Posts with tag warrior-guide

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works.

Honestly, believe it or not, I'd actually like to talk about DPS today. My current raiding guild has between three and four regular tanks who show up for most every 25 man raid. As you might expect, you don't need three to four tanks for ICC. At this point in the raid's life cycle, if you have two tanks you can get through most everything except Putricide and maybe Blood Princes. (We have used two tanks and a DPS for this fight, but we usually use our feral tank for it, so three tanks.) Marrowgar at this point can be done by two geared tanks and a plate DPS standing up there mashing away, although to play it safe we usually just use three.

So last night, after tanking Sindragosa, I got to DPS on Arthas, which is fun for a warrior. (Ah, Glyph of Cleaving, you make up for the mechanical deficiencies of my class.) Then I went and did some stupid fun heroics with a warrior tank, arms warrior, another fury warrior and a resto druid who kept healing in bear form. (I know they can't cast healing spells in bear form. He'd occasionally pop out and throw a HoT on folks. It was pretty much all we needed.) So it wall all sorts of DPS warrior fun last night.

And then I went and read this endlessly exploding threat on tanking and now I have to talk about it. Why? Well, first off, Ghostcrawler mentions Monte Cook. That hits all of my nerd buttons. (If only you'd thrown in a plug for Kingmaker, Greg.) Secondly, we both hated the old Shield Block mechanic and we both hate the current Heroic Strike one.

Ghostcrawler - Re: Just get rid of dodge and parry altogether

I understand your point, but I hated old Shield Block. It was always the right button to push whenever it came off cooldown. It wasn't an interesting decision – there was no point in saving it for the right moment and no penalty for using it at the wrong time. It's okay to have some relatively spammy buttons, but old Shield Block crossed the line (and current Heroic Strike still does).

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Frankly, the Bladestorm nerf is a minor one, albeit an extremely annoying minor one. Granted, it means that opposing rogues, warriors and sometimes hunters (ah, hunters, the Y's of WoW) will be able to turn the major source of "And now YOU DIE" available to arms warriors in PvP into "Whee, I'm a pretty ballerina watch me spin". Arms is still pretty strong if it's geared to the absolute teeth and has significant backup, which is about the best you can expect from a warrior in PvP.

PvP for a warrior has always been "die ten million times to other classes until you finally get geared enough to get some payback and then get nerfed because they don't like it when their free kill turns around and kills them back" anyway. This is just more of the same and not even really significant more of the same, it's a very minor change that only rankles because it's piled on the back of more significant (and in some cases more ridiculous) nerfs to the class. It irritates me, sure, but let's be honest: that's not terribly hard to accomplish.

Arms in general has been getting the crap end of the stick this expansion. It's ludicrously difficult to gear for it in PvP, it got outperformed by protection for a while, and in PvE you end up as a bleed bot for feral druids while the fury warriors scale better even with all the neat tricks arms can do. Of course, part of this is ye old 'hybrid tax' which penalizes you for playing a class that has a tanking spec. There have been back and forth arguments on that... is it fair, should it exist at all, what would become to pure DPS classes without it (oh, boo hoo, we must protect the poor vulnerable little rogues and mages, let's set up a bloody nature preserve for the precious little darlings so they won't be threatened) etc etc.

This week, I'm not here to debate whether or not it should exist or how it should be applied. It's here, we have to deal with it. Instead, I'm here to argue that due to the fact that it exists, DPS specs for warriors become even more important and must be as viable for as broad an application as possible. The time has come for the warrior to no longer have dedicated trees for specific roles. With the coming of Mastery, we're looking at an opportunity for real, meaningful change to the class that I hope Blizzard embraces. It's time for arms, fury and protection (yes, protection) to be viable tanking and DPS trees.

Yes, I still owe you an enchant, gem and glyph 101. However, I want to really get all my ducks in a row for it and cover both PvP and PvE glyph choices for all three specs. As one example of how complicated it can get, if you're running exclusively in five man content, you'll use different glyphs for your prot set than if you're raid tanking. I personally switch glyphs several times a day (in fact, my glyph switching has become what respeccing was before dual specs, a necessary step for different tanking situations) - I tend to use Devastate, Cleaving and Heroic Strike as my 5 man majors while I still use Last Stand, Shield Wall and either Vigilance or Taunt for raids. (Sometimes I mix these up and use Heroic Strike or Devastate for my raid glyphs as well.)

