Posts with tag Fury

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

We now have a new version of the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator to discuss. While we've covered the Mists talents and abilities before, every new iteration of the design process brings us new elements to consider. What we're effectively being presented is a snapshot of the future through the lens of current design, giving us a chance to muse about what warriors will be doing and not doing.

One of the things that jumps out immediately when considering the new talents is that the current capstones Bladestorm and Shockwave (as well as Avatar), which had been gained at level 90 before, are now level 60 abilities. I'm not actually surprised by this change, but I am pleased by it. Those are abilities people can currently get by around the end of Outland, so making them level 60 talents means they'll be useful for leveling characters again.

Let's go over what can be gleaned from the calculator update and discuss what it all means.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

In my first draft, I started this article off with a detailed explanation of what my main problems with Single-Minded Fury are. I still want to talk about those. But first, I want to say this about the talent.

It's crazy-fun. I've been raiding, Raid Findering and 5-manning with it all week, and frankly I love how smooth the rage generation is. If you ever played fury back in The Burning Crusade or even vanilla, before TG was a gleam in a designer's eye, SMF will be familiar and yet different to you. What's changed? Well, you don't use Whirlwind as your second attack anymore; it's purely a trash ability now. Raging Blow and Bloodsurge instant-cast Slams give you more to do but take the concept of rotation and shake it up, meaning that you're watching for procs more than ever. Colossus Smash gives you a very-long-cooldown ability that you're always going to prioritize. But for all those changes, the talent is still you dual-wielding smaller, faster weapons.

If you were the fury warrior with the Vanir's Fists in late BC, you'll recognize what this talent does for fury. If you leveled a fury warrior in Cata, it's exactly how levels 1 through 68 went. It's a fairly simple concept to grasp. You're not the warrior crushing everything in his path with raw power, and you're not the one using discipline and weapon control to make precise strikes, either. No, you're the one with speed and relentless assault over finesse.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

I love fury. I raided in vanilla WoW with a two-handed fury DPS spec and also tanked, because everyone who played a warrior tanked back then. I tanked with a fury spec that worked very well for threat generation, but I eventually switched to an arms/prot spec for the Mortal Strike debuff.

When Titan's Grip was announced for Wrath of the Lich King, everyone who knew me knew what my reaction would be. TG fury became my DPS spec of choice until I became a main tank for my Wrath guild, and it has stayed my favorite spec throughout the talent's existence. Even now that I raid as arms DPS, fury is technically my main spec and arms my secondary. I even applauded when Single-Minded Fury was announced for Cata because I knew a lot of fury warriors missed the one-handed weapon playstyle.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

We are about to live in interesting times, my friends. Last week's BlizzCon effectively promised us most, if not all, of the candy I wanted. With the full awareness that this is all subject to change, take a look at the mock-up for abilities (not talents, core abilities) that all fury warriors will get as they level from 1 to 90 in the revamped Mists of Pandaria scheme. With the announcement that Slam will be an arms-only ability, I personally suspect that Wild Strike is the replacement for Bloodsurge's Slam proc. More importantly, you'll note a few things.

One I really want to highlight at the start are the no-brainer talents that aren't talents anymore, like Flurry, Raging Blow, Bloodsurge and both Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury. You'll also note that you don't have to choose between TG and SMF. You get both at level 38. I used the fury abilities screenshot because that's the one I managed to get. If Blizzard did an arms or protection one, I didn't see it. But all three talent specializations are worth discussing, because we're heading into a future where your talent choices are no longer constrained by spec.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Now that we've covered gearing up in detail, it's time to talk about what to do with that gear. Now that the Firelands have been out for a while, we've all had a chance to get in there and kill some mobs. That includes me; I have also had a chance to do that. So what have I experienced in my excursions to the hell of upside-down fire elementals? (Okay, they're not upside-down.)

