Woe betide me

Tried zerging Sarth +3D on late Friday evening/early Saturday morning with me tanking. Almost had him a few times, best attempts were 100k HP remaining, or 3%. A few wipes caused by me, some by others, kinda normal for a learning raid. Called it a day and decided to try another time.

Did Ulduar-10 on Wednesday evening again with me tanking. Wasn't so bad; cleared FLV, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn and Auriaya with a few wipes here and there. Bear in mind this was an impromtu raid with people who have never played with each other before, and with undergeared people and people who have never stepped into Ulduar before.

Continued Ulduar-10 Hodir, Thorim, and Iron Council yesterday evening. To say that it was a fiasco (on my part) was probably an understatement. Some wipes caused by me, some by others; a bit more than I would have expected, but then again its a learning raid for some of us. We ended up calling it at 4am. We started at 10.30pm, and only killed one boss in all that time. Not good. Someone called me a bad tank. Maybe I am, maybe I am.

Note to self 1: Don't ever try to tank when exhausted/sick. Bad for me, bad for everyone.

Note to others 1: Don't ask me to tank when exhausted/sick.

Note to self 2: Never agree to tank when exhausted/sick.

And the list goes on...

Parry, or rather, Parry-haste

Since you people have been so good, I decided to reward you with another post :)

Here's all you ever wanted to know about parry. What I'm interested in talking about, is this hidden mechanic all tanks used to know and fear (ok maybe not all, there will be some scrubs who choose to remain in the dark about important things): Parry-haste.

What Parry-haste simply means, is that when you parry an attack, the remaining time on your current swing is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed, unless this would result in a reduction to less than 20% of your swing time remaining.

For example, I'm using a 3.00s speed weapon, and have just started my weapon swing. At the same time, I parry a mob's attack. My swing speed for this next particular attack, will now be reduced by 40%, leading to a new speed of 1.80 seconds.

As another example: I'm using a 3.00s speed weapon, and I am 2.00 seconds into my weapon swing. At the same time, I parry a mob's attack. The remaining time on my swing timer is now 1.00s, and according to parry mechanics, this is reduced by 40% of my weapon speed which is 1.20 seconds. However, this violates the rule "unless this would result in a reduction to less than 20% of your swing time remaining," and therefore, my new remaining swing timer is instead reduced to 20% of my weapon swing speed, which is 0.60 seconds.

As a third example: I'm using a 3.00s speed weapon, and I am 2.50 seconds into my weapon swing. At the same time, I parry a mob's attack. 20% of my weapon swing speed is 0.60 seconds. Since I have gone beyond 20% of my weapon swing speed remaining, I will instead continue to land my attack 0.50 seconds later. It's like the game says (and I quote Disquette from EJ here): "Hey, parry can't reduce you below 20%, so just let the swing land like it's supposed to."

This has been extensively verified, especially at EJ here, starting from post #7, and I hope that clarifies it a little for you people new to this.

Lets reverse the situation a bit, and imagine you were swinging at a boss, and the boss parried your attack. (Yes I can hear many of you going "Aha!")

If the boss is one with an infamously fast weapon swing speed, such as Prince Malchezaar in phase 2, or Morogrim Tidewalker in SSC, you could find your main tank dead very very fast even without crushing blows, if you constantly attack from the front and aren't expertise capped. Now, in Wrath, crushing blows no longer exist, but raid bosses are hitting harder and harder. Imagine having your main tank take 12k 5 times in two seconds from XT-002 in Ulduar. Bad, isnt it?

I can't stress it enough: Never ever DPS from the front of a boss unless you absolutely have to, such as in Kologarn or Mimiron in Ulduar. You lose DPS, and risk killing your tank. If you absolutely have to do so, any extra expertise gear you have lying around will be doubly or even triply valuable.

As a tank, trying to reach the expertise cap of 13% for Parry is unwise and ill-advised, because it will more than likely gimp you in other areas. Strive for as high a number as you can get, without compromising other stats. Parries are to be expected, so try to minimise them as much as possible. Your healers will thank you for it.

Unorthodox tanking

A while ago, I mentioned that Unrelenting Assault was something of an unorthodox tanking talent. Matt Rossi has tried it out not so long ago in a spec something like this, and I can't seem to find his post again, but I vaguely remember what he said. According to him, it was fun, but the rage coming in didn't seem to be sufficient because his Revenge was stunning almost everything in sight.

