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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe Care and Feeding of Warriors: I still love you, Titan's Grip
by Matthew Rossi 
Aug 8th 2008 at 2:00PM
Dear, sweet Titan's Grip, be thou not angered at me. Dost thou remember how our affair began, as news of you first broached the shores of Europe and invited the whole world in? Yes, I have aired my doubts of you in public before now. For the truth is, my fair one, you are not perfect. You can indeed withhold from me that sweetest of rage, which I use to rend my enemies in twain. But in truth how could I ever stay alienated from your beauty? For you do allow me to hit my enemies with two great honking weapons at the same time!
And that is wonderful.
Yet there are other wonders than Titan's Grip waiting for you warriors at the roof of the World of Warcraft, the ice-tinged continent of Northrend. What awaits us, you may ask? Well, ask or not, here comes a day's observations of what awaits us. (Also, if you're wondering why I'm using Gorehowl and a shield in that picture, let me just say, Shield Slam doesn't use the same cooldown as Bloodthirst. Also, fury tanking! More about this in the post itself.)
Now that I've done the expected and obligatory gushing about TG, what say I talk about the state of things warriorish in Wrath of the Lich King's enthralling beta? (Yeah, yeah, it's not a word. Sheesh, you people.)
And that is wonderful.
Yet there are other wonders than Titan's Grip waiting for you warriors at the roof of the World of Warcraft, the ice-tinged continent of Northrend. What awaits us, you may ask? Well, ask or not, here comes a day's observations of what awaits us. (Also, if you're wondering why I'm using Gorehowl and a shield in that picture, let me just say, Shield Slam doesn't use the same cooldown as Bloodthirst. Also, fury tanking! More about this in the post itself.)
Now that I've done the expected and obligatory gushing about TG, what say I talk about the state of things warriorish in Wrath of the Lich King's enthralling beta? (Yeah, yeah, it's not a word. Sheesh, you people.)
First off, the arms tree feels somewhat incomplete. Bladestorm is fun, but not terribly powerful, certainly not so potent that it feels like it's worth being the 51 point arms talent. Bull Rush increases charge and intercept stun by a whole second if you put three talent points into it. Strength of Arms is solid, but like all such "makes you stronger" talents it doesn't have much of a feel to it. Trauma works nicely with Blood Frenzy and Deep Wounds, and with Rend now working with weapon damage it's probably worth getting if you're that far down the tree anyway.
The problem I had looking at arms talents was, the tree still feels absolutely defined by Mortal Strike. Now, I love Mortal Strike. Who doesn't? (Hint: every single other class in World of Warcraft. Death Knights will be making corpses explode, raising their arena teammates as ghouls, and pulling LoS casters right to them with Death Grip, and will still complain about Mortal Strike.) But it's the 31 point talent in a 51 point tree, and it still dominates the tree utterly. I don't want to see it nerfed, both because I hate nerfs and because I believe MS is far from overpowered (go ahead, as an MS warrior using any weapon other than a Stunherald, try and kill an equally geared resto druid or disc priest. Go for it.) but I am kind of embarrased and annoyed that 20 points down the tree, nothing, not even Bladestorm feels as cool or powerful as an ability that's been around for two years. Something needs to be done. Bladestorm needs something cool (perhaps a crazy animated target to target charge like Kargath's Blade Dance) to make it actually powerful rather than somewhat gimmicky. (The complete snare/root/fear immunity is nice, it's a shame it's not an actual fear break though.) Right now, the following build would be possible at level 80, and while it's just one I threw in at the spur of the moment, it shows how deep you can get in fury while still grabbing MS. Personally I find the idea that it's even considerable (I'd probably go deeper in arms just for Strength of Arms, myself) to be a problem.
I took prot spec out for a spin on my human warrior as well. So farm I'm in unmitiated squee country with it. Shockwave is astonishing fun, good for grinding, good for tanking. In my two test tanking runs on my human (one in old school T5 - T6 tanking gear, one in PvP/DPS gear for resil crit reduction and more AP) I quickly found myself using Shockwave every single time it was up. A 20 second cooldown makes this semi-spammable, and the boosted damage from AP gear makes me hope the promised re-itemization of tanking gear materializes, because I had solid threat in the PvP/DPS set from it. Without a functioning meter (Blizzard's in game one just annoyingly pops a '100% threat' over mobs heads at odd moments at present or what have you) I can't say for sure which generated more threat.
