Posts with tag warrior-info

Leveling warriors in Mists of Pandaria, 1 to 30

by Matthew Rossi Feb 9th 2013 at 2:00PM

The Care and Feeding of Warriors Leveling in Mists, 1 to 30

There is no need to see a trainer to learn new abilities as you level. Instead, as soon as you gain the appropriate level, they appear in your spellbook, ready to be used.
The talent trees from Cataclysm were removed, and most abilities were either removed or folded into class abilities you simply gain as you level. You now need only choose 1 talent out of three every fifteen levels, starting at level 15.
By level 60, you will have four talents, up to and including one of three AoE damage abilities. Each talent is accessible to any class specialization, meaning that your chosen role doesn't limit you from choosing a talent that sounds interesting to you.
Almost all dungeon quests are accessible via a quest giver inside the dungeon entrance as you zone in, which combines with the Dungeon Finder to make it easier than ever to run dungeons as a means to level your character.

With abilities having been redesigned, leveling provides something useful roughly every 2 to 3 levels between specialization abilities (strikes like Colossus Smash are a specialization ability, accessible only by arms and fury warriors), talents, and class abilities. You get Charge at level 3 now, and once you do, it will open up the real fun of the warrior class. Namely running headlong into things and smashing them.

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Leveling a new warrior, Part 1

by Matthew Rossi Feb 3rd 2013 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Taste for Blood

by Matthew Rossi Jan 26th 2013 at 2:00PM

Ghostcrawler - PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues

Warrior
- For Arms, we are going to try Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death instead of autoattacks. This will make haste slightly worse (which we can fix) but we hope will help make the rotation slightly more compelling, since autoattack procs can feel really random. With Overpower you can anticipate it a little more.
- Likewise, Overpower will cost no rage in Execute range. We agree that saving rage for Overpower and spending it all on Execute don't play well together.
- We haven't made a tuning pass on Arms (or any spec) yet. Don't fret about DPS numbers at this stage.

source

I actually like this change quite a bit. Yes, I am capable of liking things. It's not all whining about haste over here.

What I like about it is that it emphasizes Overpower over autoattacks, which are fairly unimportant for an arms warrior anyway. You hit cap at 7.5%, which is absurdly easy in comparison to fury anyway (which is why no fury warrior bothers to try, leaving hit a fairly pointless DPS statistic... but we've talked about hit and expertise before) so you're going to land those slow hits and generate rage with them... and that's pretty much all they should do, in my opinion. With Mortal Strike and Colossus Smash both so important, giving Overpower more to do is fine by me.

I also absolutely agree with the idea of making Execute completely discount Overpower's rage cost. In fact, I agree with it so strongly that I'm sort of bemused here. Usually I don't wholeheartedly endorse a proposed change.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Never mind about haste

by Matthew Rossi Jan 19th 2013 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The future is soon

by Matthew Rossi Jan 12th 2013 at 6:00PM

So, how about patch 5.2 as of the most recent PTR. Second Wind is currently back up to 3% healing a tick (still lower rage gen), Defensive Stance is nerfed for non-tanks but should remain exactly the same for tank specced warriors, Impending Victory got a mild buff to its healing (up to 15% from its current 10%), Slam is still slightly buffed, Taste for Blood is still completely redesigned (and I will talk about it, having gotten the chance to play around with it some) and frankly kind of weird, but none of these changes are massive ones aside from that Taste for Blood change and its repercussions.

As we discussed before, most of the changes seem aimed either at Vengeance and its scaling, or PvP issues like everyone taking Shockwave for a stun on a 20 second cooldown. The Taste for Blood change is obviously also rooted in PvP, but one of the more interesting consequences of that change is that it makes Heroic Strike even less desirable for arms than it already was. For fury, the Bloodsurge change is clearly aimed at getting us to want to use Wild Strike more and Heroic Strike less since it's more rewarding to pool rage and throw off a couple of HS after a Colossus Smash than it is to wait for a Bloodsurge proc and use a low damage Wild Strike, and squeezing in three of them just doesn't fit the rotation most times.

