2008 August | Tank Hard!

Time for Fury

August 26, 2008 By Rochelle 4 Comments

Just like in my post about the new Arms tree, I need to stipulate that I am not in the beta and I have not actually played with any of these talents. I have simply read about them and drawn my conclusions. I could be completely wrong and there might be something in-game that makes a talent better or worse than I describe.

Blood Craze got buffed from 3% regen at max rank to 6%. Not a huge deal, but pretty nice.

Enrage got nerfed from 25% damage increase to only 15%. This is a big one. Warriors in PVP have a unique playstyle that you just don’t get in other classes. Many classes have some kind of healing ability and all class have some way to escape – they can vanish, go immune, or use a long duration CC and run away. A warrior can do none of those things. The warrior is in the fight until someone dies. And Enrage is a perfect embodiment of that idea. When the warrior is being attacked and is under pressure, he doesn’t run away, he hits back. Hard. So, right from the start I don’t like this nerf for philosophical reasons. But as far as practicality, this really doesn’t affect PVE at all. The problem for PVP warriors that want to go Arms is that Blizzard didn’t nerf Enrage hard enough. It is still good enough that you will want to spend 20 points in Fury and therefore give up on going deep Arms. But I suppose that is irrelevant because as I will talk about further down, Arms warriors are going to be extinct.

Death Wish got nerfed and no longer grants fear immunity. This is a bummer. The reduced cooldown on Berserker Rage through the Intensify Rage talent makes it bearable though. Death Wish is still an awesome talent.

Intensify Rage (3 ranks) – Reduces the cooldown of Bloodrage, Berserker Rage, Recklessness and Death Wish by 11%. This is a nice new talent. Warriors will still be relatively un-fearable in PVP because of the reduced Berserker Rage cooldown and being able to access the burst DPS of Death Wish and Recklessness more often is quite nice as well.

Bloodthirst is getting a buff that appears to be nice but is actually kind of meaningless. The current version of Bloodthirst heals you for a whopping 30 HP on each of your next 5 successful melee attacks. The WotLK version will heal you for 1.5% of your max HP instead of 30. This reminds of the itemization problems that casters were all complaining about a few patches ago – melee gear from high end raids was all about increasing AP, armor pen and crit, all of which was a direct DPS increase but caster gear from those same raids was all increasing spirit and mp5 and intellect which increased longevity and not necessarily DPS. Nobody uses Bloodthirst for healing and nobody wants to use Bloodthirst for healing, it is used for damage so if Blizzard wants to buff it, they need to increase the damage. I don’t think anybody is going to say ‘no’ to the extra healing, but I can’t bring myself to think of this as a buff.

Furious Attacks (2 ranks) – Your normal melee attacks have a 50% chance to reduce all healing done to the target by 25%, this can stack 2 times. Blizzard gave Fury warriors Mortal Strike. I honestly don’t know what to make of this. It seems to me that this talent makes Arms warriors obsolete. Fury warriors can dual wield 2 handers, they have Mortal Strike, they have Death Wish, they have Enrage, they have Piercing Howl, they have Flurry… they have everything that you could possibly want for both PVP and PVE. Fury warriors will put out more damage than Arms warriors, and with 2 2-handers the damage will come in big bursts and now they will have a Mortal Strike THAT IS APPLIED AUTOMATICALLY AND COSTS NO RAGE. The Arms warrior is dead.

Heroic Leap – Leap through the air and slam down on all enemies within 5 yards dealing 50% weapon damage and stunning them. This used to be a laughably bad talent when it had a knockback instead of a stun. It will be nice in PVE for trash, but trash is… uh… trash. In PVP it looks like it will be a very nice addition to the caster lock-down chain of pummel/intercept/fear. With the removal of mace stuns, its nice to see that warriors are getting a controllable stun instead. This is no longer the top-tier talent of the Fury tree.

Rampage is totally different. The new version no longer includes an AP increase, instead, when you score a crit, the entire party or raid gets an additional 5% melee crit. That sounds great, but (correct me if I am wrong) Leader of the Pack is also raidwide and it doesn’t stack with Rampage. Since you almost always have a feral druid somewhere in your raid, this talent is becomes quite dumb.

