Filed under: Warrior

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid -- we're just crazy.

After some careful thought, it seemed like as good a time as any to say goodbye to that most controversial of stats, armor penetration. As of this writing, it's not even going to be baked into Battle Stance any longer once Cataclysm hits, so we can essentially call an end to warriors' bypassing or ignoring armor the way other classes do with magic damage. Like it or hate it, all warrior damage save bleeds will now be mitigated by armor. Yes, even Thunder Clap.

So what, you may ask? What's the big deal about armor penetration, anyway, and who cares about its not being around anymore in Cataclysm? Well, the short answer is, it lets our damage penetrate armor better (that is to say, it reduces the amount by which armor mitigates our damage) and warriors (and feral druids, and some rogues) care because our damage is overwhelmingly physical and thus reduced by armor.

The long, strange trip of armor penetration in this expansion started at launch with ArP being a somewhat undesirable statistic. It had been converted to a rating following its rollicking high in The Burning Crusade, due to the way it became such a devastating staple of warriors in PvP.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid -- we're just crazy.

And so we come to this, the last in our report card series for warrior specs in Wrath of the Lich King. In some ways, arms warriors saw the greatest amount of changes this expansion. The addition of Taste for Blood and Sudden Death making arms a far more proc-reliant spec than it had been previously, while the improvement of Rend saw the bleed damage of the spec (already somewhat of a staple of the arms playstyle in The Burning Crusade) emphasized. Arms started off in Naxx as lower in damage but competitive with fury, while it remained a fairly dominant PvP spec (but saw a challenge to its popularity from protection by about the middle range of the expansion's life cycle) throughout. Arms' damage and raid viability saw its high point in Ulduar, and unfortunately (for me, as a PvE-specced arms warrior) then entered a slow decline that continues to this day.

I said last week, "I considered writing the arms report card instead, but considering the PvE state of arms, I just got depressed. 'Still OK for PvP' doesn't seem like enough for a column." While that's a fair statement, it is extremely oversimplified. Arms is a very solid leveling spec, as it outperforms fury until a certain gear threshold is met and requires less expertise (since Overpower, one of its bread-and-butter strikes, cannot be dodged, and arms has an expertise talent), and arms can generally be sure that Overpowers will critically hit due to the higher crit rate from Improved Overpower. Arms' main PvE limitation is based around the fact that as a bleed-heavy, proc-dependent spec that makes little use of Heroic Strike, it simply doesn't scale in the same berserk manner as fury once rage becomes less of an issue.

Let's look at what arms does well and what keeps it a potent PvP force while preventing it from matching up with fury in PvE.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, into the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid -- we're just crazy.

Good morning. I had said at the end of last week's column that this week would most likely be more about Cataclysm. Why, then, the sudden switch? Well, three reasons.

• I want to give the beta a chance to drop another patch. Without a numbers pass, most of what I've said in previous columns more or less holds true. But discussions of changes to the way rage generation will work definitely have me in a holding pattern as far as actually discussing the nuts and bolts of any spec. Quite frankly, my worgen warrior leveling to 60 already needed to use Battle Shout and Bloodrage on cooldown to generate rage; if they change rage gen so that critical hits don't generate more rage, he'll be looking at complete rage starvation. Rage will need to be tweaked upward quite a bit to give the "you can do your rotation and occasionally a Heroic Strike" feel; right now, it's more of a "please give me some rage, sir, I'm ever so rage-starved" feel.
• I also want to give the people who complain we talk too much about the beta a week off from writing angry emails. I personally love talking about beta issues and the way they show us the progression of the class, but I get that not everyone feels that way.
• I considered writing the arms report card instead, but considering the PvE state of arms, I just got depressed. "Still OK for PvP" doesn't seem like enough for a column.

With this all swimming in my head, I wanted to talk about the lore of the warrior class and who it derives from in the setting. We know who the paladins are (Turalyon, Uther, Arthas), who the hunters are (Alleria, Sylvanas, Nathanos, Shandris), who the mages are (Medivh, Khadgar, Jaina, Kael'thas) and who the gigantic demon-tainted night elves are (seriously, I wonder if we're ever going to get demon hunter as a class) -- but who are the warriors?

