Warrior’s Journal: Bladestorm

It is probably time I continue this journal, especially since the other day when I thought it was smart to link the earlier entries on mmo-c for new warrior levelers. Great for new readers but also means I cannot continue to slack. So, it has been quite a few levels since my last report and I gotta say, the fun never stopped. In fact, it only increased once I was able to hit Outland and consequently entering Northrend. There are some issues with speccing that I want to address in today’s post, as well talk about AoE’ing as arms warrior.

First things first, speccing issues. Anyone who has leveled an arms warrior in solely pve environment, since Cataclysm, will notice that there are a few hiccups in our talent trees. I’ll demonstrate it with a little bit of show & tell. If you look at the following spec, you’ll notice that we are an impasse, where we only have 27 points spent, we need 30 for [Bladestorm] but we have no more pve talents to pick.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LhbcfRMRuM:McZcaZ0

Personally, I found this a bit frustrating when I realized it, soon after entering Outland. The best choice I found was to take [Throwdown] and [Tactical Mastery], since, although limited, they have at least some benefits in pve. The first allows you to stun a target for a few seconds, which is sometimes useful when dealing with really large packs or in dungeons when the tank has problems controlling all the mobs, and Tactical Mastery lets us retain more rage when stance dancing. [Sudden Death] looks very nice but unfortunately warriors will not gain Colossus Smash until level 81. Alternatively you can spend those two points in [Field Dressing] but since levelers run solo I did not see it to be very significant. You can make use of it in dungeons but if you’re like me, a responsible player, then you should not be taking unnecessary damage and what little damage you will take is easily healable without it.

After that ofc, speccing becomes a no-brainer. After bladestorm, you will want to take two points in [Blood and Thunder], which lets you spread rend to nearby targets. In simple terms, bladestorm itself will make AoE’ing mobs really powerful and with B&T, it will be positively overpowered. Outland especially is an area that is designed with a lot of mobs in close proximity to each other, and you can take them by storm (no pun intended).

Something About Rotations

After linking my earlier posts and reading through them, I realized I had almost completely neglected to talk about rotations. I did mention something about it in my first post but in all honesty, the warrior rotation develops quite a lot as you level. At the very start it was simple, charge + rend + heroic strike. Simple enough and mobs literally died by the time of that first heroic strike.

As glyphs, mortal strike and overpower became available, my rotations changed toward more what they are at max level, which is charge + rend + mortal strike + overpower. You can still use heroic strike but I don’t recommend spamming it. If you are high on rage, by all means mix it in, especially after mid levels when mobs no longer die from two hits, and make use of it along side another ability (e.g. mortal strike) since it is off the GCD. Overpower becomes a good addition to the rotation, once you get full points in [Taste For Blood] but does not really have a big impact until level 60 or higher. Up until then, I would get the occasional OP off, especially if mortal strike was on cooldown but only after I entered Outland and Northrend did it really start to shine.

At early levels, your rotation will not be significantly different from your single target rotation, except you will substitute heroic strike with cleave. However, as you progress the same opener morphs into a powerful AoE rotation: charge + rend + thunder clap. After this use both bladestorm and sweeping strikes when cooldowns permit. Just be careful of pulling aggro from the tank and be mindful when you use these abilities. Otherwise follow your normal rotation and just make sure your rend never falls off.

It might seem strange to talk about specific rotations during a leveling process but the player really benefits from paying attention to such details early on. Think about it, once you hit max level, you will that much more ahead when you have done much of the ground work before hand. At that point you can start to fine tune your rotations and adding to it with more advanced techniques like stance dancing, proximity charge, and so forth. The effort will show immediate, particularly when you start doing heroic 5-mans and you will immediately begin to top the meters, while the others are still getting used to their classes.

