The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The deaths of the multitude

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.

The changes to arms in patch 5.4 are good if viewed from the lens that the fury warrior DPS model is one that arms should be emulating - namely, more AoE than burst or single target. Quite frankly, when discussing warrior DPS, I think the emphasis on our damage isn't where it should be. Fury does good to very good AoE damage, especially with the right talents, but our single target burst and sustained damage lags far behind other classes. Fury simple doesn't hit as hard, especially not on fights where rage gets interrupted for any reason, and arms adopting the same shotgun blast AoE damage model has problems. Yes, it will bring arms up on the charts. But it could also cement warriors as the trash DPS - bring them to clear to the boss or kill a lot of adds, but if you need someone to put sustained high damage on a single target, you may want to switch them out.

This isn't to say that fury is terrible at single-target. It isn't. It's simply a concern of mine that fury, which underperforms compared to other melee in that regard, should perhaps not be the model for how arms is designed. If the two specs are functionally both concerned with AoE DPS, they come dangerously close to feeling homogenized. But for now, we have to deal with the spec we have, not the spec we might think we would rather have. So what will be happening with arms in patch 5.4?
Looking at the most recent datamined spell changes, and of course keeping in mind that they are datamined, nothing is final yet - we see that arms has several changes aimed at increasing its AoE output. The first is the change to Blood and Thunder. This will buff both protection and arms' AoE DPS by making Thunder Clap hit for 50% more as well as applying Deep Wounds, it's a basic damage buff. But what gets interesting is the change to Seasoned Soldier reducing the rage cost of Thunder Clap by 10, making Thunder Clap a much easier to use part of the rotation. Interestingly, Sweeping Strikes gets a nerf, now hitting additional targets for 75% damage. This indicates that the buff to Blood and Thunder is a concern for balance, and it also indicates that the developers are afraid arms warriors are leaning too heavily on Sweeping Strikes for their AoE.

Then there's Slam. Frankly, the change to Slam that causes all targets in range to take 35% of Slam's damage to its target is unusual. It will encourage warriors to keep thinking of Slam as a rage dump, but frankly when I'm AoEing I usually spend all of my rage on AoE attacks anyway - I'd still rather hit Whirldwind, Sweeping Strikes or Thunder Clap than Slam in an AoE pull. It could be useful in a more 'Boss plus one or two adds' situation, or to reward warriors who just have Slam hardwired into their reflexes or macros now. Now, if it was 50% of that initial hit to all targets, then I'd be impressed. Of course, this also matters because we saw in the patch notes for 5.4 that Slam will do an extra 10% damage to targets afflicted with Colossus Smash - does that increased damage get shared?

It seems clear that there's not just an effort to increase arms AoE damage, but rather to redistribute it - it is in fact possible (though doubtful, to my eyes) that all of these changes will end up canceling each other out. Thunder Clap's 50% increased damage and Slam's 35% damage splash might just make up the loss of 25% from each Sweeping Strikes hit. It comes down to how often are you going to hit Thunder Clap? Are you going to use it rotationally, or just to apply Deep Wounds to your targets? If the latter, if TC damage isn't worth using the ability more freely, then this could end up lowering arms' AoE DPS, which would make them even less likely to be brought along in PvE content already dominated by fury.

This leads me back to my initial concern - do warriors do enough single target? All of this playing with AoE seems like a lot of effort to fix a problem warriors don't really have right now - while it's true that most arms warriors rely heavily on Sweeping Stikes for their AoE, was this a design that required significant rebalancing? Is it purely because the Blood and Thunder change (which affects prot as well, and was clearly intended for prot, since they use Thunder Clap much more rotationally) adds more AoE DPS and a rebalancing was necessary to adjust for it? It seems that this will be a more active design for arms AoE DPS, and if balanced correctly it could lead to increased AoE damage, or at least AoE damage that isn't quite as reliant on hoarding rage for Sweeping Strikes. Being able to hit TC for 10 rage vs. 30 rage for SS, you suddenly have variety in your playstyle.

I do definitely think, while we're making all these changes, we might want to take a look at warrior single target DPS. Especially considering that arms in particular is so rarely represented in PvE content at the moment. As for PvP, these changes won't matter all that much - none of them are as useful for PvP as the Shield Wall/Spell Reflection changes that freed us from the tyranny of macros. Hamstring's 1 second cooldown is aimed at keeping us from just spamming it the second we get into melee range, which means we're going to get kited even more than we already do, making it long past time that charge got better at keeping us in melee range. Then again, it's hardly fun to have to spam Hamstring. Since we're tinkering, why not dump that rage cost? We can't spam it anymore, why keep the rage cost that served to prevent that spamming in the first place? It would be nice if Staggering Shout got a revamp as well, gave us something we sorely need, a reliable way to control ranged once we get in range of them.

Okay, next week, either we'll talk about fury or something else from the PTR. At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: arms-warrior, arms-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, featured, fury-warrior, fury-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, guide-to-warriors, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A snapshot of change

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.

Yeah, we're going to be talking about patch 5.4 again. Honestly, it's hard not to when they keep dropping changes on us. Between all taunts now adding 200% threat for 3 seconds after they're used (a move seemingly aimed at helping with tank swaps), the addition of Riposte, and a whole lot of small changes to damage abilities for protection and arms.

I'll admit, I was ecstatic just to see Shield Wall and Spell Reflection no longer requiring a shield, and frankly I don't really care about players who are saying 'It doesn't make sense to have Shield Wall without a shield' because warriors have needed the survival improvement this gives for years now. It's a minimal change for PvP (since no warrior seriously PvP's without a shield equip macro) but it gives arms and fury warriors in PvE a nice survival ability on a three minute cooldown.

We'll go over the other changes in detail after the break, reproducing the patch notes and working from there. Rygarius - 5.4 PTR Now Live!Warrior

General Blood and Thunder now also increases the damage of Thunder Clap by 50%.Hamstring is no longer on a global cooldown.Riposte is a new passive ability learned at level 76. When the Warrior dodges or parries any attack, they gain 50% of their Parry and Dodge as an additional bonus to Critical Strike for 20 seconds.Shield Wall no longer requires a shield. If the Warrior does not have a shield equipped, it will show a visual of an equipped shield.Spell Reflection no longer requires a shield. If the Warrior does not have a shield equipped, it will show a visual of an equipped shield.Talents Impending Victory now heals the Warrior for 20% of their maximum health at all times (up from 15% on attack and 20% on kills that yield experience or honor).Storm Bolt now also has an off-hand attack for Fury Warriors.Warbringer now roots the target for 4 seconds instead of stunning them for 3 seconds. The 50% reduction to movement speed snare effect for 8 seconds remains unchanged. Glyph of Blitz will now cause Warbringer to root an additional 2 nearby targets.Arms Seasoned Soldier now also reduces the cost of Thunder Clap by 10 Rage.Sweeping Strikes now causes melee attacks to strike an additional nearby target for 75% of the initial damage (up from 50%).Protection Ultimatum now activates from critical hits with Shield Slam instead of a flat 20% chance, and the ability will make the next Heroic Strike or Cleave be a critical hit in addition to costing no Rage.