Let me explain. What he basically did, was combine UA and Improved Revenge, such that he would be basically spamming Revenge every GCD.

Fast forward abit: I was in my second warrior, X, DPS'ing a Naxx10 raid, just killed Grobbulus, and about to proceed to Gluth. Since it was a raid mostly composed of friends, I volunteered to kite tank the zombies that Gluth spawns. Throwing on my tank gear, I realised, to the horror of horrors, that X has dual specced into PvE Arms and PvP Arms. "Oh well, how hard can it be, right?" was what I thought to myself. In we go, and to my surprise, I actually had a lot of fun spamming Revenge on the zombies.

Taking what Matt did a step further, using my same warrior X, I managed to tank the whole of heroic Gundrak in the cookie cutter PvE Arms spec. Threat output was slightly lower than normal, and damage taken was quite abit higher than I would have liked, but Revenge spamming was seriously fun (keep in mind that Thunder Clap and Cleave are essentials in holding mobs too, and even more so in this case). Kudos to B and Z and whoever else went with me (I can't remember, sorry).

As a final note, UA is NOT meant to be a main tank/progression tank ability. It can, however, provide tons of fun if you do choose to mess around with it in a 5-man or 10-man farming raid offtank (make sure your party members are sympathetic though!).

Midsummer Fire Festival

In case you're wondering where I've disappeared to for the past 6 days, I've been working on the Midsummer Fire Festival. Since this is the only holiday that I ever did, and probably will ever do, I decided to do a little something more this year. Last year, I only had 4 toons, that did most of the fires, while my rogue did all, inclusive of stealing the enemy capital cities' fires.

This year, I am proud happy to announce that all my 8 toons now have the achievement "The Flame Warden", along with the brazier and the pet from the vendor. It's taken awhile, but it was kinda fun while it lasted =D

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all you daddies and budding daddies out there!

I suppose I should have posted this earlier, but my 3rd warrior has been 80 for a full week now, and has already been sufficiently geared up from heroics (and Naxx10 to a certain extent) :)

For some reason, B has recently taken to taken to asking me to tank for heroic achievements, something I swore I would never do again after my first warrior, H, completed all of them and gotten her Red Proto-Drake. Looking through all my toons, I realised that most of them have had more than half of the heroic achievements done, and my third warrior, S, has had, as of this moment, 38/51 of them complete. I must say that the prospect of a second Red Proto is quite appealing...

DPS as a Warrior (Part 4)

Warriors are an easy class to learn to play, but are extremely difficult to master. It takes lots of practice, practice, practice, and then more practice. It involves a lot of reading up on class mechanics to really understand what's going on and why you need to press something at a certain time.

Admittedly, my Wrath experience has been limited to heroics, Naxxramas and certain fights of Ulduar, but from what I can deduce, Fury still has a slight edge over Arms at the highest of gear levels. Below that, Arms is probably a better choice if you want to maximise your DPS. Granted, the recent Fury buff has reduced the gap somewhat at lower gear levels, but truth be told, I had favoured Fury over Arms from day one. Arms did feel more dynamic, but it lacked a certain oomph that I felt while playing Fury.

To add on to all that I've said regarding both trees, one must note that there is absolutely no benefit for you to be hitting a boss from the front, and doing so WILL lower your DPS. Therefore, always make sure to hit mobs/bosses from behind, where they are unable to parry your attacks. They will, however, still be able to dodge attacks, and this is where your Expertise comes into play.

Also, for you budding and veteran warriors out there alike, DO note that warriors are one of the most, if not the most, gear and buff dependent class, to produce maximum DPS. The DPS jump from ilevel 200 blues to ilevel 200 epics is larger than that from ilevel 200 epics to ilevel 213 epics. Raid buffs like Might (Battle Shout), Kings, MotW, Trueshot Aura, Sunder Armour, etc etc, would almost double your DPS at most gear levels; credits for this go to Landsoul's warrior spreadsheet which can be found here. Go on, try it out on a heroic dummy, and then try it on a raid boss fully buffed. You'll see what I mean.