Well, it's called the Warcraft setting for a reason. There are quite a few of them. (So many, in fact, that this could end up being a series of posts.) Today we'll look at three: one Alliance, one Horde and one who could be claimed by both.

1. No heirlooms. This is 100 percent quest rewards and random drops. (Yes, the Wyrmslayer Spaulders dropped randomly for me while questing in Felwood.) I didn't run any instances because after level 30 or so it got really hard to find an instance group at the levels I was at, but that wasn't a hard-and-fast rule.
2. Try and exhaust a zone before moving on. This means doing as many quests as I can, no skipping around, and experiencing as much of the new versions of old zones as possible. Turns out you can actually do fairly well that way. There are a lot of quests out there now.
3. Switch talent specialization every four or five levels. There was no real rhyme or reason to this, I just wanted to see how talent specs felt at different levels. Blood Craze is very strong now. Combined with Bloodthirst and the heal from Victory Rush, a fury warrior can easily take on groups without falling over dead or running away. The old warrior strategy of "kill them before they kill you" is actually somewhat viable now.

So let's discuss the experiment. What did I find were the pros and cons of the new system? What's good for warriors and what's bad?

This twitter developer chat was focused on the recent beta talent tree overhaul announced for Cataclysm. Lots of information came out including drastic changes to the paladin class. A lot of the answers had to do with the fact that a couple classes aren't very done in the current beta build that everyone has been poring over.

Some highlights:

• paladins will be using a new Holy Power resource system in addition to mana
• all death knights will gain Runic Empowerment via trainers for all specs
• no planned hard cap for the new Mastery stat
• still no guild housing

The full categorized round-up is after the break.

• Arms warriors get Mortal Strike, Anger Management and Two-Handed Weapon Specialization for picking arms as their talent specialization.
• Fury warriors get Bloodthirst, Dual Wielding, Dual Wield Specialization and Precision.
• Protection warriors get Shield Slam, Vitality and Vengeance.

What this means is that each tree will have a rigorous, defined role, and only that tree will make use of certain key abilities. As an example, only fury warriors will be able to dual wield at all. No more arms and prot dual wielding of any kind.

In addition, we can now look directly at each talent tree with the new redesign and look at what you'll be spending those 31 points in. However, just because it's in this beta patch doesn't mean it will make it to live; we already know Impending Victory is not likely to survive.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid, we're just crazy.

Never fear, we'll be doing more leveling posts and more report cards in the future. (I've been messing around with arms again lately on my night elf warrior -- having some fun with it, too.) But this week, we'll be talking about the Ruby Sanctum instance. The storyline of the Ruby Sanctum links Wrath of the Lich King's storylines with those of the upcoming Cataclysm, but the encounter mechanics and loot are still pretty solidly Wrath.

First we'll talk about the minibosses and Halion himself from both a DPS and a tanking perspective. Since much of that work has already been done by Michael Gray, we'll then go on to talk about loot. Then I'm gonna go eat something. I'd invite you, but by the time you read this I will have already eaten. The bane of the internet: I can't share my jalapeno-flavored chips with you. (Nor, to be honest, would I. They're mine. MINE!)

The first thing to talk about in Ruby Sanctum are the trash pulls. As a DPSer, you really just need to know what the kill order is and to stick to it, but I also suggest to be aware. Remember Ulduar on the way to General Vezax? Yeah, it's like that. There most likely will be CC, and it's a bad idea to Whirlwind/Bladestorm in the middle of it. So pay attention and use your abilities responsibly. As a tank, you should likewise watch your AoE threat moves and make sure only to break CC when you need to. Make sure to use Charge to get right back on the Charscale Invoker when it punts you, and in general, use your stuns and silences to keep the casters locked down as much as possible when tanking them. If you're tanking the Charscale Commanders, pull them out; don't let them use Rallying Shout. There's no reason to let a five-or-so-mob trash pull get a 25% DPS increase.

Once you get done with the trash, it's on to the mini-bosses.

Let me first just say, "Woah." Perhaps even "Ho-lee carp!" Pretty much everything we've seen so far in the beta is nothing compared to this change, which will essentially halve the amount of talent points you'll be spending. Whereas a level 80 character right now has 71 points to spend, under the new system, you'll have 41 points at level 85. Furthermore, at level 10, you'll be asked to pick a talent specialization and you will not be able to spend talent points out of that specialization until you've spent 31 points in that tree.