Well, for starters we can see a few decent buffs for arms in here - the Blood and Thunder change will buff both protection and arms damage, the Seasoned Soldier change will make Thunder Clap cheaper for arms, and the Sweeping Strikes change is just a buff for arms' AoE damage. None of these changes will affect arms as a single target spec, but arms isn't really hurting for single target DPS at the moment, it's AoE where it falls way behind. I'm actually pretty optimistic that these changes will go a good way towards creating some parity for arms without necessarily catapulting it to the top of the warrior DPS the way the nerfs to fury after Firelands put arms as the number one DPS spec in Dragon Soul.

Fury actually has to make a hard decision now in terms of its final tier of talents - get Bloodbath and spread that DPS around (for heavy AoE fights, Bloodbath will still be the winner) or get Storm Bolt and smash some single target face in? That second Storm Bolt offhand attack will make the talent very compelling for any fight where you're expecting to do the majority of your damage to one target. Fights like Durumu or Megaera, unless you're padding the meters with pointless cleave/AoE (I've found it pretty easy to hit two heads for most of the fight) you'll want Storm Bolt. Some fights, like Ji-Kun heroic or Lei-Shen, will make this a really difficult decision. It's nice to have as much AoE damage as possible for certain moments like Ball Lightning, but it's also nice do do as much single target as possible. We'll see how it shakes out.

The changes to Shield Wall and Spell Reflection are huge and yet, not mechanically very big, and they won't affect protection at all. I don't expect them to last into the next expansion - I'm willing to believe that we'll end up seeing a shield slot for warriors and paladins that will be used to equip our shields for abilities like this. It'll probably be balanced so that we don't get any stats from the shield when not using it to tank, in order to prevent it from becoming a new relic/ranged slot and cause other classes to get upset about our getting extra stats. What's really great about this change for a DPS or PvP warrior is you won't even need to have a shield and you won't need a shield equip macro just to have some extra survival.

The change to Hamstring is a PvP one, a band aid put on a sucking chest wound. Warriors are ludicrously kitable, overly dependent on abilities like Charge and Heroic Leap that are immediately countered and escaped from, and spamming Hamstring isn't going to fix that. Neither is being able to hit Shield Wall/Spell Refection without a macro. Even the Warbringer change won't really help very much - if anything, losing the stun means that your rooted target will have more time to use a root breaker or teleport and get away. Maybe if Staggering Shout just rooted without needing the snare applied, or if Hamstring could have a chance to proc a root, but these are still just trying to fix a fundamental weakness of the class now that its burst has been gutted. Yes, Virginia, warriors do need the same ability to deal ludicrous burst in PvP that ranged classes get. Without it, the only other alternative is to significantly improve our uptime or our survival, neither of which has happened yet.

Okay, we've discussed DPS specs, now it's time to talk protection - however, most of these changes will affect protection's DPS. Riposte isn't going to directly increase protection's survival, protection isn't getting any benefit from the Shield Wall or Spell Reflection changes (they're already using a shield) and the Impending Victory change is okay but not enough to really seriously alter tank survival. No, what we're looking at is a new ability, a reworked Ultimatum, and a buff to Blood and Thunder that will all add to DPS in one way or another. Looking at Riposte, every time a warrior dodges or parries he'll get 50% of those two stats as a buff to crit. Now, in my mix of gear from the previous tier of raiding, ToT LFR and ToT normal, I'm at about 12% dodge and 16% parry (I'm set up for hit/expertise) so that's roughly 14% crit for 20 seconds every time I dodge or parry an attack, and I'll probably dodge or parry at least once in the time before that falls off, so it's basically a free 14% crit in gear that's not even set up for dodge or parry. It wouldn't be hard to reforge my gear for more dodge and parry, especially as I go forward and get better overall gear (right now, I have almost fully capped expertise and I'm close to capping specials on hit). It seems reasonable to assume that by the time patch 5.4 drops I could easily have 15% dodge and 20% parry if I chose, giving me 17.5% crit.

With the change to Ultimatum, it may actually proc less (since it will only proc from crits, while may be lower than 30% even with the new Riposte - right now, looking at my tank gear, even if I pushed dodge and parry to very high levels it would still be closer to 25% crit with Riposte. But the change that guarantees that next Heroic Strike or Cleave will crit will mean extra damage, and it means that Ultimatum will scale with gear, increasing your chance to proc a free guaranteed crit HS or Cleave as your gear improves. Meanwhile, the buff to Blood and Thunder increasing Thunder Clap damage to 50% is nice by itself, but with Devastate and Shield Slam also proccing enrage, as physical damage those Thunder Claps will have a chance to be buffed by Enrage. This means you're looking at a potential 60% increased Thunder Clap damage, not just 50%, and every little bit counts. The synergy of Riposte buffing protection's crit chance, Shield Slam and Devastate crits proccing Enrage and Enrage buffing Thunder Clap's already buffed damage will potentially have the most effect on tanking DPS, especially AoE DPS, for warrior tanks. Free rage Cleaves that are automatic crits thanks to Ultimatum won't hurt AoE DPS either.

Overall, I'm optimistic now. I don't think the Warbringer or Hamstring changes will do enough for us in PvP, although fury might see some popularity due to the buff to Storm Bolt there. For PvE survival, DPS warriors will have some new tools, and that's solid, but I'd still like to see a bit more than just 40% less damage - we need a survival cooldown that lets us avoid some of the ridiculousness in raiding and keep our uptime intact. But overall these are positive changes. At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: featured, guide-to-warriors, patch-5.4, Patch-5.4-ptr, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Diving into Patch 5.4's PTR

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.

Okay, so let's look at what we're getting as of the most recent Patch 5.4 PTR build. What stands out? Patch 5.4 PTR Patch notesWarrior

General Enrage now also triggers on critical hits from Devastate and Shield Slam.Shattering Throw no longer costs rage.Talents Enraged Regeneration now instantly heals the warrior for 10% of their total health (up from 5%), and an additional 10% over 5 seconds (up from 5%).Vigilance no longer transfers damage to the Warrior. The talent now reduces amount of damage the target takes by 30% for 12 seconds.Arms Slam now does an additional 10% damage to targets affected by the warrior's Colossus Smash.Fury Titan's Grip now works with polearms.

