Warrior PvP info

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

WowWikki's Warrior PvP Guide

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

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

I'll post more as I find them.

My Charge Card is now limping!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

40*2.075 = 83 < 100 = 125*0.8

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

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

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

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

Notice the entire effect here:

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

(Dmg) x 10.979

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raid dps Arms spec for 80.

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

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

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

Dailies, dailies. . .

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

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

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

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

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

Be looking out for me.

Ok, Who ran up the "Charge" card?

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

Warriors

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

Items

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

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

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

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

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

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

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