Still, there are definitely things to talk about with this PTR and warriors. A lot of them aren't implemented yet is the problem.

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Titan's Grip

by Matthew Rossi Jan 5th 2013 at 4:00PM

So far in Mists raiding, TG seems to be on par with SMF for the most part. I've had days where I handily beat the SMF warriors in our raids, and days where they beat me just as easily. I raided with Shockwave instead of my customary Bladestorm/Dragon Roar last night and it worked out fine, but in the end I switched back to Dragon Roar for its being useful both as a single-target and a multi-target ability. In general, I feel fairly confident in saying that fury warriors can raid with either TG or SMF, depending entirely on the combination of personal preference and what drops for you. That being said, four piece tier 14 is pretty much essential for parity as a DPS warrior, and even more so for fury with its desperate need to crit on pretty much every Bloodthirst. Since TG swings on average a full second slower than SMF, it seems exaggerated.

Keep in mind that SMF sims better at present, so all things being equal it might be the best possible choice for a DPS warrior min-maxing obsessively.

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: 2012 ends, 2013 begins

by Matthew Rossi Dec 31st 2012 at 9:00AM

The Care and Feeding of Warriors How 2012 will change 2013

Above you're looking at the consolation prize the game finally handed me for not getting a 1h weapon for testing out Single-Minded Fury. As consolation prizes go, it's a fairly nice one. I enjoy hitting things with it.

While looking over the patch 5.2 notes we saw last week, I got to thinking about the warrior changes, most of which seem aimed either at reducing protection warriors' AP scaling (which I assume must be 10% too good, based on these nerfs, despite my not noticing warriors tearing up the universe as tanks) and several changes rooted entirely in PvP. The Shockwave change will leave it basically unchanged for tanking warriors while making PvP warriors less likely to use it as an every 20 second stun (potentially making Dragon Roar and Bladestorm slightly more competitive in PvP again) and the Taste for Blood change was expected ever since they nerfed the ability to only stack once in PvP.

So I'm not surprised by any of it, save the Slam buff (moving Slam up to 220% weapon damage means to me that there's an expectation that arms DPS is going to drop significantly with the new TfB) but I am contemplative of it all. See, to my mind, the warrior class exists in a state of AC (After Cataclysm) and it will be patch 5.2 that makes the first really significant changes to warriors in the Mists of Pandaria world. So let's take a look at these notes, and see what they tell us.

Filed under: Warrior, News items, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: My dream for haste

by Matthew Rossi Dec 23rd 2012 at 4:00PM

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 really want to like haste. I really really do. The problem is, it just doesn't do as much for us as it would have to for me to like it. What would it have to do? Well, for starters it would have to reduce the cooldown on our rage generation abilities. The fact that no amount of haste affects, as an example, my Mortal Strike or Bloodthirst or Shield Slam cooldown hurts the stat for us. I've tested this by stripping completely naked to ensure I had no haste at all, then putting all of my gear back on and having 6% haste - 2,545 haste rating - and making sure that none of my abilities can be used more often. While haste still does increase our rage generation in Battle or Berserker Stance, by increase how fast our autoattacks are, this is a piddlingly low benefit compared to other plate DPS.

It does even less for us as tanks. Some tanks like paladins and DK's are able to use haste items as tanking gear, because the haste increased their resource generation and thus their active mitigation. But for us, haste does nothing for tanking because we generate no rage from autoattacks when we're in Defensive Stance. There are three plate classes, all three can tank or DPS, and of those three only one of them gets minimal rewards from haste as melee DPS and absolutely nothing from it as a tank.

Filed under: Warrior

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Tanking itemization

by Matthew Rossi Dec 15th 2012 at 6:00PM

The Care and Feeding of Warriors The alternative models of tanking

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.

Still waiting for the extra 1-h weapon to start looking at Single-Minded Fury. But I did start working on my tanking again recently. I went back to September to look at Theck's posts on warrior mitigation statistics and started thinking about how warrior gearing works now. To oversimplify for convenience, the value of our various active mitigation statistics and our passive avoidance statistics varies depending on how you prioritize Shield Block and Shield Barrier. This means, among other things, that you can gear, gem and reforge differently if you intend to be running primarily five man dungeons vs. raids, and that you can even change your tactical outlay of stats based on whether or not you're running 10's vs. 25's to some extent.