There are actually some other changes if you log onto the PTR itself that aren't in the notes: Bladestorm is down to a 1 minute cooldown on the PTR, for instance. I like to call this the Christmas in Pandaria. In fact, if you look at these spell changes on Wowhead, you'll see that a lot of spells got buffed - Storm Bolt's damage got increased, Impending Victory's heal got doubled to 30%. So now that we've looked at the changes, what do they mean?
Well, the change to Enrage is clearly aimed at getting Protection Warriors to become enraged more often, thus increasing their damage dealt by 10% for 6 seconds. It will make hitting Devastate feel more valuable, and since it costs no rage and has no cooldown, this means warriors can lean on it when they want to get enraged. It also means warriors might consider taking crit gear with hit or expertise for their tanking sets, since the 10 rage when you enter an enrage state is able to be directly converted to Shield Block or Barrier. In essence, crit becomes active mitigation by filling up that rage bar.

Now, this isn't going to magically fix warrior DPS when tanking - it'll still probably be lower than other tanks. If it makes crit that good for prot that we start stacking it, we may see significant damage increases, but I don't expect that to happen. It is interesting that this change, while doing nothing for haste, gives warriors a DPS offstat in the same way that paladin and DK tanks use haste on their gear.

I'd still like to see some damage buffs, of course. But it's a positive step in the right direction.

The changes to Enraged Regeneration (which are in the patch notes), Impending Victory (which are not, but which are currently live on the PTR) and Vigilance all seem aimed at buffing talents that are less popular and also, potentially, helping a bit with warrior fragility. DPS warriors are current very susceptible to dying compared to other classes, and while I don't think these changes will really fix that (for one thing, neither change will let a warrior cheat the way other classes can and do and avoid things entirely) they are positive changes that also have the side effect of making these talents more competitive. I've played with Enraged Regeneration on the PTR, and popped while you're enraged it can heal a good sized chunk of damage.

The problem with the changes to these talents is that it doesn't really address why players don't choose them, except in the case of Vigilance which is now a very strong talent for a tank. (The refreshes on taunt can be a godsend.) Then again, even with taking the damage it's a strong talent for a tank, it's just better in 5.4. If you didn't like Enraged Regeneration, it was probably less about the size of the heal (although it was certainly weak) than it was about it being a button you have to press - combined with it basically being a heal and a heal over time when many other classes have abilities that just plain prevent damage or debuffs from even being applied, and I'm not sure that the status quo will change. I tend to take ER as a tank because I like having a dependable cooldown.

Shattering Throw not costing rage is nice, but considering it still has a cast time, it's still going to be annoying to use. Just go the rest of the way and remove that cast, make it an instant. The cooldown will be enough to keep it under control.

Slam being changed is clearly an attempt to prop up Arms' damage. It'll take more than that. Bladestorm with a 1 minute cooldown is lovely for AoE fights, but it won't make warriors take the talent unless they can depend on getting to AoE stuff at least once a minute. Storm Bolt is going to hit bosses/unstunnable mobs like a truck made up of smaller yet angrier trucks, but will that make you take it over Avatar or Bloodbath? Personally, getting to synch my Bloodbath and Bladestorm every single minute seems pretty compelling to me.

Finally, the purely cosmetic change I have longed for, Titan's Grip now works with polearms. It looks a little weird in action still (I assume that will get ironed out) but it's nice to finally get to use Bo-Ris in my main hand. I seriously hope that this leads to the design and itemization of more polearms for warriors (and those other strength classes we don't talk about here) - at least now there's no reason not to do it.

My take on the 5.4 changes (except for TG with polearms) is That's a good start, but more is needed. Protection warriors need more baseline damage, not just more enrages. Getting some use out of crit in the same way other warriors do is nice, but until I get a chance to really see the change to Devastate and Shield Slam proccing Enrage in action, I won't know how much more DPS warrior tanks get out of it. And while I like seeing the survival talents get buffed, I feel like they need more oomph before they'll become compelling. But I'm definitely happy with what I see so far - more warrior tank damage and more survivability are moves to address our current problems. At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: featured, guide-to-warriors, patch-5.4, patch-5.4-PTR, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Speculative solutions

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 the past few weeks I've talked about warrior survivability concerns and our problems with itemization and that's got me thinking: what are the solutions? Now, I'm not a dev nor even playing one on TV, I'm basically just a fan of the game, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about these things. It's easy to complain about issues, after all, but harder to discuss meaningful solutions. So I've decided to do just that, since the comments alone are usually worth the price of admission in cases like that.

The main concerns I'll be discussing are as follows: DPS warrior survivability in PvEThe rapid decline of Arms warriors in PvP (Cynwise's recent class distribution numbers went a lot more in depth than my own class rep post, and it's convinced me the warrior decline in PvP is more meaningful than I first thought)Warrior tanking issues (haste, overall DPS, our lack of 'cheese')So what could we see that would help with these issues? What changes would be effective without being too effective?
Universal Haste

Haste needs to be better. Granted, we're always going to stack whatever the best stat is for us (crit), but I'm not as concerned for haste as a DPS warrior stat - we're doing okay right now. We're certainly not destroying the charts, but we're competitive enough. Haste's complete uselessness for protection warriors combines with our general lack of oomph to put us way, way down at the bottom of tank DPS, and it's one of the issues that's hurting warrior tanks. Right now, if a guild has a warrior tanking, it's often because that warrior has been tanking for a long while and knows the role. Since we know that fury warriors are extremely popular in PvE right now, the fact that warriors are behind the curve in class representation in PvE comes down to their other two specs. Arms warriors are so vanishingly rare in PvE that the fact that my raid has one comes down to the fact that we have four raiding DPS warriors and are therefore a massive outlier. (And since I'm raiding as TG right now, I'm not that fourth arms warrior anymore.)

So why does prot lag behind, and what can we do about it? Well, for starters we could make warrior DPS while tanking scale more with our stats. Hit and expertise work fine, but haste (which pops up a lot on otherwise suitable mastery/hit/expertise gear) does basically nothing for us. It doesn't lower our GCD, it doesn't increase our damage in any meaningful way, and it doesn't increase our rage generation. Since rage generation only counts for DPS if we're using Heroic Strike or Cleave, and is far more commonly used for Shield Block/Barrier, I don't think more rage is going to fix warrior DPS issues.

So what will? For starters, letting haste do something for our DPS. It would be nice if haste could lower the cooldowns on warrior tanking abilities like Thunder Clap or our big three AoE abilities (especially Shockwave, which is probably still the favorite for tanking) - getting TC down to a four second CD with haste or Shockwave down to 30 seconds (15 if hitting 3 or more targets) would go a long way towards making haste a useful stat for prot as well as increasing our overall damage. It wouldn't be the only fix needed for protection warrior DPS, but it would be a nice bump.

