Warrior Guide

Admin Posts : 31 Join date : 2010-12-27 Location : Sweden

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Basic mechanics changes:

- The Rage system was reworked. Rage generated is no longer dependent on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead each auto-attack now generates a set amount of Rage. The Rage gained from damage taken is now dependent on how much health the Warrior has when he receives the damage, the higher your health, the less Rage you will get (this was done so that undergeared people don’t do so much worse than the rest).
- Blocked attacks now have 30% of their damage reduced. Prot Warriors also have the chance of getting critical blocks, which reduce the damage from the hit by 60%. Since the damage reduced is now proportional to the damage taken, blocking won’t be so circumstantial anymore.
- Defense as a stat was removed. Tank classes can now become uncrittable by mobs through talents and stances.
- Warriors, Paladins and Death Knights now receive 25% of their Strength as a bonus to Parry Rating.
- The way Armor reduces damage won’t be changed, but some Armor values will be tweaked on gear, to even out the new Armor damage reduction curve in Cataclysm. This will result in changes to the bonus Armor on a lot of items.
- Parry-haste was removed (the speeding up of boss attacks after a successful parry).
- Sunder Armor has been reduced from 5 to 4 maximum stacks, each removing 4% armor now.
- Dodge and Parry now have the same diminishing returns.
- Resilience is no longer interesting for PvE, as it only reduces damage from players now.

Primary skills:

Active:
- Shield Slam

Passive:
- Sentinel: Increases your total Stamina by 15% and your block chance by 15%. You also generate 50% additional rage from attacking targets that are not targeting you.
- Vengeance: Each time you take damage, you gain 5% of the damage taken as attack power, up to a maximum of 10% of your health.
- Mastery: Increases your chance to block by 10% and your chance to critically block by 10%. Each point of Mastery increases your block and critical block chances by an additional 1.25%.

General Changes to Skills:

- Bloodrage and Mocking Blow have been removed.
- Battle Shout and Commanding Shout now function similarly to the Death Knight’s Horn of Winter: they’re free, on a 60 second cooldown and generate 20 rage when used
- Battle Shout now works exactly like Horn of Winter, giving a Strength and Agility buff.
- Commanding Shout now increases stamina instead of health, just like Power Word: Fortitude.
- Demoralizing Shout now simply reduces targets’ damage by 10%, instead of reducing Attack Power.
- Heroic Strike and Cleave aren’t “on next swing” skills anymore. They’re instant attacks costing 30 Rage each, they aren’t on GCD and share the same 3 second cooldown.
- Berserker Rage is no longer on GCD.
- Victory Rush heals you for 20% of your maximum health
- Thunderclap increases the time between targets’ attacks by 20% by default.
- Intervene no longer has a minimum distance of 8 yards.
- Shield Wall now reduces 40% of damage taken without any talents and Glyphs and has a 5 minute cooldown (2 minutes with talents)
- Shield Block increases your block chance to 100% for 10 seconds with a 60 sec colldown (30 with talents), same as before, but now only costs 10 Rage. The removed ability to double Shield Slam damage for the duration can now be obtained through the Heavy Repercussions talent.
- Vigilance still reduces the damage taken by the target by 3% and when the target gets hit, your Taunt cooldown resets. The threat transfer part was removed, though, replaced by a new Rage generation mechanic. Whenever the target is hit you gain Rage as if 20% of the damage was done to you. It’s also worth mentioning that the 3% damage reduction on the target is now a unique buff, no other class has it.

Modified Enchantments:

Chest – Greater Defense: Now increases Dodge rating by 22 instead.
Shield – Defense: Now increases Dodge rating by 20 instead

Gems:

Some cuts have had their color changed. Hit rating went from yellow to blue and Mastery was introduced as yellow. The most important change is that Dodge went from red to yellow. So if you are using Austere Earthsiege Diamond in your gear and filled the red socket requirement with Dodge/Stamina gems, you’ll now have to look for another purple or red gem.

