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Posts with tag titans-grip

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury report card for Wrath

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid, we're just crazy.

A couple of months back, I had intended to start a series reviewing each of the warrior specs as they are in current endgame. While I freely admit I got distracted by all the shiny bells and whistles of the beta, the time has come to step away from the looming apocalypse and instead look again at the class as it is right now when you log on.

As we established last time, there are no major changes incoming for any of the classes until Cataclysm ships. The way your class plays right now is the way it will play until the pre-expansion patch drops and changes everything.

So how does fury rate overall? It's had its ups and downs ... from top of the DPS in Naxxramas to middling in Ulduar and Trial to (finally) near the top again in ICC (at least if you're in the best possible gear, much of which is still leather). Even if you're in merely solid gear, however, fury can put out a serious hurting. I have yet to be less than No. 1 on the DPS charts on any 5-man I've run since I started collecting my 264/277 DPS set. I'm hardly any great shakes as DPS; it's the nature of the spec and how rage, talents and gear all intersect for the fury warrior. A talented fury warrior (again, I make no claims to be particularly talented) can lead the DPS on any fight halfway friendly to him in ICC.

Wrath saw fury gain and lose on talents -- for example, the change to Rampage (although a late one) that made it a passive crit aura was a very positive talent change -- and ebb and flow with new gear as each raid dropped.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King

Breakfast Topic: How did you start WoW?

Time has passed in this game. People have histories, both personal with each other and in-game with their characters. These histories can be very telling not only about the individual, but about the progression of the game itself. For instance, my first character started out in Northshire in Elwynn Forest killing all the wolves he could get his warrior hands on. Now he's rampaging through the dungeon finder Titan's Gripping everything in existence.

But perhaps more interesting, at least to me, was how I got started in WoW in the first place. I originally began in 2004 by being very excited about EverQuest II, and only picked up WoW as something to try that was a little different. At the time I wasn't very happy with the cartoon like characters of WoW compared to EQII, and I didn't think the gameplay would be as hard core as EQII would be.

How wrong I was.

On that day in November 2004 when I picked up both WoW and EQII I had no idea that in the next five years my interest would shift entirely, and that so much of my time would be taken up by talking about everything Warcraft.

How did you get started in WoW? Are you where you thought you'd be when you first picked up the game?

Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Death to Whirlwind


Well, no, not death. But the synergy between Whirlwind and Titan's Grip is, to my mind, the reason why Titan's Grip was nerfed in the first place. The secret is in Whirlwind's tooltip. For those of you who just hate reading floaty boxes, here's the skinny: "In a whirlwind of steel you attack up to 4 enemies within 8 yards, causing weapon damage from both melee weapons to each enemy."

What's the problem, you're probably thinking, or maybe you're thinking about pennies and kittens, I'm no mind reader. Plus, I'm writing this before you get a chance to read it, so while I'm composing it you're not even thinking about what I'm typing because you won't read it until later and I'm also incapable of prognosticating the future.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Talents

Unspecified Warrior damage buffs in the works


The devs have been promising some buffs to warrior DPS for a while, but there haven't been any specifics. Today is no change. There are "buffs planned" for Arms and Fury, but there are no details announced yet. Ghostcrawler does mention that "there is almost no chance of a Titan's Grip change at any time in the near future," so don't hold your breath about that. My guess would be they're simply tired of making changes to that talent.

The only other piece of new information in the post is that the impending DPS buffs "might come with PvP nerfs," since they're seeing a ton of Warriors in the arena right now. The Juggernaut nerf that went live today might address that some, as well. What do you think Blizzard should do to buff warriors in PvE, without making them (more) overpowered in PvP?

Filed under: Warrior

Phat Loot Phriday: Armageddon


Spellpower maces and wands and bows are cute and all. But sometimes you just want a big sword.

Name: Armageddon (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDigger)
Type: Epic Two-hand Sword
Damage/Speed: 554-831 / 3.40 (203.7 DPS)
Attributes:
  • First, just look at that thing. This is clearly a sword that, when swung in an arcward manner, brings all sorts of death and destruction.
  • +101 Strength, and +108 Stamina, which is (definitely not the first weapon ever, but) the first weapon I've seen that has two triple-digit buffs.

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Filed under: Paladin, Warrior, Items, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Raiding, Phat Loot Phriday, Bosses, Death Knight

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Scarce Change on the PTR


Yesterday saw me still without PTR access, followed by a massive cable outage and some computer problems that kept me offline until very late. Logging onto my Horde server (my alliance server was already dead thanks to it being on east coast time, plus I generally prefer Horde now anyway) I found myself needed to tank an Obsidian Sanctum run, which went fine. Then, I was needed to DPS in Naxx, so I respecced, but mistaken specced fury because I respec on autopilot now. So after the raid I had to respec back to arms. So basically, I dropped 150g to raid yesterday. You could argue that were I not an idiot I could have saved myself 50 gold.