• For starters, all three DPS warrior specs are really close together right now. In my experience, arms and fury DPS is neck-and-neck, with arms performing better on some fights and fury better on others. Also, SMF and TG fury are both pretty viable, with TG seeming to move ahead once you're using a pair of Firelands 2H weapons.
• Once again, gearing up takes you past the nerfs in a few weeks. I basically raid with a fury spec and an arms spec, and some nights I respec from TG to SMF and/or the other way around. (Now that my axes have dropped, I usually stay TG.) My DPS was much poorer going into Firelands than it is now. The difference was pretty dramatic, and while I'm hardly blowing ahead to the top of the charts, DPS is solid again. Basically, what's controlling my DPS (again) is encounter design (again).
• Be prepared to use your utility abilities. Rallying Cry. Remember it? You'd better, because it's a raid-wide cooldown that you're definitely going to be using on Majordomo Staghelm. Speaking of Majordomo, if you have Seeds on you and you blow up the raid, it's because you forgot you have one of the best abilities in the game to get out to range in time and then some of the best abilities in the game to get back in.
• Blizzard needs to very quickly create and implement a set of non-tier DPS plate shoulders. Look at me -- I'm still wearing ZA shoulders. I am knee-deep in Firelands every week. I've killed Domo several times now. Why won't you give me shoulders? There is absolutely no option for plate DPS save tier, although there are several pairs of tanking shoulders. This is bloody insane, and it needs to be addressed. Firelands or the valor point vendors need more loot, guys.

So let's discuss the Firelands from a DPS warrior perspective.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

All right. With patch 4.2 dropping next week, it's time to discuss it in detail -- at least, what it means for warriors. What changes will it have in store for tanks (almost none) and DPS (less of it) warriors? What will happen to us in PVP (arms and fury warriors will lose burst, prot won't)? Why is our PVP set so ridiculously ugly that it makes me cringe?

We'll start by looking at what Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said about class balance. And specifically about warriors, because that's the column, you see. I could give a rat's hindquarters about the other, lesser classes. Except shamans. If you can't be a warrior, being a shaman is a good backup plan. Why not be both? Go ahead and roll six warriors and a shaman, I'll wait.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Tanking is what we've talked about for the past couple of weeks, so let's switch it back up. DPS warriors come in two varieties, arms and fury, and for the next couple of weeks (depending on if/when patch 4.0.6 comes out), we'll be talking about the talents of each of those DPS trees and what you can use them for. Fury's going first because I despise alphabetical order and all of its works. Do you hear me, alphabet? I do not fear you. Well, except for when I try and spell Cataclysm. I always get the Y and the S flipped around.

With some of the fights in Cataclysm being among the most unfriendly to melee DPS of any expansion, it's important to consider that taking survivability and mobility talents can be just as important for PvE as for PvP. So let's take a look at fury and its talents.

Look, it should come as no surprise that World of Warcraft is king of the hill, head of the list, cream of the crop, at the top of the heap when it comes to MMOs. Whatever Blizzard did, it did it at exactly the right time with the right team and the right IP; it was a perfect storm of something. And it did other game developers a favor in that it's now possible for an MMO to do respectable business, even if the numbers don't quite approach WoW's 12 million concurrent subscribers.

Naturally, though, there are studios that aren't content with having their own subscribers. They want WoW's, too. And that's a pretty tall order. To that end, they reference WoW in their ad campaigns. But what good does name-dropping the world's most popular MMO in your ad campaign even do? Let's take a look.

One of the consequences of the proposed radical changes to rage generation and abilities like Whirlwind and Heroic Strike has been that DPS warriors (especially fury) have been sitting around wondering what their rotation will look like in Cataclysm. So this forum thread is of interest to any warrior who enjoys the fury playstyle. Since we know Whirlwind is going to be an ability you use specifically when AoE is the way to go instead of a free extra DPS on trash ability, and HS isn't going to be an on next ability, warriors will be left left with a lot of space in their rotation to fill. What will fill it?

Ghostcrawler - Re: Cataclysm Fury Rotation

That leaves Fury with Bloodthirst and Slam and Heroic Strike. Heroic Strike will play more of a role since it will require a GCD, but you also may not want to push it every time in low rage scenarios. So we do think Fury will need one more rotational button. The one we are messing with right now is Victory Rush. It feels pretty cool so far, but a lot of things will change with classes over the next several weeks. Not sure yet whether it works better as a proc (like Sudden Death) or something available all the time.

source

I'd personally like to see Victory Rush become a proc like Sudden Death or Bloodsurge Slams: in fact, it wouldn't be hard to simply add VR to both of those abilities, letting it proc either instead of or at the same time as a Sudden Death Execute or Bloodsurge Slam. You'd need to leave it enough time to not end up wasted a lot, but there's potential there.

Ghostcrawler also makes a good point about glyphs and Cataclysm (if you think an ability isn't good because of a glyph or too good because of one, don't assume that glyph will still exist or be in the same form in the future) and again emphasizes the problem with Whirlwind style abilities. While it's good to see them thinking about this, we need more details: how is Bloodsurge going to be affected by losing Heroic Strike spam, for just one concern? Still, I'm hopeful they'll work out the new rotation fairly soon.

