The quest for Shadowmourne

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.

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

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

Warriors

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

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

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

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

Short Sabbatical

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

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

PTR warrior changes

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

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

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

Warriors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stat Priorities for an Arms Warrior

So, my thoughts on Stats are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything else put in Strength. The more the better.

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

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

WowHead's new Profiler

Hey, everyone,

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

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

Check it out here or in the links section.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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