3.1 through the eyes of a prot warrior
It’s going live today, how exciting. All raiders are probably chomping at their bits to set foot into Ulduar. Casuals will flood the Argent Tournament. Dual-specs will turn out exciting for most everyone, I assume. 3.1 is the biggest patch to date, Blizzard says.
But what’s in it for protection warriors? Let’s have a closer look. I will be listing all the stuff that seems relevant to me as a prot warrior.
- Defensive Stance: Now reduces damage caused by the warrior by 5% (previously 10%). That’s a flat increase in DPS and threat for us, so that’s a pretty awesome change.
- Soloing fury warriors get a buff, as berserker stance makes you take 5% more damage instead of 10%. Everyone in battle stance gets 10% armor penetration now. As there are more changes to armor penetration, it really seems that Blizzard is trying to make this actually useful.
- Last Stand: Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This is pretty awesome again, because it means we can fully macro Last Stand+Enraged Regeneration now and really save our butts every 3 minutes. With the Glyph of Last Stand you can push that cooldown to 2 minutes, which will probably a huge lifesaver in progression fights in Ulduar.
- Warbringer: Now also allows Intervene and Intercept to be used in any stance. Can you see us zipping around non-stop? I can. That’s some insane mobility.
- Mobility is the name of the game for Arms warriors as well now: New Talent: Juggernaut: Grants the warrior the ability to Charge while in combat. Critical strike chance of next Slam or Mortal Strike increased by 100% following Charge.
- All flasks now last 1 hour. To compensate, all flask recipes will provide 2 flasks for the same material cost. This is actually great for me as casual raider. We raid for 3 hours per raid day, which means I am no longer wasting away an hour of flask time while fishing.
- Increased the health granted by the Flask of Stoneblood. I still think it’s a terrible flask compared to the TBC tank flask. An avoidance or threat stat along with the health wouldn’t have hurt.
- Added new recipes for epic gear, found rarely on Ulduar bosses. These recipes are unbound and can be traded. Those blacksmithing plans are pretty amazing, item level 226, and as they only drop in Ulduar 25, prices on the AH will be astronomical, once raiding guilds have handed them out to all guild blacksmiths.
- A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man ‘O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food. Less time spent eating means more time to do stuff, so I approve. It does prove that fishing and cooking always go together. *flexes her new fishing 450*
- New glyphs for tanks:
- Glyph of Barbaric Insults: Increases threat on Mocking Blow by 100%.
- Glyph of Enraged Regeneration: Your Enraged Regeneration ability heals for an additional 10% of your health over its duration.
- Glyph of Last Stand: Now reduces the cooldown of Last Stand by 60 seconds. The penalty on maximum health gained has been removed.
- Glyph of Shield Wall: Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.
- Glyph of Shockwave: Reduces the cooldown on Shockwave by 3 seconds.
- Glyph of Spell Reflection: Reduces the cooldown on Spell Reflection by 1 second.
- Glyph of Vigilance: Your Vigilance ability transfers an additional 5% of your target’s threat to you.
The best of the new glyphs all enhance our survival abilities and will certainly be worth a consideration for progression tanks.
- Damage Shield: Fixed a bug which caused this ability to benefit from Recklessness. Aw, dang.
- Improved Revenge: This talent will now increase the damage done by Revenge by the proper amount. I am hoping this means it will do more damage now, not that it did too much in the past. Anyone know?
- Last but not least, the two most amazing and useful changes ever: Loot from clams now stacks correctly! Changed the icon for Succulent Clam Meat so it doesn’t look quite as disgusting. Now 100% more succulent! Thank you Blizzard, clam lovers across the world bow to you. >.>
And now a quick look at my dual specs. I am a dedicated tank, and while DPS possibilities are huge for warriors now, I will be going with two different tank specs. My first spec is going to be my current Deep Wounds build. I love the TPS I can do with this build. As possible second spec I am contemplating this build. It goes down to Commanding Presence in the fury tree, for more health with CS. Also picks up Piercing Howl which should be a boost for add tanks. I’d also pick up Imp Demo Shout and Imp Spell Reflect, and go with the survival glyph, to be optimal for boss fights.
How about you? Now’s the perfect time to share warrior builds!
Nice to have all changes for prot warriors at a glance, I didn’t follow the patchnotes too closely.
At this point I guess I won’t change playstyle, glyphs or spec unless I have missed something really important.
The thing I’m most curious about is how prot dps will be compared to DK/paladin dps. Right now I’m really behind a those two classes.
As for dual specs I’m going arms. Arms and Prot are the two only specs that do it for me as a warrior. I never liked fury and I like TG even lass. But as it looks right now, arms might pull off competitive dps with a fun interactive rotation. And as much as I like smashing shields in someone’s face, a huge two-hander comes pretty close behind that.
