Filed under: Warrior

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

There are columns I don't like to write. This is one of them.

When multiple players from all levels of raiding tell you that they've dropped the warrior class for better alternatives, there's a problem. When people who have played a warrior for six years (and who therefore have survived from BC through Wrath and Cataclysm to the present day) tell you they had to switch to keep from hindering their raids, there's a serious problem. It's not just tanking, it's not just DPS, and it's not just PvP - it's all of them. When the expansion opened, arms warriors were at a ridiculously high 14% of high end PvP - now that number has dwindled to around 5%, and that's around a 2% drop in two months. Meanwhile, prot warrior numbers in raiding have only fallen slightly, but that doesn't change the fact that other tanks like Death Knights, Paladins and Guardian Druids are all going up in numbers - even Brewmaster Monks are up to 2.2% of the raid population.

Another way to put it is like this - protection warriors are 2.5% of total representation in raiding, but overall are 3.5% of the game population. Both Guardian Druids and Brewmaster Monks see more representation in raids than in the game at large - prot paladins are almost twice as common in raids as they are in the game. Death Knights are an interesting outlier, in that they make up 3.7% of raiding, but 4% of the total DK population - clearly DK's are still very popular tanks, but even they lag behind the prot paladin juggernauts.

We've talked about fury warrior DPS and the complete lack of arms warriors in raiding - to some degree, arms will probably see a bit of a bump when 5.4 comes out and significantly buffs their AoE DPS. Since the PTR hasn't done damage balancing yet, harping on fury or arms DPS issues seems disingenuous. We'll wait for that balancing. Let's talk about where warriors are going, instead.

If you remember from last week, Vengeance is being changed in patch 5.4. If like me you've been curious about how it will specifically be changing, Lore over on the official forums has our first explanation of the changes and how they'll shake out. Here's the breakdown.

Lore - 5.4 Vengeance Mechanics - Info Request

Here's some details on exactly how the multi-target diminishing returns are set to work in 5.4. Warning: here there be maths.

The basic, concise explanation is as follows: The Nth strongest (based on pre-mitigation average auto attack DPS) mob that has hit you in the last 5 seconds grants 1/Nth of full vengeance with their attacks. N is recalculated on every hit taken.

So here's an example. Say you're tanking 3 mobs – we'll say it's a boss and two adds. The boss has pre-mitigation average auto attack DPS of 1500k, one add does 400k, and the other add does 300k. The game will form a list of those mobs from 1-3, like so:
1. Boss: 1500k DPS, 1/1 (100%) of normal vengeance is granted
2. First add: 400k DPS, 1/2 (50%) of normal vengeance is granted
3. Second add: 300k DPS, 1/3 (33.333%, repeating of course) of normal vengeance is granted

This would of course continue as more mobs are being tanked (granting 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, and so on). Also, if the second add were to land a hit at any point when the first add hasn't attacked you in the last 5sec (such as if it swings first), that attack would grant 1/2 Vengeance instead of 1/3.

Hope that clears things up for the theorycrafters.

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So if tanking a small group or adds that accompany a boss mob, this change will have little effect - it's when tanking huge packs that the vengeance decay will be most noticeable. The calculation based on most damage seems interesting to me - hopefully the calculations won't be such that vengeance fails to stack properly.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Okay, I was all set to write a mildly disappointed post about patch 5.4 and what it hasn't changed for warriors. And then Blizzard went and did this. So here I am, feeling multiple things. I'm not good at feeling multiple things. Here's what's going through my head:

• When I was first told about this, I was in a raid. I frankly did not believe it. It's still somewhat hard to believe, actually.
• Holy snap, I did not expect this ever.
• Haste? I mean, really?
• If these are Ordos drops (as I suspect they might be) then I guess I'm gonna have to go kill Ordos a few times. I mean, I have to get a pair of those, right?
• Seriously, haste and mastery? Hit/mastery would have been the best spread if you wanted them to be useful for both tanking and DPS (which two blue sockets makes me think) and if you wanted dedicated DPS shoulders, then crit/mastery or crit/haste would have been better.
• Man, I really got an item named after me. That is so cool I don't even know.
• Wait, haste and mastery on an item named after me? Is this Blizzard trolling me? Am I being trolled by the biggest MMO in the world?

I'm a little afraid that writing something critical of WoW's upcoming patch 5.4 direction will seem a trifle ungrateful after this news. But let's face it, everyone knew what I was yesterday, and everyone knows who I am today. Warriors could be the number one DPS and best tanks by miles and I wouldn't really be satisfied. Still, it must be said that this is an awesome thing and I'm very very grateful to see my name on an item in WoW.

