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Upcoming 3.1 Warrior Glyph Changes

February 24, 2009 By 7 Comments

With patch 3.1, we’ll be getting some new glyphs, as well as some changes to existing glyphs.  Here are the ones I have seen for Warriors:

Warrior

  • Glyph of Heroic Strike – Increases the critical strike chance of Heroic Strike by 5%. (Old: You gain 10 rage when you critically strike with your Heroic Strike ability.)
  • Glyph of Barbaric Insults – Your Mocking Blow ability generates 100% additional threat. (Old: Your Mocking Blow ability also taunts the target.)
  • Glyph of Sweeping Strikes – Reduces the rage cost of your Sweeping Strikes ability by 100%. (Old: You generate 30 rage over 12 sec when you use your Sweeping Strikes ability.)
  • Glyph of Overpower – Adds a 100% chance to enable your Overpower when your attacks are parried. (Old: 50%)
  • Glyph of Bladestorm (new) – Reduces the cooldown on Bladestorm by 15 sec.
  • Glyph of Shockwave (new) – Reduces the cooldown on Shockwave by 3 sec.
  • Glyph of Vigilance (new) – Your Vigilance ability transfers an additional 5% of your target’s threat to you.
  • Glyph of Enraged Regeneration (new) – Your Enraged Regeneration ability heals for an additional 10% of your health over its duration.
  • Glyph of Spell Reflection (new) – Reduces the cooldown on Spell Reflection by 1 sec.
  • Glyph of Shield Wall (new) – Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.
Filed Under: Tanking, Warriors Tagged With: ,

How to be a better tank

February 15, 2009 By 15 Comments

Situational awareness.

I’m getting tired of repeating this over and over. Situational awareness, threat, and survival are all three pretty much equally important for a tank (depends on specific cases, but in general that’s the rule of thumb). All three aspects need to be mastered if you want to perform well. If you’re only sitting there and pulling off TPS and soaking all the damage, that’s fine, but without being able to react, you’re not as good a tank as you could be

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Tanking

Upcoming Tanking Changes (Druids & Warriors)

February 13, 2009 By 5 Comments

In case you missed it, Eyonix has been making posts about upcoming class changes and a post a couple of days ago focused on Druids and Warriors, which included some changes to how we will be tanking in the future.

DRUID

  • Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.
  • Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.
  • Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.
  • Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.
  • Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.
  • Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.
  • We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

WARRIOR

  • Changing stances now has a much reduced cost: you lose a maximum of 20 rage (10 with Tactical Mastery). For example, if you have 100 rage and change stances, you will have 80 rage remaining. If you have 10 rage and change stances, all of your rage is lost. In addition, we may change the penalties associated with some stances.
  • You now gain rage when damage done to you is absorbed, such as through a Power Word: Shield.
  • Blood Frenzy now causes 2/4% physical damage done.
  • Sunder Armor (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 4% per application, and is now a single rank. Creature armor has been globally reduced so that debuffed targets should take about the same damage from physical attacks that they did before this change. The net effect should be that this debuff is slightly less mandatory in PvE and is not disproportionately more powerful against cloth targets in PvP.
  • We are also adding increased damage to Arms, possibly through Overpower or Slam.
  • We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries.

Some very strange changes to armor debuffing, but important none the less.

Filed Under: Druids, Tanking, Warriors

Polar Bears: Episode I – Northrend’s Got Talents!

February 9, 2009 By 11 Comments

Now that my Warrior is hitting Naxx on a regular basis, is exalted with Hodir and has nearly all the goodies out of Heroic Instances that I had on his shopping list, I’ve been feeling the call of the wild, urging me to return to my Feral roots and level my Druid, Urago, who has been sitting idle in Shattrath City for many moons now. I wanted to be able to provide Bear Tank insights here anyway, and the best way to do that is to experience it first hand, right? So I’ve been hitting Howling Fjord the past couple of days, gathering Goldclover and killing Vrykul along with my Resto druid buddy Rivanu. So far we’ve not run into any major challenges with my AoE tanking abilities and his HoTs, we just keep hitting and healing until things sparkle. I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with builds and here’s what I’ve finally landed on:

Urago’s Talent Build

I’ll go through each of my choices here as well… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Druids, Tanking, WotLK

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