Ah, that feels better

Linedan lasted two days as Arms before I took him back Prot.  I learned enough to know that (a) I need better gear before even thinking about bringing an Arms spec on a raid, especially as big a weapon upgrade as I can swing, and (b) I am totally addicted to the Prot playstyle now and it’s really, really hard to give up the crack.  I guess for me, it’s worth slowly grinding through my dailies at 1100 dps and bringing up the bottom of the DPS meters in Naxx-25 to be able to pull entire camps and survive, or tank Kel’thuzad, or even solo elites.

It’ll work having Arms as a dual spec for those times I want to deeps.  But I can’t give up being the Panzercow.  I just can’t.  It’s in my blood.  I have to face facts…I have a fever, and the only cure is more cowtank.

Don’t panic, it’s temporary

So if you go to look at Linedan’s armory link in the next few days, don’t freak out.  I haven’t been hacked, and the Armory isn’t broken.

For a few days, the Panzercow…is DPScow.

Yep.  In the interest of trying out a potential Arms dual-spec come 3.1 (as I mentioned in a post a while back), I’ve shifted Linedan over to a 53/18/0 Arms build for a little while so I can try to learn how to play it.  Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere as a tank.  Tanking is still my first love.  But in the interest of raid utility and general versatility (since we have a lot of good up-and-coming tanks in our circle of online friends), it makes sense for me to have my main have the option to deeps occasionally.  I don’t have anywhere near the gear for Fury, and Arms provides some raid utility, hopefully moreso in 3.1.  So, Arms is the plan, and I’m test-driving it now.

My first impression, from a single heroic Utgarde Keep run, is that I’m going to dub the 53/18/0 Arms build the “waiting for Godot” build.  I’m sitting there constantly waiting for something to happen.  Waiting for Taste for Blood to proc Overpower, waiting for Sudden Death to proc Execute, waiting to have enough rage to Mortal Strike, Slamming if nothing else is available…good grief.  I just thought Prot was reactive.  Arms is so much more reactive than Prot is, it’s scary.  Talk about worshipping at the Altar of the Random Number Generator, sheesh.  This is crazy.

BTW, my performance in that HUK run?  1250 dps, 2 stupid deaths due to agro yoinking.  If I was tanking, I’d have probably done 1250 dps and not died once.  Yep.  I’ve got a lot to learn, and a lot of gearing to do, to make this work.

And I’ve only got 21.8k health and 13.3k armor.  Sweet motherhumpin’ zombie Jesus, I’m squishy.

Dual specs, or the loneliness of the long-distance offtank

So Blizzard has put out a Q&A with Ghostcrawler about how the Dual Spec feature planned for the 3.1 release is going to work.  You’ve probably already seen the information, if you’re hooked into the WoW blogosphere at all.

I am really looking forward to this feature because of where I sit with my current 25-man raid.  I am in a raid that’s, basically, a side of pwnage stuffed with spectacular, drizzled in awesomesauce, and wrapped in bacon.  I’ve been part of it off and on for three years now, from the days when I was a badly-undergeared level 60 31/5/15 hybrid and got dragged to Molten Core, all the way up to being a regular offtank on Tier 5 and Tier 6 content in Burning Crusade.  Now, we’re in 25-man Naxx, with everything but Kel’Thuzad dead.

We do things a little differently–instead of a “standard” 3 tank/6 healer/16 DPS setup, we usually run with 4 tanks and either 5 healers/16 DPS or 6 healers/15 DPS.  And by “tank” I mean dedicated tanks–a prot warrior MT, a prot paladin, a frost DK, and me, the other prot warrior.  We also have one or two feral druids that are quite capable of stepping up if needed–trust me, we’re not hurting for an offensive line on this team.  All four of us dedicated tanks buff out over 35,000 health–I’m the squishiest at about 35.5k, with the warrior and paladin closer to 37k and the DK at an astonishing 40k fully pimped.