Meanwhile, I use arms as my PvP spec and fury as my PvE spec, so in addition to re-speccing every time I intend to do some battlegrounds, I have to put in all new glyphs and even have an entirely different set with different stat weights and gems (for instance, a lot of my armor pen gear has expertise on it that's entirely wasted for my arms spec but needed for my fury spec) -- this all needs to be addressed in any post about gems and glyphing.

But for now, lets deal with a more pressing issue.

This week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors continues its look at the warrior specs with Arms 101. Matthew Rossi spends some time this week talking about that peculiar form of finesse that involves smashing things with a two handed weapon.

We've talked about protection, the tanking spec, and we've talked about fury, the Tasmanian Devil spec. This week, we're talking about arms. We defined fury last week as the spec for people who want to kill things, and that's fair, but if fury is that, what's arms? Well, fury is the 'kill it kill it kill it until it's dead and then kill it some more' spec, defined by Blizzard as the 'screaming barbarians in woad'. Arms, however, is the finesse spec. Yes, that's right, I'm defining the spec that relies on using a great whacking axe, polearm, sword or mace as 'finesse'. Welcome to the warrior class, where the fanciest Dan at the party is still a hulking madman in plate. As the class Q&A put it:

However, we would like to reinforce a little more the kits of Arms and Fury. Everyone (I hope) gets the difference between Frost and Fire mages. Arms is supposed to be about weapons and martial training and feel "soldierly." Fury is supposed to be about screaming barbarians in woad. You get a sense of that, but it could be stronger.

Indeed it could, and for my money, eventually will be, but that in a nutshell is arms. Fury is about grabbing anything big enough and beating on things until they're paste. Arms is about style, about finesse, about perfect control of your weapon, and about taking advantage of openings for huge, devastating blows that get around normal conventions and defenses. If you like the idea of being really, really good at hitting people with a sword the size of a barn door, then arms is for you.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is here to hurt things this week. Hurt them, make them bleed, make them die, stand over their corpses and find something else to kill. Hear the warsong hammering in your ears? Let it out. Let it out and show the world your rage. Matthew Rossi knows that sometimes, dead is better.

Last week, we talked about Protection. Protection warriors are the tanks of the warrior class, the guys who stand up there and bang on their shields and bang their shields into things ranging the gamut from large horrible squamous tentacle monsters in Old Kingdom to giant walking bone piles in ICC. And that's fine: somebody has to keep the monsters and bosses of the game focused on a hard target so the rest of us can kill it. It's good to see prot warriors alongside bears, walking corpses and daisy picking fancylads doing the tank job. (I kid you paladins because my heart is black and full of envy.) It's good that there are warrior tanks.

But that's not you, is it? You haven't read this far because you want to tank. If you did, you'd have clicked that link and been on your merry way. You don't want to tank. You don't want to stand up front and keep monsters attention focused like some kind of giant nursery school teacher for the horrors of Azeroth. No, you don't want to tank.

You want to kill things. You want to rip them into bloody gobbets and leave their ruined, looted corpses in your wake. You want to wear two huge weapons crossed on your back and reach up to draw them forth as soon as things get ugly, which can't come soon enough in your opinion. You want to get on up there and rip things heads clean off. You're the kind of person who thinks Grom Hellscream had a good idea but didn't go far enough with it.

Come right this way. Fury is the spec for you.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is WoW.com's weekly column for warriors. This week, we jump on the bandwagon. Matthew Rossi tends to miss jumping on bandwagons, fall, and hurt himself, followed by a lot of swearing. It's actually somewhat entertaining to watch.

There is, ultimately, only one thing warriors actually do.

We hit things. We don't poison them, we don't electrocute them, we don't burn them or freeze them or hit them with diseases or the Holy Light. We just hit them.We don't turn into anything, we don't stand back and let an animal hit things for us, we just plain hit things. We hit things and get angry, and we get hit and get angry about that, too.

That being said, warriors can specialize in one of two ways to hit things. One is to heft a big two handed weapon (or two of them) and hit things to death. The other is to put on the heaviest armor we can find, strap a car door to our arm, and get things to hit us as hard as they can, and then hit them back.

This week, we look at protection, the "Is that all you got? Is that it? COME ON!" spec.