The bare fact of the matter is, warrior tanks just plain need more damage. Pretty much every single ability except Shield Slam needs a significant boost to their baseline and their attack power coefficient. Devastate, Revenge, Thunder Clap, they could all use buffs. Another thing that could happen would be to make Heroic Strike and Cleave less punitive for warrior tanks. If we could hit Cleave on trash packs without costing ourselves rage for a Block or Barrier, we'd be more likely to do it, and I think the way here is a class ability that gives Devastate a chance at a free Cleave or HS. Perhaps something similar to how Wild Strike works, where you get a chance at a lowered GCD, and your next two or three Cleaves or Heroic Strikes either cost no rage, or even generate a little rage. It would definitely help warrior tanks put out more damage if these abilities didn't force as much of a tradeoff as they currently do.

Of course, I'd like it if haste increased how much rage you generate in Defensive Stance if you're prot spec. But I can't see that happening.

Finally, I think prot spec needs to get some damage out of its mastery. Making it so Critical Block added a percentage of damage to your Shield Slam would be a nice way to make Mastery do more for warrior tanks. And if haste then allowed you to Shield Slam more by lowering its cooldown, the two would have some nice synergy. Yes, I know Heavy Repercussions adds damage to your Shield Slam when Shield Block is active, and I like the glyph, but I think that we've moved past the design that has glyphs that increase your damage. Just bake HR into the class, give us a fun cosmetic glyph that makes Thor or Odin appear over your head screaming Viking war oaths when you Shield Slam, and then let haste and mastery buff the attack more. It's not like warriors are one shotting people in PvP as prot.

How Not To Die

So, now that we've taken a shot at buffing protection, how do we get DPS warriors to not die? One of the ways that comes to mind is the concept of negative health.

This isn't an immunity, exactly. Imagine an ability that, when activated, allowed your warrior to go below 0 health. As long as the ability is up (say 20 seconds) they can drop to a certain threshold (say -35% of max health) and they won't die until either the ability ends or they hit that threshold. As soon as one of those two things happens, they keel over dead unless they're back up to above 0 health. So suppose you're in a raid and you know an attack is about to go off that automatically reduces you to 0 health. You trigger Nope Not Gonna Die Now and the ability goes off. Now you're at 0 health. You don't die. You take another 20,000 damage. You still don't die. All the healers are dead and you didn't take Second Wind, so you don't get healed. At the end of the 20 seconds, Nope Not Gonna Die Now expires and you keel over dead.

It's not an immunity - you still take the damage. it's not a self-heal - as soon as it runs out, you die without a heal. It doesn't make you unkillable - there's a specific threshold of death you can be pushed below. It's similar to Last Stand, which gives you more health, but it has a specific condition that would make it useful against abilities that would otherwise guarantee a kill. (Any ability that does, say, 100% of your health wouldn't kill you, since you can take up to 135% of your health before you die in this scenario.) And it fits the warrior style - it's you taking a beating and just being too blasted ornery to keel over, even though on paper you're not just dead, you're really dead. 35% might be too low for this kind of ability, or it might be too much. It would certainly make people wail in PvP.

Frankly, considering how much warrior representation see-saws in PvP, maybe that would be a good thing. We've tried the burst damage rodeo for four expansions now, and it just leads to the same cycle - warriors get buffed, everyone moans and cries, warriors get nerfed. Perhaps instead of two shotting people, warriors need to be almost impossible to kill. Making it an ability means it would have a cooldown, meaning you'd save it for specific moments and it could be countered by forcing you to use it early, but it's something.

However, now we move on to my favorite part of these kinds of columns: you. What do you think warriors need? What abilities would you like to see? What would address our tanking DPS woes or properly buff our survival, or just plain is something you've always wanted warriors to have? Diablo III style mighty weapons for TG warriors? A rhino mount in Onslaught for our class mount and why have none of you made me one of those yet? At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: arms-warrior, arms-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, DPS-Warriors, featured, fury-warrior, fury-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, guide-to-warriors, protection-warrior, protection-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Itemization Concerns

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 the title is a fancy way for me to say I want to talk about a bunch of stuff, all related to warriors without dedicating the entire column to one of the topics. These things I want to discuss include: The ridiculous dependence on crit to the exclusion of pretty much all other DPS stats for fury.Warrior tank threat/DPS and how it holds back the class.The ridiculous amount of hit on Throne of Thunder gear.Why I'm still annoyed that haste does nothing for protection warriors.I know I've been flogging that haste for protection horse for a while, but it just irks me to see two of the plate classes getting solid use out of haste/expertise or haste/mastery gear for their tank sets and we get nothing. Considering point #2 for warrior tanks (namely, that our DPS and thus threat is just way behind the other tanks) I find it absolutely maddening to see haste be so completely useless for protection warriors. It doesn't give us resources at all, due to the way rage regenerates in Defensive Stance - it doesn't even help us with our rage generators like Shield Slam and Revenge because haste does nothing for our GCD. I took a pair of haste legs for my tank set recently (they were still a huge upgrade, that's how bad my old tank legs were) and every time I look at that haste on them, and know I can't reforge all of it away, I get this lump in my gut where the snarky itemization elitist in me says haste? Really?

I hate that guy. I hate him even more because I know he's right. Haste has no business on my tanking gear because haste does nothing for a warrior tank. Nothing. We don't even generate rage from our autoattacks, so the miniscule increase in attack speed doesn't even avail us.
Part of the reason this bothers me so much is because, frankly, protection warriors could use the help. Throne of Thunder is showing that while prot warriors can tank a boss just fine (although we lack broken immunity abilities that allow a certain tanking class to cheese encounters meant to be tank swapped and single tank the whole thing) we're suffering on certain fights. Encounters like heroic Horridon or Tortos really task a prot warrior's ability to generate snap AoE threat, especially when Vengeance isn't up to full yet. I'm not sure if we just lack the oomph of other classes for some reason, if our itemization is just too limited, if we're wearing more dodge/parry than other tanks, or a combination of the above, but it can be really noticeable on some fights.

In general itemization or how we interact with itemization seems to be a real issue for us this raid tier. While I can't say it doesn't work, our design as DPS is so ridiculously crit-intensive that it feels like we're just stacking crit as mindlessly as we once stacked Armor Penetration, and it's diluting Recklessness. Let's take a quick look at some hypothetical situations. Assume for a moment that you're a fury warrior with 25% crit unbuffed. (If you're raiding normal ToT, or even running ToT raid finder, you probably have significantly more, but for ease of discussion.) This means that your Bloodthirsts have a 50% chance to proc an enrage before any raid buffs are taken into account.

