PTR patch notes update for patch 3.2.0

Just wanted to let those of you who check in with me know the latest skinny.

Warriors

• Bloodrage: This ability now generates 20 rage initially, and 10 rage over the next 10 seconds. The health cost is unchanged.
• Execute: This ability now never costs more than a total of 30 rage. The tooltip for Sudden Death has been revised to remove reference to that maximum, since the ability now behaves that way even when untalented.
• Shield Slam: The benefit from additional block value this ability gains is now subject to diminishing returns. Diminishing returns occur once block value exceeds 30 times the player's level and caps the maximum damage benefit from shield block value at 34.5 times the player's level.
• Talents
• Fury
• Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor.
• Bloodsurge: Notification that Slam has become instant now appears in floating combat text.
• Protection
• Devastate: Weapon damage increased to 60% and bonus per Sunder Armor on the target increased by 20%.
• Shield Specialization: Now provides 5 rage on a block, dodge or parry instead of 2 rage on a block.

So That's all very interesting.  Notice that we've added some new features.  It's hard for me to tell whether I like the Execute change, on the one hand, for PvE combat, it means you really will be able to spam Execute after 20% without worry.  On the other hand, for PvP you can say goodbye to those massive execute crits in the 12K range, not that you need them when your opponent is down to 20% (since 20% of even 30K is still only 6K).  But in PvE, while it does make a good damage/rage sense to do it this way, since Execute still suffers from the global cooldown, now instead of being able to dump all our rage each time it's ready (even if that means we're in a fight like Thaddius, and we build rage so quickly it's scary) and may mean that we end up with a lot more rage in the end that would have been nice to be able to dump into the boss instead.

I don't have the numbers right here, but it seems like I tend to get Sudden Death crits in the range of about 4K-5K usually, with non-crits being in the 2.5K range.  The catch there is that Overpower has a phenomenally higher crit rating because of my talents, and can usually do 5-7K damage (or more against poorly armored adversaries).  And even my Mortal Strike that already costs 30 rage can do about 3-6K damage.  I'll have to really look closely at this for a bit to see how it goes, but I almost wonder if Mortal Strike and the SD Executes (or Executes limited to 30 rage) aren't basically the same damage wise, which means the debuff that Mortal Strike gives actually ends up giving it the advantage in the end.  This would be a shame, really, but I'll do the math in a couple weeks and see what I can find out.

I think the change to bloodrage is quite nice, here's hoping that stays in place.  And as far as the shield block value bonus to shield slam, I forgot to check my own equipment, but I think I'll be ok being limited to no more than a 2400 block value.  I think MAYBE I might be approaching a number in the early 1K-1.5K so I think I can adjust myself to the diminishing returns between 2400 and the cap at 2760.  If, on the other hand, you're wearing the latest and greatest shield block value items, you might need to pick up a new trinket or something.

Short Sabbatical

Hey, guys, don't fret if you don't see anything new from me for a little while. I'm taking a short sabbatical for a few weeks to take care of some other things that need my attention. I may still post once or twice in the mean time, but I'll have to wait for new post material until I'm done with my other tasks.

In the words of the Governator of California: "I'll be back".

PTR warrior changes

Ok, so I didn't post anything before, becaus there was one, count it ONE change to the warrior tree and it was a DUH good thing, with nothing to say.

I'm concerned a little because all of a sudden I'm seeing a lot more "good" things in our tree, and the last time I saw nothing but good things in the reported changes they snuck in and bit us pretty good on the UNreported changes.

So here are the current reported changes to warriors according to the PTR test notes as of today, July 7th, 2009:

Warriors

• Talents
• Fury
• Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor.
• Bloodsurge: Notification that Slam has become instant now appears in floating combat text.
• Protection
• Devastate: Weapon damage increased to 60% and bonus per Sunder Armor on the target increased by 20%.
• Shield Specialization: Now provides 5 rage on a block, dodge or parry instead of 2 rage on a block.

Notice, all good things. I heard some people saying that the change to Armed to the Teeth was strange, but as my own way of pointing something out, notice that all this change does is put this in line with the DK's similar ability in that the DK's can take up to 5/180 points of armor in bonus Attack power which is exactly a 1/36 conversion factor. The 3/108 is also a 1/36 conversion. The only thing I would expect to see them do otherwise is to either make the DK's ability also a 3 talent point or to make ours a 5 point cost. Personally I'm hoping for the former rather than the latter. We have so many talents we have to invest in, regardless of which spec we're playing, and even though for Fury/Arms, I could easily spare the extra two talent points, it would hurt my Protection spec to have to find 2 extra talent points to invest in extra attack power. As it is, (and you can look this up) my spec is 12/3/56 so you can see that the Fury tree would basically eat 2 points from somewhere else that I can't really spare. I'm already pretty lean and mean on the Arms tree with what I've chosen, and I'd have to lose utility points on Protection tree to be able to afford it.

I suppose, though that there's nothing preventing me from simply taking only 3 of the 5 points, but then the intented purpose is lost on tanks, who, let's face it, need it the most. While I've seen DK's, Druids and even Paladins to some extent tanking with 2K to 2.5K dps, I have yet to see any warrior tank do significantly better than about 1.4K dps and even then, that's only fully 25 man raid buffed. With the number of dps races that they've figured in, I'm not a bit shocked that recently I've done more dpsing than tanking in my raids. Simply switching my position leaves our "intentional" dps about the same, but raises our tanking dps by nearly 1K.

Ok, so the Bloodsurge change was badly needed. Way back when the talent procced 100% off a crit from one ability in our rotation, we could just watch for that to crit and then throw the slam. Now that it has a slim chance on a bunch of abilities' crits, and since hopefully you're critting most of the time, the only thing you can do is (a) watch for the buff to appear and hopefully hit the slam before it vanishes (also hopefully not end up in a void zone while you're trying to watch the buffs way in the other corner of the screen), or (b) use a lot of addons to basically do exactly what this change is doing, notify you or bring the things you have to watch closer together.

You can't go wrong pushing devastate higher in the priority queue. Devastate is a nice ability and I use it frequently. Because it doesn't generate a lot of rage for it's cost, however, it generally gets shoved into the "if I have nothing else ready to go at the time, then throw that" column. Although the increases aren't significant, it could bring the threat up to something comparable to some of the other abilities that you might be using over Devastate for now.

You also can't go wrong with giving a warrior more rage for doing his job right. So many warriors use the "stack stamina out the @$$" method of gearing because they want to get hit to generate rage. I believe that we should be mitigating as much as possible. I believe we should have 30% dodges and possibly 25% parry chances. I believe we should have 20% blocks and that the block should play SOME part in boss fights as well as trash pulls. It would be great if they could figure out a way to make that possible without making block basically another version of parry.

The ONLY suggestion I've ever had in this regard is to make block value a percentage instead of a hard number. This would lessen the impact on trash pulls (since sometimes blocks can completely block incoming damage, instead of only a portion) but would make it significantly more desireable on bosses, (taking even 25% less damage on a blow that would have done 36K is still 9K damage you don't take).

I've noticed that Blizz has gone to a lot of percentage based values instead of hard values because of how difficult they are to keep up with. It causes some problems, but eliminates others. For example, notice how obnoxious it is to have your abilities cost a certain % of your total mana pool. As you level up, your mana pool increases, but the only benefit you see from it is that it takes LONGER to regenerate the mana needed to cast the same spells, and you can't even cast them more often. (not that we have any issue with this, mind you :D but some of my friends with a "drinking problem" have mentioned it.)

I think this may be one of those situations that might benefit more from being made into a percentage than it is losing. Of course, they don't read my blog anyway, so I doubt it will ever happen.

Stat Priorities for an Arms Warrior

So, my thoughts on Stats are:

It's never a good idea to stack only one statistic at the expense of all others. I think especially with some of the changes, the best mixture for us is:

a) make sure you have at least 263 hit rating (right on 8.00% hit chance)

b) make sure you have at least 26 expertise (or 22 when you count the 4 you get from Strength of Arms) that's about 181 expertise rating.

c) after that point, pile on as much crit rating, armor penetration and Strength as you can manage. The balance of these will be what stands you apart from your competition.

Our biggest damage abilities come from critical strikes, so that's always something we want. However, crit rating has diminishing returns, so although it would be fantastic to have 100% crit rating (4591 rating points, go for it if you think you can) it's not realistic to believe you can get there. Remember we have talents that help us out some like your improved Overpower (adds 50% crit chance to Overpower) and others Cruelty (5% extra crit chance), etc.

So, in the meantime (while you're waiting that extra couple seconds for another crit), we want to add Attack Power. Now, it doesn't really matter to us whether we add attack power or strength, but if you're raiding, your pally friends have blessing of kings that raise your strength by 10%, but it doesn't raise your Attack Power by 10%. Since 1 point of strength = 2 points of Attack Power, after you consider kings, Strength is really like 2.2 points of Attack Power, and that makes it a better choice usually, since rare gems will give either 16 strength or 32 attack power and 16 strength will equal 35.2 attack power. Slight difference, but a difference nonetheless.