But as the #4 tank, generally, I don’t really tank all that much.  I MT every so often, but mostly, I tank trash where I can, grab and hold adds (slimes on Grobbulus, worshippers on Faerlina, etc.), work the back of the room on Four Horsemen sometimes, stuff like that–the kind of lunchpail down-in-the-trenches work that offtanks do while the MT gets to dance with Big Nasty.  With a great MT and two very strong AOE tanks, though, and with the design of Naxx encounters not really needing four dedicated high-health, high-avoidance tanks all that often, a lot of the time, I’m left DPSing, while still keeping my tank suit on in the event that things go to hell in a bucket and I have to step in and take some hits.  And while it isn’t the total effort in futility that it was pre-3.0, DPSing as a prot warrior who’s not getting beaned in the head is never going to produce a lot of deeps.  Rage generation of a 1H + shield is, and will always be, very low, even with a good weapon like Lin’s Split Greathammer.  Low rage = low damage output.

Dual specs offers a ray of hope.  It may give me the chance to make Linedan what I have wanted him to be for a very long time…a true hybrid combination of tank capability and painbringing, a DPS/offtank hybrid.  Hybrid specs for warriors right now simply do not work.  You’ve got to be 51+ in some tree or other, and 51+ in either of the DPS trees is generally not going to leave you capable of main tanking even a 10-man raid, possibly even a harder heroic (depending on gear of course).  I’ve chosen to take him Prot, 15/5/51 currently, because that’s what I have the gear for, and that’s the spec I generally like playing.  He’s a good tank, geared and ready for anything up through 25-man content.  I’ve worked hard to make him a good tank and make myself a good tank player.  But there are situations where another tank isn’t what’s needed…and maybe I can help.

So my long-term plan, at this point, is to start using heroics and 10-mans to build him an offspec DPS set with an eye toward a raid Arms build–54/17/0, or whatever a similar raid-support Arms build looks like after Blizzard tweaks Arms for 3.1.  (Build courtesy of the folks over at Big Hit Box.)  Why Arms?  Because while I don’t like being dead last on the Deeps Parade, I’m not in it to blow the top off the meters.  I’m in it to help the raid succeed.  And Arms brings a lot of toys to help a raid that’s heavy on physical damage, as ours sometimes is, kill stuff faster.  Trauma giving +30% to bleed damage for 15 seconds after a crit?  Hell, my wife the feral druid will love me for that alone.  Then throw in the extra +2% (maybe +4% in 3.1) physical damage from Blood Frenzy whenever Rend or Deep Wounds is up.  I won’t do the insane DPS that a TG Fury warrior can do.  But I can do more than I can as Prot, and jack up everybody else’s too.

I’m not going to go Arms full-time, no way.  I like Prot.  I like tanking.  I’m not going to change from primarily being a Prot warrior.  Arms would be my secondary build, to be dragged out in situations where I know I won’t have to MT anything and I’ll only be occasionally offtanking.  If the materials for the “portable Lexicon” Ghostcrawler mentions aren’t too expensive, maybe I can even switch mid-raid if it proves necessary.

I sure hope Blizzard doesn’t bork this feature up, because it’s one of the cooler concepts that’s come along in WoW for a while.

Ten Commandments for DPS

DPS Plate speaks truth.  Follow them, or yay verily, you wilst be known as That Guy.  And you will be cast out into the realm of bad trade-channel PUGs where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Dramatis Personae: Beltar

Continuing my character introduction series, next we have my second WoW character on Feathermoon, my Alliance-side main, the cranky old hunter with a heart of bronze and a liver of steel…Beltar.

• Full name:  Beltar Forgebreaker
• Created:  August 2005
• Level/race/class:  Level 77 dwarf hunter
• Spec:  Marksmanship (currently 16/52/0)
• Age:  127 (human equivalent ~55)

Beltar is a fairly stereotypical dwarf.  He’s cranky, he’s curmudgeonly, he’s loud, he’s profane, he’s often drunk, and he occasionally smells faintly like stale beer and pig.  Physically he’s not imposing–a bit on the scrawny side for a dwarf, maybe an inch shorter than average, with a craggy, wrinkled face, hazel eyes, bad teeth, and mostly-gray hair that hangs straight to below his shoulders.  His skin is weathered from a lifetime outdoors.  He likes hats, and has a garish red fedora (Mirren’s Drinking Hat) that he often wears with dark-colored shirts and pants when not geared up for killing.

