So lately I've been on a major kick of leveling and gearing alts in a frenzied state. Wanting them for bring to different challenge mode comps. So after I leveled the psycho gnome Deathknight and the literal clone of an asexual, flower-loving Druid. I decided I would next level a character that could actually heal as well...turns out me and 9 minute queue times don't really mix. It also turned out all my friends are out of tanking characters as well. So I looked at my account and with constant poking, prodding, and pushing, I faction changed my very first warrior. When I first started playing all those years ago, my first character was an Undead Warrior by the name of Bonetooth. I was on the trial starter as I didn't have money at the time to fully upgrade. Turns out my friend who got me into WoW was mained Alliance toons. So I shelved him for the time and made Zelix.
After awhile I started to leveled him casually with the help of my girlfriend who ran me through instances. I managed to get him to 70 before I lost interest. Fast Forward to MoP, and I managed to get an Elixir of Ancient Knowledge, and for some weird reason I just shipped it off to Bonetooth and had a blast leveling to 75 before the duration wore off.
So after this culmination of needing another Tanking character and actually having fun on one, I finally made him Alliance. He's now a Worgen Warrior. I plan to keep him Prot/Arms, while I'm serious on Zelix and always play the proper spec for each encounter, I don't plan on doing that with this guy.
Simply put, he's a RP relaxation character. While his story isn't set in stone or completely fleshed out, I plan to work on it. Even then I think my current story is falling apart due to when the Greymane Wall went up and how long it took...go figure...(Probably contractors.) Anyhow, feel free to drop a comment if you'd like me to go more indepth about his Story.
Moving on to actually playing a Protection Warrior,
I've been mostly following Elitist Jerk's basic outlines of tanking. Stacking Mastery, getting Hit/Exp.
I also installed a fun addon called ShieldMaid. Basically: Numbers.
It will keep track of your current rage/ap conversion to Shield Barrier absorb effect, and it'll tell you how much damage you did block with Shield Block once activated. Keeping a watchful on it has pointed out some painful things too me. Absorbs hurt my rage generation, but not the reasons you think.
Simply put: When you can Absorb the Hit, you won't block. Ever. If you can't block you won't roll to critical block and you won't get rage, and this entire build falls apart. I noticed major issues with spike damage with a friend healing my as a holy paladin spamming sacred shield and his Mastery. He agreed I was taking too much damage. But later that night I went an ran another instance with a pug shaman and with no absorbing effects I took a lot less damage. Shield Block was actually useful and wasn't just having all it's damage it was suppose to mitigate magically absorbed.
Another thing that made Shield Block useless was how much parry/dodge I had. - It's not going to be a problem later on once I start to get hit massively with the scaling increase but running around 45% parry, and 25% dodge was pretty hindering to my rage generation and detracted from my "active mitigation". ;)
While I have no math, to back up any of these claims I am fairly sure of them and willing to stand by them for now. Seriously, I casual-core tank. But I myself don't like to do the math. I prefer to DPS instead.
As for my other musings, I missed Heroic Leap so much during leveling. Such great mobility and damage. I really have no idea how other Warriors live with out this and it's glyph. It's a shame people just don't realize how much damage it does. On Sha/Galleon Runs it racks up to a good 7.5%-9% of my total damage done on adds. Plus how the hell do people fall down cliffs with out this thing?
Anyhow, enough of my rambling.
As for my last topic of discussion, my Fury guide. I was committed to writing it and it's slowly slipped away.
It started out nice, but then kinda fell flat as it basically turning out to be just another guide you could just read. So while I haven't given up on it totally, I will go over some of the more advanced stuff in the future blog posts.
In the mean time, if you do need a Fury Guide:
Samayael's Fury Guide.
(*)Drunkbeard's Arms Guide.
First of all, I fully support Samayeal's guide except for his Tier 2 talent choice. Taking Impending Victory and using it rotationally isn't a good idea. It completely invalidates that entire purpose of that tier of talents and it's damage it too poor to warrant the execution time.
(*) If you can, Request a Sticky! - Drunkbeard's guide is currently up at this time but he tends to get banned on the forums and gets his posts deleted. ;P
-Zelix
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
SimC and Bugs.
While in the process of writing a section of my guide I wanted to make sure all my ducks were in order and perfectly aligned. I started to tinker with SimC due to wanting to see stat weights. As a long time Warrior I knew that SimC should be taken with not a grain, but a giant handful of salt. As it's often been bug ridden and as far as I know has no proper full time maintainer of the Warrior module.
As of yesterday, I managed to keep that assumption correct, While tinkering around I got distracted with the simple action priority list and saw raging blow as "actions+=/raging_blow,if=buff.raging_blow.react". Now I'm not the best with SimC's "language" but it seemed to me that from the way .react works, the script was just executing Raging Blow the second it could. While not totally wrong, still not optimal.
