warriors
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Skill Mastery: Bloodsurge
While a lot of debate goes back and forth about how much damage Fury is doing in Wrath, and how fun the tree is, there's one fury talent that is unabashedly awesome in my opinion: Bloodsurge. Bloodsurge is a pure delight to use, and is a perfect example of synergy in action: the Fury tree stacking a boost to critical hit with the new Rampage (which we will also be spotlighting, never fear) which causes your Bloodthirsts to crit, which gives you an instant cast Slam with a high chance to crit as well.It's quite possibly my favorite Fury ability (yes, even more so than Titan's Grip, which I am currently back in love with - I know you were all pulling for us crazy kids to make it) just for the fun of hearing the swoosh-bang on a BT crit. That sound means hit the slam button for extra damage! It's like getting all cherries on the slot machine, but without having to sit with all those people feeding quarters into the boxes with that desperate, hardened stare. Those folks scare me. I get the sense they'd like an instant cast slam as well, so as to easily steal my quarters.
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?
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a night elf
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the seventh in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.The night elves are probably the most difficult race to roleplay well in all the World of Warcraft, which is particularly ironic considering how very popular they are. Many a roleplayer has been disappointed by seeing player character night elves who are 21 years old, who were born in Darnassus or Teldrassil, or whose mother or father is human -- all of which would be next to impossible according to the actual lore of the game. The only way to make things like this is to change the lore to suit your own preferences, or to rely on cliche devices such as time travel and special magics which really go too far into the realm of the abominably self-centered Mary Sue.Night elves can also be difficult to understand, and full of contradictions: they can be over 10,000 years old, and yet they often do not possess the vast wisdom that would seem to come with such an age; they are deeply connected to nature, and yet they sometimes act without the blessings of nature; their women are supposed to be very fierce warriors, and yet their animation in the game has them bouncing up and down like teenage girls at their favorite boy-band concert.And yet much of this is just the sort of thing that draws people to the night elves. There's a youthful passion combined with ancient grace and sadness that many roleplayers just love to get into. Also, for those who love to develop long and complex background stories for their characters, there is a great deal of history about the night elves' ancient past which can serve as good inspiration for many of your own character's life events. We won't go into every detail of ancient history today, however; instead we'll cover the basics that you'll need to know in order to start out with a night elf that fits in the Warcraft story, and direct you to some more resources if you'd like to make one with a really deep and complicated background.
The return of incoming warrior changes
Once again Ghostcrawler strikes with the fury of her scuttling avatar, depositing a myriad of changes for warriors.What, may you ask, are these changes? Well, while I'll replicate the entirety of her post after the jump for those of us who have trouble accessing the forums for whatever reason, here's a big change to tide you over.Remember Thunder Clap? Sure, we all do. It has no target limit anymore. Wrap your heads around this, the single most requested change to warrior tanking since paladins began consecrate spamming their way through dungeons. Combined with a threat increase and our new Damage Shield talent, warriors will finally be viable AoE tanks.For the entirely of Ghost's post, we adjourn to after the jump. Leap with me!
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.
Skill Mastery: Shockwave
One of the new talents for Wrath of the Lich King, Shockwave is the 51 point protection talent. Described as having been intended to help with both tanking and soloing, it is a cone attack directed in front of the warrior for ten yards, dealing damage based on attack power and stunning for four seconds. As you can see from the screenshot, it can do reasonable damage if it critically hits (that cloud heading off into the distance is the animation of the spell). In my opinion it does exactly what it is intended to do, helps protection spec warriors with both soloing and tanking.
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 1
Warriors, at the heart of it, only do one thing.They hit things. And that's it.Everything warriors do is in terms of hitting things, ultimately. An argument could be made that some warriors spend an awful lot of time trying to make it so things that hit them don't kill them as fast as they could and that argument would have merit. But I'd argue that those warriors are merely attempting to optimize their hitting things time. Generally speaking, most things won't hit themselves, so if you die when they hit you, then they'll go off and hit someone else. You have to keep upright if you're to keep hitting anything.Well, okay, I suppose warriors do two things. They hit things and they yell a lot. They yell at the mobs, they yell at their fellow adventurers which somehow makes them feel healthier (I admit that I'm not terribly sure why my shouting can have all these variable effects. I must have amazing vocal control. Like Don LaFontaine, may he rest in peace.) Well, it seems to me in reading the various posts by Ghostcrawler in the warrior beta forums that the intention for prot warriors is to emphasize their hitting of things.