So for that reason alone, even with the big, big nerfs to fury, I want 3.1 to get here.

Let's start the day with a fun quote from Ghostcrawler:

"Fury warriors who think their dps will be too low after this change in PvE are probably comparing themselves to classes or specs with inflated dps who are also being brought down (even after the Deep Wounds fix). If you are worried about the PvP ramifications, I think we can probably agree that a 10% swing in dps is not what is going to determine whether warriors are viable in Arenas or not."

Yeah, we can agree on that. People would have to be taking warriors to arenas in order for us to determine if warriors were viable in arenas or not. Since they are not... I guess lowering warrior DPS bt 10% (as Ghostcrawler has just admitted these changes intend) doesn't really matter. When no one brings your class anyway, it's unimportant if it gets nerfed or not. Good point, GC. Very good point.

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Filed under: Warrior, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, News items, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

WoW Patch 3.1 PTR: Warrior glyph and undocumented changes


We covered the changes (including the undocumented ones) to warriors on the PTR, including the new Titan's Grip 'damage tax' on fury warriors. Yeah, it sucks, I'm not happy about it, but it's probably not going to go away.

The idea of Titan's Grip being too powerful is too entrenched in too many minds, so we basically have to hope that the damage penalty only comes into play while you're actually dual wielding and is not just a flat penalty on all of your abilities while you have the talent, which would make offtanking or tanking five man instances quite painful for fury. We'll see how bad it is. Dropping fury warrior DPS by a full 10% seems pretty extreme and it hurts those warriors doing their absolute best the most (if you're putting out 4.4k DPS now, you're losing 440 DPS with this change). I guess it's a good thing I specced my tauren Arms when I did.

But enough grumbling. What about the changes to glyphs?

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Filed under: Warrior, Patches, Odds and ends, News items, Talents

Ghostcrawler: Okay with Titan's Grip not being an optional talent

One of the founding points in WoW's talent system, or any game's talent system, is to allow players to customize their characters based on their personal preferences. Want to play a healer with your Priest? Great, here's a few dozen holy talents. Your Paladin needs to crit some face off? Retribution is your key.

Within each of these talent trees are many, many choices. And while cookie cutter specs eventually develop, the option is still there to allow for whatever spec or combinations of specs you decide works best for you. The rest of the world be damned, it's your choice.

However there are some exceptions to this. These occur in talents that we all need to play, more or less. Or in more specific terms there are talents that the rest of the tree is designed around. One such talent is Titan's Grip, and according to Ghostcrawler Blizzard is okay with that (for now).

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Talents

The Queue: Punching our way to greatness


Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

Yesterday we were talking about the Bros Before Ho Ho Ho's achievement a bit. Specifically, do you need to be level 77 to get it if you're a Horde player? Most of us thought yes, you do, but stacy (one of our readers) popped in with some pretty creative instructions on how to do it. Check that out, then we'll get on with the Q&A!

Classy asked...

Anyone know a good place to fall to get the "Going Down?" achievement?

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Wrath of the Lich King, Achievements, The Queue

Warrior changes in PTR Patch 3.0.8: Dead parrot edition


Warriors are now the most powerful class in the game. Please delete all other characters and switch to your level 13 Warrior alt you haven't played in three years. Also, please be sure to level bandaging up quickly as 24 other warriors bandaging the main tank is all you'll need to defeat most Wrath raiding content.

Okay, now that I've got that out of my system... let's take a look at the three changes they've made to the Warrior class for PTR Patch 3.0.8.

First and foremost, the one you'll hear around the campfire the most – Titan's Grip has had the hit penalty removed. Completely gone. It is no more. The Titan's Grip hit penalty ceases to be. It is an ex-hit penalty!

'Ello hit penalty? Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call!

/thumps-the-hit-penalty-on-the-counter

Now that's what I call a dead hit penalty.

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Filed under: Warrior, Patches

The Queue: Bloody rare


Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

We had no maintenance today, what a pleasant surprise! Rolling Restart Tuesdays are always a nice breath of fresh air. Or wait, was that what regular maintenance Tuesdays are for? Hmm. I can't keep this 'fresh air' concept straight at all so let's just start on the Q&A.

Etcee
asked...

Can you explain exactly how rare spawns in Northrend work? I've heard multiple theories - from "Every 20 or so hours for spawn," to "Only one rare mob is alive at a time, and the next one doesn't spawn until that one dies," etc.

