Posts with tag guide-to-warriors

I tank a lot. I moved back into tanking around March or so of this year, because a tank was needed, and I know how to tank. I've stayed a tank in Mists of Pandaria so far because the last thing anyone needs is another melee DPS, because I generally like tanking, and because the new tanking system has actually given me something to learn. What have I learned tanking so far? Well, lots of things, actually. Here's a few highlights.

• People will always want to be told what stat to stack. Saying "You should try and balance your mastery, dodge and parry, while keeping hit and expertise reasonable" is possibly the least popular thing you can tell people outside of telling them who to vote for.
• Shield Barrier is a lot easier to use than Shield Block, and especially in five man dungeons where you may not have a lot of rage to throw around on a pull. In a raid, you can usually time your rage acquisition to use Shield Block followed by Shield Barrier to smooth out incoming damage, but in a five man you're often tabbing around, gathering up adds, and in general using Revenge as your main rage acquisition move so you'll end up hitting Barrier for a cheap and easy damage absorb over Block. When I find myself with enough rage to hit Block, I do, but even then I usually follow it with a Barrier as soon as possible.
• I like the Glyph of Unending Rage a lot more than I expected to. Sure, it's a major glyph, but that extra 20 rage can actually come in handy. I like having the ability to bank rage in situations like Feng the Accursed and using it to blunt big damage spikes with a full rage bar Shield Block/Barrier combo.
• One of the biggest changes to tanking has nothing to do with the tank classes at all. The change to healer mana pools fixing them so that healers can't stack up a bigger mana pool means that we have to be more reactive than ever to incoming damage. The active mitigation system cannot be ignored: the more difficult the encounter the more you need to be on the ball with your Block and Barrier use and paying attention to cooldowns and mini-cooldowns like Demoralizing Shout and Demoralizing Banner.

So let's talk about tanking in Mists of Pandaria.

I love scenarios and I just figured out why.

I love scenarios because I can queue up and run them as DPS, and when I do, I end up DPS tanking everything. Whether or not there's a healer, it almost always goes the same way. I queue, get in, wait to make sure everyone else is there, and start charging into things. The damage I take I mitigate with Die by the Sword, the Draenei racial and my ridiculously high parry chance. Finally, after eight years, I can get a sense of what arms tanking would be like and it's glorious. It's exactly what should have happened after Wrath of the Lich King, instead of DK's losing tanking spec versatility, warriors should have gained it. Let's rename protection into juggernaut spec, and all three trees should be able to tank or DPS!

No? Just me? Ah well. At least in scenarios, this is exactly what warriors do. I come in as prot and I wreck faces, I come in arms and I Bladestorm/Sweeping Strikes everything onto me. And I'm having a blast doing it.

Scenarios are perfect content for the warrior just getting used to level 90, finding your feet and trying to decide what role you want to play in instances. They're like danger room practice sessions and you get to be both Colossus and Wolverine, throwing yourself at the mobs. I find them excessively satisfying. For some, though, they might be a little daunting. So we're going to talk about how to approach the scenario as a warrior.

It really struck me when running dungeons with fellows like the Sha of Violence and hunting down the Sha of Hatred in the Townlong Steppes that the warrior class is to the Sha what the Hulk was to Loki in The Avengers. Sure, they're monsters of pure emotion, but we eat emotion. We are rage. Go ahead and fuel that furnace, see where it gets you. In fact, let me tell you where it gets you - it gets you dead and it gets me loot. Or it gets me spirit plate, which is all that seems to drop.

So far we've had a week to explore active mitigation tanking in a leveling setting, so it's time to talk about how the changes to Vengeance and the switch to the new system affect us in leveling content.

We all know this one's going to take a while.

Every expansion brings with it the gear reset - without it, we'd just keep wearing our previous gear, and there'd be little point to running dungeons. Whether you're decked out in Heroic Dragon Soul gear or haven't quite hit level 85 yet, there's going to be a whole new gearing cycle, repeated with every patch. We remember it from the original game, from The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm and we'll soon get to know it again in Mists of Pandaria.