Unlike arms, even with the loss of Shield Slam (it's a skill now, all warriors have it) deep prot is just packed with excellent on-purpose talents. Vigilance is worthwhile just for the 10% threat reduction: slap it on that annoying DPSer you know and keep it on him the whole run! (Or put it on the healer if you're feeling proactive.) I didn't actually have to use the taunt aspect of it all that much, but it's nice too. I never got to use Safeguard at all, as I never had to intervene to anyone. It looks good on paper, though. Sword and Board seemed a little buggy (I could swear I was getting the proc sound and seeing the buff but not always being able to Shield Slam) but when it worked, it was very very nice indeed. I could gush and gush about Critical Block, Stalwart Protector, and Incite (I really like Incite for other tanking specs, while I'll cover next) but eventually I have to stop going on and on about how awesome prot is now and move on.
My tauren, after a brief run as arms to get the feel of the spec, went full-on fury. (I've chosen him as my fury testbed because his gear isn't as good, so he'll see more upgrades faster... oh, and yes, because the Horde quests and starting zones seem cooler so far. If anything, Wrath of the Lich King could be the expansion that wins me back full time to the Horde. I'm not kidding.) This is his current spec, aimed at DPS with some tanking viability. If things went live unchanged (which they won't) then this would be the level 80 version of the spec. Don't let the picture accompanying the article fool you, you can't actually tank with a 2h weapon and a shield, you won't get any rage. You can, however, grind with a 2h weapon and a shield and experience almost no downtime. You take remarkably little damage, Bloodthirst scales with total health now, and if you have the rage handy you can Bloodthirst and then Shield Slam almost immediately after.... heck, if Bloodsurge procs you can Bloodthirst, instant-cast Slam, and then Shield Slam all in one go. I tanked Utgarde with the level 70 spec and had a good time (no loot, though). I did try with the Gorehowl, but no, you just don't generate enough rage even with full Intensify Rage (at least not fast enough to keep them off the healer). If you have the rage and a good macro though you can swap between a fast tanking weapon and your 2h for some nice slams when Bloodsurge procs, that gets attention. Doing the run in my PvP/DPS set on the cow meant I had solid AP for my Thunderclap and the new strength/Block formula meant I still had a respectable 450 block value or so. (It might have been higher when Gorehowl was equipped.)In short, if you want to fury tank your way to 80, it's possible. It requires slightly more patience from a group, especially if there's no CC, but the potential is there. Prot's still better, so if you're a prot warrior worried about losing tanking spots to fury, don't be. Prot's got more threat, more tricks and more survivability, but at last, you can stay grinding spec and tank a five man or stay tanking spec and still complete quests in a reasonable time with nice AoE moves.
I'm either bad at targeting it or Heroic Leap can't be targeted properly yet. I don't know what it looks like when someone else does it: when I do it, it looks silly from my perspective. In general, even with the scaling issues Titan's Grip is the solid heart of a really nice tree that just needs a few tweaks. I'd say of the three talent trees, arms is the most in need of some solid review love, fury could use some polishing and some better animations but is almost there, and prot is gonzo solid.
And that's two days in the beta for you. Tons of quests, lots of nice green plate if you're not well geared yet (see the above screenshot) and a lot of running all over the place to digest. If there's anything you want more detail about, speak up: if I haven't tested it yet I'll be happy to do so for you.
Check out more strategies, tips and leveling guides for Warriors in Matthew Rossi's weekly class column: The Care and Feeding of Warriors.Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Expansions, Classes, Talents, Buffs, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 3)
Kaphik Aug 8th 2008 3:57PM
@Saelorn: lolwut?
Fury is all about aoe melee damage. Sweeping Strikes, Whirlwind, Cleave. In Mount Hyjal on trash waves I beat out everyone for damage done.
Phohammar Aug 8th 2008 4:01PM
It's not, you do white attack while it's going on.
Phohammar Aug 8th 2008 4:07PM
@Kaphik
ur warlocks are bad.
