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World of Warcraft Patch 3.2 Warrior Guide
WoW.com has covered patch 3.2 extensively. Everything from the surprising changes to flying mounts, to the latest and greatest loot, and all the changes in between. In our patch 3.2 class, raiding, and PvP guides we take a look at exactly what changes and how the changes will affect your playing.So Patch 3.2 is out. What does this mean for warriors? Well, there will be a very slight upturn in DPS with the change of the Armored to the Teeth talent, and tanking warriors will see some changes to how Dodge and Parry work, as well as changes to items that have Block Value. In general, warrior tanks should see minimal changes (perhaps a slight increase in their overall damage dealt with the buff to Devastate, although the changes to how Shield Slam works might end up capping that ability's damage and threat down the line) and DPS warriors will probably barely notice.Briefly let's cover the changes to Dodge and Parry - while they're not warrior specific, warrior tanks should still be aware of them. Basically, both the amount of Agility (which will have a negligible effect on warriors) and the amount of Dodge Rating (which will have more of an effect) necessary per point of Dodge has increased by 15%, while the amount of Parry Rating per point of Parry has increased by 8%. What this means is, your current dodge rating will drop in 3.2, your parry rating will go up to match it, although not massively so. It's a slight rebalance meant to make Block more appealing overall. (Thanks to the folks who caught that I flipped the parry change over. I blame Mondays, even though it's Tuesday.)
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Going Back To The Well
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is WoW.com's weekly column about all things clanky and rage-related. Matthew Rossi felt like using that old, old, lookit me in my bug shoulders from AQ40 screenshot. Yes, those are the Might legs. We can all look back and laugh now, sure. Back then it wasn't funny.Believe it or not, there is a method to this particular madness. Since Blizzard was so kind to go back and release more Q&A for warriors this week, I felt to some degree constrained to talk about the answers they gave (and the questions they answered, for that matter) and in going over the post, one particular passage brought me back to the beginning, so to speak. To the days of running MC, BWL and AQ, gearing up in anticipation of patch 1.11 and Naxxramas. Let's look at the particular exchange I'm referring to. Community Team: It appears that many players who enjoy the Warrior class for its damage aspects continue to feel that, without best in-slot items, their class's performance is very truncated. Q: Is this an issue that we have seen in the Warrior class? If so, do we have any plans to accommodate those players who do not have best in-slot items, while still keeping those with the very best equipment from being too powerful? A:This really just gets back to the way rage works, which is that damage leads to rage so you have to pick a point at which you balance warriors. High damage and high rage? Low damage and low rage? The way to fix it is to normalize rage even more so that you always get X rage per second regardless of gear. But once you always get X rage per second you essentially just have rogue energy. So, as with the previous question, we don't like the way it is working and want to change it but we don't have a perfect substitute in the can just yet. This has been an issue for the warrior class since Blackwing Lair. See? I told you there was a reason I dragged out the old picture.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Where the Action is Not
The Care and Feeding of Warriors once more shuffles forth clad head to toe in clanking metal, devoid of holy light, harnessed death magic or any of that fancy stuff, to bash things about until they cough up shiny pixels. Matthew Rossi has been bashing things about for their loot since January of 2005. He'll be doing an analysis of the Warrior Q&A soon, he promises, please don't stab him with pitchforks.Honestly, I'd like to rant more about how Warrior DPS is still way too low in PvE. Especially since I keep seeing posts on the forums from the blues telling me classes with equal or better DPS are in fact too low. It's sort of maddening, really. But as much as I'd like to go on a written rampage about encounter design serving as an arbitrary limiter to warrior DPS in Ulduar, and how paradoxically my DPS is at its best on fights that are supposed to be hard mode fights (this week, for instance, my personal highest DPS numbers were recorded on XT - 002's Heartbreaker mode, where two Warriors including myself finally managed to break the top four and were ahead of the other hybrids) due to the mechanics of those fights actually allowing the warrior some uninterrupted DPS time.But unfortunately, a whole lot has been said about tanking this past week. So as maddening, vexing, downright baffling as I find the encounter design limitations of Warrior DPS in some cases (really, not much can irritate me like knowing my DPS time was broken up by big chunks of having to run away, run around, get out of the way of lightning or exploding seeds or any of the sixteen things Mimiron does that make me unhappy to be alive) that rant's going to have to stay confined to these opening paragraphs. (For a simulation of what I sound like during a raid, get four angry woodpeckers and have them attack your keyboard while you scream "Oh, COME ON" every few seconds and imagine you're the Gravity Bomb again.)So what happened with tanking this week, you ask? Well, more was said about block, about avoidance, and about tanking specced players as DPS and in PvP. So let's go over what was said.