Now, consider Recklessness, which unglyphed adds 30% chance to crit to your special attacks for 12 seconds every three minutes. So far, so good. It doesn't increase your overall damage, but it means your Raging Blow, Wild Strike and Colossus Smash will all have an extra 30% chance to crit... and it means your Bloodthirsts will get an extra 60% chance to crit. Since you can only really have a 100% chance for a critical hit, this means that 10% of that Recklessness crit chance is wasted in terms of proccing an enrage. But that's only with a 25% unbuffed crit chance. What if you have a 30% or higher chance to crit (easily attainable in full normal mode ToT gear)? Well, then you're looking at even more wasted Reck. Even with the glyph (which I use) I'm looking at 104% chance to crit when I hit BT, and this means that as warriors keep stacking crit, Recklessness is going to feel less and less relevant. It's less a big cooldown that you feel awesome pressing and more something you macro into your abilities and forget because all it does is heap more crit on the crit pile, and worse, it only really matters for specials anyway.

This leads me into the next part of my complaint, namely, how much hit there is on ToT gear.
Frankly, after dumping my hit mainhand and swapping out a cloak with hit for one with crit last night, and reforging/regemming as far away from hit as I could get, I'm sitting at 9.6% hit right now. That's 2.1% over the special attack hit cap. Now, it's not necessarily the case that hit is hurting my DPS - more white hits means more rage, after all - but we all know that once you cap your specials, hit drops in its contribution to your DPS below crit, below strength, below mastery and below haste, which is saying something. Hit to 26% is still prohibitively expensive, so we're left in a weird netherworld where we're not able to actually cap white hits even if we wanted to, but we're forced to walk around with up to 12% hit if we get unlucky on drops. Dual wielding two Zerat or Shellsplitter Greataxes can leave you absolutely swollen with hit rating.

Granted, I'm not sure what the solution is. Lower the hit cap for complete white hit coverate? Probably not feasible at this point, although it's worth considering for the future - while I understand that leaving that cap too low risks hitting a point where hit/expertise become useless on gear, the current situation just has them feeling like chores, and since warrior itemization absolutely rewards crit stacking over everything else, everything (even hit and expertise) just feels bad in comparison. Mastery is our #3 behind crit and strength (for fury, it's below haste for arms) but even that doesn't really feel good, compared to crit.

I'm going to go back to haste again, but this time from a DPS standpoint - we really missed a golden opportunity to make haste good enough that warriors would actually have to do some thinking about what stats we want on our gear when the change in 4.3 was made less exciting. At least for arms, once your crit is around 30% you can stop focusing exclusively on it and start looking at haste, which is not as terrible for arms as it is for fury. I have to admit I actually find the Arms gearing strategy to be more satisfying than fury - strength over even crit, crit to a certain threshold, then haste and mastery, with both hit and expertise capped to 7.5% and then forgotten. Frankly, as I've said before, hit and expertise aren't interesting stats. Either you can completely cap them (arms) in which case you do, or you can completely cap expertise (fury) and you just cap to 7.5% and never try and get more. For arms, this astonishingly high amount of hit on gear is even worse, because unlike fury, they get absolutely nothing for going to 8% hit, much less 9 or 10% which can happen. My arms set-up with Uroe is still around 8.2% hit, I just can't shed any more of it.

In the end, each spec has issues with itemization. I really think how protection gets rage, and how it spends rage, needs to be addressed so that haste is worthwhile and our overall tanking damage goes up... significantly up, in fact. Fury needs to either de-emphasize crit for the good of the spec (a more arms like spread would be nice) and both arms and fury need hit to be less everywhere. At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: arms-warrior, arms-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, critical-strike, critical-strike-rating, expertise, featured, fury-warrior, fury-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, guide-to-warriors, haste, hit, mastery, protection-warrior, protection-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Survival and the modern warrior

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'm not looking for a buff to warrior DPS. Every time I talk about warriors as DPS (and half the time I talk about warriors as tanks) it comes back around to people assuming I want a DPS buff, but I don't. At least, I'm not asking for our damaging abilities to do more damage. What I am asking for is parity in terms of methods to be able to apply that DPS.

Quite frankly, raiding today has lots of methods to prevent a warrior from doing damage. There are mazes to run, debuffs that force you to switch targets, interrupts to hit, and conditions that will instantly kill you if you don't take them into account. To use one example, let's look at Heroic Jin'rokh. Both his Ionization and Lightning Strike force players to move out of optimal position (you don't want to be decursed of Ionization inside the Conductive Water, or you'll blow up the raid) and in the case of Lightning Strike, you'll spend half the phase dancing around. For a warrior, this is DPS death. We have no abilities outside of a couple of throws (one with a cast time) that can do damage at range, and we have no method to remove Ionization or prevent its application. If you're about to mention that not all classes have a means to remove or prevent it, that's true, but of classes in melee several have a means to either remove it or prevent its application in the first place. Warriors meanwhile have to run out of the Conductive Water, lose valuable DPS time and hope that someone decurses them soon so they can get back in. If the debuff is allowed to run its full course and you know it will be, you can stand in the puddle until it's about to drop, but most raids prefer not to risk that, and so warriors get the shaft. This is just one of many such mechanics that penalize us over other classes.

I don't like suggesting stealing from other classes, even as I look at abilities like Cloak of Shadows and Deterrence and wonder why these classes even need so ludicrously powerful an ability that they can just ignore major components of a fight's mechanics while my class has to run away. But then again, I don't really have to suggest stealing, when the ability Spell Reflection exists and has been nigh useless in PvE content since it was introduced. Frankly, the problem is that Spell Reflection doesn't do anything for the majority of boss abilities -- in some few cases it reflects spells (like on Tsulong, it reflects the spell attacks of the sha adds) but in most cases, it does nothing at all and isn't consumed.

Frankly, though, I think it's time for Spell Reflection and Mass Spell Reflection to add a spell immunity effect even if they don't reflect anything. Especially for a class so absolutely dependent on staying in melee (compare warrior ranged damage to any other melee class from rogues to death knights to paladins to shamans, only feral druids have the same issue and even they could shift to caster and dump their mana pool into Wrath if they were forced to stand out of range dodging Lightning Strike) the idea of being completely unable to do anything just rankles, and having so few ways outside of Die by the Sword to stay alive in periods of high damage just makes bringing a warrior less optimal.

Now, of course Spell Reflection is already very powerful in PvP, but I can think of several ways to keep it from getting too powerful with this change -- make it so it only grants an immunity if it can't reflect a spell to a target, for instance -- and there are apparently some spells and spell effects that Spell Reflection provides this sort of immunity for now. To my mind, that just makes it make even more sense to extend the immunity. But it doesn't have to be an immunity, and it doesn't have to be any sort of buff to Spell Reflection so much as it needs to be a buff to warrior survival in some form. Frankly, after several expansion of other classes complaining that their health pools were too low and they took more damage in melee range, we've seen them all buffed to some degree. Some got powerful immunities and damage reduction, overall health was increased, and as a result warriors (who got none of this) are standing there with the same proportional survivability as in 2007, while everyone else's went up. Maelstrom Weapon heals, AMS, Feint, these are just a few of the ways other melee can keep themselves upright. Warriors lost the ability to convert incoming damage into rage (unless we switch stances) but didn't gain any survivability.