And finally we have armor penetration. It does seem that arms warriors benefit more from armor penetration than other warrior classes. I suppose this is because armor can have such a big impact on the damage you deal, and we only have the one weapon to attack with. So I think stacking enough armor penetration to get at least reasonably close to the 100% armor penetration mark (even if it's only when you use Shattering Throw, and have your trinket fire) is a pretty good target.

So basically, I think the best mixture of those three will be something like 250-450 Armor Penetration rating (depends on you), and as much critical strike rating as you can comfortably put on without just gemming and enchanting for nothing but crit. I think a total (after agility bonus) of about 16%-20% bonus is pretty healthy that gets you up to nearly 30%-35% unbuffed, which is pretty nice.

Everything else put in Strength. The more the better.

If you are stuck on some items for enchanting (say, um, cloaks) Agility will do in a pinch, remember it does add some crit rating. In general though, try for strength (or attack power if strength isn't available) once you've gotten everything else to the right levels.

If you feel that something about that isn't working the way you'd like it to, just adjust the last three until you're happy. I would suggest not adjusting the expertise and hit ratings, because ultimately those are (up to the caps) the best way to make sure your dps is working the way it's supposed to.

WowHead's new Profiler

Hey, everyone,

If you don't already know about it, Wowhead has done something really neat recently, that you should take advantage of.

It's like an online version of Rawr (a great program, by the way) that uses Wowhead's databases to provide up to the minute gear lists.

Check it out here or in the links section.

My observations that may help you to get started on using this are these:

-- First you should have an account on wowhead, otherwise you can't save profiles for later viewing.

-- Second, once you have your "main" character bookmarked, use the pull down menu under "my profiles" to create a blank character template, and name it something useful. Don't forget to mark it private.

-- Third, for maximum benefit try to be as honest as possible and fill it out as though this was your character's twin. Then open a second window to wowhead and use their handy-dandy search engine to search and filter objects exactly like you would usually do. Once you know the names of the objects you want to place on your blank canvas, just right click the appropriate spots and select "Equip". It's that easy. Right clicking on gem slots and enchant slots and on items will show you "other options" such as filling a gem slot, enchanting, replacing a gem or enchant, etc.

And once you're done, don't forget to hit "Save As" to store your test profile, and then check the profile drop down menu to make sure it's there. If it isn't there, then it didn't save and you should try again.

I made the mistake more than once of trying to use the "Save as" starting from my main character, and watching all my hard work go *poof*. If you start with a blank profile it seems to work a lot more solidly, and the "new" link seems to work as well as the "new" link in the drop down menu.

Undoubtedly they will be modifying this as time goes by, but in the meantime I thought I'd lend a helping hand.

Armor Penetration Information

Ok, many of you have already seen this, but since it is not only interesting, but factual, I wanted to provide a couple extra thoughts on the current posts.

I begin with a direct quote from Ghostcrawler:

We didn’t want Armor Penetration Rating to be too powerful against low armor targets, like it had been in BC. We also didn’t want Armor Penetration Rating to be too powerful against high armor targets.

So, we decided on a system where there is a cap on how much armor the Armor Penetration Rating can be applied to. So, the first X armor on the target is reduced by the percentage listed in the Armor Penetration Rating tooltip, and all armor past that X is unaffected. Another way of understanding that is we multiply the percentage in the tooltip times the minimum of the two values: the cap, and the amount of armor on the target after all other modifiers.

Computing the cap is a little tricky unless you are already familiar with how World of Warcraft armor works. There is an armor constant we’ll call C. C is derived as follows (in some pseudocode):

If (level<60)
C=400+85*targetlevel
Else
C=400+85*targetlevel+4.5*85*(targetlevel-59);

For a level 80 target, C=15232.5. For a level 83, C=16635.

The cap for Armor Penetration then is: (armor + C)/3.

A level 80 warrior creature has 9729 armor. C=15232.5. So, the cap is (9729+15232.5)/3=8320.5. Let’s say a player has 30% armor penetration from armor penetration rating and no other modifiers that complicate the calculation (talents, Battle Stance, Sunder Armor, etc.). The game chooses the minimum of 8320.5 and 9729, so 8320.5. That is multiplied by 30% = 2496.15, and so that much armor is ignored. The effective armor on the target is 7232.85 (9729-2496.15). From a player point of view, the armor penetration rating didn’t ignore the full 30%, but instead ignored 25.66%. (85.5% as effective as expected).

So, I see one point of interest here that we should be (possibly) happy about. Namely that there is no "cap" per-se on Armor Penetration, except that you cannot possibly ignore more than 100% of the Armor penetration cap amount. Thus we can stack our Armor Penetration up to (but not over) the 100% mark (which is already pretty tough to get to anyway.

I'd LOVE to have enough AP gear to actually test this theory, but I'm having a significant amount of difficulty getting to that point.

If you read the early post on how to calculate this sort of thing, let me amend whatever I may have said about the Armor Penetration rating. Since the modifications to AP (they buffed it significantly), the new "base" value that needs to be used appears to be about 3.754 (it is slightly more than 3.75, but that's a rough estimate of how much more).

So, Arms warriors can expect that in heavy combat situations, on top of the 10% armor penetration we have from battle stance we're going to to want 5 sunder stacks (eliminating 20% of the target's "removable" armor) and we'll assume that for stressful situations we will also allow shattering throw to remove an additional 20%, so we want to know how much AP rating it would take to get to 50% passive armor penetration (yes, you may have trinkets that boost it occasionally, but let's first find out what the number to stay below is).

And the answer turns out to be 616.

Now, I was goofing around looking at some items I could use, and I noticed that I can get up to about 400-500 easily, which nets us about 32%-40% passive AP.

With this in mind, watch out for trinkets like the Mjolnir Runestone (which are phenomenal if used correctly). You don't need to worry about them being "not as good as advertised", only worry that (if you notice), adding 612 AP rating for 10 seconds won't do you a lot of good if you're already stacked to 400-500 AP, since you'll be pretty much hitting your cap around even without any "extra" armor penetration rating, just from the trinket.

For those adventurous few that are seeking more than 50% armor penetration, here's the guide for caps up to 100%, I'll start at 50%, though.

50% = 616 AP rating

60% = 739 AP rating (I suppose so you can dps in Berserker stance?)

70% (so you're capped with only 5 sunder stacks) = 862 AP rating (with a 612 boost from the runestone, this would be fairly simple, and then you can ignore Shattering Throw for all intents)

90% (so you're capped even without sunders) = 1108 AP rating.

100% (so you're capped even in Berserker stance without sunders?) = 1231 AP

My thoughts on this are that basically, if you want to shoot for the 862 rating cap, that could be very nice. If you assume that you're doing this with the 612 rating boost from the trinket, that means you'll have about 250 Armor Penetration rating all the time, with the trinket boost coming into play every so often. You still have a reason to keep your sunders up, and you'ld be looking at having:

Passively: 30.3% armor reduction (of the armor that is reducible, see above)

W/Sunders: 50.3% armor reduction

W/Sunders & Shattering Throw: 70.3% armor reduction

W/Runestone (Grim Toll also works) proccing: 80.02% armor reduction

W/Sunders & Runestone (Grim Toll also works) proccing: 100% armor reduction

So essentially, since these have an internal 45 second cooldown on procs, and they last 10 seconds, we can say that (provided you have your sunders up) you could expect to have 45 seconds of 50.3% armor penetration followed by 10 seconds of 100% armor penetration every 55 seconds or so.

This would amount to an average of 59.33% Armor penetration all the time (obviously with the sunders).

Notice that this is equivalent (basically) to stacking the 616 AP rating. Also be very careful when making statements like "Grim Toll/Mjolnir's Runestone is BiS trinkets for blah blah blah" because each of these separately proc a 612 AP rating, and you have to look at your chance of having them proc separately or simultaneously.

For example, if you have them both equipped and have the 250 AP rating to go with them, and they proc separately, then you could enjoy a comfortable 20 seconds of 100% armor penetration out of every 55 seconds of combat, or approximately a 68.37% Armor penetrated (of that which is penetrable) overall. However, if they procced at the same time, even with all that massive overload, you would have exactly the same 59.33% Armor penetration that you'd have with only the runestone, since you can't penetrate more than the 100% of the penetrable armor.

Because the benefit from either of these trinkets is so massive, I might suggest going ahead and not worrying if one takes you over the count, but I don't know whether or not I'd gamble on both at once. For example, this set of (admittedly high level) gear would give you 584 Armor Penetration (before enchants and gems) and isn't the highest you could get. However, it would give you 57.44% passive Armor penetration with the 5 sunder stacks giving you a 77.44% passive Armor Penetration, and the 10 seconds when the trinket pops, you get the extra 22.56% for 10 seconds, which would give you an average AP of about 81.54% overall. Notice it's not a big increase from the passive amount, but it is an increase even over using Grim Toll/Runestone only even if they proc separately all the time. Also, it's nice to know that you can always add an extra 20% AP with Shattering throw during any of those internal cd's of the Runestone that you know you want the extra oomph during.

