Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Highmaul Gladiator : Logscraft #2

Hello Gladiators!

The world first race is over, and the champions Paragon made a few really interesting comments in their interview on manaflask. Most importantly ( to me ) is that Bear Prime aka Sejta, went Prot Warrior. When asked why Warrior, he said that when a fight has 50% tank time the ideal tank was Prot Warrior, since we're able to have mitigation up whenever we're the active tank. I would call this a win for Prot Warrior, he might not be a Gladiator, but it's nice to see.

Shortly before the release of Mythic Highmaul we saw buffs come in for Fury, and I heard some serious rioting over twitter and the forums. Basically a lot of people had the misconception that Glad wasn't the best choice in Highmaul. And from the numbers it looks like a lot of the Fury and Arms Warriors were able to do some pretty sick damage. Gladiator however, is up there on some of the fights. Lets take a look at how some of those who did have the constitution to stick to Glad ranked up. Right now it's a good time to look at the Mythic rankings on Warcraftlogs as most of these fights are still too hard to start using cheese/stacking strategies that inevitably ruin the rankings. I've taken a look at the Boss DPS for these examples because on >4 Add fights right now we're going to get ruined by Arms Warriors.

BOSS DPS: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/6#class=Warrior&metric=bossdps




One of the fights still being hidden is Butcher, a single target, patchwerk style, tunnel vision fight and I hope we see a few gladiators way up there. Looking at the current rankings it's telling in that we a competitive with fury and arms on the 1 or 2 Target fights, but we seem to fall out of the top 10 if the boss has more than 2 targets. Personally I've been stuck tanking and since i'm only in Normal/Heroic I've been keeping my APM up with Unyielding strikes and seeing some decent tank damage.

I thought it was interesting to see one of us in second place on Ko'Ragh, so I thought i'd take a deeper look at how it was done. Emperorz from the new Nihilium ranked 2nd for all warriors, and 21st worldwide on Mythic Ko'Ragh.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/CGAVbYFkqJWtBmZP#fight=61&type=damage-done&source=12&target=26

Using Bloodbath, Unyielding Strikes and Dragon Roar, he was definitely built to burn through Ko'ragh single target. He only used his dragon roar and thunder clap a few times to help with adds.
Also he chose to use the Rude Interruption glyph as you have to deal with Mind Controlled teammates on this fight. You can also see from his Heroic Strike damage that he was using the cleave glyph as they were keeping volatile anomalies near the boss until they were low enough to put in a suppression circle and kill. Looking at rage usage, you can also see that he wasn't using the extra rage glyph. Emperorz wasted 360 rage, which is pretty good considering the kind of situations you can get in at 4+ stacks of Unyielding and SS coming off cooldown.



- Cyc

Friday, December 5, 2014

Highmaul Gladiator : Logscraft #1

Gladiators!


After having been required to tank for my guild this week, suffice to say I'm a bit sad to see everyone else shield charging without me. However, Prot Tanking itself has been a blast and not all is grim. I know I'm always 1 GCD away from Gladstance. Today's topic will be some advice on what talents/configurations are working best for Gladiators in Highmaul Heroic. This will be a series and as of next week I'll start digging into Mythic kills instead :).  What I've done is review the top parsers on Warcraftlogs to look for any tricks/common themes.

Remember that your raid leaders strategy may not allow for these recommendations.

Kargath Bladefist

Reviewing the top Gladiator's on Kargath shows that there are two route to go here. You can either focus Kargath the entire time, or help with adds. We've got Bladestorm and Dragon Roar which is decent, but in this instance I think it's our best bet to forgo the adds for some pretty amazing single target damage. If you wanted to focus adds for your raid, I would recommend you go Arms!

In the top 10 Gladiator parses we're seeing between 23 and 25k DPS. The top parse is also the top damage done to Kargath himself by Intrepid ( Armory ). Dropping a staggering 8.6M Damage on Kargath in a 22man raid.

Unyielding Strikes

If you take a look at the above picture, you can see a great uptime on Unyielding Strikes. 91.36% is a great uptime. Just having US up is half the game though, you need to make sure you don't let it drop early, and take advantage of it at top stacks. Below you can see that Intrepid only ONCE let US drop at 5 stacks. And It looks like he decided to start executing sub 20% and stopped keeping US going. This was actually a DPS Loss, as you can see that he dropped to 23k DPS from a Solid 25k before that.



Lining up CD's. 
One of the most important factors is to look at how he lined up use of his Scabbard ( Sword Technique ) with his other Trinket ( Strength of Steel ), Potion and Bloodbath proc's.

This really shows the power of a right click trinket being used effectively!


Tracking these sorts of Proc's is a UI Issue, and while I plan to do a comprehensive post for gladiator UI soon, I think what you will want to do is either have an addon that automatically shows you when proc's like "Strength of Steel" are active, and even the internal cooldown of that trinket to know when to save a right click trinket like the scabbard. With the RPPM trinkets, is very important to know when the trinket CAN'T proc. Look at the mountains of DPS when all of that lined up.


- Cyc

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Gladiator's First Night in Highmaul

Gladiators!

Heroic Highmaul has been released, and I am happy to say we're doing extremely well. Just browsing Warcraftlogs you can see that the top parses for Warriors in Heroic Highmaul are almost all Gladiators.

Rankings:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings/6#difficulty=4&metric=dps&class=Warrior

Looking at the first two bosses we did extremely well. The Arms warrior who beat us on Kargath only did 11K DPS to Kargath himself ( with glads bringing in 22k ). Arms is for killing adds, and this is expected.



Kargath




The top ranked Formality has a glad and arms warrior at around 18k dps.
Near the bottom of their raid. Link
Enigma had a Glad doing 22k dps here. Middle of the pack.
Consolium at 21k DPS here. Also middle of the pack.

Kargath is an easy fight with only a few short windows to do aoe burst ( the coliseum adds ) so unless the Glad is going up there, and planning for that burst it's going to fall behind Boomkin, Ret, and of course Arms. Rest assured though, planning for burst that inconsequential is padding ( anyone remember Mythic Immerseus? ).

Butcher

A fight more in our favor would be the Butcher. Basically Patchwerk, and depending on strat, you really shouldn't lose more than a second or two on the boss ( when he knocks us back ).

Hard in the Paint - Jin with a respectable 21k DPS, Ranking 6th in his raid.
Reckless - Rigge in 5th at nearly 23k DPS. Ranking 5th.
Enigma - Tartarus at 22.1k DPS. Ranking 4th.
Adapt - With TWO Gladiators at 3rd and 6th.

So we're not topping the meters, but the difference between us and the top class is within a thousand or two dps. NOT TOO BAD Gladiators.  I can't wait to see how we do in Mythic, once we've had a week to gear up.

One other note is the Hotfixed Trinket Changes make Knight's Badge extremely desirable for Gladiator's now. Far outshining the Skull of War.



- Cyc