Tank Hard!

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.

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.

You can read more here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765643774&sid=2000

We’ll see how it pans out but one of my bigger concerns is that tanks in general are going to become more homogenized and very similar.

Well, it came and went and I didn’t even realize.  Tank Hard has now been running for a year ! It was last July that I decided to start this tanking blog.

So Happy Birthday to us!

Well, through a nice set of circumstances, I managed to pick up a Wrath of the Lich King beta key. I have had just a little time to start tinkering around and checking out the new talents, abilities and content.

Fury

The first thing I did was check out a few quests and mob slaying. I spec’d nearly full Fury, picking up Titan’s Grip and Heroic Leap. I was able to dual wield World Breaker and Gorehowl. Let me just say that coupled with the new Bloodthirst and Blood Craze, downtime was minimal, which was very nice. Dual wielding a couple of massive hard hitting 2 handers made short work of mobs as well. I was not afraid to wade into a group of 3, 4, or even 5 mobs and just go Whirlwind and Cleave crazy. Mobs would be falling left and right and Victory Rush was utilized to it’s fullest! Bloodsurge is also an awesome talent and near as I could tell, did not reset your swing timer when used. With a good crit chance, you’ll be getting free reactionary Slams in quite regularly.

Heroic Leap on the other hand is a Heroic Flop in it’s current state. About the only useful thing I found for it was using it to get away from mobs when I had bit off more than I could chew. I could not find any decent use for it in an offensive capacity.

But hey, enough about this dps crap, this is a tanking blog, right?

Tanking

After playing around as Fury, I jumped at the chance to tank a couple of instances and try out our new tanking abilities. Let me just say, as far as 5 mans are concerned, I’m very happy with the changes. Our group tanking abilities have gone way up. Shockwave is great! And picking up Incite is a must if you plan on multi-tanking mobs (and who isn’t?). Not only that, but you now also have reduced cooldowns on Challenging Shout (3 mins), Mocking Blow (1 min, and usable in Defensive Stance), and Concussion Blow (30 sec) make it all the better.

I did a run of Utegarde Keep and The Nexus. Both were fairly trivial. Utegarde Keep had a max pull of 4 mobs and it was no problem maintaining aggro. Nexus has some pulls that can get larger, but even then we had no problems keeping them on the tank.

All in all, I’m very happy with how the entry levels for Wrath are shaping up. There are some talents that need some looking at though. While Sword and Board looks good on paper, I just don’t really see the benefit of this talent, not to mention it’s a 46 point talent that requires 5 points to upgrade to it’s full potential. I am going to look at running some numbers later to see just how good (or bad) this talent really is, but my gut instinct is that in it’s current form, you are much better off picking up 5/5 Cruelty instead.

If anyone else is on the test realms and looking for a tank or whatever, look up Bizztoo on Lich King Horde!

Hello out there!

As my guild has just mostly dropped Tempest Keep from our roster to focus on Mount Hyjal, and is looking at dropping SSC too, to focus on Back Temple, so I think now might be the perfect time to have a quick look at the differences between the two sets of instances.

When we zoned into BT, the first thing I realised was that I didn’t know how the trash worked. I’d gotten so used to marking up and pulling the SSC and TK trash, that I forgot that you actually need to know that sort of thing. So I quickly pulled up the WoWWiki article. Immediately I noticed a distinct lack of strategy for each pull. That really bothered me, so I quickly starting reading the list of each trash mob’s abilities and devising a bit of a pull strategy “on the fly”. Turned out not to really need it. The trash in BT is very very forgiving and very very easy. Even the infamous double Coilskar General pack in front of Naj’entus was easily one-shotted. We took down Naj’entus after a couple of goes…it was a very interesting fight, the spine mechanic is very well done.

The trash to Supremus was even easier. None of the mobs hit particularly hard, there was an AOE pack where I took literally zero damage, the mobs were hitting for less than my block value. Considering that my spell damage trash set only has 295 block value, thats not inconsiderable.

Supremus gave us a lot more trouble. We had big issues with people dying to volcanoes. Not entirely sure if it was a fault of them or a fault of our strategy, we’ll have to work on that.

After all was said and done, I had a great time in BT. The trash in Black Temple is the way trash should be. It takes up the time so you’re not just hopping from boss to boss, but its not a boss in and of itself. A couple of times doing Supremus trash, we accidentally pulled two packs. Now, we were completely unfamiliar with the trash, yet we effortlessly picked it up and tanked it. I love my raid group and I think we’re awesome but we’re not THAT good. If we pulled two packs at once in SSC or TK we’d wipe instantly. Its too unforgiving. All of the mobs have some annoying ability that can only be dealt with one at a time. Ask any SSC or TK raider and they’ll tell you that they absolutely detest the trash in there, especially SSC. Lurker’s trash? Not difficult at all, but there’s six platforms of exactly the same trash over and over again. Leotheras? Annoying trash, awkward room terrain, and close proximity to a boss does not make for funtimes. Void Reaver’s trash? Gigantic exploding robots of pain.

Basically, Black Temple does everything right. The trash is fairly simple, very forgiving of lapses in attention, which is good, because expecting people to pay solid attention not only for all boss fights but for trash as well is not really possible. Black Temple trash is challenging enough that you can’t slack off, but forgiving and easy enough that a lapse in attention for a few seconds isn’t going to wipe you.

We’ll be back in there tomorrow until Supremus and Shade of Akama die.

-Tyaera