Another nice thing about your gear is that it should be balanced enough to privide a healthy amount of crit rating (here you get 682 or approximately an extra 14.86%), enough hit and expertise rating to get the rest of the way to hit cap and expertise cap with some gems and enchants, and plenty of strength and Armor (which will be more important for us after patch 3.2, which is the only reason I bring it up) to give us a healthy dose of Attack Power.

A secondary piece of information to take from this is that we now know (A) how to anticipate a mob's armor values a little, and (B) how to cheat the system in PvP. Suppose you're worried about a warrior stacking 100% armor penetration in an arena. . . get the highest armor value you can before you go after him.

Note that this is because of the way they average these values together. If the armor value for the mob etc. were less than half of the C value they give for that level, then the overall armor penetration possible would be 100% of the armor the mob has. So for level 80 this gives a lower armor value of 7616.25. Any target with this amount of armor or less would essentially be "disarmorable" with 100% armor penetration. On the other hand, if you are wearing 21000 armor, that same 100% armor penetration will only allow them to remove 57.51% of your armor value, which may come as a shock to them.

So assuming that level 80 mobs do actually have differing armor values, Armor Penetration will still be on a sliding scale of effectiveness, with the more armored foes being less vulnerable to it, but now we know how it works.

I think I've found the gear set I'm going to work towards here (at least until the new patch when better is available). This accomplishes (once enchanted, gemmed etc) about 422 Armor Penetration (34.28% penetration + 10% battle stance, + 20% sunders gives 64.28% Armor Penetration most of the time, with 100% for 10 seconds out of every 55 seconds, giving an average of 70.77% without considering Shattering Throw), balanced out with 1019 crit rating (about 22.2% extra bringing me to 34.24% unbuffed), about 1285 extra strength and enough hit and expertise to be just barely over the caps (albeit the soft cap in the expertise case).

Ok, not too bad, now to actually accomplish it. :D

Warrior Perspective on Antechamber of Ulduar

Ok, howdy again. You've probably noticed that I haven't really covered trash much at all. Some of the trash has it's own quirks that you will want to read up on, and the Antechamber of Ulduar is no exception. You should probably look for a more in-depth look at the trash for strats on them, especially if you're tanking.

Auriaya: If you're the MT here, you'll want to LOS pull her to a safe area where there is enough movement to allow you to rotate her at least once (explained later) but to keep everyone clustered together. Our raid likes to use the niche next to the stairs on the right for this. The basic trick to this fight is that everyone will be grouped up together. She does a blast every so often that causes a fixed amount of damage spread out over everyone in the cone in front of her, so the more people that are there, the less damage everyone takes. She starts with two adds, that (if you choose) can either be OT'd or can be killed first, just depending on what your MT and raid want to do. There are really two things you want to pay attention to during most of this fight. First, she does a mass fear (that friendly shamans can help with if you have some) and immediately follows it with a big spell that has to be interrupted. Make double sure that you have your Berserker Rage somewhere convenient, ESPECIALLY if you're either Fury or one of the tanks, since you have an interrupt that won't involve stance dancing. If you are Arms and you have no one else that can interrupt (but most tanks can, this is just an extra safety thing) you might go ahead and put together a macro to equip a shield and use Shield Bash, since that's something that is available from Battle Stance and that won't kill your rage like trying to dance to hit Pummel will. The second thing to watch out for the whole fight is that she periodically does a summon that summons a large number of small adds that need to be burned down quickly. Save your big cooldowns (unless you're Fury) for this time. If you're one of the tanks, blow Shockwave once that happens to try to stun as many of them as possible. If you're tha MT (and hence already tanking Auriaya) try to use Challenging Shout, otherwise use everything else you would normally do for group pulls to try to keep as many as possible off the rest of the raid. If you're Arms, you will save your Bladestorms for this point (and Sweeping Strikes if you've glyphed for it). If you're Fury, you're going to do what you always do: Whirlwind, Bloodthirst, but now might also be the time to use Cleave for your rage dump instead of Heroic Strike.

Eventually, Auriaya will call for a defender, and this is when the OT steps in. The defender will jump around and will cause bleed damage and stuns randomly, but if everyone is grouped together still, that shouldn't be an issue for you to continue to keep aggro on it. Now, here is where the fun begins for everyone. You essentially have two options: try to keep the defender alive, or try to kill it. The feral defender has 9 lives (ha ha) and each time it goes down it will spawn a large void zone that will remain for the rest of the encounter. If you want to kill it you will need to have a place scouted out where you can safely place 9 different void zones. You will also need to do it quickly. Basically, each time the defender is up, dps them down quickly, move to a new location, burn down Auriaya. From everything I've read about trying this, even if you do it right, it will be close to the enrage timer when you finally kill the 9th defender (I plan on trying to talk my raid into trying this at least once, but sometimes they're less interested in the achievements than the hard modes, I like both. ^.^). If you decide to ignore the defender and focus on Auriaya, do exactly that. It may happen that the defender dies accidentally once, so that's why you need to have at least one other place you can stand her to avoid the void zone. This way is pretty cake, since Auriaya doesn't have that many HP.

Iron Council(optional): So many good things to say about these guys. To begin let me break down into tank and dps categories. If you're dps here, there is basically one thing to worry about. Whenever you need to move, MOVE! Otherwise, dps. You will have different times that you will have to move (depending on who is up when), Stormcaller does an Overload right from the start, Molgeim does a Rune of Death if at least one of them has gone down, and Steelbreaker does a static disruption (with at least one of the others down) that does a small amount of damage but also adds a debuff that increases susceptibility to damage. Avoid these. Otherwise, just remember that this is a "one at a time" fight. You cannot get them all down at once, you just need to pick the order and focus fire through it.

Ok, now to the tanking. Being the MT in this is all about survivability. Being the OT in this is all about your ability to position and move your targets (even though one is a caster and WILL NOT follow you). Everything else depends solely on which order you choose to follow. For example, the easiest way is to work from large to small. In this situation, the OT will rush in and grab aggro on them and pull them to one side of the room (the MT will pull whichever one you're starting with to the other side), remember to use Heroic Throw (which is talented with Gag Order) to silence Stormcaller so he'll run where you tell him to. Runemaster is easier from that respect because he's a melee type. I hate to admit it, but because Stormcaller is so difficult to maneuver (since you have to use either Shield Bash or Heroic Throw to move him, and you're going to be interrupting a lot too.) sometimes we just us a DK tank to handle this. If, on the other hand you're starting with this guy, then it's very possible you could MT him without worry (he does barely any damage and EVERY one of his abilities is interruptible early on), since there won't be any death runes to try to pull him out of. You'll still need to pull him out of the Rune of Powers, but it's not as serious since he doesn't really do that much damage at first anyway. You will need to have someone available who can dispell Steelbreaker's Fusion punch if you're tanking him, since that will kill you faster than anything, and you'll need someone who can dispell Runemaster's Shield of Runes since that also will kill you faster than anything.

Once one of them are down, the remaining ones acquire new abilities and are healed back to full. Runemaster gains the rune of death everyone will have to avoid, Stormcaller gains the lightning whirl that must be interrupted immediately, and Steelbreaker gains the static disruption I mentioned earlier.

At this point, the MT will take one of the two that the OT is holding away and move him over to the other side of the room where you all just took down the first one, and continue on. Once this guy goes down everyone can focus on the last target, which is good, because there are a number of difficulties that arise with the last batch of abilities. If Stormcaller is last, he gains Lightning Tendrils where he floats into the air, and follows a random person doing damage for a while to everyone in range. For this reason, everyone should spread out for this and stay away from each other as well as be out towards the walls. Runemaster gains a rune of summoning which summons an elemental that will target a random player and head for them to cast a lightning blast that hits for a lot. That rune will periodically summon these elementals until it subsides.

Steelbreaker gains the worst ability, and I'll tell you what it says, but I haven't done it yet. The power is called Overwhelming power. It targets someone and increases size and damage of them by 200%. After 60 (30? I see different reports) seconds it causes a meltdown which causes them to die instantly and also meltdown causing them to deal about 30K damage to everyone within 15 yards. If you get this, I'd guess you dps like crazy for the time you have and then get away from whomever melted down. From reading the strats, you're going to need at least a druid or lock or two to get at least one soulstone and/or one brez in order to do this properly. The tank will take the debuff and get the time to do damage, and then at about 5-10 secs left, the OT will taunt off them and the tank will run off to die in a big explosion. Hopefully the raid can get the big guy down to about 30%-40% in that time, because he also heals up some. One of the guides I read would make Arms a good dps to have along since they can limit healing taken by 50%+. I'm eager to try this. Incidentally, if your plan is to eventually take on Algalon (which requires doing not only one of the hard modes here, but also the four hard modes on the four keepers) this is where you will start. First you need to either "choose" Runemaster or Steelbreaker, and whichever you choose, you will get the quest item needed to begin the quest to unlock Algalon. To complete the quest you will still have to do the other hard modes, but at least if you do this first, you can work on the other hard modes later.