Instead:
actions+=/raging_blow,if=(debuff.colossus_smash.up) (buff.raging_blow.stack=2|buff.raging_blow.remains<3)
I basically told the script that it should only use Raging Blow IF CS is up, or Raging Blow is at 2 Stacks, or has only 3 seconds on the charge buff. After I ran the script DPS dropped by 3k, but Raging Blow's Damage Per Execution Time Jumped by 5k. Looking over the results it was a little confusing as to how Raging Blow's damage dropped from 15.9% of my damage done to 11.3%. If anything it should have increased from higher usage during CS.
There in lies the problems. First off, I'm a noob at SimC scripting.
I should have added (buff.raging_blow.stack=2&cooldown.colossus_smash.remains>4.5)
Secondly:
It would probably help if Raging Blow didn't EAT all charges of the buff.
That's right, as of SimC 505-3, Raging Blow consumes all charges of the buff. Now I'm not going to claim to be a major genius of how the hell SimC should work but I have the feeling that the way it values Raging Blow would be greatly heightened if you were able to use three of them during a colossus smash, thus probably pushing crit further up? But I digress.
In other news, I have started to stream! ..somewhat.
That's right you can watch me play and mess up at http://www.twitch.tv/lord_spaztic
While I don't have any raiding videos, I'll be streaming dungeons, LFR runs and a couple of other minor things. Hopefully Challenge Modes soon too!
-Zelix
As of yesterday, I managed to keep that assumption correct, While tinkering around I got distracted with the simple action priority list and saw raging blow as "actions+=/raging_blow,if=buff.raging_blow.react". Now I'm not the best with SimC's "language" but it seemed to me that from the way .react works, the script was just executing Raging Blow the second it could. While not totally wrong, still not optimal.
Instead:
actions+=/raging_blow,if=(debuff.colossus_smash.up) (buff.raging_blow.stack=2|buff.raging_blow.remains<3)
I basically told the script that it should only use Raging Blow IF CS is up, or Raging Blow is at 2 Stacks, or has only 3 seconds on the charge buff. After I ran the script DPS dropped by 3k, but Raging Blow's Damage Per Execution Time Jumped by 5k. Looking over the results it was a little confusing as to how Raging Blow's damage dropped from 15.9% of my damage done to 11.3%. If anything it should have increased from higher usage during CS.
There in lies the problems. First off, I'm a noob at SimC scripting.
I should have added (buff.raging_blow.stack=2&cooldown.colossus_smash.remains>4.5)
Secondly:
It would probably help if Raging Blow didn't EAT all charges of the buff.
That's right, as of SimC 505-3, Raging Blow consumes all charges of the buff. Now I'm not going to claim to be a major genius of how the hell SimC should work but I have the feeling that the way it values Raging Blow would be greatly heightened if you were able to use three of them during a colossus smash, thus probably pushing crit further up? But I digress.
In other news, I have started to stream! ..somewhat.
That's right you can watch me play and mess up at http://www.twitch.tv/lord_spaztic
While I don't have any raiding videos, I'll be streaming dungeons, LFR runs and a couple of other minor things. Hopefully Challenge Modes soon too!
-Zelix
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Wow, I'm behind on this blogging thing.
I'll admit, I'm not the greatest with keeping up with things not related to Warrior, which is weird since this is a Warrior's Blog. *Shifty Eyes*
It's been a long time since my last post, and a lot of things have changed since then and now. MoP is no longer in beta, and has been out for a solid two and a half weeks. Warriors are finally feeling right once again as well.
Anyhow, Just wanted to announce that I'll be keeping up with this blog a bit better in the future, and my first step will be to write a guide on 5.0.5 Fury.
- Zelix
It's been a long time since my last post, and a lot of things have changed since then and now. MoP is no longer in beta, and has been out for a solid two and a half weeks. Warriors are finally feeling right once again as well.
Anyhow, Just wanted to announce that I'll be keeping up with this blog a bit better in the future, and my first step will be to write a guide on 5.0.5 Fury.
- Zelix
Friday, May 4, 2012
Another Warrior Update!
What an exciting Beta! I've been invited at the 2nd to last wave of invites. But I feel like I've experienced a lot more than my friends have. Seriously, need to print up shirts with <I survived Crash Turtles.>, or <The Jade Witch is a Hoax>, or <Why can't healers dispel on Sha of Doubt??>, <I've seen growing Rakes in...BETA>, <Obvious Cheesy Karate Montage is Obviously Cheesy>. Anyhow, with out throwing more spoilers your way. (Seriously, the quests are awesome.) I'll go over some of the new changes over the past couple of days.
