Tank Hard!

Since Patch 2.2 went live on Tuesday there has been a flurry of information flying around about upcoming class changes in 2.3. Warriors (and tanking) are no exception! Here is a run down of the changes that are said to be coming for Warriors:

• Yes, we do plan to reduce the chance for Mace Specialization to occur in patch 2.3, but it will provide 7 rage instead of 6. (Bornakk)
• We also plan to have healing reduction effects affect all drain spells and abilities. As the example that most people bring up, Mortal Strike will affect Drain Life. (Bornakk)
• While arms/fury warriors aren’t meant to be as good as protection warriors at tanking, we do plan to make an additional to Tactical Mastery that may help them out. This talent will grant greatly increased threat from Mortal Strike and Bloodthirst when in Defensive Stance. (Bornakk)
• It may also simplify things a bit to when we make Devastate combine the effects of Sunder Armor into it’s effect and be affected by all talents and items that affect Sunder Armor. We plan to make this happen in 2.3. (Bornakk)
• The Arms talent Weapon Mastery is going to be significantly changed. Instead of providing 50/100% chance to avoid Disarm effects, it is going to reduce the duration of Disarm effects by 25/50%. The reason for this is that having full immunity with this talent really took the idea of disarming out of the game and we want it to be more viable. (Bornakk)

Several changes in there directed at PVP, but there are some nice tanking changes coming too in allowing Arms/Fury tanks better threat generation as well as the combined effect of Devastate. The Devastate change will be very nice!

Patch 2.3 and you: Warrior edition [UPDATE: Weapon Mastery nerfed] - WOW Insider

The Enchant Gloves : Threat enchant has been around since AQ40. At this point in the game though, it can be hard to find an enchanter who has this formula.

Well, with path 2.2 going live today, that all changes. We now have the same enchant available on the Sha’tar Quartermaster. According to reports from PTR, the enchant requires exalted with Sha’tar, will cost 10 gold and will require the following materials:

8 x Primal Life
2 x Greater Planar Essence
4 x Small Prismatic Shard

On my server, you would expect to pay somewhere around 50 gold for all the mats for this enchant.

This enchant will increase all of your threat output by 2%, thus enabling your DPSers to push that much harder.  For me, this took the place of a +8 STA enchant, thus costing me 80 hp for 2% more threat overall.

It should be no surprise to anyone reading this blog that my guild is not an end game progression guild. I haven’t seen Illidan or Archimonde other than in Warcraft3, heh.

Our guild isn’t very big, and attempts to stay casual by nature. And by casual, I mean in playtime and raiding schedule only. When we are online and raiding, we play and raid to win. We are currently running 2 Karazhan groups and clear Kara weekly. We have only been seriously putting forth effort in raiding since early June. All in all, I’m pretty happy with our progress.

Now, we are turning our eyes towards the 25 man raids. Our roster still isn’t full enough to do guild only 25 mans, so we joined forces with another guild for our first ever attempts on High King Maulgar and Gruul.

I’m happy to report that we downed HKM on our 5th attempt, and got Gruul to 20% on our 3rd try before calling it a night. I learned a valuable lesson on our 3rd HKM attempt. When going up against bosses that can hit this hard, that first little bit of rage should be spent on Shield Block. Typically I use my Bloodrage for an initial Shield Slam for aggro. Last night, on our 3rd attempt, HKM came along and smacked me for a 9500 crushing blow right out of the gates. Followed by an Arcing Smash and regular melee. He finished me off doing 25k damage in just under 4 seconds. My 18k buffed hp wasn’t enough to survive that opening salvo.


05:00'12.343 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Bloodrage
546 Bizzam gains Prayer of Mending
05:00'13.390 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Bloodrage
05:00'14.437 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Bloodrage
05:00'15.359 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Bloodrage
05:00'16.375 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Bloodrage
05:00'17.390 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Bloodrage
921 High King Maulgar's Melee hits Bizzam for 9241 (crushing)
05:00'18.140 Bizzam's Shield Slam parried by High King Maulgar
281 Bizzam's Melee hits High King Maulgar for 172
578 Bizzam gains Lightning Speed
578 Bizzam gains Shield Block
625 Bizzam's Prayer of Mending heals Bizzam for 1542
640 Bizzam performs Prayer of Mending
05:00'19.375 High King Maulgar's Melee hits Bizzam for 4982 (398 blocked)
375 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Bloodrage
812 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Shield Specialization
812 Bizzam's Melee hits High King Maulgar for 127 (glancing)
05:00'20.218 Donator's Flash of Light crit heals Bizzam for 2270
234 Kcinham's Holy Light heals Bizzam for 4640
234 High King Maulgar's Arcing Smash hits Bizzam for 6541 (398 blocked)
671 Bizzam gains 1 Rage from Shield Specialization
05:00'21.468 Bizzam's Heroic Strike crits High King Maulgar for 507
578 High King Maulgar's Melee hits Bizzam for 4652 (398 blocked)
05:00'22.265 Bizzam dies


From now on, my first rage spent will be on Shield Block as the boss is incoming. There isn’t much more demoralizing than getting obliterated in the first 5 seconds of a boss fight.

In the end though, we still prevailed. Our guild performed great and we came together to down HKM 2 shots later. We had good attempts on Gruul and he’ll go down the next time we see him.

To wrap up, as noted, we are trying to fill out our roster for 25 mans. If you or anyone you know is interested in having a look at a mature, casual playtime, yet serious when playing guild, take a look at Calzowned!

dawarria posted a request on the forums for useful warrior tank macros. Here is one that is very useful for many encounters in the game:

#showtooltip
/cast [nostance:3]Berserker Stance;Berserker Rage
/cast [nostance:2]Defensive Stance

This macro will do the following:

If you are not in Berserker Stance, it will switch you to Berserker Stance. When hit again, it will activate Berserker Rage, and when hit a 3rd time, it will switch you back to Defensive stance.

This macro is great for mobs that fear, such as Nightbane. When the fear is incoming, just hit your macro 3 times to activate Berserker Rage and make you immune to fear and keep your raid from getting wiped!

Not only that, but you can use it while doing normal groups to help generate extra rage!

So last night before we went in to finish clearing Karazhan (Illhoof - Nightbane), I decided I wanted to try out a little more +hit to see what kind of noticeable difference it would have in my threat generation and DPS. I swapped out my normal [Solid Star of Elune] on my [Gyro-balanced Khorium Destroyer] for a [Rigid Dawnstone]. By putting in the yellow gem, I get the +3 STA socket bonus so it cost me 90 hp for +8 hit raiting.

At the end of the night I ran my WWS parser and compared my logs. I saw a 1% decrease in my normal melee miss rate, which was nice and expected. What I wasn’t really expecting was a significant reduction in my miss rate on my specials. Heroic Strike, Shield Slam and Revenge all had their miss rate dropped by about 4%! This was huge! In addition, I had a noticeable increase in my overall DPS, which directly translates into added rage, and added threat!

I knew that adding hit rating would help, but even I have been underestimating the value! From what I saw last night, I will looking for more gems that I can swap out for added +hit that will hopefully not lower my health by too much. I have some def/sta gems that I can likely swap and might even manage to grab some socket bonuses from re-gemming existing gear. I am going to shoot for around +5% hit which will require around 80 hit rating. The gains from adding the +hit is that it will generate more threat which will allow your DPSers to open up even more and get those boss mobs down quicker.