Kologarn: There's not much for us to worry about on this guy. You should already know how to tab target, and that's really all you need to worry about. As dps, you'll notice that you can stand right in the middle (in front of the guy) and still target/hit either arm without difficulty. Don't let his size concern you. In fact, to observers, they'll think you're dpsing Kologarn instead of his arms, but don't let that bother you either. The advantage to dpsing from there is that you are guaranteed to be in melee range, and hence not a choice for his eye beams, and also whenever you whirlwind or bladestorm, you'lre going to hit him and both his arms simultaneously (also whenever you Cleave/Sweeping Strikes you'll get the same thing. As a tank, you're either on Kologarn or you're on the adds. In 10 man, you probably only have 2 tanks, so the tanks will rotate. [edit: No need to rotate in 10 man since the debuff only exists in 25 man] Kologarn does a debuff that you can't let stack beyond 1 for very long, so once it gets to 2, the other tank needs to taunt him off. Whomever isn't tanking Kologarn at the moment that the right arm goes down needs to grab the adds. The ranged dps should AoE the adds down quickly to free up the tank on the adds, so he can go back to taunting Kologarn off the other tank. In 25 man, you'll have 3 tanks, so it's not such an issue there. One tank will do the adds, the other two will stay close to Kologarn and dps/taunt and tank as needed. Your ranged dps and healers will have eyebeams and stuff to worry about, but the only time you'll need to worry about these is if you're tanking the adds when he starts. Just move to the side and keep moving around in a wide pattern to keep him trailing after you, and don't go too near the rest of the raid if you're in that position. The adds should stay on you with just some simple Demo Shouts and Thunderclaps, use challenging shout if things get out of hand. The only thing the melee dps will ever have happen to them, they can't avoid or do much about anyway. If you get picked up and your healers are having a rough time, having a macro to equip a shield and use shield block will save them some effort ( just like you did on Ignis) but generally you won't be taking too much damage from being picked up by the right arm.

And grats, you're past the antechamber!

Warrior perspective on Siege of Ulduar

So in a note of excitement, my 10 man group finished up through Mimiron, the last keeper of Ulduar, this weekend. We stumbled a bit on General Vezax, which is strange, because he doesn't even have two "X"s at the end of his name! (ha ha) No seriously he's not that tough, but there's a lot going on, and it's mostly on the casters. Boy, I've never been happier to NOT be a caster.

It's a fascinating set-up. You have to have casters, because if you don't, then the shadow smashes will target the melee and that's no good, not to mention the mark of the faceless (that heals him based on how many people are standing around the person affected) that shouldn't be aimed towards the melee.

But overall, things went very well. I've now got some properly decent Ulduar level 219 tanking gear (mostly) and even a few pieces of dps gear too. My dual spec may really come into play before too long, because our awesome druid OT is also an awesome feral cat, and there may be some hard modes where we will need the extra dps she puts out.

So, from a warrior perspective, here are some things you might need to know about the bosses in Ulduar, I'm starting with the Siege of Ulduar bosses.

Flame Leviathon: Ok, not much to this, it totally depends on which vehicle you're in, and very little on your class. The only catch is if you're dps specced, you may be put in the gunner's chair in a Demolisher to be launched onto FL to overload him (and stop him from moving for a while and remove the buff that stacks to increase his speed).

Chopper:> You have 2 jobs. 1 - every cooldown, speed in front of FL and drop tar. 2 - whenever someone is launched, you need to go pick them up after they've killed the turrets. That's really it. If you're bored in between times, use your attack. A little extra dps never hurt anyone.

Siege Engine:> You have 2 jobs, which change based on which seat you're in. If you're in the driver's seat, your job is to 1 - interrupt Flame Vents every time FL does it. In order to do that (and that's really the important one) you need to be right up on the back of FL unless he's chasing you. If he's chasing you, then your job is 2 - don't die. You have a speed boost you can use to help kite him. If you're in the gunner's seat, your jobs are to 1 - shoot down the pyrite barrels, and 2 - cannon the tar on the ground when possible. The only other thing you should ever do, is notice when your driver is having a hard time getting away from FL and use your shield to help out.

Demolisher:> You have 3-4 jobs, which change based on which seat you're in. If you're in the driver's seat, your job is to 1 - put up to 10 stacks of pyrite onto FL and keep them on. The debuff lasts 10 seconds, so you can use the cannon 2-3 times between shots to help it last longer, 2 - stay away from FL. You are ranged, so act like it. You don't want to be anywhere near the guy if you can help it, 3 - if you start to get low on Pyrite (say 30/50 or so) you have to drive closer to Pyrite barrels, and finally 4 - you need to launch your passenger onto FL when it's time (basically 6-8 stacks of the buff, and when you're not the one being chased) and then stay the heck away from the guy and try to make your pyrite last until the cannons come down. Once they do, FL will be stuck into place and this is a good time to make sure you top off your 10 stacks of Pyrite. If you're in the gunner's chair, then your jobs are 1 - shoot down Pyrite all the time, your cannons don't do a lot of damage, don't worry about them, the Pyrite is a lot more important, 2 - whenever your driver gets you close to a Pyrite barrel, pick it up, 3 - if FL starts pursuing you and it's close, hit the speed boost and then go back to job 2 to fill up the Pyrite again, and finally 4 - when your driver tells you to, use the last button to hop in the catapult and go up and smash the cannon you're on.

If everyone in the vehicles (and there should be pretty much a mixture of them. In 10 man 2 each, in 25 man, 5 each) does their jobs, this fight is pretty simple, even though it seems at times like it's just not going your way. Get good at the basics, and you can start leaving towers up.

Razorscale(optional): Ok, back to typical fighting stuff. You may have 3 rolls, MT, OT, or DPS. The only difference in MT and OT is whether you're tanking Razorscale or any Sentinals or other adds still up during the ground phases. In 25 man, you will probably have 2 OT to deal with adds, one specially for pulling out the sentinals, and the other just for the adds since there will be more adds left up when Razorscale drops.

Razorscale starts out in the air, and tunnelers (like the ones the dark iron Dwarves come out of) pop up and bring adds. If you're a tank, you're grabbing these adds and moving them into a central location (since there will be more than 1 tunneler) if you're DPS you'll be waiting until they're collected and then going in and mowing them down. First DPS priority will be the sentinals (big guys) the OT will typically pull them away from the rest of the adds so they can be single targeted by the Ranged dps or any spare melee. Several waves of these will spawn until deadly boss mods will announce that the turrets are ready. (You won't care about this. Someone else is in charge of these.) During this time the main thing to watch out for is the fire shots. There are two colors of fireballs that Razorscale launches at you. The blue and orange ones hit for barely any damage at all, and can be ignored, since you can't avoid them anyway. The pure blue ones, however, hit and then spawn a blue flame "void zone" on the ground where they hit. Avoid these at all costs, no matter who you are. Keep this up until the turrets are ready. Once the turrets are ready, they'll be shot and Razorscale will be brought down in reach of your viciously cool axe (or sword, I'm not prejudiced). If you're MT, you'll be grabbing Razorscale, if you're OT you'll catch the adds left up. If you're DPS at this point, you switch to Razorscale. The object here is to do AT LEAST 25% damage to her. While she's on the ground during these ground phases, she will not shoot the fire out, so everyone can burn dps like there's no stopping. At some point she'll lift back off, and the next air phase will begin. She'll keep doing this until she's at 50% health. If you want the fight to go quickly (and who doesn't) you will want to get the first 25% on the first ground phase, and get the second 25% on the second ground phase, afterwhich she won't go back up again, and we'll enter the second chapter of Razorscale. If you don't make it, then you'll end up with at least one more air/ground switchoff. To facilitate this speed dps, make sure that you have SUNDER at 5 stacks always (improves EVERYONE's dps) and make sure that you use big cooldowns early on in the first ground phase so that if you're lucky you'll have them to use again somewhere in the middle of the second one. I'm talking about Deathwish/Recklessness, and then Whirlwinds, I'm talking Rend, Shattering Throw and then Bladestorm, all that stuff. If you're tanking, you don't need to do anything but try to help keep your targets in place. Keep sunders up so the dps don't have to, keep Demoralizing shout up to help you live longer, etc. these phases aren't tests for you, they're for the dps.

Once you have her below 50% the MT and OT will basically dual tank Razor. First the dps should mow down any remaining adds to free up the OT for this. Razorscale will begin dropping more of the lovely blue flames, and will also put a debuff on the tank. The MT and OT will need to be aware of this debuff and taunt Razorscale off whenever 2 stacks are present. Basically 1 is acceptable, but as soon as it hits 2, the other tank needs to taunt. Each stack reduces armor by 20% and movement speed by 20%. As if that wasn't enough, the tanks will be trying to move her so that the dps don't have to stand in the blue fire puddles she's dropping everywhere. This is the part of the fight that tests you as a tank. The good news is, no more surprises. That's about all there is to worry about. She should go down pretty easy once you get the hang of that.

