30 March 2011

The Ideal Build.

Simply put, the way things are now, there is no "ideal" build. At the moment, I primarily use this build, but I would in no way say it is the "best" build. I use two tank specs for different situations. Neither is the be-all end-all of tanking. Let me explain why there really is no tank spec that is perfect.

First of all, our goals as tanks are different from say DPS. We don't pick our talents based on what does the most damage. Our goal is simply to protect our team mates and to survive. Except for a few essential talents like Bastion of Defense, we are free to pick and choose what we acquire based on our own individual play styles. Using just the bare minimum points to get to the bottom of the tree, I was able to pick up all but four talents. This allows me to keep ten points to do whatever I want with. From the selection, there are quite a few play style choices, but not one of them will make or break your game. Each will help you in some way or another, each will either let you live longer, allow you to keep threat better, allow you to save rage, whatever you so desire or require.

Min-maxers will do everything in their power to tell you what is best. But there really is no best anymore. Need more single target threat? Put some points into Incite and Cruelty. Having problems staying alive during the enrage phase? Put some points into Impending Victory and Blood Craze. This avoidance of a "best" spec is actually liberating, as I've said before in this entry. The lack of having a perfect spec no longer pigeon-holes you into playing a certain way. You can easily customize your talents to your gear or play style without having to go an outside source to see how to talent.

That's really the best part of this new talent system. It used to frustrate me that all the information I needed to play at my best was never actually in game. The recent gutting of class specific quests from the game has further made it harder to learn how to play your class in game. The new talents have really made outside sources less of a necessity. One can surmise what buttons are best to push based on what your talents buff, and you can select your talents based on what you want to do. The inability to delve into the other trees until you've completed your first tree really streamlines things for new players as well. As there will be a lot less confusion and people won't end up part way through every tree. Easy, convenient, with a lot less "junk" talents that bloat the trees.

That said, I can highly recommend my secondary talent build which I linked for starter tanks who want to just have something to put in. Just please don't be misguided into thinking it is the best or the only spec. Learn what's best for you and your gear, adapt to your style and the style of the groups you run with, then change your talents accordingly.

Thanks for reading!

25 March 2011

Why I Stack Mastery.

I've gotten a lot of questions from friends, guildies, even total strangers in game asking me why I stack mastery to the detriment of anything else. The most common points of confusion originate in either a Wrath mentality, where stamina was stacked and nothing else, or from a belief that parry and dodge are better because they allow no damage to come through, rather than merely a 30%-60% reduction like block does.

Let me start by stating what a warrior's mastery does. Critical Block is the name of our mastery, and if you mouse over the link, you'll see that it increases our block. Back in Wrath, block was a pretty miserable stat. There were two ratings one had to increase, block rating, and block value. The former would increase the chance to block, the latter, the amount blocked. Needless to say, to get any sort of interesting value from the stat, one had to stack quite a bit of both, and while effective against trash, really didn't do much against bosses. Block for warriors today is much more interesting. It blocks a solid 30% of the incoming attack, and has a chance to critically block for 60%.

Dodge and Parry

So the question remains, why stack mastery over any other stat? I can explain this simply for each individual stat, and explain why mastery trumps anything else easily. First, consider dodge and parry. Their main advantage over other stats is the fact that if you dodge or parry an attack, you simply get no damage. They used to be somewhat different stats, but these days they're pretty much exactly the same. In fact, that's why they are no good to stack anymore. They're exactly the same, and start to be affected by diminishing returns at the exact same rate. Diminishing returns is simply the tendency of a stat to lower in value the more of it you have. For parry and dodge, it starts almost immediately. This means attempting to stack them, even evenly to get the most out of them, will only yield very small returns. It's like trying to swim upstream, we're not really meant to do it. The advantage mastery has over these two stats is that it suffers from zero diminishing returns. You can stack mastery until your eyes bleed and never start to suffer in stat gain. This is important because the more you increase at least one of these three stats, the more it pushes normal hits off the hit table.

What is the hit table? Simply put, the boss has 102.4% chance to hit you with an attack. It rolls an invisible die and checks it against your dodge, parry, block, natural miss chance, or hit. Critical hits are taken off the table due to the talent Bastion of Defense, which every tank should have. So, the higher your mitigation and avoidance stats are, the better your chances of not being hit by a "hit" attack are. That is to say, a full unmitigated punch to the face. Once your dodge + parry + block + 5 = 102.4% or higher, you are officially "unhittable". Please don't take this to mean you cannot be hit, merely you have pushed the "hit" attack off the attack table of the boss. That 5 by the way indicates any mob's chance to naturally miss you. Also, each skull level mob is considered three levels above you, and that gives them a +0.8% chance to hit you for each level, adding up to 2.4%, which is why it's not an even 100%.

