The Doctor's Report: Warriors

So I was sat in this chair last night thinking about all the new things that the new expansion is going to bring, and I'm so happy with the way Blizzard is taking their game. Then it dawned on me. What about what's already in-game? There's so many things that they're addressing in the new expansion like the removal of reforging, dodge/parry, hit/expertise, the addition of "fun" stats like Cleave and Lifesteal, that I'd just like to take some time and analyse something that is already in-game that still needs fixing. As my main is a Warrior, I thought I'd start there. What follows is entirely my opinion and most of the examples that will be given are going to be PvP-Orientated.

Class: Warrior

Role(s): Melee DPS/Tank

Strengths:

• High Mobility
• High Utility
• God-Tier Burst Damage
• Non-dispellable Fear.
• Almost unpeelable
• Strong AoE Damage/Pressure
• Probably the best AoE Burst of any class currently (Patch 5.4)
• Two Spell Reflects
• Two Interrupts

Weaknesses:

• Very squishy when caught off-guard.
• Damage very limited when out of melee range.
• Can't generate resources when out of Melee Range (Exception being Charge)
• Two methods of CC have to be chosen as talents at the cost of less burst damage.
• (PvP) Selfhealing requires you to be nearly at Execute-Range to be of any use.
• All of our burst is negated by Parries/Dodges
• Damage in Defensive Stance is severely limited.

Now I know I might have missed some things out, but these are the first to spring to mind. I'd like to suggest a few changes to the things that I've mentioned on this list.

1. Mobility - I would happily lose some mobility for more damage on our lesser-used spells, such as Overpower, which is currently almost useless.
2. Our Utility is too much in certain circumstances. Personally I would change Skull Banner to be a personal CD, as paired with certain classes (Destro Lock/Ele Shaman) the damage that gets done in the 8s that it's up is sometimes just too much.
3. Our burst damage is a bit RNG. Sometimes I'll hit for 50-60k Slams, other times it's for 100k+ against players with 75% resilience. This RNG needs to go.
4. Being unpeelable isn't fun for the other players. If we've got this much mobility and Blizzard is happy with it, then some of the damage, naturally needs to go. Would like to see some damage shifted away from Slam, and on to either Overpower or Execute. Make Execute feel like it's designed to kill someone, rather than Slam hitting for ~30k more.
5. Make Disrupting Shout and Mass Spell Reflect replace their weaker, baseline versions. It's not cool to be able to just straight up ruin someone's day because you can Pummel, Reflect, then Disrupt and Mass Reflect after that.
6. Second Wind, in my opinion, needs to be baseline, the fact that the only way Warriors can get healing is by killing a target is ridiculous when every other melee can heal itself WITHOUT talents. At least give us some healing that only requires us to... be alive.
7. Colossus Smash needs to always land. I.E. Impossible to dodge or parry. A lot of people might jump out of their chairs at this, but it's the same situation as a Deep Freeze or Frost Nova. To ensure decent burst goes off as a Mage, the target needs to be Frozen. To ensure decent burst goes off as a Warrior, the target needs to have CS on it. Deep Freeze can't be parried, or dodged, it' can be reflected and that's it.

I could probably keep going, but I'll probably get someone shouting at me for these anyway.

As always, if you want to leave a comment or some feedback, you can add me on skype (Veren1994), or sign up on pvp-live.com and drop a message to Exhil in our livechat (pvp-live.com/pvpchat). I'm always happy to discuss my opinions.

Thanks for reading!

Exhil MD

Warlords of Draenor - The Savior of PvP?

At Blizzcon this year, it was announced that Blizzard had plans to change a load of things about PvP. I'll summarize these in a brief list:

• New World PvP Zone (Ashran)
• UI Changes
• Rewards from Battlegrounds
• Trial of the Gladiator

Now straight away, I saw this list and thought "Blizzard are making... good PvP changes?" and immediately started doubting how the panel was going to go. However over the course of the next 10-20 minutes, I was in complete awe of what Blizzard wanted to do with Warlords of Draenor regarding PvP content.

Ashran:

So according to what we were told at Blizzcon 2013, Ashran is a new World PvP zone located off of the northeast coast of Tanaan Jungle (Hellfire, roughly). It's going to be a staging area for the Alliance and Horde in the new expansion, and for lore reasons that you probably don't really care about, they want all the goodies that the island has in abundance, of course. It's going to feature a base for either faction, plus a number of "hotspots" similar to Wintergrasp and Tol Barad that both factions are going to want to control.

