Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Heroic Stike: Rage Dump or Headache


Heroic Strike. It has long been a staple of the Warrior's tanking rotation. If you are above X rage, Heroic Strike. The purpose of Heroic Strike was to dump rage. A rage dump is using rage so that you never hit the 100 rage mark. If you hit 100 rage, you are wasting rage due to the fact that rage bars stop at 100. Every hit you take or bit of white damage you deal at 100 rage does not get you more rage.
It has also long been said that tanks are not heroic stiking enough. This is true, but lately it has been a bit of a double edged sword. If rage situations are so high these days, how can we possibly Heroic Strike enough?
On most boss fights and all trash pulls, I can probably starve myself with too many heroic strikes. One someone like Patchwerk, it is a different story. You will basically be flooded with rage, and there will be times that rage is wasted. On Patchwerk you will be pressing Heroic Strike like a madman. On my last Patchwerk, I did 261 Heroic Strikes and just 7 white hits, not to mention my other abilities being used constantly. I put out 2100 dps. There is a video out there somewhere where a Warrior tank breaks 3k DPS on Patchwerk. He landed 100 percent Heroic Strikes during the fight and averaged around 10 key presses per second.
Yes....10 key presses per second. How many other tanking classes have to press that many buttons just to be at their best? The correct answer is none.
I think that there are a number of ways to fix this problem. The first idea would be to have a Heroic Strike Toggle button. This would allow you to toggle Heroic Stike on, and it will Heroic Stike on every single melee swing without you smashing the crap out of your keyboard. The second idea for me is to change the way Heroic Strike works. I was thinking something along the lines of execute, but will use 50 percent of you rage. The amount of rage used makes you do more damage. This would cut the key strokes down significantly and cause less arthritis to our Warrior tanks :).
I know that the blues have been looking into Heroic Strike usage, and that is fine. Just do something about it already. Warrior tanking is great fun, but having to mash the Heroic Strike key 7 million times can get a bit excessive.
I personally put Heroic Strike on the down wheel of my mouse. It makes it much easier to roll the wheel constantly while you mash your rotation with your keyboard hand.
(Sorry about the wall of text. I cant space my paragraphs for some reason. Think it has to do with my picture.)

6 comments:

Merlot said...

Do you read ThinkTank? Kalon's been writing about the exact same thing with Maul and found an addon that helps him set the attack on toggle. Looks like it should work for heroic strike too:

http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/2009/03/general-toggleonnextstrike-maulhs.html

Darraxus said...

No, I havent read that blog, but I will go an check it out. Thanks!

Vads said...

Glad to see more reactions on this, its gone from being a useful thing to dump excess rage on, to being a mandatory buttonspam and a strain.

More on HS spammage at Ragebar, Tankspot and Tobold.

And completely agreed, a toggle ability is just the thing we need imo. :)

Darraxus said...

Thanks Vads, I posted a comment on your site regarding this topic.

P said...

DK tanks have a similar love hate relationship with rune strike. its great for threat, and on bosses like patch i can replace a good percentage of white strikes with it. i have it macroed to all my other abilitys that way i just spam them and don't wear out my rune strike key. Good post!

Anonymous said...

/cast devastate
/cast heroic strike

/cast whatever
/cast heroic strike


... Bar #one -> no heroic strikes
... Bar #two -> heroic strike macros on each talent

...Heroic strikes for everybody with no additional button presses


-> Win.