Having said that, it is easy to see why warrior DPS can seem so inflated on certain fights, because of the way the fight mechanics/buffs scale with the rage mechanic. This can be read here. Matt Rossi has kindly explained that with a white damage buff from fights like Thaddius or Loatheb, a warrior would have more rage to convert into specials, which converts into even more DPS. I can understand Blizzard's need to respond to all the complaints about warrior DPS being too high, but come on! You designed these fight mechanics, and didn't see this coming? And now you, in the interests of having to pacify all these other classes, are nerfing warrior DPS where it didn't really need a nerf. Warrior DPS WILL be exceptionally skewed on fights like these, and you need to explain that fact to other classes, instead of hitting us with such a bad nerf and then applying some band-aids over it because you thought warrior DPS was a tad too low.

Since I've almost always been a Fury/Prot warrior, I'm just going to put my trust in Blizzard again and hope they do something about it. I understand warriors are ridiculously difficult to balance, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.

As for you folks out there, my advice is: Try both trees out, find out which one you like more, and stick with it. After all, there's not much point in playing a style you dislike, is there?

DPS as a Warrior (Part 3)

After a long bout with throat infections and flu, from which I still have not recovered, and some desktop problems, this is finally here. Enjoy.

Warriors have been around a very long time, so naturally it follows that Arms warriors have been around just as long. PvP veterans of old learned to fear and revere Arms warriors for their deadly Mortal Strike. In those days, Arms was THE warrior PvP tree, and PvE Arms was non-existent. Come Wrath, and especially patches 2.4 and 3.1, Arms was no longer a PvP only tree. Now, there isn't any one talent that really defines the tree, except maybe for Bladestorm, and even that is a point of contention among many warriors.

The tree has seen many changes, notably, the changes to Poleaxe Specialization, where it previously gave +5% crit, it now also gives +5% crit damage, the introduction of Taste for Blood, making Rend and Overpower now primary skills in the Arms arsenal; whereas previously Arms warriors had no defining stance for DPS, they now almost always use Battle Stance. There was also Sudden Death and Unrelenting Assault (UA is an interesting and unorthodox tanking talent too, more on that next time), Wrecking Crew, and Juggernaut, which provides much-needed mobility.

Previously, Juggernaut provided a +100% chance to crit, but patches 3.1.2 and 3.1.3 reduced that chance to 25%, and increased the cooldown on Charge by 5 seconds, respectively. Needless to say, this must have been an attempt to balance for PvP. Still, it is a great PvE talent, and that is what we are interested in.

The Arms DPS cycle is somewhat more complex than its Fury counterpart. In a nutshell, you simply Charge a mob, Rend, followed by Mortal Strike, while using Execute/Overpower procs when they become available, refreshing Rend when there is less than 6 seconds left, squeezing Slams in whenever possible, and using Bladestorm, combined with Sweeping Strikes if there are additional mobs around. It therefore naturally follows that you will be specced for Improved Slam and have the Glyph of Rending to go along with it.

It must be said that Slam, however strange it may seem, is essentially a large part of Arms DPS and cannot be ignored. Since Arms warriors generally have no rage issue without environmental raid damage, Slam is an effective way of burning excess rage. With the 2T7 bonus, which increases Slam damage by 10%, a 2/2 Improved Slam + a queued Heroic Strike after will provide some nice damage along with burning excess rage. What I've noticed people saying is to use Slam instead of Heroic Strike. I respectfully disagree... I use both! Its true that Slam>Heroic Strike for rage dump, but if you can somehow manage to get both to come off together, which I've been able to pull off on multiple occasions, that would increase DPS and burn more rage (for situations with extremely high raid damage).

Of course, there is also a question of prioritizing procs. This is where the fun starts. The Arms DPS cycle is so hectic that you'll probably never ever have a free global cooldown. So then, what happens when Execute lights up, Overpower lights up, Rend has less than 6 seconds remaining, and Mortal Strike is off cooldown at the same time? First things first, don't panic! Always prioritize it such that Execute is the highest on your list, since Sudden Death can proc off itself, then followed by Mortal Strike/Overpower in no particular order, then refreshing Rend, and finally Bladestorm. Bladestorm is last, because while it may be a nice DPS boost on paper, you are unable to do anything for that 6 seconds, save white attacks and moving around, which also means you will be unable to press Execute and Overpower... the list goes on.

All weapon specializations in the Arms tree were not created equal. Sword spec may look nice, but is very lacklustre. Mace spec provides more oomph, but the work done by Landsoul and many others over at Elitistjerks have shown that the ArP is insufficient to justify speccing into this, so we are only left with... Poleaxe specialization. 5% crit chance is big, but 5% extra crit damage is enormous, or so the experts say. I'm just going to trust their math on this one, and say that Poleaxe spec is THE 2H spec.