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.

Bornakk popped onto the forums late Thursday to confirm that Blizzard is planning to add a +strength version to the Ashen Verdict rings in an upcoming mini-patch. The appearance of the four current rings with patch 3.3 caused a minor furor on the forums, with plate DPS being left out in the cold. While there are +strength DPS rings available elsewhere in Icecrown Citadel, there's no replacement for a reputation ring's valuable proc.

One of the interesting things about the +strength ring's initial absence wasn't its absence per se, but the reason for omitting it. Apparently the Ashen Verdict choices were a reproduction of older reputation-linked quest items (e.g. Violet Eye and Scale of the Sands rings) that allowed only four choices, and Blizzard wasn't able to get past the programming issues to add a fifth option before 3.3 went live. Well, that's going to get fixed in the upcoming mini-patch, which will also see a few other class-related changes. The date of the patch is still anyone's guess, but we'll keep an eye out for you.

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.

This week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors chronicles a turn. After 11 months as fury, Matthew Rossi has changed gears and transitioned his role once more. Sometimes you can go home again.

I've given fury up for dead. Not because it actually is dead. You can do good DPS with it if you have best in slot gear in every slot, which is par for the course with fury, really... I'm sure we'll see some nerfs heading into patch 3.3 to soft reset fury DPS to keep it below everyone else the same way we did going into Ulduar. But for me, it's not even the fact that you have to gear with a spreadsheet and compete with every other physical DPS class for those few drops that actually have the stats you want, it's the fact that when you do this, you get to follow the exact same stultifying rotation we've had since forever. Fury may or may not be fine, but frankly, it's gotten boring.

Bloodsurge can only make up for so much. At least with an Arms spec, while the DPS is slightly less, you get to do fun things. And so my DPS spec is now arms all the way since I have Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader gear to support it, a honking great 2h sword (and so far I'm liking the retooled sword spec) and plenty of things to swing it at. Arms is active. You're constantly using abilities, and while it's ultimately almost as predictable as fury when you get right down to it, it doesn't feel like it is. Between keeping your Rend active (letting it fall off then reapplying it for maximum Overpowers), hitting Sudden Death Executes and Slam in between MS and Overpower feels less like a clunky, hit this key then that key then this key rotation and more like you're weaving in attacks.

This week The Care and Feeding of Warriors finally does that long piece about Armor Penetration. You'll find Matthew Rossi screaming at the moon, caked in his own blood, after plunging into these non-Euclidian mysteries.

I've been threatening to write about it for weeks. Thing is, I'm not too sure who I'm threatening, you or me.

Armor Penetration has been with us in one form or another for quite a while now. There are abilities like Sunder Armor and Expose Armor that lower armor temporarily, of course, and the rogue talent Serrated Blades. My first conscious exposure to the mechanic was the epic weapon Bonereaver's Edge, which dropped off of Ragnaros. Back then, the mechanic was fairly simple. Bonereaver`s Edge would ignore a certain amount of armor with each proc of an on-hit ability, in this case 700 armor. It could stack up to three times, so in a fight that lasted for long enough Bonereaver`s could maintain an effective -2100 armor debuff on a boss that only applied to the person using it.

Effects like this weren`t terribly common in Vanilla WoW. I myself never had a Bonereaver's (Don't cry for me, I did all right on Rag drops if I do constantly brag so myself) and so Armor Pen didn't really impinge on my consciousness. Of course, I was mostly either a tank or an offtank back in the old MC/BWL/AQ/NAXX40 days anyway. Back when you could tank with an arms or fury spec and dinosaurs ruled Un'Goro. (They still do, we just don't go there very often.) So it wasn't until Burning Crusade that I really started to notice ArP.

Back in BC, armor pen didn't have rating yet. Enchants like Executioner read "Permanently enchant a Melee Weapon to occasionally ignore 840 of your enemy's armor. Requires a level 60 or higher item." Gear that had armor pen on it told you how much armor it was going to penetrate. Cataclysm's Edge, for instance, just said "Equip: Your attacks ignore 335 of your opponent's armor." What this meant was, when you collected a whole set of ArP gear, all you had to do was add up how much armor you were ignoring. The plus side of this was, it was very simple to understand. The down side? Well, on bosses or classes with low armor (we're talking those annoying skirt wearers who can take half of your health off in one attack that completely ignores armor, you know the ones) reducing up to, say, 3000 armor at level 70 was pretty dang nasty. So they changed Armor Pen to a rating.

From there, all our troubles began.