Now, I'll admit that Die by the Sword is superior to Evasion. But since we've listed two other abilities that Rogues can use that are far superior in modern raiding, I don't see that as a problem for them, but a problem for us. What abilities do DPS warriors have to stay alive outside of DbtS? Two raid cooldowns that we're usually expected to save until the raid asks for it. In the same tier as Mass Spell Reflection (which I pointed out won't reflect most boss abilities) we have Safeguard and Vigilance, which save other people at our expense. Similarly, our self-healing tier has an ability that only kicks in below 35% and which only heals you to 35%, an ability on a timer that only works well when you're enraged, and an ability you actually have to attack in order to use. They're just not impressive when compared to what other classes can do.

I understand not wanting to weaken warrior identity by making us homogenized with other classes, but in that case some of these abilities need a serious upgrade in terms of their survival potential. Enraged Regeneration's overall 20% healing (when used when you're enraged) is just pitiful in comparison to 50% damage reduction abilities that can be used over and over again, outright immunity, or both in some cases. Of the plate classes, DPSing warriors are the least tanky, bringing us back to the feel of the days when warriors wore leather but without actually wearing leather - we're just squishier than the actual leather classes. It needs to change. At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: arms-warrior, arms-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, featured, fury-warrior, fury-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, guide-to-warriors, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Warrior representation

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 find myself wondering about protection warriors as tanks. Clearly, we're neither the most nor least popular tanks, holding steady in the middle of the pack - both blood DK's and protection paladins absolutely own tank representation. Blood is at 4.2% and prot pallies at 4.1% of total class/spec representation in Throne of Thunder, with prot warriors at 2.7% and guardian druids in about the same spot as brewmaster monks, 2% for guardians and 1.8% for brewmasters.

It's fairly clear that fury warriors, despite being a relatively smaller fraction of total class representation, are by far the most popular warriors in current raiding. Protection is not only second, but a distant second, and arms (despite being a solid 3% of the total player base overall) is vanishingly under-represented in raiding. We'll worry about arms in raids later. For now let's ask why protection warriors aren't being seen in raids. It's not based on class popularity by itself - based on looking over Realmpop for a couple of hours I'd argue that warriors are holding pretty steady at about 9.6% of the total population. (It's a slight drop from the 10.14% we saw last December) World of Wargraphs puts the number at about 9.5%, so either way, there are a lot of warriors. But looking at the Wargraphs data, two things come to mind. First is that arms, the most popular warrior spec at 3.5%, is barely even present in raiding. The second is that protection, the second most popular spec at 3.2% of the total population, is present in raiding at 2.8% of those in Throne of Thunder. This means that protection warriors are tanking the raid at fairly close to what one might expect. So part of the reason there aren't that many warrior tanks compared to blood and retribution is sheer class/spec popularity. There are only so many prot warriors to go around, and they're found in the raid in the same proportion that they're found anywhere else in WoW. Looking at the blood and prot pally numbers, blood DK's are just seriously popular among DK's as a whole (4.2% of raiding vs. 4.3% of the total playerbased) while prot pallies are clearly overrepresented (4.1% of raiding vs. 3.1% of total). So prot warriors are pretty close, if slightly below what we would expect in terms of numbers tanking raids.

With an eye to the recently announced changes to Vengeance for patch 5.4, it's not likely to affect warrior representation. Warriors main issues as tanks are that we can't cheese encounter debuffs and single tank bosses that are meant to be tank swapped and we don't have the AoE burst of DK's and pallies (and for that matter, druids, who are even lower represented) due to the way Thunder Clap and Shockwave work. In part this is due to how absolutely useless haste is for prot warriors, but ultimately it's due to how we scale with attack power as our gear improves. Since warriors get revenge procs from dodges and parries, pure avoidance gear is better for us than it is for DK's and pallies, although it's still not great, and in general we stack less hit and expertise (and far less haste) than any other tank. We're not putting on gear with threat stats the way other tanks do, so we do less DPS, exacerbated by how our abilities work. It's not crippling, it's just a factor. It does mean we're less likely to feel the Vengeance changes as strongly as other tanks do, but make no mistake - if you're currently tanking in a raid you'll definitely feel the very large reduction in attack power from 100% to either 50% or 30% of your current max health.
Frankly, no tank (including warriors) is really having any trouble getting and holding aggro in most situations so its likely the Vengeance change is aimed at runaway tank DPS on some AoE fights. With threat being 5x the damage dealt for tanks, it's not really necessary for tanks to do 400k or more on an AoE pack. I really want to see how this is implemented before I'm willing to go into why I think this could be good for tanks overall, but I am at least not seeing any evidence that the sky is falling for tanks, especially tanking warriors, at this news.

Arms representation in PvE has always been low, especially considering the huge spike in interest in arms PvP at the beginning of the expansion and the subsequent drop (although even now arms commands a very high 7.9% representation in 2200 and above PvP) - arms warriors were nearly 14% of this bracket last December. We've seen no bump for them in raiding, and it seems likely that the roughly 1% drop in the class as a whole came from the ranks of those who rolled warriors to PvP and left as soon as the class wasn't considered overpowered due to the old Taste for Blood and chainable stuns with Charge, Storm Bolt and Shockwave. I myself raided arms and have been easing back into PvPing with it now that I no longer have to for my legendary quest, and it's still possible to spec into a decent amount of stun and retain some burst, but the burst has definitely been toned way, way down, probably too far. Still, can't argue with arms numbers in PvP - they may be lower than they were, but they're still very high = considering that only 3.5% of all players are arms warriors, the idea that almost 8% of 2200 rated players are arms is still arms doing very well.

It's just as clear that fury is the dominant DPS spec for the class, although its not inflated for PvE the way arms is for PvP. It's possible to do solid DPS as arms, so I assume players are still chasing after the advised 'perfect' spec that does the absolute most damage. Without actually sitting down and armory stalking every fury warrior I can't tell what percentage raid SMF vs. TG - while SMF is still superior on paper, I raid TG, and it works out fine (TG has excellent AoE DPS). Looking at the overall class distribution, warriors are literally in the middle of the pack - there are five classes with higher representation and five with lower. Looking at the raiding and PvP numbers, it's easy to work out where these warriors are and why - tanks are tanking at expected rates, fury is almost entirely PvE focused, arms majority PvP.

For now at least, we seem to be healthy, able to tank or DPS or PvP. We'll see what the future brings. At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: arms-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, featured, fury-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, guide-to-warriors, protection-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The future is soon

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.