A standard Arms spec would look something like this. Note that the points in the first two tiers of the Arms tree are mostly fillers, as are the points in the second tier of the Fury tree. Also, it is VERY IMPORTANT to note that Trauma is provided by Feral druids in the form of Mangle, and Blood Frenzy is provided by Combat rogues in the form of Savage Combat. If you have those two in your raid, feel free to stick the talent points elsewhere; Anger Management would be a good choice. If you are intending to go it solo, or have neither of these in your raid (unlikely), I recommend you take the 2 points out of Improved Execute and stick them into the necessary abilities.

With regards to gear, there are two schools of thought: Armour Penetration and Strength. While the kind folks at Elitistjerks have already concluded that gemming (and looking for) Strength on gear is generally superior to ArP, it might have changed since this was written. 8% hit is the absolute maximum you should have, 7% with a Draenei in your party. Mix and match your gear with Weapon Mastery so that you'll sit at 6.5% expertise, which is the dodge soft cap.

Glyph-wise, never leave home without Glyph of Rending, Glyph of Mortal Strike, and Glyph of Execution. For minor glyphs, you can use the same as those for Fury, which are here.

Next: Conclusion!

Thank you, come again! (Part 2)

Yesterday afternoon, I was convinced to tank regular Gundrak at level 75 by a friend who has been levelling his paladin alt. He said the healer was good, so I agreed, and dragged a hunter friend along (who hit 80 later in the day).

The run was very smooth, and fast even by my standards. I happened to notice that my blessing had 15 minutes left, which meant that we cleared the place in 15 minutes. The healer said, and I quote:

That was stupid fast..

Another perk of being a tank :D.

Granted, it's a team effort - high dps, good healer, but it's up to the tank to get the ball rolling and set a steady pace, without which the party would never get anywhere.

Thank you, come again! (Part 1)

One of the perks about being a tank is that sometimes you can derive enormous satisfaction from tanking. A couple of nights ago, while questing on my 3rd warrior, S, in Borean Tundra, someone whispered me "Are you a tank?" Now I usually don't respond to these messages because sometimes people dont even have the basic courtesy to say "Sorry to bother you, but could you tank xx (instance)?" and just barge straight to "can you tank AN", but on this night, I made an exception (it sounded friendly), and replied:

What of it?

We need a tank for regular Old Kingdom. Would you like to come?

Now I must reiterate that I am a sucker for polite people, so I agreed without hesitation. I join the group, which are all gathered at the summoning stone already, and receive a summon (suspicions start creeping in at this point: Did they just lose a tank?). We go in, we buff up, I ask for party leader, and start pulling. omfgwtfbbqTHEMOBSARENOTDYING starts to run through my brain from the first pull. The second, third, and fourth pull are the same. I chanced a glance at my damage meter and nearly fainted was utterly horrified couldnt believe my eyes.

(Let me say here, that I am not a meter-person. I keep it around just to see how people are performing relative to me. There are too many ways in which the data could be skewed or incorrect.)

To the horror of horrors, I was leading the pack for damage done. Let's be modest, a protection warrior of reasonable gear at level 74 puts out roughly 700 DPS while tanking. Even considering my combat uptime, the DPS had to be really really bad for me to be at the top.

Allow me to sidetrack a little here. Our group consisted of me, a shadow priest, and three others from the same guild, a discipline priest, retribution pally, and fury warrior. Only the shadow priest was close to me in terms of damage done. His DPS was roughly about 1000, but he was still doing less damage than me.

At this point, I resign myself to a long instance. Who asked me to be such a sucker for politeness, right?

After awhile, we reach the first boss. I explain the fight, I pull. First attempt, nobody hits the Guardian add that spawns, the small spiderlings become immune to damage, and my healer dies from them while I could only watch. The fury warrior gets DI'ed near the boss after me, my healer, and the shadow priest die. I run back. Nobody else releases. Are they expecting a rez or something!?!? I explain to the fury warrior that perhaps he could try to shadowmeld after removing DI. He/she dies, and grumbles abit. They all run back in the end. I inspect the fury warrior's damage breakdown and spec. I choke want to /wrist nearly faint again. He/she is sporting a spec something like this (can't remember the exact thing, was too busy fainting), and his/her skill breakdown showed that Bloodthirst was non-existent.

