item currently present into account it doesn't necessarily provide you with an accurate picture of the way it will all shake out once you actually set foot in Northrend.So keeping in mind that not only can this all change tomorrow but that we're talking about gearing the most gear dependent class in the entire game, let's start looking at what gear we're going to require at 80. The defense cap at level 80, for instance, is going to be 540 defense requiring 689 defense rating. For a fury TG build, you're looking to overcome 15% hit penalty on specials, meaning that you'll be stacking roughly 500 hit rating at level 80 (based on this forum post which seems like a pretty good test bed to me) not to mention all the crit and AP you'll need to be effective. Frankly, I think the defense gear will be easier to assemble than the hit gear. For arms, of course, you won't need nearly as much hit, making an Arms DPS build substantially easier to gear for. (To be fair, a fury DPS build designed around Impale, Rampage and Incite would also be easier to gear for.)Of course, the real issue isn't "Does the gear exist" but rather "How easy is it for me to assemble a reasonably effective set for what I want to do?" Does a newly 80 prot warrior have a chance to tank the instances and heroics? What about a DPS warrior, will he be effective? So far, it seems that the gear exists, but can be somewhat difficult to assemble: the introduction of faction vendors in the most recent beta builds actually goes to help in these situations. This week we're going to look at the faction rewards and see what warriors would be interested in. There's also instance drops, crafted items and PvP rewards to consider before all's said and done, but we have to start somewhere.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A short intermission
In all the talk about the beta, about nerfs and buffs to the class, about design philosophies and alterations to talent trees it can be pretty easy to lose sight of the class as a living entity. The other day, while trying to level my night elf warrior on test in the face of the 132 error (I'm pretty sure my drivers are up to date, but I'm going to check to make sure after I get done writing this) a friend asked me why, since I'm almost always tanking, I'm so concerned about the fury and arms trees and their upcoming viability."You never DPS. You're always tanking. So what if fury and arms aren't as good?"I had a hard time answering this until I logged onto my old Horde server and talked to Elle, a friend of mine who plays a warrior. Elle has never played prot spec seriously, doesn't like tanking. A discussion of the state of the various trees made her unhappy, and she made the point that even if prot were capable of good DPS, it wasn't a playstyle she wanted for her warrior. This makes sense to me: she's always leveled as fury or arms, generally, and she's done so in a guild with at least two serious, dedicated tanks around most of the time. The thing about tanking is, you only need so many. In a guild that fields at best a 10 man raid by itself, two or three tanks is plenty.With paladins, druids and DK's as well as warriors, that's four tanking classes, all of whom are expected to be viable for trash, offtanking and MT positions. Warriors are one of the most played classes in the game, so it's clear that with four tanking classes not all members of these classes are going to be tanking. And two of those classes can only DPS or tank, there's no healing DK or ranged caster DPS warriors.
Warrior changes in Beta build 8962
So how have warriors fared in the current build? Well, while I'll be going into more detail tomorrow we can cover some specifics now. The neverending saga of Titan's Grip continues as it now only imposes its melee miss chance penalty on damaging abilities that require a weapon. Bloodthirst's health return has been nerfed from 1.5% of total health to .6%, turning a great soloing ability into a much less great one. In addition, Bloodthirst now requires a weapon, making it useless when you are disarmed and making it clearly affected by the Titan's Grip miss penalty. Trauma is now going to work for all melee critical strikes, including specials. Improved Thunderclap moves from Arms to Prot, and Tactical Mastery moves back to Arms after having been switched to Prot in The Burning Crusade.For all these changes and more, we shall adjourn to the viewing parlor and discuss. Jump with me, if you will.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Great Divide Part 2
I had intended to talk about the new paradigm for Arms warriors in the Beta and, presumably, patch 3.0 when it goes live. I had intended this, but I'm not going to, because as of beta build 8926, I don't really know where either DPS spec is going. I've taken my human warrior into a very heavy prot spec and, quite frankly, am doing more damage with far higher survivability than I would have in arms or fury.When I talked about how I felt prot was going to develop last week, I had no idea how far I was understating it. Talents like Damage Shield, the changes to Shockwave and Devastate, and how much crit you can get on your special abilities with Critical Block, Sword and Board and Incite make prot a remarkably strong tree for soloing/grinding/leveling. With 600 block value or more (not terribly hard to get now that 2 str = 1 SBV) Damage Shield and Shield Slam can rip mobs in half. 2000 point Shield Slams are far from rare with an extra 15% crit on your slams, and with full Improved Defensive Stance you can sit in D stance and have a 100% chance to enrage on any successful block, parry or dodge, giving you the option to do more damage or to spend the enrage to heal yourself for a significant chunk of your total health.