Our overall rage gen was nerfed. Went from a 6.5 to a 2.5 rage modifier. This also affected bears too. While this is true this did happen, don't fear unless you're a Protection Warrior or Guardian Druid. The nerf seems to be aimed at them overall because of...
That's right, our three stances have been changed yet again. Battle now generate 100% more Rage, and Berserker Stance generate rage from damage taken. Defensive got kicked in the crotch with a 6% Crit Immunity tied to it's stance.
Basically it boils down to Battle if you're Arms or Fury, Defensive if Prot, and Berserker can go pump iron, crying, while listening to Manowar in a corner. There will be no stance dancing as a Prot Warrior if you're the main tank, your crit immunity has been tied to the stance so you won't be able to get the *2 on your RPS. Mean while, Enraged has been buffed as well from 0.25 to a 0.50 modifier, this further boils down to, 3.6 Weapon: 9 RPS, 13.5 Enraged, 18 Battle Stance, 27 with both! While this seems like a nerf to our Rage and thus damage, it's very minor. Currently we are swimming in rage for no real reason.
Berserker Stance, while I don't have concrete math, I'll just let this be filled with a quote from Vulgrym @ Windrunner in this thread.
Meat Cleaver has recently changed, and despite hating it at first, it's actually really cool.
I had recently recopied Zelix on to beta again, and questing as Fury. It felt really good doing the first Hozen quests and pulling a metric crap ton and then popping DbtS and Whirlwind'ing them all down spamming Raging Blow at 3 stacks and Impending Victory rush procs. Overall, this is a nice change, but my concern is Glyph of Raging Wind, how am I suppose to use this more often to buff Whirlwind?
I may have accidently had the 2nd revision of Meat Cleaver nerfed. As it stacked up it reduced the rage cost of Whirlwind. Quickly becoming one of our strongest DPR attacks. I was one of the first to point this out.
Sweeping Strikes has received some love too recently and I like it, the cooldown has been removed and still keeps the 30 Rage Cost. Essentially we're like more bad ass combat rogues with high uptime. The glyph USED to be cutting it's 10s duration to 5s but making it cleave two extra targets instead of one, but that changed for some odd reason. The new glyph instead makes it so you generate 2 rage per strike cleaved on to another target. It's interesting to say the least but very underwhelming, I liked the old one better though as it was an option to use it. My only complaint is it's duration, I wish it was a tad bit longer on the duration.
If I had to sum them up in one word? : Useless to my own character. Sure they're supposed to be utility and a reason to bring a Warrior to raid. (I thought it was because I have the social grace and elega...damn this lying thing is hard...). On a serious note though, Banners are just a tad bit above useless in a raid environment. Skull banner makes the raid's crit damage 20% higher, Demoralizing Banner is basically an over glorified Thunderclap debuff, and Mocking is useless, unless you have suicidal tendencies.
Skull is raid wide Impale buff, but with Warriors really low crit levels it's practically useless for them as you'd have to use Recklessness in conjunction or pray the stars align and you crit a few times in it's short duration. You'll be bringing this for the Ferals, Fire Mages, and Hunters in the raid. At least Shattering Throw affects you too, which will be brought by Feral with Symbiosis as it currently seems like it's the only real option.
Demoralizing is okay I suppose, but still it's just an extra Thunderclap. I think Blizzard wanted this to be our raid wall, but 10% isn't impressive on the grand scale of things. And the wording is...vague at best. Does this work for raid mechanics like Alsyrazor's tornados, or Blackhorn's Twilight Onslaught? Rag's Intermission Phases with adds? You know, normal shit that a REAL raid cooldown works on without question.
I rather this just be changed to <Strength of Steel Banner> and just place it near allies and have them be under a 10% damage reduction.
Not going to go into detail about Mocking Banner as it's just not a DPS's banner unless it's a niche fight.
Thinking Beth'talic in Firelands. From what I hear, Banner's trend of uselessness extends into PvP. Sure you can Intervene to it, but Intervene lost all of it's glory and no longer breaks roots. So your more logical choices are still just Charging or Heroic Leaping. Will these banners be useful? Yes, but I have the sinking feeling that Blizzard will accidently-on purpose make Raid fights that require Mocking Banner or Demoralizing for add streams to justify giving us a horrible watered down version of other abilities at level 87. The same can be said for Mass Spell Reflect aswell!
Besides a couple of other small changes, mostly nerfing the scaling of Thunderclap, and making Bloodthirst's auto-crit seriously confusing. Nothing much as changed. Our problems are still present and the same issues are still around. So until Blizzard does something expect nerfs every tier content thanks to crit scaling. =)
By the way, I'm still seriously advocating that warriors get another button for our rotation that justifies our ridiculously high passive damage. Most logs have been boiled down to ~45% passive damage for Fury. Something like Savage Roar, Inquisition, Steady Focus.