If you'd take half a second to look at other classes than warrior and their trees, you'd see something akin to what they've done with death knight trees. Blizzard has stated directly to the death knight class that they want ALL trees to be able to do the class's roles equally well, depending on specific talent choices ofcourse. Taking that idea and applying it to the other classes and their talent trees, you can clearly see that the developers want to take the other classes in that direction as well.
For once I'd like to see someone of the warrior class wrap their massively thick skull around the idea that possibly, bladestorm is not mainly intended for pvp application and titan grip is not mainly intended for pve application.
tchernobyl Aug 8th 2008 5:25PM
Phohammar: wrong. white attacks do not happen during a bladestorm.
Vish Aug 8th 2008 7:44PM
@ Dan " For raiding synergy and utility you're going to see a lot of DW1h Trauma builds. Mark my words. "
You think something like this: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=LAhhzhi0xc0bbZVVzmxxoVh ?
I put points in both sword and axe spec just to get to the Trauma build. Unless you were messing around with healing mobs or BG's I'm not sure where else you could put them in and not be a waste per se...
Teaspoon Aug 8th 2008 10:53PM
What about Imp OP and Imp TC instead of an extra weapon spec?
You're saying it's a raiding build, so why not get Imp TC and use it on some spare GCDs so your tank can spend more of his GCDs on high threat and less sustaining debuffs?
Kaphik Aug 8th 2008 3:54PM
"Hint: every single other class in World of Warcraft. Death Knights will be making corpses explode, raising their arena teammates as ghouls, and pulling LoS casters right to them with Death Grip, and will still complain about Mortal Strike."
Truer words were never spoken.
As far as Heroic Leap is concerned, I don't think it is targetable. That's my experience with playing around with it, and which is why i think the talent sucks the way it is right now. I thought that there would be a target icon pop up, like when magex cast Blizzard, but no. As it stands now, Heroic leap is buggy as heck and pretty much useless.
Phohammar Aug 8th 2008 4:17PM
Heroic leap = 2nd intercept
Stop thinking in the terms of
pvp tree/pve dps tree/pve tanking tree
with the exception of the prot tree, which raiding warriors who want to tank will obviously have to go into e_e, the other trees aren't exclucive anymore in their deep talents, if you're going to min/max like most raiders will for dps then you probably won't pick up titan grip and definately won't pick up heroic leap. just the same as warlocks currently don't pick up shadowfury
Kaphik Aug 8th 2008 4:21PM
Heroic Leap is still useless because it isn't targeting properly.
tchernobyl Aug 8th 2008 4:59PM
cut/pasting this from a previous reply of mine...
Warriors ok?
Couldn't be further from the truth. Arms is still locked around the power of the 31 pointer, mortal strike. Every single talent after that, or even before, anything new in that tree still pales in comparison and offers NOTHING that a warrior would want. The only GOOD talent that really exists in there is Mortal Strike. imp thunderclap as a close second, and that should speak WORLDS of how horrible the arms tree is. It needs a complete redesigning. (if you ask me, mortal strike should be trained, and the arms tree completely redone from the ground up, but that might be a tad extreme). Oh and, bladestorm is simply a button that hits whirlwind 4 times for you (minus the cooldown). But the rage cost is there. Want to whirlwind once? 25 rage. twice? 50. 4 times? 100. you get the idea. Add to that being disarmable, and it doesn't *break* CC but simply renders you immune during the short duration... it's worthless.
Fury... is okay. It is as strong as it has been in the past, but there is still no synergy for raids. No real reason to bring a fury warrior except for DPS. As for the new talents, well... getting more threat when hit? Why should a fury warrior be getting hit in the first place? Or the threat reduction talent? equally worthless, because if points are put into it, you're wasting them, and won't be causing enough damage to do much threat in the first place.
Bloodsurge... worship this talent. It is made of WIN.
Titan's grip still has all its problems, no matter what anyone on wowinsider might say. Yes, visually it looks awesome, and yes, damage can spike quite high from having two 2 handers... but the drawbacks still outweigh the benefits on this talent.