There have been a few changes this time around - the reputation gear has been changed so that there's justice and valor point gear on each faction vendor, for instance. There are no level 90 dungeons, instead going straight to heroics as soon as you hit level 90. Therefore, there's gear you'll collect as you run dungeons, and gear you'll collect when you hit level 90 and start collecting the heroic dungeon versions of that gear. There's also a few epic pieces sprinkled through the dungeons.

This week, we're going to talk about gearing up through dungeon running. Going from 85 through 90, dungeons remain a viable way to get gear to make leveling easier, even though I suspect attempting to level purely through dungeons will be extremely onerous. I wouldn't recommend it. We'll list each dungeon's drops both on normal (for when you're getting to 90) and heroic (once you're there).

Okay, let's talk about some things that are concerning me as far as the future of warriors in Mists of Pandaria. These are things that are bothering me about the design of the class going forward, and I think it's worth discussing them in some detail. These issues are as follows:

1. With warrior tanks relying so much on Revenge, dodge and parry end up working as both avoidance and threat stats, and hit and expertise end up devalued. Of all four tanking classes going into Mists, warriors are the least likely to want hit and expertise at the 7.5% caps. Theck's stat weights indicate that mastery is king for prot, with dodge and parry just behind it, and hit and expertise well below them. Well below them, to the point where in the most recent set of numbers you don't need any.
2. Warrior tanks get nothing at all from haste. So when abilities like Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp get used, warrior threat doesn't go up and neither does warrior resource generation.
3. With stance-switching on a 3 second cooldown, it seems unlikely to me that most DPS warriors are going to switch to Zerk stance except in extremely specific high damage situations. At this point, PvE warriors have two stances, and PvP warriors have two, since I expect both Defensive and Zerker Stance to be the PvP flavors of choice. This depends on how well Battle Stance's rage generation works in PvP.
4. Warrior DPS seems heavily AoE dependent, even with changes to Sweeping Strikes to cut back on Arms' cleave. Warriors have a significantly higher bite when AoEing, until you get into Execute range, and it makes warriors feel weak on any fight where you can't get a significant chunk of Executes off.

None of this means the class is broken or unplayable. The rage redesign, stance redesign and tanking redesign are all complex, and having multiple such changes occur at the same time invariably leads to issues.

It's hard for me to write about protection right now, because it still doesn't feel finalized to me. I've been tanking on the side lately, since raiding is on hiatus until Mists, and I have mixed feelings about it. The thing is, I don't think it's because the current state of protection is bad, so much as I'm spoiled a bit.

See, here's part of my problem in terms of being fair to patch 5.0.4 for protection. The protection warrior talent specialization was the best designed talent specialization in Wrath of the Lich King, and it was the best designed talent specialization in Cataclysm as well. And it was better in Cataclysm than it was in Wrath. In short, not only was protection the best spec in the game for four years (2008 to 2012) but it managed to be the best spec in the game without being overpowered, in fact being a better spec than specs that were overpowered. You can keep your paladins, your druids and your DK's, all of whom had their moments of being blatantly too good for this fight or that fight. Warriors were never that. The tanking warrior was the best designed spec because it managed to have tools for every single possible potential tanking situation you could imagine without ever once being considered the only possible option for the job.

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 doesn't want to tame your animal style.

If there had been any way in the world that I believed it possible that ye olde editors would have let me name this post "Shooting at the walls of heartache," that's exactly what it would have been called. However, since this is week four of our 101 guides to Mists of Pandaria for warriors, I felt constrained by the already established naming convention. Nevertheless, what is true is true, and heart to heart you'll win, if you survive. Bang bang.

Anyway, I really have to stop referencing that song and give you an article about arms in Mists.

