To my mind, the news from the Worldwide Invitational is big enough to push back our discussion of DPS gear for the starter raider. (We most certainly will talk more about it, believe me.) Several statements from the invitational need discussion for us warriors, I think, especially worth considering how they may well change the design philosophy of the class.
Also, yay, Diablo III. It's especially appropriate that we get the news about Titan's Grip on the same day as we get our spiritual forefathers, the barbarian class, back. So, you may ask, what exactly was said about warriors that was interesting?
Warrior
Wanted to make the class feel more like Warcraft III -- put the Bladestorm Shockwave in, and tweaked Arms and Protection.
Shockwave will help with Prot damage problem
Titan's Grip is confirmed -- dual wielding 2h weapons.
Every Tuesday, Chris Jahosky contributes Build Shop, which takes a look into one of the many talent specs available to players. This week, Michael Gray guest writes to talk about the perennial Warrior build for the upcoming Season 4.
If you're like me, you're looking forward to June 24th with almost breathless anticipation. New season, new ratings, new competition. And like hundreds (thousands?) of others, we have a Warrior sitting patiently at the stables, prepping for the gates to open. He sits there, foaming at the mouth, smiling nervously at his partner Druid or Priest, with Mortal Strike almost literally visible in his pixellated eyes.
Build Shop has discussed Warrior hybrid builds previously, but that 28/33 build was focused on actual hybrid play - a mix of PvP and PvE. The classic Arena-based "Mortal Strike Hybrid" starts off with at least 31 points sitting in the Arms tree -- you can't have a "Mortal Strike Hybrid" without Mortal Strike. Mortal Strike is a foundation of the Arena build. While there's leeway earlier in the Arms and Fury trees for this build, the deeper in the trees you get, the more certain talents become "mandatory."
After the break, let's talk about the talents and whirligigs that make the Mortal Strike Hybrid so popular and powerful in the Arena.
Tank Talk is WoW Insider's new raid-tanking column, promising you an exciting and educational look at the world of getting the stuffing thrashed out of you in a 10- or 25-man raid. The column will be rotated amongst Matthew Rossi (Warrior/Paladin), Adam Holisky (Warrior), Michael Gray (Paladin), and myself (Druid). Our aim is to use this column to debate and discuss class differences, raid-tanking strategies, tips, tricks, and news concerning all things meatshieldish. At least, that's what the others said they were doing. I intend to use it mostly as a soapbox to complain. Absolute power tends to......something something.
Welcome to Tank Talk. I am your bear Druid hostess for this week, with a topic that occurred to me while reading a recent article here on the site. Eliah Hecht wrote that his guild is facing a not-uncommon tank shortage and that he has considered the possibility of leveling a tanking class to 70 before Wrath, or tanking on a Death Knight afterwards. A number of people on my server and in my guild have talked about doing the same thing, or switching mains once Wrath hits. With so many people playing Death Knights, I think it's very possible that more people will discover they enjoy -- or at least, don't mind -- tanking, and may seek to do so in a raid environment without necessarily knowing what they've really signed up for.
From those of us who have tanked raid content in vanilla WoW or BC, here are the 10 questions you'll want to ask yourself if you're considering the possibility of tanking serious raid content:
Curse has noticed a very intriguing change to the Death Knight information page. The descriptions of each of the talent trees has been changed. Here are the old descriptions:
Blood: Talents in this tree focus on damage dealing abilities. Blood Presence increases damage output by a percentage.
Frost: Talents in this tree focus on tanking abilities. Frost Presence increases threat and lowers damage taken by a percentage.
Unholy: Talents in this tree have a variety of functions including summons, diseases, and PvP-focused abilities. Unholy Presence increases attack speed and reduces the global cooldown on death knight abilities.
Warriors can rejoice today, basking in their newly leaked talents from Wrath of the Lich King. This information has been first obtained through a [redacted] but has since been independently confirmed by WoW Insider staff. Note that the information you're seeing here is correct, while the wiki page you're seeing now could be updated with false information. However, that's where our confirmation of the data comes into play.
Read on after the break for the full list we have so far. This is a spoiler, so don't look unless you want to!
Update: At Blizzard's request, we have removed the information from our site. Update: Please don't post notes or references to notes in the comments. We're just going to remove them. Thanks.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors knew that there would be discussion of whether or not warriors are broken, and so decided to provide picture evidence that at least one warrior is broken indeed! Matthew Rossi apologizes for that pun. Really, he couldn't be expected to resist it, now could he? Look, mob violence never solved anything.
I have in the past written about what's not broken in the warrior class. So you might think that a column entitled "Are warriors underpowered?" would be easily answered with a no, and then we could move on.