Really, what it comes down to is Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier use and the tension between trying to avoid the absolute most incoming damage vs. trying to create the most predictable spread of incoming damage. Theck makes the point that, while spamming Shield Barrier might cause you to take the least amount of damage overall, you're going to end up taking spiky damage. Spiky damage is something healers hate. A healer would much rather you were taking hits that kept you constantly losing about 60% of your health than be in a situation where most of the time you took no damage, but occasionally you took 90% of your health in one hit, especially when those hits could occur back to back.

As a result, while it may be mathematically best to rely on Shield Barrier, it won't work out that way in actual practice because healer mana isn't infinite and they can't just bomb heal you to full if you go down to almost dead in one or two hits. Damage spikes are the enemy, and a balanced use of Shield Block and Barrier will cause your incoming damage to be far more predictable and easier for your healers to cope with.

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Birthday Miscellany

by Matthew Rossi Dec 8th 2012 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Warrior, PvP, Raiding, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: My ludicrous experimentation with offspec tanking

by Matthew Rossi Nov 26th 2012 at 9:00AM

This is not a valid tanking strategy for progression content and you shouldn't do it in any situation where you don't know the other players involved, unless you're simply the only alternative to not moving forward at all. After waiting 20 minutes for another tank to sign on, quite a few healers are quite amenable to arms or fury tanking.
If you do this, you are tanking at a fairly steep disadvantage and are demanding a lot more of your healer. This is not the kind of thing to just spring on a poor person trying to keep the group alive, since your active mitigation in this setup is practically zero. I always made sure to tell people up front what I was doing when I was the tank of last resort, and at 90 I've only done this with groups I knew.
This is something I did purely for fun. Sometimes, we actually get to have fun while playing World of Warcraft. I do not expect Blizzard to itemize for this, nor do I expect them to redesign the warrior class around the idea of this being viable.
It is crazy fun, however.

Offspec tanking is one of those things warriors most often find themselves doing because the tanks are dead. In those situations, you can't really do more than hit taunt, maybe switch to Defensive Stance and pop Die by the Sword to try and stay up as long as possible. If you happen to have a Shield Wall macro that equips a shield for you, you can do that too, but that's basically it. Most warrior players who want to tank will do so by speccing protection. Why wouldn't you? It's a great tanking spec.

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: DPS warrior performance and perception

by Matthew Rossi Nov 17th 2012 at 6:00PM

The Care and Feeding of Warriors DPS discrepancies and the power of situation

Fury is twice as popular as arms for PvE DPS, but both warrior DPS specs combined are less popular than either of the popular rogue specs or any of the really popular DPS specs.
Arms absolutely dominates warrior PvP, and is one of the single most popular specs in PvP at the moment.
Fury's DPS is absolutely middle of the road in 10 and 25 man normal raiding right now, hovering right around the baseline.
Fury sees a sudden shift upwards when going from normal to heroic raiding - Fury is a contender for the top DPS spec in 10's, and practically is the top spec in heroic 25's.

Now, there's a lot that we can't say based on the data we have from these two posts - for starters, which fury, TG or SMF? These also don't tell us what talents in particular these crushingly dominant arms warriors are taking for PvP (if I had to guess, though, based on the Avatar nerf in patch 5.1 I'd go with a Bladestorm/Avatar combo) or what talents fury is using in PvE. Still, there's still a lot to talk about here. What does all of this mean?

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, PvP, Raiding, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Racial abilities and warriors

by Matthew Rossi Nov 11th 2012 at 2:00PM

The game's history shows us that racial abilities have always been a subject of contention. Since warriors are at present the only class that all 13 races can play (pandaren can't be DK's, worgen and goblins can't be monks) we're the only class that has to consider all racials. Some racials are stronger in PvE than PvP, and the inverse is also true. Still others (Arcane Torrent, Stoneform) are fairly good for both. I have over the years race changed between various options, usually for purely aesthetic reasons, but at least twice I became a night elf entirely for the night elf racial Quickness, which is astonishingly good for a tanking warrior.