Now then, we were scheduled to talk about how patch 5.4 is shaping up in terms of warriors and class changes.

If you're a tank in World of Warcraft you know what Vengeance is. Originally intended to allow tanks to keep up with increased DPS from improved gear with DPS stats on it while accumulating tanking gear that generally lacked those stats, it's turned into a means for tanking players to do chart topping DPS on some pulls (especially AoE ones with multiple tanked mobs). There's been a lot of discussion about what might happen with Vengeance in patch 5.4, and now we have our first look at what Blizzard is contemplating for the tanking specialization.

Rygarius - 5.4 PTR Patch Notes - August 2

Vengeance has received several changes.

• Vengeance now grants Attack Power equal to 1.5% of the damage taken, down from 1.8% (The tooltip said 2% but it was actually 1.8%).
• Tanks no longer receive Vengeance from many persistent area damage effects (standing in the fire) or from missed attacks (dodging and parrying an attack will continue to work as it has before).
• There are now diminishing returns on Vengeance gains while tanking multiple targets. Each additional target grants progressively less Vengeance.

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These changes are almost certainly aimed at reducing the very high DPS that we can see on trash pulls and boss fights with a great many streaming adds (such as Tortos' bats or the packs before Iron Qon) especially as we head into the final tier of gear for Mists of Pandaria, which would inflate these numbers even more. Raids that use tanks with the highest DPS tanks will probably feel these changes the most. As always, this is the PTR, so if you have an opinion on these changes getting on the test servers and testing them out is useful so you can give proper feedback.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

For most of 2012 and 2013 I was simply unable to test SMF out myself. It was simming to be the best DPS spec for warriors as early as normal Mogu'shan Vaults. but like all warrior specs it's ludicrously gear dependent and arms was simply easier for me to gear up - you can completely hit cap arms, it's not so shackled to crit as the only worthwhile DPS stat, and most importantly I had a two handed weapons. One handers were a myth told to me in a dream by ghostly apparitions, not items I actually saw drop. Even my tanking weapon was in fact an agi weapon that would have gotten disenchanted if I hadn't picked it up.

Then I found myself in a situation with three other DPS warriors, and again getting 1h DPS weapons seemed absolutely impossible because I was constantly competing with two other players for them. But the funny thing is, eventually everyone else gets geared up, and then? Then the drops are yours to rescue from the disenchant pile. When a thunderforged Qon's Flaming Scimitar dropped and no one wanted it (saving their points for heroic drops, no doubt) I decided I'd snap that up and go SMF for a week. What did I learn?

Some of the coolest stuff on the PTR are the new glyphs. And one of the coolest purely cosmetic glyphs I've run into is the Glyph of the Weaponmaster. In the header image above, you can see me dual-wielding Uroe, Harbinger of Terror and Bo-Ris, Horror in the Night. And yes, they happen to look like the Warglaives of Azzinoth. That's because I have the glaives in my backpack, and so, every time I use Battle or Commanding Shout, I get a ten minute buff called Weaponmaster that picks randomly from every weapon I have in my original backpack, and places that weapon appearance over my currently equipped items.

The buff doesn't care about weapon categories as far as I can tell - two handed weapon models can go over 1h weapons and vice versa. Polearms can become swords or maces or fist weapons. (In fact, it can even put the wrong fist weapon model on a hand, so that it's clearly backwards.) If you switch the weapons out, the effect fades but the buff remains and it can bug out so that you have to clear the buff in order to use the effect again. But it does allow you to basically switch between a variety of weapons in your main bag if you like variety, or it allows you to effectively use legendary weapons in your current transmog look, if you're a warrior.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

First, you should read this - it gives you a solid overview of what the Celestial Blessings fights require from a tank or melee DPS. Now that you've read that, I figure I'll spend this column taking the lessons of my day spent doing Celestial Blessings (about two hours of attempts all told before I finally got the cape) explaining what the quest taught me. I did both the melee DPS and tank options several times, ultimately settling on the tanking quest after four 5% wipes on Wrathion on the melee DPS challenge.

I'm of two minds about these quests. On the one hand, I'm really happy I got through them - I feel like it was a worthy achievement and forced me to use a lot of my toolkit. Getting Wrathion reliably to 5% feels like a moral victory, especially because the four times he killed me I was killed by being inside his cone despite the graphic showing that I was outside of it - that feels like cheating, you dragon jerk. Doing the tanking challenge definitely is easier than the melee DPS one, purely because it's easier to control the tanking challenge. Sure, Wrathion will do his level best to take damage and die, but almost all of it is something you can work to prevent.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

There's an old saying about not seeing the forest for the trees. It can be applied to World of Warcraft - sometimes you can't see the problem with your class because you're operating in a vacuum composed of yourself and your raid group and you have no way of knowing how others are doing. I let this happen to myself over the course of Throne of Thunder and now I'm forced to realize things aren't fine after all. The problem is fairly simple - warrior DPS has not kept up.