Ghostcrawler - PTR Class and Set Bonus IssuesWarrior
- A Prot Warrior using 2 pieces of the DPS set will get 1.0 RPPM of the enrage.
- We agree with concerns that the new Arms rotation doesn't involve much rage management. We are considering a small rage cost for Overpower. Arms will likely need some additional retuning of damage because of the changes to Overpower, Taste for Blood and Slam -- we haven't completed tuning yet.
- We made a change to warriors to double the effect of haste for them. This is similar to the shaman Flurry benefit, but is passive and not tied to an ability. We want to make haste a better stat for warriors without it eclipsing stats like crit -- we aren't trying to force every warrior to reforge.
I am going to have to agree that Arms needs new rage management. Granted, rage is always easier on a dummy, but I took the new Taste for Blood out for a spin and frankly, it's hard to fit two Overpowers in-between Mortal Strike, Slam and Colossus Smash procs. You end up with a charge unspent, and Mortal Strike refreshing the new Taste for Blood so you end up stacking available Overpowers. It's not that damage is bad - my dummy DPS varied between 70 to 75k single target, respectable and fairly close to what it is on live - but you end up doing nothing but hammering on the Overpower key between Mortal Strikes and occasionally throwing off a Slam to keep your rage below 100. Now, I'm aware that this is PTR, and moreover that these tests were Patchwerk style dummy tests, not the give and take of an actual raid encounter. But I think it's fair to say that with TfB stacking Overpower charges the way it does, Arms will very quickly find itself sitting on more rage than it can easily use. I ended up throwing some Heroic Strikes out just to bleed down some rage, but even with HS not on the GCD it's still an action in-between MS, CS and Slam that leads you to stacking more TfB charges. Once you get five TfB charges, you pretty much can't get rid of them, and you end up hitting Overpower like a metronome in-between MS and Sudden Death procs. Once that happens, rage sits at 100 indefinitely.
Now, in an actual raid situation you're going to want to use other abilities, especially if trash was involved. I actually think arms would have much freer use of Sweeping Strikes, Whirlwind, and Thunder Clap with the TfB change keeping you from dumping rage normally. Would that be a good thing? Perhaps it would. It would certainly elevate arms damage as compared to fury, which is low right now, especially on adds/trash. I don't know if I want warriors to become the trash clearing class, however.

The news of the Haste change is interesting. (Here's Shaman Flurry so you can see what he's talking about.) What will this mean for warriors? Well, it won't help prot warriors at all because prot doesn't get any rage from white hits, meaning that tanking warriors won't generate rage faster from haste, meaning that they're still going to be the only tank who gets nothing at all from it, unless haste is going to affect the 1 rage every 3 seconds part of Defensive Stance. But for DPS this could be interesting.

I should admit, I don't think this is going to make us want haste - crit simply does too much for us right now for that to happen. What it will do is make us less likely to rend our garments at the plethora of haste trinkets out there for melee, especially for fury warriors who are swinging two weapons around. However, it could conceivably be even better for arms, considering at present all arms warriors are using one big, slow (3.6 almost exclusively) weapon. Even TG fury has that other big slow weapon to swing. So with haste getting double its effect, it could potentially eclipse mastery for arms, especially if we see a rage cost attached to Overpower or some other rage redistribution or damage balancing. If Overpower gets nerfed both in damage and by adding a rage cost, I'd expect to see haste become arms' #2 stat.

Finally, the Bloodsurge change is a nice minor change that isn't going to make fury want to hit Wild Strike much more than they do now. The biggest problem with Bloodsurge is that Wild Strike hits for very little for its normal rage cost, but when it is discounted by Bloodsurge, the three Wild Strikes are hard to fit into the fury rotation. It's not impossible to do it, but it's also not very rewarding when you could just bank rage and throw a Heroic Strike or two after a Colossus Smash. To be fair, part of the problem is that this isn't a very good use of Wild Strike after a Bloodsurge proc - it's much better to throw those three discounted Wild Strikes into any empty space in your rotation than to try and hit them all one after the other. It's just that this is often fairly hard to do in the chaos of mass combat.

Frankly, I think that to make Bloodsurge worth it, they're going to have to redesign Wild Strike. Possibly make it hit much harder, lower the amount of uses to two, and make it free when Bloodsurge is active and prohibitively expensive when it isn't. Heck, maybe just make it not work at all when Bloodsurge isn't active. With Bloodthirst, Raging Blow, and Colossus Smash/HS already in the rotation it's very hard to fit in Wild Strike and it could be made more convenient.

In the end, since we know this is the PTR and we have Ghostcrawler telling us balancing is still in the future, all we can do is wait and see, but the concepts behind the waiting are still very interesting. Can haste be made better? I hope so.

At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: featured, guide-to-warriors, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Titan's Grip

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.

So as I predicted, I did not get a second weapon for SMF. I've decided this is the universe telling me that my fury spec is to forever be Titan's Grip, and I'm okay with that. What with the holidays raiding itself was slow over the past two weeks, so I jumped onto the beta and messed around with some older content to test out my theory about Second Wind, and I was right - it's a significant kick in the teeth to our ability to solo older content. Granted, it mostly means we need help with Wrath era raids, but if you were feeling cocky about being able to solo, as an example, Trial of the Crusader 10, adjust your expectations.

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. Of course TG rewards the best possible weapons, which at this stage of the game is whatever flavor of Shin'ka is available to you. There's no maces at all this tier of raiding and only one sword, so if you're raiding you're either using Shin'ka or trying to get one. (For players running heroics, there are several 2h weapons available in heroic dungeons and a crafted axe at the same ilevel) There's really not much else to be said about weapons for TG - there are two of them, and Shin'ka is by far the better option.

Right now, in terms of itemization, once you get hit and expertise in the right general ballpark of 7.5% apiece, get crit. Crit crit crit as much as you can get. All fury, indeed all DPS warriors love crit, but TG loves crit like a mouse loves a teddy bear. (Trust me, mice love teddy bears.) You should be gemming for crit unless you need to gem for hit/crit to make a cap, you should be slapping the crit enchant on your cloak, you should be reforging for crit or choosing crit gear whenever possible. We talked before about how crit interacts with Bloodthirst, so I'll just summarize it - your critical hit chance is doubled for Bloodthirst, so if you're looking at your character pane and seeing a 31% crit rate, what that means is that you have a 62% chance to get enraged every BT. Since enrage gives a 10% damage buff for 6 seconds, the more crit the better until you hit 50% raid buffed. Since you can hit BT every 4.5 seconds, the higher your crit rate, the closer you can get to being enraged more or less constantly and getting a flat 10% damage buff.

I really can't say enough how good the four piece set bonus is. Beingh able to use Recklessness every two and a half minutes is huge for fury, since it will push you very close to 100% crit on Bloodthirst while it's active.

After crit, most sources will tell you mastery over haste. This is in part because of how bad haste is for us, and in part because mastery has good synergy with crit because of how our mastery works. The closer you get to that complete uptime for the Enrage damage buff, the more mastery does to increase that damage buff. Mastery is a distant second to crit, it's absolutely true, and you'll want to get hit and expertise around those soft caps first. I'd put strength ahead of mastery as well, although behind crit (I'd recommend gemming for crit over strength for TG warriors). As for weapon enchants, Dancing Steel if you've got the money or mats for it, with Windsong as the backup enchant.