Anyhow, I'm going to leave off here for now. Have a good one! Also, been thinking this blog is drab and gray...needs some art.
-Zelix
Rage Per Swing was NERFED.
Our overall rage gen was nerfed. Went from a 6.5 to a 2.5 rage modifier. This also affected bears too. While this is true this did happen, don't fear unless you're a Protection Warrior or Guardian Druid. The nerf seems to be aimed at them overall because of...
Stance Changes.
That's right, our three stances have been changed yet again. Battle now generate 100% more Rage, and Berserker Stance generate rage from damage taken. Defensive got kicked in the crotch with a 6% Crit Immunity tied to it's stance.
Basically it boils down to Battle if you're Arms or Fury, Defensive if Prot, and Berserker can go pump iron, crying, while listening to Manowar in a corner. There will be no stance dancing as a Prot Warrior if you're the main tank, your crit immunity has been tied to the stance so you won't be able to get the *2 on your RPS. Mean while, Enraged has been buffed as well from 0.25 to a 0.50 modifier, this further boils down to, 3.6 Weapon: 9 RPS, 13.5 Enraged, 18 Battle Stance, 27 with both! While this seems like a nerf to our Rage and thus damage, it's very minor. Currently we are swimming in rage for no real reason.
Berserker Stance, while I don't have concrete math, I'll just let this be filled with a quote from Vulgrym @ Windrunner in this thread.
Just questing a bit in 'zerker stance and am noticing I get 1 rage for incoming hits north of 3K damage ... I got about 15 rage for ~60K damage.
When I first saw the change posted I was excited but rage from damage is going to have to scale much more sharply than this for that stance to be worth anything. Losing half your health for about half a Slam won't cut it. If this is one of those things that can't be balanced across raid damage vs. PvP, then they should just abandon it now.
Meat Cleaver & Sweeping Strikes.
Meat Cleaver has recently changed, and despite hating it at first, it's actually really cool.
I had recently recopied Zelix on to beta again, and questing as Fury. It felt really good doing the first Hozen quests and pulling a metric crap ton and then popping DbtS and Whirlwind'ing them all down spamming Raging Blow at 3 stacks and Impending Victory rush procs. Overall, this is a nice change, but my concern is Glyph of Raging Wind, how am I suppose to use this more often to buff Whirlwind?
I may have accidently had the 2nd revision of Meat Cleaver nerfed. As it stacked up it reduced the rage cost of Whirlwind. Quickly becoming one of our strongest DPR attacks. I was one of the first to point this out.
Sweeping Strikes has received some love too recently and I like it, the cooldown has been removed and still keeps the 30 Rage Cost. Essentially we're like more bad ass combat rogues with high uptime. The glyph USED to be cutting it's 10s duration to 5s but making it cleave two extra targets instead of one, but that changed for some odd reason. The new glyph instead makes it so you generate 2 rage per strike cleaved on to another target. It's interesting to say the least but very underwhelming, I liked the old one better though as it was an option to use it. My only complaint is it's duration, I wish it was a tad bit longer on the duration.
War Banners.
If I had to sum them up in one word? : Useless to my own character. Sure they're supposed to be utility and a reason to bring a Warrior to raid. (I thought it was because I have the social grace and elega...damn this lying thing is hard...). On a serious note though, Banners are just a tad bit above useless in a raid environment. Skull banner makes the raid's crit damage 20% higher, Demoralizing Banner is basically an over glorified Thunderclap debuff, and Mocking is useless, unless you have suicidal tendencies.
Skull is raid wide Impale buff, but with Warriors really low crit levels it's practically useless for them as you'd have to use Recklessness in conjunction or pray the stars align and you crit a few times in it's short duration. You'll be bringing this for the Ferals, Fire Mages, and Hunters in the raid. At least Shattering Throw affects you too, which will be brought by Feral with Symbiosis as it currently seems like it's the only real option.
Demoralizing is okay I suppose, but still it's just an extra Thunderclap. I think Blizzard wanted this to be our raid wall, but 10% isn't impressive on the grand scale of things. And the wording is...vague at best. Does this work for raid mechanics like Alsyrazor's tornados, or Blackhorn's Twilight Onslaught? Rag's Intermission Phases with adds? You know, normal shit that a REAL raid cooldown works on without question.
I rather this just be changed to <Strength of Steel Banner> and just place it near allies and have them be under a 10% damage reduction.
Not going to go into detail about Mocking Banner as it's just not a DPS's banner unless it's a niche fight.
Thinking Beth'talic in Firelands. From what I hear, Banner's trend of uselessness extends into PvP. Sure you can Intervene to it, but Intervene lost all of it's glory and no longer breaks roots. So your more logical choices are still just Charging or Heroic Leaping. Will these banners be useful? Yes, but I have the sinking feeling that Blizzard will accidently-on purpose make Raid fights that require Mocking Banner or Demoralizing for add streams to justify giving us a horrible watered down version of other abilities at level 87. The same can be said for Mass Spell Reflect aswell!
