Gurggalicious: Gurggy's Grill

Day 2 of Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone

2010-10-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

Last night our guild dipped it's toe back into ICC to see what it was like. Mind you, none of us had beta accounts so we really only had our experience on the PTR as preparation for this patch, and since we raid pretty solidly during the week, we really didn't have a lot of time on the PTR even.

I ended up tanking, but I would have done that by choice, as I'm not entirely happy with the general "feel" of the fury rotation anymore. I don't know if it's the ability queue system interfering with my ability to capitalize on procs, or the fact that we have so much more of our rotation linked to unstable procs than before, but one way or the other, I've found that even when the RNG swung my way and the numbers were good, those "good feeling" rotations didn't last more than one or two stretches. It's a strange combination of having a very tight rotation (BT every 3 seconds, means one button press in between, which is supposed to be one of Raging Blow, Instant Slam (both procs, and uncertain) or WW for multi-target situations, and hit Heroic Strike or Cleave when you have 50 rage or more -- yet another proc) along with having so many parts of that tight rotation that can't be counted on to be available. On the PTR I ran once through Heroic UK and literally only used Raging Blow about 3 total times. Not because I didn't want to, but because I never enraged. Admittedly, I could have used Berserker Rage or Death Wish to patch over some of that, but I wanted to see what the rotation felt like without having to resort to using cooldowns. I would go into combat, hit BloodThirst, and by the time I got another button to press (usually Bloodthirst again) most of the pull was dead. I lost count of the number of times I finally enraged and had the opportunity to hit Raging Blow at just about the same time that everything died. I normally am a huge fan of warriors sundering just to help, and I've made MANY posts and comments to that effect, and suddenly I find that I don't want to sunder any more. It doesn't help as much as it used to, and more importantly, I don't have the gaps in the basic rotation to slot it in any longer.

Tanking, on the other hand, was great. I did not find it to be tougher than it was Monday, just slightly different. I definitely had to go into it with an open mind, but once I was comfortable, it was really very much the same as it had been.

If I had any complaints at all about tanking, it was that I occasionally felt like I was made of tissue paper, but I found myself wondering if this was a bug or something. I would go for long stretches of time and be perfectly fine, and then all of a sudden, I'm dead with no warning at all. I went back through my combat logs and I only see evenly spaced hits coming in ranging in the 6-8k damage and not even too frequently, so since I'm reasonably sure I was being healed at the time, I really can't say what happened. I don't see any huge spikes, nothing.

But so much of that kind of thing will happen, we encountered at least 3 bugs just getting up to halfway through the blood quarter that we're glad we only decided to bring a 10 man group to raid with. As an example, during the Gunship battle, one of the Alliance sailors (that should have been dead) apparently went invisible and came onto Deathbringer's Rise with us. All through combat it was attacking some of our ranged dps, and we couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It also kept putting us back into combat after we wiped making it impossible for us to rez or even take the transport to the rise (which we can't walk to). Finally someone found the spot that the invisible sailor was in and we killed him and things went smoother.

But all in all, things went much smoother than I'd have thought. Bosses went down very quickly, which had me a little concerned. Damage numbers weren't really "higher" than usual, but our 10 man was setting speed records on every boss we downed, and half our dps were really not our "best" dps. No one was over 11k, including our lead Fury warrior who usually sits pretty comfortably at 18-20k sustained average with the ICC buff.

If you're worried about the 4.0 patch and it's effects on the game until December, let me caution you to wait. They're going to fix all these strange inconsistencies, because the last thing Blizzard wants to do is tick off everyone who plays one particular class and lose that richness of uniqueness that makes the game fun.

I can understand if Fury warriors are having a tough time right now, I am too. They've already announced that they're buffing our numbers, but for me it's more of a feel issue. I'm just not happy with my basic rotation yet, and until I can get comfortable there, I don't know that having bigger numbers will help as much as they might think. I know when I was dpsing I was seeing melee damage at 30%-38% of my overall damage, and that just hurts my feelings. At that point it almost feels like I shouldn't bother even hitting buttons, since just standing in place does almost as much damage as trying to accomplish something. But, this is now common knowledge, and they're already fixing coefficients and adding to baseline damage of abilities and doing everything they can to make this right for us and ret pallies and kitties. I don't know if rogues are suffering at all, and I know that DK's are still seeing massive numbers, so those all seem ok.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to welcome little Perppy to my 80 club. In addition to my two other plate wearing alter-egos, I now have a fun loving little rogue of my own to play with.

Of course, she literally just hit 80 on Monday, so this may be the perfect opportunity for me to take some time and find out how to play a rogue post 4.0.1, since I won't have the pre-patch misconceptions clouding my judgement.

Some Patch 4.0.1 Warrior notes for PvE

2010-10-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

Hello. I spent some time testing on the PTR and also researching through information on EJ and others, and here is basically what I've gleaned about how Fury and Protection will work for secondary stats.

Fury priorities in order:

Hit Softcap (still 5%), Expertise Softcap (26)
Fuzzy area (Hit to a "reasonable" level, not sure what that is, then Strength)
Strength, and Mastery
Crit
Haste

Basically, what most people are saying is a 'good' idea is:
(1) make sure you're wearing plate, wearing only plate adds 5% to all stats.
(2) reforge as much haste as you can to hit rating, at least enough to get a "comfortable level of rage income" whatever that means. If you lack expertise rating, use some of this budget to get to soft cap.
(3) Gem everything you have for Strength, but go ahead and match sockets, i.e. use Strength/Crit to match yellow sockets, or Strength/Hit to match blue sockets.
(4) enchants should stay about like they are, but if you have enchants that add hit/expertise, etc. and you don't need the rating, and there's a better option, get that.
(5) I haven't been able to find any indication of whether mastery is desirable enough to forego Strength or Hit for, but since the only way to get mastery right now is by reforging, and people seem to be agreeing that we need a lot of hit rating, I'm guessing that at 80 we're not supposed to spend a lot of time worried about mastery rating. We may investigate this some and see if we can get a better idea how to include this.

Protection priorities in order:

Hit rating to soft cap (8%), expertise rating (as much as you can get, hopefully softcapped)
Stamina
Strength
Parry/Dodge (basically the same, but Parry has a talent that edges it out if you take it)
More Expertise until hard cap
Mastery (people are saying that mastery is about 2/3 the value of other mitigation types right now, so this is pretty much last for us until they change their minds)

So the 'basic idea' at this point (from what I've seen and read) is to

(1) reforge to hit expertise and hit caps
(2) any additional reforging that you feel you want to do either put into block rating (I think this is still available) or dodge or parry, and probably parry will be the go-to stat for a while here.
(3) gem for stamina. It "may" still be advisable to look at socket bonuses, but stamina will cause your vengeance to scale, and your gear should have a lot more dodge/parry than before. If you do try to get socket bonuses, use the standard stamina/hit, stamina/expertise, stamina/dodge, and stamina/parry gems, unless you feel you need some crit rating or something.
(4) otherwise we're pretty much the same as before.

I'll apologize in advance to any Arms warriors we have, as I haven't really spent a lot of time looking into your new designs. I will try to do that at some point, but from what I've heard, while Arms is "closer" to being viable in PvE content, it's still behind Fury by enough that most people aren't really looking at it seriously yet.

Some Pre-Cataclysm Warrior Tank Specs (Guesses, but well educated ones)

2010-10-06T14:14:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a guild mate ask me for some advice on speccing out his warrior tank after patch 4.0.1 hits and it started me thinking that perhaps it would be easier to put my thoughts here so anyone that wanted could read them too.

To begin with, here are a couple links to "mostly" current PTR quality talent trees:

Wowhead

Mmo-Champion

Personally, I like the wowhead calculator better as it also lists Mastery etc. in the beginning exactly as it will appear in game.

Now to the trees. I want to point out some specific talents in the protection tree, some good some bad, but all noteworthy.

Must Haves:

Toughness (Tier 1 3/3) may not be exciting, but it's a must. Tanking in Cataclysm is looking hard enough without turning down free armor rating.
Gag Order (Tier 2 2/2) hasn't really changed much, apart from the reduction in the Heroic Throw CD (an amazing change), but it's still 100% necessary. Control is the name of the game, and we don't have any other way to control casters. If it makes you feel better, pretend it's Death Grip for Warriors.
Last Stand (Tier 3 1/1) is an oldy, but you'll need every cd you can muster, and this is still nothing that can be skipped.
Bastion of Defense (Tier 3 2/2) is a new talent, and a Cataclysmically original must-have. This talent takes the place of Improved Defensive Stance, but with some differences. Among other things, this talent now eliminates the need to worry about becoming defense capped (which is good, since defense is gone). The less exciting changes here are that it no longer reduces damage taken by 6%, and the enrage chance has been reduced to 20%. Don't worry too much, though, they've added a new Vengeance mechanic that should be picking up where this enrage effect dies off.
Warbringer (Tier 3 1/1) in WotLK was a decent talent and very useful, but in Cataclysm you're going to need the ability to react and stay mobile more than ever. They've still left the restrictions on removing the movement impairments to only with Intervene, but I can see this being something no warrior tank will be functioning well without since our AoE threat mechanics have been tuned down significantly.
Improved Revenge (Tier 4 2/2) has been moved up in the tree, but still does the same thing. Threat has been an issue, and this is one threat talent you're going to want no matter what, even though in the past it has been debatable. This will be a mandatory talent for the same reason glyph of Cleave is going to become a staple on tanks in Cataclysm.
Devastate (Tier 4 1/1) just like before you'll want this key ability. With sunder stacks being less important than before, your dps will really not be interested in applying this much, so not only is it up to you, but you need the threat building action.
Heavy Repercussions (Tier 4 2/2) snuck into the talent tree. This was an ability that was tied directly in with Shield Block back when the damage from Shield Slam came from block value. Now that they've been separated, this talent will allow you to not lose this important burst threat ability.
Sword and Board (Tier 6 3/3) will still be mandatory.
Shockwave (Tier 7 1/1) hasn't really ever been in question, but now that Thunderclap no longer brings with it the kind of snap aggro it used to, Shockwave is the only remaining AoE ability we have to keep large groups under control. It does good damage, and generates good threat. In Cataclysm it's a must-have.

Don't Takes:

Safeguard (Tier 6 2/2) probably looks about the same to you, and it is. Intervene is definitely a useful ability, but on a raid tank if you're having to intervene people, things are already out of control, and perhaps your two talent points should have been spent getting something to keep things under control in the first place. Although this talent sounds like it could have so many uses, the fact that it requires distance (although I heard they are removing a minimum distance from cataclysm for intervene, so that may change things) and the fact that there is a taunt associated with it kind of stuffs this into the category of something you'll "use occasionally during tank-swapping fights where you don't have to stand right on top of each other" and right off the top of my head, I can't think of even one from previous content that fit this bill. Not to mention that when you intervene someone, you also take the next two hits from that mob, and the damage reduction barely lasts longer than the time you're getting yourself hit from them. Not terribly worthwhile in my opinion. Possibly more useful in PvP.

Beyond that, here are the way I'd likely distribute talents depending on my intention:

Soak Tank - High Survivability: Level 80 (2/3/31) Level 85 (5/3/33)
Additions here include:

Incite 3/3 - This looks to be a very promising increase threat move for single targets.
Shield Mastery 2/2 - big time important, decreased cd's on all your great defensive cd's
Vigilance 1/1 - Typically Soak Tanks aren't the ones that are being targeted, so their rage generation suffers. With the change to vigilance, this is now the perfect tool for Soak Tanks and Add tanks.
Hold the Line 2/2 - This one can probably be traded out if you don't feel it's getting enough use. It requires being attacked and if you're not parrying anything in your encounters, it may be best to swap these for Blood and Thunder to help the MT with sustaining threat on spawns.
Field Dressing 2/2 and Blood Craze 3/3 from the other two trees are pretty desirable, at least until you know for sure whether your healers are having difficulties or not. If it turns out that they're not, you should see if you can swap these for talents like Cruelty or War Academy.

Heroic Tank - All Around Tank for 5 mans: Level 80 (5/0/31) Level 85 (8/0/33)
Additions here include:

Thunderstruck 2/2 and Blood and Thunder 2/2, and eventually Deep Wounds 3/3 again all intended to make Pugging at least a little less painful, along with Blitz and a couple points in Shield Mastery to help with rage generation and pull control.

Main (Boss) Tank - High Single Target Threat, Moderate Survivability: Level 80 (3/2/31) Level 85 (8/2/31)
Additions here include:

Cruelty 2/2, War Academy 3/3 for added threat
Shield Mastery 3/3 for extra rage generation
Hold the Line 2/2 since you'll be parrying often
Impending Victory, since you'll actually be in a position to use this more often than the other tanks (except the Soak Tank, who also has it) and the combination with War Academy is just extra nice.

My Favorite Upcoming Cataclysm Talent Tree and Why

2010-09-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

A while back there was a blue post somewhere that asked us to tell them which talent tree we think they did the best job on and why.

At the time I was still trying to assimilate the changes to us warriors and hadn't really had enough time to poke around to find out more, but now that I have I wanted to share my opinions on this.

In my opinion the best upcoming talent tree re-design is the paladin trees. Now, in terms of feel of filling it out, it's approximately the same as the others, but what really distinguishes it is their better overall design when compared to current talent trees.

Let's look at a couple comparisons to understand why I say this. Let's look at the holy tree now and then.

Right now the "pinnacle" of the holy tree is beacon of light. Beacon is something that no holy paladin can really be effective without, so this makes sense. Currently you can't learn beacon of light as a holy paladin until you hit level 60, but once you do, you've got a wealth of options as to how to proceed from there.

In Cataclysm, you'll be able to get beacon of light at level 39. Admittedly, healing will be working differently, but this advancement has the effect of making you "FEEL" OP whether you are or not. I mean, you get to have the current "pinnacle" talent at 39. In fact, going one step beyond that, the next several tiers of the tree just feel like they're improving on that whole tree. A talent to improve how well beacon works (Tower of Radiance) an extra heal buff (Conviction) and a completely new "pinnacle" for the talent tree, the AoE heal that paladins are still talking about (Light of Dawn).

In fact, if you look at the other trees, you'll see this kind of careful redesign at work there too. Hammer of Justice is now an 11 point talent. You have so many new chewy things in the protection tree above Hammer of Justice it just makes it feel like it's shiny and new. The one criticism I have with the upcoming protection tree? Ardent Defender being made the new "pinnacle" talent. However, there were some critical changes to how Ardent Defender works that might make it better, but it's a tough call right now. Personally (since warriors have 0 automatic cooldowns) I'm fine with other tank classes also having to hit a button instead of relying on a strange rng or hidden cd to maybe save them from death, but I don't know how the paladin community feels about it. Regardless, I feel like this ultimate talent spot could have gone to something more, I don't know, "epic" I guess.

The ret tree also is seeing some of this redesign love, with the former pinnacle talent "Divine Storm" moving down to it's 11 point resting spot, and the new Zealotry replacing it. The thing I like about Zealotry is that it plays directly on the new Holy Power mechanic, just like the 31 point talent in Holy does (although I notice the protection tree ultimate talent does not). Even if Zealotry is not as epic as it could be, this still makes the talent itself seem shiny and new and gives this air of Blizzard trying to help players find direction with this new system they've designed.

I compare all of this to trees that I feel like were kind of "phoned in" by the developers more than the paladin's. In each of the remaining talent trees, I think the ones that look the best were the ones where the devs decided that the current "pinnacle" talent should become the level 10 baseline ability for that tree, which forced them to redesign the top tiers of that spec.

Unfortunately, the others are suffering. let's look at our talents (as examples, not as QQing). Currently, we can get to shockwave in protection, TG in fury, or bladestorm in arms at level 60. These are the "pinnacles" in our classes as it stands, and outlands leveling is made so much more enjoyable since we have these. (tanking in outlands or early Northrend without shockwave? It makes those initial seconds in a pull that much more crazy and difficult to control.) How does that compare to the cataclysm version of these same trees? Well, the 31 point talents aren't available until level 71. That's right, level 71, a full 11 levels after they're available now.

I think the general comparison for how the trees feel is somewhat stinted just because of that. Instead of reworking the trees to make something that fits everything right, we're stuck with the same talent tree, but postponed 11 levels, making them more expensive and less exciting all at the same time.

Suppose we were going to make something for, say, Fury that mirrored how the paladin trees were overhauled. Well, for starters, TG and SMF would both be 11 point talents. No protection or arms spec would be able to spec into them, so they're safe, and warriors would be able to make a decision immediately about whether they're going to be using 2 2 handers or 2 1 handers as they level up through their 40's. Of course, that would also mean they'd have to come up with some better idea for a pinnacle talent for the Fury tree, but I think they can do it if they put their minds to it.

Shockwave (and quite possibly Bladestorm), then, could be similar to beacon of light. Move it a little down from the top (even if only to the 26 point talent) and give a 2 point talent somewhere that improves upon it, and maybe a cool new epic tanking talent that still gives us the nice stun for those first few seconds of a fight when things go bad by 60-ish, but something even more epic to work up to by 71.

Anyway, that's my opinions about which talent trees I think were done right.

Updates from the up and coming Tank

2010-08-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Hello again. I just wanted to update everyone on the exploits of my up and coming "warrior main tank" on the separate realm so I didn't have the impetus to shower him in BoA gear or extra cash from my other toons.

So far things have been much easier than I remember them being the first time I did the leveling process on my warrior. For one thing, I did it the hard way the first time, but for another, adding the extra survivability really is the way to go, and with the changes to Improved Revenge, hitting shield block virtually guarantees that you will (a) have plenty of rage from shield specialization, (b) have Revenge procced for a while, and (c) kill them dead. Now, to be fair, there have been some challenges I haven't been able to overcome. For one thing, I am not able to solo group quests of 3 or more unless they're at least 2-3 levels behind me (more if they require more people). I've done pretty well with some 2 person quests, but the 5 person quest to end the Tranquillen reputation grind did not go so well at 22. I'll come back later to take it out once I hit 25, I think.

Meanwhile I've been adding to my gear by running dungeons with the LFD tool, and even at the low 20's and late 10's I've been seeing mostly insta-queues. I've already picked up some decent blue gear, and (while I don't really have a good measuring stick for this) I'm sitting on about 900 health at level 22, which seems pretty good.

I'm reminded again why I hate questing in the vanilla areas so much, though. All the constant quests to "go pick up X from some obscure location in the middle of the other continent" (even though you're barely able to ride a mount) which gets turned back in to the original quest giver to be followed by "now take Y back to the same place you just were (middle of other continent) and ask if she needs anything from here" (inevitably she does, and you just continent hop for an hour to get 3 quests done). I don't think I mind the quests so much, as the fact that the difficulty involved in so many of them is just the annoyance of getting to wherever it is you're supposed to go to do whatever. The actual task is kind of boring, and not always as lore-filled as some would try to argue.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the changes in Cataclysm to the questing system. I'm still hoping to find the time to finish Loremaster before it gets here (since 3,000 quests seem even more daunting, even if you can do 25 of them in the same time it takes you to kill a bug in Mulgore and then gloat about your exploit to someone in Brill, and then turn the quest in to some dude in Sillithus (a quest that, no doubt, came from the Hillsbrad Foothills).

Thoughts on rotation for Cataclysm Fury Warriors (as of beta build 12694)

2010-08-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

So, I noticed some subtle changes to the fury rotation recently, and I wasn't going to invest a lot of time into trying to guess the rotation for Clysm, but since the Bloodsurge design is getting a bit of a nip/tuck, I'm starting to wonder about it.

Looking at the single target rotation, we have essentially two abilities we're likely to use. Bloodthirst and Raging Blow. Now, Bloodthirst has a 3 second cooldown and no obvious limitations on its use, so that's going to be the capstone of our rotation. Since there is the 1.5 second gcd, that means no matter what else we do, BT will be every other hit (unless something comes up that makes more sense to hit instead). Raging Blow has a 6 second cooldown, so it's going to occupy space between alternating Bloodthirsts (assuming you can keep enraged "pretty much" all the time).

So, here is our rotation:

BT -> RB -> BT -> ____ -> BT -> RB -> BT -> ____ ... etc.

The blanks signify the "gaps" in our rotation that we would be filling with things like Slam if bloodsurge were procced, Sunders, Shouts, etc.

They've said that HS will be off the gcd, which means you can hit it anytime within this rotation you like provided you have the rage for it, so that will not be considered here.

In addition, since they've changed the Bloodsurge design to have a 30% chance to proc off each "hit" from either Bloodthirst or Raging Blow (HS is not included as of this build, and you also have to consider that the effect is only available once per 6 seconds), this works out to a preliminary chance of having a Slam proc (in the first 4.5 second rotation) of about 67%, and eventually it averages out to about 41% chance each subsequent open space. So this means that our Clysm rotation will essentially only have about 3 open spots in our rotation every 22.5 seconds. Some things won't affect us, as I believe that pummel is staying off the gcd as will be HS (under current designs), but this still leaves all the sunders/shouts/etc.