So where does this leave us? The following is a good level 77 spec that I would strongly recommend. It heavily on AoE damage, since that is really what you should strongly emphasize during level up and will also yield more performance during early dungeon runs.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LhrcfRMRuMk0oZ0b:McRcaM0

Patch 4.1: Protection Warriors

Yes, I know, a lot of talk about the patch 4.1 lately. Everyone is posting about it, which is why I only stick to protection warrior’s point of view for now. There is plenty of material out there about the new instances, dungeon finder, etc. Actually, it is surprising just how large the patch was, despite not featuring a new raid instance. A lot of things have changed, been redesigned, and altered to seriously change the way we play the game.

The official patches are can be found in the following link and obviously, you should always check them out yourself and see what is what. But I will try to cover some of the major changes and give a few thoughts on them. I resisted the urge to write about this yesterday, before I had a chance to get a feel for it.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2219878#blog

There is also a round of hotfixes that have been implemented, in response to many of the problems that came out with the patch, and suggest everyone will also have a look at that.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2220751#blog

Rallying Cry

First, lets go over the new warrior utility, Rallying Cry. Keep in mind; this is actually something all warriors received, regardless of spec, so the dynamics of its usage are rather interesting. It essentially functions like the Paladin’s Divine Guardian ability but instead of 20% less damage taken, RC gives the raid 20% more health for 10 seconds. It shares its CD with Last Stand and what that means is that if a tank uses it, he will not be able to use LS for another 3 minutes. Another warrior using his RC will not affect another warrior’s RC or LS.

The utility of this ability is innumerable and is only limited by the 30 yard range. That means that using it during the Nefarian encounter, phases 1 & 2 you will not grant you a lot of benefits, unless used by a warrior close enough to the main raid. Then again, in phase 3, used by a DPS warrior, it would be awesome for Electrocute. Other examples are in Halfus, Valion & Theralion, Cho’gall, etc. To me, this ability is just great and something the class has needed for quite a long time.

Spell Block

The warrior tank has always been, somewhat, more vulnerable against magic damage. Spell Block is a 5 second buff that gives us 20% reduced damage from magic when we use Shield Block. We need to spec into [Shield Mastery] but this is hardly a concern since it is must-have talent for protection warriors anyway. The important thing is that we finally have a raid-viable ability against magic damage and because it is bound to Shield Block, it makes how you spend that particular ability a bit more a question of time.

For most of the current tier’s encounters you are not going to want to alter your Shield Block routines in anyway, since most of them do not really feature powerful magic attacks. Ofc magic damage is present but it is much more useful to still give your Mirror of Broken Images trinket priority in dealing with them. The reason is simply because Shield Block still also functions as a means to mitigate physical damage and your goal should be to still maximize its effectiveness.

Personally, I would reserve Spell Block primarily against the three end bosses; Ala’kir, Cho’gall, and Nefarian, because those three are the ones that contain the most prominent sources of magic damage that cannot be entirely covered by the trinket. There are few other examples too however, like if you are tanking Ignacious of the Ascendant Council, when he puts up his shield and does a very powerful fire attack on the tank.

A good general rule, for me at least, is that it is not worth delaying Shield Block for more than 10 seconds maximum. The reason for that is because the ability is only on a 30 second CD and if you end up delaying its use by e.g. 20 seconds at a time, you lose a lot of physical mitigation, which is still very important to maintain. Some have made the argument that, well, tanks do not really die from overall damage done over a lengthier period of time, but I would say a bit reason for that is because warrior tanks have so much overall mitigation. So even if we take a few hits without blocking or avoiding them, the next couple will again be mitigated, which lets a healer catch up. If we degrade our ability to produce those heavily mitigated attacks (of which Shield Block is a big part of) we will end up taking more overall damage, making us more vulnerable and harder to maintain.

Spell Resistance

I think the cooldown change on Spell Resistance (changed from 10 seconds to 25 seconds) is two-folded; first relates to pvp, where a skilled warrior could potentially spell reflect crucial attacks by mages, priests, and other spell casters, thus making them unable to keep the warrior at a sufficient distance. Basically though, this is not a big problem in my books. Casters were already gaining a lot of downtime from a warrior by simple kiting and using slows, roots, and stuns that a warrior had to be skilled with SR to even be competitive against them.