Warrior Q&A Analysis
Well, the warrior Q&A is finally here. if you play a warrior and you were hoping that this would be the beam of sunshine that would fix your issues with the class, I'm sorry to tell you that it probably won't be. This isn't a huge surprise... so far the entire Q&A series has been fairly conservative and this one's no different... but let's go over it anyway.First off, of course, we have the intro to the class, which contains this interesting sentence: The warrior class has been a very tricky one to balance, largely due to the way rage converts into damage (which converts into rage, which converts into damage...), and we haven't completely nailed that design just yet. I think it's fair to say that anyone who remembers Rage Normalization trembles just a little bit when they see sentences like that. It's so very easy to render warriors absolutely impotent by tinkering with our rage generation, so I'm going to say right now that I desperately hope they test whatever changes they make very, very thoroughly.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 3.2 gets weird
Today The Care and Feeding of Warriors is confused. Matthew Rossi looks at this week's patch notes and sits there blinking a lot, not entirely sure what to make of themAnother week, another series of patch notes to leave me scratching my head and saying "Seriously? This is what we're doing, nerfing the crap out of agility for tanking? Did dodge rating steal somebody's lunch money as a kid? And Shield Block, I trusted you." It's strange to feel betrayed by a core tanking ability. I get why they're nerfing it, since they're increasing the amount of Block value on gear that has to double it's current values, I've already heard Prot warriors and paladins contemplating putting together BV sets for PvP and this change will keep warriors from using SB to get hideous crits in PvP with Shield Slam. At least I think that's the reasoning: I can't believe that anyone was actually worried about Prot Warriors' DPS while tanking in PvE content being too high after the change for 10 seconds out of every 40. Even if Protection Warriors put on every single piece of Block value gear imaginable, that 10 seconds of double damage with Shield Slam would still leave them at the absolute bottom of the tanking basement in terms of damage dealt while tanking.The agility change is a near non-issue for almost all Warrior tanks: maybe you had Agility as your cape enchant or a few AGI gems, but for the most part Warriors don't stack Agility as tanks. However, since Dodge is at the moment probably the best stat a warrior can stack, the Dodge rating changes will sting quite a bit. (I am aware they're more like a hammer to the back of the head for Druids, but even so.)