What sets Ashran apart from these two other "World Battlegrounds" is that Ashran is going to be completely sandbox. The "Timeless Isle of PvP" in the words of Tom Chilton, where there'll be regular PvP Objectives and Goals, similar to the Alterac Valley of Vanilla, where fights could last for days on end before a victor was decided. What really puts the cherry on the cake for this new island though, is the implementation of cross-realm technology.

Blizzard understand that some servers are tilted very heavily in the favour of one faction (Outland, Sylvannas, Stormscale - Looking at you), and so are going to use the XRealm technology to alter the amount of people on the island at any given time to ensure a constant balance of Alliance and Horde forces. On top of this, we'll be building (or stealing) Siege Vehicles to completely destroy the enemy base. BUT THE FUN DOESN'T STOP THERE.

Due to the way the Island works, losing teams will be capturing objectives (such as mines, lumber mills, etc) to rebuild their broken fortress so that they can get back on the offensive, allowing what would be a very stale, one-sided BG to become a shifting island of destruction. Alliance winning one day, Horde winning the next. I'm so excited for this that words can't adequately describe it.

UI Changes:

This is a pretty short topic, but it's just a quality of life change for the most part. Blizzard have acknowledged that the icons and flags in the older BGs are a bit outdated, and we're getting a few updates. Flags in Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin will be changed, allowing the actual flag itself to act like a loading bar. For example, the Horde capture Stonehearth Graveyard (as always) and the flag turns from blue to grey. The flag will then colour itself in with the Horde colours from bottom to top, and when it hits the top, it's fully captured.

This helps when you're near the flag, but what if you're the other end of the map, you might say? No fear, Blizzard is here! The map and objective tracker are similarly being updated to show a countdown circle over the base (on the map) or a DBM-Style timer on the right hand side of your screen to let you know how long you have left to recapture, or defend, a specific base.

Rewards from Battlegrounds:

This is an interesting topic that's been brought up a few times over the years, and has been more prominent since they drastically reduced the amount of money you got from removing Insignias from corpses. What Blizzard's plan is apparently is to allow you to win goodies from Random Battlegrounds, which include pieces of PvP Gear, BoE items, consumables, "and more..." Really hoping this rewards interesting things like BG only consumables or custom PvP Banners similar to the current War Banners and the banners from the Krasarang World PvP Vendors. We'll have to wait until further confirmation or until Beta to see what kind of items Blizz is going to throw our way!

The Big One - Trial of the Gladiator:

Now a lot of PvP enthusiasts around the world saw this announcement and collectively screamed like fanboys/girls. Blizzard plans to implement a bi-weekly event where you:

1. Turn up.
2. Get a free set of top-tier PvP gear.
3. Free enchants/gems to get it all sorted out.
4. Play all the games you want.
5. Get titles and other rewards.
6. ALL ON A WEEKLY BASIS.

This could be one of the best ideas Blizzard has ever had in the PvP Department. No more rage on the forums about "X Class destroyed me because of the gear difference, Blizz pls fix". The game can start to be a tad more balanced and we can leave Chief Holinka to tweak and balance things for the better so that when you jump into the Trial of the Gladiator and come out on top for that week, you can rest assured that it's not because you've cheesed your way there *cough* Blood DKs *cough*, it's because you damned well earned it.

If anyone wants to discuss anything further about any of the changes, throw some new information at me, or even to point out that I've missed something important, feel free to message me on Skype (Veren1994), on PvP-Live (Exhil) or leave a comment below!

Back to Basics: Arms Warrior 101

I get a lot of questions about different aspects of Warriors, regarding stats, how to do X, all sorts of things, so I thought I'd grab a whole load of data + personal experience and cram it all together into a guide. So without further ado:

THE BASIC ROTATION:

Arms Warrior, in my opinion, is a very low skill-capped spec. I don't mean this in a harsh way, but the spec is very easy to get to grips with, but there are a few subtle nuances that separate a good Warrior from a bad Warrior.