Other Changes and Closing Statements.
Besides a couple of other small changes, mostly nerfing the scaling of Thunderclap, and making Bloodthirst's auto-crit seriously confusing. Nothing much as changed. Our problems are still present and the same issues are still around. So until Blizzard does something expect nerfs every tier content thanks to crit scaling. =)
By the way, I'm still seriously advocating that warriors get another button for our rotation that justifies our ridiculously high passive damage. Most logs have been boiled down to ~45% passive damage for Fury. Something like Savage Roar, Inquisition, Steady Focus.
Anyhow, I'm going to leave off here for now. Have a good one! Also, been thinking this blog is drab and gray...needs some art.
-Zelix
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Angry Man, Edgar Allen Poe, and Heavy Metal Pyrotechnics!
Sorry for the long time between posts. I had recently got involved in both the Diablo 3, and now MoP Beta!
I meant to be writing an Arms guide for 4.3 but it's kinda fallen by the way-side. (Blame my Diablo addiction.)
I decided to list my thoughts on Warrior changes in MoP, I'm going to start off with the things *I* like. Because then you can read the things I like then skip the things I'm overly negative about! (Won't that be fun?) Once I list these, I'll go into detail about the ones I deem important. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like one of them to be discussed in depth!
Recklessness, Cleaving, Colossus Smash, Enraged Speed, Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Raging Wind, Resonating Power, Victory Rush, Sweeping Strikes, Rude Interruption.
Recklessness, Victory Rush, Mortal Strike/Bloodthirst, Enraged Speed, Cleaving/Resonating Power are currently the most interesting and in my most used list. Colossus Smash, looses value now that there is more useful glyphs. Guardians Druids are looking pretty overpowered too, I expect an influx of them. Rude Interruption is extremely gimmicky, will probably be used on interrupt heavy fights. Raging Wind is decent, but I'm assuming that Fury will move away from Thunderclap as a AoE ability and more to using Cleave/Whirlwind. Sweeping Strikes on the other hand, Why isn't this base line? This has been around since Wotlk and has been taken every time!
Personally, I'll probably be running MS/BT, Victory, Cleaving/Resonating.
Recklessness loose points in my eyes simply because healers are use to it. I'd rather increase my self-healing or healing received than decrease the damage I take for 12 seconds every 5 minutes. Enraged Speed basically turns Berserkers Rage into a mini-Sprint. And hopefully as Fury with enough uptime, I could replace my boot's enchant with a full dps enchant...maybe. (Thank you Kurn and Jaymz for both teaching me the value of MSI) Joking aside. Enraged Speed also looses some value to me as well, we can Charge, Heroic Leap, Intervene to get around. Is 20% MSI really needed, much less at the cost of developing bad habits? Like using Berserkers Rage between a fight in a 5 man then needing it 15 seconds later to Enrage myself for Fury's Raging Blow.
Useless duds: Overpower, Hoase Voice
Going to be brief here. Arms currently cannot support the rage cost of using both Heroic Strike and Slam, much less Cleave and Slam. Battle Shout currently has a 1 minute cooldown, and most everyone should be use to this by now. Glyph'd or not, you'll have the same amount of rage generated at the end of the fight.
Another let down is that Fury still currently scales either amazingly well, or amazingly shitty. In this example, Fight duration is 300 seconds (5 minutes), we'll be following Cata Formulas, and that only thing that changes is how much haste rating equals 1% Haste, and that 12% Haste doesn't happen by accident in T14 gear. Also, we're ignoring misses, and offhand swings right now.
Point is, 12% Haste will only give you 237 extra rage over a 5 minute stand still fight. That's pretty shitty scaling for something that doesn't happen from having a couple of pieces of gear having haste. Getting more crit thus a higher enrage uptime is a better use of stats, which also makes our mastery useful in the first damn place.
Now, That's an example of how scaling is amazingly shitty, but what about the Amazingly well? Just go back to T12, Alysrazor as Beta Fury. With the flying buffs, it would become a cycle that fed into itself.
Massive Haste = More Swings = More chances to Flurry = More Rage = More Abilities Used = More chances to Crit = More Enrages = Even more Rage = More rage dumped into Unproc'd Wild Strikes and Heroic Strikes = More Damage. While Flurry branches and loops back to feed Massive Haste...
Moving on, another annoying factor is just how high our White Damage is for no justified reason. It's one thing to do a lot of white damage because I pressed a Savage Roar-esque button that increased it's damage because I had a great uptime. It's a whole different animal when it's baseline, what's to stop Warriors in T14 LFR and 5 Mans from just AFK'ing through fights? Currently our white damage is SO high that unless you knew better you might actually be thinking that Warrior who was at the lower end of the "middle pack" in Skada was okay.