1. What is protection?

Well, read the above. Now we'll go into more detail. The warrior protection spec is the oldest actively used tanking spec in World of Warcraft. Tanking is the role in a five man, 10 man raid, or 25 man raid (and originally 10, 15, 20 and 40 man raids as well) where one player deliberately attempts to hold a mob or multiple mobs attention so that they do not attack the healers and/or damage dealing players. To do this, tanks need to work on two separate but equally important aspects of play.

1. They must hold aggro. Aggro (derived from aggression) is the hostile attention of the mob or mobs in question.
2. They must survive the damage inflicted on them by the mob or mobs long enough to be healed.
3. No, really, you need to do these two things. Otherwise, you're not tanking, you're just a greasy stain on something's fist and/or other means of killenating.
4. Yes, I said killenating. What, you're too good for made-up words?

In a follow up to the thread we discussed recently, Ghostcrawler discusses where the buff to protection warrior DPS will come from (sorry, guys, but it sounds like a buff to Devastate to me, yay for spamming) and a whole lot more. The discussion indicates that while they're interested in single target DPS increases over AoE increases that they don't think tank DPS is that big a factor in boss fights (and to be fair, he's right, it isn't a major factor although the fact that players will overreact to minor factors and stress out their tanks over their DPS, that is) and moves on from there.

The discussion about Devastate (that it's an easy ability to adjust) is fair enough but ignores the even easier solution of simply reducing the defensive stance penalty. To be honest I'd like to hear why there's still a penalty there when abilities like Righteous Fury and Frost Presence suffer none. I find the idea that buffing defensive stance would cause big problems for PvP balance kind of absurd. Battle stance grants 15% ArP and Zerker grants 3% crit, at most people would pop into d stance when focused, like they do now anyway. But we're likely to see buffs to Devastate, so just get used to it. My suggestion? While we're buffing Devastate, also have it queue Heroic Strike for us so that's one less button to spam and I can retire my macro.

In a forum thread discussing the recent prot warrior block changes and Warbringer nerf and the state of prot warrior DPS (it's basically acknowledged as the lowest DPS among the tanks) Ghostcrawler chimes in that they intend to buff sustained prot DPS while reducing burst in PvP. However, he quickly comes back to point that at this stage in the expansion they don't want to make any sustained mechanical changes and so, don't expect one. The sustained DPS increase will come from buffs to existing abilities.

While I can understand the trepidation from prot warriors at this statement (no one is terribly excited about a buff to Devastate, not even me) it's an unfortunate but valid point he makes here. You really don't have the time to make drastic mechanical changes this far into the cycle. We might like a more drastic solution, but with Cataclysm looming on the horizon you don't really want to see too much tinkering with the base mechanics.

Still, please don't just buff Devastate. Please. I'm begging you here.

I want Last Word. Yes, I know everyone hates the proc. I look at it and say "remember Heartpierce" and keep on wanting it. (I've actually considered picking up a Heartpierce for tanking heroics with but they didn't buff the rage gen when they buffed the energy and daggers have crappy coefficients for warriors.) I half expect to see that mace get buffed to add 200 str when it procs. If not, not. I still want the great ugly thing, even if I'll probably pick up a rogue offhand axe to use as a threat weapon.

None of this has much to do with what we're here for today, namely clearing out the Plagueworks, hopefully with as few attempts on Putricide as possible so we can save them for Lana'thel over in Crimson Halls. (No bets on what next week will be about.) I'll probably also mention some loot they drop, but don't expect a comprehensive loot list, this is more about the strategy and tactics of killing some really rather disgusting bosses.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is WoW.com's weekly column for all things angry and clanky. Matthew Rossi writes it, when he's not busy being angry and clanky.

Dev Chat Update: While today's post is about fury, it's worth mentioning that in addition to nerfing Shield Block's contribution to Shield Slam, we will supposedly see a threat buff to the ability. Hopefully it's a scaling, and not a static, threat buff, something that adds X threat for every Y block value or something. They'd also supposedly like to add sustained damage to prot for PvE without PvP burstiness, which would be nice if it happened..

Lately I get plenty of tanking action in raids, to the point where I honestly don't want to do it in PuG's. When musing about it the other day I realized that I'm too used to hard modes and progression when tanking: I demand perfection of myself to such a degree that I get tense and stressed over the smallest error in execution. This is possibly admirable (when not taken too far) in a raid setting on a new boss where strategies are being tested and modified constantly and everything's on the razor's edge between being able to pass the checks inherent to the content.