On the one hand, this should be fine. Each warrior will have at MOST 2 shouts they need to use (but one costs rage, and probably would only be used if the tank didn't talent for it) and sunders. So, on average, that will basically give us exactly the opportunity that we're wanting to have, with one open spot every 22.5 seconds for, I dunno, something fun?

Of course, the variation in this rotation will be availability. Raging Blow is only available to use if you are enraged. Slam is only useful if Bloodsurge has procced, otherwise casting Slam is like nailing your toes to a stop sign so the raid can play tetherball with your head -- it's a huge headache.

I think what I'm most afraid of is that this rotation is SO set in stone. There really is no wiggle room at all. Our current rotation is mostly like this, but because of the 4 second, 8 second cooldowns which don't "quite" mix with the gcd's, we end up with a lot more spots where things could go, but they're more costly. For example, our rotation now starts with a BT -> WW -> 1 second spacer -> BT
That 1 second spacer "could" be used for an emergency sunder or a procced slam, but it will also delay the next BT by 0.5 seconds, which makes you have to pause to consider whether having the extra attack etc. in that second is worth losing the 0.5 seconds from the extra gcd, especially since right after your gcd from that next BT, you're looking at a 2.5 second free space which is easily one extra ability, plus another awkward 1 second space.

Now, BRILLIANTLY, Blizzard placed the 0.5 second gcd reduction on slam as an additional proc from the T10 set, which makes slam actually fit nicely into those awkward pauses... a la:

BT -> WW -> Slam -> BT -> Slam -> (Some other Ability) -> and so forth.

But since that only procs 20% of the time that Slam is instant, the remaining pockmarked mess looks the same:

BT -> WW -> awkward 1 second pause -> BT -> Slam -> awkward 1 second pause -> and so forth.

The catch is though, those two awkward 1 second pauses there actually give us some room to fire extra stuff, or do nothing, or whatever is called for, but possibly at a slight loss to us. If Victory Rush is procced, we can throw those in and take the 0.5 second hit. If sunders are about to fall off.... If shouts are wearing out.... etc.

I think I like that we're going to be having a nice tight rotation, but if it's this tight, it may make some of the other utility we used to provide seem kind of sketchy. If we can't be enraged (at least nearly)100% of the time, it will make our rotations very difficult to keep up with, what with hovering over the Raging Blow button and watching, and having nothing else to press really if it doesn't light up.

Of course, I'm assuming that just like the post they made about ret paladins recently they're trying to make our white damage "significant" so that haste remains "more attractive for us" and perhaps that will make all this theory crafting about yellow strike rotations null and void, but that's a separate rant for another time.

For now, that's what it looks like we have to work with, and we'll have to wait and see how things go.

Incidentally, because I haven't said anything about it here yet, notice that our rotation is pretty tight, and the cost is right at 66.15 rage per 4.5 second rotation, which works out to 14.7 rage per second. Dual Wielding, with 0 haste, that will require your main hand weapon to generate 9.8 rage per second and your off hand weapon to generate 4.9 rage per second (well, minus any "additional rage sources"). This makes it seem as though a standard white melee hit with a 3.5 second timer should yield about 34.3 rage, or with a 2.0 second swing timer about 19.6 rage.

And I know that the new Battle Trance talent is very handy, but bear in mind that you're looking at 1 proc of that per 20 Bloodthirst strikes, so figure that means one free swing every 60 seconds, reducing our rage per second needs to 14.36 rage per second. Not exactly a huge change, but that's what it does.

I figure if they're going to make this rage normalization work at all, it will have to be balanced around having "some" haste, but it can't be a significant amount since we'll already have to be stacking hit rating out the wazoo to make up for the hit penalty from dual wielding, especially if white damage is meant to be "significant" in Clysm.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on a rotation come Clysm. We'll have to keep our eyes peeled and find out what else the future has in store for us.

Glyph of Taunt for Tanks

2010-08-02T09:50:00.000-07:00

So, I did a tiny bit of investigation today into why a tank would take the glyph of taunt even if he already had over 8% hit rating, and as it turns out, there IS actually a reason.

Since this is something that I had wrong before, and hadn't really had issues with (well, to be fair, I rarely MT anything, and when I do, I've glyphed so much for AoE threat that I only use taunt occasionally, so a 6% miss chance might not show itself easily) I thought I'd go ahead and write a quick post in case anyone was interested for future reference (assuming this won't change for Clysm, which it probably will).

The catch to this that makes it confusing for everyone is that taunt works like a SPELL. It's pretty much the only thing we have that does, so I can understand why it's confusing.

Since it's a spell, it has a 17% spell miss chance, and not an 8% melee miss chance that you're used to. For this reason, you have to use spell hit ratings to see how it works instead of melee hit ratings, and you'll find that it requires 446 hit rating to guarantee that taunt will work every time.

Now, there are mitigations, for example, if you have a boomkin or faerie fire etc. in raid, that will reduce that to 14%, or 368, and if you have a draenei (why would you, aren't you horde?) you can reduce that by another 1%, leaving you with needing 342 (barely over 341) in order to guarantee 100% landing of taunt.

That's a lot of hit rating to have to add to your gear, especially when most of the tank gear doesn't include a substantial amount of hit rating to begin with.

Now, on the other hand, if you glyph for taunt, you only need to achieve 9% (respectively 6%, 5% with raid buffs) to guarantee the taunt lands, and that's a more moderate level 237 hit rating (respectively 158, 132).

The 158 hit rating will only get you 4.82% melee hit rating, but that's not nearly as important to you anyway, since pound for pound, expertise is what you "really" want. I mean, in an ideal world, you'd want to have enough to not have to count on raid composition, so you'd want to shoot for the 237 hit rating mark (which still leaves you with only 7.23% miss chance reduction). I happen to know a tank with over 8% hit rating and also the taunt glyph, and that's really awesome, but at the same time, his expertise is lower than the recommended 26, so in that case, he's probably seeing as much of a loss of threat from dodges/parries as he would be from miss if he could trade out the hit rating he's over the 237 mark for expertise. Not that he has any problems in that area, because believe me that's NOT the case, but for all you other warriors who aren't as up on the lore, I think if you're the raid's MT, and you KNOW you have a boomkin, I'd try to adjust your hit rating slightly to about 158 hit rating mark, and funnel whatever else you have options for into expertise (while pretty much gemming/enchanting for pure stamina/mitigation) and TAKE THE GLYPH OF TAUNT. If you're NOT your raid's MT, your taunts may actually not be as vital. In fact, you may really want to have more "spread the love" glyphs, so you can keep a pack of mobs on you easily while the MT is taking the big whallops. On the other hand, you may be the tank assigned to keep adds off the clothies, and if that's the case, you'll want to have this glyph in those fights where one add can one shot a clothie in about the same time it takes your vigilance gcd to wear off so you can try a taunt again.

So, in summary:

Without glyph of taunt, you're looking at:

446 hit rating needed to guarantee a taunt is successful,

With glyph of taunt, you're looking at:

237, 158, 132 hit rating depending on your raid buffs.

And since hit is not easy to come by, you should consider that something to consider.

Some prospective Clysm Warrior Talent Builds as of 7/30/2010 (build 12644)

2010-07-30T08:45:00.001-07:00

Ok, this is mostly a mental excercise, as I know full well this will not hit live as is, but every time they adjust this, I like to go through and work on builds I hope (or might like) to have on myself once I hit max level.

I'll start with the one that just gets juicier the more they have played with it.

Protection Self Healing Talent Build (4/3/34) (main tank, probably)
I debated a lot about how to spend these talent points, but here's what I decided. Since Heroic Strike may or may not be something I hit as often come cataclysm when I tank, I just don't know if the new Incite is worth even considering for Protection (in case you can't see the link to MMO Champs, the text reads: "Increases the critical strike chance of your Heroic Strike by 5/10/15%, and your Heroic Strike critical strikes have a 33/66/100% chance to make you next Heroic Strike also a critical strike. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds."). However, some moves in other trees have made some tasty decisions.

Arms: For example, I now have taken 2/2 in both Field Dressing and Blitz in the Arms tree, but since I'm still dubious about the utility of HS now that the mechanic has changed (although they still say it will be off the gcd) I don't feel taking even one point of War Academy is justified, and there is no "vital" talent on Tier 2 in Arms, so we'll turn instead to Fury. Although, I reserve my right to change my opinion once I can actually try some of this.

Fury: With the loss of AttT, I can only assume they're going to be tweaking Attack Power some other way, and once again, I am faced with a choice of either improving some damage from a couple talents or taking Blood Craze. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't think of anything better for a tank than if he does take damage, there is a chance he could auto heal. Add to that the improvement from Field Dressing in the Arms Tree and you're looking at a chance to recover 10% of your health automatically every so often. With health pools being larger in Clysm (some tanks already have nearly 80k health raid buffed) that could be a pretty sizeable hot. There are some other tasty threat talents to be found here, but I think I'd rather go back and get more from the Protection tree.

Protection: Ok, no lie, pretty much there are only two talents I'm not thinking of taking here. Incite, as written now, seems like it may not have as much all around utility. It may prove me wrong once I test, but right now I'm "--eh". The other one is Safeguard. IMO, not really that great of a talent. I do use intervene in battles, but I work pretty hard to make sure it's not necessary 90% of the time, so this falls into the "probably a PvP oriented talent" area. As an off tank, this could be used by the OT to give a mini-shield wall to the MT occasionally, except that if you target the MT it will also taunt the boss off them. It could be done, but it would requre that both of you were ready at exactly the right time, and even vent lags by a couple seconds. Everything else is pretty nice, I like the shield block mechanic now, and I'm working to put as much into my shield block as I can, so talents like Hold the Line, Shield Specialization, Shield Mastery, and the old Damage Shield all make shield blocking fun. Now, if it turns out that I will need more threat from this build, I would be most likely to take a point out of Shield Specialization and two points from Hold the Line and invest those three into Incite. Again, I'll just have to wait and see. The only other talent I'm not 100% certain about it's necessity is Impending Victory. Mostly, I'm taking this because of all the constant posts warning us that healers mana will be an issue again, and damage will be bad, etc. etc. etc. This is the reason I took Blood Craze and Field Dressing. The combination of these talents will give me some constant self healing to help the healers out as I go, and will also give me a situational heal I can use towards the end of a battle once mana is becoming scarce.

Furious Stance Dance TG build (9/32/0)
There is a part of me that wants badly to invest 3 points into Incite with this build, and I may go back (especially if the glyph of Heroic Strike stays with the same wording it has now). But for now, let's assume that we will want to maybe stance dance to apply rends, or whatever. For this, I don't think you can beat the overall utility here.

Arms: I really want to get to the second Tier here, so I've taken full ranks in War Academy and Field Dressing. I think they'll both serve some purpose, so no loss there. The reason I wanted to get to the second tier is for Deep Wounds, which hasn't changed (including it's cost, meaning the price has doubled, but at least you don't have to take Impale to get it). I've also spared one talent point for Tactical Mastery, which should give me up to a 35-50 rage cushion when I stance dance. With that kind of a cushion, it could actually make a SD Rend macro something that might not make you angry every time you press it (and not in a good way). I only invested one point, because I wanted the other point to go somewhere else.

Fury: Ok, so besides the decision about Single-Minded-Fury vs Titan's Grip (I've chosen Titan's Grip because I wasn't ever as enamored of the single hand DW prior to WotLK, but to each their own. If it turns out to be more dps, I'll switch too, but for now I already have 2 excellent 2 handers, and not a single good single hander to my name.) the other things I've included here are 1/2 Rude Interruption (I chose 1/2 because Pummel still has a 10 second cd, and most of the time I'm on interrupts I interrupt pretty much 2/3 to 1/2 of the time Pummel is off cd, so at worst we're talking 20 seconds between them), Piercing Howl, Heroic Fury, Furious Attacks (if you have an Arms warrior, and we're assuming that Arms dps is competitive in some way unlike presently, you can drop this and take 3/3 Blood Craze instead of 2/3) and 2/2 Skirmisher. I've passed up Die By the Sword which to me seems like an amazing PvP utility talent that could also help out in a crunch if the tank goes down and someone needs to be tanked quickly (since sword and boarding will be virtually impossible still now that gear has 0 defense). Essentially this build should give the mobility for PvE, it adds the debuffs (even if they're rng and not specified) and gives optimal excuse to use your shouts/pummels during combat.

I think that for a more damage intensive design, I might swap Furious Attacks and Heroic Fury into Improved Execute, especially if you're not void in Arms dps.

A New Warrior Dawns

2010-07-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

I recently decided on an experiment, now that Blizzard has done many things to make leveling more pleasant. I decided to try to level a warrior from scratch (again), but to remove any temptation I may feel, I'm doing it on a different server. The only assistance I'm allowing myself is having a couple of alts on the same server, one of whom is, I must admit, a DK. The only reason I'm allowing the DK alt is that I remember how long some of the slow grinding for money was, and now that some servers' economies are a little wacky, I wanted to have a way to get a couple hundred gold when my auctions weren't selling well. I'm not using any heirloom items, I'm not affiliated (yet) with any guilds, just grinding up.

To that end, I found a good sticky thread that covers the basic "how to" of this, which I'd like to share with you.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23393139760&sid=1

Jackburton does a great job of outlining not only what you want to strive for, but also why. This thread is highly polished and does a great job of explaining most everything you're going to need to do if you want to try this out.

So far, I've worked for about 12 hours, and I've gotten my little Garggy up to lvl 17. I'm disregarding the DK and paladin alts that I have put in also, as they are meaningless to me at this point.

I have a couple things to add regarding leveling your prot warrior, and that is that if you find yourself doing quests as well as the DF, I would suggest looking at Tranquilien (if you're horde, obviously), as the rep purchases there are pretty nice for low level paladins or warriors, and there is a quest chain that rewards you with a sweet shield, and if you hit exalted with them, a fantastic low tanking cloak is your reward.

I won't go too far into what I have done, but since you can't use the DF until you hit 15, until about 10 I quested in Durotar, and then once I hit about 10-12 I went to Ghost Lands and started the Tranquilien quests. I loved the reward from the warrior quest at 10, as the axe went perfectly with my tanking orc makeup.

I'll occasionally keep you posted on what he's up to.

A Sad Farewell

2010-07-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

Even if you don't know who this is for, I just wanted to say to some people out there that it's been nice knowing and playing with you and I hope you won't be complete strangers. This Tauren is in a good home now and so are my alter-egos, so I look forward to making new friends along the future path, but I will remember my old ones fondly, I'm just sorry that the decision for us to part ways entirely happened.

Best of luck.

G

Oh happy day! When Blizz announced the Raging Blow.

2010-07-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

So, some happy news recently came out of the question and answer session:

Q: Are Fury Warriors still going to see a new attack to fill the loss of Whirlwind? Any insight?
A. Yes! It’s called Raging Blow (at least for the moment), because we wanted to distance is a little from the old Enraged Assault. It's Fury-only and can only be used when Enraged, but does not consume the Enrage. It does indeed strike with both weapons (including the animation).

and just to remind you about some of the proposed features of this ability (beyond the ability to strike with both weapons, yay!) it will only be usable when you enrage, it will not use up the enrage, and I believe it's supposed to have a very short, if any, cooldown so that it can be used as often as you like. That being said, I'd expect some serious changes around how Slam works since otherwise, if this is as good as they make it seem, it could replace any Slam interest at all.

In the end, we should see something like this for a desirability ranking:

Instant Slam, Procced Victory Rush > "Raging Blow" > Bloodthirst > Heroic Strike.

This is because we should want to hit BT when we can, unless something else has procced (which should be more desireable within that time frame) and Heroic Strike should be what we use to bleed rage if we can't hit anything else.

On multi targets, of course, we'd probably still target the main target and replace this with

WW > Cleave > Instant Slam, Procced Victory Rush > Bloodthirst

or something like that.

The Warrior Mentality, and why it's different.

2010-07-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

Hi, I know many blogs go on about tactics and other issues associated with a class, but I thought I'd take a step back for those new to the game to explain a little about what you're in store for if you choose to level a warrior from scratch.

First of all, there are only two mindsets to be in when you decide to level a new warrior: The patient, and the dead.

Unlike many classes, warriors are not invincible machines that can just keep churning and churning through mobs like butter. Your main resource will be your life. When your life is gone, you'll have to run back, and notice I said "when" not "if." You will die many many times. It's ok, though, just remember that you're a warrior, and the goal as a low level warrior is to learn to think tactically, and apply the abilities you have at hand to accomplishing the goal you set before you.

Now, if you have infinite patience, you can level as Protection. Your damage will be low enough that you will frequently see Arms warriors running through levels 8 million times faster (possible exaggeration) but you will also die less and have more chance of surviving multi-mob pulls than them. If you choose this route, remember that defenses, armor, shields, stamina, those are your treasures. Stay away from fancy stuff that gives you more of anything else, unless it also gives you more armor, stamina, or a shield. A shield is your friend. About the only friend you have better than a shield is defensive stance. Once you get those two things together, you're ready to find out what being a tank is all about.

If you have less patience, you can level as Arms. Arms warriors have to be crafty, but they will go faster than protection warriors. You will need to control the size of the pulls you make on solo quests, keep them to 1-2 until you know you can deal with them. Remember, as a warrior, you have no escape routes. You're in it to win it or die trying. If you finish the goal, and kill the pack of 3 raptors guarding the chest of silver, you don't have to explain that you died and ran and rezzed and killed the last raptor to do it, you just turn in your quest and go on. Escape routes are for other classes. You're going to find that whether you're a female or male, this class will make you feel "macho." You're literally going to learn the mindset of attack and no surrender. Notice, as you go, you have charge (a way to go into combat quickly), intercept (another way to go into combat quickly), and intervene (a way to go into combat quickly, and help someone else get away). I dare you to find me one ability on your bar that says "helps you get out of combat safely." Oh, sure, Intimidating Shout looks promising, but 3/5 times once they're done running away from you and they come back and bring all their friends with them, you'll be wishing you hadn't. But as arms, you have a lot of things to make it easier to take some people down, you just have to learn to be on your toes all the time, ready to use the right skill at the right time.

If you're masochistic, you can level as Fury. Fury warriors (for soloing) are the ultimate in the warrior mindset. Just look at the explanation of Berserker Stance (where you'll spend most of your time): "An aggressive stance. Critical hit chance is increased by 3% and all damage taken is increased by 5%." in the words of Stan Lee, "Nuff Said." Fury warriors are the ultimate reckless fighting machines. You don't care if you die, you don't even care if you get hit, all you care about is trying to kill as many of them as you can before you go down. It makes a fury warrior a frightening prospect in pvp until other classes learn how to kite you. If you close with them, they're going to hurt, they have to hope they can survive your assault long enough to start kiting you, or they're going to be in a world of pain. If you level as Fury, just be aware that you're going to die more than any other warrior out there. Of course, you're also going to carve through some quests faster than them too. But some of your deaths will slow you down enough that you may find that Arms will end up being faster.

Warriors are not rogues, we do not have an escape route. We do not have a bubble we can use to avoid pain and misery when we're outnumbered. We can't avoid stopping to eat every so often to heal up. We LOVE the first aid skill, and we max it out as soon as we can. We continually struggle between moving faster to avoid rage loss, and moving slower to avoid health loss. The path of the warrior is a path of balancing rage and life. Depending how much weight you give to each side will determine which of our trees you walk along. If life is more important, you will choose Protection and learn the way of a tank. If rage is more important, you will choose Fury and become a sweeping path of destruction that can only be stopped by being killed. If you value them equally, you will choose arms and have a range of abilities and approach every situation tactically and carefully and ready to respond to whatever happens.

I don't know if this mindset affects anything else in our life, but I can promise you if you want to be able to "get away" from trouble, a warrior will not work well for you. Maybe take a hunter, or shaman. Really almost any class will work for that, just not a warrior. A warrior will surround themself with death. The deaths of others, their own death. They also hold lives in the balance, their own, and others. As protection, you hold yourself responsible for every life in your group. It can be very stressful, but when others appreciate you, you feel very good indeed. As any other kind of warrior, there comes a time when you will try to take up the mantle of tank, because if you don't, no one will. As an example, the other day, I went into a random dungeon which I specifically queued for as dps so I wouldn't have to tank. The DK tank that was selected apparently thought it would be funny to pull the first group of mobs and then drop group. Some people have no honor. So, there I am in my fury gear, berserker stance, taking extra damage, and crits, and everyone around me is panicking, so what do I do? I intercept straight into the heart of the mobs, hit a quick whirlwind to get their attention, and then swap to defensive stance and hang on for dear life while I Blood thirst, rend, and thunderclap like crazy. Demo shouts and the whole nine yards. The healer, being fairly pro also, didn't miss a beat. It's fair to say that in this situation, the priest had probably had more than a few warriors do this exact same kind of thing when tanks went down unexpectedly or whatever. People just come to depend on warriors to be able to do this. By the way, once the other 3 dps kind of calmed down and figured out what was going on, we took them down pretty quickly, and no one was scathed. I was annoyed, because I had to put on my tanking gear to blow through the rest of the dungeon, and that wasn't the responsibility I wanted right then, but I knew it was my job and I did it.

