Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Ding Fries are Done!

After much leveling and toiling, I finally reached level 80 on my Warrior. Strangely, level 79-80 was the easiest of the Northrend levels. I just jumped into instances that I still had quests for and I was done like that.

Once I hit 80, it was time to spend some of my hard earned money. I purchased my ilvl 245 shoulders with my emblems and then bought the Breastplate of the White Knight, Saronite Swordbreakers, and Tempered Titansteel Treads off of the AH.

With all of the enchanting/gemming/gearing, I ended up about 9 hitpoints shy of 30k unbuffed and 537 defense.

So I decided to do Forge of Souls for my first regular instance at level 80. We breeze through it pretty easily, but the mobs are hitting pretty damn hard. We down the last boss and.....the Heroic Achievement pops up. Yeah, I queued us up for the wrong one lol.

As it is right now, one of the biggest upgrades I need is my weapon. I am still rocking the Ragemane's flipped one from Zul'Drak.

It is nice to not be the top damage and DPS anymore in an instance. Before 80, I was doing 1400-1700 while it seemed like everyone was below me by a couple hundred. Total damage was much worse as I was doubling up many of the dps. Sometimes it makes me wonder if people just don't know their class or are just being lazy.

Anyways, the Druid will be next. Although he will just be a gets there when he gets there kind of toon.

Hope you all had a good weekend.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turning....

I love Journey. If you don't love Journey, you fucking suck. So what does this post have to do with Journey? Nothing.

I am on the home stretch now of leveling my Horde Warrior. Almost thar. I hit level 78 over last weekend. In one day I got to exalted with the Hodir. I didn't need the Hodir rep on my Warrior, but I figured it would be nice to have for once I start leveling my Druid.

I have also started doing some of the Argent Tournament dailies. Woohoo. I think if I really go for it this weekend, I can hit 80.

I am still outdamaging everyone in instances. It must be my leet skills.

I am also making very decent money on my Horde server with my glyph industry. I believe I am sitting at about 22k and usually pull in 700-1k plus gold on any given day. The best part is that it takes me about 15 minutes a day.

My sister is a leveling whore. Her Rogue is probably 80 by now on the Horde server and her Priest is the same level as my Warrior. Hard to catch up when you dont have time.

Anyways, how have you other bloggers been?

Friday, April 16, 2010

Where in the World?

I have been super busy. Work/gym/wife has left little time for blogging recently. Doesn't help that my site is blocked at my work again.

Anyways, there hasn't been much going on. I did get my Horde warrior to 77 which means that I don't have to keep running around and aggroing shit like a retards.

WoW has really slowed down. Perhaps when I get my Horde warrior to 80 I will be glad to go through the gearing process. Then again, maybe I will hate it. Who knows.

I still enjoy playing, but I can't play the long hours that I did back in the day. After a maximum of around 3 hours, I get tired of it.

One small pleasure I found is healing with my Tauren Druid. EZ mode.

Hopefully next week, I can find the motivation for more blog posts....or at least have something to blog about.

Until next time......

Friday, April 9, 2010

Cataclysm Warrior Update

New Warrior Abilities

Inner Rage (Level 81): Whenever the character reaches a full 100 Rage, he or she will gain a buff that causes attacks to consume 50% more Rage and do 15% more damage for a short amount of time. This is a passive ability so it won't need to be activated by the player. The goal for this ability is to provide a benefit for hitting max Rage instead of it feeling like a penalty. However, we also don't want warriors to feel like they're supposed to pool Rage and do nothing until they hit 100, so we'll be closely monitoring how this plays out during the beta testing, and making adjustments as needed.

This will really help out some of the tanks who are not as quick on their Heroic Strike Button. It also makes it so it isnt a true waste to hit 100 rage. It should be good for all levels of tanks.

Gushing Wound (Level 83): This ability will apply a bleed effect to the target. If the target moves, the bleed gains an extra stack and refreshes its duration, up to a maximum of three stacks. The ability is currently planned to have no cooldown, cost 10 Rage, and have a 9-second duration. Gushing Wound is designed to be weaker than Rend with one stack, but better with three stacks, which will be reached when fighting a moving target.

I am not sure if this will be available for Prot Warriors, but if it is....damn. That will be a nice chunk of extra damage if you are constantly dragging mobs around. We will have to wait and see though.