Unless Blizzard pulls their heads out of their asses and gives us a DECENT amount of crit, baseline and scale us around that. Fury is going to be a major problem. Cata design was horrible. Being nerfed every tier was an annoying sight. But when your class is balanced around only having maybe 10% crit but yet somehow you kept up with everyone else for the top spot for only one tier, you're going to cause problems next tier when Warrior's crit jumps up to 20%. Both for PvE and PvP.
Anyhow, I've covered what I wanted to say and I'm getting tired so I am going to leave this off here.
I'll be posting more content later about the Beta! I'm really excited to have it an to actually post feedback!
Comment if you'd like something explained in more detail or think my basic math is wrong or too open ended! =P
-Zelix
I meant to be writing an Arms guide for 4.3 but it's kinda fallen by the way-side. (Blame my Diablo addiction.)
I decided to list my thoughts on Warrior changes in MoP, I'm going to start off with the things *I* like. Because then you can read the things I like then skip the things I'm overly negative about! (Won't that be fun?) Once I list these, I'll go into detail about the ones I deem important. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like one of them to be discussed in depth!
Things I like.
- NEW ICON ART!!!
- Deep Wounds is the new Rend that auto applies!
- Charging as Fury!
- Thunderclap as a viable AoE ability!
- Dragon Roar!
- Die by the Sword baseline for Arms/Fury!
- Disarm, and Taunt no longer has a Stance Requirment!
- Intervene no longer has a minimum range!
- Awesome Minor Glyphs!
Things I dislike.
- Fury RNG.
- Glyph of Sweeping Strikes not being baseline.
- Fury RNG.
- Die by the Sword's Duration.
- Arms not needing to use Heroic Strike.
- Lack of any mechanic that lets Mastery or Haste scale better.
- Fury RNG.
- Still having crappy Warcraft 3 Icon Art.
- Level 75 Talent Choices.
- Avatar and Storm Bolt being on the same tier at level 90.
- Too many Major Glyphs that are good.
- FURY RAGE RNG RAGE.
Icon Art.
If you've hung around me before, I've probably said something about how tired I am of the Warrior's WC3 icon art. While it was cool and retro at first, it's now a plain annoying. Almost all classes have been getting art updates lately. So it's a very nice to see Raging Blow, Avatar, and Storm Bolt 's art icons change. Hoping this trend continues.Major & Minor Glyphs .
According to Blizzard, you will be changing glyphs for your personal needs. Warriors go from having jack shit, to so many choices it's not even fair that half of these are not baseline. Ignoring unused Major Glyphs, for both Arms and Fury I'll point out some of the best.Recklessness, Cleaving, Colossus Smash, Enraged Speed, Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Raging Wind, Resonating Power, Victory Rush, Sweeping Strikes, Rude Interruption.
Recklessness, Victory Rush, Mortal Strike/Bloodthirst, Enraged Speed, Cleaving/Resonating Power are currently the most interesting and in my most used list. Colossus Smash, looses value now that there is more useful glyphs. Guardians Druids are looking pretty overpowered too, I expect an influx of them. Rude Interruption is extremely gimmicky, will probably be used on interrupt heavy fights. Raging Wind is decent, but I'm assuming that Fury will move away from Thunderclap as a AoE ability and more to using Cleave/Whirlwind. Sweeping Strikes on the other hand, Why isn't this base line? This has been around since Wotlk and has been taken every time!
Personally, I'll probably be running MS/BT, Victory, Cleaving/Resonating.
Recklessness loose points in my eyes simply because healers are use to it. I'd rather increase my self-healing or healing received than decrease the damage I take for 12 seconds every 5 minutes. Enraged Speed basically turns Berserkers Rage into a mini-Sprint. And hopefully as Fury with enough uptime, I could replace my boot's enchant with a full dps enchant...maybe. (Thank you Kurn and Jaymz for both teaching me the value of MSI) Joking aside. Enraged Speed also looses some value to me as well, we can Charge, Heroic Leap, Intervene to get around. Is 20% MSI really needed, much less at the cost of developing bad habits? Like using Berserkers Rage between a fight in a 5 man then needing it 15 seconds later to Enrage myself for Fury's Raging Blow.
Useless duds: Overpower, Hoase Voice
Going to be brief here. Arms currently cannot support the rage cost of using both Heroic Strike and Slam, much less Cleave and Slam. Battle Shout currently has a 1 minute cooldown, and most everyone should be use to this by now. Glyph'd or not, you'll have the same amount of rage generated at the end of the fight.
Moving on to Minor Glyphs..
Just going to list these fast as these have become my new favorites and they needed nick names.