Don't ever expect to be given an "easy" way to do something. You might as well wish for Blizz to mail you a pony. I guarantee that no matter what you do, you'll have it harder than most everyone else. You'll be put to the test over and over again as you pull your way up from 1 to 80 and above. You'll become intimately familiar with where graveyards are in each zone and which areas you want to die the least in. You'll learn to pace yourself and watch your aggro radius carefully. You'll learn that it's NOT ok if you accidentally pull a second group of mobs. These are all things that other classes can do and laugh about once they're safely away. These are not things you can do.

If reading this hasn't dissuaded you from choosing to level a warrior, then I welcome you to our ranks, brother or sister. Strength and honor.

On a personal note:

2010-07-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

As some of you may notice, I've moved homes. My friends, the Hawks, aren't raiding as much as I'd like to be, and so I've followed some of my former Hawk friends to a new guild that has some very dedicated raiders, and I'm looking forward to many new adventures with the Stormwind Mall Security group.

So far, to be honest, it still feels like I'm among friends, as I know so many of them already, but I can definitely tell a difference in the atmosphere. I think there may be some thunder on the horizon.

Thoughts about Warrior Talent Trees in Cataclysm

2010-07-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

Hello, all you platies out there. I've thoroughly inspected your preliminary talent trees, and there are some nice things and some things I'm not happy about. Perhaps you feel somewhat the same way. I will start with a blog about my talent trees first, and then look at those of my alter egos, BlackGurggy and PureGurggy the DK and Paladins that share my name.

First and foremost, I am not opposed to the idea they're going with in swapping to a 31 talent centric tree design where talent points should do more, since they'll be fewer of them available to us. I like the idea of giving the classes certain talents etc. immediately at level 10 as it makes level 10 feel like you're really starting to play your class....

My biggest concern, though is for those of us who are already at level 80 and who are facing a grind up to 85.

consider this: Here is my current Fury Talent Selection, and Here is my interpretation of that in the Cataclysm Talent tree. Now, here's what concerns me so far, that I hope gets addressed. My current level is 80, and to get 'the same abilities from talents that I have now' I'll have to get to 85.

Ok, this makes no sense. The reward for getting to 85 is that we can finally have back the same abilities we have now? I think one of two solutions needed to be added globally to every tree, in much the same way that I see this problem in the warrior trees:

1) if you copy and paste a talent from the current talent tree (no matter where it is) and place it into the Cataclysm talent tree, it should have about 1/2 the cost (see Cruelty, Flurry, Bloodsurge). It should not have the same cost, with no extra effects (see Armored to the Teeth, Impale, Deep Wounds, Intensify Rage, etc.). The cost can be rounded up, in the case of 1 point talents, for instance, but in some cases, maybe the 1 point talents should be considered as trainable instead of taking up a position on the tree. Especially if, like Piercing Howl, they've come to be associated indelibly with a warrior attempting to do exactly what this expansion is purporting to attempt to have us remember how to do, and kite things and cc them instead of just wail on them. Basically, I'd just like Blizz to think of this like a currency exchange. You want to make "Clysm-Talent Points" that spend almost like 2 "Wrath-Talent Points." And the goods we're buying shouldn't end up seeming like a bad deal after the exchange.

2) If you don't want to make the talent point cost of an ability less than it is now, but you still like the effect, then increase the effect to make it worthwhile. For example, let's look at Armored to the Teeth. Admittedly, a great talent, arguably an important one to take. The only advantage that it has over the other version of Armored to the Teeth is that Blizzard has already upped the coefficient from where it was originally (requiring 3 talent points but not getting to the level it is at now). If you consider where AttT was "pre" Lich King buffs and where it will be in Clysm, this is a good example of a way that you can make a talent cost the same but still be worthwhile. Unfortunately since the buff happened mid Wrath, at this point warriors have come to expect this level of AttT as a normal version, and won't be happy with less. As a better example, look at the changes to Improved Execute. I love that instead of making the cost less, Blizzard is making it hit harder. As long as the numbers on Execute live up to what I've been hearing (Execute supposedly hits much harder now than it did) I think this could save Execute from being Heroically Stricken from our toolbar. This is a talent that was performed correctly. They wanted to keep it a 2 point talent, so they "engineered" the effect to make it more worthy of those 2 "Clysm-Talent" points (which are actually equal to about 3.7 Wrath Talent points, but close enough to double).

3) If you don't like option 1 or 2 for a talent, then go with option 3, get rid of that talent and design something fresh and interesting to take it's place. Look at deep wounds. Ok, so maybe the devs don't like having that talent be "stronger" than it already is, but for fury warriors, who can't easily rend in their rotations, deep wounds IS our dot. It's the ONLY dot we have. We pretty much HAVE to take that talent, we have no choice. Impale is pretty much the only "optional" talent of those two, and even there, it has been a pretty important addition to our dps. Now, notice, Deep wounds is EXACTLY the same, but costs now nearly twice as many talent points. Impale is actually WORSE, because it provides the same boost as before, but only to "some" abilities instead of all of them. What's worse, the only ones in that list that will help Fury are Slam and Execute, both of which are situational and unpredictable sometimes. Execute may not be as spammable at end of battle as it is now once they normalize rage generation, and Slam is only useful when it's instant, as otherwise it delays our white swing timer. Both of these are nearly twice as expensive as they are now, but are not more valuable. This idea needs to be "relooked at" soon. As an example, if you absolutely must keep it like this, maybe change it around so that you make the first talent (the 3 point one) something like "Each critical hit will also cause an additional 20/40/60% of the original damage over the next 5 seconds." If it scales as crit damage, then it's suddenly worth more, and the 3 point expenditure seems justified. But still keeping with the lame 48% weapon damage just feels like a slap in the face. Similarly with Impale. If you want to "tame it down" to just 20% of some abilities, then tame down the price to 1 point, or redesign the talent to do something else, because clearly it isn't exciting enough to really consider if you can't do better than just copy and paste.

4) A final option that could be considered for some of this is to make sure in the talent tree you can essentially "re-create" the essence of each build currently available AT LEVEL 80 in the new tree AT LEVEL 80. Then, as we level up, we'd get new talent points that would actually be talent points we could put towards IMPROVING what we have now instead of just rebuilding it to what it was.

Ok, enough about what I don't like and what I'd like to see changed.

Here's what I do like:

(notice that a lot of it is along the lines of my suggestions earlier):

I love Fury in the Blood. This is an example of a newly designed talent that does what the talents in Clysm should do. It takes an already utility ability and makes it even better, turning it into an automatic cooldown we can pop, and so changing our gameplay a little to save these for those "crucial" moments, or popping them every chance we get on those dps race bosses.

I love Blood and Thunder. No, this doesn't fix the problem we have with streaming adds, but it sure as heck does address how we can deal with the AoE tanking issues we've been having. This way, we can place a dot on everyone in range immediately, so those mobs will stay more securely (short of dps being idiots) and as new adds stream in, we can use our taunts and other abilities to grab them, and once we TC again, we can cement those to us also. It will not be as easy mode as Paladins/DK's have it now, but it will certainly make it more of a joy than it is now.

I like Hold the Line. This has a great potential for making parry a more prioritized stat, and also adding threat generation as well as mitigation at the same time. I'm looking forward to using this.

I like the changes to Shield Mastery. Even though this is pretty much the same cost etc. the effect of now improving our cooldowns to be more in line with other tanks is much more desireable than the previous effect.

I love the change to Vigilance. This is one instance where I can definitely tell the devs listen to the community. We all said that one of our biggest problems as warriors was trying to off tank. When we don't have anyone wailing on us, how do we get rage? I also love that now the possibility of having two warrior tanks Vigilancing each other to mitigate damage and keep their taunt at the ready is now not a guessing game of concern over whether or not the threat transference will even out. I know some people are complaining about the loss of threat transfer, and while I will miss that somewhat, I'm hoping that the new threat mechanics will help to make up for that.

Now for my "I don't know"s:

I can't decide if I like Lambs to the Slaughter or not. On the one hand, I think having a proc coming from MS is a great idea, but having it happen and all that the proc does is lessen the swing timer on your next swing by 36% is not as cool as it could be. Mortal Strike now has a 5 second cooldown, so assuming that an arms warrior could keep that going every 5 seconds (2 gcd's in between, so maybe room for one Overpower, and/or one rend or slam) it would basically mean that every other white swing would take only 2/3 the time, so every 6 swings would generate one extra swing, so it's kind of like adding up to 16% haste (depending how often you can hit MS). One side of me likes the way they're trying to do that, because the feel of Arms is very reactionary, the other side wonders why they don't just make it something like "adds 16% melee haste for 5 seconds after using Mortal Strike" or some such.

I also can't decide how I feel about Field Dressing. On the one hand this sounds like a nice talent to have for PvP. On the other hand, I notice that it is pretty much the only other talent in tier 1 of the arms tree that a Fury warrior would be interested in, since rend is not planned to be usable in berserker stance still. So I find myself looking at this as a Fury or Arms warrior. First of all, Arms doesn't get Bloothirst, where the majority of our self healing comes from. They can, however, make it up to Blood Craze which has been modified to proc off any damage done, but an extra 20% on that is pretty miniscule, especially since that is only a 10% chance to proc. So, really, the only good Arms gets from it is from Enraged Regeneration. Fury might get some good from it, but if they're doing what they should be doing, they shouldn't be caring too much about the self healing they're getting from Bloodthirst (which is nowhere near what a blood DK does now) and won't really be getting a significant amount from any Blood Craze points they've taken either. In many ways this feels to me like a mandatory talent for protection warriors trying to take some arms talents and not much else. If that's the case, though, what are DPS warriors supposed to take to get to Deep Wounds, which, as I've said, will still be pretty much a mandatory talent group for us as dps?

There are several others that I could go on about the changes, some subtle, some not so subtle, but for the most part I think the majority of what is left falls into either a "I'll have to wait and see how it goes" category, or into one of the four "Blizz please re-think this" categories I mentioned earlier.

Next time I'll discuss the DK trees.

Tips for Noob Putricide Abomination Tanks

2010-07-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Hey there. Last week I pugged a group for an ICC 10 run and one of their tanks had to bail mid run so I shifted my position from dps to tank to help fill out. I'd never done the Abom tank position on Putricide before, and apparently I was the only one of the two tanks interested in doing it, and I've noticed a pattern that seems to happen to every ICC 10 group I've been in: The first time you tank with the Abom you fail, but every other time you do it, it goes pretty smoothly.

I think I determined why these things happened, and I'd like to share my knowledge with anyone who is searching for tips on doing this (in case they've never done it before).

First of all, you will have 3 abilities whose importance is also their lineup in the keys:

1 - eat ooze : This abilities is basically a button you spam until the slime puddle is gone, if you leave even a small amount left it will grow back up and will become almost impossible to clear out. Each time you hit this it adds 4 energy to your bar.

2 - regurgitated ooze : This ability will spit at either of the adds that pop out and slow their movement by 50%. for 20 secs (it also deals damage). It costs 45 energy to use each time.

3 - mutated slash : This ability hits target, dealing weapon damage and reducing armor by 4% stacks up to 5 times. Costs no energy.

Ok, so here are the tips that will help you be a first time Abom champ:

Tip 1: You should get to use the slash some, so equip your best dps 2 hander (and have your sword and board macro ready to go for phase 3).

Tip 2: click the table, then run back to the raid. The Abom will take a bit to spawn out of you, but you don't have to stay near the table. Since the slime will spawn near the raid, the less time you have to take running there, the better.

Tip 3: make sure you stand IN THE MIDDLE of the puddle. I mean the exact middle. Not "near" the middle.

Tip 4: you will spam 1 until a puddle is gone, then go to the next puddle. Puddles spawn in 2's, once they're both gone, you can slash like crazy, and save one regurgitation for when the add spawns.

Tip 5: 1 is spammable. Once you're in position, spam it.

Tip 6: regurgitated ooze lasts 20 secs, so you don't want to hit the mob right away, but you do want to hit it before it starts moving. This may involve practice, but not too bad.

Tip 7: If the slime puddles are soaked up, your priority list is the following:

(a) regurgitate ooze on add (if up)

(b) slash add (if up)

You should find that the pools don't take too long to eat up, which should leave you time to do all of these.

Tip 8: The key to eating the puddles is to get them while they're small. Larger puddles take longer to eat, and cause you to take more damage. Get the puddles eaten fast, THEN do everything else.

Tip 9: If the worst happens, and your abom is killed, just run back and grab another. If this happens, though, you're most likely spending too much time standing in large ooze puddles and the raid is probably going to wipe, so don't let this happen.

Tip 10: Even in the abom your priority is to make the adds go down. You want to eat the puddles quickly so that you can spend your time on the adds. If no adds are up, and you have no puddles to eat that's the ONLY time you need to worry about the professor.

If you'll follow those tips, I think you'll find that your abom career will be a glorious one.

Recent Pause in Blogs

2010-07-12T09:44:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone, I'm sure some of you noticed that it had been a few weeks since I posted anything, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, it had also been a number of weeks since I've done any raiding. The two things are likely to be linked somehow, as I find that when I raid I have things to talk about, and not so much when all I'm doing is leveling alts or doing dailies for cash.

I have recently started raiding with some different groups, so that now I have multiple raid access which makes raids more likely for me for a while, so I expect to have some good things to talk about for the rest of the Summer.

I have two rather big goals, the first of which is to down the LK in either 10 or 25 man. I think it's going to happen sooner rather than later, as I'm 11/12 in ICC 10 man, and I'm starting to do some more 25 ICC raids again.

The second goal has to do with completing my quests to get Shadowmourne. I'd like to do it, if at all possible, prior to the release of Cataclysm (since by then it will be replaced by some green quest reward, you know).

So, I should have lots to talk about in the coming weeks now, just warning you.

Cataclysm Talent Tree Changes

2010-07-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

So, by now you've heard that Blizzard has decided to completely redesign the talent trees for Cataclysm. Now, I'm not one of the lucky few privy to the beta testing, so I'm still having to speculate. I've been trying to read the forums, but since posting is restricted to beta testers, I haven't really been able to get much of my own feedback, so I'm having to base what information I have on others.

That being said, I think some things about this move are exciting. First of all, I like the idea that at level 10 everyone will be getting some "defining" characteristic of their class which should make leveling much easier and your initial choices more epic. I am hoping that they are coupling this choice with some revisions to lower level gear to allow talent tree choices to be less painful in terms of gear collection (after all, we still won't get our second spec until 40). I know that much of this is in my head, since it's been a while since I was there, but as I recall it, upon getting to choose my first talent point I found myself practically blinded by the dizzying array of choices, none of which really seemed to matter much anyway. In fact, I heartily agree with the devs when they say that your talent tree choices didn't really start to 'gel' until you hit about 35-40 anyway.

Face it, at low levels, tanking was more a matter of "who wants to" than it was "who is capable of it."

I'm concerned about some of the decisions about how to assign those 41 talent points, as it seems they want to intersperse them on every odd level (which means at each level you either need to visit a trainer or learn a talent). Of course, I also recall them saying that they were removing all those Level 1-Level 9 skills nonsense and just making the same skill level as you did by making them percentages or some such, but perhaps this has fallen by the wayside as well.

I'm also concerned because they can't seem to decide what they want the "defining" characteristic of Fury to be. They seem to be waffling some between some kind of enrage enhancement or an extra proc of some kind.

I don't know how many of you have a Fury playstyle like mine, but I actually took my 5 talent points in Intensify Rage and Improved Berserker Rage just so I would always have something to hit and also so that rage would never be an issue. My standard "wind-up" is to use these two alternately while I wait for the raid leader to be ready and I usually begin every boss encounter with 80-100 rage built up and ready to go. This means that my initial Intercept and about 3-5 subsequent abilities are already paid for before I ever start. I like to spend my freebies on Sunder Armor because (a) I like my dps numbers with Sunders up and (b) it forces an "easing in" period at the beginning of fights when the tanks are the most stressed out about aggro. Yes, it's true, the tooltip to Sunder says it "causes a high amount of threat" but my whirlwind causes a high amount of threat too, and so does my cleave, but these cause high threat to several targets instead of just one. The catch to Sunder is that it causes a "fixed" amount of threat per application instead of something that scales with damage done. I should probably run numbers at some point, but I've never had a lot of problems with pulling off tanks with that opener, and I HAVE had problems when I open with whirlwind.

Anyway, I say all this to point out that I like the possibility of an extra attack we can spam while enraged, which was hinted at by Ghostcrawler recently. If we were given an ability at 10, I'd have to say the best choice would be (a) dual wielding, as I think that should be a characteristic you get used to early, and (b) an extra attack that you can pop whenever you enrage which should hit with both weapons on a single target (and which doesn't consume the enrage, as suggested). Of course, the other thing that would need to happen is that we be given some kind of automatic enrage of some sort, even if it's one of the most basic and infrequent ones. Even berserker rage should work fine as it would turn what starts out as a defensive technique into a cd you can use to increase damage dealt.

And I think that's the best way to define the Fury tree at low levels.

Upcoming Cataclysm Post-NDA news

2010-07-02T12:39:00.000-07:00

So, some big announcements that have gone somewhat under the radar, which I feel should be pointed out. Here

Intimidating Shout
We're also changing (probably) Intimidating Shout into a single-target, longish duration CC (basically taking off the fear from the secondary targets and increasing the duration to the Repentance level).

We see here that the devs are listening to us somewhat. While we may not be getting an interrupt for every stance yet, we are at least getting a CC similar to paladins. And our holy brethren need not fear, they have said they'll be getting an interrupt too. Soon it really will be up to who you have that likes to interrupt and not which classes you have available.

Thunder Clap
Thunder Clap is something we are experimenting with. It might be that it works with no cooldown if Shockwave hits hard enough for the emergency or burst threat. We also might end up changing it back.

I am eager to see how that works. The idea of a spammable thunder clap is both frightening and exciting. If we can spam it, will they diminish the threat/damage it does to compensate? However, having a shorter cooldown (or none) would certainly make those "trickling adds" encounters less of a pain in the tuckus to tank.

Heroic Strike
Heroic Strike is something we're still not entirely happy with. The new design works technically, but it is still a little confusing (one of the things we wanted to avoid) and we are worried that warriors of all three trees will lose some of the visceral feel that warrior players liked about the class. Don't get me wrong -- replacing every white attack with a Heroic Strike was terrible gameplay, but being able to sneak more than one attack into a GCD could be fun too.

The new mechanic that we are trying now is Heroic Strike is still instant, but is off the GCD and with a short cooldown. The rage cost doesn't scale, but we can make it more expensive if it needs to be in order to adequately burn off rage. We are hoping the rage normalization and Inner Rare mechanics do a sufficient job on their own of keeping rage from ever getting infinite. We're still not fans of the next swing mechanic, so that isn't likely to return. It delays gratification, and ends up being really confusing because you lose the rage and damage that white swing would have caused etc. (It also causes a bug allowing dual-wield warriors to cheat their hit chance, but that's fixable in other ways.)

All of this makes us think that Heroic Strike isn't a good starting ability for warriors since teaching them to spam it is a bad thing.

I'm hoping they get this mechanic to work right. Moving HS off the gcd would bring back a lot of the feel that our class has now that I was worried about them losing when they added it to the gcd. It would mean that we can still have our rotation (even though I'm still waiting on our other single target button as Fury, but we'll give them time) and also be able to burn extra rage when we need to. Additionally if it doesn't interrupt the white swings, we'll have the added benefit of the HS no longer killing our rage generation, so rage accumulation should look smoother, and be a lot more manageable.

Incidentally, I agree that HS should probably not be the early warrior's ability. It's confusing to new players, and difficult to use until you get much higher. On the other hand, if there were an ability that sat in a place similar to slam, but was instant cast, it would fit nicely into the early levels and even into the later levels. The trick would be either (a) balancing it so you'd still want to hit slam when it became instant, or (b) putting it on a cooldown time about equivalent to WW, so that slam would still be a hitter, and once you got closer to endgame, you could add MS or BT into your rotation along with it.

Another possibility would be to make slam instant to begin with, and then find something else fun to do with the talents whose purpose does nothing other than shorten the swing timer.

Thinking out Loud (pre Cataclysm brainstorm)

2010-06-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

So, Blizzard still seems to be debating on whether/how to replace WW in the fury rotation. Blue posts seem to waver between indicating that they're considering it, and debating whether we really need one.