It's not when you're PuGging Halls of Lightning for a couple of extra Emblems of Frost.

In fact, what can help you get past Rotface is downright madness causing when heading down to Loken. At this point, Loken holds no surprises, and neither does the trash. Being a tanking perfectionist just leads you to tend towards freaking the heck out over stupid crap bored people do, and that's turning the game from fun to a drag for yourself. (It probably does for them, too, but they can look out for themselves.) Lately, I've taken to running the random daily and any 10 mans I PuG on my own as DPS, just to get a break from my own self-imposed desire to try for flawless execution. (I'm not saying I ever accomplish that, by the way, just that I want to.)

And I have to say: fury got good again when I wasn't looking.

Every week, Matthew Rossi writes The Care and Feeding of Warriors. Every week, he claws at his feeble brain to come up with a header paragraph, which really is kind of unfair. Warriors shouldn't have to think. Do you have any idea how many blows to the head we take?

So yeah, turns out I should probably have shut up and not told you guys that prot was actually good at PvP. Sorry about that. I'm not going to actually freak out until I see how they plan to balance prot so we're not good at PvP anymore, since I barely even PvP and am far more concerned with prot as a PvE spec, that is to say, tanking with it. If they make a bunch of changes and my threat stays the same and my survivability stays the same and I'm not seeing any major hits to my tanking, then whatever, I'm sure there will be enraged prot warriors still but I won't be one. If, however, I see a 2k threat loss and I'm dying like a chicken trying to tank a bloody heroic, then yeah, I'm gonna be upset.

I'll probably skip 'fevered pet' and move straight into 'enraged mouth breathing' territory. I can think of all sorts of ways to tweak prot in PvP that wouldn't have much of an effect in PvE, and I know the folks at Blizzard are better at class design than I am, so waiting and seeing is the order of the day. That being said I do find it irritating when we get told over and over again that we're fine until suddenly we're not. Just saying, some consistency would be nice.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors this week goes back to Icecrown Citadel to discuss the last two currently accessible encounters, the Gunship Battle and Deathbringer. Matt Rossi kind of wishes the Deathbringer fight was just against a great big talking axe. We don't have enough boss fights with inanimate objects.

Okay, so you've done the first two bosses in the place. Now what? Well, now you launch yourself via poorly designed goblin explosives between flying boats and you fight the son of possibly the greatest living warrior on the face of Azeroth. And then if you're Alliance you turn the whole thing over to a gnome with a frying pan and go raid Trial of the Grand Crusader for another week, I guess. Horde are presumably too clever to trust the opening of Icecrown to breakfast technology. Or too hungry. At any rate you're stuck with the same content as the rest of us.

So let's get on with it, shall we?

Wow, that was a year, huh? From the dizzying highs of fury spec in Naxxramas to the somewhat less dizzying highs of Ulduar, arms' constant evolution and protection spec's astonishing makeover as the expansion launched, 2009 was a year that saw warriors sway from top DPS and solid tanks as if in some kind of gale force wind. Armor Penetration went from a stat we'd take if we had to and is now one of our top DPS stats, Block got a makeover that led to changes in how abilities like Shield Block and Shield Slam calculate, and in general we saw the effects of stat inflation on gear really have an effect on us and how we stack up to other classes as tanks and DPS. If you were a tanking warrior in Naxx on January 1st. 2009, for example, you may have had upwards of 35k health. (To be honest, it's hard for me to remember, it may have gotten up to 38k if you stacked stamina.) Now, a geared TotGC tank walking into ICC can pretty easily hit 54 to 55k health fully raid buffed.

And it's only going up from here. Icecrown Citadel promises much improved itemization as well as crazy old school procs that should have warriors, be they DPS or tanks, salivating.

Warriors have definitely had their ups and downs this year, but I think we can say we're ending the year on a fairly high note. Fury DPS has managed to get back to a competitive place with the new weapons, arms still lags behind but has solid PvP and PvE uses, and protection is quite possibly the single strongest tanking class by virtue of sheer flexibility: other tanks may have more health, more armor, or more AoE threat, but protection's suite of abilities includes standouts like Shockwave, Vigilance, Spell Reflection and Warbringer, making it possibly #2 in every single tanking category when no class can claim to be #1 in them all. Let's look at some changes and how they shook out for warriors.