Red: Strength, Agility, Parry, Expertise
Yellow: Dodge, Mastery, Critical Hit,
Blue: Stamina, Hit

Items:

- Defense rating, Block rating and Block value on items were converted to Parry rating.
- Shields and items with bonus armor have ahd their armor reduced by approximately 25%, so you have to rethink their value.
- Since Bloodrage was removed from the game, the 4 set T 10 set bonus (absorb damage equal to 20% of your maximum health) will now be triggered by Battle Shout or Commanding Shout, making the set bonus weaker since those two skills are on GCD and you might have to use them during a fight at times you wouldn’t have before.
- Because of the Heroic Strike/Cleave mechanics changes, we should re-evaluate whether to use a slow or fast tanking weapon. A fast one would give additional Rage because of the new Rage generation system and more auto-attacks, while a slow one would increase the damage of Devastate and through that increase threat. Slow weapons will be the norm in Cataclysm at the latest, though, so we can assume that the extra Rage generated from fast weapons won’t be needed, even if no one knows what Rage generation and threat is like in raid environments at the moment. That’s why you should already start looking for a 2.60 speed tank weapon, even if there aren’t any slow weapons with defensive stats right now.

Stats

There aren’t any solid indications on which direction to go for tanking as of now. As mentioned before, no one has any real data for raids, so we know nothing about how Mana efficiency or healing output in relation to damage taken, or on Rage generation in raid encounters.

What we can say is that you should have Parry and Dodge ratings at the same levels, so as to reduce diminishing returns as much as possible.
If you’re aiming for a high threat – high rage generating build, you should go for Parry rating. A lot of parrying also benefits the new Hold the Line talent (whenever you parry you gain a 10% increase to crit and block chance).

Expertise no longer helps with survivability since parry-haste has been completely removed (it was only present on two bosses in ICC anyway), it now only helps with Rage generations and threat, same as Hit rating. The amount of Hit and Expertise you need will, as before, depend on how well you manage your threat and how well you can keep mobs on you.

The ratings for Expertise and Hit are slightly cheaper now, so you’ll get a bit more of them out of your current gear after the patch. But, since the passive 6 Expertise from talents is gone now, you’ll have less of it even with the extra benefit from the rating. The Dodge and Parry ratings remained the same.

Talents:

Since, as mentioned before, there isn’t much info on raid circumstances there also aren’t any definitive builds yet. I’ll be starting with this in the patch:

The must have ones are:
- Toughness
- Shield Mastery
- Last Stand
- Bastion of Defense
- Improved Revenge
- Devastate
- Sword and Board
- Shockwave
- Field Dressing

It’s a self-healing focused build with average single target and AoE tanking capacities for raids. You’ll notice by the few must-have talents that there are many possibilities open here to take the build in various directions.
Let’s talk about the talents that I didn’t mark as must-have.