Here are a couple thoughts that this brings up for me, and mainly this is a curiosity more than anything else.

Point #1: Bloodthirst, Slam, Heroic Strike, Cleave, as written do main hand weapon damage only.

Point #2: WW is our only strike that attacks with both weapons.

Point #3: having two weapons has pluses and minuses, e.g. on the up-side, we can melee swing more often (about twice), on the downside we experience 10% damage reduction (for current incarnation of TG) and our miss percentage goes from 8% to 27%.

So, let's take a look at an idea here, suppose that we consider a Fury build that is based around only carrying one 2 hander instead of trying to dual wield. On the one hand, this is not the direction this was normalized in, but on the other hand....

Suppose our melee damage (white swings) are intended to be about 30% of our overall damage. Let's suppose that means that we have two weapons swinging at about the same time doing 30% of our damage. Let's also suppose that we've invested the large amount of hit rating needed to hit cap our white swings. Now, the other 70% of our damage (except on multi-target pulls) doesn't benefit at all from the off hand swings. Only rage generation gets any boost at all.

So, if we trade off our off hand for a single two hander, we gain 6 talent points (maybe more depending how important WW is) to place other spots on the tree (maybe handy, maybe not) including the heretofore undesirable Unbridled Wrath (who knows how this will fare in Clysm?). Let's suppose those extra talents kind of wash out some of the unmeasureable factors, i.e. suppose that those extra talent points in things like Anger Management and Unbridled Wrath cut our rage generation loss so we still generate about 70-80% of the rage we did before instead of 50%, and otherwise have no real effect.

I'll use relative terms so we can compare directly.

Now, not having TG means that our 70% of yellow damage is actually 77% now, and the 30% of white damage becomes 16.5%. However, all that hit rating we no longer need (19% hit rating = 623 hit rating currently) can be transferred to extra haste/crit (interestingly enough, 623 Haste rating = 19% haste currently). So, we can add 20% to the white numbers as well as 20% of our rage generation as well. If we also assume that we are capped on our crit rating (say 50% for a nice comparison) that extra crit + haste interaction will also generate an additional 10% for both white damage and rage generation, thus giving us a total of 30% increase to those two numbers.

So, we're looking at Yellow Strikes making up 77% damage, white strikes making up 21.45% damage and rage generation at about 91-104%.

So, in theory, at least it would seem that swapping to a single weapon style with Fury would yield about the same end result as trying to dual wield.

Rage Generation (normalized to 2H Fury)

TG fury: 100%

Single Fury: 91-104%

Damage:

TG Fury:

30% white + 70% yellow = 100%

Single Fury:

21.5% white + 77% yellow = 98.5%

I can't wait until our talent tree has a preview available so I can see how feasible this idea is.

The Clysm raid changes, and some raid thoughts.

2010-04-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

They look interesting, but I'm of mixed emotions about them.

For one thing, I like the fact that I could run with my 10 man group all the time instead of having the "herding cats" experience that 25's can become, but since they're still going to incentivise doing the 25 mans (by offering more badges, etc) it may mean that the only way to get the "good" gear quickly is to run the 25's. I guess it will depend on numbers a lot. For example, if they make the next tier items cost the same (60-95 emblems) as the T10 gear, and if a raid boss offers 2 emblems on 10 man, and 4 on 25 man, since you can only do one of them, it will take you twice as long to work towards tier gear doing 10 mans.

But if they don't incentivise 25's that way, I know many many people who will choose to "cut the fat" so to speak and just run with a 10 man that they are comfortable with. Less demand on their machine, so better frame rates, etc. and overall easier to communicate, and fewer people to have to worry about.

I think it's safe to say that even if the rest of the gear drop amount goes up, I doubt that will really make the difference, i.e. if 2 pieces of gear drop from 10 mans, and 5 pieces of gear drop from 25 mans it's still exactly 1/5 of the raid that has the "chance" to get a piece of gear, regardless which one you're in. In my experience it's easier to get the 10 man gear, because the 10 mans will be consistent, so if someone wins a piece one week, they won't need it next week. I don't want to tell you how many people won the Dual Blade Butcher from week to week in our ToC 25's and then never came back to the raids. I drooled every time it dropped, and every time it went to someone else, sometimes a ret paladin (Armor Pen? Really?) and sometimes a DK or Warrior, but the axe never came back equipped to the raid.

On a secondary note, if you are a raider, please don't do this. You have to realize that everyone is trying to get the same gear as you, so if you don't know what the optimal gear is for you, please look it up. And if you are taking something because it "might" be cool, at least wait until everyone else has had a shot at it.

Examples of things that have annoyed me in the past:

Please, if you want to be a raider,

Fury warrior rolls on a second (name of weapon removed) but never equips it to raid, because really it wasn't as good as his other off hand weapon
Raid leader decides spuriously to award a hunter a melee weapon over a melee class who won the role because "the stat bonuses (agility) are more itemized for a hunter".
Someone rolls and wins item X and then later that night rolls and wins item Y which goes in the exact same slot, but rather than trade it off to someone else, has to sell item X since they gemmed it immediately not realizing there were much better upgrades. Note: both items about the same level, just stat bonuses were in different places.
Despite our guild's policy for the T10.5 upgrade pieces, someone rolls for a second or even third Sanctified piece of gear and wins over people who have none.

Please, if you want to be a raider, don't do these kinds of things. For example, I have a list right now of the 7 pieces of gear that might drop from ICC 25 that I would like. They are the ONLY pieces of gear I will roll on, and they are prioritized. For example, I have a drop from Saurfang that takes precedent over the drop from Deathwhisper, and both of those take precedent over all other drops in ICC. I would gladly put dkp on the drop from Saurfang if it came to that, but since our guild doesn't use point systems, it's a matter of politeness. Unfortunately for me, that trinket has a low drop rate and is the best in slot for a lot of dps classes, but here again, the trinket is an armor pen trinket, so if I lose the roll to a hunter, rogue, or fellow warrior, or even a DK, I'm fine, I'd have to have a good talk with a friend of mine if a retadin or ele shaman rolled on it though (and ask him WHY would they need it?).

A little research and politeness go a long way, finding out a little bit about what gear you actually want is definitely more worthwhile than just rolling on everything that might apply to you. Not to mention, if people see you allowing things to spread evenly, and then one day you request something specific, you might get the chance to have priority for a change.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you can't post a list of items you would roll on (and also a list of possible upgrades for those items that might be gotten) you probably shouldn't roll on things until you can.

Up to a point, I believe that these raiding loot rules work pretty well:

Research ahead of time. If you don't know if something is better for you, ask.
Look at the other people who are rolling on gear. If something is kind of so-so for you, but would improve their gear dramatically, it will improve your RAID dramatically overall. In that case, you should pass it to them.
Everyone present has the same chance to get items that are appropriate for them. If you don't know what is appropriate for you, please see the first rule.
Especially in big raids, try to use the 1 drop per person per raid rule, and for infrequent drops, possibly even 1 drop per person until everyone has gotten one. If no one is interested in an item, it can become sort of fair game to try to claim a second or third piece, but until then, stay out of those rolls. This also means you should save your rolls in some cases for those pieces you REALLY want, or if you win one and you might want something later, you can apply the second rule.
There will always be some exceptions, such as the legendary hammer pieces that drop in Ulduar. For a raid to benefit from that kind of thing, the same person has to get all of them. In that case, the decision should be made as a group who gets those items, and that person should be someone that can be counted on to be at the raid so that those items get used as much as possible. Similarly with the legendary axe that drops in ICC, a decision should be made who gets the "first" crack at it, and all others can be on a "next in line" basis. Otherwise it will take forever to get one in the raid.

Fury Changes in Clysm

2010-04-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

So, I'm pondering the possible outcomes of being Fury come 'Clysm, and I'm thinking that I read something on EJ's site that makes a lot of sense.

In order to get us to want to prioritize abilities correctly they'll have to do something like this for a sort of damage order:

Bloodthirst > Slam (proc) > HS > WW > Furious Sunder

The one thing I'm not certain about is whether HS (max) > Slam (proc) > HS (min) or

Slam (proc) > HS (max) > HS (min). Both have some use, but I think the latter would better preserve the use of the procced slam mechanic.

Now, I think this is going to be something very similar to the actual damage allotment, since otherwise, one of the no cd abilities would trump the cd abilities.

I know that all the talent trees are going to be revamped anyway, but they sound like many of our core talents will be left primarily in place, we'll just lose some of the passive "gain X% damage" type talents, and there should be some shifts, but for the purpose of this discussion, we'll mention the talents for these abilities as though they will remain largely the same.

I.e. If HS > Slam (proc) then why would you bother with waiting for Slams to proc? Plus, that frees up talent points, since that is all that talent does. Imagine, if HS trumps Slams even if it has to be maxxed to do it, I think most warriors would choose to use HS every chance they can, and place the 3 talent points into rage generation to help pay for their expensive HS's. If HS > Bloodthirst, then why bother using it? Essentially, they'll want to keep BT and Slam as the two top damage dealing abilities for a warrior's single target, and just use HS as a really good way to fill the gaps between the Bloodthirsts when Slam isn't proccing.

Regarding the right end of the spectrum, Furious Sundering was announced as a way to lessen the cost of needing to apply sunders, and is not supposed to be a move that replaces HS in any way, and I'd bet that it isn't supposed to be greater than WW either, and is just supposed to be a filler move. Of course, on the flip side of that argument, with sunder stacks reducing to 3, and the importance of keeping them up no longer as noticeable, perhaps they'll want to make it close to the minimum HS level, perhaps slightly below. Then you can do a 10 rage attack for about the same damage as minimum HS, but if you want to wallop off extra rage you can do a maxxed out HS.

They'll definitely want to keep WW low on this list in order to force us not to use it in single target fights, regardless.

And they've said they're considering giving us something else to push also, which would be nice, considering as it is we're looking at (count with me)

Bloodthirst
Slam
Heroic Strike
Sunder

total buttons we need to use in combat. Of course there will be the shouts as well, but depending on what they do about the "more powerful spell in effect" some people may not be shouting either. Or else we'll all need to take the talent that improves our shouts for 5 talent points whether we want them or not.

But I think having at least one more ability would be nice. If BT will stay on it's 4 sec cd, I think another 8-10 second cd ability that trumps it would be appropriate. I think it would be best if it made use of the dual weapon style that Fury uses, so some kind of double slam, similar in nature to a rogues Mutilate ability, or perhaps similar to a DK's Obliterate, some kind of ability that has a % damage effect, but if you are dual wielding it also adds a certain portion of your second weapon's damage.

A New Day's Insight into Yesterday's Fears

2010-04-12T10:20:00.001-07:00

Hello again,

So, I've been really pondering. There are still concerns I have, but I think I can supply some counter-fears as well, which may help to alleviate my concerns a lot.

For example, in reference to the WW changes, I think the end result will be a completely new and revised warrior rotation/priority system.

For example, I wouldn't be entirely shocked if the rotation became something as simple as HS (unless Slam becomes instant or BT is off cooldown), and use a sunder every 20 seconds or so.

I think the issue is whether this is an improvement over our current rotation (which is debatable).

But, until we have numbers to look at, don't be afraid of new rotations. They may work out better for us, who knows.

I also expect that since we won't have as much burst damage, they'll have to increase our damage from our abilities or our white strikes to compensate. Don't be shocked if we end up seeing 30-55% of our overall damage coming from nothing but white strikes.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the overall damage will go down, just that the rotation may get less interesting than it is now.

And, while I'll be the first to tell you that I'm more concerned about overall interesting rotation, the raid is more concerned about overall damage.

I suspect that since our sunders will be less mandatory, and our other debuffs are replicable by other classes, our damage on a per strike basis will have to come up. Perhaps this alone is part of the reduction in the weapon damage component to WW, they're afraid that without this, our AoE damage will tear through the roof.

However, along with that, I wouldn't be surprised to see our new AoE rotation becoming Cleave, cleave, cleave, cleave... (etc.), and only switching to include a WW once every cd if we have more than, about 4-6 mobs in the pull.

Again, though, don't expect this to be a necessarily bad change, it's clear that it will be less interesting from our side, but the damage output may be normalized so that it still works for the raiding environment.

Warrior change preview

2010-04-09T12:25:00.001-07:00

Well, if you haven't already, please go check these out on the forums:

MMO-Champion's Blue sheet

The forums

There are a lot of concerns I have, and the devs keep telling us to calm down and see what they are going to do, but compared to the other class previews, I wouldn't expect to be too happy.

Protection warriors will be happy, Arms PvPers will find some good things and a couple down sides, but overall will be ok. Fury warriors may as well just consider becoming tanks or arms warriors or changing to a DK/rogue/hunter etc. I hate to say the sky is falling, but if you recall the beginning of WotLK, when the TG changes went in and most warriors switched to Arms because the damage was better, and the rotation was more fun, Cataclysm looks like it may be similar.

I'm actually trying to keep a "Wait and see how beta goes" attitude, but so far, I'm having a really hard time keeping an open mind about the effects on Fury. This only bothers me because Fury is a warrior's only viable PvE dps spec, and we're seeing it being ignored by the developer's preview of upcoming attractions, and only getting nerfs to some of our core abilities. It's' clear that they're giving us plenty of rage generation abilities, but since our rage dump will be on the gcd along with everything else, there's going to be a finite amount of button pushing we can do regardless of how much rage we have.

On that note, with regard to the lack of haste improvements, I tried to explain my fears to a friend earlier today as follows:

Let's propose a test to see how much resource management actually limits damage dealt.

Phase 1: take one member of each class, have them do whatever rotation they think will maximize their damage for 10 minutes to a target dummy in basic gear (or no gear, whatever) but with haste nullified.

Phase 2: take the same people, but set their resource (runes/energy/focus/rage/mana) at maximum and never diminishing at all. Have them do whatever they have to do to max out dps for the same time period (still with haste nullified).

Now compare these two numbers.

What will this test tell us?

If someone's damage goes up significantly (as I believe it would in the case of rogues/hunters/DK's) then that class has their damage tied directly to their resource management, so haste being something that increases their resource gain would be beneficial to their overall dps, and you could even use those numbers to see if any abilities needed tweaking.

If someone's damage stays pretty much the same (as I believe it would in the case of paladins and warriors) then that class really doesn't benefit much at all from increased access to resources, and thus, haste doesn't really do what was promised by developers.

The reason I suspect that rogues/hunters/dk's would see a pretty noticeable improvement is that they're the classes whose resources really do limit how often they can press a button. Rogues' buttons are only pressed on gcd during the initial phase and when they have sufficient energy to allow it, and the rest of the time they're waiting for more energy to build up. Hunters, with the new focus resource, would likely be similar. DK's are limited in a different way, but still by their resource. If runes were permanently activated, a dk's rotation would be (1) apply diseases, (2) spam big attack (Heart Strike/Death Strike/Obliterate/Scourge Strike) until diseases needed to be reapplied. So, in the case of DK's, their resources limit their choices in which abilities they can use next.

Give infinite resources, all three are then able to spam their best attacks continuously in perfect rotations to achieve big increases.

Now look at paladins and warriors. We already have pretty much infinite resources, but our damage isn't infinite. It's still limited. This is because we have not one resource (mana/rage), but 3. Our most obvious resource is rage/mana, but our other resources are gcd's and cooldowns. If you wanted to see the same results from this test as you saw from DK's, rogues, hunters, etc. from warriors and paladins, the only thing you could do would be to take away gcd's and/or cooldowns. Since gcd's are an inherent part of the game and are part of what allow the server time to deal with things, let's focus on cooldowns.

Let's say Bloodthirst is our best ability. We can hit it once per 4 seconds. Notice that this is the same whether we have just barely enough rage to hit it, or an infinite amount of rage. In fact, if that's the only button we have, unlike the dk's, rogues, hunters, etc. our damage would stay EXACTLY the same in this test, because rage is not what holds our damage back, it's the cooldowns on our abilities. Now, if rage were enough of an issue that it prevented us from using our abilities every cooldown, then the argument could be made that this would be a good thing. However, they'd need to normalize our abilities to do MORE damage to allow this to be the case.

So, in short, if they really want to make haste better for us, it seems like one way to do it is to constrict us with rage starvation. Force us to wait more than our cooldowns for enough rage to hit a button, and then amplify our damage from each ability to compensate for that. Then, when we get haste, we'll get rage faster, be able to hit buttons faster, and all will be well, except then we'll be QQ out of the frustration of sitting at our computers waiting to hit a button.

An alternative is to let haste shorten our cooldowns.

Frankly, I like the second one better.

New Rage Mechanics in Cataclysm, some numbers

2010-04-06T12:26:00.001-07:00

Hi, guys.

So, just for my own edification I set up an MS eXcel simulator to see what the numbers would look like in cataclysm for rage generation as dps.

Most of what I found wasn't unexpected, but I'll talk about it anyway.

To begin with I set up a trial combat similar to what might happen vs a target dummy. I did not take level or damage or anything else into account, since according to blue's those won't figure in anyway. Instead I held a few things that I could modify to run the numbers.

First, I'm assuming expertise cap. Perhaps this is a mistake, but if not, it just makes the misses happen more frequently and I'll talk about those in a minute. Second, I didn't exactly use appropriate battle tables since all I'm looking for is a basic understanding of what will be happening. Third, I allowed user input hit percentage (and I assume you're at the 27% dh miss chance), crit chance, and haste rating to allow for any combination that matters to you. I also allow the user input of blizzard assigned elements such as rage per second from hits (this is the normalized value that the weapon speeds would modify so they all had a standard rps output) off hand modifier (which blizzard states will be 1/2) and crit modifier (which blizzard states will be 2).

Now, to get a solid and clear understanding of what happened, let me give you some of those numbers. I randomly picked 1 as my base normalized rps number. Regardless of what actual value is here, the results will simply be multiplied by the resulting number so that I can talk about absolutes such as twice as much rage as X situation or whatever.

Next I wanted to get some baseline numbers so I could compare haste's benefit to rage vs crit vs hit. The easiest way to do this is to start with white hit cap. Yes, I know that's WAY up there, but that's where I'm starting since I think that's probably going to end up how we have to do things.

Then I started with 0% crit chance or haste (which is not that reasonable) and modified haste up to 100% and then did the same with guaranteed crits every swing. Here is the table of those results for baseline numbers:

So, what do these numbers mean? The first thing I notice is that crit %, in the new system, will translate directly to a multiplier for rage generation, just as it does for dps now. Clearly with numbers between 0 and 100 % crit, there will be variation, but again, these are just baseline numbers.

Notice that with no chance to crit and no haste to speed up your weapon swings, your rps is pretty close to the 1.5 you might expect from the description of how rage is generated. 1 rps from your main hand, and .5 rps from your off hand.

As you add haste, you notice a slight improvement, approximately on the order of a multiplier to rage gained. 10% haste is roughly equivalent to 10% more rage gained, as you might expect. And, clearly, since crit also multiplies, we're not surprised when double rage from crits and double rage from haste stacks to give us approximately 4 times the rps.

I want to reiterate that these are baseline numbers only and cannot be used definitively until Blizzard makes these plans more concrete. So, now I have a fairly good idea of what to start from and I have some clear notions immediately.

1 - As far as rage generation is concerned, haste and crit will work multiplicatively to increase your rps.

2 - Since according to the blue posts so far, haste will do nothing else than what it already does for us, the dps impact of these stats will remain approximately equal.

3 - As far as rage is concerned haste and crit are equivalent in terms of adding, but having both haste and crit values will be equivalent to the product of the two, hence better than the sum.

I also do not yet know what position in this table Blizzard will pick to normalize around, but notice that if your standard rotation (feels good, plenty of rage, but not too much) is normalized at about 3 times the set base rps, people in low gear levels might feel considerably rage starved, and in high level gear (which will now stack crit / haste / hit instead of current stacks of armor pen/strength/crit) you'll be seeing about twice as much rage generation as they've normalized around, and you may still find yourself rage bloated.

Knowing that rage generation is about the same, but also knowing the cost of each point of crit/haste, we can maximize a functional over this set of parameters and see that the optimum ratio of crit / haste (admittedly using current values for these, which may change in Cataclysm)

will be 2/3. So, if you have about 1.5 times as much haste percentage as you have crit, you will optimize your rps.

Ok, now for the secondary side of this.

Note that they still haven't changed the way haste works for dps. Unless they do something about this later, all we'll have going for us in this department is the hope that our white swings will do more damage. As it stands, a good raiding warrior should be seeing white damage in the neighborhood of about 10-12% of his overall dps. With haste affecting nothing other than white swings, this means we really see only 10-12% of the effect from haste that we see in critical strike as far as dps go.

If we factor that in, from a dps perspective, we see our cost for haste skyrocket to somewhere between 273.25 for one percentage point dps increase up to 327.9. At that cost, the optimal ratio for our crit/haste goes to 7/1.