Bloodsurge (3 ranks) – Bloodthirst crits have a 33% chance to make your next Slam instant cast. I honestly can’t decide if this is good or not. Does instant Slam reset your swing timer like regular Slam? How does the swing timer even work when you are dual wielding? Does slam reset the main hand swing only or both hands? Depending on how this works with your swing timer, it seems to me like it will be anywhere from terrible to ‘meh’. If it messes with your swing timer for both hands while you are hauling 2 big slow 2-handers around, then it could be a pretty awful talent. If the effect on your swing timer is minimal (MH only) that would be better but still only ‘meh’ because it requires a Bloodthirst crit to be activated. So every 6 seconds (Bloodthirst cooldown) you have a ~30% (or whatever your crit % is) chance to get an instant Slam which translate roughly to 3 per minute. Not bad, not great either.

Unending Fury (5 ranks) – Reduces the rage cost of Cleave, Whirlwind and Bloodthirst by 1 (stacks to 5) and gives your Enraged Assault a 6% (stacks to 30%) chance to refresh the cooldown of Bloodthirst. If Titan’s Grip is leaving fury warriors with a lot more rage issues than ever before, then this is pretty nice. But, in TBC, a fury warrior in a proper melee group has more than enough rage to do anything he wants. So this may end up having the same problem as the Bloodthirst change – its nice, but it doesn’t increase damage.

Titan’s Grip – Dual wield 2 handers. This has been reduced to a 1 point talent and the swing speed penalty has been removed. Finally this talent is good. As far as I can tell, this is the most exciting thing that is going to be happening to warriors in the expansion… and it only took 3 tries for Blizzard to make it good

Filed Under: Tanking, WotLK

WotLK talent review

August 24, 2008 By Rochelle 2 Comments

I am not in the beta. Since I have not played a warrior in the beta with the new talents/skills, maybe I shouldn’t draw conclusions about them. But I am going to do it anyway. All the information I gathered is from mmo-champion and then I drew my own conclusions from there. For the most part, I am pretty unimpressed by the warrior changes and if things don’t change, I will probably play another class in the expansion.

Arms:

Taste for Blood (3 ranks) – Whenever your Rend ability causes damage, you have a 10/20/30% chance of allowing the use of Overpower. This is actually kind of nice. Now there is a reason to use Rend.

Justified Killing (2 ranks) – You gain 3 rage every time you parry an attack. Before I say anything else about this talent, I have to say that I think the name is really stupid. Moving on, Its purely a PVP talent because an arms warrior should never be attacked in PVE and therefore will never have a chance to parry. Its not a bad talent for PVP except that I don’t think I have ever seen/heard warriors asking for a talent like this (not in the arms tree at least).

Mace Specialization – Gives your melee attacks a chance to generate 10 rage. That means no more mace stuns. Which in turn means that mace are now obsolete. Swords will be better for PVP and it will be a toss up between axes and swords in PVE. Nobody is going to use maces ever again.

Sudden Death (3 ranks) – Melee crits have a 10% chance to allow you to execute regardless of your targets health. This is a terrible talent. Good warriors almost never use Execute. In PVP, you need to be absolutely sure that Execute is going to kill your target or else you are left standing there with no rage to pummel or reapply hamstring or mortal strike. In PVE (and PVP), Execute doesn’t do enough damage to be useful. The damage from Execute is a fixed number (925 at max rank in TBC, 1665 at max rank in WotLK) plus more damage based on how much rage you have. The damage is not modified by weapon damage and it is not modified by attack power. So if you have reasonably good gear, you need at least half a rage bar to do as much damage with Execute as you would do with Mortal Strike or Bloodthirst. And if you have half a rage bar, then you can use MS and HS or WW and do more damage than the execute. This talent is like the current version of Improved Rend – it improves a crappy ability that nobody uses.

Unrelenting Assualt – Used to be worthless but with the recent addition of Taste for Blood, this talent is now useful.

Improved Slam – Recently moved out of the fury tree and moved up 2 tiers. This never fit in the Fury tree and should have been in Arms all along. Its a good change to an old talent which makes it hard to get excited about.

Strength of Arms (2 ranks) – Increases total strength and stamina by 2/4%. This is pretty nice except is was nerfed down from 10%.

