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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Reforging, itemization, and the player

It's not exactly a secret that I'm terrible at keeping my finger on the pulse of the community. I just sort of wander around with my usual private obsessions, doing what I do, and sometimes I blunder into an emergent discussion like a rhinoceros stumbling into a clearing. Such is the case with the discussion of reforging currently going on. The post I have linked to by Mushan basically highlights the discussion, with some folks arguing that World of Warcraft has gone too far in the direction of gear optimization and too far away from the days when you'd get a drop, know it was better, and put it on. As a result of that argument, some are arguing that reforging should be removed from the game.

I can understand this argument, because if we think about it, reforging was never meant to be what it became. The initial purpose of reforging back when it was first announced was to allow players who got a drop that was otherwise significantly better than what they had, but itemized for a different role (so, as an example, a cloth piece itemized for healing over DPS) to make that drop better for the role they intended to use it for. So if your tankadin got a pair of plate lets with crit and expertise on them, he or she could swap some of the crit to a stat more useful for tanking. However, players being what they are, they immediately grasped that reforging also allowed them to trade away stats that were less effective on gear for stats that were more effective. Reforging allowed players to customize their hit and expertise in ways that had never been accessible before, allowed for dump stats to be dumped with even more efficiency than before - it was the absolute biggest change to the game in years, and ended up the largest single legacy of Cataclysm.

Mushan's arguments about removing the process of reforging are good, and I'm not going to belabor them here - instead, what I'm going to do is discuss my own personal feelings on reforging, and how it benefits the game.
What reforging does

For starters, reforging allows for classes to wear similar gear yet have different stat priorities without any of those classes being quite as penalized when a piece that doesn't fit their stat priorities drops. Right now, as an example, haste is lackluster at best for warriors, but better for paladins and DK's. Yet these classes overlap their gear, and thanks to reforging, when a piece itemized with strength drops and it has haste on it all three classes can consider that drop. Likewise, DK's don't value crit as much, but they don't have to merely ignore a crit drop, they can still choose to pick that piece up and make it work.

There's always been and will always be classes that wear the same gear, but value different stats on said gear, and reforging works with this process. The synergy of reforging and variant stat priorities is a solid one. Make no mistake - if you took reforging out tomorrow, classes who wanted to perform on the cutting edge of content would still be visiting websites, making best in slot lists, playing with their gemming and enchanting to optimize their characters. All removing reforging would do is make some pieces rise and some fall in terms of where those pieces fell on those BiS lists. Managing hit and expertise caps in particular would become painful at best, because you would still have to play a game of Jenga with your gear, attempting to assemble the right assortment of gear to get your hit and expertise to their soft caps without going over on either stat and wasting itemization. Make no mistake - one of the absolute good results of reforging has been how it has allowed us to reach those caps without having to pass over pieces with other stats on them to do it.

What the benefits are

The loss of reforging would add fuel to arguments already in place over which character should get priority over which drop because 'it's better for me', an argument that reforging didn't do away with, but did make far less compelling.

Reforging's presence in the game hasn't had any negative ramifications in my game. Now, I understand the danger of assuming personal experiences to be universal (I had better, right?) but that doesn't mean personal experience should be entirely discounted, so let's discuss my personal experience here. Reforging has allowed me to do the following:
Create two sets of tanking gear, one optimized for mastery and avoidance, the other for hit and expertise, and those two sets share several pieces of gear.When I switched from DPS to tanking, or tanking to DPS, I could use hit/expertise pieces by regemming/reforging them to suit the new role, getting more use out of gear.Reforging allows me to switch from arms to fury when new gear drops without having to say "Well, I'd like to be arms, but I have way too much/too little of X stat"I've been able to decide how much of certain stats I have, customizing my character. When I want to experiment with haste over mastery I can go to the reforger, change my statistics around, and go hit some dummies and run some dungeons, putting more control of my character into my hands.Who benefits? We benefit.

This is, to my mind, the ultimate positive result of reforging since December of 2010. The ability to change the stats on our gear has put the ability to decide what stats we want to favor more directly into player hands. Yes, in order to use reforging to its fullest we consult sites like Ask Mr. Robot or Wowreforge or use addons like reforgelite. But here's a dirty secret - on my non-raiding alts, I don't use anything. I reforge to get close enough to the hit and expertise caps that I don't see a lot of dodges or misses, go for the biggest DPS or tanking stat necessary for me (since my 90 alts are all warriors atm, it's usually crit or mastery) and then I stop worrying about it. For characters who run scenarious, heroic dungeons and LFR, it's not necessary to spend a lot of time on external sites.

It is my considered opinion that the depth and variety given to us by the reforging process is worth the minimal cost of using secondary help to maximize the benefit of the process considering that the use of those external sites is wholly optional and, for the majority of players, completely unnecessary. You can look at your character pane and see exactly what percentage your stats are at, and what your chances of hitting or missing a mob of up to boss level are. The game already does that for you.

Considering that reforging smooths over the difficulties caused by classes that wear the same gear but value different stats experience, allows us to control what stats we emphasize (which, when you can have different gearing strategies is a good thing), makes suboptimal upgrades better for us, allows us to switch a talent specialization without needing to abandon our current gear for all new pieces, I'd say the minimal and optional inconveniences required to fully utilize the feature are more than compensated for by its benefits. Removing it would be foolish.

Now, if they wanted to incorporate something like reforgelite into the reforge UI, you wouldn't catch me complaining. But scrapping it? No, that would be a bad idea.

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Tags: addon, ask-mr-robot, external-site, reforge, reforgelite, reforging, wowreforge

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria

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