So, essentially, dps would dictate we should budget for 7 times as much crit as haste, but rage generation dictates we should keep a 2/3 ratio of crit chance to haste. This will likely create the dilemma for all of us at the release of Cataclysm, having to decide between a ratio closer to 2/3 for purposes of rage, or 7/1 for purposes of dps.

Now, in all of this, I haven't yet addressed hit rating. From everything I did in tests, any miss chance, be it from misses or dodges (or parries if you're standing in the wrong place) start from those baseline numbers and begin to reduce your overall rps. How much is not entirely clear without some meta-analysis of these simulations, but from initial inspection it seems that the drop is basically equivalent to the miss percentage on average.

So, if you are expertise capped and have 17% hit rating, you can expect to reduce the numbers in the above table by approximately 10% all the time from misses. So, what you see then is a formula something like:

total rps = BaseRPS x (1 - miss/dodge/parry chances) x (1+crit chance) x (1+haste percent)

And I think the lesson I took from this is that every 1% hit you don't have will correspond to a more than 1% rage loss.

So, I expect (and this is completely aside from any values these things may take, and is based solely on their explanation of how rage will work) that we will see a score priority of something like:

hit until white capped, expertise until soft capped > haste, crit

(and the ratio of haste to crit will be up to the individual, but I suspect that it will probably end up at 7 crit = 1 haste, since I figure that raiding individuals SHOULD be able to easily hit the normalization level that Blizzard sets, so they'll focus on the dps instead of extra rage we can't bleed off.)

Hit replacing Armor Pen?

2010-04-05T13:45:00.001-07:00

Well, this will be odd, but I suppose since we won't have armor pen in Cataclysm, at least we can use those 1400 points to eke out our 24% hit rating (obviously assuming some 3% extra hit talent or whatever) and still have 600-700 points left over to add more haste and crit.

So maybe there's some silver lining after all, but I can't claim to be excited at the thought of stacking nearly 900 hit rating (which does very little for my dps, really, it can maybe add as much as 5% total) as a replacement for armor penetration. I'm adopting a wait and see attitude, because I'm sure that Blizz has caught all this stuff, but I'm also nervous to see how our starting dps compares to other classes that aren't losing their most important stat.

Cataclysm Rage Changes good, Haste changes lackluster

2010-04-05T10:18:00.000-07:00

I have been reading for a couple months now how, in Cataclysm, Blizzard plans to make haste a more attractive stat for melee dps (citing us in specific) by making it better for us especially in terms of resource management.

So, now Bornakk comes out with a description of rage mechanic changes along with a brief blurb about haste.

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

We are going to take the opportunity in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the problems with the Rage mechanic for both warriors and druids. Some of these problems include:

Warriors/druids in the lowest levels of gear can be Rage-starved.
Warriors/druids in the highest levels of gear no longer have to manage their Rage when it becomes infinite.
Warrior/druid tanks lose Rage income as they improve their gear and take less damage.
The gameplay of warrior and druid tanks loses a lot of depth when massive boss hits means never having to manage Rage.
Heroic Strike and Maul are effective, but tedious abilities for using up extra Rage.
In general, warriors and druids don’t have enough control over their Rage.

To resolve these issues, Rage will be normalized in Cataclysm. This will make the Rage gained by characters more consistent and avoid drastic differences between low-end and high-end gear.

The concept of normalized Rage may leave a negative impression on some veteran players, as we tried it once before in The Burning Crusade and it wasn't successful, resulting in them feeling weakened. However, we think that the concept is still sound -- it was just that the previous implementation didn't balance the values correctly, leading to players being Rage-starved. That is not the goal. As part of the change, we want to give warriors and druids a lot of ways to control their rage, so even in the worst-case scenarios they won’t feel like they lack the resource to do their job.

Here are some of the ways the Rage mechanic will change in Cataclysm:

1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:

If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.

2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

3) We will provide warriors and druids with more instant sources of rage. For example, the warrior shouts are changing to work more like the death knight ability Horn of Winter. Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown. Both classes will have additional methods to generate Rage in an emergency or bleed off Rage when they have too much.

4) All “on next swing” attacks in Cataclysm are being removed. Heroic Strike and Maul will be instant swings that cost a variable amount of Rage. For example, imagine Heroic Strike costs between 10 and 30 Rage. You must have at least 10 Rage to use the attack, but it will consume all available Rage up to a maximum of 30. Any Rage consumed above the minimum will cause the ability to hit harder, and in some cases much harder. We will tune the ability so that it’s generally not a good idea to hit it when you have low Rage (unless everything else is somehow on cooldown) but becomes a more attractive button the higher your Rage.

We understand this change may be scary for many players, but keep in mind that the constants in the formulas for gaining Rage will give us the ability to make quick adjustments if we feel Rage generation is too low. Our goal is for each character's Rage to not be always high or always low, but rather a resource that needs to be managed properly by the player.

So, basically, I'm torn here. First of all, I really like the ideas of the changes to rage mechanics. Yes, I know that in the beginning this will severely nerf our dps at the high end, because now we'll basically be using one heroic strike every now and again, so it would be equivalent to the 1K dps loss I see if I don't use HS at all during a fight, and yet, I think overall this will be good for the class in general. It makes crit more attractive, it makes hit more attractive, and it keeps things working in general the same for warriors at all levels even though that "sameness" will likely be less than it is now.

Am I "excited" at the prospect of dropping back in the pack as I resume my lackluster gcd restricted rotation of WW, then BT, then hit Slam only if Bloodsurge procced, then wait until BT is off cd, then hit it again, then wait for Slam to proc, then rinse/repeat? Not really, but in the big picture, at least we'll be able to hit HS for one or more of those awkward pauses in the action, and I like the fact that tanking will be so much more arranged around having better gear instead of not. I do worry some that basing the rage mechanic on total Health will prompt the exact same kind of over-emphasis on Stam stacking that goes on now, but if that's something Blizz wants to encourage, at least we know what's what.

Now, onto the blurb about haste. I mean, really, HOW IS THAT DIFFERENT THAN NOW?!?!??!?

Right now, the ONLY effect haste has on us is decreasing our swing timers. Our gcd that actually manages everything we REALLY do stays constant, but our swing timer goes down. So, stacking 10% haste (which is quite expensive, don't you know) increases our white swing damage and rage generation by 10%. Ooooooh.

And their proposal to "fix" haste so that we want it more? Leave it exactly like it is.

They're removing Armor Penetration something which I've seen personally increase dps by 40% and more even at relatively low levels, and to "make up for that" they're making haste do exactly the same thing it does now.

I'll be honest, the changes to rage are actually exciting to me, even though I dread the overall impact that the changes to HS/cleave will have on our dps as a class (I just hope they don't drop enough that I'm not invited to raids anymore). I think overall they will be good changes.

The changes to haste? Bah! What a cop-out.

Essentially, Blizzard wants to make haste more attractive, so they're trying to FORCE us to use haste in order to have enough rage to do our 75% of current dps in the future.

I mean, if you wanted to talk about changes to haste for melee dps, I have some ideas that I think are more innovative than "NOTHING":

Make haste affect not only swing timers, but also gcd and cooldowns. If 10% haste meant gcd went down to 1.35 seconds instead of 1.5 seconds, warriors would be camping on haste so fast your head would spin. Especially now that we will have one new thing to activate our gcd during combat (HS and Cleave). If our overall cooldowns went down with haste, we could get through our rotation that much faster. Faster rotations = more interested fury warriors who don't have enough to do during their rotations as it is = Warriors and ret pallies (and possibly rogues) flocking to jump on the haste bandwagon.
Allow haste to scale abilities that are instant. Abilities with cast timers receive this kind of bump from haste, since cast times are affected, but instant abilities (i.e. virtually everything we do) are unaffected, hence haste does nothing for us in that regard. If 10% haste meant a 10% buff to damage from instant abilities, once again, we would see melee dps flocking to haste like a bunch of escaped convicts to a government subsidized whorehouse. This is possible since so many of our abilities are based on weapon damage which actually does scale with haste on white swings, but that change isn't reflected in our yellow instant strikes which make up more than 80% of our damage.
haste should scale dots, i.e. the dots from poisons, deep wounds, etc. that we do should speed up just like you've done for healers and caster classes. Furthermore, these dots should somehow figure into your rage calculation so that having haste would NOT ONLY increase rage generated from white strikes but would also benefit us in rage from having our dots up on targets.
Or, finally, just drop the attempt to make haste beneficial to melee and come up with something else. Make it something called "Uberness" and it can directly scale with attack power to make everything hurt more, say 10% Uber = 10% overall increase in dps (scaled appropriately, of course).

Because, the simple fact of the matter is, if everything is going well, a warriors dps should only be about 10-12% from white strikes, and if haste ONLY affects our white strikes, then 10% haste means a whopping 1-1.2% increase in our overall dps. ONE PERCENT! 328 haste rating (equivalent to more than 16 gem slots) to improve our dps by ONE PERCENT!

If you can't do better than that, how about just leaving us armor penetration since at least that does what we need?

April Fool's Day 2010 Blizzard jokes.

2010-04-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

Once again, everyone is in rare form this April Fool's.

Some things I can link because they might still be there, others probably won't, so you'll have to see them while you can.

1) On the armory today, you'll see some "differences" in your character (see below for example).

2) Interested in finding a 2's partner in life? Try this site: Blizzard.net's Matchmaking Service

3) Sick of Pugs with no gear clue? Now this Gear Potency Number will help.

Off Off Off Off Off Tanking For Dummies

2010-03-29T14:24:00.001-07:00

Howdy,

Well, I'm finally close enough on my main spec gear list (with some modifications for quickness) that I can start trying to see about what to do for my tank gear. Tank gear is harder for me, because it's my off spec, so in order to roll on decent gear, either (a) all the tanks in the raid need to have that item or better, or (b) I need to be tanking that night with the understanding that I'm rolling on tank gear only.

With that in mind, several things have to take a back seat to my main spec, so my tank gear has to be primarily drops, since I don't know how long it will be until I can afford to purchase any of the tier gear for it (not until I've bought 4 pieces of my main spec's tier 10 gear), so I have to temper my dreams for my tank gear a little more than usual.

However, I find that tanking gear is a little bizarre for me at this point. If I upgrade pretty much everything, I actually end up trading defense and some expertise for armor and health. That's pretty much the tradeoff. I'm just baffled, as my dodge stays about the same, my parry about the same, my hit about the same, It makes me wonder what exactly they've itemized around. After all is said and done, I think I gain about 200 strength, and about 400 stamina, which is certainly good, but I'm losing about 24.5 defense skill for it (which isn't a lot, admittedly, but it does increase block, parry, dodge, and attacking miss chance by about 1/5 of a percent each.) It ends up being a tradeoff of about 300 ish defense rating for those 200 strength and 400 stamina (which I'm willing to admit is a great trade up) but I'm also increasing my iLevel quite a ways on most of those pieces (in some cases from 200-219 up to 251-264) so I almost find myself wondering why nothing else is improving any more than that.

Regardless, here is a beginning wowhead comparison of my current gear to an "eventual" gear set (which won't be any time soon, but it's somewhere to start).

Tanking Gear Comparison

Hammering the Armor Pen discussion into the ground

2010-03-19T13:22:00.000-07:00

Ok,

Last comment regarding the Armor Pen situation.

Let's discuss a value/cost estimate of Armor Penetration vs. Critical Strike rating.

Recall that each percentage point of Critical Strike costs 46 crit rating points, while one percentage dps increase from Armor Pen costs 25.45 percentage points (based on our model earlier which shows that for bosses 100% armor pen is equivalent to a 55.6% dps increase, so on average it requires about 1.8 percent armor pen to achieve a 1% dps increase.

It is clear just from looking at these, that if we're trying to decide on gems or attribute values to allocate, Armor Pen is "more valuable" than crit rating.

Since these each have essentially a cap, the overall "best" we can do with them is to get the 55.6% increase from Armor Pen and, let's say, a 60% increase from crit rating.

So the product of these two shows that this would be effectively a dps increase of 149%

How much does this "cost"? Well, 1400 armor pen + 2760 crit = 4160 total rating points. Since in most cases (e.g. gemming) these have the same value, so they can basically be added directly without needing conversion rates.

Clearly, if you have to choose one to go with, you go with Armor Pen first, and then add critical strike in afterwards, since your metric from 0 will always be minimized taking that route.

What about Strength? Well, it depends on your current dps, and many other factors, but since strength is linear, the cost in strength rating to accomplish the same task depends on your dps.

At 100 dps, the 149 additional dps you're getting from 100% ArP and 60% crit is equivalent to 1049 Strengh points. Clearly you have a huge advantage going with Strength over ArP + Crit in this case. Then again, if you're doing 100 dps, you're doing something wrong.

As you increase your own dps, the value of your higher ArP + Crit also increases, for example, at 5K, the resulting increase of 7450 dps would require 52,150 strength rating. Clearly less cost effective than the 4160 from earlier.

In fact, what is the "break even" base dps? Well, according to a chart, the cheapest way to get each percentage increase from 2% up to this "cap" of 149% shows that the break even dps numbers are between 300 and 400.

Now, this is all theory crafting, and is not based on actual abilities that take this into account in different ways. For example, some abilities use weapon damage and also add a fraction of attack power. In those cases, strength is playing double duty, as well as the 10% raid buff from kings which affects strength and nothing else.

However, Even if we are very generous and say that we'll double the value of strength (effectively buying our dps at half off), the break even point never deviates much above about 800 after you get up to a 10% or more dps increase. And I know very few fury warriors that can't get more than 800 dps even using vendor white weapons and no armor or trinkets.

I'd like to run some simulations on some numbers with training dummies, although this can be difficult, but basically it should be that the amount of armor penetration and crit rating can affect how valuable your strength is, but strength alone will not be able to do the kind of dps increase that crit and armor pen can accomplish.

Is Armor Pen Worth it? What about Sunders? Haste? Strength? What do I gem?

2010-03-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I did a little calculation, and here's what I can say about these things.

First the part that you can find many other places.

It is widely accepted that bosses in LK have been adjusted to all have 13083 armor value. GC also announced exactly how armor penetration is calculated, and I gave a few statements toward that earlier.

So, here's the skinny:

BASE:

Boss level = 83, boss armor = 13083, boss physical damage mitigation = 46.2%.

this means that out of every 100 points of damage you do, 53.8 points "get through" armor.

Before we look at armor penetration, let's look at sunders/faerie fire.

a 5 stack of sunders and FF give 25% reduction to armor value, which gives:

Boss level = 83, boss armor (minus Sx5/FF) = 9812, boss physical damage mitigation = 39.18%.

this means that out of every 100 points of damage you do, 60.82 get through. So, for classes with all physical damage output, that's a flat 13% dps increase. Sure, it takes some maintenance during the fight, but it stay's up pretty much the whole time, and it's raidwide.

Ok, now what does 100% armor penetration do for us?

Well, calculating the value using GC's formulas shows that for bosses

C = 400 + 85*(Lvl) + 4.5*85*(Lvl - 59)

C = 16635.

So, summing this with the armor value and dividing by 3 gives us the armor pen "effective armor" value of

(16635+13083)/3 = 9906

So, 100% armor penetration (no sunders) gives us:

Boss level = 83, Effective Armor (minus 100% ArP)=3177, Phys Damage mitigation = 17.26%.

so now, out of every 100 points of physical damage dealt, 82.74 get through, or an increase over the base of 55.6%.

I.e. for us, this means a flat out 55.6% dps increase without changing anything about our rotation.

Now, with sunders.

The calculation above is taken based on boss armor value, which is decreased by sunders and FF, so if we take these into account, remember the boss's armor value is reduced to 9812. So now the ArP cap becomes

(16635+9812)/3 = 8815.

So,

Boss Level = 83, Effective Armor = 997 (yep, that's all), Phys. Damage Mit. = 6.14%.

So, now, out of every 100 points of damage dealt, 93.86 get through. That's an increase over the baseline of 74.4%, and an increase of 13.4% over 100% armor penetration alone.

Now, as to whether or not this is worth going for is difficult to determine. Percentage increases for armor penetration are just as confusing as percentage increases, say, in critical strike. However, it's fair to say that a 1% increase in dps is the same either way. Especially if they stack, as these do. Notice, however, that a 1% increase in critical strike costs 46 crit rating points, while a 1% increase in armor pen costs 14. Admittedly, 1% armor penetration is really only about a half a point dps increase, but even looking at the scenario above, the price is still only about 25 armor pen for a 1% dps increase.

Strength, the other popular choice for gems, is a linear increase, and as such, benefits more the person who doesn't already have high dps. Each 20 points of Strength yield 40 Attack power, which add 2.86 dps onto your weapon stats, and if those scale with abilities, it adds to there too. However, many of our abilities use weapon damage and only use portions of our Attack Power to calculate damage dealt. Notice that if you're doing, let's say a respectable 5K dps in raids, 3 dps is adding a tiny fractional increase to your overall dps.

However, the combination of all of these seems to be the most effective. High strength/crit when possible, ArP until you hit cap, then your doing the following:

(DPS + Str)*Crit*Arp

That way you're getting the most out of all three.

If, for example, you have a 40% crit rating along with the 100% ArP and sunders, you're looking at a calculation like:

(DPS + Str)*(1.4)*(1.74) = 2.436*(DPS + Str)

Which should be doing an awful lot for your dps, I would think.

Compare that to either of the other possibilities:

(DPS + LOTS_Str) = DPS + Str + Extra Str

(DPS + Str)*(1.6) = 1.6*(DPS + Str)

around the point of crit diminishing returns

or even

(DPS + LOTS_Str)*(1.6) = 1.6*(DPS + Str) + 1.6*(Extra Str)

You can see that the higher your baseline DPS, the better benefit you get from using multiplicative stats over linear stats. If Haste actually affected your dps similarly, I'd end up going with a ArP + Crit + Haste model, but Haste only affects your swing speed, and your melee white damage typically hits about 12% of your overall dps, so if Haste speeds up your white swings by 100% (3279 haste rating, by the way) it would mean a 12% increase to your total dps, this is why warriors typically frown on haste in general. Supposedly in Cataclysm they're modifying how haste works for melee in some way to try to make it more attractive, but I'll have to wait to see. Since our attacks are primarily either instant, or (like Slam) on a specific swing timer that doesn't adjust (and this is not something that would really benefit a lot from needing massive amounts of haste rating) I'm not sure how they're planning on monkeying with our haste<-> rage conversions, but I'm keeping an open mind.

So, at the moment, my advice (take it for whatever it's worth) is to consider your stat priorities as follows:

Hit rating (minimum 164) try for 230-"ish"

Expertise soft cap at 214 rating.

Armor Penetration hard cap at 1400.

And whatever else you can afford, dump into some combination of critical strike and Strength.

Since Crit seems to hit a wall at about 60% (with raid buffs), I suspect that if your crit is already in the 45-50% range, you probably want to do more Strength.

And it is possible to do all of these, see my earlier post for examples.

So, how can I get 100% passive armor pen as fury?

2010-03-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

Well, you'd need a phenomenal and well designed gear set. Now, this is VERY high end, I realize, but if you'll notice there are actually a few "throwaway" gems that are being used for Strength/Crit, or other types of gems that aren't really needed. If you happen to be a JC/BS as many people are, then rejoice, because you can get 82 more armor penetration than anyone else can, which makes this even easier to get.

The goal is to shoot for the 1400 rating, and that's going to involve filling every available slot with the best item you can find that has armor penetration.

However, notice that I could have gone a little differently, because I used one trinket for hit rating, instead of getting the other armor pen trinket, and you can also substitute in something like the Scorpion until your gear is up there, since even though it won't work 100% of the time, 15-20% up time is better than no uptime at all.

I'm also not happy that this gear set has so much expertise (you need about 26, 32 is a little overkill) and I'd love to be able to trade some of that for a little hit rating (I think, and most people agree, that your minimum needed is 164 (with Precision), but since you don't cap out until 820, and your white strikes generate rage as well as about 12% of your dps, I think I'd like to have somewhere in the mid 200's, like 263 or so, but I could definitely make do with the 178 that this gear set has, and I could always use up those other yellow gem slots on more hit gems, but in this case I chose not to.

Here is a second possibility done by swapping around ranged weapons, rings etc. that has more hit rating, still goes just over the 1400 cap (and really, you could stop at 1397 and be fine, I think but I wanted to demonstrate that the 1400 cap could be achieved). It still has a little more expertise than I would like, but I'd rather have 27 expertise than 25 since you don't get fractions, so if you can't get 214 rating, go to 223.