So if you're going to apply a PvE rotation to anything (PvE or PvP) it's going to look like this:

Colossus Smash > Mortal Strike > Slam > Overpower

Now this is very basic. I would honestly say that there is 4-5 different rotations for Arms, and that's purely down to the passive ability Sudden Death. Sudden Death allows your autoattacks and Mastery Procs (Strikes of Opportunity) to reset the cooldown on your Colossus Smash. This straight away changes the rotation because you don't use Colossus Smash on cooldown, you use it if the target doesn't have the debuff on the target. If you'd like to see, in my opinion, what the rotation should look like, it's this:

Colossus Smash (If not on the target) > Mortal Strike (if below 50 Rage) > Slam (if above 50 rage) > Mortal Strike (if above 50 Rage) > Overpower > Slam (If below 50 Rage) > Colossus Smash (If debuff is on the target)

This is not even factoring in if the target is within Execute range. Simply using Overpower over Slam in the wrong place can drop your damage by a ridiculous margin. 80-90k Overpower Crit vs the chance of a 250k Slam Crit. Apparently this is Mr. Street's intent, they want Slam to be the burst ability and Overpower to be the filler ability, but there's such a divide between the damage of the two that it seems... a bit absurd. But I digress:


STAT PRIORITY:

Arms is pretty straightforward:

Strength > Critical Strike > Haste > Mastery

I put Critical Strike in bold for reasons that I'll highlight later, but this is basically going to be your go-to Stat Priority.

GEMS:

Red Slot: Expertise/Crit OR Strength/Crit
Yellow Slot: Crit
Blue Slot: Hit/Crit (Crit/PvP Power for PvP)
Meta Slot: Legendary Gem or Reverberating Primal Diamond
Prismatic Slot: Crit

The reason for these choices is the explanation to the bolded Critical Strike marker in the Stat Prio section. What happened when Blizzard tinkered with the value of secondary stats is that Crit gained so much value that it brought it to over half the value of Strength. In number form Strength could be 1.0 and Crit could be 0.65. This means that due to Secondary stats giving 2x the amount of that stat compared to Primary Stats (i.e. +320 Critical Strike vs +160 Strength), Crit is worth more on gems than Strength is. Using the example above:

Strength Value = 1
Critical Strike Value = 0.65

1 Strength Gem is worth 160 points.
1 Crit gem is worth (0.65x320) = 208 points.

These values are only being used as an example, if you want to min-max on your Warrior, run it through Simcraft and get values specific for your Warrior.

Another thing to remember is that sometimes socket bonuses really aren't worth it. As a rule of thumb you can go with:

+60 Crit/+120 Str on Bonus = Match Sockets
Anything else = 320 Crit gems in every socket.

PVP ADVICE:

This section is going to be worth reading if you're inclined to only PvP on your Warrior. You can still follow the rotation and gem choices as listed above, this is just a set of simple rules/guidelines to go by while in Arena, RBGs, and premade Random BGs (less applicable in Randoms).

1) Never LoS your healer - as a Warrior, you're very easily squished if you get stunned while you're outside of Defensive Stance or don't have any cooldowns up. Second Wind isn't half as good as people make it out to be, and while it will keep you up when you're low, you need to kite and LoS whoever is trying to kill you to get yourself back up to 35%.
2) Correct use of Berserker Rage - So many times I've popped BR to get that extra 10% damage in a burst and as soon as it's over, I just get feared and I'll either have to trinket it if my healer gets focused, or sit a 3 year long Fear. Unmacro Berserker Rage. Save it to break out of Fears IF YOU NEED TO. Don't BR a Fear if you can sit it. While you'd rather not be CCed to oblivion, sometimes saving a BR can mean the difference between a kill and... not a kill.
3) Get used to Banner-Intervene - What this means in a nutshell is bind Mocking Banner to your bars. You can quite easily drop it, intervene to it, and carry on going. HOWEVER. If you're using Safeguard, probably best to use it on a party member, your Banner won't appreciate 20% less damage taken like a Healer will.
4) Don't be afraid to backpedal when necessary - By this I don't mean "Backpedal everywhere, it's a good idea", I mean when you have abilities like Die by the Sword active, backpedaling to ensure that the Rogue/Warrior/DK/Pally/Enhance stays in front of you is sometimes the only option you have.
DISCLAIMER - I DO NOT ENDORSE BACKPEDALING IN A NORMAL SCENARIO. IT'S SLOW, AND BAD.

This is my first time making a guide like this, so if there's anything you'd like me to add to this one, or maybe something to discuss in a future post, feel free to add me on skype (veren1994) or message me on PvP-Live (Exhil)

Thanks for reading, and hopefully talk soon!

Exhil MD

Blizzcon Day 2

So, tonnes of changes and announcements today, I'll summarise the ones I feel are going to be the most gamechanging.