Warrior Update Incoming
Blue poster Gamnin posted to the warrior forums a list of changes that either came in on the last patch or which are intended for an upcoming patch. Later in the thread he posted to answer questions and clarify a few things. We can assume that we will be seeing the effects of all this when patch 3.0 goes live. Now, some of these changes are at least potentially very nice... I especially like where the designers are going with the talent Vigilance. I've always believed that warriors should have a form of threat transfer, so getting 10% of target threat with this ability is definitely a step in the right direction. Other changes, such as the ability Warbringer in the prot tree (the ability to charge in combat that's had us all scratching our heads) don't do much for me. Since it's only usable in Battle Stance, you still have to risk stance dancing over, losing a huge chunk of your rage, getting back some rage from the charge and then dumping most of it to switch back to defensive again... it's just an odd ability right now, very deep in prot for a minimal benefit. If you could use charge in defensive, then I'd be more exacted about it, but Gamnin confirmed in his clarification that they intended the current design and don't want charge used in defensive stance.Arms had the new armor penetration effect of mace spec highlighted (totally on the fence about this, no idea if it's good or not), while Fury's big changes are the removal of the cooldown component of Improved Whirlwind (which is bad, in my opinion, Imp Whirlwind was used to make the ability more friendly to damage rotations, but with the greater number of possible abilities that's no longer as crucial) and the note that they believe Titan's Grip still needs a counterbalance but they haven't decided on one yet. I'll admit to being mildly underwhelmed: I really feel like Prot has given away most of its best abilities to other classes (Last Stand, Shield Wall, Shield Slam) and hasn't gotten much of anything. The reworking of Enraged Assault to either include or become Enraged Regeneration is a nice step. but if we're going to have parity between tanking classes, then all four tanks need to be able to do the same jobs and that means more love to the prot tree, in my opinion. But go check it out for yourselves, you may love what you see.
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.
WoW Insider Show Episode 52: Club Penguin is the WoW-killer
We were live on WoW Radio as usual last Saturday with our weekly podcast, and this past week we welcomed Krystalle Voecks of our sister site Massively into the mix, as well as Daniel "BigRedKitty" Howell, and of course the Turpster. Krystalle chatted with us about what's planned for the big DragonCon event in Atlanta this weekend (WoW Insider will be there, even though I unfortunately won't be), and we also talked about: The pending release of Warhammer Online and what it means for WoW players. More beta talk, including those changes to Warriors that made it into the game and BRK's favorite things about all the pets he's been trying out. Sylvanas' model change, and whether she's hot or not. And of course we answered emails, including your questions about our legendary missing show, why female Draenei broken are the only ones who wear hoods, and what exactly private servers are. It was a fun show -- we wandered around a bit, but don't we always? You can listen to it right now over on WoW Radio's website, and of course in iTunes as well. If you have questions or comments about something we said, send them along to theshow@wow.com and you might even hear them next time around.And if you missed the live show this past week, we do this every Saturday afternoon at 3:30 Eastern, so tune in live on WoW Radio's website, and you'll even be able to join us in IRC chat. Enjoy the show this week, and have a good one.
Warriors will be cooling down faster in Northrend
Which, I suppose, makes sense. It's cold up there. If you've been playing a warrior for a long time, you've probably gotten used to the way your three big class abilities work. Presently, Shield Wall, Retaliation and Recklessness are linked abilities with a shared 30 minute cooldown. This means if you use one of them you can't use any of the other two in addition to the one you used for half an hour. Not only has this restriction kept warriors from using any of their big cooldowns in Arenas, it also serves as an inhibitor in raiding and soloing and questing. You don't pop Shield Wall unless you're absolutely sure you're going to die, because then you won't have it for possibly two or three boss attempts. This will no longer be the case in Wrath. In a move that simultaneously nerfs and buffs these long-standing warrior abilities, the base effect of each has been reduced but their cooldown shortened to 5 minutes. The tooltips of each ability spell it out now. The duration of each has dropped to about 12 seconds (not a huge deal), Recklessness has lost its fear breaking ability, Shield Wall only reduces incoming damage by 50%, and Retaliation only hits 20 attacks now. Yes, these are all nerfs. But the upside of a 5 minute duration makes them far more friendly for use. You can pop shield wall on trash if needed and still have it for a boss. A fury warrior can use reck secure in the knowledge that he'll most likely have it back up by the time the boss hits execute range. And retaliation might even be viable for multi-mob tanking now! A little stance dancing and you don't have to fret that shield wall is gone for half an hour.To me, this is an awesome change. It makes those abilities less restricted and thus, makes me more willing to use them.
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.)
SK Gaming raiding Sunwell live tomorrow
Haven't been to Sunwell yet? Sure, you say it's that you don't have time to raid, or that maybe you just can't find a guild that vibes with you, or that raiding is pointless until the expansion releases. But we know the truth: deep down inside, you really do want to go, but you're just not good enough. Worry not, you noob: the good folks at SK Gaming (whom we've interviewed in the past) are here to let you experience the instance anyway. You may not have the healing prowess needed to stand up with the big boys, but they do and they're streaming the whole thing live over the internet, complete with commentary and two points of view.The show starts at 2pm EDT tomorrow afternoon, and to see it, you've got to pick up Joost, which is a free download, for Windows or OS X. They're set to talk mostly, they say, about Warriors, Mages, and Paladins, as well as UI setups, and they're also planning to attempt a world record for DPS on Brutallus.Should be fun to see, and if nothing else, you can pretend to be a raider. Take that, Brutallus! Have another Frostbolt!