Considering you'll only have 41 points to spend in total, this means that there will be very little talent overlap between, say, an arms and a fury warrior and as such, much less risk of an arms warrior trying to cherry-pick fury for DPS talents. Likewise, tanking warriors won't be going up arms to pick up Impale (unless it is very, very low in the arms tree), and you'll have to be level 72 before you even get to spend points outside your main tree (tour 32nd talent point).

To say this is "monstrously huge" is to dabble in understatement. The very method by which we choose talents is changing -- how we can choose them, and how often we get them. Many abilities that are currently class- or spec-defining talent choices will be linked to the talent tree you choose to specialize in, and passive abilities that currently exist as talents will simply be applied by making the choice between talent trees for your specialization.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors. This week, we look at where the class is going in Cataclysm.

Sorry if you were desperately hoping for a discussion of leveling, but with the new Cataclysm beta and the lifting of the NDA, we have details -- Finally, glorious details! It's been so long! -- to discuss about where the class is going. While there are not actually a lot of new talents to discuss, a great many talents have been altered in order to fit with the new design elements. Safeguard, for instance, isn't useless; it's practically mandatory. You're not going to want to take it ... That intervene effect more or less fits the definition of "useless" still ... But you'll need to take it for the crit immunity. This is the way of things for quite a few changes with Cataclysm. You may like them, or you may hate them, but you have to deal with them either way.

I'm going to drop my usual attempt at detachment and be up front going into this. I like some of the changes a lot. I hate others. I am not unbiased about what's coming. How could I be? I've been playing warriors for over five years now. I love the class, and I'm never giving it up no matter what comes down the pike.

So let's take a look at what's coming down said pike. Yesterday we covered talent and ability changes. I'm not going to repeat too much of that here; no reason to reinvent the wheel and all. Supposedly, Inner Rage is trainable in the latest beta build. They're also moving crit immunity from Safeguard to Improved Defensive Stance. As always, beta means constant changes.

For those of you who don't know much about tanking, we're going to talk quickly about a stat that won't exist in Cataclysm. This lowly stat is called defense rating, and it's something that tanks need quite a bit of. The nice thing is that it's on just about everything that tanks wear, which means at higher gear levels, we've got it coming out of our ears. The primary point of this stat is to reduce the critical strike ability for incoming melee hits from the standard of 6% to 0%. Druids currently don't need this stat, as they've got a talent called Survival of the Fittest, which means that bosses don't need to drop defense leather.

All in all, the stat is kinda boring, as while it does still do nice things after you reach the defense cap of 690 rating (or 540 skill), most people don't bother with it and stack stamina or other avoidance. So Blizzard decided that they're going to get rid of it.

Around BlizzCon 2009, we were told that the crit reduction we formerly got from defense rating was going to be tied into things that were available to all members of each tanking class. Examples used were baking it into Bear Form for druids, Righteous Fury for paladins, Defensive Stance for warriors and Frost Presence (or rather, Blood Presence in Cataclysm) for death knights. That means that if a retribution paladin or arms warrior wanted to tank, all he'd need to do was swap to vaguely appropriate gear (or just over to a sword and shield), pop his respective abilities, and away he'd go. That's not how it appears things went down, though.

Well, we finally have some insight into how warrior talents and abilities are changing in Cataclysm. While it's fair to say that we're not getting a ton of new abilities, what we are getting are worth discussing, and some of the talents have changed pretty dramatically from their current implementation.

Just one example to start us: Shield Slam no longer uses block value in any way, shape or form, since block value is going away. Now, Shield Slam is purely dependent on attack power, which is of course derived from strength. The stronger your warrior is, the harder he or she hits things with a shield. In other words, if you want to hit hard with your Shield Slams? Stack strength. It really shouldn't be all that hard to do. Frankly, removing the whole shield block value conversion to this ability is welcome from my perspective.

It should be noted that several abilities mentioned in the Cataclysm warrior previews are not here. Either they won't be, or they're not implemented yet, I have no idea which. Please don't stone me. Masteries appear to be exactly as they have been related to us, but Gushing Wound, Inner Rage and Heroic Leap do not seem to be implemented yet.