On a personal note:

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

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

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)

(c) slash professor

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

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

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

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)

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.