Raid Difficulty Changes

Raid Finder = 10-25 Players
Normal (Was Flex) - 10-25 Players
Heroic (Was Normal) - 10-25 Players
Mythic (Was Heroic) - 20 Players
All have separate lockouts.

This is going to really screw with the way casual guilds work, and will especially tinker with how Heroic 10m Guilds are functioning. They'll need to find ~10 more players (Sub players dependant). Looking forward to testing it all out though.

"From level 91 to 100 you will get upgrades to your core spells. Some will be slight class changes, some will be passive bonuses, similar to old spell ranks. Some of the boosts will definitely be easy to feel."

This is good. You will feel an obvious power increase, and you don't get any more action bar bloat. Really looking forward to seeing these changes, especially for Warriors.

Hit and Expertise - Gone!
Dodge and Parry - Gone!
Reforging - Gone!
Fewer items can be enchanted!
Stats on Armour will change based on spec!
Armour will become a good tanking stat again!
Tertiary Bonus Stats! - Lifesteal, Avoidance (AoE Damage Reduc.), Cleave, Speed, No Durability Damage!
Item Squish! - Relative power unchanged, stats dropped by approx. 96%

This list is just... I have no words. Blizzard have finally woken up and smelled that delicious chocolate iced frappuccino in the corner, downed it, and decided to start fixing their broken game. Still many more changes to be made, but this expansion so far is picking me up and giving me a 1st Class Ticket on the Hype Train.

Will edit this with any more cool information that gets brought to my attention, so feel free to leave a comment or add me on Skype (veren1994)!

Exhil MD.

Blizzcon's First Day, Warrior Talents, and my boys at PvP Live.

Well, it happened. Warlords of Draenor is the new WoW Expansion. It's going to spring loads of graphical updates to the character models and the models they showcased so far (Orc Male, Gnome Male/Female, Dwarf Male/Female, Tauren Male) all look fantastic and I can't wait to see the rest.

The new zones, the story, I love it all. Blizzard have made an expansion that I've really fallen in love with. The high-fantasy style that they've embraced here, while it might anger a few of the completely lore-correct people amongst Roleplaying communities, I feel will be able to drive WoW out of the rutt that it got itself into with Mists of Pandaria.

On to the Warrior-Based stuff! New Talents:

Blade Barrier - When you Whirlwind or Thunder Clap, whirling blades continue to spin around you for 30 seconds. These blades to 1000 damage every 1.00 seconds to all enemies within 8 yards. (Passive)

Ravager - 40 yd range, 1m cooldown, 0.879 sec cast -Throw a whirling axe at the target location that inflicts 3000 damage to enemies within 8 yards every 1 sec. Lasts 15 sec.

Extreme Measures -
[Arms and Fury] - Masochism - Deal damage to yourself equal to 20% of your maximum health and gain 30 rage.
[Protection] - Gladiator Stance - Increases all damage dealt by 20%. Also causes Shield Slam to consume Shield Barrier as additional damage, and have an increased chance to critically strike equal to your critical block chance. (Replaces Defensive Stance)

So. Blade Barrier is of course, completely situational, as a tank this will be pretty good for AoE damage. As a DPS it will be good for AoE burst and AoE sustain. No downsides to this one in an AoE situation.

Ravager is along the same lines, completely situational. I guess as a tank, I'd use this to pull a group of adds I know will be spawning somewhere so that they're immediately aggroed on me before I HC Leap onto them or something along those lines. As a DPS this is going to be a bit iffy as it has a cast time and it requires the adds stay in the axe. Blade Barrier superior in this scenario.

Extreme Measures is just... Wow. For a Tank, if this doesn't reduce damage taken while in the Defensive Stance then this is the most useless ability besides maybe... no, nevermind. It needs to replace Berserker Stance for Protection or it's just complete trash. As a DPS, trading 20% of my health for 30 rage seems like a massive trade for what is basically the old Bloodrage, just with no cooldown. Except that the old Bloodrage cost 4% less health. I really think that this could do with some tinkering, and it can't be something to do with single-target damage, else it makes it the clear winner vs Ravager and Blade Barrier.

Lastly, I've been very active on Twitter during Blizzcon supporting the guys at http://pvp-live.com/ - If you PvP at all, or want to start and don't know how to get going, I recommend signing up and getting invovled with this project and the amazing people there. Brief shoutout to Mwi (@notoriousMWI) for getting me involved with it all!

May write a brief write-up tomorrow after further information regarding Warlords of Draenor, but until then, seeya!

Exhil (@DrExhilMD)