- Incite: Single target threat talent, usually taken because there’s nothing better to get on that tier.
- Blood and Thunder: I didn’t get it because it doesn’t help when you start talking a mob (and it even hinders your tanking, because starting with Rend makes your threat really low at the start and delays the Thunderclap), or later on since it doesn’t generate a lot of threat in general. I guess the talent is for keeping aggro on already tanked mobs while doing something else. We have to wait and see how much AoE tanking there will be in the future
- Shield Specialization: We’ll get to see how useful this talent is when we get a better sense of Rage mechanics in raids.
- Hold the Line: I took it because it’s one of the few survival talents there are left, even if it’s very weak without a lot of Mastery. Critical blocks (as far as we know) work on a 2 roll system, meaning that it first calculates whether you’ll block at all and then rolls the critical block chance after that.
- Gag Order: I didn’t get it because silence effect isn’t very useful in raids (it’s much better in 5 man instances). Whether its worth it just for the 30 second cooldown reduction for Heroic Throw remains to be seen.
- Concussion Blow: Only interesting in raids encounters with stunable mobs (again, much more powerful in 5 man instances) and I only got it to Vigilance.
- Warbringer: Nothing new. It’s useless for standard tank-n-spank situations where you stick to one mob the whole time, but it’s still worth it for the added versatility. Plus you use it often enough to warrant a talent point, and it makes the class somehow easier to play.
- Impending Victory: Even if you went for self-healing in the talent tree I find this talent too weak, too expensive and situational at best. For two talent points you get a chance to get a procc off a low priority skill (even if it doesn’t have a cooldown) when a boss is under 20% and then you get a 50% chance to heal yourself for 5% on your next GCD. It remains to be seen whether you can afford help out the healers with this talent, especially in the execute phase of an encounter, when the DPS’s threat is rising, since you’re sacrificing threat for the healing capability.
- Thunderstruck: I took it for AoE tanking. Unlike Blood and Thunder it’s effect is immediate as soon as you start tanking a mob, you don’t have to waste a GDC for Rend and it increases the damage of Cleave, Thunderclap AND Shockwave on top of that. Plus you can really use a triple-charged Shockwave to get you out of a lot of messy AoE situations.
- Vigilance: With the removal of the threat transfer this talent got a lot weaker, and it seems only interesting for raids (not so much for 5 man instances) to make sure you don’t run out of Rage in those rare occasions you aren’t tanking anything.
- Heavy Repercussions: I took it to get even more single target threat. It could become a must-have talent, depending on the threat situation in raids.
- Safeguard: Since Intervene still lowers threat on the target, it’s still not useable on another tank and the damage reduction isn’t really of that much use for other classes. You’re better off spending your talent points elsewhere.
- War Academy: Useable for a build with maximum threat in mind.
- Blood Craze: I picked it for additional self-healing capabilities, mostly just to be safe.
- Battle Trance: Might be useful, if we do start having issues with Rage. I don’t think we will, though.
- Cruelty: Useable for a build with maximum threat in mind.

You could say that my build is one with balance in mind. You can add more self-healing, single target threat or AoE threat to it, as needed, it’s adaptable. Which will be the top-talents and which will turn out to be useless remains to be seen.

Glyphs:

Prime:
- Glyph of Shield Slam: Increases Shield Slam damage by 10
- Glyph of Devastate: Increases the critical strike chance of Devastate by 5%
-Glyph of Revenge: Increases the damage of Revenge by 10%

Major:

There aren’t any must-haves here, but there are a few interesting one that are situational dependent on play-style.

- Glyph of Cleaving: Increases the number of targets your Cleave hits by 1
- Glyph of Sunder Armor: Your Sunder Armor ability affects a second nearby target
- Glyph of Long Charge: Increases the range of your Charge ability by 5 yards
- Glyph of Thunderclap: Increases the radius of your Thunder Clap ability by 2 yards
- Glyph of Shockwave: Reduces the cooldown on Shockwave by 3 sec
- Glyph of Victory Rush: Reduces the cooldown on Shockwave by 3 sec (only useful in combination with the Impending Victory talent. It’s unknown if the Glyph affects the target)
- Glyph of Shield Wall: Shield Wall now reduces damage taken by 60%, but its cooldown is increased by 2 min. (Only good for fights like Festergut, where you’re expecting large amounts of damage over a short time period)

Minor:

Demo Shout should definitely get glyphed, the other two can be any of the following:

- Glyph of Berserker Rage: Berserker Rage generates 5 rage when used (A weak Bloodrage, since Berserker Rage isn’t on GCD anymore. Only use it in this capacity if you don’t have to break fears.)
- Glyph of Command: Increases the duration by 2 min and area of effect by 50% of your Commanding Shout
- Glyph of Battle: Increases the duration by 2 min and area of effect by 50% of your Battle Shout (You don’t have to worry about not gaining the Rage because of a “more powerful effect is already active”, you’ll get the Rage normally, but the duration won’t be extended in those cases)

Admin Posts : 27 Join date : 2010-12-28

Nice !! when my rogue is level 60 i will make a warrior so nice to know

Posts : 14 Join date : 2010-12-28 Location : Denmark

Very nice guide Razz

keep up the good work Smile

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