When I wrote Beltar’s history, I knew basically nothing about Blizzard canon history in the Warcraft universe prior to WoW.  So I left it very vague.  For the past century or so, after leaving home (the circumstances of which are explained in a story here), Beltar wandered all over the Eastern Kingdoms selling his skill with an axe or a gun.  At various times, he was a merchant guard, bandit, hired killer, bodyguard, mercenary soldier, watchman, and much more.  Because of his work with various merchants, he managed to miss both the First and Second War; before the Third War, he was grievously injured while bodyguarding someone, and ended up stuck in Anvilmar recuperating.  By the time he was up and around again, it was years later, and he had to start regaining his skills again…from level 1.

Beltar’s one constant is his pet boar, Squealer.  He tamed Squealer in Dun Morogh at level 10 and he’s had him ever since.  He’s dabbled in other pets (he currently has an as-yet-unnamed Sholazar dreadsaber as a DPS pet) but keeps coming back to the big black crag boar, lousy DPS and all.

Beltar is simultaneously fun and frustrating to play.  He’s my favorite character to roleplay, above and beyond even Linedan.  Lin is quiet, he’s serious, he blends in to backgrounds.  Beltar, at times, is loud, abrasive, profane, insulting–generally socially inept, and what’s more, he doesn’t give a damn.  On those relatively rare occasions where I can just lay back and have fun being a drunk-ass crotchety gun-toting dwarven redneck, he’s an absolute hoot.  And, unlike the basically noble and decent Linedan, Beltar is an amoral little son of a gun.  He doesn’t really get the chance to show it off, but I’ve always envisioned him as being a perfect Mafia hitman.  He’s not into dark magic, he’s not really into torture for the sake of torture, he likes puppies and kittens and rainbows well enough.  But cross him or those he considers his–like his guild, the Wildfire Riders–and he’ll castrate you, nail you to a barn door, pull your guts out through your throat, and feed them to his dreadsaber while you watch…then head down to the Pig and Whistle in Old Town Stormwind and pound back some ale like nothing ever happened.

Even his accent is fun.  His accent isn’t quite the normal faux-Scottish Blizzard-standard Dwarven; I figured his speech patterns in Common have gotten munged up by a century of exposure to humans from Lordaeron to Stormwind and everywhere in between.  So his accent is similarly twisted; inside my head, it’s a bizarre mixture of Blizzard Dwarven, combined with some occasionally swallowed vowels and clipped endings (so “y’r” instead of “your,” “findin’” instead of “finding”), a bit of Minnesotan or Canadian prairie thrown in (he tends to pronounce things like “house” as almost “heouse,” if that makes any sense–it’s a linguistic thing peculiar to the part of Virginia I grew up in), and grammar patterns based off folks I grew up with in rural Virginia and those I knew in South Carolina.

The frustration part comes more from actually trying to play him.  He’s always been a marks hunter, and always will be; I have Illithanis, my blood elf, to scratch my beastmastery hunter itch.  Beltar is a gunbunny.  It’s what he does.  But marks hunters are generally inferior to BM hunters in a lot of circumstances, without any real “oh shit” buttons like Bestial Wrath if things go sideways, and they’re harder to level solo because their pets are much less effective.  And with most of my time being taken up by Lin, Beltar almost exclusively solos.  One look at his craptacular Armory tells you that; at 77, he’s still wearing lots of Karazhan pieces.  He’s done exactly one instance run since entering Northrend.  With only being able to play him a few nights a week, and with the majority of his acquaintances already long since 80 and gone onto heroics, he’s lagging, and his low gear level makes leveling him a bit of a slog.  Beltar may make me break my “I don’t pickup group” pledge just to get the massive backlog of low-level instance quests out of his quest log.

I’d love to be able to put more time into him.  But there aren’t enough hours in the day, really.  So I roleplay with him when I can, and grind out a few hundred thousand xp when I can, and keep hoping I can pick up some instance runs or help with group quests, usually without too much luck.  But as befits a dwarf who’s led a rough life on the road for over a century, I keep on keeping on.

To bleed or not to bleed

One of the more interesting discussions that pops up from time to time over on the Blizzard WoW warrior and tanking role forums is regarding shifting some points from the Protection tree over to the Arms tree to pick up two DPS talents in Arms–Impale, and Deep Wounds.

Impale:  Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your abilities by 10% per point.  Two points.