And last, but not least, you might say, well, Gurggy, I don't have a guild that's pwning ICC 25 heroic every week yet, how can I get this 1400 cap? Well, admittedly, it requires a little bit of patience and creativity, but here's a comparison of the last choice with a gear set that's attainable, pretty much, by lots of frost emblems, and a few 25 man runs, no heroic gear, and it doesn't even count on the drops to upgrade the tier gear.

It does, admittedly, take into account completing the initial quest for Shadow's Edge, which I've already mentioned, but even taking that into account, if you're a serious raider in a serious raiding guild, this should be very doable.

Don't forget, as long as you can keep your expertise at around 214, and your hit rating at about 240-260 (minimum 164, remember) you can feel free to gem as much as possible to the 1400 armor pen cap.

In almost any set of gear you'll have, you should be looking at at least 200-300 armor pen possible just from sockets alone (or 15 gem sockets all together), maybe more. If you'll notice, this lower set of gear holds the equivalent of 19 total Fractured Cardinal Rubies, or 380 armor pen rating just in gems. Again, if you're a BS/JC as many are, you can notch this number up another 82. So even in this set of gear there is still some play to move things around. You'll notice a couple of what I call throwaway gems that are Str/Crit gems.

Also notice that in each case, I've satisfied the metagem conditions with two puissant dreadstones, and also fulfilled the 4 piece tier 10 bonus, even though this was entirely optional (some of the tier pieces could have been traded for higher armor pen pieces that didn't budget in the set bonus, but eh, why not?).

Fourth version, even easier, uses a better + hit rating trinket that isn't as cool, but can be bought for emblems of triumph.

Fifth version, trades low drop rate Flame Leviathon thrown weapon for badge one.

Last one. I think this one may be my starter Armor Pen set. I already have many of these pieces, and most of the rest I can do as I acquire more frost emblems, and I only have 4 drops that I have to hope for in ICC 25. The catch here is that the hit rating is lower than I'd like and the expertise is way too high, but without doing 25 Ulduar or some other raids that will be difficult if not impossible to get people to go for, this may be my best bet for now (of course, it still hinges on getting down more bosses in ICC 25, but I have faith in my guild. Even when we struggled at things before, we eventually overcome.

Here is my transition chart so I can follow along.

The quest for Shadowmourne

2010-03-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

About 3 months ago (maybe a couple weeks more) I started saving up primordial saronite for the turn in to gain Shadow's Edge The rest of the materials, I felt, would probably be available by the time I finished. And I was right. The solo quest item (the hammer) really wasn't that tough to obtain, but our guild is at the point where we're trying to down Festergut and Rotface in ICC 25 right now, and that's exactly where we were when I bought my 25th primordial saronite.

Let me just say, if anyone out there is interested in this quest chain, be aware that it is neither short, nor cheap, nor easily obtainable.

So, for a quick recap, if you want to start this quest chain, the first quest you have to turn in requires you to be friendly with the Ashen Verdict. If you're grinding your way to the 25 Primordial Saronites, don't worry about this, as you'll probably hit exalted long before you get enough frost emblems to buy them all anyway. Once you hit friendly, you're given the quest The Sacred and the Corrupt which requires you to return to the forge with:

1) 25 Primordial Saronite which can be bought by frost emblems (23 each, total: 475 frost emblems), off other people and the Auction house (for about 1800 each total: 45,000), dropped off ICC 25 bosses (at about a 10% chance, possibly more for heroic) or any combination of the above. Obviously the speediest way is the most expensive, and I estimate that you can easily obtain about 49 frost emblems each week if you can do one heroic each day, the raid weekly each week, the first four bosses of ICC 10 and 25, the frost watcher in VoA on 10 and 25, and complete the ICC weekly quest on 10 and 25. Of course, you may not have time for all that, so scale that back accordingly.

2) Light's Vengeance the hammer of Arthas. It's really not that tough to get this item. Several strats are available, but if you're like me, and you have a tank off spec, just use that. Go into the cave, start the guy going by touching the hammer, then make your way to the hammer (where he threw it), use Demo Shout until everyone is in close, then Shockwave, grab the hammer. Now, you have to go try to pick it up again, and you'll have to fight the boss, but he's fairly simple. If you can solo Threat From Above, you'll laugh at how easy this guy is to take down. Quest done.

3) Rotface's Acidic Blood and Festergut's Acidic Blood are the last two things I need. These only drop in 25 man ICC, and only one per boss downed. So, if you're one of 10 warriors/dk's/paladins that want this axe, be prepared to have to wait through them unless you've done the leg work to get everything else up to this point. Note that getting this ready could take up to 30 weeks or so, but if you have a ton of gold, could be done in a day.

Once these are turned in you have Shadow's Edge, a really amazing axe in and of itself. But the best part is, that you then can pick up the quest A Feast of Souls which will take you a few raids to complete (1,000 souls actually goes faster than you'd think, but it's still not 'quick').

Once that quest is turned in, you get three new quests to infuse your axe with Unholy, Blood, and Frost powers and then slay Putricide, Lana'thel, and Sindragosa respectively.

Once these quests are all completed, you will need to obtain 50 Shadowfrost Shards, which have a 25-50% drop rate off each boss in ICC 25, and about a 50-100% drop rate off each boss done in heroic mode in ICC 25. Note that this means on an average raid week period (12 bosses including Arthas) you could see between 3 and 6 drop in normal mode, and between 6 and 12 drop in heroic. At most, then you'd expect to be able to complete this phase in 2-4 months on regular mode, assuming you're the only one in your guild collecting them.

Once this is complete, you'll be given the might of Shadowmourne and Darion will ask one final task of you, take down Arthas.

As you can see, this is a fairly epic questline, but the end result is definitely worthwhile if you have a guild that is intent on clearing ICC 25, and you're interested, good luck to you.

Hello again.

2010-03-11T12:46:00.000-08:00

Wow, I needed a break apparently. I've still been gaming, but I just didn't have the time to write about it much.

Well, I'm back and excited. Some things have happened since last I typed:

- A) I don't remember if I mentioned that I went Fury. I can't help it, Blizzard made Fury the clear winner in the pve dps race. I tried it one night just to see and my dps went up nearly 50-70% immediately. A no brainer, then.

- B) So, now I've got some ICC gear (10 and 25), I've built up my 25 Primordial Saronite, and done the side quest, so I'm anxiously awaiting the chance to grab the two acidic blood drops from Festergut and Rotface so I can have my very own Shadow's Edge (and who knows, maybe eventually my own Shadowmourne). I'm also excited to be able to spend frost emblems on tier gear finally.

Our guild recently returned to 25 mans after a long hiatus. The truth was we just didn't have anyone that interested in doing them. We did at one time, but our numbers thinned out for various reasons (which we won't go into), and we were left with only about 10-15 people that were even interested in running 25 mans on a regular basis.

I'm especially excited about our 10 man raid, though. We started with some very new people who were dedicated and very interested, and last night we one shot the new VoA boss and the first six bosses of ICC (FG and RF being the 5th and 6th, since they're not in linear order) and cleared trash to Valithria, all well within our 3 hour time limit, even with breaks. It was also the first time we'd gotten the quest to get infected with the orange and green poison thing, and we spent longer trying to decide whether to try to glitch the encounter to ensure getting it, or to just go normally. In the end we decided on a normal approach (which was quite brave, I think, since we've only downed him one time (last week)). One shot. Us -1 Rotface - 0.

Anyway, I'm very proud.

Tonight our 25 man meets again, and I'm hoping that we modify our order some before we get too far in tonight.

I did some calculations, and the Festergut 25 man encounter is quite literally (as far as boss damage goes) the steepest dps requirement in 25 man ICC. Almost all other encounters can be accomplished with dps averaging a minimum of 4K, but Festergut 25 requires a minimum of about 6.7K+ on average. I'm sure this would be no issue if we were decked out in 25 man heroic gear from ToC, but we've only just done Northrend Beasts in ToGC 10 man this last Tuesday (and many many clears of 10 and 25 ToC) and it was anything but easy.

The totals ran something like total dps requirements for all fights in ICC about 67K - 72K, but Festergut requires 134K.

Holy crud!

That's quite a step up to force people to make in the same instance. Compare that to Rotface that has no enrage timer, and just requires the coordination to get through it before mana runs out, it seems a little extreme. Festergut in 10 man is noticeably less of a steep bump in the road. I think our 10 man is meeting two more times this week to try Putricide again, and the blood and frost wings. From what I've read, the other wings sound significantly less complicated than the Putricide fight, so we'll have to see how it goes.

PTR patch notes update for patch 3.2.0

2009-07-16T05:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-07T10:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-02T12:57:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-05T10:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-05-22T11:16:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-05-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-05-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

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. . .

2009-05-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-05-12T14:08:00.001-07:00

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:

2009-05-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T14:11:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-07T09:13:00.001-07:00

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

*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

2009-05-04T10:16:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

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.

Off-Tanking Ignis in Ulduar

2009-05-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

So, as I'm doing this from different perspectives, I'm learning a little about what needs to be done.

My guild 10 man just downed the first 4 in Ulduar last night in under 2 hours.

I was playing the role of off-tank for the whole time, and as off tank, I can say that for sure, the most annoying of the four is Ignis, but last night I noticed some tricks that make it VERY easy to do.

Off Tanking Ignis:

The basic setup: in 10 man, we determined that the key ingredient to this fight is the healers. You will most likely need 3. One for the main tank, one for the off tank and raid and one for the pot (and raid when no one is in the pot).

The dps and healers will pretty much stand in the middle of the room (right between the two pools) and the MT will kite Ignis around in a circle, close enough to the dps for the melee to hit him, but always facing to the side of the group (imagine running a ruler around a penny, where Ignis is the point of contact between the two, and he's facing along the ruler).

You (the OT) are in charge of grabbing any of the 20 constructs that can be brought to life and making sure that they are killed in a timely fashion so that Ignis doesn't buff enough to wipe the tank and then the raid. The constructs are arranged around him in 4 rows on both sides of the area, and you have to police all of them in 10 man (in 25 man, I think it would be worthwhile having 2 off tanks).

So to begin with, you're not going to be anywhere near Ignis for "most" of the encounter. Ignis is big, and hard to see around. Your main tank is most likely going to be circling Ignis around the middle of the floor (right between the two pools). So you want to stay close to the sides, and keep moving. you need to be constantly watching both sides of the room.

Once you hear him say "Arise, soldiers!" start looking OVER his head. He will throw a spark to whichever construct he is activating. Having your camera distance set at maximum will help a lot with this. Once you know which construct he's activating, start running that direction. You want to hit him with something quickly. If your raid group is doing this right, most of the group is huddled basically in the middle, and you don't want to get "too" far out of range for the healers, but you need to be the first thing the construct sees. If you miss it, it's ok, they don't do a lot of damage immediately, but you will need to taunt it ASAP, and quickly lock your target's aggro on you.

Next step is to make your way as quickly as possible (which may be a slow crawl, since you may have to walk backwards to kite them without letting them aggro onto the raid group) to the most recently placed "upside down flame tornado" (that's my name for them). Then stop. If you have the ability to have some druids or mages on hand to root them in the middle while you step out, that's good, otherwise, you'll need to stay healed while you sit there and babysit your little guy(s). Once you see them become orange (or have 20 stacks of the debuff, whichever is easier for you) you need to call out in vent to alert the ranged dps that you've got an incoming brittle guy. As long as you parked them in the most recent flame-nado, you shouldn't have to move them again, but if you were forced to use an old one, you might need to take them to a new one before they finally go molten. Run, don't walk, directly to the nearest pool. Do NOT go anywhere near the raid, and don't be afraid to taunt them one extra time for good measure on the way. I've noticed that the moment they become molten they drop aggro and reset, so you'll definitely need to do something to get their attention off the raid long enough to get to the pool. Do a quick in and out at the pool, and call out in vent again that you now have a brittle construct so the ranged dps can destroy it. Run quickly, as if you are still in range the explosion will hurt badly. If your ranged dps has a hard time keeping oriented, you might tell them "North" or "South" pool to make it easier for them to know where to orient.

Unlike the dps, you won't really have to worry about being in the pot, and you won't really care about "most" of the things that Ignis does, but if you are a paladin or DK, do watch out for the spell lock periods. Each time he casts flame jets, remember that this will interrupt casting and prevent casting from that school for 8 seconds. If you're using spells to tank, this might be an issue. Obviously it's not a big deal for me.

By the way, ever notice that all the "shouty" bosses in Northrend have the same voice? Hmmmm.

Ah, back to it.

2009-04-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

Hello, I had a brief vacation, during which time, of course, Patch 3.1 comes out, so I missed out the first week of it.

I come back and first thing I do is get the dual spec. I love it. In Naxx last weekend, I swapped out protection/fury several times. Great.

My fears over the nerf to titan's grip, though have been realized. I'm seriously considering building and using Arms for my dps spec, which will be all at once cheaper and better, according to comparisons to the warrior we have in our 10 man raid that went arms right away.

My average dps is now topping out at about 2700 (bumps up to 3100 occasionally), about 300-400 less than I was doing, and about 800-1200 less than all the other classes in my raids.

I expect that it won't be long before we experience a mass exodus of Fury warriors, since raids don't invite us along for our good looks.

But on a happier note: My first trip into Ulduar, and I hear all these horror stories, and it's almost pop pop pop, Flame Leviathon, Razorscale, and XT all go down. Mind you we don't even start raiding until nearly 9:00pm my time, and I work Friday mornings too, so I don't even stay up late. From what my group said though, the week I was gone they couldn't do more than the first two and it took them Thursday and all day Sunday to get that far. Having never done "semi-unknown" content before, I couldn't relate, but now I do. We tried a few times to take down Ignis, but had better luck on Sunday when we were fresh. So now the first 4 bosses are down, 2 achievements and we've gotten REALLY close on Iron Council. One more try this week, I hope.

So from a warriors perspective (after one run through part of Ulduar) here's my tips for the 4 bosses we managed to take down:

1st) Flame Leviathon. I was "dps" for this. I started out in the turret of a siege engine and switched to a Chopper for the boss fight. This fight is a blast. Basically, as a chopper you have 3 jobs:

(1) speed in front of him and throw out the tar

(2) try to hit the guy with your sonic thing when you can

(3) when group members get catapaulted onto FL, you pick them up, heal them and take them back to their vehicles.

2nd) Razorscale. I was dps for this fight too. I've read this same thing other places, but essentially, since she goes in phases, during the air phase you go after the adds like crazy, and watch out for the blue fireballs. There are also blue and orange fireballs, but while these cause damage, they don't leave a burning blue spot on the ground like the blue ones do. During the ground phase, ignore the adds and burn the boss. That's pretty much it from a dps perspective.

3rd) XT. This one took most of our tries the first night. we 1 shot FL and 2 shot Razorscale, but XT took about 3-5 tries. I have two tips that made our job easier:

(1) There are two groups of adds "INSIDE" the chamber that need to be cleared before you start. They are standing ON the same piles of rubble that the other adds spawn from. They will not aggro the boss. I understand Blizz fixed an issue that caused both of these groups to aggro simultaneously, which is good, but make sure you do them before you start.

(2) Burn boss, ranged will hit bomb things to kill as many adds as possible.

(3) when heart drops at 75%, burn it fast

(4) Burn boss to 50%

(5) when heart drops a second time, take care of whatever adds you can, then go back and do as much dps on the heart as possible.

(6) Burn boss to 25%

(7) when heart drops this time, burn it quick so you can almost kill him once he reactivates, and then take care of the last 1-2%.

4.) Ignis. So the first night we tried this about 2-3 times before calling it, and then went back to do it Sunday. Ok, what can I say, this guy is kind of hectic. I was the add tank for this fight. So basically, while everyone else burned the boss, my job was the constructs. Here's how that works well.

(1) he'll activate these guys pretty frequently. You can tank more than one, but don't let them wander into the group as once they become molten they do aoe damage. Note: Ignis says something like "RISE MY SOLDIERS" each time he activates a construct.

(2) I REALLY tried to find a good way to stand so that the construct is IN the fire and I'm OUT of it, but it never seemed to work right. Basically, it worked best when I just kited them right into the fire and stood until they became molten. Here is where Vent comes in handy. Call out to let the ranged dps know that you have a molten construct and run him into the fountain. You only need to go into the shallow part, not the deep part, so just lead them in and you run right back out.

(3) the hardest part about this is SEEING the constructs. This encounter is probably a LOT easier in 25 man because each add tank can grab constructs on one side of Ignis or the other so they don't have to keep looking around Ignis to find the construct that just spawned.

(4) Heals are the biggest challenge here. Your group will likely want 3 healers for this encounter, even in 10 man. One for the MT, one for OT and raid and one for the Mush Pot (slag pot, whatever) who can toss raid heals in between slag pots.

5.) Iron Council. So once Ignis went down (and it took another 5 tries Sunday) we went in and tried the Iron Assembly. Our group tried a few things and we came up with this strat that seemed to "almost" get us there. (2 down, only the last one to go, but he wiped us due to an unfortunate healer shot). Note: we did what is understood as the "easy" mode - Largest to smallest in kill order.

(*) IF you can spare it, go ahead and have 3 tanks, and 3 healers for this until everyone gets used to things. Have the main tank take the first guy to go down, and have the two other tanks grab each of the other two guys.

(*) IF you're doing it in the same order here's the way it goes:

(*) One healer will stay on the MT, make sure someone can remove the debuff the first guy puts on him IMMEDIATELY.

(*) One healer will stay on the first OT (the Medium size guy) and must remove the self Buff that that guy puts on himself IMMEDIATELY. The rest of the time that healer can raid heal some.

(*) One healer will be strictly raid heals and will occasionally glance in the direction of the second OT (the small guy, who hits like the little blood elf girl orphan I'm going to be chauffering around next week). Any warrior worth his salt should be able to handle this guy since he is BOTH interruptible AND stunnable. What a combination for a boss. The ONLY trick to this guy is that he WILL NOT MOVE unless he's silenced, so you'd better have taken gag order or you're up a tree right from the start. This guy needs to be tanked as far away from the raid as possible because he does an uninterruptible aoe blast that HURTS, but it's really slow and he has a recording of Sartherion (from Obsidian Sanctum) that he plays really loud right before he does it. "RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL!!!!" It's not as intimidating coming from a munchkin.

(*) So obviously this was my guy.

(*) To draw him off to the other side of the room, run in and use Heroic Throw (because you have gag order this will silence him for 3 secs and that's how long you have to position him. If you need more time, hit him with a shield bash and move him again.) Once you have him in place, unless he's screaming at you to RUN, you want to cycle through something like: "Oh, you're doing something -- concussion blow. Oh, you're back up and doing something else? -- Shockwave. Oh, you're moving and doing something else? -- Revenge (because you took improved revenge, right?) Oh you're doing something else? -- shield bash. Oh you're doing something else? -- Heroic Throw." and by now your shield bash or shockwave and/or revenge should be up again. Rinse repeat. There are only two things to consider:

(*) if you can avoid using your Heroic Throw to stop him casting, save it for those OH $#!+ moments. Reason is, once the first guy goes down, the medium guy will start casting "rune of death" underneath someone, and even you will have to turn and run out. Now, to effectively tank this small fry, you need him to come with you. Of course, the rune of death makes getting into melee range of him (if your shield bash was on cd when it happened) will be practically suicide, so that's when you want to use your Heroic Throw.

(*) In a pinch, charge can be your friend. If shockwave, shield bash, concussion blow et al are on cooldown, don't forget that your little friend isn't going anywhere while he casts so a quick back off and charge could interrupt him nicely. It's certainly what you should use after you "RUN AWAY, LITTLE GIRL!!!" because you'll have to close back on him before he starts casting his next spell.

The first few times we tried Iron Council we did it with 2 tanks, and I have to say that once everyone is really familiar with this fight, that's probably doable, but the Medium guy hits too hard with his cool red sphere buff up for you to take it much, so if you do one add tank, you're going to need a dedicated healer to that tank who can remove the Buff from medium guy.

I expect we may be able to take these guys down this week, so if we do I'll let you know how things went.

After a short absence. . .

2009-04-13T14:54:00.000-07:00

While my alter-ego played some other game involving driving around and generally being "naughty," I returned yesterday before my 10 man raid's foray into Naxx to find that I needed to respec back to tank. Which is fine by me.

Eye of Eternity still gives me fits, for some reason. I feel like I do fine, but it's almost like we never bring enough healers into it, and I feel that I'm at least partially responsible whenever the healer(s) can't keep me up, even if there's really not that much I can do. Once I've blown my last stand/shield wall/enraged regeneration/pot/lifebloom/healthstone/Commanding Shout (if it wasn't up already) I'm kind of out of options until the next cooldowns wear off. And since some of them are 5 minutes, there's no guarantee that I'll make it that long. That generally makes me a little more than twice as hard to kill as normal, but it's still doable.