I personally love Bladestorm, but unless you're expecting to really need AoE damage (say, the adds that get summoned by Heroic Feng's shield throw or during Shek'zeer) Dragon Roar and Shockwave are probably better. Shockwave is annoying for DPS due to its 20 second cooldown (to become 40 seconds in 5.2 unless adds are up) which means that for me Dragon Roar is the talent I take for bosses. For level 90 I tend to prefer Bloodbath due to its low cooldown. It's easy to use Bloodbath both in conjuction with other cooldowns and by itself to increase overall DPS, while Avatar seems lackluster in comparison. Is the 20% damage increase of Avatar over 24 seconds worth losing the 30% extra damage over 36 seconds you'll get with three Bloodbaths? Storm Bolt can be used every 30 seconds, but the admittedly impressive extra damage it does to targets that can't be stunned doesn't really make up for the ability to pop Bloodbath and have it buff everything you do for 12 seconds.

Rotationally, you're going to want to hit Colossus Smash so that you can follow it with a Bloodthirst and a Raging Blow if possible. Prioritize Bloodthirst to proc Raging Blow, which is your highest damage strike, and Raging Blow over anything while it's lit up, but keep in mind that Raging Blow consumes your Enrage so you may want to delay it if you get a Wild Strike proc to keep your Enrage. Hitting Raging Blow just before your next Bloodthirst gives you a better chance to try and keep Enrage up as long as possible. So in terms of priority it's Colossus Smash, then Bloodthirst, then Raging Blow, then Wild Strike after a Bloodsurge proc, with HS and Cleave as rage spenders. Keep in mind that the Glyph of Raging Wind means that in AoE situations your Raging Blow will hit multiple targets after you use Whirlwind.

That should cover the basics of Titan's Grip right now. Here's hoping I get something for SMF for next week, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: featured, guide-to-warriors, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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

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.
Patch 5.2 notes
Warrior Shockwave now has a 40 second cooldown (was 20 seconds), striking 3 or more targets will reduce its cooldown by 20 seconds.Second Wind now causes a Warrior that has been reduced to 35% health or lower to regenerate 2% of their health per second (was 3%), and now generates 15 Rage over 10 seconds (was 20 Rage).Warbringer now reduces the target's movement by 50% for 15 seconds (8 seconds in PvP) in addition to its other effects.Shield Barrier now scales approximately 10% less efficiently with attack power.Storm Bolt now deals 125% weapon damage (was 100%).Enraged Regeneration now costs 30 Rage (was 60).Glyph of Death from Above no longer increases the damage dealt by Heroic Leap.Arms Taste for Blood has been redesigned. It now causes the Warrior to gain 2 stacks of Overpower (maximum of 5 stacks) when Mortal Strike deals damage or the target dodges, and no longer interacts with Heroic Strike. It now requires level 20 (was level 50).Slam now deals 220% weapon damage (was 190%).Protection The base damage of Shield Slam and Revenge has been increased by 150%, but these abilities now scale approximately 10% less efficiently with attack power.
Well, first off I should probably admit that the Second Wind change makes me sad. Second Wind simply isn't that good in any current content - it can easily be burned through by anyone in PvP who is even half awake and it won't save you on any current raid encounter. Shaving a third off of its healing really puts a crimp in warrior soloing. But cumulative with the other changes, this one is clearly aimed at addressing complaints about warriors in PvP, and potentially is aimed at making Second Wind less attractive so that Enraged Regeneration and Impending Victory will be more attractive by comparison. (I personally prefer ER for tanking, as it becomes basically another mini-cooldown to be used when needed.) Seeing ER get its rage cost reduced confirms my suspicion that Second Wind has basically just been too attractive, and that ER and IV have been suffering in comparison.

The change to the Glyph of Death from Above is pretty easily understandable - it was one of the few glyphs that offered a cut and dried DPS increase. In the current glyph landscape, this glyph is simply too powerful. I don't like the change, but I do understand it. The Warbringer and Storm Bolt changes both seem clear enough to me - these are talents people aren't taking. Both Juggernaut and Double Time are very attractive talents for both PvP and PvE, it's not surprising that people are taking a reduced charge time or an on-demand second charge over a fairly limited version of the excellent old Throwdown ability appended onto a charge. Baking a snare into the ability might at least give it parity in PvP. As for Storm Bolt, increasing the damage may make me pick it back up for my PvE DPS spec, if it ends up competitive with Bloodbath. I already use it for tanking.

The changes to Shield Barrier, Revenge and Shield Slam seem aimed at warriors stacking strength for the combination of its parry and attack power benefit, which increased Shield Barrier's absorbs as well as the threat/damage of Shield Slam and Revenge. I don't know how much of a problem this actually was (I certainly wasn't stacking str in my tank set) but that's the best explanation I can think of. None of these changes thrill me, but they're not insurmountable either. The changes mean that Shield Block just got even better by comparison.

What really interests me out of all these changes is the redesign to Taste for Blood, a tacit admission that this ability just plain doesn't work. At present, while a five stack TfB can be crazy awesome, it's extremely annoying to hit Overpower and not see it stack the TfB buff, and to watch it fall off entirely time and again. With Slam getting a damage buff, and HS no longer getting TfB's bonus, arms warriors are now going to even more heavily rely on Overpower and Slam as their fillers between Colossus Smash and Mortal Strike. Since it will be Mortal Strike that stacks the buff, and based on the way the notes are worded it sounds like every MS or target dodge will stack the buff. I'm not entirely sure what this will mean - will you hit Mortal Strike and follow that up with two Overpowers back to back? Are you ever going to want to sit on your Overpower and then hammer four or five off at a time? We'll have to see how this affects arms DPS.

What's really interesting to me is how none of these changes are a direct nerf to fury. We know that right now fury is the more dominant DPS spec for warriors in PvE, and unless the new TfB works out to a DPS increase for arms the 5.2 changes we have so far will only put fury out ahead of arms in PvE. Since fury in turn is really only dominant once it hits heroics, we could be looking at an outlier based on limited representation - fury looks good because those few fury warriors in heroic raiding are skewing the results. At any rate, fury warriors will have to check their talents, but no baseline mechanics like Wild Strike are seeing any changes as of these notes.

Of course, these are very preliminary. There could be more changes coming, and we'll have to pat attention. Next week, I'm going to talk about how Titan's Grip is doing since the universe won't give me an offhand for SMF.

At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors. Tags: featured, guide-to-warriors, patch-5.2, warrior-guide, warrior-info, warrior-talents, wow-warrior, wow-warrior-info, wow-warriors

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

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