Warrior glyphs and talent changes in Beta build 8905
We were just talking about the state of protection warriors in the Beta, and lo and behond, not only do we get a new prot-heavy beta build to try out, but we also get those long sought warrior glyphs to drool over. So what are the big changes? Well, MMO Champion and World of Raids have the lists but some of the standouts are worth mentioning here.For starters, warriors get a variety of changes aimed at tanking: Warbringer allows a prot warrior to charge in combat, in any stance, Thunder Clap's damage is increased by 50%, and Damage Shield, a new ability, causes warriors to deal damage whenever hit by a damaging attack or when they block an incoming attack equal to 10/20% of block value. With the new way strength adds to block, this is an indirectly scaling with AP ability. Improved Shield Block now is folded into Shield Mastery, Vitality now adds expertise in addition to strength and stamina, and several abilities have had their threat reduced but their direct damage increased to compensate. A change that surprised me greatly was seeing Sword and Board now adding yup to 15% critical strike chance to Devastate in addition to resetting Shield Slam's cooldown and reducing it's rage cost by 100%. This could make devastate a very attractive DPS option in the right gear.And Shield Wall is back up to 60% damage reduction for 12 seconds. The Improved Shield Wall talent is gone, replaced by Improved Disciplines, which lowers the cooldown on Retaliation, Recklessness and Shield Wall by 60 seconds max.
Warriors and Beta build 8885
I'm warning you now, any further reading will contain spoilers for talents and skills for warriors in Wrath of the Lich King. You cannot say you were not warned, if not by the title of the post, then by me now.Overall, the changes are deceptive. They look small at first, until you really stop and think about them. The biggest changes are also a little baffling, but not necessarily bad. You can't really expect sweeping changes two builds in a row, so it's really not terribly surprising that prot didn't get the big review we've been waiting for to date. On the whole, the changes aren't anything to get worked up over, but they do seem to be heading towards a desire to balance threat generation, and so I applaud them even if I don't think they were entirely successful.I've dithered enough: on to the changes, concealed from view behind the jump.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Climb to 80
It took several days longer than I expected, in part due to there being one less zone than there would be live, but last night I managed to level my tauren warrior to 80 in a mix of blues and greens, all of his PvP epics and Karazhan gear having been finally replaced. Admittedly, in some cases I deliberately chose a sidegrade merely to be able to say that I'd changed my gear or to try and preserve my crit rate from level degradation, so it's safe to say that if you have Kara epics or better they'll certainly last you into level 74 - 75, but by 80 I had only one piece of gear from before the beta still intact. And that was a really nice trinket that I kept mostly for the proc.I figure, with the new talents and abilities stated to be coming before Wrath, I should discuss my experiences to some degree.Based on the leveling experience, I can tell you various things about gear and spec in Wrath that I would have felt premature talking about before now. However, since it would be spoilertastic, it will go behind the jump. Just imagine me flapping my giant white arms now. Also, while it's not the subject of today's post, I am kind of concerned that Battle Shout won't stack with Blessing of Might anymore. That seems like a nerf. We'll see how it plays out.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: When words are insufficient
Go and read this. Yeah. I mean... yeah. Hard to come up with a response to that, isn't it? Well, okay, I had one. I believe I turned to my wife (lovely and talented mistress of beasts and long time WoW partner) and I began gibbering like a maniac who had just stumbled upon a shipment of new chainsaws. As I write this, the download is 41 percent complete, and I am nearly losing my mind with each slow, incremental tick of the bar towards completion. Titan's Grip with no speed penalty? Furious Attack? You're telling me that I'm going to be able to main hand this with no speed penalty at all? That my white hits are going to have 100% chance to debuff healing by up to 50% for up to 8 seconds? That my melee critical hits are going to increase the melee criticals of myself and everyone within 20 yards of me by 5% for 10 seconds? I'm not even talking about the arms tree buffs yet. I hereby dub this beta patch "The patch warriors will never actually see go live" because it's simply too amazing. While yes, mace specialization has been nerfed, I honestly hated it anyway: getting stunlocked is bad enough, but it's even worse when it's another warrior doing it. The new version doesn't really offer much, though, I can't imagine anyone taking it over Sword or Poleaxe.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Starved for Choice