Nonetheless, I actually think we had a convergence of two problems last night that made Eye difficult, and Naxx a "little" tougher than usual. Firstly, we were down a healer from what I understand. Secondly, some of the dps were new to raiding, and probably weren't expecting to have to put it all out there like that. Phase 1 of Eye took a little longer than I was used to it taking, and that wore the healers out a lot, and the few times that we made it to Phase 2, we also made it past Phase 2, but in Phase 3, once again, we were struggling from some losses from earlier, and just having a lot of people unfamiliar with the raid. I'm beginning to think that Eye of Eternity is mocking me. Even when I know that we have the grouping for the thing, somehow it still doesn't come out right.

Naxx went pretty good, and is also the reason that I'm posting. Someone decided to make me MT with an OT that I wasn't very familiar with, but who did a pretty good job overall. We only had to replace him once when we did Gothik, and then we stayed switched off to get through 4 Horsemen, Patchwerk, Grobbie, Gluth and Thaddius, and then I MT'd Sapph, and ended up MTing KT as well, although at first I was just OTing. I was especially impressed that I OT'd Patchwerk, Grobbie and Gluth, considering that a) apart from Patch, I'd never OT'd any of them, and b) they went pretty well (once Grobb stopped shooting "extra" slimes out). I haven't figured out when or why this happens, but sometimes, even if the dps are definitely trailing after the MT, and even if the MT has aggro, and even if the MT is moving backwards at the correct pace, Grobbulus will turn around to inject someone, and will spray slimes before turning back around. When this happens multiple times, it really causes problems. A single slime each time can be handled pretty easily, but 3 or 4 or more are more than a pain. I did figure out a pretty surefire way to pull them off the melee group when it happened though, Each time I saw dbm put up the message about him spraying slimes, I charged in and TC'd immediately. That would generally put enough aggro onto the newly formed slimes to get them off him, I would then back quickly away, and if I saw any that weren't following, I'd Taunt them if it were 1 left, or run back and do a shockwave and Demoralizing shout (and maybe another TC for good measure) if there were more than one. This seemed to work pretty well. Gluth turned out to be really easy to OT with a freindly mage helping out. I would charge, TC, Demoralizing shout, and then run away, and the trail of Zombies would follow me and the friendly mage would stop what he was doing and throw up the ice blast that rooted them in place, at which point I'd step back, charge in and do it all over again. Shield Slamming those that just spawned to make sure they didn't leave before my TC etc was off cooldown.

The first attempt on KT, our MT went down at one point, and I grabbed KT, and we held on, even with the guardians joining in until KT was at (no kidding here) 2234 HP left until dead.

What a defeat! So close! It lasted a little longer than usual, because I know I had time to last stand at least twice during the fight, so I just kept thinking, "Wow! Over the course of those 5-6 mins, if we'd had even 8 more dps from somewhere, we'd have had him (preferably in a burst right at the end I'm thinking). I mean, even one more hit from a well geared fury warrior would have been all we needed. It was rough to come that close and not finish him, but exciting too.

So we swapped out and I MT'd instead and our previous MT switched back to his warlock for the extra dps, and everything went like clockwork (pretty much).

The only thing I noticed about MTing those two is that:

a) Sapphiroth's biggest challenge is getting him to face the right way immediately. You have to run to be behind one of the iceblocks during the air phases, and then you have to get back to the correct place to taunt him so he looks at you IMMEDIATELY when he lands. Otherwise, he'll cleave the in-rushing dps which is no good.

b) KT isn't so bad, really. I'm still playing with my UI a little, and I haven't gotten used to the castbar for XPerl yet, but basically it's pretty staple (admittedly I had to leave most of the interrupting to the dps, but I threw Shield Bashes every chance I could in between Shield Slams, revenges, Heroic Strikes and devastates), and I wasn't having to rush too hard to keep up with aggro. I think the hardest thing about KT was that once he engages a tank, it seems like he really doesn't think he wants to move anymore (unless that tank goes down, because I've seen how fast he suddenly decides to move then). I mean, when he engaged, someone else took aggro for a second while I was waiting for him to get into range, and he turned and went after them immediately. I taunted him off, but had to actually move myself into melee range, since he didn't feel that he "needed" to close in on me (arrogant #$%&*). Everything went fine, but I can't help but wonder why the tank can't "position" him a little better in the beginning. Fortunately everyone was on the ball, and things went fine, though. Two shot, but I've been through worse.

Special new mount revealed to be, ummm, "special"

2009-04-13T14:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I have to chuckle a little at this.

First, just so you know, "YES" I will most likely be fishing my brains out looking for this, even though I think it's silly.

I mean, hey, free mount!

But realistically, even though the colors are nice etc. Notice the tooltips and what the testers have been saying about

the NEW AND AMAZING and RARE mount that drops from fishing Northrend Pools!!!

Ok, anyone else somewhat under-whelmed?

So here's the official check-off:

Pros: Ummm, looks neat, probably won't be that many people with one, if you're not a druid with the swim speed glyph then this is as fast as you'll ever go in water and uhhhhhhhh. .. ..

Cons: Ok, how much time do you actually spend swimming, and here's the kicker, when you WANT to be swimming? The rest of the time, this thing will be as intoxicatingly rapid as a gang of caterpillars inching their way up a wet rain gutter in a mist-storm. For those of you keeping track, that's about 3.1% less exciting than watching paint dry, and about 14.8% more exciting than watching grass grow.

Neutrals: I guess if you ever really wanted to block a mailbox, have a Tauren on one of these babies, and have another one on his Travelling Mammoth, and you two could keep people who don't know how to zoom in their cameras from checking that mailbox until you get bored and go do something useful with your time, like watching painted grass grow and dry.

Hold your Talent Horses!!!

2009-04-13T14:14:00.001-07:00

So, another exciting thing with the release of 3.1 (maybe not so much for some) is that with all the changes being made to talents in 3.1 everyone is getting their talents points back to respec. With that and the addition of the second specs (1000g well spent for some, maybe not so useful for others) you can play all you want and still have a chance to redo them for free once the patch hits.

Some wonderful things upcoming in the patch notes.

2009-04-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

So, I noticed today that there is a report of some changes that are on the PTR that will be welcome news to most of us.

1st and foremost, Arms warriors (even if you're in the closet) have some reasons to rejoice. Lots of great stuff happening for you now.

Juggernaut talent 1 point -- Charge from any stance, once you charge, your next Slam/Mortal Strike has a +100% chance to critically hit if completed within the next 10 seconds.

Add that to things like deep wounds and Trauma, and that's a pretty great way to start a combat.

Not to mention the increase to 1.5 secs stun from the charge.

The Unrelenting Assault talent (1/2 points) now does a LOT for you in addition to reducing the cd on Overpower and Revenge by 2/4 secs, it also 1) increases damage from both by 10%/20%, AND 2) If you use Overpower against someone who is casting, it will reduce their damage/healing from spells by 25/50% for the next 6 seconds. Stack that with something like "Taste for Blood" and you can basically nerf a caster as long as you can stay on them. Not to mention that if you use Mortal Strike in between the Overpowers, you might even be able to take down a healer, since (I can't verify this but) it would seem that the statements "... their magical damage and healing will be reduced by 50% for 6 secs," (Unrelenting Assault) and "... wounds the target, reducing the effectiveness of any healing by 50% for 10 secs," (Mortal Strike) seem like they're meant to stack. So it would look like you can basically chip down a healer to 25% "self"-healing just by alternating Rend/Overpower/MS, maybe a hamstring or Sunder Armor thrown in to keep you from having to chase them all over.

Although it has been reported and then still isn't in the official notes, it sounds more and more like Shattering Throw is going to make it in. For those of you that don't already know, this has a 5 min cd like Heroic Throw (whether they can be used independently or not, I don't know) but in addition to doing the same damage as Heroic Throw, it will EITHER (but not both) reduce armor on target by 20% (stacks with Sunder for a total or 40% less armor) for 10 secs OR if the target has immunity it will remove it. All for 25 rage and a 1.5 sec cast time.

I don't know about you, but it's starting to sound like Arms warriors could be fearsome in PvP finally.

2ndly, and by no means least, Prot warriors are also seeing an unexpected (at least to me) and yet exciting change. The "Warbringer" talent is now being adjusted so that Charge AND Intercept AND Intervene may all be used from any stance. Now, this isn't really a hugely exciting change, but this will mean two things. Firstly, we'll be able to Heroic Throw one target, taunt another, Charge a third, and then Intercept a fourth, all from defensive stance. Mind you, in all of that, only the intercept costs any rage, and the charge will more than make up for the 10 rage cost for Intercept, and if you fire a Bloodthirst before you start, you can even do a TC on the way through all that mess. Just imagine the kinds of HUGE groups you can round up this way!

The ability to Intercpet and/or Intervene from Battle stance is also nice for those Prot warriors who like to PvP in battle stance, but I generally don't bother leaving defensive stance. I have read reports of some Prot warriors who have only been out of defensive stance twice in the last two years, and one of them was by accident.

The "makeup" for Fury warriors who don't have access to either of these phenomenal running talents is that we lose the "expertise" buff talent that we didn't really need anyway, and we gain back Improved Intercept in its place, which is good.

ALSO, as the patch release nears, it seems that Blizz is very close to fully deciding to use the 4/8/12/16/20% strength buff for Improved Berserker Stance. As I discussed a while back, this means that there will be a small (I don't know exactly how big, as it depends on the warriors) increase to overall AP, and hence overall damage (pre-10% reduction). This will help to make up for some of the 10% loss we experience at the top of the tree, but exactly how much I will have to find out when you do because I'm going to be out of town until after the patch comes.

Thinking Gear For the Last Time, Pre 3.1

2009-04-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

So in thinking about it for the last time before 3.1 comes out,

I think these are the gear pieces that I want to work towards:

Gear Sets

There are still a few adjustments I might make, but ultimately it's pretty much what I'm looking for. Both sets have enough hit to make me happy, and enough expertise to improve matters pretty well. Both sets have enough armor value, and a good portion of everything else I want to see.

Of course, the Obsidian Greathelm is still just a pipe dream for me, but who knows? Once Ulduar hits, and our 10 man gets a little better gear, maybe we can start doing S2 and S3 on a regular basis.

3.1 Update to Improved Berserker Stance

2009-04-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

It would seem with the patch day coming soon, Blizzard is still uncertain about the change to improved Berserker stance. On the European sites it lists that it will be increasing Strength by 20% (with 5 talent points) but on the US sites it doesn't list any change at all. I suppose we will have to wait a little longer to see.

Gearing up to Tank the Bigs

2009-04-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

All right, so I've managed to meet the minimums, and I'm slowly accumulating better gear. Eventually I'm going to want to be able to MT Heroic raids instead of just occasional 10 mans.

So what do I want to shoot for?

Originally I had this sneaking suspicion that I wanted to be aiming for def, hit, and expertise (soft) caps, and let everything else fall where it may. Now, though, I'm not so sure. I think that with judicious use of your vigilance and other abilities, as long as you have "some" hit adjustment, it may not be necessary to have full hit cap.

My original idea for gear to accomplish this was here:

All three caps on gear

Now the only reason I'm not "married" to this idea, is that it involves an awful lot of precision and doesn't leave much room for flexibility.

But I'm beginning to wonder if maybe losing a "small" amount of hit rating in favor of some extra expertise might be nice, especially if it could be done while adding some other mitigation as well.

A Mentor's Pride

2009-04-07T09:31:00.000-07:00

So last night we finished our first 25 man Naxxramus clear in a little while. Our guild has had some personal issues and we've gone through a slight adjustment period while we sorted things out.

An old guild member came back to us from the "dark" side and decided to go tanking with his 80 undead warrior. He's used to tanking as a night elf druid on the "dark" side, so this has been an adjustment for him. He has come to me for help and I'm proud to say he did very well over the course of the raid this last week. He and I were respective off-tanks and his gear was subpar when he entered, but now he's def capped, and starting to be comfortable with his ability "toolbelt".

Last night he took his job as one of the two off-tanks for KT very seriously (and it's not an exciting job for a while, and then it gets exciting for a few minutes and then it slacks off for a while, and whether or not it gets exciting again kind of depends on your healers) and did a great job. Except for the two very odd draws that I haven't seen happen that way before, everything went very well, and we downed him.

The two odd pulls, I was perplexed by. In one of them, I pulled my first of the two Guardians to me, then waited, then pulled the second and tried to get into position so that I could see the ground underneath me (so they didn't hide the evil void zones like they like to do) and suddenly a third Guardian came out of my side portal. Huh? So I wasn't expecting that, but I call out in vent that I've got a third add, figuring that either the other warrior only has one, or that the healers will know to kick things into a higher gear for a smidge, but lo and behold, the other warrior is tanking both of his adds that he was expecting and the healer on me can't keep up with the three Guardians, and I go down after about 6 seconds of my shield wall, even though they're beating through my 40K health from last stand. Wow, ok, mental note to self there then.

So the pull after that, I grab the first Guardian and I'm standing there and waiting and waiting and waiting and I hear the other tank shout, I have 3 on me. Ok, I say, I know what that's like, and his gear is a little behind mine, so I run into taunt range and immediately pull one of his off him and the two healers that were on him kept him alive long enough to make it till I could close the 20 yards to taunt range. And thereafter everything went smoothly.

I think that most of us agreed that the wipes we had that evening on KT were from nothing more insidious than just having no definite "plan" for healer positioning. The first two tries we had a number of people going down to iceblocks just because there weren't healers around to help them, and since at least 2 of those were healers each time, it left us with a big deficit to recover from, and so we Etch-a-Sketch and start over.

The last time through, though, the healers got organized and arranged themselves in a line next to the throne and everything went like clockwork (except for the unusual 3-1 Guardian entry which we managed to avert the crisis of) and I am so proud that our guild has a new warrior raiding tank that made that possible.

It just makes me beam to see a fledgling warrior come into his own, and I'm amazed I could help with that in however minor of a fashion.

Deciding between the bevy of chest enchants in WotLK for Warriors

2009-04-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

Well, if you've come here you too are bewildered by the choices. What to do, what to do. .. .

All the choices. .. .

Well, let's read it down the list and see what we find. .. .

There's the "primo" enchant, Powerful Stats, which gives +10 to ALL stats. Well, ok, even though all the stats are at +10, the only ones that do us any good (depending on spec) are Strength, Stamina and Agility, pretty much in that order. Let's see, that's +10 strength, which gives us 5 more shield block value (for Prot only, really) and 20 more attack power (that's a little more than 1 dps before diminishing returns), as well as about 5 more armor from +10 agility and about 100 health from +10 stamina. So, ummm. . .

Hmmm,

Ok, what else is there?

There's Super Health and its epic +275 health. That's pretty good for tanks, you can practically get that much benefit from a solid sky sapphire, as long as the socket bonus isn't more stamina. But still it's an increase to base health which is good, and it's more than double (almost triple!) the +10 to stats health bump, but you lose out on the 5 shield block value and 20 AP. Then again, that's not that much either, one red gem can give you +16 Str which gets you a lot more gain than that. Ok, so +275 health looks better for tanks for now, and dps Warriors would probably rather have the +10 stats, but since they both seem kind of paltry, what else is there?

Ok, what else is there?

Ok, good news, if you want to PvP there's a nice one, namely the exceptional resilience. +20 resilience is good stuff as long as you're not decked out in all the best PvP gear and are starting to suffer from diminishing returns.

Hmmm, what about the rest of us?

Oh, a +22 defense enchant, ok. Well, unless you're over defense cap, that's pretty good. If you are over it, though, . .. I'm not sure that +22 defense is better than +275 health, which is already not that great, but at least it's something. However, at least if you're not over defense cap yet, this is clearly a must. But if you're tanking in WotLK raids, you have some exceptional gear choices, why aren't you over defense cap? If you're dpsing, why are you trying to reach defense cap, unless you're standing where you shouldn't be?

hmmmm. .. ..

Well, if I were low enough, that Lesser Absorption looks really fun. Why isn't there a "Greater" Absorption or "Super" Absorption or something? I suppose Blizzard actually doesn't want there to be much in the way of chest enchants for us. . . I suppose because we already have the really nice head, leg and shoulder enchants available (which we do). Even though our hand enchants and bracer enchant choices are almost as bleak, but at least they fill in needed gaps for either hit or expertise rating.

So, I guess, the decision is this:

If you're in PvP: +20 resilience

If you're dps: +10 all stats

If you're tanking: +275 health

If you're tanking and not yet defense capped: +22 defense

Admittedly, other than the PvP gear, you won't really benefit as much as other classes will, but in the end, I guess it's back up to us to be able to play our characters as well as we can, anyway, and the enchants aren't going to make a lot of difference. I would almost believe that except that we're such a gear dependant class. We need all the gear help we can get.

Helping to Buy School Clothes for tanks, (or what gear do warriors want at 80 pre-Naxxramus?)

2009-04-06T08:47:00.001-07:00

Ok, so to begin, I know full well that there are any NUMBER of great sources to go to for this exact same information that I'm about to give, but since I was asked this weekend by a newer 80 guild mate, I thought I'd go ahead and run through my opinions on it, at least for dps and tank builds, since I spent so much time putting together my list.

Mind you, I was asked this by a hunter, who wanted to find out how to gear his DK friend, so they should take some of this with a grain of salt, since the rules for DK's are ever so slightly different than the rules for us.

First and foremost, here is a basic list

For Protection Warriors

For DPS Warriors

Both of these are links to www.LootRank.com which is a great source for compiling a "basic" list of gear to use. It's not the greatest in the sense that it tends to not allow you to compile the gear statistics you're looking for, but inevitably the gear set you want can be found by looking somewhere in the top 10 of each slot's values (and you can just ignore the gems, enchants, etc.).

I've set these up to exclude all raid drops, and all BoP profession crafts and PvP purchases. If you wish to include any of these, please feel free to, but this is intended to be as general purpose as possible.

So, here's my thoughts on the gear selection:

For Protection Warriors (I'll do the dps warriors in a later post):

Your first priority is defense cap. Nothing else matters until you get there. I have seen MANY foolish tank newbies offering to tank in resilience gear. Trust me, just don't try it. If you're "barely" under def cap and you've done everything in your power to get the gear and can't, you can use a "TINY" amount of resilience to get you there, but don't count on resilience to save your hide when the bosses can hit for 20-30 thousand points of damage and you really need to be avoiding as many of those hits as you can to give your healer time to prop you back up to be ready for the next 20-30 thousand damage strike. After that, get as much hit as you can afford, and as much expertise as you can afford, and put as much into dodge and parry as you can. Mind you, your goals will change once you get into raids, as this def cap will get easier and easier to reach with gear, and you'll be able to invest more of your gear rating towards worthier goals, but that's where you have to start.

Now, in line with that, you have some priorities. Getting your Argent Crusade rep to Revered is one of them. Getting your Hodir rep as high as possible (to Revered or better) is another of them. You will NEED the enchants from these. The Arcanum of the Stalwart Protector and either the Lesser or Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle will reduce the whopping 689 defense rating you need by 30-35, and you'll need it. Plus the dodge/stamina boost is pretty great too.

Ok, now to talk about gear.

Helm:

If you can manage it, skip straight to the Tempered Titansteel Helm. If you can't manage it, the Arcane Shielded Helm from Heroic Nexus is your next best bet.

To gem this puppy, I'd go with the +37 stam, +2% armor value meta gem, and use the other gem to either A) make up for any deficiencies in your gear totals, or B) add extra stamina.

Neck:

Don't start drooling over the Titanium Earthguard neck, I know it's pretty, but you want the Chained Military Gorget. You need the hit rating, and the loss of a single defense rating to get it and all the other things that go with it is well worth it.

Shoulders:

Ok, so if you have the gold or spare time to try for the world drop shoulders, be my guest. Ultimately, though, you're going to be replacing them once you start going through Naxx, so I'd advise against investing that kind of effort unless you just have more gold than sense. Now, here is one of the places where the choice will change for DK's. I would suggest the Pauldrons of the Colossus from Heroic Gundrak, and not for the shield block rating, but for the gem slot (which you can use what is suggested for a total of +8 defense and +18 stam, or wait and use it to fill any remaining gaps once you're done). For DK's, however, even though it lacks a gem slot, DK's will want to maximize their parry (since they have only dodge and parry) so the Iron Dwarf Smith Pauldrons look good for them.

Back:

The Cloak of the Enemy from Heroic Nexus is a good choice, and if you happen to be at least Honored with Wyrmrest accord, the Cloak of Peaceful resolutions is hardly a downgrade for you. Again, you want the hit rating, trust me. The top one on the list is only purchasable with the Emblems of Valor, and it's one of the first purchases you'll probably make, considering I LITERALLY never saw this cloak drop for me and had to make do with whatever pos cloak I had until I got the emblems to replace it. The main thing to do here, is get the titanweave enchant on your cloak that gives you an extra 16 def rating.