- "Angry Man", My friend Jaymz calls Guardian of Ancient Kings "Angry Man" and I'm stealing it!
- Edgar Allen Poe, Execute's damage pretty much rolls anything, Thus this glyph makes total sense.
- Heavy Metal Pyrotechnics...need I say more?
Die by the Sword.
Hopefully a nail in the coffin for Shield Wall macros. I'm not totally happy with the duration. I'd like a Glyph (Minor one at that!) that reduced the parry to nil, but increased duration. Otherwise we're going to see a lot of guilds stacking Warriors on the next tight enrage fights like Baleroc, or Chimeron. Don't forget that Taunt no longer requires Defensive Stance.Fury RNG.
Fury is currently a mess, Flurry no longer proc from Crits, and Enrage only procs from Crits. (Flip'd basically.) With non-talented, and low crit chances it's practically impossible to have good uptime on Enrage which enables Raging Blow, as well as fueling our entire rotation. Due to a bug Bloodthirst currently does not offer the 40% crit as advertised, which only complicate matters.Another let down is that Fury still currently scales either amazingly well, or amazingly shitty. In this example, Fight duration is 300 seconds (5 minutes), we'll be following Cata Formulas, and that only thing that changes is how much haste rating equals 1% Haste, and that 12% Haste doesn't happen by accident in T14 gear. Also, we're ignoring misses, and offhand swings right now.
Now, That's an example of how scaling is amazingly shitty, but what about the Amazingly well? Just go back to T12, Alysrazor as Beta Fury. With the flying buffs, it would become a cycle that fed into itself.
Massive Haste = More Swings = More chances to Flurry = More Rage = More Abilities Used = More chances to Crit = More Enrages = Even more Rage = More rage dumped into Unproc'd Wild Strikes and Heroic Strikes = More Damage. While Flurry branches and loops back to feed Massive Haste...
Moving on, another annoying factor is just how high our White Damage is for no justified reason. It's one thing to do a lot of white damage because I pressed a Savage Roar-esque button that increased it's damage because I had a great uptime. It's a whole different animal when it's baseline, what's to stop Warriors in T14 LFR and 5 Mans from just AFK'ing through fights? Currently our white damage is SO high that unless you knew better you might actually be thinking that Warrior who was at the lower end of the "middle pack" in Skada was okay.
Unless Blizzard pulls their heads out of their asses and gives us a DECENT amount of crit, baseline and scale us around that. Fury is going to be a major problem. Cata design was horrible. Being nerfed every tier was an annoying sight. But when your class is balanced around only having maybe 10% crit but yet somehow you kept up with everyone else for the top spot for only one tier, you're going to cause problems next tier when Warrior's crit jumps up to 20%. Both for PvE and PvP.
Anyhow, I've covered what I wanted to say and I'm getting tired so I am going to leave this off here.
I'll be posting more content later about the Beta! I'm really excited to have it an to actually post feedback!
Comment if you'd like something explained in more detail or think my basic math is wrong or too open ended! =P
-Zelix
Friday, April 6, 2012
The Idiot Helm
I'm sure this is pretty late into 4.3 to rant about this, but I still want too.
People on my realm, posters on Warrior forums, even saw 8/8H DS Warrior who runs a blog is using this item. I've was whispered by someone and called stupid for still wearing Greathelm of the Voracious Maw instead of The Idiot Helm. I really hate this thing, it's a plague and every class that wasn't designed to wear it, Is wearing it. I don't care if it's cheap, or you're casual, or that it is easy to obtain. You just should not be wearing this if you're a Warrior. The helm out of the Hour of Twilight Instance will hold you over until you can get at least the Raid Finder tier.
Now, in all fairness it seems like I'm hating on this item for no reason. (Or because I am a elitest snob.)
But I'll present logical reasoning as to why that helm is horrible for an Arms Warrior.
Arms Stat Weighs, AKA (Which gives me the most DPS.)
Strength -> 8% Hit -> 26 Expertise -> Critical Strike -> Mastery ->> Haste
Hit and Expertise is Accuracy Stats, They make sure you hit the boss.
Critical Strike allows you have a higher chance to do double damage with abilities, and procs a stacking DoT called Deep Wounds. Mortal Strike crits cause you to Enrage, and when you crit you deal 30% additional damage.
Arms Mastery: More mastery increases the chance to deal extra damage and proc Sudden Death.
These extra strikes can crit, which adds to our Deep Wounds damage.
Haste decreases your white swing timer, and allows you to cast Slam faster...BUT.
Having a 3.6s or 3.8s Weapon Swing time and only having off maybe 0.02 seconds doesn't do a lot.
And Slam already casts at a 0.5 base cast time (Less than a GCD) so there is no need to lower it more.
Logically, If you look at the secondary stats. GotVM will beat TIH.