Deep Wounds:  Your critical strikes cause your opponent to bleed, dealing (16% per point) of your melee weapon’s average damage over 6 seconds.  Three points.  Requires 2/2 Impale.

Now, for reference, this is Lin’s current spec as of this post.  It’s a 15/5/51 Impale/Deep Wounds prot spec; basically, it’s designed to be a DPS-oriented tank spec.  In order to get the points to go 15 deep into Arms, I had to give up a few things over in Prot and Fury; namely, three points of Shield Specialization, all three points of Puncture, and (in Fury) three points of Cruelty.

At first glance, this looks kind of crazy.  Impale, OK, that’s easy enough to see as a good talent.  +20% to critical damage bonus on “abilities”–translation, yellow damage–is pretty handy, because the new post-3.0 way of doing things as prot means you’re getting the vast majority of your damage from yellow damage, not white swings.  This basically gives you +120% damage on yellow crits instead of +100%.  Add in the +15% crit chance on Heroic Strike, Thunder Clap and Cleave from Incite, the +15% crit chance on Devastate from Sword and Board, and the +15% crit chance on Shield Slam from Critical Block, and it should be obvious that Impale is extremely useful.  But why would you spend three precious talent points on something that only adds half the damage of a white hit, especially considering that tanks generally swing fast weapons with low raw damage numbers?

Two reasons:

1.  Deep Wounds activates off any crit.  Anything.  White damage, Heroic Strike, Shield Slam, Revenge, Thunder Clap…even Damage Shield.  Yep, that’s right, if you put all 3 points into it, Deep Wounds will activate if somebody crits themselves on your Damage Shield.  Right now, 2/3 Deep Wounds is not proccing on Damage Shield, but 3/3 is.  Either 2/3 should be proccing on Damage Shield, or 3/3 shouldn’t.  We don’t know which is correct, Blizzard hasn’t said anything.  But anyway, think about this.  Warriors throw out a lot of attacks, between passive Damage Shield hits, white swings, special attacks, etc.  That’s a lot of chances to get crits…and five of those attacks have +15% crit chances on them in most prot warrior builds.  With 3/3 Deep Wounds, every time you crit, WoW takes 48% of the average white damage on your mainhand weapon, mitigates it by the target’s armor since it’s physical damage, and applies it to the target in three ticks, two seconds apart.

2.  Deep Wounds “rolls.”   Basically, it stacks.  If the target has Deep Wounds on, and you crit again, the timer refreshes to 6 seconds and the 48% damage is added onto the existing Deep Wounds ticks.  And there’s no limit to how high it can stack.

Now you can start to see how a talent originally balanced around 3.50+ speed two-handers can become useful in the hands of a prot warrior.  If we chain lots of crits together, even with a low-damage weapon, those Deep Wounds ticks start to pile up into significant damage.  How significant?  Well, my only recorded data point so far was tanking a normal Culling of Stratholme run a few days ago–I’m terrible about forgetting to check my Recount before clearing it after an instance.  In that run, Deep Wounds was 5.9% of my total damage.  That’s not inconsiderable.  And, considering it procs off Damage Shield crits?  I can stick a bleed on a mob without ever swinging at it.  That may have some negative implications for crowd control, but it’s a short duration, and who CCs nowadays anyhow?

The only downside is that if we really wanted to push this even further, and take 5/5 Cruelty, it would require giving up all three points in Armored to the Teeth.  Considering that AttT is going to boost your average warrior tank by 300 to 400 attack power, I wouldn’t do it.  I’ll gladly take 350 AP over 3% crit, even with a DW build.  And, 15/8/48 isn’t an option, because it costs us Shockwave and either Damage Shield (which removes most of the reason to even take DW in the first place) or 2/3 Sword and Board.

So at the expense of a little bit of mitigation, we pick up a surprising amount of damage.  As a tank, our primary job isn’t leet DPS, that’s true.  But in this brave new world of WotLK tanking, DPS is how we generate most of our threat.  More DPS, more threat, stuff dies faster.  Personally, for raiding, I am leaning toward a 12/5/54 build, dropping Deep Wounds and transferring those three points to fill out Shield Specialization for the +3% block and guaranteed rage gain.  Right now, though, I’m a Deep Wounds prot build fan.