Warrior DPS falls as more mobility and/or target switching become required on fights. While it's hardly conclusive of anything, take a look at this listing of DPS rankings from Noxxic. If you remember the same rankings back when patch 5.2 first came out, you'll remember that fury was a lot higher up on it, not ranked around number 19/20. Arms is an even more depressing number 23. What happened to our DPS?

Well, for starters, all the fights did. There's always a difference between optimal DPS (that is, you can stand there, hit all your buttons properly, and put out your best) and realistic DPS. If you look at Noxxic's maximum DPS for 522 gear, you'll see a pretty substantial improvement, popping fury back up to number 11 or so. Again, this isn't conclusive, it just points to a trend. If you want more evidence of that trend, take a look at the World of Logs DPS rankings for Throne of Thunder. On Normal, looking at all regions, warriors only manage to make the top 10 on Tortos. On heroic, they don't even manage that. Even heroic Tortos, a fight warriors excel on in normal mode, becomes grueling on heroic.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

So yeah, I just plain forgot they'd nerfed Sweeping Strikes down to 50% a while ago. I haven't played arms since I got my second 2h weapon in ToT, so it just plain slipped my mind. Sorry, everyone. This of course means that arms is just plain getting an AoE buff, and I still maintain that single target DPS is where both arms and fury fall behind other classes.

Right now the only class that can reliably beat me on AoE fights is warlocks. I don't know if warlocks have an incredible means to spread AoE damage or I'm just running into the best warlocks in existence. So I find this emphasis on AoE for arms a little baffling. I'm not necessarily complaining about it, just confused by it.

It's also fairly clear that as of right now the PTR has no significant changes for fury outside of TG polearms. So we're basically in a situation where prot is getting DPS buffs, arms is getting AoE buffs, and fury gets to look like a helicopter. Since there are no egregious nerfs on the horizon, Shield Wall and Spell Reflection are shaping up to work on live without shields (Horde players currently pull an old Horde PvP shield out, Alliance the Ally shield) we're clear to discuss something I've been thinking about for a while, namely whether warriors should have a fourth spec and if so what should it do?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

The changes to arms in patch 5.4 are good if viewed from the lens that the fury warrior DPS model is one that arms should be emulating - namely, more AoE than burst or single target. Quite frankly, when discussing warrior DPS, I think the emphasis on our damage isn't where it should be. Fury does good to very good AoE damage, especially with the right talents, but our single target burst and sustained damage lags far behind other classes. Fury simple doesn't hit as hard, especially not on fights where rage gets interrupted for any reason, and arms adopting the same shotgun blast AoE damage model has problems. Yes, it will bring arms up on the charts. But it could also cement warriors as the trash DPS - bring them to clear to the boss or kill a lot of adds, but if you need someone to put sustained high damage on a single target, you may want to switch them out.

This isn't to say that fury is terrible at single-target. It isn't. It's simply a concern of mine that fury, which underperforms compared to other melee in that regard, should perhaps not be the model for how arms is designed. If the two specs are functionally both concerned with AoE DPS, they come dangerously close to feeling homogenized. But for now, we have to deal with the spec we have, not the spec we might think we would rather have. So what will be happening with arms in patch 5.4?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Yeah, we're going to be talking about patch 5.4 again. Honestly, it's hard not to when they keep dropping changes on us. Between all taunts now adding 200% threat for 3 seconds after they're used (a move seemingly aimed at helping with tank swaps), the addition of Riposte, and a whole lot of small changes to damage abilities for protection and arms.

I'll admit, I was ecstatic just to see Shield Wall and Spell Reflection no longer requiring a shield, and frankly I don't really care about players who are saying 'It doesn't make sense to have Shield Wall without a shield' because warriors have needed the survival improvement this gives for years now. It's a minimal change for PvP (since no warrior seriously PvP's without a shield equip macro) but it gives arms and fury warriors in PvE a nice survival ability on a three minute cooldown.

We'll go over the other changes in detail after the break, reproducing the patch notes and working from there.