Ignis(optional): Ok so either you're a dps here and you can sleep through most of this, or you're a tank and you're going to pull your hair out. This fight will need either 2 or 3 tanks, depending on 10 or 25 man raiding party.

The fight from a MT perspective. You have one job: positioning Ignis. Ignis will need to be moved in a square/triangle/etc to give specific burn points for the OT's to use and you'll need to move anyway to keep from getting burned. Ideally, you will make this cool geometric figure in such a way that the dps can all stand directly in the middle of the room and never have to move.

The fight from an OT perspective. You are in charge of the iron construct that will be activated. If it's 10 man, you'll need to watch both sides, in 25 you can watch only one side. There are three tips I can give you. 1) each time Ignis activates a construct he'll say "Arise Soldiers!" and throw a spark up into the air that will arc towards whatever construct is being activated. Get him, but don't stray too far from the middle, because that's where you need him to come anyway. 2) Shockwave, Concussion blow, or having a druid that roots them in place will save your healers a ton of mana. You want them in the fire (preferably the most recent fire that was laid down) and you don't want to be in it. 3) when the constructs become molten, you'll see four things: first, they'll turn orange, second, they'll speed up, third they'll drop aggro and go for whomever, and fourth they'll hurt a lot more in an AoE. As soon as they go molten, you have to reacquire aggro and kite them to the nearest pool of water. Once you run into the water (and stay in the shallow part) announce to he dedicated ranged dps that you have a brittle construct and then get the heck away. It sounds simple until you try to do it.

the fight from a DPS perspective. Yawn. dps the heck out of the guy. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you might be put in the slag pot. If that happens, make sure you have some kind of something you can do to mitigate the damage he's going to do, even though it's not as bad as it was. I.e. equip a shield, switch to defensive stance and use shield wall, drink a potion, use enraged regeneration, etc. You can also be healed while you're in there, but bandages won't do you much good (as you're suffering from a dot). This used to be worse, and is now not as bad as it was.

XT-002: This guy is fun. The majority of the difficulty here rests on the healers. If you're MT, your job is to hold XT in place, and it feels like a basic tank and spank. We have found the best placement for XT is on one of the sides (we use the left) right between the two scrap piles. This way only the far two scrap piles spawn adds instead of all of them. If you're dps just whack the heck out of the guy. Save your cooldowns for the times when his heart comes out. The only time you have to be careful there is if you don't want to kill the heart (hard mode) in which case, you want to curb your 4K dps enough to keep the heart barely alive. If you're OT, then you're going to get a bunch of pummelers that you have to keep aggroed. And you can kite them, and you can play with them. Just have a good time. The only thing to continuously watch out for as dps is that there are types of "bombs" that XT casts on you, in either case, you need to run away from everyone else. each of them does damage to you, but does damage to everyone around you also. If you're the one with the bomb, you just get at least 20 yards away from everyone else, and the healers can keep you up no problem, if you don't, they have to try to keep everyone up, which is tough. There will also be tantrums that will cause raid wide damage that must be healed through. During these tantrums, if you have potions or something you can use to heal yourself (like enraged regeneration, Lifebloom, potions, etc) doing so will make it that much easier to keep you alive.

And a few phases of heart in/heart out and he goes down.

I'll post up some info on the Keepers of Ulduar later.

Basic Lvl 80 Fury Warrior Talent Build and discussion

Recently I was asked about this by a guildmate, so I thought I'd post it just in case.

Fury spec (18/51) not much room to move

Ok, so this spec is pretty much the least "forgiving" as you notice, you have 2, count them, 2 points to put somewhere else, however, depending on the builds of other warriors in your guild/raid, you may be able to shift some other points around.

Options:

 1/1 Anger Management -- IMO a good idea.  Gets you 20 rage/min all the time, slowing rage loss out of combat as well as helping you build rage in combat.  Works better than an extra point in Unbridled Wrath.

 You can choose to spend your points differently amongst

  Commanding Presence

  BloodSurge

  Heroic Fury

  Intensify Rage

  Improved Berserker Rage

  Improved Cleave

  Piercing Howl

But basically that's about all the wiggle room you have if you're going PvE.  Since you'll be wanting to stay in Berserker stance for as much time as possible (to reduce aggro, increase crit chance etc.) you'll want to shy away from strange things in the arms tree that require you to be in Battle Stance, and don't worry about any of the PvP talents that reduce healing on the people attacked or anything.

If you want to do something other than this, you might consider putting the two throw-away points that are currently in Tactical Mastery and place them somewhere else like in Improved Heroic Strike.  The reason I've gone with this way is for those off chances that I'll want to change stances (like in emergencies) especially if I need to tank for a few seconds to allow a battle rez on the MT.  I feel like that's worth more than reducing the cost of something I only throw to dump rage anyway.  Plus, I've glyphed for returning rage when my HS crits, so ultimately I think they're about equivalent.  You definitely don't need to worry about improving Charge or Rend, since you can't use those most of the time anyway, and the few times you do, you'll be making up less in dps/usefulness for that cost than you're losing for the talents you could have taken.

Fury Rotation:

  Pretty much you are going to use Intercept to charge, WW and Bloodthirst.  

  Pop Recklessness and/or Deathwish as long as you're sure the tank has aggro and as long as you're not going to be having problems that require them elsewhere.  The only other things you are going to be paying attention to are: (1) if Slam becomes instant because of Bloodsurge, go ahead and use it, (2) if Victory Rush is up, use it, (3) if you need to use Pummel because you're fighting KelThuzad or someone else that can be interupted, use that, (4) if your rage gets over 40 spam Heroic Strike or Cleave until you start to have rage problems again, (5) if you have a chance, put up those sunders, and (6) if you like your tanks, maybe throw a demoralizing shout once in a while (oh, and also (7) if you have nothing else to do throw in a Heroic Throw just for fun).  Then just wait for Execute to proc.  Once you're down to 20%, you don't want to spam Execute, but don't use any other rage dumps, just proceed with your rotation, and once rage hits 30-50+, use Execute and start over.

The main reason for that rotation is that it won't leave you raged starved constantly, but still put out a decent amount of damage.  

Warrior PvP info

Hi, I'm beginning some research into the best way for me to arena well.  I wanted to post some links in case anyone else is looking at having an Arms or Prot heavy build that they want to use for arenas or BG's.

WowWikki's Warrior PvP Guide

I thought this was a good overall guide, showing a lot of the major points you want to look out for.  However, I did notice that they were trying to throw in a few "skills" you aren't as likely to use much at first, such as Disarm, Recklessness, etc.  

Don't get me wrong, stance dancing isn't dead by any means, since they didn't implement the incredibly bad sounding stance change system, but in most situations you're having to weigh the cost of gcd's on how it get's spent.  If you're in a situation where you have low rage, (say 20 or so, unless you're talented to keep up to 30) then it might make sense to write a macro to stance to berserker, pop Recklessness, and then shift back to battle.  Even with the increase in the crit (which is nice, don't get me wrong), you definitely like the 10% extra armor ignored by your battle stance, and you don't want to be without it for long.  I just found that for now (I'm still new to PvP, remember) things are hectic enough and I don't know the best time to pop something like that.  Retaliation and Bladestorm (especially when accompanied with a glyphed Sweeping Strikes) I've about got the hang of, which are fantastic burst damage potential, and I know I still need other things in my arsenal.  I worked on a macro to allow me to spell reflect in a pinch, and I'm probably going to modify it to allow me to Shield Bash instead, since that is a lot better once I've closed to melee range.

I'll post more as I find them.

My Charge Card is now limping!

Ok, so yes, they've changed the mechanics of Juggernaut, and since I don't use the Glyph of Rapid Charge, I'd never notice any changes there.

So the previous changes only reduced the crit chance, and this is what I said then:

What I do want to mention quickly is that I notice that I'm sitting pretty at around 40% crit chance unbuffed as it is, so I'm still critting after a charge about 2/3 of the time anyway, and that's before any procs from any druids or Fury Warriors etc.  

So I think I'm fine.  It didn't add nearly as much uncertainty into my rotation, it just means that once in every 3 charges I make I see a weird number come up under my Mortal Strike damage that I have to look at twice to make sure I'm not crazy, since it's so much lower than all the other times.  Even still it strikes for about 2100+ damage, so it could be a lot worse.  

Now they've also increased the cooldown of Charge from 15secs to 20secs.  Whoah, now.  Warriors are already pretty "kiteable" by some classes, and charging is about all we can do to catch up sometimes.  Why is it that talents and glyphs for warriors are like Blizzards chance for us to elect "trade-offs"?  Other classes get full out benefits depending on their talents.  We get "Well, we're going to allow you to do this, BUT we're going to nerf something else if you take this ability."