And so it is. See you next week!
Oh, right. I still have to write a column. Also, to be fair, the answer is more complicated than no, although it ultimately works out to a no by means of averages. Warriors in the whole are not underpowered or broken, but they have some issues. Some aspects that have always annoyed me. It's too bad I don't have a weekly column about warriors so I can talk about that, isn't it?
Every week, Alex Ziebart comes to you with Hybrid Theory. A column with... theories about hybrids, I guess. I mean, that's what it says at least. I guess it could be something else, but probably not. Honestly, you should probably just read it and find out for yourself.
In the past here on Hybrid Theory, we've discussed what Hybrids are capable of doing in a raid, as far as beneficial talents and utilities. We talked about the fact that a few well-placed hybrids in your raid can take your DPS from 'good' to 'horrifyingly good.' All of this comes to the front again in a boss that many high-end raid groups are clashing against right now: Brutallus.
If you haven't read anything on this boss yet, it's the single largest gear check in WoW yet. It's Burning Crusade's Patchwerk, mostly. To beat Brutallus, you need roughly 29,000 sustained DPS across your entire raid. If you don't pull that off, you hit his enrage timer and he destroys all of you. Simple as that! If you're lucky you can burn off a final two or three percent of his health after the enrage, but that's about as far as you go. That three percent is about 300,000 health, so don't get too confident.
What's up with Mortal Strike? And why is it, when Blizzard feels that a class or spec needs to be made viable in Arenas -- and let's face it, the game is all about Arenas now, isn't it? -- they give them a Mortal Strike-style debuff? When the developers were figuring out how to raise Hunters' representation in Arenas, they changed Aimed Shot in Patch 2.3 to give a heal-gimping debuff similar the the Arms Warrior's bread and butter ability.
Enter Patch 2.4 in the PTRs. When Kalgan finally descended upon the Shaman forums, he said that Shamans were definitely getting buffed just in time to quell the wake of an uproar to the nerfs made to the Elemental spec. Along with the reversal of the Nature's Swiftness and Elemental Mastery shared cooldown, the current iteration of the progressive patch is seeing a change to the Shaman's Flametongue Weapon and Totem, which happens to be -- surprise, surprise -- a Mortal Strike-style debuff. Yawn.
While it's certainly a welcome change, considering that Shamans get so little love, frankly it's getting a little boring. Allie mentioned calls for putting the buff on every class (Mortal Sheep or Mortal Portal for Mages is a classic), so this begs the question... is a Mortal Strike-type ability the only way to make a class or spec viable in the Arenas? Aside from the fact that Mortal Strike Warriors are conceivably the most popular class & spec, healing debuffs are clearly one of the game-breaking abilities in Arenas. With Resilience making crit-based and burst damage specs less and less viable, is there really a need for another Mortal Strike? Can't Blizzard make another buff to make a spec Arena-viable without using the same old trick? What do you guys think? How much more creative can you be?
Welcome back to Build Shop! This time we're checking out an Arms Warrior Poleaxe build (41/20/0), and what a good time to do it, thanks to the newly implemented changes to the talent trees in patch 2.3. The Arms tree for warriors has a long and illustrious PvP history, and it's just gotten even stronger. Moving Death Wish out of the Fury tree clears Warriors up to go deeper into Arms to pick up those last few talents and is a very welcome change for me.
This is an Arms build mostly focusing on PvP using a Polearm or Axe, but shift those 5 specialization points around depending on what weapon you're using.
Welcome everyone to this week's edition of Ask WoW Insider, where we throw your questions out to the wisdom of crowds. Last week we looked at how to approach PuGs when everyone can see your spec in one click, and this week we have another talent-related question. David wants to know if there are any truly great builds that are highly viable in both PvP and PvE:
I'm on my second re-roll and finally have my character to 70, fairly well geared and have found myself in the exact same position as before... My PvE 5-man spec is entirely unsuitable for raids, or PVP, my raid spec is unsuitable for soloing or PvP, and my PvP spec is useless outside of BGs and Arenas! I was previously a Warrior, who needs to be Prot for tanking but Arms/Fury for Arena and I at least only had to bounce between two specs. Now I'm a Mage, and I have to consider bouncing between THREE specs to be what everyone expects me to be if I expect to be competitve!
I know the common answer is "suck it up and pay to respec whenever you want to do whatever you want to do" because dailies give out so much free money, but this doesn't work for my mage with however many hundreds of gold and hours of work put into getting my Frozen Shadoweave set. The problem is, I rolled a mage for the exclusive purpose of not HAVING to fill two roles with one character and not having to respec every time I wanted to branch out and experience multiple aspects of the game.