However, coupled with the new Spell Block buff to our Shield Block, the change begins to make a whole lot more sense. Remember, both abilities are completely viable for use in pve and pvp. In fact, I have already created a macro for my arms pvp spec, that lets me pop Defensive Stance and Shield Block and I can see a lot more warrior using that now. For pve, in viable environments like 5-man heroic dungeons, we can benefit from both SR and Spell Block by semi-chaining them. Imagine, you can first pop SR for a specific attack and half-way across the CD, you time your Spell Block for another. That totals a lot of damage that you did not take and if SR still had its old 10 second CD, it would be seriously overpowered. You could pop two SRs inside Spell Block’s CD.

There is, of course, also the Glyph of Spell Reflection which now reduces SR’s CD by 5 seconds, instead of the old 1 second reduction.

Interrupts

As protection warriors, we received two changes total to the way our interrupts work. The first and foremost, shared by all classes, capable of interrupting, is that from here on out, any non-damaging interrupt does not require hit cap to successfully hit. Just like taunts, they now hit automatically, which means that tanks can go with their best survival gear even for fights that require us to perform interrupts.

Until now, we’ve had to maintain hit gear and special buffs to be capable of that job, which especially in 10-man environment has been a bane in our existence. Many do not realize just how much in survival stats we lose in total, when we have to spend them on hit rating, a stat that is otherwise completely useless to us.

Another major change has been the removal of Shield Bash, replaced now by Pummel. There was a lot of discontent about this fact, for a good reason, as Shield Bash is probably one of the most iconic abilities that protection warriors have. Unfortunately, it was removed but to me, in the end, the importance of a more viable interrupt makes more sense. Remember, Pummel is on the standard 10 second CD, unlike Shield Bash which was on 12 second CD. Those 2 seconds shed off our interrupt lets us solo interrupt a lot of abilities, like the prototype adds on Nefarian.

There were of course a lot more updates to this patch and again, I urge everyone to check them out for yourself.

Happy gaming.

Warrior’s Journal: In the Face!

I believe my new warrior character was at level 31 when I last wrote about his progress. Few days have now passed and he has reached level 48 and so far, I cannot find anything about the Arms spec to complain about. It almost seems like Blizzard intentionally chose to make Arms the early level spec of choice, simply due to the rate of abilities you learn. At 15 you got everything you needed to begin tanking and the progression supports the protection tree. For DPS role, the early progression supports Arms a lot more than Fury. In fact, by the time you get to level 44 you will have learned all but a couple of your core abilities; including slam, rend, overpower, etc. After that point, the next upgrade does not even come until in the next expansion, beyond level 60 and from this point on, you will gain fury abilities.

So if you would prefer to level as fury, do not feel disheartened. Stick to Arms first until you begin gaining those Fury powers and then make the switch. I am fully enjoying my time as an Arms warrior so I will stick with it. Actually, I have so many of my Arms abilities that I cannot find a niche to use them, except with the odd “difficult” quest boss.

But enough of that lets have a look at the spec I am currently playing.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LhbcfMMR:MZMZ0

You will notice, from my old spec, I have switched two points from [Second Wind] over to [Drums of War], like I said I would in my previous article. I have also progressed through the 4th tier of talents. You will want to pick them all, trust me. They are all good for you but the difference is in the order you pick them. The reason is, if you check what level you learn Slam, it will not be until level 44, so until then taking [Improved Slam] is just not useful. [Deadly Calm] is an iconic Arms cooldown ability, but also not very useful during normal pve questing. So I started by picking two points in [Blood Frency] and then taking my first point in imp slam at level 43. That way, I would learn Slam at 44 and get my second point immediately after at 45.