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Small changes
Each week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors looks at the warrior class, the dizzying highs, the devastating lows, and the agony and ecstasy of plate wearing, rage using toons everywhere in Azeroth, Outland and Northrend. Matthew Rossi is our slightly demented, hirsute guide to all things warrior. We're not kidding, the guy's really hairy. Like a sasquatch, really.Okay, first off, a confession: I'm cheating on my fury spec.I have been since the option to have dual talent specialization came out, actually. See, I tanked all through original WoW and The Burning Crusade (to be fair, I tanked as an arms or fury warrior because I could in MC and BWL) and so I figured, what the heck, I'll go prot for my offspec and tank some heroics. After an initial hiccough where I actually specced arms for some fights and fury for others, I settled back into a standard prot build for tanking heroics for friends. Then summer hit, and we all know what happens in summer: people suddenly want to go outside and froilic in the sunshine and you're sitting there waiting to raid with 22 people and no tanks. So what do you do?Well, you strap on all that offspec tanking gear you collected 'just in case' and you tank Ulduar, that's what you do. Over the past couple of weeks I've tanked more than I've been DPS That's not the problem, however. It's not that I've been tanking that has me bothered... it's that I liked it. A lot.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 3.2 wish list
What to say about patch 3.2 so far? One of the dangers of writing about the PTR in general is the possibility that, as you are typing out what you want to say, a brand new PTR patch is dropping. To some degree this would be a welcome circumstance even though it would erase what I'm writing about now, because the current PTR has nothing for warriors. Well, okay, not nothing. They buffed Armored to the Teeth slightly. On the PTR it grants 1/2/3 AP per 108 armor, as opposed to on live, where it takes 180 armor for that same benefit. Why 108? Maybe because it was easy to swap the 8 and the 0. Honestly, I couldn't tell you. The amount of AP you get from the talent isn't tremendous, but anything's better than nothing I suppose.Also, the block value changes are in (I tested them out yesterday), and, well, they fail even as a band aid fix to the problem of block performance: sure, you deal more threat to trash pulls and take less damage from them, but as far as bosses are concerned, block is still lackluster as a 'oh I don't want to die' stat. You can now block up to between 3 and 4k of a 22 to 25k hit, I'm not exactly breaking out the party hats. Especially when you'd have to stack the heck out of the stat to get even that much out of it.And man, as nice as the T9 tanking set is in terms of pure stats and bonuses, you will not want to give up that T8 4 piece set bonus with the straight up 20% magic damage reduction for it. 10 seconds of 20% magic damage reduction? You simply can't undersell how awesome that is for tanking big spike damage bosses in Wrath raids. It's pretty much the only thing that keeps warrior tanks viable against DK's and druid tanks for those fights.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Leveling Warrior in Wrath
I promise we'll get back to our Ulduar guide for tanks and DPS warriors next week. For this week, however, since we're midway through the sixth month of 2009 and we've seen patches up to 3.1 released (and we're waiting on 3.2) I thought it would be a good idea to go back and cover some of the things a leveling warrior might want discussed. We get emails from all kinds of warriors, and so it's only fair to cover the concerns of warriors who aren't raiding Ulduar but rather just setting foot off of the dock in Howling Fjord.Before we get started, though, the upcoming Patch 3.2 changes for Warriors in their current entirety: Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor. Try not to get too excited, people.First off, I'm often asked about stats for up-and-coming warriors. We have covered some of these before back in the beta, but the beta was a year ago now and things have been changed and polished. First off, I'm going to link all the posts of interest to a leveling warrior and discuss how they may have changed, and then I'll try and cover some more general advice. Building Up To It covers some target numbers and stats to focus on. I should note that this was written before the changes to Armor Penetration made it much, much better as a DPS stat for warriors: the more ArP you have, the better it is as a DPS stat until you have enough ArP to reduce target armor by 100%. We covered Hit and Expertise in two posts, one for DPS warriors and one for Tanks. The tanking post is still accurate as of 3.1, but the talent changes to Arms and Fury mean that there is currently no talent that reduces chance to dodge for Fury Warriors and Arms has both Strength of Arms for passive expertise and Weapon Mastery. We discussed the dangers of overstacking a stat to the exclusion of other, also necessary stats. Finally, we covered gearing up in a four part post just before Wrath launched Parts one, two, three and four were all published before Wrath itself had actually come out, but they're still reasonably accurate to help your warrior get from 70 to 80, We covered weapons between 70 and 80 too.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Ulduar Tips Continued
Last week, we started our homage to Chase's rogue tips for raiding Ulduar by discussing what you, as a warrior, can expect from that massive Titan fortress/prison for old gods and their flabby, tentacle faced minions. That's right, Vezax, I'm calling you flabby. This week, we'll discuss the bosses of the Antechamber, Kologarn, Auriaya and the Iron Council, three bosses in one! I was hoping that the warrior class Q&A would be up by the time I sat down to write this so we could discuss that as well, but such does not seem to be the case. Since the Iron Council is the most complicated of these three encounters (and because it has two alternate, or hard modes, we'll discuss it last. Of course, as a warrior you'll either be tanking or DPSing in these fights... there's simply no alternative role for warriors... but there's more to it than that in each case. Let's start with Kologarn.
