Twas the night before Patching.
All through the Auction House,
The Warriors were Raging,
Frothing at the Mouth.
Changes are Coming!
Warriors will be good!
Our damage will be stunning!
Our enemies in the mud!
We'll be the M.T.
We'll get all the loot
Or its a damn travesty
Warriors will be moot!
Then patch day hit
Warriors did rout
We rocked that sh*t
The rest started to pout
Then we got nerfed
Warriors started to cry
War tanks got turfed
The forums asked why
Nerf Patch Buff
Damage PVP Survival
Cry Huff and Puff
Soon, the Warrior revival.
I know, that was bad, but somehow accurate though written last summer. The stunning pun was 100% unintentional, I had a rogue get pretty mad at me for that. Something about GG-Bladestorm in pvp. I originally posted this one on the WOW forums a while back. Thought this would be a good place for this silliness as well. I thought the title was so perfect, I stole the title from this funny post on our warrior forum.
Redesigns are the talk of the week, and will continue to be for months before release. I should probably warn that the entire Glad Stance idea COULD be cut right out of the game, and our hearts. However, this looks to be an exciting experiment, so I will do my damndest to test the hell out of it come Beta ( if I can get in. ).
First, I'd like to draw attention to one of my favorite shows on the internet, FinalBoss.TV. If you're reading my blog you're probably already interested in Endgame content, and Prot Warriors. This happens to be an awesome talk show where they've interviewed a few of the more vocal Prot Warriors from the MMOC message boards. I had actually rallied for another Prot War Ep as the first one was a much different format of show from what I've come to love in the current episodes. Be sure to go show your support @ the Finalboss site too! Here is the Ep!
* Spoilers * Second, Our new Tier was Datamined. Well We think its our new tier, and it looks AMAZING! Thanks to the MMO Champion Team for this! Don't fret if its not quite fitting your new Tauren Model face right now. I'm sure they'll fix that. * Spoilers *
Finally, the Glad Stance Related Changes:
The latest patch notes had a few interesting changes. Riposte and Blood Craze:
Blood Craze is a new passive ability for Protection Warriors.
Blood Craze causes Multistrike auto attacks to trigger a Blood Craze, which regenerates 3% of the Warrior's health over 3 seconds. When this effect is refreshed, the remaining duration is added to the new effect.
Riposte has been redesigned.
Riposte now gives the Warrior Parry equal to their Critical Strike bonus from gear. gives the Warrior +100% to Parry chance until they Parry an attack after getting a critical strike with an Auto Attack.
I'm thinking this means we're going to have a metric ton of parry to keep us nice and survivable for some of those niche situations where we'll drop a Mocking Banner and get beat on for a few seconds ( Protectors of the Endless Sun's Bubble ). The Blood Craze change is huge though! We should be healing a ton as we're going to be loving Multistrike already for the extra damage, and extra passive healing is a nice bonus.
Remember they've changed second wind so you will be less able to kite for 5 seconds and climb back to 35%.
This leads me to the last point, and to me, the most exciting:
@Cyclonus_WOW Bonus Armor will actually provide DPS value for tanks. Yes, it's part of the item's budget.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) April 21, 2014
@Tengenstein A passive, Bladed Armor. Increases Attack Power by 100% of your Bonus Armor. (NOTE: Just *Bonus* Armor, not ALL Armor)
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) April 21, 2014
This is another trade of defensive stats for offensive stats. And I think this sounds great. Not only do we get to continue to look for gear with tank stats on it, straight up Plate DPS gear will also be useful. This sort of versatility in our gearing strategy also means we're going to need to do a ton of testing :). Remember our SPEC ( protection ) is going to be deciding how our gear rolls. So we should also expect that the Tier Set bonuses for the tank gear are going to be useful to us as well.
Hello Gladiators! There have been a few informative Blue Tweets on our new DPS spec that I wanted to review. First, there was definitely some needed clarity on whether we are still intended to be able to tank with the Gladiator's Resolve Talent. Other than the obvious lack of being able to switch out of this stance in Combat, it needed to be said. Matthew is a WowInsider Editor who blogs about Warriors as well.
@MatthewWRossi If you take the Gladiator Stance talent, you can still tank, with 5% extra DR, but none of the offensive benefits.
Second, We wanted to know if Gladiator Stance would give us the ability to compete with dps. That was confirmed as well by Celestalon, that it is not only tuned for DPS, but will remove your ability to tank all that much better than an Arms warrior.
@JalopyWoWGladiatorStance will be tuned as a DPS. It will not be able to tank much more than an Arms warrior can (ie, not much).
So, to be clear, Gladiator's Resolve enables Warriors to have a 3rd DPS Spec. It will be tuned for DPS, and we can therefore expect it to compete with Arms and Fury. Thusfar, I can only think of one downside to this if you prefer dps with a shield, and simply that we as Protection are not on the list to get the Draenor Perk for 50% increased Execute damage. We're also losing Recklessness and Therefore the newly baked together Skull Banner benefit. •Recklessness is now available only to Fury and Arms Warriors. As with other classes, we wanted to reduce cooldown stacking. Cutting Skull Banner did a ton to help that across the whole game. But for Warriors specifically, we needed to make further changes, including merging some of the personal benefit of Skull Banner back into Recklessness. Also, to make up for Throw being removed, we modified Heroic Throw to be more frequently usable.