So, my question is this: Is there any class+spec out there, that is equally effective and in demand for 5-man instances, raids, solo play and PvP?
You heard the man -- what's your answer? How do you find a balance between PvP and PvE-oriented specs, and how do you maximize your ability to enjoy all the types of content you want to enjoy without spending a fortune respeccing every 5 minutes?
We know you've got questions, and Ask WoW Insider wants 'em! Send us your queries at ask AT wowinsider DOT com.
Warriors, turn and face the community! Once again Schwick has compiled a list of what the EU forums put forth as the issues of a specific class, this time our buddies in plate without mana, the warriors. You've seen what the community had to say about druids, about rogues, priests and hunters. What do they want to see changed for warriors? Here are a few highlights.
Block value Currently Block values aren't affecting Warriors that much. An idea to make this stat more desirable could be to enhance the Threat levels of Sunder Armor and Devastate based upon Block values. This would also help with the aggro generation on mobs/bosses.
I can't really say I disagree with this one. I'd like to see more done with block.
Improved Mortal Strike While Mortal Strike is nice, this talent doesn't help much. Most Warriors agree that the reduced cooldown and more damage don't have much affect. Removing this with something more useful might help.
I see a lot of warriors saying this, but while I get the logic that speccing that deep into the tree loses you fury talents like flurry, I still find myself agreeing with WarriorPWNS when he argues for Imp MS. The talent could maybe use a little buff, but it's hardly useless.
If you're keep to see what the posters had to say (including what seems to me to be a lamentable focus on gutting fury of all its good PvP talents in exchange for, well, nothing) then take a look here, s'il vous plaît.
Before we get rolling I wanted to link to this site. He doesn't always have complimentary things to say but I find the candor refreshing, and it's nice to see this post. Yes, a paladin/warrior team does well in the arenas. No, it's not the end of the freaking world. Quite honestly, anything that gets paladins and warriors to cooperate is a good thing in my opinion. There are some good posts back in the archive there on PvP builds, various spec issues, patch notes and so on. And this post about Black Morass and Shattered Halls mirrors my own views exactly. If you're interested in warriors, especially arms warriors, you should go give it a look see.
Now, to discuss the warrior. Specifically, the future of the warrior in 2.3, as I managed to port my horde warrior over to test this week and played around with specs as much as my limited gold allowed (getting an initial free respec helped). Things to tell you up front: a 41/5/15 arms/fury/prot build can tank heroics with average tanking gear now. I'm talking Latro's Shifting Sword as a tanking weapon average. I did heroic Mana Tombs and heroic Sethekk on test with minimal issue (the warlock pulled aggro a couple of times, nothing earth shattering, I got it back) and so far as I could tell without being able to use a threat meter because I forgot to install one, Mortal Strike is getting the threat bonus they promised from Tactical Mastery.
So it seems to me that, if things continue as I've experienced them, we may be looking at the return of the Arms warrior as the default, cookie cutter spec. And to be honest, I don't know if I like that idea.
Every week Matthew Rossi brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, a column dedicated to that guy who keeps Mortal Striking you in the arenas, Whirlwinding in Alterac Valley, popping Intimidating Shout in Arathi Basin, and standing there rooted, sheeped or sometimes Death Coiled in Warsong Gulch. Yeah, we all know you hate that we get to wear plate. We hate that you get to set us on fire, if it helps any.
This week, instead of talking more about tanking (although you can expect a tanking article covering Protection spec in more detail soon, covering the abilities unique to that talent tree like Shield Slam and Defiance) I've decided we should talk about two related, but not identical, aspects of the warrior - PvE DPS and PvPing. There are some myths to dispel, and some good and bad news for those of us who enjoy the idea of gearing up in the heaviest armor and smashing things with a great two handed whacking stick. There's so much to cover that I expect I'll have to come back to each subject again in the future, but you have to start somewhere.
First off, as most experienced warriors will tell you, PvE DPS is actually better if you dual wield. I say this as a devotee of the two hander, mind you. When I raided, I stayed Mortal Strike and used a Sulfuras as my weapon of choice, and I still put out very respectable numbers even in Naxxramas. But I could never match the damage of a dual-wielding fury/arms warrior. I sacrificed that damage for big crits and whirldwind damage which saw me top the charts in places like the suppression room where I could compete with the mages and at the same time I had much less threat than friends who used a Crul in one hand and a Thunderfury in the other. Granted, the proc on TF meant that we had some spirited debates about whether or not you should offhand it in a DPS role at all, or just tank with it, but I won't bore you with that specific and outdated a debate.
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