Okay, before we get into it, always remember this is datamined information from the next PTR and none of it is guaranteed to make it live. That being said, there are some interesting changes in the pipeline for tanks in patch 5.4, not the least of which is the creation of Riposte, an ability for warriors and death knights. The reason Riposte is interesting is because it seems to be a means to convert parry and dodge into critical strike, which means several things. First, you'll be less likely to stack critical strike as a tank (warriors were at least thinking about it with the change to Enrage, including Shield Slam and Devastate) and secondly, it makes those purely defensive stats work as threat generators, increased the low tank DPS of the warrior tank (and perhaps the DK tank as well, although I'd not heard any complaints about low DK tank DPS) and it must be noted, is not an ability that druid, paladin or monk tanks will be getting.

I find this very interesting, especially combined with the changes to Dark Command, Reckoning, Growl and Taunt. All of these abilities will now not only force a target to attack the tank in question, but will also increase her threat by 200% for 3 seconds. This means that, even if you are tanking a boss or mob that you already have threat on, these four abilities will still increase your threat overall when used, meaning that if you hit a taunt while tanking it will still have a positive effect on your threat. It's worth noting that hunter pet Growl works exactly the same - hunter pets will also get the extra 200% threat over the three seconds.

We're clearly not even remotely done with tweaks and fixes in patch 5.4, but by themselves these changes suggest that tanking is definitely going to see its fair share. The change to taunts is the biggest change to how taunting works that has ever happened, and the inclusion of Riposte goes one step further towards making avoidance also provide threat.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Okay, so let's look at what we're getting as of the most recent Patch 5.4 PTR build. What stands out?

Patch 5.4 PTR Patch notes

Warrior

General

• Enrage now also triggers on critical hits from Devastate and Shield Slam.
• Shattering Throw no longer costs rage.

Talents

• Enraged Regeneration now instantly heals the warrior for 10% of their total health (up from 5%), and an additional 10% over 5 seconds (up from 5%).
• Vigilance no longer transfers damage to the Warrior. The talent now reduces amount of damage the target takes by 30% for 12 seconds.

Arms

• Slam now does an additional 10% damage to targets affected by the warrior's Colossus Smash.

Fury

• Titan's Grip now works with polearms.

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There are actually some other changes if you log onto the PTR itself that aren't in the notes: Bladestorm is down to a 1 minute cooldown on the PTR, for instance. I like to call this the Christmas in Pandaria. In fact, if you look at these spell changes on Wowhead, you'll see that a lot of spells got buffed - Storm Bolt's damage got increased, Impending Victory's heal got doubled to 30%. So now that we've looked at the changes, what do they mean?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

In the past few weeks I've talked about warrior survivability concerns and our problems with itemization and that's got me thinking: what are the solutions? Now, I'm not a dev nor even playing one on TV, I'm basically just a fan of the game, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about these things. It's easy to complain about issues, after all, but harder to discuss meaningful solutions. So I've decided to do just that, since the comments alone are usually worth the price of admission in cases like that.

The main concerns I'll be discussing are as follows:

1. DPS warrior survivability in PvE
2. The rapid decline of Arms warriors in PvP (Cynwise's recent class distribution numbers went a lot more in depth than my own class rep post, and it's convinced me the warrior decline in PvP is more meaningful than I first thought)
3. Warrior tanking issues (haste, overall DPS, our lack of 'cheese')

So what could we see that would help with these issues? What changes would be effective without being too effective?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

I admit the title is a fancy way for me to say I want to talk about a bunch of stuff, all related to warriors without dedicating the entire column to one of the topics. These things I want to discuss include:

1. The ridiculous dependence on crit to the exclusion of pretty much all other DPS stats for fury.
2. Warrior tank threat/DPS and how it holds back the class.
3. The ridiculous amount of hit on Throne of Thunder gear.
4. Why I'm still annoyed that haste does nothing for protection warriors.

I know I've been flogging that haste for protection horse for a while, but it just irks me to see two of the plate classes getting solid use out of haste/expertise or haste/mastery gear for their tank sets and we get nothing. Considering point #2 for warrior tanks (namely, that our DPS and thus threat is just way behind the other tanks) I find it absolutely maddening to see haste be so completely useless for protection warriors. It doesn't give us resources at all, due to the way rage regenerates in Defensive Stance - it doesn't even help us with our rage generators like Shield Slam and Revenge because haste does nothing for our GCD. I took a pair of haste legs for my tank set recently (they were still a huge upgrade, that's how bad my old tank legs were) and every time I look at that haste on them, and know I can't reforge all of it away, I get this lump in my gut where the snarky itemization elitist in me says haste? Really?

I hate that guy. I hate him even more because I know he's right. Haste has no business on my tanking gear because haste does nothing for a warrior tank. Nothing. We don't even generate rage from our autoattacks, so the miniscule increase in attack speed doesn't even avail us.