Heroic Leap (Level 85): This ability makes the character leap at their target and apply the Thunder Clap ability to all enemies in the area when they land. Heroic Leap will be usable in Battle Stance and shares a cooldown with Charge, but the Juggernaut and Warbringer talents will allow Heroic Leap to be used in any stance and possibly while in combat. The cooldown for this ability might be longer than the Charge ability, but it will also apply a stun effect so you can make sure the target will still be there when you land.

This will be awesome for chain pulling if the cooldown is not too long. Charge into group one, thunderclap, shockwave, start rotation. Heroic leap to next group, rinse and repeat. Sounds good so far.



Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

In addition to learning new abilities, you'll see changes to other abilities and mechanics with which you're already familiar. This list and the summary of talent changes below it are by no means comprehensive, but they should give you a good sense of what we intend for each spec.

Heroic Strike will no longer be an "on next swing" attack, as we are removing this mechanic in Cataclysm. To keep the niche of Heroic Strike as a Rage dump, it will become an instant attack, but will cost between 10 and 30 Rage. This ability will not be usable until you have 10 Rage, but if you have more than 10, it will consume up to 30, adding additional damage for each point of Rage consumed above the base 10. Other abilities, such as Cleave, Execute, and Maul (for druids) will work similarly. The goal is to provide players with an option where if you can't afford the Rage, you don't push the button, but if you have excess Rage, you can push it a lot.

This will be a nice way to make it a bit more spammy. I am sure that there will be some complaining from the old school tanks about tanking being dumbed down too much.

Battle Shout, Commanding Shout, and possibly Demoralizing Shout will work more like the death knight's Horn of Winter ability. Specifically, these shouts will cost no resources, generate rage in addition to their current effects, and be on a short cooldown.

The best part of this is that it become a no-brainer to use these. And they will probably be used constantly for the extra rage generation when there is an extra global cooldown available.

Whirlwind will hit an unlimited number of targets, but only for 50% of weapon damage. The intent is for this ability to be used in multi-target scenarios and not on single targets.

Meh. I don't get into DPS spec much, so it will not affect me nearly as much.

Overall, heals cast by players in Cataclysm will be a lower number relative to players' health than the current game. So to make the Mortal Strike debuff less mandatory but still useful in PvP, Mortal Strike will reduce healing by only 20%. All equivalent debuffs, including the Shadow priest and Frost mage debuffs, will be for 20% less healing. At the moment we aren't considering giving this debuff to anyone else, though we will certainly consider PvP utility for historically under-represented specs that use other mechanics.

Another meh for me. Lets see how it turns out.

Sunder Armor will be reduced to three stacks instead of five, and still provide only a 4% reduction in armor per stack. We want to make this debuff easier to apply and less of a damage swing when it falls off.

I guess this opens more global cooldowns but will reduce damage somewhat? Another one that we will have to look at the math on. I imagine that in long fights, it will be a significant dps decrease.


New Talents and Talent Changes

The Furious Sundering talent in the Fury tree will make the Sunder Armor ability cause 25/50% weapon damage and reduce the threat generated by 50/100%.

Devastate for Fury...woohoo.

The Mace and Poleaxe Specialization talents in the Arms tree will be removed. These provided just passive stats, which are not the kinds of talents we want to design in the future. We will keep the Sword Specialization talent, but it will be changed to a talent that applies to all types of weapons.

No more respecs because you are using a new weapon. Nice little change.

As a Fury talent, Booming Voice will increase the Rage generated by shouts.
While we like how Titan's Grip plays, we recognize some warriors liked the Fury tree because of the really fast swings that dual-wielding one-handed weapons could provide. Therefore, we're planning to try out a talent called Single-Minded Fury that is parallel to Titan's Grip and will provide a large boost to the damage of a pair of one-handed weapons.

Will make you have to think of if two one handers are the way to go or two handers. I think it will be good since there really arent a lot of classes using one handed physical dps weapons at this point.

Several talents that reduce the Rage cost of abilities will be changed to focus on increased damage for those abilities instead.

More damage. Nom.

The new Arms talent called Disarming Nature will make successful disarms cause the target to cower in fear for 5/10 seconds.

Oh noes I lost mah weapon! Im gonna piss mahself!

Another new Arms talent called Blitz will make the Charge ability hit for extra damage. The amount will possibly vary depending on the distance travelled.
Improved Pummel, a Fury talent, will cause a successful interrupt to generate 10/20 Rage.