I managed to catch Mr Celestalon's attention today on twitter, and he confirmed that regardless of us missing out on the new Reck, and (S)Execute, we will be keeping up!
Hello Gladiator's! I've decided to create a blog based around the new Gladiator Stance Warrior in World of Warcraft. I've played Warrior a ton since the game first came out, and like to think that I actually played its predecessor in Everquest way back in the day :). Everquest had a class named Warrior, and it's primary role was to keep threat on every single mob, and to do the most damage. A little bit like our MoP challenge modes now that I think about it :). I wanted to have a place to try to contribute back to the community! I've never seen a game with so much community support behind it, and it is awesome.
About Me: I've tanked and dps'd my way through Vanilla up to Loatheb in Naxx 40, and only got C'thun once. From there I've played off and on since and really started to play the most in Ulduar ( as fury ) and then Dragon Soul. Right now I've tanked my way to 11/14H in MoP in Siege of Orgrimmar and am Guild and Raid leading a casual 10man group with my Girlfriend as my OT. We are progressing on Iron Juggernaut. In Real life I'm an IT guy. I help companies dealing with our AV Software. I like to think that the customer management and support skills i've honed sync nicely with raid leading and troubleshooting other peoples trials in the game as their raid and guild leader. WOW is definitely my primary hobby and I probably spend too much time reading patch notes. Which leads me to the reason for creating this blog! Warlords of Draenor Alpha Patch Notes are out! Along with a ton of tweets from helpful blizz staff there's a ton of new information on the coming changes, and I've never been more excited to play Warrior than I have today. Each of the new features of the class are exciting on their own, however one stands out far above the rest for me. Gladiator's Resolve. Our level 100 Talent. This talent allows us to DPS as a Protection Warrior! The soundtrack for reading this ability is as follows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=IP__m7xQYOA#t=15
Gladiator's Resolve
Passive Requires level 100
Increases the damage reduction provided by Defensive Stance by 5%. Also allows you to forgo your defensive role, and instead focus only on offensive capabilities, by replacing Battle Stance with Gladiator Stance.
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Gladiator Stance
Level 100
Instant cast
A dauntless combat stance. Increases physical damage dealt by 20%, and replaces your Shield Block with Shield Charge. You cannot change into or out of this stance during combat
Shield Charge
Level 100
20 Rage
10yd Range
Instant cast
15 sec Recharge
Requires Warrior Requires Gladiator's Resolve
Requires Shields Raise your shield and charge a short distance to your target, increasing the damage of Shield Slam, Revenge, and Heroic Strike by 30% for 6 seconds. Maximum 2 Charges.
At first glance, this might be somewhat confusing. You have images of 300 playing in your head, and you know you're going to be dropping BOMBS with your shield. I am so goddamn excited. Rotation Remember this is all hypothetical :) Shield Charge > Shield Slam > Revenge > Devastate. With Heroic Strike as your rage dump. Setting up the shield charge to precede shield slam is very doable either with Charge itself, or Battle Shout. Since Shield Charge lasts 6 seconds, and has two charges, we should be able to maintain an uptime around for 12s every recharge. Think of it a little bit like Colossus Smash.. WITH YOUR SHIELD. Gear To consider this properly we should also note that Dodge and Parry were being removed.. Prot Warriors are going to wear Mastery, Crit, and Haste gear! So we'll be able to turn around and tank if we want as well! However, please remember we'd have to switch stances, and you can only do that out of combat :) Mastery
Warrior
Mastery: Critical Block now also passively increases Attack Power by 12% (percentage increased by Mastery), in addition to its current effects.
Increases your chance to block by 4% and your chance to critically block by 18%.
I believe since this is a straight attack power increase, we're going to want all the Mastery we can get our hands on, especially if it continues to stack so well per point as it did in Warlords! Haste
Headlong Rush is a new passive ability for Warriors:
Headlong Rush: Haste reduces global cooldown and the cooldowns of Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Shield Slam, and Thunder Clap.
This means we're going to have a lot faster play, which I believe will be a lot more fun. I'm already used to making sure I hit an ability every global, and now I'll get to play at the speed I've been loving on my Brewmaster for a year now! Crit I believe this still still be a top priority. But I think we're probably going to want to hit some sort of haste cap so we can guarantee we're able to spend all the rage we're generating. This will definitely require some testing. Also, it should be mentioned that we're going to have some really nice defensive abilities as Glad... ( holy shit we have a shortform )
Riposte has been redesigned.
Riposte gives the Warrior +100% to Parry chance until they Parry an attack after getting a critical strike with an Auto Attack.
This is a big deal, as we're going to be able to make amazing use of our ability to Parry with add waves ( as dps ). Think of the Embodied Phase for Sun on Protectors. DPS warriors are already dropping taunting banner to help with adds, now they can parry every time they crit with an auto-attack and also block! And thats it. I'm sure the coming Alpha is going to be exciting and I hope to keep you guys updated on how this Spec plays and changes. We might be a lot different from now till launch, but Blizz definitely has the intent to let us be Spartans :)
Celestalon 
