New Level 45 Talents

Hello Gladiator's,

I've put off this post while I wrapped up doing about 25 different entries for Warlords Beta keys. I've created my own hearthstone card, created Draenor postcards? You name it. However, through use of new media coming from sites like Wowhead and MMO Champ, I will continue to provide this blog as a repository for Gladiator Warrior information aggregated from those sites. Should I end up getting into the Beta, I'll be sure to start generating some video's to go along with these posts.

Today's topic is our new level 45 Talent row. This a replacement for the removal of Staggering and Disrupting shout, as well as Piercing Howl. What they've done to provide us with a ranged snare is to add the snare to Thunderclap.

The new Talents:

Heavy Repercussions - Shield Slam deals 50% additional damage while Shield Block is active.

Previously, a glyph, this should be the more commonly used Talent with our Stance. I expect most Glad's will want to use this as Shield Block gets replaced by Shield Charge, and that will end up giving us a huge bonus to Shield Slam. 30% damage from Shield Charge and 50% from HR.

Sudden Death - Your autoattack hits have a 10% chance to make your next Execute cost no initial Rage and be usable on any target, regardless of health level.

Previously available as a baseline talent to Arms Warriors, this one should be rarely used as execute hits like a wet noodle for protection, since we don't have the Perk for Execute ( missing 20% damage ) and we're not going to be Executing that much as it is.

Unyielding Strikes - Devastate reduces the Rage cost of Heroic Strike by 6 for 6 sec, stacking up to 5 times.  Once this effect reaches 5 applications, its duration will no longer refresh.

Really the only viable alternative to Heavy Repercussions, this should result in a ton of damage from Heroic Strike. Current Parses were showing that you can actually end up doing slightly more damage with US vs HR as a talent, but remember tuning is not yet done. I'd be interested to see if we end up capping on rage using this talent.

Overall this is a pretty cool tier of choices as it will greatly affect our rotation, for not only Glad, but all of our spec's.

- Cyc

Defensive Toolkit Questions

Hello Gladiator's,

I know you're probably staring at that animated gladstance gif ( made by Archimtiros ) and getting pretty excited, but stay with me for a moment.

Right now the Alpha patch notes appear to have restricted many abilities to defensive stance only. A lot of the raid utility abilities that Fury/Arms get ( like rallying cry ) require you to stancedance to defensive stance prior to being able to cast your rally. The same sort of revision on abilities was seen on some of the Prot Only utility, like mocking banner, and spell reflection. Now, knowing that Gladiator's Resolve replaces defensive stance, raises the question:

Do we lose out on Prot Only utility when going Gladstance?

The answer is not perfectly clear.. yet.

But what I did manage to find out is that their intent is clear in that, you can expect abilities that work for Protection to work for Gladiator.

@Cyclonus_WOW Gladiator Stance is for DPS, but restricted from swapping, so will likely count as both Battle and Defensive.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) July 4, 2014

Now obviously this doesn't give us the clarity we'd like. But it's definitely a positive response. So if you're concerned, just give the dev's time, they will update patch notes, they will address these questions. In the meantime, did you see the new gladstance animation? It's just below in gif form.


Update 7/11/2014

We've been given the clarity we requested as seen below, I hope my lucky Beta Gladiator's are wrecking it in there. I plan to do a followup post on our new Talents once the iteration appears to slow down a little.

• Warrior Stances now once again have their own action bars.
  • Attempting to use an ability that requires a different stance will now automatically switch to that stance.
• Hamstring now requires Battle Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Intervene now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Mass Spell Reflection now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Mocking Banner now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Revenge now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Safeguard now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Shield Slam now requires Defensive stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Spell Reflection now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Taunt now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Thunder Clap now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.
• Vigilance now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.

- Cyc