Now, does that mean you can't tank on anything but a night elf? No, not at all. For one thing, in our active mitigation system, hit and expertise racials are also fairly solid, but more to the point, no racial ability is so good that it must be chosen for any role. This isn't to say that some racials aren't fairly dominant in PvE or PvP, especially the latter - Every Man For Himself is always going to have a high representation among PvPing warriors. It would be foolishness to argue otherwise. My point is don't treat racials as must haves and force yourself to play a human if you'd rather play a gnome, or a forsaken when you want to play a troll.

Let's take a look at all the racials and see where we end up.

Filed under: (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The trouble with Execute

by Matthew Rossi Nov 4th 2012 at 6:00PM

This is not going to be a post where I tell you that warrior DPS is bad. That would be absurd. Arms is performing well and even fury can put out respectable numbers. There are problems with DPS warriors, but the problems aren't the kind that lead to low numbers. The problems are more esoteric. Fury's main problem is how staggering the dual wield miss penalty is now that there's absolutely nothing we can do save stack more hit to try and negate it, but all DPS warriors have the Execute dilemma.

Again, before players of other classes come along and say "What problem? Execute hits like a truck" that is, in fact, the problem. Execute hits like a truck, all right. In fact, Execute hits like a truck full of angry bees that have just seen you crossing the street in your Winnie the Pooh costume. The problem is just how much of a DPS warrior's damage comes from Execute. It can be up to 25% of a warrior's damage, which considering it's only applicable during the last 20% of a boss fight, means that DPS warriors underperform during the learning portion of a fight, and overperform in the part of the boss fight that's at 20% or below.

Now, this has been an issue since early in the Mists of Pandaria beta, with warriors in the beta test constantly bringing this up. The ability was even nerfed once we went live with Mists itself, and yet the problem persists. Why is that? What's the trouble with Execute, and what (if anything) should we see done about it?

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The redundancy of hit and expertise

by Matthew Rossi Oct 28th 2012 at 6:00PM

The problem with hit and expertise as stats in World of Warcraft is fairly simple: they do the same thing in practice, even if not in theory. The more hit you have up to the cap (i.e. the amount of hit needed to hit a skull level mob, which is effectively level 93 in Mists of Pandaria content since we're raiding at level 90) the less likely your attacks are to miss their target. This means that not only will they successfully deal their damage, but you'll properly generate the resources said attack would generate (if any), hold threat (if that's what you're doing) and so on. Similarly, the more expertise you have up to the soft cap (the amount of expertise needed to ensure that an attack from behind a skull level mob will not be dodged) the less likely that your attacks will be dodged, which means they're more likely to successfully deal their damage, generate resources, hold threat and so on.

Expertise' only real difference is that it also reduces the chance your attacks will be parried, at a much higher cost (the parry hard cap being almost twice the dodge soft cap) but, again, that just means that expertise does the same thing as hit twice. Since warriors don't need to worry about ranged attacks for the most part, we can be grateful that at least we don't really need to worry about spell hit caps and factoring both hit and expertise into spell hit chances. Since expertise caps out dodge chance and only then parry chance, it just becomes a very complicated means to determine whether or not your attacks do damage. In the end, while there's plenty of mechanical difference between hit and expertise, they do the same basic thing. The purpose to these stats is to give you something you can cap to add complexity to what would otherwise be a system where people figured out their best stat, then capped it. If crit is a warrior's best DPS stat, she'll stack crit until the cows blow up when she hits them, so by adding stats like hit and expertise you add a level where capping, reaching a certain level of X stat becomes a viable gearing strategy.

The problem is really that hit and expertise, because they do basically the same thing, don't serve us well. This especially becomes true when considering these stats alongside the other stats warriors will be using in their various specs. An arms warrior's relationship to hit and expertise is different from either fury or protection. This becomes even more complicated when considering SMF versus Titan's Grip, or hit/expertise/mastery tanks vs. mastery/dodge/parry tanks.

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

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