As exciting as some of the changes to Warriors have been over the last year, the fact that so many of our good abilities are being reduced to "trades" is a little obnoxious.

What's worse, we aren't really afforded the chance, as in the case of Titan's grip.  Sure, we don't "have" to take it, but since all the talents in the Fury Tree kind of lead up to it, and lean heavily on it, not taking it is kind of like kicking yourself in the head: not only does it hurt, but it leaves you wobbly and probably lying on your back.

When should you execute? To spam or not to spam, that is the question.

Ok, so I've been looking at some numbers and here's my official information regarding when to execute as an Arms warrior.  

Execute is a funny ability.  Even though it scales up to give us a burst damage as high as 12K+, the actual damage/rage from a properly talented and glyphed Execute actually decreases the more rage you put into it.  The reason for this is that the first 10 rage (remember you have it properly talented?) which is spent to initiate the attack returns you the huge damage bonus of over 1400 + 20% of your attack power (I assume at the very least this is 3K +) so you're looking at an initial damage of 2K (before crits are taken into account) for the first 10 rage points (which you get back, by the way, so really it's even cheaper than that).  And once you add in the Glyph of Execution you took, you're really doing 2380 damage with those 10 rage points.

So it's pretty simple, 238 damage per rage > 38 damage per rage which is the additional rage that is added per rage point you have over the initial expense.  So once you get up to where you're spending 100 rage points and your damage is up in the 5800+ range, Notice that you're now getting only 58 damage per rage.  

Now, this comes with a tradeoff.  If, for example, you're using this ability in PvP, you want the high burst of damage, because it's harder to heal through.  Taking a 12K critical hit will completely wipe out most clothies, especially if it's preceded by a Mortal Strike + Rend + OP combo that wipes their effective healing to zilch.  So in PvP you want to wait until you're full of rage prior to using this, in order to increase your chance to kill the target.

In PvE, however, which you should do depends a lot on your rate of rage regeneration.  If you notice that you build rage fast enough to accumulate at least 62 rage in 1.5 -2 seconds (the global cooldown plus some possible lag waiting for Sudden Death to proc back your 10 rage) then you should definitely be waiting and doing an Execute every other global cooldown.  

If you don't generate rage that quickly, then you should be using Execute every gcd, because essentially, that's the amount of extra rage it takes for you to double your damage.  If, for example, you earn 20 rage per second, so over 2 seconds you would get 40 (ish) then you're better off spamming Execute every time it pops during those last 20% of the bosse's health.   Every time, that is, except the once every 15-18 gcd's where you need to refresh your Sunder stack, or if OP procs.  This is because OP is your best damage per rage attack doing 170% (check the talents, my friends) weapon damage and costing only 5 rage.   A crit with this attack can easily hit for 5K+ and even not crit for just under 2K, so compare the 400 damage per rage up to 1K+ damage per rage you get from Overpower to the 238 or less you get from Execute and you can easily see why that's the one attack you should use a gcd for.  In order to proc it, you may also want to spend one gcd every so often on a Rend also. 

So my basic rotation in PvE on most bosses after they hit the 20% is to choose:

OP (if it's up) > Sunder (if the stack is going to fall off) > Spam Execute > Mortal Strike or Rend if I feel like the rotation is getting boring.  Although, to be fair, Mortal Strike is fantastic earlier in the fights, but later on, it's not nearly as rage efficient as your low rage executes or Overpowers, so I'd stick with Rend if you get bored since it will proc your best attack occasionally.  Otherwise stick with the basics.

Threat building, what's the better way to go?

Since one of my jobs in any raid is tanking (I'm not fortunate enough to be a dps only warrior, if that's fortunate) I am always considering threat amounts and searching for ways to do it better.

I've been trying an unusual Protection spec lately that seems to be working very well. Allow me to explain:

Gurggy's (12/3/56) Tanking Spec

This is a little different from most of the "standard" cookie cutter specs I've seen in that it

a) doesn't take Deep Wounds (although I've considered that too) but 

b) instead takes the Improved Spell Reflection and fills up all the prot talents we know and love.

First let me say a word or two about deep wounds.  Since the patch, I think it's fair to say that deep wounds is really only viably good if your weapon damage is good.  Not that my Red Sword of Courage's 240 avg damage is pathetic, but the ticking for 40 damage per second is less impressive than when coupled with the mighty BoH and it's whopping 750 average damage that ticks at 125 per second.   In fact, notice that even with the 2.075 increase to threat from defensive stance (even coupled with the .8 threat modifier from battle/berserker (not improved) stance) we have

40*2.075 = 83 < 100 = 125*0.8

so essentially, this talent will generate less threat for you than it will for dps warriors that are using a good slow 2 hander to cause their damage, even taking proc rates etc. into account, mostly because any good dps warrior should be far more "critty" than you anyway.

I exclude from this any discussion about attack power, since dps warriors should also have you beat in terms of attack power also.

However, it's companion, Impale, does something interesting for us.  Specifically in its synergy with Incite and Improved Thunder Clap.   So, here's the way this works:

First of all, Thunder Clap generates threat with a factor modifier of 1.85 * damage.  In defensive stance, you then multiply this by another 2.075 (assuming the standard method of dividing all threat by 100) [Source], and because of Incite you have a fairly high chance to crit when you do this.  It hits everyone around you once, and thus is very good for maintaining aggro with multiple mobs.  

Notice the entire effect here:

Threat of bumped Thunder Clap = (300 + modifier based on AP damage) x1.3(Improved Thunder Clap) x2.2 (crit + Impale) x 1.85 (built in) x 2.075 (Defensive Stance) gives us

(Dmg) x 10.979

If you couple that with Armsman enchant, you're talking about an 11.198 modifier to your threat from your base Thunder Clap damage when you crit, which you do 15% more often than you normally would.

Now, that part of that selection of talents may seem minor, but if you reduce the extra 20% damage from crits from abilities, those numbers drop to 9.981 and 10.180 with Armsman. 

That's a 10% increase in threat generated from an equivalently talented Thunder Clap without using Impale. 

I'm not even going to start in on the equivalent discussion for Heroic Strike, which you should be using whenever you hit Revenge because of the glyph.   Even though it's insta-threat isn't quite as dramatic as the Thunder Clap's, it's still a sizeable increase.  

So, while Deep Wounds is nice (and it is, don't get me wrong) the fact that it's tied to our weapon damage is part of why my threat generated from that ability wasn't even getting up anywhere close to the 10% of overall threat that it used to.  

Now, why take Improved Spell Reflect instead of whatever extra threat Deep Wounds would generate?  

Pre-Ulduar, the only time this talent came in handy was Eye, during phase 2 of Malygos.  Most of the rest of the time, bosses are attacking with area effect damage spells that aren't targetted, and therefore can't be reflected.  

However, in Ulduar, you'll find LOTS of places where mobs (even trash mobs) fire off spells that individually target people based on proximity, and in some cases, (for example: the displacement device which is created by these guys) the ability spawned "mob" can't be individually targetted, but spell reflect can hit and destroy it immediately, even when the tank is only close to whomever it is targetting.

I never heard so many people so happy about Improved Spell Reflect until I started raiding Ulduar.  

You don't really need every tank in your party to have this, so if you have 2 warrior tanks going along, and one of them has traded out for Deep Wounds instead, they'll produce maybe 4-6% more threat than you which will be really good for dps race bosses, but I would rather have the trade-off ability during most of the raid.  

I happen to be the only warrior tank that goes along on "most" raids, at the moment, so for me this is a no-brainer choice.  If we had another consistent warrior tank, I think I'd flip them for it.  After all, an extra 4%-6% threat is better than nothing.

Raid dps Arms spec for 80.

Ok, so I've been playing a bit with my cross-purpose spec, and I can say that I don't hate it, but since my guild is going to be doing Ulduar 25 for the first time, I'm thinking about going ahead and switching to a raid specific build.  

In light of that, I present my "alternate" raid version of my Arms spec:

Gurggy's (and it seems to be popular) 54/17/0 Raid spec

Dailies, dailies. . .

So I want to start a push to convince Blizzard to add a "feat of strength" to their list of achievements.  Specifically, I'd like to add

"Overachiever" - "In a single action, complete the requirements needed to complete more than 5 achievements simultaneously."

Specifically I want this, because I'm going to be doing it in about a week and a half. 

Oh, I know you may think that I have exactly 6 I can get at one time, but nay, I have planned carefully and I'll be awarded 7 achievements at once.  And lest you think that more is impossible, I beg to differ.  In fact, if you plan it right you would possibly be able to do the same ones (give or take) as I am, and "maybe" even get 1 or 2 more at the same time.  Of course reputation gains cause some difficulty in doing this, but I think it might be possible.

I'm actually hoping to take a screenshot of the event so that I can post it for the archives. 

Be looking out for me.

Ok, Who ran up the "Charge" card?

So, I'm looking at the PTR notes, and I see two things that make me think someone has been charging more than we can afford.

Warriors

• Juggernaut: Critical strike chance bonus reduced to 25%, down from 100%.