It's 2am in the morning, I didn't feel like offering any friendly advice.

Boss dies on the second attempt. We work our way to the second boss. I explain the fight. I pull. Nobody seems to want to DPS the boss when he teleports. I work my ass off Shield Slamming the boss and the luckily the healer doesn't get incapacitated, and he also works his ass off healing those people. Boss dies in one attempt.

On the next pull, ret pally uses /rw to announce that he is going AFK. WTH? I'm not blind!! I can read party chat!! I keep pulling. Two or three pulls later, ret pally announces he's back... via /rw. I can feel my blood pressure rising. We reach the third boss without incident. I explain the fight, and resign myself to eating the enrages hope against hope that they can kill the adds so I wont have to eat the enrage.

Attempt 1: At 75%, boss flies up, summons add. Party doesn't seem to realise the add is there until it walks to the boss' spot. He enrages, and plants a Thundershock at my location. Everybody was clustered somewhere near me for some unknown reason. Everybody eats 10k nature damage; my healer and the ret pally die instantly, we wipe.

I say again in party chat: Please kill the add, the enrage is really painful.

Attempt 2: Everyone spreads out abit more, but still nobody seems to want to hit the add or even realise that its there. Fury warrior dies at ~65% boss hp due to Thundershock, I press one or two cooldowns at every enrage, hoping against hope that I live. The damage comes in by the (many) thousands. Not fun to see. Boss has 10% HP left, healer is OOM, I am out of cooldowns, and he spawns a Thundershock below me. My HP is at 4000 or so. Somehow I manage to dodge and parry his next few melee strikes and we survive; boss dies.

We proceed to the last boss. I explain the fight. Ret pally goes "Cool" when I reach the insanity part and starts linking all the gear that the boss drops. My patience is wearing very thin here. Attempt 1: I kill off my adds, and help two other DPSers with theirs (!!). Healer goes OOM during second insanity, the boss' Mind Flay is too pain, we wipe at 9%.

Attempt 2: The PUG shadow priest kindly provides us with Guru's Elixir. I kill off my adds, and hope against hope that I get transported to my healer's realm to help. I don't. After helping one DPSer, we go to the healer's realm. Joy. At start of second insanity, healer has 70% mana. I am confident we will down him, and we did.

Its finally over; timestamp reads 2:45 AM

Recount at the end

To be honest, although I was exasperated, I felt pleased and satisfied at myself for having successfully led this bunch of people through a more-difficult-than-normal regular instance. As for the second picture, number 1 is me, 2 was the shadow priest, and 7 was my holy priest. In case you're wondering if this was made up, its not. I won't waste my time justifying myself here. All-in-all, an interesting experience, though not one I care to repeat (yes I've had many of these already, and yes I seem to always land such groups), but don't count on it.

Edit: I didn't save a screenshot of that Fury warrior's damage breakdown, but I did notice he/she had 42 immune Hamstrings and some Thunder Claps, which meant that he/she was DPSing in Battle Stance some of the time (!!?).

Whose fault is it?

Theoretical situation 1:

You are tanking a pack of mobs with a clearly-defined kill order. A DPSer focuses on your primary mob but his AoE pulls aggro from another mob, causing his death. Whose fault is it?

Theoretical situation 2:

You are tanking a single mob. A DPSer manages to pull aggro from you and dies. Whose fault is it?

Call me wierd weird, but in both cases, it would be my fault, unless the DPSer massively outgeared me, or I was having latency issues. In a perfect, lag-free world, yes, the fault would be mine first and foremost, and the DPSer's second.

Let me explain. In situation 1, it would clearly be my lack of situational awareness that caused me to have insufficient threat on the particular mob that killed my DPSer, while in situation 2, I must have been dreaming or thinking about lunch or something to that effect. Allow me to clarify that this is a more radical, new-school style of thought. The old school of thought (prevalent back in TBC) is that as DPSer, you watch your own threat; if you overaggro and die, its your fault. However, I suppose this is close to impossible now.. monitoring your (DPS) threat on the primary AND secondary targets (think Whirlwind or Divine Storm).

I suppose its this chain of reasoning that constantly makes me strive to put out more threat (read: damage) so as to allow my DPSers to perform at their maximum capacity.

