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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 4.2 lurches towards us
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. All right. With patch 4.2 dropping next week, it's time to discuss it in detail -- at least, what it means for warriors. What changes will it have in store for tanks (almost none) and DPS (less of it) warriors? What will happen to us in PVP (arms and fury warriors will lose burst, prot won't)? Why is our PVP set so ridiculously ugly that it makes me cringe? We'll start by looking at what Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said about class balance. And specifically about warriors, because that's the column, you see. I could give a rat's hindquarters about the other, lesser classes. Except shamans. If you can't be a warrior, being a shaman is a good backup plan. Why not be both? Go ahead and roll six warriors and a shaman, I'll wait.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury 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. Tanking is what we've talked about for the past couple of weeks, so let's switch it back up. DPS warriors come in two varieties, arms and fury, and for the next couple of weeks (depending on if/when patch 4.0.6 comes out), we'll be talking about the talents of each of those DPS trees and what you can use them for. Fury's going first because I despise alphabetical order and all of its works. Do you hear me, alphabet? I do not fear you. Well, except for when I try and spell Cataclysm. I always get the Y and the S flipped around. With some of the fights in Cataclysm being among the most unfriendly to melee DPS of any expansion, it's important to consider that taking survivability and mobility talents can be just as important for PvE as for PvP. So let's take a look at fury and its talents.
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.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury demolishes entire cities in 4.0.1
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. Forget Deathwing. After the horrible start fury got in 4.0.1, it saw some buffs that have made it an extremely beefy DPS spec again. While we may not be topping the meters in all fights, we're certainly putting out some very solid DPS numbers. "Solid" depends on your gear, of course, but my mixed-geared night elf can easily push out 9-11k in a heroic, and my much better-geared draenei can easily put out more if the boss stays alive long enough. With the ICC buff, fury is once again competitive for the top spot (although much less likely to own it) and is no longer a hindrance to your raid. And if you're not a raiding fury warrior, with the change to the justice point system and the removal of ratings on PvP gear, it's never been easier to get solid DPS gear (like I did for my night elf, above). The gearing requirements are different now, the rotation has changed and we have new glyphs to consider, so while the damage is solid again, there are some real differences to consider.
What will fury do in Cataclysm?
One of the consequences of the proposed radical changes to rage generation and abilities like Whirlwind and Heroic Strike has been that DPS warriors (especially fury) have been sitting around wondering what their rotation will look like in Cataclysm. So this forum thread is of interest to any warrior who enjoys the fury playstyle. Since we know Whirlwind is going to be an ability you use specifically when AoE is the way to go instead of a free extra DPS on trash ability, and HS isn't going to be an on next ability, warriors will be left left with a lot of space in their rotation to fill. What will fill it? Ghostcrawler - Re: Cataclysm Fury Rotation That leaves Fury with Bloodthirst and Slam and Heroic Strike. Heroic Strike will play more of a role since it will require a GCD, but you also may not want to push it every time in low rage scenarios. So we do think Fury will need one more rotational button. The one we are messing with right now is Victory Rush. It feels pretty cool so far, but a lot of things will change with classes over the next several weeks. Not sure yet whether it works better as a proc (like Sudden Death) or something available all the time. source I'd personally like to see Victory Rush become a proc like Sudden Death or Bloodsurge Slams: in fact, it wouldn't be hard to simply add VR to both of those abilities, letting it proc either instead of or at the same time as a Sudden Death Execute or Bloodsurge Slam. You'd need to leave it enough time to not end up wasted a lot, but there's potential there. Ghostcrawler also makes a good point about glyphs and Cataclysm (if you think an ability isn't good because of a glyph or too good because of one, don't assume that glyph will still exist or be in the same form in the future) and again emphasizes the problem with Whirlwind style abilities. While it's good to see them thinking about this, we need more details: how is Bloodsurge going to be affected by losing Heroic Strike spam, for just one concern? Still, I'm hopeful they'll work out the new rotation fairly soon.
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.
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 Daily Quest: Of Spirit Beasts, Fury Warriors and Rupture-less Rogues
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. BigRedKitty has video of Gondria the new Spirit Beast on the PTR. He explores the talents of the rare beast and shows it in action. Part Time Druid spends time with on his Warrior and comes back with Five Rules for the Fresh Fury Warrior. He mostly covers how to increase DPS on raids, but has leveling advice as well. Zaltu at One Rogue's Journey takes a question from a reader about the viability of a Rupture-less Mutilate and impact of the Patch 3.1 Rogue Glyphs currently on the PTR. Just My Two Coppers has advice for those who play the Auction House on crowded servers. OutDPS posts the third in their three part series of using Hunter traps to deal with each boss in Naxx. This installment covers Gluth and Grobbulus. Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ, by using our tip line and we'll consider it for a future TDQ post.
Forum Post of the Day: Great Warrior literature
This thread, sent to us by reader Talmar (thanks!) is probably the best QQ thread I've ever read. Not because it's full of substantive criticism about the class, but just because it's got lots of references meant for literary nerds like me. The styles of Kafka, Shakespeare, Camus, Wilde, and Douglas Adams (who fits in that crowd, right?) all make appearances as players combine old literary quotes with the plight of Fury Warriors.And when Pynchon shows up on page 3, then the rails really go off the tracks. But it is a lot of fun. Because if you're going to QQ, you might as well do it in style, right?"Ghostcrawler believed in the perfect Fury build, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms our further... And one fine morning --So we grind on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Titan's Grip hit penalty down to 5%
Titan's Grip, in case there are any of you in the audience who are not familiar with it, is the Fury Warrior 51-point talent. It allows the warrior to wield two 2-handed weapons (or a 2h and a shield, I guess, if they wanted to). Pretty awesome, right? Yes. But as a counterbalance, to make sure Fury isn't doing overly insane DPS, it imposes a penalty in the form of a decreased chance to hit with "damage-dealing abilities that require a weapon" (i.e. most special attacks). That decrease started out at 15%, and was changed to 12% before 3.0.2 went live. Ghostcrawler has now announced that they're changing it again, to only 5% decreased chance to hit with special attacks. This is a massive buff. Part of it is in response to raising raid boss armor by 10%, but this goes well beyond correcting for that. GC says that this probably makes TG a bit overpowered for a 51-pointer. I have, though, seen many, many Warriors complaining about the huge miss chance when the talent is picked up, so hopefully those complaints will be put to rest now. Oh, and the attack power coefficient of Bloodthirst is up too, from 45% to 50% (i.e. it will scale better as you get more AP). But man, TG is going to be crazy good now. Updated for accuracy.
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.