So that alone explains why mastery far outweighs lesser stats like dodge or parry, it's lack of diminishing returns allow you to add up your totals much faster, and hopefully get them into the seventies or eighties. Combine this with Shield Block and you are over unhittable status, and any excess becomes critical block, allowing you to block for 60% reduced damage. Quite a powerful stat!

Stamina

The next argument that people make is that stamina is still better than mastery, because it allows you to soak up more damage. There are many very simple problems with this logic that are immediately apparent. First of all, stamina is like a bucket that has a hole in it. There is a hypothetical maximum, but one is usually being hit enough that this maximum doesn't really ever get reached. To get your hit points filled up, someone has to heal you. Constantly. The more hit points you have, the more they have to dump their own bucket's water (their mana pool) into yours. Before long, their bucket is dry, and you can only watch the remainder of your water slowly trickle away until you're dead. Healers cannot spam heal and keep tanks topped off through a hundred seventy thousand hit points. Healers who are quitting the game and spending all their time on the forums complaining about how healing isn't fun are usually healing incorrectly, and have tanks who gear incorrectly. Wrath was about healing people through massive damage, Cataclysm is about avoiding that damage in the first place.

Your job is to make the healer's life easier in any way you can. Having a massive health pool is the opposite of that. The stats one sacrifices (like mastery) to gem for more stamina, are not worth the added damage one takes. Which brings up another point. The bosses in Cataclysm don't hurt as hard as Wrath's when done properly. Their normal auto attacks are not in danger of killing you in one shot. So why do you need massive health pools? That was the very reason we stacked stamina in Wrath, was to avoid the insane damage the bosses would deal in a single attack. Then the healers would pop us back up with a massive heal that cost nothing, and we'd be back at it. It's not like that anymore. Damage tends to be a lot more manageable now, and high stamina is not as important as reducing the damage that comes in. Mastery does this better than any other stat. It cuts the damage down in sizable chunks and makes the healers sweat a lot less. They can use their slower heals and not worry I will go down before it goes off.

The last reason I want to see stamina stacking go away is to avoid people's false idea that the tank with the most health is better geared. This is not the case. Unbuffed I have less health than a good number of lesser geared tanks in my guild who stack stamina. But healers don't like to heal them, because they have no mitigation and they end up using their entire mana pools keeping them up. If nothing else, avoid stamina stacking for your healer's sake.

Gemming and Reforging

Now that we've established that mastery is the best stat by quite a lot, the question remains how to gear for it. Enchanting is something I rarely talk about as there is usually one accepted "best" enchant per slot, so that leaves gemming and reforging.

Simply, I gem for pure mastery. I use Fractured Amberjewel and nothing else. I see a lot of tanks either avoiding it as a whole, or using whatever half/half mastery gems they can to get the socket bonus. I can tell you flat out that socket bonuses are rarely if ever worth it. You often end up sacrificing 20 mastery for 30 stamina and 10 dodge, or something equally as poor a trade. If the bonus is 20 mastery or more, then it might be worth it, but so far I haven't seen any bonuses that good.

Reforging is a generally simple process for the warrior tank, and where we actually can get the most out of our stats if we really tweak them. There are two simple rules we follow:

1) If it doesn't have mastery, get mastery. (Hit or expertise are ideal stats to trade)

2) If it does have mastery, reforge to keep your dodge and parry ratings as equal as possible.

That's it. The reason we keep the two equal is because they suffer diminishing returns at the same rate, so you get more bang for your buck if neither is higher than the other. Keep in mind I said dodge and parry rating which means you'll have to mouse over their percentages to see the numbers. Their actual percentages might vary by as much as 1% or so.

Developer's Intentions

The final reason to stack mastery is because it fits the thematic intention of the developers. This is usually a safe stance to take, as usually remaining true to the class will best results. It is only people who try to hack the system or use something beyond the intention of Blizzard that get nerfed eventually and end up crying about it. Starting out on the right foot will keep you honest and allow you to really see what makes the warrior such a great class. Simply looking at the Protection talent tree reveals why mastery is meant to be the best stat. Shield Specialization is proof on its own. It provides a good deal of rage every time you block. The more you block, the more rage you'll accrue, the more threat you'll deal. If anything, this talent makes the stat almost a threat stat. Hold the Line is a talent people point to when justifying why they are stacking parry, but the fact of the matter is, adding 10% to a stat you're not stacking doesn't really do much. The talent, if anything is meant to add even more block when you do parry, not be an excuse to only parry.

I hope this has efficiently explained my reasoning behind stacking mastery to the detriment of everything else. I've been experimenting with it for several weeks now and have had great success. Healers who previously would end up out of mana after a trash pull are now able to keep up with me as I chain pull an instance. It's really quite an effective gearing strategy, and I highly recommend it for your own warrior. Thanks for reading!

01 March 2011

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!