First, the speed debuff. I don't think that there SHOULDN'T be one, but 20% is extremely harsh. At a standstill, my weapon speeds are 4.2 and 4.1. Flurry does indeed increase this to make it substantially faster, but they're still at least EACH a full second slower than the slowest 1 handed weapon. What, you might ask, is wrong with that? Multiple things.
A: Rage generation. You miss even once, or get dodged, or parried, etc... your flurry fades. Almost guaranteed. When your flurry fades, you're waiting 4 seconds for any rage to come in. While you're waiting, you're a sitting duck.
For titan's grip to be effective, a warrior would need high crit (30-35% or so)... high hit (not the 9% for the main hand abilities like bloodthirst, but the full 20-25% so that the offhand doesn't miss)... you'd need expertise against dodge/parry, but hit is more important. And to top it all off? You need a lot of AP at the same time, since bloodthirst is based on attack power and not weapon damage. We admittedly don't know how well gear will be itemized at level 80/raids, but at the moment, I haven't replaced any of my t5-t6-s3 gear, at level 76. Titan's grip needs to have less of a speed penalty, or increase hit percentage. For that matter, our +hit talent is pathetic at 3%, and could use a boost as well.
Heroic leap is not worth talking about. Pathetic damage (300 crits!), stuns that don't work half the time, no way to target or judge the distance of the leap? No use at all. For that matter, why is this pvp talent in the pve tree? (on that subject, why is blood frenzy, purely pve talent, in arms, the pvp tree? )
Protection is by FAR the best tree in beta, currently, and even that has its drawbacks.
Vigilance, while nifty, doesn't seem to refresh taunt consistently.. other than that, it's interesting.
Sword and board, while interesting at first glance, is not worth 5 points for a mere chance at a proc, which for that matter is more of a disruption than a help. A normal threat rotation would include shockwave, devastate, shield slam and revenge, in a similar order to that. Suddenly however, sword and board procs, you notice it and shield slam, but you're stuck waiting for the global cooldown/other cooldowns to tick down, and the flow is disrupted. Overall, the threat gain from the shield slams over longer periods of time doesn't outweigh the loss of threat from not having used the other abilities in your rotation.
Finally, shockwave. Surprisingly fun talent, I must agree. While the stun can be rather detrimental to rage generation, the threat seems okay, especially if you have the correct gear for wotlk... not gear simply with avoidance, but tank gear that has plenty of strength as well. Why? shockwave is based off of attack power, and so is the threat generated by it. With normal, BC tank gear, it's more of an aoe grab/stun than a pure threat generator, especially with such a long cooldown.
And naturally, the 5 man bosses are immune to the stun. So it's really just a 5 man gimmick talent, with maybe some use on trash in raids (if you can even target it correctly without breaking CC... the cone is too small!) but will have little use on the bosses.
I am definitely awaiting our class review, and hoping for the best. Arms needs a complete revamping/redesigning, the new wotlk talents for fury need revision, protection needs to be polished, and some talents revised somewhat. I've been playing this class since release, and while I've not tanked every raid in the game, I do definitely know what I'm talking about. Right now, moreso than in BC, every class eclipses the warrior. It's to the point where I'm seriously considering making a DK, if my favorite class doesn't get the attention it deserves.
Moltare Aug 10th 2008 3:46PM
Tcher, you may be a rampant hor, but you speak truth.
Teaspoon Aug 8th 2008 10:14PM
Now, I am not in the beta (Can we make IANITB an official acronym?) but I don't see how TG's rage generation is so problematic. Your rps is a level-based constant multiplied by your DPS (oh, and you get an extra 1.75*(1+crit%) since they decided to "normalise" rage gen a few patches ago), regardless of weapon speed. If you miss 20% of the time, you miss out on 20% of the potential rage but the only difference is the lumpiness. Maybe this means you need to make sure you keep more rage in reserve to keep you going if you miss a lump, but the rage generated in a minute will be the same with fast weapons as with slow and so the number of abilities you can use per minute should come out the same.