Wrath news for Discipline and tanks
Talents like Grace in the new Discipline tree seem aimed at making Discipline priests very viable tank healers in Wrath, in addition to their current role as highly survivable in PvP. However, one of the problems inherent in the tree for a tank healer is that their shield based abilities, Reflective Shield and Divine Aegis, deprive tanks of rage and/or mana that they'd need for being healed. (Apparently it's also an issue for Runic Power for DK tanks.)Redoubtable Blizzard poster Koraa comes to the rescue with words of reassurance: if rage/mana generation continues to be an issue with these spells (since they absorb damage and thus either prevent the tank from gaining rage via damage or mana via healing that damage) then there may well be changes to allow them to be less of a problem. We're warned that this would be a last resort fix, however.I'd personally love it if a priest could shield me as I run in on a boss without being worried that I won't get enough initial rage to start generating threat. Perhaps (as some posters argue) the bosses will be hitting so fast that rage won't be an issue. We'll see what happens, of course, but the very idea of Power Word: Shield and its related talents not cheating me of my initial threat generation makes me giddy.
University of Hawaii games stay SD, for now
Warrior football fans will need to watch their next QB to put up incredible college numbers and proceed to a career as practice squad NFL QB in standard def for the next season or two. Local station KFVE/KHNL just doesn't see it being feasible to put its PPV University of Hawaii games in HD yet (although the local cable channel on Oceanic already shows high school games in HD). The good news (we guess) is that HD is on the way, someday, unfortunately the cost of the necessary new facilities -- despite the Hula Bowl managing to go HD -- has put it on the back burner at the moment.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: On my treads
One of the complaints I see from time to time on the WoW forums and even here on WoW Insider is, to paraphrase is, "there are all these level 70 warriors and yet I can't find a tank." I have a variety of responses to this statement as a protection warrior at level 70. It might be how you ask, for one thing: a polite tell from someone asking me if I'll tank heroic Ramparts once saw me taking an entire group of relatively new 70's through both heroic Hellfire instances. It's also possible that, while I am a tank, I don't feel like tanking for you with an hour to go before raid time, since I'll be tanking that entire time. But I'm curious about this mindset that assumes that with all these level 70 warriors, you should be able to find a tank.I don't see "all these level 70 paladins and druids and I can't find a tank" nearly as often. Now, I understand that paladins and druids can heal, and the general populace finds that to be just as valuable. But I know there are a host of DPS druids and paladins out there. While they're derided to some degree (and unfairly so, but this column isn't named Matthew Rossi defends every one of the tanking classes if they choose to DPS - we know it's unfair, we'll let it go at that) there doesn't seem to be this absolute assumption that the first and best role of any class that can tank is to tank the way it seems to be there for warriors.Now, I love tanking. I'm good at it, I enjoy the challenge, I stay up all night working on threat sets, avoidance/mitigation sets, stamina sets, I go to sites like Wowhead and look at shields all day. Tanking is my idea of a good time. So I'm certainly not arguing that warriors cannot, or should not, tank.I'm arguing that they should not tank just because you want them to.
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.
Tank Talk: The better (and lesser) angels of our nature
Tank Talk continues this week with one requisite "Why does my ingame life have to suck so hard?" story in deference to a point made by commenters on our first column. We will then take a look at the most fundamental decision you will encounter as a raiding tank -- and one you are likely to make, and then re-make, on just about every boss encounter in the game. There is a Druid on my server who messages me almost daily asking me to come tank his heroics. What annoys me is not being asked to tank per se, but that he, too, is a feral Druid. His gear isn't as good as mine simply because he hasn't raided past Magtheridon, but he's sitting on at least three of the better pieces of Tier 4, crafted epics, and several of the badge pieces that I'm still using to tank Tier 6. At a matter of fact, with the advent of two different badge vendors and badge drops from 10-man and 25-man bosses, his stats are significantly better than the ones I had tanking most of Tier 5. This guy literally has the gear to do just about anything in the game short of the more advanced content in Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, and I used to point to him with no small measure of Druidic pride as proof of what a little elbow grease could accomplish.But he still wants me to come tank for him.I started getting irritated with the constant begging at one point and asked him, "How can you possibly have any difficulty getting groups? Everybody in LFG is looking for a tank, and your gear is excellent."At his computer, I'm sure he was shrugging. "You do it faster than I do.""I really don't. Just get some good DPS and you'll be fine."And then the truth came out: "Well, I don't really like tanking. I'd rather DPS." Ah.