Chest:

The Breastplate of the solemn council. If you have some aversion to getting Revered with Wyrmrest, then you can consider the Ziggurat imprinted chest from Heroic Drak'Tharon, but why would you possibly not want to get to at least Revered with them for such a huge bonus? Extra def rating and expertise too? You should be salivating. Another possibility is to go with the Icebane Chestguard and gem and enchant it for max defense. I know that sounds bonko, but you'll likely need it for the end of Naxx anyway, so you may as well go ahead and get it going. Personally I carry it still, in case my guild doesn't want to try for the 100 club achievement that time, or in case I'm not MT on Sapphiron. Until you get def cap, +22 defense to chest is your only enchanting choice.

Bracers:

You may notice I don't really have to say anything here. Basically, you have one choice. And Harold in Heroic Ahn'Kahet is holding onto them for you. You will probably go with the Expertise enchant here. Greater stamina is expensive for something you're probably going to be getting rid of, and you need all the expertise help you can get.

Hands:

Ok, two perfectly good options here. If you are already (or don't mind running heroics to get to) exalted with Kirin Tor, then the Fireproven gauntlets provide more dodge, which is great for mitigation. If you don't feel like it, then the Horn-Tipped Gauntlets from Heroic Gundrak are great for threat generation (with extra expertise) as well as some secondary mitigation (if bosses don't parry you as often, they don't get their swing timers reduced as often, so they attack you slightly less, etc.). For an enchant here, get Armsman, even though the extra hit rating would be nice, you want the threat increase, and it has 10 parry rating too, pretty tasty.

Belt:

The Ancient Aligned Girdle is pretty good from Heroic Azjol Nerub, but you should have the Emblems of Heroism to spend on the Waistguard of Living Iron, so I suggest doing so. An Eternal Belt Buckle in that and you've got a belt that will serve you well until you get your Ablative Chitin Girdle.

Legs:

If you're like me, you can't seem to catch a break on the stupid Bolstered Legplates from Heroic Violet Hold. I'm not kidding you. I lucked out here because I was still dps specced and went through an Heroic Obsidian Sanctum with a pug where all the tanks already had the DragonBrood Legguards and I beat the other off-spec rolls, otherwise I'd probably still be running Violet Hold today hoping to get them. Unfortunately, those are the ones you need. And there's only one leg enchant to even worry about, so get your frosthide leg armor and tip the nice leatherworker for it.

Feet:

Ok, you're going to laugh, I'm STILL wearing my Greaves of Ancient Evil from heroic Ahn'Kahet (at least at the time of writing this). I'll be springing for my Kyzoc's Ground Stompers soon, but for a blue, it's still your best option for a long long time. My suggestion for enchants? Go with Tuskarr's Vitality. Yes, it gives you a smaller amount of stam than the stamina only enchant, but kiting becomes SO much easier with a little extra speed.

Rings:

Even though it's down there further than you'd normally look, the rings you want are A) Unsmashable Heavy Band from Heroic Utgard Keep, and most likely either get your friendly JC to make you a Titanium Earthguard ring, or if you're already at def cap, you might be ok with the Keystone great ring from Heroic Drak'Tharon.

Trinkets:

Essence of Gossamer from Heroic Azjol-Nerub is a given. Even if you don't get this before you start running Naxx, you will have to beg your friends to go back and try for it until it drops, because you'll have a hard time finding anything better EVER. Second chair for general purpose is probably either the Seal of the Pantheon from REGULAR Halls of Lightning (if you're still not def capped) or the Heroism Emblem purchase of the Valor Medal which will give you some much needed dodge, plus an "OH #$()%*" extra dodge boost if you need it.

Weapon:

Here again is a difference between DK's and Warriors. No warrior in their right mind would do a protection spec and equip a 2 Handed weapon. EVER!!! Your shield generates MOST of all the good things you do, and the rest don't work unless you have a one handed weapon (don't believe me, equip your Betrayer of Humanity and try to use Devastate, I double dare you!). You will ultimately want the Red Sword from Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle, and I have seen quite a few people who make do with one of the next three from either Heroic Utgarde Keep, Regular Hall of Lightning or Heroic Oculus.

Shield:

Ok, no kidding around here, the FIRST purchase you make with your emblems of Heroism needs to be Crygil's Discarded Metal Plate. I know it's ugly, but you won't find a better one until you start into real raids. And get it defense enchanted for goodness sakes, there's no better choice anyway, and you can always use the def rating. Heck, if that puts you over def cap, you can go back and trade out your trinket for the dodge one, right?

Ranged weapon:

If you can afford it, go ahead and spring for the Combat Shotgun from your engineering friends. It's well worth it. Remember that you don't need the weapon so much for pulls, but if you like to use your thrown weapon for pulls (I know I do too) you're probably going to be stuck with the Weighted Throwing Axe you got from quests in Storm Peaks while you were bored while working on Hodir rep (because you've grinded to exalted already, right?) unless you're already over def cap, in which case, maybe you'd rather get a Stolen Vrykul Harpoon from the Frenzihearts in Shalozar Basin (because what you really need is another rep to grind up).

As far as scopes for the gun, watch out for those. Notice the wording on the ones from "post-BC" that say "ranged damage" or "ranged hit". These will do you exactly 0 good. You're most likely going to end up trying to find someone who can make a Stabilized Eternium Scope since it's the only one that has a decent plus that doesn't say "ranged" in the description. Look around if you don't believe me.

So here is, essentially, what you want to try to have "pre-Naxxramus" (really pre-raiding, you may start with Obsidian Sanctum, who knows).

Gear set

Notice that with the +35 defense from the head and shoulder enchants (Exalted with Hodir, it's worth it) and the +22 from the chest enchant and the +20 from the shield enchant, you're over defense cap already at 700 even. This is why you can afford to take the Valor Medal etc. If, on the other hand, you are about as unlucky with drops as I am, you may want to get that Seal of the Pantheon to help make up for whatever defense you don't quite have. Then you can afford to put whatever gems in this that you can scrounge to get more hp, or more hit/expertise/dodge/parry etc. and you don't have to try to scrounge together extra defense gems just to make it all work.

WTB intelligent redesign for Pally heals

2009-04-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

I really like having a paladin healer in some fights, and the biggest issue I have with the way Blizz has set them up is that their instant heals crit for amazing amounts of heals (which is fantastic), but this leads to an awful lot of timing issues, which generally leads to a 50%+ overheal situation when they spam heals to keep us up.

Now, I don't blame the pallys at all for this. They don't have the hots that druids have, they're all about burst healing on single targets, which is great. But in order to prevent overhealing, they'd have to basically wait until I am at less than 1/3 health before firing anything, and at that range I am risking being one shot by Patchwerk. I think maybe there should be a talent or something for Pallys that gives them a "partial" refund of any overhealed amounts. Like, as an idea, suppose they get back 50% of the mana they spent to overheal you (as a percentage of total heals), so, if they heal for 20K, and do 10K overheal, suppose they get a "refund" of 25% of whatever mana they spent to cast the spell. I know there are talents in place that ensure that they receive mana back when they crit, but just take the "after" cost of the spell and refund 25% of mana when they overheal. This way, they could keep from running out of mana so soon, while doing 50% overheals trying to keep a tank up above 60% during some of these heavy hitting fights.

Or, if that's still too much, how about making overheals sort of a "burst" heal in a small area either around the paladin or around the target? Say spread the overhealed amount in a burst among the nearest 4 targets within 10-20 feet of them? Even if you only spread 50% of the overheal amount amongst them, it would at least have a better chance of doing some good.

There may be a way to adjust this to make things "fair" for pvp setups, but it just seems like such a waste for the good paladin healers to be constantly wasting over half their spells effectiveness.

Hmmmmmmmm. . . .Improved Berserker Change

2009-03-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

Interesting,

The tooltip for Improved Berserker Stance is undergoing some changes on the PTR. At first glance, I thought maybe they decided that the nerf to Titan's Grip was too high, and they were trying to make up for it some, but then I went through some of the math.

In fact, if you look at the sources, you'll see these are the different things being reported:

Current tooltip (at rank 5): Improves AP by 10% and reduces threat by 10%

Proposed tooltip (as of a week ago): Improves Strength by 20% and reduces threat by 10%

Proposed tooltip (more recently): Improves Strength by 15% and reduces threat by 10%

Ok, so let's see. . . .

At level 80, it's not uncommon to see Fury Warriors with around 900-1100 strength, which contributes 1800-2200 AP pre-increase, and 1980-2420 AP post increase. This is out of the total AP which is usually in the 3000-3500 range.

Suppose that instead of increasing AP, they instead increase Strength (which admittedly plays a big role in the AP calculation). So to start with, let's take 90% of the total AP range giving about 2700-3150 total AP, of which, 1800-2200 is from strength.

Now we increase strength by a percentage, say p% (so essentially, we have (1+p)*S where S falls somewhere between 900-1100 pre buff etc.

What does it take to get to an equivalent AP?

Well, suppose we get a range for it as well, since these are just estimates anyway. Suppose we have the lower end of everything there.

(1+p)*900*2 + 900 = 3000

gives us p = 16 2/3 % (approximately 16.67%)

Now let's look at the upper end of the range

(1+p)*1100*2 + 950 = 3500

gives us p = 15 10/11% (approximately 15.91%)

So essentially, it seems as though the 15% is less than the equivalent AP buff which itself is less than 20%.

Let's get some anonymous true data from Fury warriors in my guild that do pretty well, all of them have improved Berserker stance.

#1 Strength 1069 AP 2721

#2 Strength 1173 AP 3467

#3 Strength 1030 AP 3700

So for Warrior #1, the un-increased AP would be 2449, and 2138 of it would be from Strength.

So,

(1+p)*1069*2 + 311 = 2721

gives

p=12.7%

For Warrior #2, the un-increased AP would be 3120, and 2346 of it would be from Strength.

So,

(1+p)*1173*2 + 775 = 3467

gives

p = 14.75%

And finally for Warrior #3, the un-increased AP would be 3330 and 2060 of it is from Strength.

So,

(1+p)*1030*2 + 1270 = 3700

gives

p = 17.96%

Now, before you start saying "Why the fuss? Some warriors will benefit," I should point out to you that Warrior #1, was clearly off-tanking for someone yesterday, because they signed out wearing their shield and protection gear, so it's not a bit surprising that their AP isn't that high, and of the two remaining, the second one has "Berserking" enchanted on his weapon instead of "Massacre" so instead of adding a steady amount of AP, it has a proc chance and doesn't appear in his current AP.

So it would seem that the estimates are about right, somewhere just slightly higher than 15%, maybe as high as 18% would be needed to get this to work for them, just to keep it consistent.

I have to believe that Blizzard must still be getting data that even after teh 10% physical damage nerf, Fury Warriors are still doing too much damage compared to other equally geared classes.

I'd just really like to see the data they're basing that on.

In Defense of the Devastate Glyph

2009-03-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

I've seen some disparaging remarks made about the devastate glyph, and I'll be the first to admit, if I'm MT on a raid, realistically, the glyph of blocking is a lot better, but if you're OT, or your main focus is clearing trash effortlessly or PvPing, I've decided that the glyph of devastate isn't that bad, really.

Minuses - it doesn't generate threat on the second sunder armor debuff, so it does as much threat as the first, third and fifth devastate attempts in that order, instead of the first, second, and third, which is still a little more, but not as much more as you'd have from applying a sunder armor on top of the devastate (which might be a little rediculous). It eats up one of your precious glyph slots. For long drawn out fights (like those against bosses), after the first 10-20 secs having a glyphed devastate is exactly as good as having a non glyphed devastate, so it doesn't really do you any good in this situation.

Plusses - When you're working with trash or mobs or foes that will typically drop in 30 secs or less (after they're "really" engaged) you need all the time you can get and blowing the 5 gcd's (about 8-10 secs depending on reaction time) to get up a full stack of sunders doesn't leave you much time to build aggro. So every spare gcd you can free up is one more big aggro move you can throw (Shield Slam, Shockwave, Revenge, whatever). And there's not much chance your pet mob will live to much beyond the time it takes you to get your 5 sunders up anyway, so by the time you get to the point that it doesn't matter whether you have the glyph or not, your mob is already dead.

Another thing to note about the MT situation, if you're MT for single bosses anyway, glyph of Sunder Armor (usually a staple) isn't any good right from the get go, since there shouldn't be any "nearby" mobs to receive the extra sunder stack. If you're really in that situation, you may as well consider yourself free to pick two extra glyphs. At the moment, maybe Blocking, Heroic Strike, and Revenge, although after the patch, HS glyph won't be as useful, so you can maybe pick up the shockwave, shield wall or last stand glyphs.

Spec vs. Spec (in PvP)

2009-03-25T08:21:00.001-07:00

So I'm interested to hear other responses to this. I have looked up that the best PvP spec in some people's opinions are hybrids that incorporate Mortal Strike, Last Stand and Death Wish in the same package.

Up until now I haven't knowingly faced one of these, so I can't really say what I think of this idea.

However, I have faced off with warriors with specs that at least tell me something about TG specced warriors vs Shockwave specced warriors vs Bladestorm specced warriors, and for these three specs, I think the results are obvious.

Prot wins.

CC is king, and the protection tree has the most CC of any of them. Admittedly, they don't seem to have as much cc mitigation as Fury, but a good healer pally / priest beside you and most of the things that you might have difficulty getting out of with Berserker rage and/or your Medallion of the Horde (because you're Horde, right?) aren't really an issue.

If CC is king, then survivability is queen. Sure, prot warriors have some of the lowest dps of all tank specs, but we can mitigate damage with the best of them. Shield wall is just as bad, if not worse, in PvP, throw in some improved spell reflection, shield block, the 10% increase to armor values and at least a 25-45% parry/dodge chance (not to mention the typically low amount of expertise on most pvp gear) and you're suddenly a mountain of an obstacle. Literally, with a healer (or two or three if you're lucky) on you, you suddenly become invulnerable, so the area cc's and 1K dps you're doing becomes a serious issue to those on the other side.

My fury spec was really good about racking up 3K+ dps (with crits) and even in PvP was doing better than 2.4K+ but against 40%+ total dodge/parry, literally only one out of every two hits are even landing, and the slower attack speeds make that a serious concern. Then you add the 70% damage mitigation from armor and defensive stance, on top of the shield block mitigation, and it's like my razor PvE blades are striking a brick wall, occasionally chipping out a single brick that lands on my head and takes me out completely.

In duels Prot vs Fury, although I could generally hold my own for a while, the Prot warrior could inevitably cc me more, take less damage, and keep himself alive longer than I could. So, Fury vs Prot, winner is Prot.

I faced off against many Arms warriors in bg's (which admittedly is not exactly the same thing) as Fury and what I found was that it was basically a wash. Sure, Fury did more damage, but Arms has the good "extra" problem talents for PvP. Generally speaking, it would be a huge explosion, ending in a Bladestorm, a flurry of Bloodthirsts and Whirlwinds, and both of us would fall dead in the end. In fact, the only thing that seemed to determine which of us would remain standing was who got in the right lucky shots during the initial exchange. Once it went to bladestorm, the Fury spec was in better shape to get ahead, but takes so much damage that they usually died in the process. So, my call here, Arms vs Fury is a draw.

And I've been Prot specced for almost two weeks now (at least since the last times I was prot while leveling) and last night I ran into an Arms warrior or two. I have to hope that the Prot warriors I faced while Fury had a harder time than I did against this Arms warrior. I almost felt sorry for them after a while. They spent most of the time stunned, when they went to Bladestorm, I simply charged someone else to get distance, and watched them inch closer to me, waiting for them to finish, and then charged them again and slaughtered them. It wasn't even close. So, clear winner in Arms vs Prot is Prot.

In fact, in terms of the whole PvP experience, I died less often during a full night of BG's and WG battles than I used to during a single BG as Fury. And I saw a lot more action, and on several of the BG's I even led the board in HK's (admittedly only like 57+ usually, but still). Crazy stuff.

Of course, this is also why they're changing up the specs some in patch 3.1, and the addition of the leap and some other tools to Arms' arsenal may make that a closer contest, but they're still moving Fury back in the list, so it may end up that Prot and Arms are competing for the top PvP builds with Fury crying at the bottom of the stairs.

New Glyphs for smashing with.

2009-03-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

Ok, so there are a number of new glyphs coming out, and here's some things for all of us to consider.

First, let's do tanking, since that's what I'll do first:

Right now there are a pretty standard (almost) set of choices (at least they're the ones I use)

Major:

Glyph of Blocking - Adds 10% to shield block value for 10 sec each time you Shield Slam.

Glyph of Sunder - Applies a Sunder (+ threat) to another nearby target each time you sunder/devastate.

Glyph of Revenge - After using revenge your next Heroic Strike is Free!

Minor:

Glyph of Bloodrage - Reduces damage taken from Bloodrage by 100% ( a MUST in my opinion)

Glyph of Charge - increases charge distance by 5 yards

Glyph of Thunderclap - increases TC's radius by 2 yards

And there are a number of possible new ones:

Glyph of Enraged Regeneration - Increases health recovered by an additional 10% (over the 10 secs)

Glyph of Shield Wall - Reduces cd on Shield wall by 2 min, but reduces damage by 40% (instead of 60%)

Glyph of Shockwave - Reduces cd on Shockwave by 3 secs

Glyph of Spell Reflection - Reduces cd on Spell Reflection by 1 sec

Glyph of Vigilance - Transfers an additional 5% of threat from target to you.

Now, here are my thoughts on these, and I'd love to get some feedback.

(1) Glyph of Enraged Regeneration. I like this one, but I have to measure it against the ones I already have. Sunder makes group pulls a lot easier, and I can see "re-glyphing" for boss only fights like in Eye of Eternity to use this one, but for general raids, Sunder is going to help out on trash more often than ER is going to help out on bosses. As long as you've got competent healers, ER is more of an OH %(*$%& maneuver anyway.

(2) Glyph of Shield Wall - I guess I have mixed feelings about this. If you've specced Improved Discipline here, this could potentially give you a 40% damage reduction for 12 secs every 2 minutes, and even without it would be every 3 minutes. So in some ways this would be good mitigation. On the other hand, you'll notice that since Protection warriors typically tend to be lower down on the dps meters and since damage = threat, I tend to lean towards things that help me to build threat instead of things that help me to mitigate damage. Here again, maybe for an all boss encounter I might "re-glyph" to help handle bosses that hit hard, but I don't think I'd use this for generic raiding.

(3) Glyph of Shockwave - This is like Glyph of Devastate, what a great ability to improve upon, and then the improvement turns out to not really be a great thing afterall. If Shockwave had a really low cd, it would be a great crowd control device, but lowering it to 17s cd from 20s cd seems like they're just toying with us. 10-15s cd and I'd really consider this one to replace Sunder for my crowd control glyph, but as it is, eh. . ..

(4) Glyph of Spell Reflection - Well, ok, I'm a little torn on this, but essentially, it's not really something that would be much good, except possibly in PvP. As it is, the worst thing about spell reflection is it's cost, the 10 sec cd just means that you can only have it activated about half the time, which I usually find to be plenty. I think I'd pass on this unless I were going to reglyph for a specific purpose.

(5) Glyph of Vigilance - Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you use vigilance judiciously, you probably don't ever run into problems with not getting "quite" enough of the threat from them. You should be generating threat too, not just standing there letting others build it for you. Plus this could cause issues between two tanks Vig-ing each other, since one would then be "out threating" the other. I think this is pretty much a pass. If it increased the damage reduction to the target to 5% instead of 3%, it might be worthwhile.

And there are no new minor glyphs so far. So basically it looks as though I'll probably be keeping my glyphs the same, but maybe catching a few of the others in case I need to reglyph for a specific raid or situation.

Now let's do DPSing:

There is one new dps glyph, and it's an Arms talent. No point in talking about it, so here's the glyphs that I like so far:

Major:

Glyph of Cleave - cleave hits 1 more enemy (together with Improved Cleave this is great for trash mobs)

Glyph of WW - reduces cd on WW by 2 secs (from 10 secs, a 25% improvement in downtime on your #1 burst damage ability, a win in my book)

Glyph of Heroic Strike - HS Crits give you 10 rage (I know you're trying to dump your rage, but if you get some back you can dump for longer)

Minor:

Glyph of Bloodrage - same as before (why not? Free rage = more dps)

Glyph of Battle - Extends duration of Battle shout by 1 min. (ok, I know this is kind of weak, but you look through the list of minor glyphs and find one you like better and let me know)

Glyph of Enduring Victory - extends time window for Victory rush by 5 secs (see earlier one)

So unfortunately, it seems as though while we're being given more choices, the more things change the more it stays the same. We still don't really have enough minor glyph choices, and we still don't have any options for the major glyphs unless we're preparing for a specific set of circumstances. At least we have more specific circumstances choices when we tank. And we also have a new Sweeping Strikes glyph when we decide to chuck Fury and take Arms instead.