Ah, back to it.

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. . .

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"

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!!!

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.

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

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

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.