But what about Strength, it's suppose to be the BEST stat, thanks to reforging, reaching Hit and Expertise caps is a breeze. But the thing about Arms is that Crit is so important that it can even rival strength's value of DPS gain.
- Zelix
People on my realm, posters on Warrior forums, even saw 8/8H DS Warrior who runs a blog is using this item. I've was whispered by someone and called stupid for still wearing Greathelm of the Voracious Maw instead of The Idiot Helm. I really hate this thing, it's a plague and every class that wasn't designed to wear it, Is wearing it. I don't care if it's cheap, or you're casual, or that it is easy to obtain. You just should not be wearing this if you're a Warrior. The helm out of the Hour of Twilight Instance will hold you over until you can get at least the Raid Finder tier.
Now, in all fairness it seems like I'm hating on this item for no reason. (Or because I am a elitest snob.)
But I'll present logical reasoning as to why that helm is horrible for an Arms Warrior.
Arms Stat Weighs, AKA (Which gives me the most DPS.)
Strength -> 8% Hit -> 26 Expertise -> Critical Strike -> Mastery ->> Haste
Hit and Expertise is Accuracy Stats, They make sure you hit the boss.
Critical Strike allows you have a higher chance to do double damage with abilities, and procs a stacking DoT called Deep Wounds. Mortal Strike crits cause you to Enrage, and when you crit you deal 30% additional damage.
Arms Mastery: More mastery increases the chance to deal extra damage and proc Sudden Death.
These extra strikes can crit, which adds to our Deep Wounds damage.
Haste decreases your white swing timer, and allows you to cast Slam faster...BUT.
Having a 3.6s or 3.8s Weapon Swing time and only having off maybe 0.02 seconds doesn't do a lot.
And Slam already casts at a 0.5 base cast time (Less than a GCD) so there is no need to lower it more.
Logically, If you look at the secondary stats. GotVM will beat TIH.
But what about Strength, it's suppose to be the BEST stat, thanks to reforging, reaching Hit and Expertise caps is a breeze. But the thing about Arms is that Crit is so important that it can even rival strength's value of DPS gain.
- Zelix
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Getting Started.
I haven't ran a blog before, but I thought I'd take a crack at it.
Hoping to at least have a couple of updates every so often, Mostly talking about random stuff in general.
I thought I'd open up with a nice post about myself, and my characters.
Most people refer to me as Z, or Zelix, or even Spazz of older friends, my real name is Austin and I'm computer gamer. Lately I've only been playing WoW with my girlfriend. Enjoying doing old school raids, casual-core LFRs, and HoT Heroic to gear up alts.
My main is a DPS Warrior. I hardcore raided for 3.3, after the pre-cata patch dropped, the guild decided to go 10man and horde. I didn't want to follow and money was a factor. The trend of bad luck continued as I was lined up to be in a very good guild at the time of 4.1, but real life decided to kick me in the nuts. I had to leave to avoid further trouble. After taking care of my real life problems, I was able to join a heroic-progression minded guild on my server, and managed to get 6/7 for Firelands in 4.2 since then, they've disbanded due to the majority of the core getting fed up and leaving.
Still not having money to transfer off server, and being stuck with the option of joining the only guilds left being casual raiding. I chose not to raid hardcore for 4.3. My desire to raid is still strong, perhaps if I can find an actual guild requiring my class I would actually raid again.
Well, that about sums up this brief intro post, going to use this as filler for now.
Hoping to actually post some real content soon!
-Zelix
Hoping to at least have a couple of updates every so often, Mostly talking about random stuff in general.
I thought I'd open up with a nice post about myself, and my characters.
Most people refer to me as Z, or Zelix, or even Spazz of older friends, my real name is Austin and I'm computer gamer. Lately I've only been playing WoW with my girlfriend. Enjoying doing old school raids, casual-core LFRs, and HoT Heroic to gear up alts.
My main is a DPS Warrior. I hardcore raided for 3.3, after the pre-cata patch dropped, the guild decided to go 10man and horde. I didn't want to follow and money was a factor. The trend of bad luck continued as I was lined up to be in a very good guild at the time of 4.1, but real life decided to kick me in the nuts. I had to leave to avoid further trouble. After taking care of my real life problems, I was able to join a heroic-progression minded guild on my server, and managed to get 6/7 for Firelands in 4.2 since then, they've disbanded due to the majority of the core getting fed up and leaving.
Still not having money to transfer off server, and being stuck with the option of joining the only guilds left being casual raiding. I chose not to raid hardcore for 4.3. My desire to raid is still strong, perhaps if I can find an actual guild requiring my class I would actually raid again.
Well, that about sums up this brief intro post, going to use this as filler for now.
Hoping to actually post some real content soon!
-Zelix
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