Arms is one of two DPS specs the warrior class will have available in Mists of Pandaria, and it's a storied specialization with a lot of history. The arms spec was the premier PvP and PvE spec in vanilla World of Warcraft. It was not only the most-played spec for PvP, it was the most-played spec for both DPSing in raids and for tanking. The 31/5/15 arms/fury/protection spec ruled the class.

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 covered fury; this week, we're moving to protection. Before I do, yes, I saw the most recent beta patches. This is what we have to expect and to some degree endure from the beta, continuous patch cycles that can follow hard upon each other. All we can do is wait for release, ultimately, and see where we stand then. The Vengeance changes will have an effect on several abilities including our scaling ones like Shield Barrier, but that doesn't really change their intended use, which is what this post will be covering.

Protection is the warrior tanking spec. Of the three warrior specs, it's the most "ready to go" spec in terms of how it feels to play on the beta right now, and I suspect it will launch with patch 5.0.4 feeling pretty good to most warrior tanks. It's not completely unchanged -- far from it, in fact, as rage for protection warriors has been fundamentally altered and new abilities have been introduced -- but warrior tanks in Mists of Pandaria will still be charging in combat, still using Heroic Leap to drop a huge burst of threat on certain pulls, still pinballing with Intervene and still slapping bleeds on multiple targets with their AoE. Some of it will even be easier now.

A lot of the stuff that's changed is under the hood change, stuff that will affect the game fundamentally but not in immediately obvious ways.

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 was intending to write Protection 101 this week, but with the only major changes for warriors being the change to Vengeance and Shield Barrier, I decided to give myself time to digest those and to move on to DPS warriors. This week, we'll be discussing fury, a spec that's seen some interesting changes with the new talent system, the incorporation of both Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury into baseline, and the reworking of rage and stances.

When I wrote the original Fury 101 post back in Wrath, I summed up fury fairly succinctly. That much, at least, is still the case. Fury is the spec that fills both hands with a weapon and smashes those weapons into things as many times as possible. There are no pets, no magical abilities, no fancy tricks. Fury is still the "DIE DIE DIE DIE" 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.

For the next few weeks, I am going to break down warriors in Mists of Pandaria for you. This will be an absolutely basic article, covering stat caps, basic rotations, and how the new talent system works. It's aimed to be accessible for the new player but still useful for long-term players. In following weeks, we'll cover tanking and DPS specs in more detail, but this post is intended for general use. As a result, it will touch upon offensive and defensive stats as well as talents.

The warrior has seen a lot of change, yet that change doesn't alter the class by adding a new resource system. We still use rage. We just generate it differently now. A lot of work has done into the new rage system, as well as changing our abilities and making a lot of former talents baseline abilities. This week, we'll cover what you need to know to start playing a warrior or take up playing one again in Mists of Pandaria.

One thing that absolutely needs to be said, though. Warriors are still the class that hits things and yells at them. We still don't use poison, divine magic, arcane magic, nature magic, the elements or the shadow. We hit things, yell at them, sometimes drop a banner on or near them. We have remained the most brutish of the brute force, the screaming, bellowing, weapon against shield-pounding, two-weapon-whirling, single-weapon-mastering, metal-wearing maniacs of World of Warcraft. And long, long may it remain so.

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.

And thus ends the Cataclysm postmortem series with a look at fury. Finally, we get a breather from Mists of Pandaria news and get a chance to look back at fury over this expansion. While summing up a whole expansion is pretty difficult, it's why they let me out of the box and at the keyboard for a few thousand words before tricking me back into it with a banana and a dart. So my thoughts on fury over this expansion, in easily digestible bullet points:

• SMF fury surprised us by being very competitive, even sometimes better than Titan's Grip fury, in the first tier of raiding and the heroics that launched with it. This was before the mastery nerf, so SMF could get enough mastery to make Raging Blow worth hitting, while its Bloodsurge slams still hit like angry, angry trucks driven by swarms of bees that mistook you for a bear. Trust me, that's not fun.
• After the mastery nerf, TG fury climbed ahead, especially once Firelands launched in patch 4.2. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that TG fury was quite firmly ahead of SMF (which never recovered) or arms in Firelands. As you all remember from literally hundreds of screenshots, I was a tauren fury warrior in Firelands, and I freaking loved it.
• Dragon Soul ended the hegemony of fury and moreover, pushed it down below just about every single melee DPS spec. There was nobody doing as poorly as fury. The combination of directly nerfing the spec's break and butter Dual Wield Specialization and indirectly nerfing Deep Wounds by fixing a long-term bug pushed fury under the water and held its head under until people just plain gave up on the spec for progression raiding.

To a degree, it's a shame that fury became no one's choice of specs in heroic DS, because once a fury warrior starts to accumulate that heroic DS gear, a familiar pattern starts to reassert itself. A fury warrior in full heroic DS gear is once again an effective fury warrior. Especially on certain specific fights, fury can actually be very very competitive. So let's talk about fury -- specifically, fury right now at the end of the expansion.

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.

You knew we were going to talk about this again, partially because rage and rage income is, by far, the most important aspect of the warrior class. The majority of warrior balance issues in the past have come from rage income. Whether it be too little rage (as it was in the first few months of The Burning Crusade) or too much rage (as was the argument for fury DPS in ICC at the end of Wrath of the Lich King), we always end up back at the same dance.

Since the post earlier this week announcing that enrage would be changed, we've seen a new beta build where exactly that happened, and Ghostcrawler responded to a post on the forums in greater detail for how the rage design in Mists of Pandaria is intended to go. We're going to talk about both of those things this week in some detail, which is code for "Matt gets all long-winded." Luckily, in this online format, I don't actually have to say all of this stuff -- I just type it out.

So let's look at the changes to Mists's beta build 15882 first. Many of these changes are merely tooltip changes, but a few definitely are more than that. They're the first stages in the change to enrage promised in that earlier post.

People have asked me a few times now what leveling a new warrior from scratch in Mists of Pandaria is going to be like. I decided this week to level a new warrior to 10 in order to get a feel for how it plays out. I deliberately chose a draenei because the draenei and blood elf zones haven't seen a significant revamp since The Burning Crusade, and while I've already leveled a pandaren warrior to 10, I wanted the freshest possible beta build. Also (I admit it), I figured it would be pretty easy to do. I mean, I've leveled how many warriors at this point? I admit I've actually lost track. I went without heirlooms because I wanted to get a feel for what someone new to the game would experience (although I have to be honest, I'm incapable of really forgetting the game to that degree) in terms of speed and ease of understanding.

So here we go. What is Mists of Pandaria like for a new warrior?

And back once more, my friends, into the breach in the Great Wall of Pandaria. The Mists of Pandaria beta has seen another patch, this one with gear and everything. So what do we think of it so far?

Well, they buffed Bladestorm up to being a worthwhile DPS ability again, and that's nice, but otherwise DPS warriors didn't get a lot of change. Prot saw some changes, with a small but incremental increase in rage generation in Defensive Stance and some other adjustments aimed at keeping us in Defensive Stance. Some of these seem more like tooltip changes (and confusing ones, like the change to Charge that removes the cooldown entirely), but I do think it's worth chatting about them, especially the change to defensive stance.

I've scraped together a set of 483 PvP gear for use in BGs and running scenarios and dungeons. One of the things I'm noticing is that since your special attacks only need to be capped to 7.5% hit and since you generate your rage from Bloodthirst primarily, once you get to that 7.5% hit, you might as well stop entirely. With the hit cap so far out of your reach at level 90, while you certainly would like to cap all of your white hits, I think stacking haste is going to end up being a much more sustainable approach for rage generation, especially for fury. Arms can easily cap hit. It's strange to actually want some haste, but that does seem to be where we're going.