Items

• Glyphs
• Glyph of Rapid Charge: Reduced to 7%, down from 20% cooldown reduction to Charge.

and what this leads me to ask is, who ran up the charge card?

So the first one, I think I get, even though I can't say I'm happy about it.  It adds that much extra uncertainty into my rotation I was just getting used to, but I can just amend my earlier dual purpose spec and make a raid dps spec only and switch it out to do PvP just like I was having to do back before dual specs, which will give me some extra tricks I can use to put damage down.

The second one, though has me baffled.  Bear in mind, that charge is on a 15 second cooldown.  So the 20% reduction to our cooldown made charge something that was doable every 12 seconds instead of 15 secs.  So apparently that 3 second cooldown reduction has caused so much QQ that we had to do away with it quickly to be replaced with the FAR more reasonable 1 second cooldown reduction?

Now, from a protection warrior standpoint, I can "almost" see this, except that I still don't.  For protection warriors at least charging has the benefit of removing movement impairing effects, so that gives us another way to get out of entangles, freezes, etc.  And I suppose that being able to do that every 12 seconds could be lightyears worse than allowing us to do that every 14 seconds, but I have a hard time seeing it.   For Arms warriors, though (which it seems this is directed at) if you're PvPing against an Arms warrior and you think he's charging too often, just entangle him.  What's the big deal?   And if you're against a Fury warrior who has taken Glyph of Charge, well, then just thank your lucky stars you're against such a noob and pwn him!

I add to that the fact that I always thought Glyph of Charge was a waste of a good glyph spot that could go to Glyph of Revenge/Glyph of blocking/Glyph of Heroic Strike /Glyph of Shockwave, I find myself really wondering what the big gripe about charging was.  Clearly someone is very upset that warriors can charge.  

So just remember, you warriors out there, to charge only when you've got the cash in the bank to pay for it.

One note about my Arms talent spec:

I fully realize that there are some talents (a la Improved Slam and Improved Cleave) I could put points in to increase my dps output, but I don't really see myself utilizing Heroic Strike etc, and for the time being I don't want to build a PvE only Arms spec just to have to constantly switch it back and forth whenever I do BG's or arenas, so this is a more "dual purpose" spec, and I know I could make a couple talent changes in order to improve it's performance in Raids.

Arms/Fury Talent spec post 3.1

So I'm not finding a lot of posts regarding talent specs, and just in case, I wanted to post mine to help out anyone who might be looking.

Gurggy's (54/17/0)  Arms spec.

The linkless version (for the link impaired):

Arms tree: (54 points)

1st tier - (5/5) Deflection, (2/2) Improved Rend

2nd tier - (2/2) Improved Charge, (1/3) Iron Will

3rd tier - (2/2) Improved Overpower, (2/2) Impale, (3/3) Deep Wounds

4th tier - (3/3) 2 Handed Weapon Spec., (3/3) Taste for Blood

5th tier - (5/5) Poleaxe Spec., (1/1) Sweeping Strikes

6th tier - (2/2) Trauma

7th tier - (2/2) Second Wind*, (1/1) Mortal Strike, (2/2) Strength of Arms

8th tier - (1/1) Juggernaut, (3/3) Improved Mortal Strike, (2/2) Unrelenting Assault

9th tier - (3/3) Sudden Death, (1/1) Endless Rage, (2/2) Blood Frenzy

10th tier - (5/5) Wrecking Crew

11th tier - (1/1) Bladestorm

Fury Tree: (17 points)

1st tier - (3/3) Armored to the Teeth, (2/2) Booming Voice, (5/5) Cruelty

2nd tier - (1/5) Unbridled Wrath

3rd tier - (1/1) Piercing Howl, (3/3) Blood Craze**

4th tier - (2/2) Improved Execute

* = placed instead of Improved Slam to allow for PvP

** = placed instead of Improved Cleave to allow for PvP

So rather than simply posting this, I'll share some of my thinking below regarding the difference between this and some others I've seen.

I have seen a lot of people who are taking all the talents they can grab in the Arms tree, and this is nice, but . . . . from playing for a while I think the best choice is to pick your winners.  For example, I had 2 different choices I had to make here, and I elected to lose a little PvE damage in favor of having a more PvP friendly build that could still do PvE.

My winners are: Mortal Strike, Rend, Execute, and Overpower (the biggies in the Arms race)

Because these are my winners I want to do right by them.  

So as you can see, in favor of Execute I've taken Sudden Death(3/3), I've taken Improved Execute (2/2) and I've glyphed for Execution.   I've chosen to keep execute as my "occasional" rage dump in favor of trying to improve heroic strike, and I've run the numbers.  See my earlier post for some discussion of this.  

In favor of Rend I've taken Improved Rend (2/2), Trauma (2/2), and for it's connection to Overpower, I've taken Taste for Blood (3/3).  You may notice I've elected NOT to use Glyph of Rending, and I'll say a bit about that later.

In favor of Mortal Strike, I've taken the Glyph as well as the talents Improved Mortal Strike (3/3) and Juggernaut (1/1), and notice that Trauma (2/2) also has a connection to this as well.

Now many of these are basic and givens.  In fact, I think it's fair to say that you should pick your specialization based on what kind of weapon you use.  I, for example, typically use my trusty BoH, so I'm taking axe specialization.  If I were to find one of the awesome maces or swords in Ulduar, I'd consider switching over.  Of course, if I got a shot at some of the axes or polearms, I'd stay right where I am.  (the polearms would be funny since I have 1/400 skill with them at the moment)

So where were my real choices?  Well, not taking Anger Management was one.  I talked to some Arms warriors and they said that rage was seriously not an issue any more.  I'm glad I listened, because they were right.

The other choices were basically down to PvE vs PvP.  Not knowing for sure whether I wanted to try to do PvP in the same spec or not, I elected to do a PvP spec that I felt would still be useful in PvE, so I opted to put my 2 "free" points in the arms tree into Second Wind (2/2) rather than Improved Slam.

Obviously if I were aiming this for pure PvE, I'd go with slam every time, but since I have a lot of damage dealers already, I wanted to add a purely PvP element to it since it looks to me like something I definitely want in PvP, and who knows, it may come in handy in PvE occasionally too.

So why did I pass up Improved Hamstring?  Well, yes, I know that it's vital, but those 3 points when to Sudden Death that improves my Execute.  Remember I said we needed to pick our winners?  I chose Execute over either Heroic Strike or Hamstring, both of which could have taken those same 3 points of talents and the glyph slot.

The other choice I made was in the fury tree.  I needed to get to Improved Execute (again, because Execute is one of my winners) and I needed 5 more points to get there.  The whole first tier of Fury is kind of a no brainer, but where to put the rest?

I elected to take Piercing Howl (1/1) for two reasons.  First it's kind of an homage to the 3 points and glyph I couldn't put into hamstring.  It is afterall kind of an AoE hamstring ability.  Secondly, because there have been MANY times in Naxx when whomever was tanking the zombie chow was extremely grateful for having put one point in Piercing howl, and I've seen situations in Ulduar so far where I'd be glad to have it too.   Razorscale being one, and XT being another.

Even still I had 4 more points to put somewhere, so I had to choose between Improved Cleave and Blood Craze (3/3).  This was another really tough call.  One is sort of both directions, the other is pretty much all PvP.  In the end, I decided that I didn't want to have to try to hit Cleave every chance I got.  Instead I chose to use the Glyph of Sweeping Strikes together with my original winners to "simulate" cleave often enough to get me by.  After all, a free Sweeping Strikes followed by a bladestorm does a lot more AoE damage than any number of Cleaves in a row during the same time frame, even glyphed and improved.

And my final point I stuck blindly into Unbridled Rage which I see as the biggest waste of time in the Fury talent tree mainly because when I put this spec together I was somewhat uncertain whether or not rage might turn out tougher to manage than I thought, so I figured I'd stick a little more into rage generation just to be on the safe side.

Ok, so I haven't gotten to PvP at all with this spec yet, but I'm looking forward to it.  I can say that in PvE it seems to be doing just fine.  I'm outperforming some Fury warriors that refused to switch (but are really good at their talent spec), and I can definitely hold my own in that regard.

My primary attack sequence right now depends a little on what the pull is.  For single target pulls, I use "Charge, Rend, Mortal Strike, .. Put sunders up.. (wait for whichever happens next, OP, MS, or Execute) use the next one.  etc.  Rend only needs to be refreshed once every 15 seconds, so I throw one of those in every 5th or 6th button, and I may add TC to part of my rotation just to keep the extra debuffs up.  If it's a boss pull, I'll blow one Shattering throw right after sunders are up if the encounter will last more than 5 minutes, or I'll wait until later if not.  And if all is going according to plan, the basic rotation becomes

OP > Execute > MS > Rend 

The reason for this selection is that (a) OP has the shortest cooldown.  If I throw OP I only have to wait 1 sec instead of the 1.5 sec gcd.  (b) If Execute is up, no kidding, I'm sometimes throwing executes off that hit for 12K+ and even when I use minimal rage, I'm hitting for 7K+ damage each.  Remember my discussion about spamming execute once the target gets to 20%?  It goes REALLY well.