Blood Frenzy – This was also nerfed, now it only increases damage by 1/2% instead of 2/4%. It was also moved farther up the talent tree.

Trauma (2 ranks) – Normal melee crits increase the effectiveness of bleed effects on the by 15% for 15 seconds. This will be a very nice raidwide dps buff. Unfortunately, this is very deep in the Arms tree and picking it up means you cannot put points into Flurry which is pretty crucial to Arms warrior PVE dps.

Wrecking Crew (5 ranks) – Melee crits have a 20% chance Enrage you, increasing all damage caused by 3% (stacks up to 15%) for 12s. This is a pretty good talent. Like trauma, it is very deep in Arms which precludes you from gett Flurry. But if you have reasonably good gear, you will be probably be permanently enraged which should make up for the damage loss from Flurry.

Bladestorm - Whirlwind every 1.5 seconds for 6 seconds, you can move but you can’t do anything else for the duration, can’t be stopped, feared, stunned, etc. I thought this was dumb when I heard about it on the Alpha and I still think its dumb. It will be a nice burst of damage, but the 90 second cooldown means that it will be far from crucial to your DPS cycle in PVE. It was recently changed from a 4.5 second duration to 6 seconds which made it go from a bad PVP ability to completely and utterly terrible. Since you can’t do anything else which Bladestorming, hamstring is going to fall off your target, mortal strike is going to fall off your target and you are going to be unable to make any defensive plays like fear, spell reflect, disarm or intervene, and you won’t be able to pummel or intercept to stop a cast.

Some of the talents are pretty decent: Taste for Blood + Unrelenting Assault, Wrecking Crew and Trauma. But a lot of the talents look pretty terrible, especially the 51 point talent. And when the 51 point talent is awful, it kinda overshadows any good things in the tree.

Too keep this from turning into an absolutely massive post, I am going to split the different trees into different posts

Filed Under: WotLK

Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King

August 23, 2008 By Bizzam 5 Comments

There was a blue post recently in the WotLK beta forums about what Blizzard envisions tanking to be like for the 4 tanking classes in Wrath. In case you missed it, here it is:

Threads have popped up in several class forums that seem to be converging on a few of the same issues. So rather than cross-posting a lot, I thought I would start a new thread.

Tanking design:

1) Our goal in Lich King is for all 4 tanking classes to be viable.

2) We would like for tanking to be a little more fun. I’m going to leave this vague on purpose, but it is definitely a concern.

3) In 5-player instances, most warriors, druids, paladins and death knights should be effective tanks. The healing specs may have a harder time than the dps specs. Arms wariors, Fury warriors, Ret paladins, Ferals and most DKs should do fine.

4) In 5-player heroics, the expectation is that the tank has a heavy investment in tanking talents and appropriate gear. Arms warriors might have trouble tanking a heroic unless they overgear the instance.

5) For raids, we want all 4 tank classes to be viable. If your group has e.g. a Prot paladin and Feral druid as main tanks with appropriate gear and reasonable skill, you should be good to go.

6) This is a shift in philosophy for us. Previously, we sometimes tried to steer Ferals as being better off tanks than main tanks. We also expected specific classes to appear in the raid. Our new assumption is that you might have any of the 4 tanking classes as a tank. We are trying to achieve as much parity as we can among the 4 tanks without making them too similar. If nearly all guilds want the same class as their MT, we’ve failed.

7) This is a big one: the game isn’t finished. We aren’t spending too much effort yet to make sure mitigation, threat and tools are similar across the 4 classes at level 80 in blue or purple gear. Likewise, your talent trees and core abilities aren’t finished. Tanking (and PvP) need to have a lot of other pieces of the game in place before we can really get the numbers right. It’s fine (useful even) to point out when you feel a particular ability, talent, class or build is too good or not good enough. But please don’t infer the work in progress as a reflection of our intent. If we end up changing our minds or if things don’t work out, it will be posted here.

8) There are a lot of changes in Lich King that change tanking and raiding in general. I won’t list them all out here, but keep in mind things like itemization changes, widespread raid buffs, consumables, UI changes, etc. Just keep them in mind. We’re not in Tempest Keep anymore.