Posts with tag fury-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors

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 had a week to play around with the Mists of Pandaria beta, I've gone ahead and done some dungeons and played around with specs. This week, I'm going to look at Single-Minded Fury and Titan's Grip fury warriors as they're currently shaping up. Some caveats:

• This is not a damage pass. The beta is not balanced yet, so aside from some general "This feels underpowered" or "This is brokenly good" if I think it warranted, I won't be talking much about DPS or damage.
• Emphasis is on rotation, how the spec feels to play, and how hard or easy rage is to come by. Right now, I'm more interested in discussing how the experience is playing as fury in the beta, not trying to argue for buffs or nerfs when it's simply too soon.
• With the new talent system, there's simply not a cookie-cutter build yet for either. Since all fury warriors can go TG or SMF depending on what weapons they have (both are baseline abilities fury warriors all get) and any warrior can take any one of three talents per talent tier, there's no right or wrong yet.
• While familiar, there's enough changed to make the fury priority system require relearning. It's not alien, to be sure, but the addition of Wild Strike, the removal of Slam, and the changes to rage generation and stances have altered the spec.

So, let's talk about how fury plays out in Mists.

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.

This week, we have statistics and how they will work in Mists of Pandaria to talk about, thanks to our metaphorical friend Dr. Greg Street. (I've never met the man; I can't in good conscience call him my friend, although I have appreciated his work over the years.) These are some big changes to how stats work for every class. I don't write about every class, of course. If you don't wear plate, tank with a shield, and have Bladestorm or Titan's Grip in your talent trees, then someone else is going to have to explain what this all means for you.

One of the really big changes is the change to the Block mechanic. Currently, World of Warcraft operates on a single combat roll system, wherein an attack is made and either succeeds or fails based on factors like dodge, parry, block and outright chance to miss. In Mists, things will be very different.

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.

One of the most important lessons I was forcibly reminded when killing heroic Yor'sahj this week was that dying makes you useless. Even if you can be given a battle res, that's not only lost damage time for you, it's lost damage or healing time for the person bringing you back from the dead. It means that battle res won't be available for a tank as the fight progresses, it's just a big mess. This was further reinforced by our Ultraxion kill. Killing Ultraxion on heroic means not only does everyone need to hit a minimum DPS threshold of about 33k sustained throughout the fight, they need to do this while performing nearly flawlessly on Hour of Twilight and Fading Light.

Having tanked the past couple of weeks, it was a lesson I needed to relearn. DPS players can't rely on being the target of a dedicated healer -- there's usually two or three healers at most in 25 man raids (and less, perhaps just one in 10's) focusing their attention on the raid as a whole. Even if they break the healing up into assignments and don't deviate, there's still several people at any given time needing the healers attention. While they certainly usually do their best, if we don't help them out we're only hindering ourselves. The days of 'meh, they'll heal me through it' are long gone.

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.

I admit I was hoping there would be more changes to warriors to talk about by now. At least so far, the patch 4.3 PTR has been fairly quiet on the warrior front. Sure, fury got a nerf, and a fairly large one. Fury's been the melee spec that's actually done good damage this raid tier, so I knew the writing was on the wall for it. What I didn't expect was the particular blend of buff and nerf that the spec has seen. Meanwhile, arms and protection have not changed at all, and this far into the PTR, I find that kind of baffling.

Nerfing Dual-Wield Specialization to remove the 5% physical damage bonus -- that, I understand. It's an easy Band-Aid to rip off of the spec to flat-out reduce all damage done, and with all physical attack power buffs adding 20% instead of 10% melee AP in 4.3, it's likely we won't really even feel it. What that change does is lower fury's base so that it doesn't scale better than every other melee once the AP changes are in. No, I'm not surprised at all by that, and I wouldn't be surprised if Precision gets a nerf as well to reduce our white damage slightly. While I absolutely do not agree with these changes, believe them justified in any way, or support them, I at least understand them.