Questing Zones

Someone asked me how I am picking the zones that I go quest in, so I figured I would dedicate a paragraph for it. Although, with that said, I do not really have any higher logic to that I pick which way to go. I only have two rules for the selection process and those are 1) somewhere I have not been to yet, 2) once started, do enough quests to complete the loremaster achievement for that particular zone. The simple reason is that I do not think the choice matters a whole lot in the end, not anymore at least, as Cataclysm has improved the zones so much. The loremaster achievement is just so that, if I want to later come back and actually get the titled of Loremaster, I will not have to figure where I left off with the quests but can just move from one zone to another and start them over. Not only that, but Blizzard has done a great job in weaving attractive storylines into each zones and you only truly appreciate it in the end, if you finish all the quests and get to the see the climax.

Ofc, there are some disappointments along the way. Not every zone can be as good, as the previous one. As a human, I naturally started in Elwynn and progressed through Westfall and Redridge Mountains. From there I went south to Duskwood and continued further to Stranglethorn Vale. The problem I ran into was that in Duskwood and especially in STV, the questing became much more scattered, with quest objectives piling in and marked all over the map, so it was much harder to work through them in an organized fashion, like I like to. The Cape of Stranglethorn was a particular bane in my backside because of the bug with the quest lines where you infiltrate the bloodsails. If you follow on my footsteps, make sure that after you start, do not logout before you have finished defending Booty Bay. The reason is that if you logout while you are friendly with the bloodsails, they will be marked hostile again after you come back in. They will not attack you but you cannot return any quests either. The only way I managed to reset it was to visit Kalimdor and come back, and I had to do that twice.

After STV, I figured Thousand Needles would be another fun place to visit, and it definitely was. I fully enjoyed questing in the area, even if some of the quests were rather annoying. The speedbarge was confusing to navigate, at first, and the mobs on the shore that throw alcoholic beverages at you… ohh man. Ever tried to swim when your character is drunk? It does not work. I am also notoriously bad at reading quests and just clicked “whateva” when they pop up. If I had read them better, I would have noticed that I had my own private speed boat at my disposal the whole time and would not have had to swim from A to B, to C, to D, to E, to F … and to P.

A true derp moment…

Warrior Training

The last tip of the day I can give you is to do not fret about visiting your trainer regularly. Always be aware of what you would be gaining and if the ability has no bearing on your current situation, postpone it. You will not find trainers at every corner and flying over to one and back can be rather time consuming. Some good and iconic abilities, ofc, you should go pick up but you can mostly go on for half a dozen levels at a time without any need to train in between.

That is all I have for now. Stay tuned and feel free to e-mail with feedback or leave a comment on the post. I will check regularly to approve them and I really cannot stress enough how much I would prefer to get those comments. That is what the system is there for :)

Warrior’s Journal: Charge!

I have been gnawed upon by a problem with my main warrior character for quite sometime now and that is the limitations of dual speccing in World of Warcraft. I can see Blizzard's logic when they explain why they do not want to add options to maintain more than two permanent specs per character, the way that Rift, for example, allows. However, I am currently joggling to keep track of three tanking specs and two fury specs, one for pvp and one for pve. With the new 4.1 changes that are coming around, looks like I am finally forced to switch my pvp spec to arms, adding even more complications.

Some, more politically correct players would tell you that it is already a waste of time to play fury pvp, simply due to how easy it is to counter. But still, I enjoy the fury spec in all its forms, which is why the change is coming with a heavy heart. With that in mind I have decided to separate my pvp and pve into different characters. That way I can devote each character more fully into the task which I am designing it. That is not just good for me but more than fair for my guild and arena partner.

I have already leveled a couple of characters in Cataclysm but none of them were warriors and I figured would be a fun idea to keep something of a journal through the progress. I actually once planned on doing a similar, more mechanical journal for leveling a protection warrior and I might still return that, perhaps depending on my experiences with this journal.

Choosing a Realm

I chose to level my warrior on Neptulon, a pvp realm where I had the most access to heirlooms, and also because I more in my element when playing on a pvp realm. This is an important decision though and you should not adopt for a pvp realm unless you are comfortable with the fact that, from time to time, members of the opposite factions will jump at the chance to kick your parts around the landscape. However, do keep in mind that the legends surrounding pvp realms are largely exaggerated and often blown out of proportion by explosive examples. It is all true ofc; you are as likely to be attacked by those of your level and those above you, for other reason but to kill you for fun of it. Some max level players go hunting for low level players.

