Heroic-Leap
Latest
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Keep yourself alive
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. One of the most important lessons I was forcibly reminded when killing heroic Yor'sahj this week was that dying makes you useless. Even if you can be given a battle res, that's not only lost damage time for you, it's lost damage or healing time for the person bringing you back from the dead. It means that battle res won't be available for a tank as the fight progresses, it's just a big mess. This was further reinforced by our Ultraxion kill. Killing Ultraxion on heroic means not only does everyone need to hit a minimum DPS threshold of about 33k sustained throughout the fight, they need to do this while performing nearly flawlessly on Hour of Twilight and Fading Light. Having tanked the past couple of weeks, it was a lesson I needed to relearn. DPS players can't rely on being the target of a dedicated healer -- there's usually two or three healers at most in 25 man raids (and less, perhaps just one in 10's) focusing their attention on the raid as a whole. Even if they break the healing up into assignments and don't deviate, there's still several people at any given time needing the healers attention. While they certainly usually do their best, if we don't help them out we're only hindering ourselves. The days of 'meh, they'll heal me through it' are long gone.
Cataclysm class skills previewed in Icecrown Citadel
Every one of us has been sitting at our computers with bated breath, eagerly waiting to see the new spells and abilities coming to our favorite class in Cataclysm. The truth, however, is that we've already seen many of these before. Some of these class previews started in Icecrown Citadel, not on the forums. What are we talking about? In Icecrown Citadel, there's a mob in the Upper Spire region of the raid zone called Val'kyr Heralds. They summon other mobs called Severed Essences, which are clones of members of your raid. They don't use all of your exact spells, but they fit each class. With the exception of one (Focused Attacks), each of the unique spells Severed Essences possess have ended up being a new spell for their class in Cataclysm.
Cataclysm Class Changes: Warrior analysis
Well, hey, how about that Inner Rage, huh? I seem to recall asking for something like that a couple of weeks ago. Maybe I can see the future. In which case, where are these insights when big lottery jackpots are on the line? So far, looking over the warrior changes I see some good, some bad, some very good and some we don't know yet. So let's get down to brass tacks, as it were. Bornakk Heroic Leap (Level 85): This ability makes the character leap at their target and apply the Thunder Clap ability to all enemies in the area when they land. Heroic Leap will be usable in Battle Stance and shares a cooldown with Charge, but the Juggernaut and Warbringer talents will allow Heroic Leap to be used in any stance and possibly while in combat. The cooldown for this ability might be longer than the Charge ability, but it will also apply a stun effect so you can make sure the target will still be there when you land. source I really have nothing negative here. I hope they can make it work out, since in Wrath the biggest issue with this ability was its targeting. I assume they're getting around that by making it require a target to work, as the language seems to indicate.
The Queue: Trinket-Palooza 2009
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Allison Robert is your hostess today again (our condolences).I'm in an autumnal sort of mood, hence today's picture. Yes, I know that Barrens trees always look like that. We got a really interesting question about trinkets the last time around that really caught my attention, so a lot of today's Queue is going to be comprised of an Enjoyable Stroll Down Memory Lane and Into Holy ^$*# Look At That Trinket From AQ40 How Has That Not Been Nerfed Yet.Starlin asks...So, what's up with Brewfest this year? Anything new or updated?Fortunately or us, Kisirani posted on this same question yesterday. To summarize, there are no major changes to the holiday, but Coren Direbrew has been updated to level 80, the mount drop rates haven't changed (nor are they now required for the Brewfest meta-achievement), and no new pets or mounts have been added. You can reasonably expect a beefed-up holiday boss with a new loot table (most likely of ilevel 200 items, possibly 219 if they want to match the gear from heroic Trial of the Champion), but otherwise the same experience as last year. I'll have an OverAchiever for the good folks seeking Brewfest achievements up on the site soon.
Exploitation and the demise of Heroic Leap
There was a time in the beta of Wrath of the Lich King that Warriors everywhere were excited little special snowflakes. They had not one but two, count 'em two, special talents: Heroic Leap and Titan's Grip.While the dual wielding goodness/badness that is Titan's Grip continues today, Heroic Leap was removed mid-beta with Warriors everywhere screaming and crying. Yours truly shed a tear. I loved leveling through the Howling Fjord and Dragonblight with Heroic Leap at my side. One press of a button and bam – I'd be raining down upon my enemies with my plate shining and dual two-handers blaring.Its demise has always been speculated upon. Many thought that the skill just provided one too many ways for a warrior to quickly move about the world. Others thought that it was due to it being too over powered in PvP. Still others thought it had to do with exploitation of the terrain.
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.