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.

Last week, we talked about rage as a DPS and tanking mechanic. This week, we're going to talk more about it as a mechanic, period. What are its defining characteristics?

• Rage is self-generated. There's no predictable rate of return, and even if you geared for rage generation, you're at the mercy of encounter design. (A fight that forces you to break off of your target for any reason is bad for rage generation.)
• Rage never inflates. An ability that costs you 15 rage to use when you learn it will forever cost you 15 rage unless a talent or ability discounts you in some way. Rage also never inflates in terms of how much you have. You will always have a maximum of 100 rage; there is no talent or ability that increases the size of your rage bar. It's 100 forever.
• You can generate rage via specific abilities when it is absolutely necessary. The most common are Battle or Commanding Shout, or perhaps Charge.
• With the exception of white attacks and some special cooldowns (Berserker Rage, Recklessness, Shield Wall, Retaliation, Rallying Cry), almost anything that doesn't generate rage costs rage.
• Damage taken also generates rage, but for most DPS warriors, it's not worth courting death by deliberately taking damage for rage. Tanks make heavy use of this aspect of rage generation, since they take damage anyway.

Rage is alone among all other resource systems in that it starts at zero. While Runic Power also technically starts at zero, unlike a DK, a warrior has no secondary resource system like runes to allow him to still use major abilities in the way DKs can.

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 should talk briefly about two nerfs to warrior DPS in the most recent patch 4.2 PTR. They're not earthshaking in and of themselves, but I would be remiss if I didn't address them.

Warriors

• Recklessness and Deadly Calm can no longer be used at the same time. One cannot be used while the other is active, but using one does not put the other on its full cooldown.

• Talent Specializations
  • Arms
    • Two-Handed Weapon Specialization weapon damage increase has been lowered to 12%, down from 20%.
  • Fury
    • Dual Wield Specialization weapon damage increase has been lowered to 5%, down from 10%.

If I thought warrior DPS was through the roof or overpowered in any way right now, I guess I'd understand these nerfs. It more seems to me like, "Well, we nerfed some other classes ... We might as well nerf them, too -- it's protocol." I'm going to assume it's a change similar to the one we saw when Ulduar went live aimed at keeping warrior scaling from getting out of whack with the higher amounts of hit, crit and mastery that will be available.

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.

This expansion launched on Dec. 7, 2010. That means we're into our sixth month of the expansion now. That makes it a good time to stop and take stock of the expansion so far, what it's meant for PVP and PVE, DPSing and tanking. With patch 4.2 and the Firelands right around the corner, we're on the cusp of some pretty significant changes. New gear (including a whole new tier) will expose the class and its scaling in ways the first tier never can, and new encounters will alter the balance between ranged and melee classes. As a melee class and a tanking class, warriors are always pretty solidly mired in these kinds of changes, for good or for ill.

So let's take a look at where we're coming from this far.

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 decided to wait until after 4.1 goes live (which I expect will be this upcoming week) to discuss arms in both PvE and PvP. Right now, for a short statement to tide you over, I'd say arms is viable in PvE and still strong in PvP. Part of the reason I want to hold off on discussing it is because I spent all week tanking and didn't get a chance to try arms out in raiding. So I feel like it would be disingenuous of me to tell you how awesome arms is in PvE right now when I haven't been arms outside of Tol Barad and Random BGs all week.

(Well, okay, I've been arms on my level 70 alt. But do you care how arms is doing in outdated content? I don't think so. By next week, I should have had a chance to raid as arms after the patch 4.1 changes and should have a much better idea how it's shaking out.)

That leaves us with this week. What do we talk about? Well, since I bend to peer pressure like a willow sapling (an extremely hairy one, but still), we're going to talk about patch 4.1's new heroics and a whole mess of new gear squarely between 346 blues and 359 epics. Yes, we're going to Zul'Gearup. Yes, I made that up. Yes, I'm suitably ashamed.