Now, I will admit that both situations have happened to me before, either via mispulls or having my mind wander. There even have been non-fatal occurences of the second scenario. What I'm saying is... Nobody is infallible. But if you can learn from your mistakes so that you can become a better tank... Everybody benefits, right?

DPS as a Warrior (Part 2)

The sole defining talent of the Fury tree in Wrath is definitely Titan's Grip. Having seen a multitude of balances ever since its inception, TG is now straddled with a 10% damage reduction component when wielding a 2-handed weapon in one hand. On the bright side, patch 3.1.3 brought some life back into the Fury tree, namely, reducing the cost of Bloodthirst(BT) from 30 rage to 20 rage, and reducing its cooldown from 5 seconds to 4 seconds.

After some testing on the heroic dummy, I noticed a marked increase in DPS from what I used to have. When the 10% damage reduction to TG went live, many warriors were noticing, and suffering from, rage starvation at some point or another, due to a drop in white hit damage. As in the link in the previous post, GC has said that the rage formula hasn't changed, and the TG nerf did take white-hit rage generation into account, but warrior DPS was a tad too low. Still, it doesn't explain where large chunks of other warriors' DPS went. Now, with this fix, Fury DPS cycles seem to be much smoother, allowing more Heroic Strikes, and rage starvation issues should be a thing of the past. Let's just hope that this is not another band-aid fix on top of what promises to be a great talent for warriors.

A Fury warrior's DPS cycle is somewhat priority-based. Fury warriors have 2 instant attacks, one proc-attack, and a rage dump. Most of the time, it does not matter whether you hit BT first or Whirlwind(WW) first, its just that WW provides a bigger initial damage boost. Bloodsurge procs, however, are a different story. There exist differing opinions on whether to prioritize WW before instant-cast slams, or BT before instant-cast slams, but a good rule of thumb is to fit your instant slams into a free GCD whenever possible. Keep in mind that while you are doing all this, you should also be diligently queueing Heroic Strike, never letting your rage bar fill up completely.

In an infinite rage situation (think lots of raid damage), all your mainhand attacks should be Heroic Strike. Of course, sometimes there is little raid damage, and your offhand white damage doesn't generate sufficient rage for you to do that. Thats where rage generating talents come into the equation. Bloodrage, Berserker Rage, Glyph of Heroic Strike, and Anger Management are all your friends. Even with such a wide array of tools at your disposal, you might still find yourself short of rage. This is where its time to think about a weapon upgrade, or more Strength/hit.

A standard cookie-cutter Fury spec would look, therefore, something like this.

Gearing as a Fury warrior is relatively easy. You'll want pieces with high strength and crit, while hit, expertise, armour penetration, and haste are mostly secondary. 8% hit from talents and gear will be sufficient, although 3-4% above this number will help to smooth out rage generation. 6.5% expertise is recommended for bosses, to ensure that none of your specials get dodged. Finally, you should be primarily gemming for Strength, anything else is mostly sub-optimal.

As for glyphs, must-have major glyphs would be Heroic Strike and Whirlwind, while the third slot could possibly be filled by Glyph of Execution. Minor glyphs are quite standard; you'll want Glyph of Battle, Glyph of Bloodrage, and Glyph of Enduring Victory.

Next: DPS as Arms.

DPS as a Warrior (Part 1)

Warriors have two DPS specs: Arms and Fury.

A long time ago, Fury was THE PvE spec, while Arms was for PvP. That mostly changed in patch 2.4, with the advent of Titan's Grip and Bladestorm and numerous other changes to both trees.

Along comes patch 3.1, with the nerf 10% damage reduction to Titan's Grip. Many warriors, including yours truly, have respecced countless times into both trees, and, dismayed at the state of Fury DPS at sub-optimal gear levels, switched to Arms instead. To be fair, after reading Landsoul's post, one of the most revered warrior number crunchers out there, I am still at a loss to answer where all my Fury DPS went to. Now, with patch 3.1.3, Arms received a slight boost while Fury seems to be significantly boosted, with the rage and cooldown change to Bloodthirst.

The primary difference between the two trees as they stand now, is that Fury provides a constant damage output with a few highly explosive peaks, while Arms feels more bursty and requires more concentration to watch out for skill cooldowns, debuffs, and procs. All in all, Fury excels at fights with little to no movement, and with adds (think Whirlwind), your typical stand-still-and-bash-the-boss'-skull-in kind of fights. Arms probably has an edge in fluid fights with lots of movement.