I'm really keen to get sword and board. At the moment I find that other than moving around in the fights that require it, tanking is just a matter of settling in with a shield slam/devastate/devastate/revenge loop. It used to be SS,rev,dev,dev but I put the rev at the end so that the 4-piece T4 bonus (10% more damage on the next ability after a revenge) would boost SS instead of dev and I never needed to switch it back when I got out of T4. Every now and then I skip a devastate to renew a shout or clap, but that's about it. Outside of the 4-GCD loop, I might keep shield block up if it won't rage-starve me and maybe do some heroic strikes if I've still got rage to spare. Sword and board procs will break what you call the "flow", but many others call the "rut". A proc means we restart the cycle by getting back to our biggest attack, and it means we get that biggest attack FOR FREE!
I haven't had a chance to play with shockwave yet, anybody know how the threat on it compares with a devastate?
Teaspoon Aug 8th 2008 10:38PM
Actually, there was something I had in mind to say about TG before I got distracted. The speed loss is painful because it reduces the value of AP by slowing AFTER the AP damage bonus is calculated. Yellows won't change, but you'll need 20% more AP to get the same AP-based bonus to white DPS and rage generation.
Of course, if it slowed the weapon before calculating the AP bonus, it'd be hugely overpowered because it would make swing-damage attacks (slam and whirlwind) hit for more on a 2H that's being TG'd than when it's 2H'd. Also, those swing-damage attacks would hit EVEN HARDER if you didn't spend as many talent points
I'd rather see it further increase miss chance (maybe bring white misses up to 30% against same-level, compared to 2x1H's 24%, and possibly even raise the hitcap on yellows) than slow the attacks down. It'd mean the penalty is something you could gear around properly. Gearing for 20% haste doesn't really get around the TG penalty, because the 20% haste boosts non-TG damage by as much.
But here's an exciting and original thought - why does a 46-50 point talent have to have a penalty? How many others reduce your effectiveness in one aspect to improve it in others? There's already a cost to being able to thump things with a pair of enormous weapons - you have to spend 50 points in a tree and miss out on other potentially useful abilities like MS to do it.
griever1101 Aug 8th 2008 6:19PM
What about bloodbath? Is it a viable tanking ability? Is it even usable in defensive stance?
tchernobyl Aug 8th 2008 8:01PM
griever: bloodbath is currently not even implemented, to my knowledge.
ELP Aug 8th 2008 7:15PM
Am I the only one that noticed Improved Disciplines was replaced by Sudden Death. A chance to execute regardless of target's health. Yes please! I'd like to find out how taking that talent and then going fury works for raid dps. Granted, you don't get Titan's grip, but that has got to be a seriously viable raid dps spec.
tchernobyl Aug 8th 2008 8:04PM
ELP:
Sudden death is another lackluster talent. Technically, so is Execute. It LOOKS good, yes, but it's another ability that does not scale with gear. At tier 5 or even tier 6, it turns out you do more damage as fury with the normal ability rotation (ww, bloodthirst, toss in a heroic strike if you have extra rage) than if you execute at sub-20%. So toss in a talent that lets you blow your full rage bar at any random time.. is even worse. Your dps rotation and thus dps just goes down the tubes.
Deitylink Aug 8th 2008 8:56PM
did u get to try out sudden death in PvP, it seems like an awesome talent wen it does proc. imagine:
3k MS crit then execute lights up
EXECUTE!
another 3k crit.
just wondering, that talent seems like something that would make me do arena.
also titans grip, when you tried it where u missing a whole lot?
Andris Aug 8th 2008 9:57PM
As a warrior I was really excited about Titan's Grip, I mean come on, two honking weapons of death, who wouldn't want that? But everyone has been saying it's for the most part useless due to rage normalization. I like many respeced to dps after this devastating nerf and now am content to stay that way (plus tanking sucks), but Titan's Grip as a whole discourages me as to Blizzard's priorities in the expansion, we see many epic changes to other dps classes such as ret pallies actually being viable, but warriors amazing talent is totally sub par, so my question here is do you think Blizzard will address this issue or like they usually do pat themselves on the back and basically tell us dps warriors "You're only role is tanking so get used to it."?
Mahke Aug 9th 2008 3:24AM
I've heard and seen inscription recipes for caster based classes, is there any reason to choose inscription for a warrior? I havent seen anything for melee classes. Maybe I've just missed them.