But still, it happens a lot less frequently then people are letting on. I remember leveling my main character, a warrior on a pvp realm, as well as other characters, like my mage and hunter. In all cases, I got attacked maybe a handful of times between levels 1 and 80. From those times, it was rarely by anyone who was actually good at pvp and mostly I would just kill them and go on with my questing.

Choosing a Spec

For now, I have reached level 31 inside two days of leveling and my choice of spec is naturally Arms. I am unsure how fury plays at lower levels these days but my previous experiences did demonstrate an alarming lack of rage. I do not want to go through that again so I specced arms and it is working out quite well. Without dual wielding, hitting targets is easy and mostly die within two globals. For the specific talent selection, so far I have distributed my points in the following manner:

War Academy & Blitz: This was an easy choice because both contribute to my damage and the more I can deal, the faster I can move onto the next quest.

Second Wind & Deep Wounds: This was a bit more tricky; [Deep Wounds] was obvious but [Second Wind] is only a placeholder talent for now, until I finally learn pummel. When that happens, I will switch the two points over to [Drums of War]. Second Wind is still a good choice if you do more battlegrounds than I, but is inferior for free interrupts. Not only is the rage you save valuable but at lower level pvp, if you get stunned, you are most likely going to die.

It is just a simple fact. I have been doing a couple of battlegrounds so far and the experience speaks loud and clear; the classes are not well balanced. Even an heirloom geared player can get 2-3 and if the opponent can stun or kite you, it is game over.

Taste For Blood & Impale: So far this has been the hardest tier to choose between my talents and again, if you opt to play more battlegrounds than I, suggest you alternate your choices a little bit. Hamstring is pretty useless for questing, so I left it out, same as [Sweeping Strikes]. That was a painful choice and I might actually still go back to put a sixth point in this tier. Especially once I start hitting more dungeons, Sweeping Strikes will do some good damage. Just for questing however, I figured getting those overpower procs would be more valuable.

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#Lhbf0M:MZMZ0

I will continue the spec as I gain more levels.

Dungeons

Especially if you have access to a ton of heirlooms and a high level guild, doing dungeons between quests is a perfectly valid way to level up. There are quests at the beginning of every dungeon and most of them are still extensive enough to hold a lot of trash, multiplying the amount of XP you will gain. My first Wailing Caverns run gained me two complete levels, after I had returned the quests. You will also get some gear that helps out with quests in the world, reputation, and just simply bring a change of pace to your routine.

However, be warned. If you have ever experienced bad dungeon runs at max level (which I assume you have if you have ever used the LFD tool before), expect it to be worse at low levels. People have close to no patience, ninja pull at random, and care little whether the tank is ready or the healer has enough mana. Granted, much of the early dungeons like Deadmine do not even need a tank but courtesy should still be paid no matter what. I generally do not grind gear or run a lot of dungeons as I level, but just enough to complete the quests in the dungeons and to get the daily extra XP from random queue.

Getting On With It

There is not a whole lot else that can be said about it. Just get in there and start completing quests. The nice thing about the warrior class is the fact that you get some of the most iconic abilities early on. Both charge and rend, I believe, became available before I had left the starting zone. Soon I also gained overpower and heroic strike, both which I use regularly. My main opener is charge + rend + HS. By that time, most mobs die anyway and I rarely ever drop to zero rage. I have enough to spare for a quick overpower and mortal strike if necessary.

Overpower could very well become more prevalent when I gain three points in the Taste for Blood talent because it lets me proc it from rend. All and all, I cannot find anything wrong with my leveling process so far. Since the Cataclysm revamp, Blizzard obviously made a lot of adjustments to what level and order you gain your abilities and I really cannot complain. The warrior is equally ready to function as a DPS or tank once you hit level 15. Both are viable options.