For multiple target pulls (trash etc) I use a slightly different sequence.  "Charge, Rend, MS (looks the same so far, huh?) TC (unless the tank is a warrior), Sweeping Strikes, Bladestorm"

then I just watch everyone lay down and die.  Once the Bladestorm is over, if there is anyone still up, I usually have OP and/or Execute activated and I start mowing down the survivors.

Make sure you give the tank some "lead-in" time before you do this.  Remember you aren't in Improved Berserker Stance anymore, so your threat generation is at 100% instead of 90%.

So in a pinch, I'll say this:  If you're planning on doing PvE only with your arms build, then I'd say go with Improved Cleave and Improved Slam.  Why not equip yourself with two more damage dealers?  But otherwise, I'd leave the rest the same.

Arms for PvE

So I find myself contemplating how I can make my  Arms spec more appropriate for PvE.  

First of all, let me say that Arms damage right now is, to quote a tree friend of mine, "just SICK".  I ran some 5 mans last night, so I wasn't really buffed.  No flasks, no food, just me and my little ol' spec, and I was still averaging over 3K dps, and considering that's about the second time I've done group dps with this spec, I think that's looking very promising.

So the one thing that battle stance has always lacked is convenient access to an interrupt.  

Not that battle stance lacks an interrupt, mind you, because "Shield Bash" is available from battle stance, but to use "Shield Bash" you have to have a shield, and shields are notoroiously hard to come by when all your dps abilities want a 2-Hander to do the most damage.

So this leaves me two possibilies (foregetting entirely the possibility that Blizz will make Pummel available in Battle stance, since that may be too much to hope for):

Either a macro to 

*equip a one-hand axe, and shield

*cast shield bash

*re-equip my trusty BoH

or

*stance change to Berserker Stance

*use Pummel

*stance change back to Battle Stance

Of the two, I think I prefer the first option, and as that same tree friend of mine pointed out, this would allow me to add an option to that macro to use spell reflect sometimes instead of shield bash.

Executing with Arms

Ok, so I've briefly put together some numbers on the cost/benefit to going for Execute vs. using Heroic Strike.

We'll assume in both cases that we've essentially talented and/or glyphed for each depending.

Ok, so in the Execute camp, here are the mechanics:

1st - Talents in Sudden Death, Improved Execute and Glyph of Execution

Mechanics:

-- Sudden death will proc infrequently, but at 9%, it will still happen many times during a long boss fight.  If we assume about 3200 AP, then the "maximum" damage you can do with an early execute will be about 3200 damage (give or take) at a cost of 20-30 total rage, making the damage per rage cost = 160 dpr.  If fired at 10 rage (the minimum you can use) the damage will be 2500 (give or take) at a cost of 0-10 rage.  That's correct, 0-10 rage.  The mechanics on Sudden death are configured so that each time you use execute, it "rewards" you 10 rage when it's done, so if you spend exactly 10 rage, you get that refunded to you, making the cost free.  

-- At endgame this comes into play as well.  The only cooldown you have to worry over here is the gcd, since Execute has no inherent cooldown.  Since you can use Execute at 10 rage, and since at 10 rage Execute is free, once the target hits 20% health, you can essentially SPAM execute for free, dealing approximately 2500 damage every 1.5 second global cooldown on top of your white strikes.  Of course, you'll probably do a lot more than this, because all those white strikes will be generating rage, but make no mistake, there's no point in pausing with this build, because the maximum damage you can do with Execute at full rage is about 5800 (give or take) and if it takes more than 3 seconds to completely fill your rage bar, you're better off going with 2-3 lower rage Executes than trying to get the single burst from full. 

Now in the Heroic Strike Camp:

1st -- Talents in Improved Heroic Strike and Glyph of Heroic Strike.

Mechanics:

-- During combat, you can use Heroic strike any time you wish, spamming it any time you have the rage to burn, there is no need to wait for a proc chance.  However, using Heroic strike has a 12 rage cost, and only does (again assuming about 3200 AP and a fairly good weapon) about 2030 damage on average.  Now, if we further assume a 40% crit rate, then we can assume that 40% of the time you'll be recovering 10 rage points from using it which "technically" lowers the cost to 8 rage, which makes this an impressive 253.75 damage per rage ability, but we have to include the 'hidden' costs as well.  Note that HS is not an instant attack, and note that you do not gain rage from an HS like you would from the white strike that would ordinarily be happening.  This also has to be factored in.  While rage generation is not typically a problem, rage generation while spamming HS is very difficult, as your white strikes are not bringing up your rage totals.

So in conclusion we can see that, ultimately, going with Execute over Heroic Strike as an Arms warrior makes good PvE sense.  During combat, you still have plenty of abilities to fire to keep yourself busy, and you can always blow a few HS's when you have the chance, but the ability to add an instant Execute during the lead in phase without disrupting rage generation from white strikes will keep your rage at good levels to pop for emergencies, while at the same time allowing unreal damage potential in the last 20% health on bosses.  

Growing into my Arms

So after some debate, and largely due to the clear advantages Arms has at the moment, I've elected to switch my dps spec to Arms.  Since I've never done arms before, this will take some getting used to, I fear, but I'm working on it with some guild mates and other friends to find a rotation that is both useful and doable.

So far, my current rotation seems to be something like:

(for one mob)

Charge, Rend, Mortal Strike 

If Overpower or Execute pop, fire those, otherwise, go back to Mortal Strike and Slam.

(for multi-mobs)

Charge, Rend, Mortal Strike (start with the primary and give the tank a few seconds to build some threat across the others, if you're the tank or you're soloing, just do it), sweeping strikes, bladestorm,

If Overpower or Execute pop, fire those, otherwise use Cleave, Mortal Strike and Slam

Rage dump = Heroic Strike?  I still haven't been able to determine fully whether this is still true or not.  At least one of the people I've spoken with said they never bother with Heroic Strike anymore now that they have Sudden Death, Improved Execute, and Glyph of Execution they can blow Execute many times during a battle, and it seems to be working.  

So far the biggest "options" I seem to be encountering are how to effectively manage my talents to accomplish what I want to do.  The more I play with it, the more I'm not entirely sure.  While Arms is still pretty wonderful, I've been facing several arms warriors in bg's etc again, and once again it seems that arms still can't really get through the protection barricade.  However, arms dps in raids is clearly superior now to anything Fury has to offer.  For that reason, I'm thinking of designing a purely PvE arms spec to use in raids, which will limit some of the things I had taken to facilitate some PvP and soloing.  

The Off tanking job for Iron Council (Warriors)

Hey, so even though I haven't been able to complete the iron council with my 10 man group yet, we fully expect this Sunday to be the slam dunk.  Of course, I can't be there, but that's another story, and has nothing to do with this.

If you're the only protection warrior in the group, you can expect to have the weirdest job ever against the Iron Council.  Your job is to keep Stormcaller occupied, until he dies.  It really doesn't make any difference if you're MT/OT, whatever.  The ONE thing we have over the other classes is our abundance of interrupts and stuns.  We may not do nearly as much damage (I can sometimes see my dps at about 1/2 that of DK or especially bear tanks) and we may not have area effect "ticking" threat builders like paladins and DK's, but give us a target who is both stunnable and interruptible, and you've got a fight on your hands.   

Just in case you didn't read my earlier post, I will reiterate the following.  Remember that as protection warriors you may have a lot of interrupts and stuns, but you have ONLY 2 silencing abilities, and they're both dependent on you having taken "gag order" in your talent tree.  Both shield bash and heroic throw will silence your target for 3 seconds (as well as preventing casting in the same school for longer than that).  

The reason I mention this, is that you'll need to use these two abilities to maneuver Stormcaller.  He is as caster as caster gets.  If he can cast, he will, and his spells hurt, and they hurt everyone, not just you.  So you have to carefully meter out your interrupts, use your silences to move him when needed, and make sure that he never gets a spell off (or if he does, at least don't let it go on for long).  

The only issue from Stormcaller's abilities has to do with when he shouts "Run away, little girl!" just EXACTLY in the same voice as Sartherion, that ability isn't interruptible or stunnable etc., but it also only has a 30 foot range, so run away and once it's over, charge back in to prevent the followup cast he's started doing.

Other than that there is only one other issue to do with Stormcaller.  If you're killing the big guy first, when he goes down the medium guy will use Death Rune which drops a huge bad void zone right underneath you.   If this happens, make sure you get out of there, but make sure you have at least one of your silences available when you do, otherwise, he'll just sit there in the middle of the death rune and wipe your party.

Provided you're doing the little guy last routine, once the middle guy goes down you're still going to be on "keep the little guy from casting" duty, even if you're not tanking him.  When he goes into his "air" phase, you'll probably be running away, so make sure you can still get to him with charge or intercept once he comes down.