More reason for a DPS warrior to actually use their damn interrupts.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Arms
Melee Damage
Armor Penetration
Bonus Swing

Bonus Swing: This is similar to the Sword Specialization talent that is currently in the game, but Bonus Swing will work on all attacks and with all weapons. You have a chance to proc a free, instant weapon swing that hits for 50% damage.

Fury
Melee Damage
Melee Haste
Enrage Intensity

Enrage Intensity: Every benefit of being enraged is increased. This includes doing more damage/healing/ etc. from abilities like Bloodrage, Death Wish, Enrage, Berserker Rage, and Enraged Regeneration.

Protection
Damage Reduction
Vengeance
Critical Block Chance

Critical Block Chance: As we mentioned in the stat changes preview, block rating is changing to a chance to block 30% of a melee swing's damage. Protection warriors have a chance that the block will be a critical block and block for 60% of a melee swing's damage instead. There will likely be talents available to push the amount blocked even higher.

This sounds pretty good. Less damage taken FTW.

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

Delicous damage. Lots of it. This should be very sexy and keep us from falling behind all of the other tanks.

We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Overachiever?

I have been officially labeled an overachiever by my sister and friends.

The other day, I was talking with Vordan and Moparman about the fact that I am up to 15k gold already on my Horde server. They replied "Not everyone can be an overachiver like you". Actually, I think Moparman actually called me an "overachiveing bastard".

I guess to an extent, this is true. On a day to day basis I will generally play about 20 minutes of WoW. On weekends, I will play between 2-3 hours. What little time I have, I try to make it count.

In some ways, I suppose I am an overacheiver. I have 5 level 80 Alliance toons and 260k gold on my main server.

I have a 75 Warrior and 60 Druid with 15k gold on a Horde server that I started to mostly pass the time.

I play less in a week than some people I know play in a day. Yet, I often seem to have more. More of many things. I don't mean to brag, but I am pimpalicious.

My tanking, healing, and DPS abilities are generally as good as anyone I know who are at the same gear level. Often it is better than many with much higher gear levels.

Maybe a lot of this just comes from the confidence I have gained over years of playing. I can brag because I can back it up.

Maybe it is the fact that I learned the hard way and am a grizzled vet of WoW. I have played alongside some awesome tanks. My favorites are always fellow Warrior tanks. I know one of them pops in on my blog from time to time (talking to you Blade).

I have also played with ones who didnt know their asshole from their elbow, but raid tanked anyways. I used to play with a tank who tanked all the way through Hyjal and Black Temple in BC....who didnt use shield slam in his normal threat rotation /facepalm. You couldn't say anything to him about it because he thought he was awesome.

Confidence and Knowledge. This is how you become an overachiever.

Sorry for the rambly post. This shit was directly off the top of my head.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Real Azeroth Heroes (Part 10)



Darraxus presents: Real Azeroth Heroes

(Real Azeroth Heroes)

Today we salute you Mr. DPS who does not accept the random queue guy.

(Doesn't accept the instance queue guy!)

You have been waiting for 15-30 minutes for this instance. When it is go time, you should sit on your hands and soak up the sun.

(Now it is gonna have to requeue us!)

Just like you, I enjoy random instances

(And want to run them in a timely manner yeah!)

So, stay alt tabbed out looking at porn. Without you, the random LFG experience would not be complete.

(Guess you don't want your random emblems!)

So Mr.Doesn't accept the random dungeon queue Guy, have a bud on me and enjoy never getting into an istance. We probably won't miss you in you Northrend Greens anyways.

(Mr. Doesn't accept the random dungeon queue Guyyyyyyyyyyy!)

Monday, April 5, 2010

Monday.....Blah

Another craptastic Monday....HOORAY. (Gag)

I hope you all had a nice Easter. I really didn't do anything. Easter doesn't even really feel like a Holliday to me anymore. Not as many kids around as there once were.

Anyways, enough of that. I played WoW this weekend. Did you know? Of course you did. Everyone subscribes to the Darraxus Reality Show - Dwarves Gone Wild!

Except I didn't really do any playing on my Alliance toons over the weekend. It was dedicated to the Horde toons and advancing my Warrior (and his assets).

Warrbringer got a nice bit done. First big thing is that I got to level 75. 75 is a significant level for me because I get to use my JC trinkets. One of them has two 51 stamina gems socketed in it....YUM. At level 75 I am at about 18.5k health unbuffed. Not to shabby I must say. And I am still pwning the fuck out of most of the DPS in instances. A lot of the XP came from Dungeons, but I did a fair amount of questing as well.