Next posts: More in-depth discussion on Arms and Fury DPS.

What it means to be the main tank

Of a progression guild, that is.

As the main tank, more often than not, you will be leading the 10- and 25-man raids. That, in itself, is honestly sufficiently stressful. Leave the DKP to some other officer or the guild leader (if you are not already the guild leader). Your main concern is the successful completion of the particular raid dungeon you are attempting. This means that you will be assigning tanks, healers, and sometimes DPS, to specific roles. This means that you have read strategies for the upcoming boss fights. This also largely means that you will be the main tank on every boss until it finally bites the dust.

Why did I say that you'll be tanking a boss only until your guild gets a first kill? The reasons are very simple.

1) Assume you have been main tanking the same bosses day in and day out for the past month. One day, you burn out/decide to quit WoW/are not free. BAM. None of the other offtanks know what to do, and its back to wiping on a farm boss.

2) Sometimes, being in an offtank role helps you see things in a different light. Why was my offtank the other day taking so much damage? Is it reasonable to have only 2 offtanks catching x-number of adds? So on and so forth.

Basically what I'm trying to say is: As a guild main tank, you should never main tank every single boss every time, but instead, give your other tanks a shot at it. Trust me, it works wonders in boosting their confidence. And, if you were the main tank by virtue of skill, you will be able to let the guild know, after seeing different tanks on the same boss, that you have earned your position by true merit.

Don't pull when your healers are dead

On my old server, we used to have this feral druid. Excitable little SOB guy he was, loved pulling before people were obviously ready, i.e. pulling when 1/3 of the raid was dead, and most of them are healers. This druid also seldom read raid chat, so many a time, we would have something like:

Druid: Pulling.

Raid: Wait. WAIT!! STOP!! xxx ISN'T HERE YET!!!

*The Menagerie is for guests only.*

Raid: Oh shit.

To... minimize this "friendly fire", I never ever put him in a raid leader/main tank position whenever possible.

Unfortunately, this druid also had the nasty habit of rolling on most, if not all, gear that said "cloth" and "leather", which naturally resulted in a lot of misgivings from the officer corps. I mean, come on, do everyone a favour, and don't roll on something you wont use. That poor recruit priest wont ever see any gear upgrades when he's in your raid.

Of course, this little story wouldnt be complete without a mention of -2000 points. -2000 points used to be all that too, with the exception of the lootwhore part. In his defense, he now reads raid chat more and thus causes less wipes and it is easier to get vital information across to him.

Warrior AoE tanking in Wrath

Here's how I usually do my AoE tanking for a pull consisting of 3-5 mobs:

Mark skull, X. Charge skull, Thunder Clap, Shield Slam skull, back up a couple of steps, Shockwave the pack, tab target to X, Revenge X, tab to 3rd mob, Concussion Blow, Thunder Clap, Shield Slam skull, Revenge 4th mob (if any), and all the while spamming Cleave.

Assuming you have Warbringer, 2/2 Damage Shield, and a decent Block Value, you should have no problems holding a pack of 4 mobs. A pack of 5 tends to be too hectic, and a pack of 6 (elites with high HP) will border on mildly uncontrollable. 7 would be quite unmanageable.

Oh and as previously mentioned, if you have Greatness, use it to tank. It works wonders.

OK here's what we'll do

Back in TBC, there was one time where I remember PUGging heroic Shattered Halls with a prot warrior, holy pally, hunter, mage, and me on my rogue. If I remember correctly, some of them were friends and for some reason, they were using Ventrilo, although it was quite beyond me to figure out why at first.

Naturally, being the curious sucker person that I am, I joined their chat channel. We clear the entrance hallway and first room without too much trouble, but it went downhill from there but the real fun only started at the first pack of 5 mobs. Listening to their conversation in Vent made me want to kill someone with my bare hands laugh, sigh, and shake my head at the same time. Here's roughly how it went (details are a little fuzzy):

Warrior: OK uh lets see, we have Sap and Sheep. Sap the star, sheep the moon, and I'll pick up the rest.

Pally: We have a hunter that can CC (crowd control) too.

Warrior: Oh right. (changes raid symbols around abit). OK (insert hunter name), you trap the square, we have the rogue sap the star and the mage sheep the moon.

