Burnout And The 4.1 Patch.

It's been a while since I've updated. I've been considering not playing anymore. While I decided to give the game another chance, I did take a break for a time in February to prevent burnout. Cataclysm has officially dropped, and been out for some time now. I can see that Vengeance is such a powerful stat that what I said earlier about being hit and expertise capped was wrong. I couldn't have predicted it would be so useful, and until the recent nerfs to Cleave and Heroic Strike, I was frequently in second or third place for dps in my raid due to Vengeance.

Most everything I said in previous entries was for a Wrath world, and sadly, most of it no longer applies. The once great Vigilance has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, and things in general are similar, but different. Cleave and Heroic Strike being off the global cooldown and off the on-next-swing has shaken things up from the previous spamming of those abilities, something I couldn't be happier about. Threat is generally held by liberal use of Rend and Thunder Clap, and intelligent use of priorities. Personally, I really enjoy where tanking has gone in the last few months. But in the first two months of playing the game, I grew quickly bored of the game. I had gone through all the new zones, did all the new quests, leveled two new toons to level sixty to test the revamped zones, ran every dungeon on regular and heroic a hundred times, and quickly ran out of things to do. When I wasn't raiding, which was most of the time, I found myself very bored. I maxed out all my reputations, got all my pre-raid gear, and generally sat around twiddling my thumbs after my profession dailies were done.

I can't say what about the game was boring me. I was just dissatisfied with the content after I had done all there was to do. I didn't feel like farming, leveling again, or doing those dungeons for the two hundredth time. I have the sense that I am in need of a new world to explore. A new game where I can be the wide-eyed noob wondering what every little thing is. A lot of my friends in game have turned to looking at Rift, Tera, or quit in anticipation of Guild Wars 2. I myself have considered strongly quitting Warcraft when Star Wars: The Old Republic starts, unless my situation in game has improved enough. Perhaps my guild is faltering. In the long wait for Cataclysm, most of my guild has stopped playing, and our raid group has suffered. Now that Cataclysm has dropped, the game seems smaller. Staying in Stormwind, taking portals to every new zone, it all creates a feeling of disconnection. I think I liked the previous model of having all the zones connected and having to fly to them. The portals to the new zones make everything seem almost too close. The ultimate in catering to lazy players, who already have 310% flying.

The biggest reason I chose to update today was noticing some significant changes to the protection spec coming in patch 4.1 and wanting to comment on them. The biggest thing I've noticed off the bat is the number of whining pvp prot warriors. First of all, prot was never designed to pvp in the first place. There was no intention for that to occur, and so there really is no basis to start complaining when they take away their usefulness. With that said, let's look at the changes from the perspective of a raiding protection warrior, instead of someone who's trying to eat steak with a spoon.

Pummel is now usable in all stances: This change by itself seems confusing, until you see the next change. Essentially it made little sense to have two different interrupts for the same class that one spec could use and the others couldn't. This just makes warriors have a single interrupt, no matter the spec. Perhaps some warriors were attempting to eke out more interrupts by stance dancing, which seems misguided to me, but whatever the reason, I'm fine with this change. Though I will be sad to have one less ability I use my shield for. As long as this doesn't become a trend, I'm happy.

Shield Bash has been removed from the game: Simply logical removal seeing that we now have Pummel.

All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown will now always hit the target: Though a general change, this is one of the best changes I've seen for protection specs yet. Most dps classes stack hit to the point where missing interrupts was not an issue, and healers either don't interrupt or have spirit to hit talent converters already in place. The only issue was tanks. While some tanks will advocate stacking hit and expertise, Vengeance is so high that missing isn't really that big a deal. Literally the only argument left for hit stacking was the interrupt issue. Now, that issue is effectively nullified.

Rallying Cry (new ability) temporarily grants the entire party or raid within 30yds 20% of maximum health for 10 seconds. It has a 3-minute cooldown, and shares a cooldown with Last Stand: Some warriors are complaining that this change will hurt them when they can't pop Last Stand, that ability having 10% more health and lasting 10 seconds longer. Personally, I see it as an opportunity to better protect my raid team, which is the entire reason I'm a protection warrior. In a fight where the tank is taking heavy damage, and the raid is not, I pop Last Stand. If a fight calls for the tank to take steady damage and not do much, but the raid is scrambling to stay alive, I pop Rallying Cry. I cannot tell you how much I would have loved to have Rallying Cry while learning fights such as Professor Putricide or Festergut. If anything, it gives me even more chances to be the hero and save the raid.

Spell Reflection cooldown has been increased to 25 seconds, up from 10: This is where most of the protection pvpers are complaining. They seem to feel that Spell Reflection was their saving grace ability and without it they would die. I propose that if one ability is what's keeping you alive in pvp, you are not as good as you think you are. From a raiding perspective, I am a tad saddened to see such a great and fun ability get nerfed, however, I can see why they did it. I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the number of reflectable abilities in Cataclysm is huge. In Wrath, you'd be lucky if one in a hundred spells were reflectable in pve. Now, I can reflect almost anything, which is where its problem was. On a ten second cooldown, the ability was spammed, used every time it was available to reflect anything it so happened to hit, just in case. This change puts it back into the category of having to think about when to use it. Which means when we reflect an ability, even a boss' ability, we will have to time it like a proper cooldown, like we time all our cooldowns. If anything, this change allows them to put in more reflectable abilities in the game, as we will have to use our skills and good judgement to gauge when to use it.

Shield Mastery no longer affects the cooldown of Spell Reflection, however, it now allows Shield Block to reduce magic damage as well: Amazing. A-MAZ-ING. This change is the best thing to happen to us since the patch that brought us Warbringer. The change to Spell Reflection is negligible, for the reasons stated above, but now the ability to have our main defensive cooldown reduce magic damage as well is mind-blowing. How much magic damage will be determined, and how it works is still in question, such as whether it uses your block chance to actually block magic or whether it will work on a flat number. Either way, it's a massive upgrade from having no magic defense on the ability at all. This change alone negates any sort of complaining about Spell Reflect I can think of. I would rather reduce all magic incoming for that time period that reflect just one ability that could be really weak. This change alone will help warriors in pvp more than Spell Reflect ever did. And in pve, I couldn't be happier.

Gag Order now only affects Heroic Throw: The final change is the only one I can think that would be considered a definite nerf. The loss of Shield Bash from the talent and not replacing it with Pummel makes silencing a problem for protection warriors. Especially if we need to silence a magic user so we can properly place him. This leaves Heroic Throw to do that, which is still on a 30-second cooldown with this talent. All in all though, not a bad set of changes.

Though not warrior related I am glad to see Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub return as 5-mans. I have run ZG more times than I care to remember and was sad to see it and the Zandalar tribe go. I must admit I had my suspicions that it would return when I took an alt through Stranglethorn Vale after the expansion and saw the awesome storyline Blizzard had laid out there. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

For myself, I'm eagerly awaiting patch 4.1, something I haven't been able to say in a while. Oh, and I know it's old news, but I am quite happy with the changes to Inner Rage last patch. I wrote a while back that tanks don't have threat cooldowns. Well now we do! If I feel someone is getting close to my threat, through a serious of crits or good placement, I can pop Inner Rage and spam Heroic Strike so fast that I quickly pop back up on top. I love it!

Thanks for reading!