I did a bit more in Howling Fjorde, but ended up heading out to Zul'Drak with my sister before long. We completed the first few areas pretty quickly including the Drakuru quest line. Is it just me, or is that an annoying ass quest line? At least I got a sext tanking trinket out of it.

A couple of other fun things happened in our adventures in Zul Drak. First, I got Northern Exposure. Woohoo! Worthless achivements for me. The second thing was actually quite funny.

Me and sister mounted up and running along headed over to Drakuru's area. Sister stops on the big stone path leading through ZD. I say "You may want to watch out". Sister gets smushed by Thrymm the Hope Ender. LOL.

In other news, I actually did something on my Horde Druid. I got into a partially completed ramparts run where they did not know what the hell they were doing. I was healinge everyone equally because we had Shaman and Paladins who were pulling instead of the DK tank. To top it all off, nobody died at all....until the last boss....and it was me who died.

Dragon lands across the room. I am on the platform leading down to the room. Dragon aggroes on me. Dragon stomps slowly across the room bypassing the tank and all of the DPS. Dragon NOMS my face. They took him down, but at least the dip shit tank ended up dying as well.

My bank toon also had a very nice weekend. He probably raked in 5-6 k selling glyphs (and a 100 percent profit reselling an Orb of Deception). I probably also spent at least 1500 to buy herbs. One of the main glyph sellers took most of the weekend off and I was selling many of them for 50 gold a pop. Then he returned and knocked them all down to 10 gold per glyph. Hooray.

Overall, a very good weekend. How was yours?

Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Tanking Yo-Yo

On my long journey as a Warrior tank, it has been a large yo-yo type ride. Things change. Nerf and Buffs. Mechanics changes. It has definately been a long strange trip.

Vanilla WoW: This is where I got my start tanking. I gravitated to WoW from EQ2. While leveling, I was a complete noobcake. Points thrown here and there in arms and fury. I didnt know shit basically. At around level 45, I stopped playing for around 6 months. I decided to start playing again after talking to a co-worker who played and told me all about raiding etc.

So, I continued on as a noob. I grinded mobs in WPL from level 54-60. That was not exactly fun. I dinged level 60 in about 16 days /played. I can hit 80 in way less than that now.

My friends told me I should go prot and tank. I put all of my talent points into prot and away I went. I was terrible. I was accused of buying my toon from ebay. I did get better.

Tanking in Vanilla WoW sucked. There really wasnt such a thing as AOE aggro for a Warrior tank. We sundered stuff....alot. Generally you asked dps to wait 3 sunders before opening up. There were also mobs marked and kill orders. They didnt go AOE crazy unless they felt like dying. You couldnt thunderclap in Defensive stance. We didnt have devastate or fancy doodads like that. Yet, we were to go to tank in Vanilla. This mostly had to do with just how terrible the tanking trees for Paladins and Druids were. If you played those classes, you healed or you didnt come.

Warrior tanking kind of sucked, but we were on top of the world. Enter.....

The Burning Crusade:
In the Burning Crusade, we were still considered to go to tank, but parity was coming fast. Druids had huge health pools to take monster hits and Paladin tanks were to go to class for AOE tanking. Warrior tanks were still the best rounded tank, but our AOE was still pitiful. Still no thunderclap in defensive stance. Still no multi target abilities. Our TPS was very high, but out DPS was pitifully low.

It wasn't until the end of the expansion that we got some of our best abilities. Warbringer and Shockwave come to mind. Being able to Thunderclap in Defensive stance was huge and made a world of difference. Our DPS went up as strength became a priority on gear. Going into Wrath, we were looking pretty good.....but everyone else was looking better.

Wrath: The fall and rise of the Warrior tank. Warrior tanks have been viable all through wrath....but they have not always been the most desired tank. Paladins, Druids, and DKs all put out more DPS. Paladins and Druids had more health. We were at the bottom of the barrel for much of the expansion.

No we are looking up finally. We got more health. Now we can at least be competetive with the other classes for DPS. We are no longer the golden gods of tanking....but we still get to sit at the table with the other classes. That is all I really wanted. Tanking should be about which class you enjoy playing, and shouldnt have to come down to a choice of do I want to have fun, or be more viable.

Here is to parity lasting in the next expansion. Long live the Warrior tank.