The current Wrath of the Lich King beta has had a lot of ups and downs. At present, since you can't say any class is finished and talents and abilities are subject to change at a moment's notice, all that can really be done is to evaluate what's currently the situation with the class. (As a warning, everything beyond this sentence will most likely be full of spoilers.)My general overview would be 'flawed, but with a good deal of potential'. I've covered my favorite talent to death, and the situation remains the same as it did last week, so I'm not going to belabor that particular deceased equine. I should point out that I'm still using the talent in my current build at level 75, and doing very good DPS in instances, tanking, and soloing with it too. I try and respec every day and have that day be dedicated to testing out talents and abilities, but when I decide to push for the next level, I always go back to a heavy fury TG spec. The burst damage potential of TG itself is half of the equation, but the other half is how wildly improved Bloodthirst is. To put it succinctly, I can now regain about 1000 health every 6 seconds. Sometimes, I actually end fights healed from when I went into them. Mortal Strike will probably remain the king of PvP, but for leveling I cannot imagine not taking bloodthirst now. You will bandage maybe one fight in ten. You will eat to get a food buff. It's that good.I'm going to try and go over as many comments from last week and answer what I can, and when I can't answer them I'll try and be up front and say so. I've not had a chance to do everything: I'm trying to level a shaman and a warrior to 77 as fast as possible and that's while still MTing for my guild for a full raid schedule.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: I still love you, Titan's Grip
Dear, sweet Titan's Grip, be thou not angered at me. Dost thou remember how our affair began, as news of you first broached the shores of Europe and invited the whole world in? Yes, I have aired my doubts of you in public before now. For the truth is, my fair one, you are not perfect. You can indeed withhold from me that sweetest of rage, which I use to rend my enemies in twain. But in truth how could I ever stay alienated from your beauty? For you do allow me to hit my enemies with two great honking weapons at the same time!And that is wonderful.Yet there are other wonders than Titan's Grip waiting for you warriors at the roof of the World of Warcraft, the ice-tinged continent of Northrend. What awaits us, you may ask? Well, ask or not, here comes a day's observations of what awaits us. (Also, if you're wondering why I'm using Gorehowl and a shield in that picture, let me just say, Shield Slam doesn't use the same cooldown as Bloodthirst. Also, fury tanking! More about this in the post itself.)Now that I've done the expected and obligatory gushing about TG, what say I talk about the state of things warriorish in Wrath of the Lich King's enthralling beta? (Yeah, yeah, it's not a word. Sheesh, you people.)
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: When warriors work together
Matthew Rossi would like to apologize for any confusion caused by this post being on a Thursday instead of Totem Talk. He...well, he forgot it was Friday. That's all there is to it, he just plain forgot what day it was. He apologizes (okay, I apologize, I'm him, I'm sorry, I seriously thought it was Friday) and will have Totem Talk up for you tomorrow. Like I said yesterday, kills happen when the whole raid pulls together. Yes, this is blatantly obvious, but it still bears examination. One of the debates that's raged now and again in the comments to this column has been over the usefulness/utility of DPS warriors. As a tanking warrior myself, you may have expectations that I don't like DPS warrior, that I look down on them or think myself superior to them because I'm a main tank. Nothing could be further from the truth. My guild's two DPS warriors are a tremendous asset to the raid, they have solid knowledge of the class and its mechanics both DPS and tank, they're valuable sounding boards for every fight and they help make tanking easier in a variety of ways.So today I'm going to talk about DPS warrior/Tanking warrior synergy. How come I'm so pro-DPS warrior when I hate DPSing in raids and love tanking? Because while yes, a bad DPS warrior is a liability (just like a bad player in general is a liability) a good solid DPS warrior is not only a great source of, well, damage per second, he or she is also an asset to a tank.