Hunter: No no, don't let me trap that, if it breaks I'll die. Give me a ranged mob.

Mage: Actually it would be more efficient to kill so-and-so mob after the Legionnaire dies.

(After two more minutes of discussion...)

Warrior: OK we'll stick with the original plan.

Mage, Hunter, Pally: What was the original plan again?

At this point I got so bored I had already pickpocketed all 5 mobs and was continuously sapping my assigned mob over and over again. Somehow, we manage to get through the first pack of mobs and get to the second pack, which has 6 mobs now.

Warrior: Lets do it this way...

It went on for another 5-10 minutes, and by this time, it wasn't funny anymore. I bailed out and found something more productive to do went to do dailies.

Lessons we can learn:

1) You're the tank, the group leader. Assert your authority, listen to opinions and be open to ideas, but ignore rubbish. It would have been easier to say: "Here's what we'll do, yada yada yada" and throw any nonsense aside. Saying that takes about a full 10 seconds, maybe 20 to type it out. Was that so hard?

2) Slow pulling is inefficient and makes everyone fall asleep. OK maybe not everyone, maybe just me.

I can't stress point number 1 enough. If you know your job well enough, then by all means go ahead and do it. Of course, there's a fine line between thinking you know what you're doing, and doing it the proper way. Famous last words: "Don't tell me how to tank, u fucking noob."

Add me if you think I'm good

Couple of days back, two of my friends ask me to heal heroic Violet Hold (my druid is dual-specced resto), so I says ok. One of them (a hunter) just hit 80 the day before that.

Group was ret pally friend, hunter friend, PUG mage and PUG warrior tank in 4/5 T7.25.

Warrior starts when hunter is still outside, ergo he is locked out. Hunter asks in channel for rescue, but as I am busy, he is only let in when somebody else opens the VH door. Hunter comes in in greens, blues, and two illegal epics, manages to overaggro once or twice in a couple of pulls.

Warrior (during the short break after second boss): "If you think my tanking is good, do add me to your friends list, and let me know so I can add you too."

As a sidenote, his tanking so far was so-so.

We come to the last boss. Cyanigosa has a couple of nasty abilities, including a Blizzard spell, and a frontal AoE breath attack that deals damage to all targets in a cone. Normally, when I tank her, I will always make sure to tell my party members to not stand behind me.

Said warrior picks up the boss, and the rest of the party quickly position themselves to the side or at the tail. When the boss used her magnetic pull ability, said warrior was not fast enough to build more threat, resulting in hunter getting melee'd two times. Said warrior then proceeded to turn the boss in order to avoid Blizzard, resulting in at least 3 other people, including yours truly, eating the breath attack. In addition, said warrior did this twice, resulting in the death of the ret pally.

It was only later that I learned through the chat in trade channel, that said warrior was a reject of an endgame raiding guild, apparently because he wasn't smart enough to master certain boss fights.

No, I don't think I'll be adding you to my friend's list anytime soon, or any other time in future, for that matter.

Quick bites

Things you probably never knew about a warrior in Wrath:

1) Avoidance stats now are subject to diminishing returns (DR)
2) 4.9185 Defense Rating = 1 Defense at level 80
3) 39.348 Dodge Rating = 1% Dodge chance at level 80 (pre-DR)
4) 49.185 Parry Rating = 1% Parry chance at level 80 (pre-DR)
5) 16.395 Block Rating = 1% Block chance at level 80 and is not subject to DR
6) 32.79 Hit Rating = 1% Melee Hit chance at level 80
7) 32.79 Expertise Rating = 1 Expertise at level 80
8) Berserker Rage is now usable in all stances
9) Shield Wall and Last Stand are now OFF the global cooldown
10) Almost all of your tanking abilities are now boosted by Attack Power
11) Every point of armour increases your time-to-live (TTL) by exactly the same amount as the previous point, i.e. your TTL-armour graph would be linear
12) Shield Block is now more of an "oh-shit" button
13) Absorbed damage now gives you rage
14) Shockwave and Shield Slam are the best things to ever happen to protection warriors, in that order
15) The recent nerf to Titan's Grip affects warriors who don't have best-in-slot gear the most
16) Armored to the Teeth is a talent every warrior must have, regardless of spec

N.B. Points 1-7, 10, 11, and 13 are not exclusive to warriors