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Filed under: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, Wrath of the Lich King, The Queue

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Wrath specs for leveling Fury Warriors

And so this week we conclude our leveling specs discussion with talk of fury. When I started this discussion, I mentioned that I was respeccing quite frequently, and that hasn't changed. Since I hit level 80 I have respecced twice a day. Not out of any specific need so much as out of boredom and a desire to play around with different specs, as I tend to try learning by doing as much as possible. I'm also trying to decide which of my characters to level up next, as I have the Death Knight starting at me but also several warrior alts I'd like to roll through Northrend with. I'm interested in seeing the quests from the Horde perspective, and grinding up on a warrior is cake nowadays. Every spec is solid for leveling, with Protection combining good damage and ridiuclously high survivability, arms bringing a nice mix of proc based pain and AoE damage, and fury?

Fury is for killing and killing and killing while the world runs red in ruin around you.

Sorry, but while I am a tank and I love tanking, I've discovered two facts in the past week. I can tank pretty much any five man or group quest in my tanking gear as fury and holy heck I enjoy chopping things heads off. My warrior raided throughout vanilla WoW as a DPS build, switching between fury 2h slam and Arms, and it's been nice to get back to that as a Titan's Grip build. I often don't even tell people I'm fury when they ask me to tank, I just show up in the tanking gear and use a 2h weapon and a shield. What it lacks in AoE tanking capacity (no shockwave, no damage shield) it gains in pretty solid single target threat, thunderclap still hits multiple targets, and with the right talents you can even get some solid threat from Bloodthirst. This week we'll be talking about a fury build that allows for some tanking versatility: it's not a raiding DPS build but is oriented towards letting you grind and tank or offtank when needed. If there's room, we'll then discuss a pure DPS build for five mans and leveling if you have absolutely no desire to tank or offtank.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, How-tos, Odds and ends, Expansions, Leveling, Classes, Talents, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King

Exploitation and the demise of Heroic Leap

There was a time in the beta of Wrath of the Lich King that Warriors everywhere were excited little special snowflakes. They had not one but two, count 'em two, special talents: Heroic Leap and Titan's Grip.

While the dual wielding goodness/badness that is Titan's Grip continues today, Heroic Leap was removed mid-beta with Warriors everywhere screaming and crying. Yours truly shed a tear. I loved leveling through the Howling Fjord and Dragonblight with Heroic Leap at my side. One press of a button and bam – I'd be raining down upon my enemies with my plate shining and dual two-handers blaring.

Its demise has always been speculated upon. Many thought that the skill just provided one too many ways for a warrior to quickly move about the world. Others thought that it was due to it being too over powered in PvP. Still others thought it had to do with exploitation of the terrain.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Wrath of the Lich King

Ask A Beta Tester: AABT's greatest hits, part 2


On to part 2! This series of questions spans August and early September, and we'll keep moving forward this week.

Hoops asked....

How much gold roughly would you get from questing 70-77 (until you unlock the flying mount)? I was wondering if it would it be worth farming money beforehand or would the money from questing be enough.

Elizabeth answers: I'm not 77 yet, so I can't exactly address the question as asked, but I can tell you that I've made about 400g leveling from 70 to 72. That's just from questing, vendoring trash & unneeded greens -- and it includes some stupid deaths, plenty of repair bills(I blame Dalaran for many of them!), and training a couple of professions (35g to train a primary profession to the next skill level and 100g to train a secondary profession to the next skill level).

Allie adds: I finally started keeping track of how I was doing gold-wise while leveling. On the beta I leveled a lot through instance runs because the demand for healers was so high; on the live realms I've leveled mostly through questing. Between 70 and 76 so far (remarkably fast for me but my guild starts raiding next week) I've made somewhere in the region of 2K gold after training, repairs, professions, etc., mostly through questing and keeping my bags as open as possible to sell vendor trash. As Elizabeth observes, that part's key; Northrend vendor trash and greens sell for a LOT.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Expansions, Lore, Leveling, Classes, Making money, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King

Ask a Beta Tester: The past meets the future

We only have one or two days of Ask a Beta Tester left, ladies and gentlemen. Very soon, it will be no more. Who will care about beta questions? We'll have the expansion in our hot little hands! Forget the beta, we'll have the real deal. We've actually had a lot of fun doing this for you guys though, and we're kind of sad to see it go. I like to think you guys have had fun with it, too. You know, beyond drooling over the Wrath screenshots and information.

With that in mind, I'd like to ask all of you a question: Would you like to see something similar to this continue past Wrath's launch? Obviously it wouldn't be about just Wrath's beta, it would be more about the game in general. Leveling, patches, content. Short questions that can be answered in a paragraph or two. I don't know what we'd call it. Ask a Guy Some Stuff has a ring to it, though.
Do you want to see Ask a Something Something in the future?
Yes, I do!8424 (93.9%)
No, I don't!543 (6.1%)

jared.daniels
asked...

I won't be getting the WOTLK expansion for a few days after the launch. What do you suggest I do until I can get the DVD?

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