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.
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.
Build Shop: Warrior 31/27/3 for Season 4
Every Tuesday, Chris Jahosky contributes Build Shop, which takes a look into one of the many talent specs available to players. This week, Michael Gray guest writes to talk about the perennial Warrior build for the upcoming Season 4. If you're like me, you're looking forward to June 24th with almost breathless anticipation. New season, new ratings, new competition. And like hundreds (thousands?) of others, we have a Warrior sitting patiently at the stables, prepping for the gates to open. He sits there, foaming at the mouth, smiling nervously at his partner Druid or Priest, with Mortal Strike almost literally visible in his pixellated eyes.Build Shop has discussed Warrior hybrid builds previously, but that 28/33 build was focused on actual hybrid play - a mix of PvP and PvE. The classic Arena-based "Mortal Strike Hybrid" starts off with at least 31 points sitting in the Arms tree -- you can't have a "Mortal Strike Hybrid" without Mortal Strike. Mortal Strike is a foundation of the Arena build. While there's leeway earlier in the Arms and Fury trees for this build, the deeper in the trees you get, the more certain talents become "mandatory."After the break, let's talk about the talents and whirligigs that make the Mortal Strike Hybrid so popular and powerful in the Arena.
Tank Talk: Do you feel lucky, punk?
Tank Talk is WoW Insider's new raid-tanking column, promising you an exciting and educational look at the world of getting the stuffing thrashed out of you in a 10- or 25-man raid. The column will be rotated amongst Matthew Rossi (Warrior/Paladin), Adam Holisky (Warrior), Michael Gray (Paladin), and myself (Druid). Our aim is to use this column to debate and discuss class differences, raid-tanking strategies, tips, tricks, and news concerning all things meatshieldish. At least, that's what the others said they were doing. I intend to use it mostly as a soapbox to complain. Absolute power tends to......something something.Welcome to Tank Talk. I am your bear Druid hostess for this week, with a topic that occurred to me while reading a recent article here on the site. Eliah Hecht wrote that his guild is facing a not-uncommon tank shortage and that he has considered the possibility of leveling a tanking class to 70 before Wrath, or tanking on a Death Knight afterwards. A number of people on my server and in my guild have talked about doing the same thing, or switching mains once Wrath hits. With so many people playing Death Knights, I think it's very possible that more people will discover they enjoy -- or at least, don't mind -- tanking, and may seek to do so in a raid environment without necessarily knowing what they've really signed up for. From those of us who have tanked raid content in vanilla WoW or BC, here are the 10 questions you'll want to ask yourself if you're considering the possibility of tanking serious raid content:
Blizzard changes the description of the Death Knight talent trees
Curse has noticed a very intriguing change to the Death Knight information page. The descriptions of each of the talent trees has been changed. Here are the old descriptions: Blood: Talents in this tree focus on damage dealing abilities. Blood Presence increases damage output by a percentage. Frost: Talents in this tree focus on tanking abilities. Frost Presence increases threat and lowers damage taken by a percentage. Unholy: Talents in this tree have a variety of functions including summons, diseases, and PvP-focused abilities. Unholy Presence increases attack speed and reduces the global cooldown on death knight abilities. And now, the new descriptions: Blood: Talents in this tree focus on weapons, armor, and strikes. Frost: Talents in this tree focus on control, counters, and combos. Unholy: Talents in this tree focus on spells, summons, and diseases. This is quite a drastic change, but what could it mean? Let's look at the possibilities after the break.
Warrior Talents in Wrath of the Lich King
Warriors can rejoice today, basking in their newly leaked talents from Wrath of the Lich King. This information has been first obtained through a [redacted] but has since been independently confirmed by WoW Insider staff. Note that the information you're seeing here is correct, while the wiki page you're seeing now could be updated with false information. However, that's where our confirmation of the data comes into play.Read on after the break for the full list we have so far. This is a spoiler, so don't look unless you want to!Update: At Blizzard's request, we have removed the information from our site.Update: Please don't post notes or references to notes in the comments. We're just going to remove them. Thanks.