Can’t wait to tank Ulduar!
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Glyph of Shockwave is going to be great, I love that.
I tried an off-tank spec that used Piercing Howl, but found out most of the trash in Naxx is immune. Looked like it only worked on the Noth and Gluth adds. Annoying, I’d been hoping it would make the gauntlet before Loatheb easier.
Karl Gallagher´s last blog post..Dear Anonymous Blogger
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Yay!!! patch day again, its gonna be a blast. Heh, you’re lucky to go with 2 tank builds – you must be the only decent tank in your guild then! I dont think any of us could get away with that. I’m assuming we’ll notice the prot warr dps increase – I still dont think it’ll be as high as some of the other tanks however, since currently prot warrs do half as much damage as the others in our raids at least. I think that’s a reason warriors should think about fury offspec: with a druid/dk tanking and warrior dpsing, total raid dps could be significantly higher. DK/feral/ret dps is supposed to be in the same bracket as fury. I’m also wondering how many warriors out there generally are going to say “I dont know how to dps”. That’ll be pretty funny…. but I doubt our guild warrior will pull that one.
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admin Reply:
April 14th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Nah, we have some more good tanks, just not a whole lot of them. Three prot warriors and a druid are currently raiding, and one of the warriors is the alt of our best geared disc priest. We have craploads of DPS.
If I had decent DPS gear, I would probably re-think it. Once I have a decent set, I wouldn’t mind giving fury a spin.
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Been reading visiting your sight for about 3 or 4 months now, and i have to say ty. You do a great job. I Just hope there will be flexibility with all these new glyphs for us. I was running cleave charge and Devo as my magjors and i am worried i will Have to pick up Last satand, Shield wall, and Vig instead and loose a lot of my Aoe tanking tps.
I totally agree that Prot warriors need more DPS and maybe not a TPS buff. i have no little trubble keeping my 4K dpsers safe in nax 25 but i was asked to sit so a highr dps tank could be used on lotheb, and patch. kind of hurts when you have been the MT for BC through ssc and bt, through the heroics and be a liability now due to the dps of the DK’s and pallies.
Diraan (rexxar US)
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Based on my skim of the notes.
I don’t see any mention about the changes to Sunder/Expose Armor in regards to being changed to percent based.
I pretty amazed Arms Unrelenting Assault debuff went live 25%/50%. Assuming that works on bosses, Malygos and Saph are now wimps, can pretty much forget resist gear in 3.1. This is a boon to tanks/raids as a whole IF it works on bosses. However IF it does work on bosses and no other class can bring it I can’t see how a Arms warrior wouldn’t be “required” for certain bosses. We’ll find out soon enough exactly how it works. If it doesn’t work on bosses it will be pretty much just a PvP talent, which I think was blizz’s goal.
Shattering Throw will also be a fairly huge (maybe the largest in the patch) DPS increase if used in conjunction with Bloodlust/Heroism.
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Bent Reply:
April 14th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Dragons don’t really have cast bars so Unrelenting may not proc off of them. But you get the idea on other bosses. Think Loken in HoL 50% weaker novas.
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Ogder Reply:
April 21st, 2009 at 7:55 pm
No, you still need resist gear in 3.1 because Unrelenting Assault’s debuff only works when PLAYERS are casting spells. But anyways its still a great talent point to max into if arms dps, reducing the cooldown of Overpower by a second or two I cannot remember, but it will increase your damage greatly no matter what because dumping executes for dmg drops your rage to almost none, so its best to always spam imp overpower when its up, execute when its down, and mortal strike re-do rend and slam/heroic strike (in that order)
But when it comes to tanks and such I love this site. It’s helped me out tons considering I have been attempting to build a prot set. Most likely I will be going the Threat tank spec, into Deep Wounds and such. Thanks a bunch.
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I haven’t decided on any of the new glyphs yet, but my primary prot spec is identicle to yours. My secondary spec is unfortunately fury but I plan on switching that to another protection spec sometime after next week or so.
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I have a survability spec for my first one … im kinda broke so i cant get dual spec but i will get most likely a prot pvp spec because i love to hurt the alliance. What i dont like about it right now is that the glyphs are not out yet … what i mean no one have the glyph of shield wall, i found the glyph of last stand but no one on my realm has the other one im looking for.
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admin Reply:
April 16th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
The glyph implementation is kinda sucky. It will be weeks until I can actually get the glyphs I want, and prices will be outrageous, as they’re all world drops. Sucky!
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Dont feel too bad about glyphs. I suspect the drop rate will be pretty high. We only killed our 2nd boss in Ulduar last night, and hey, a legendary fragment dropped! Sure, 1 person needs 30 of them, but so far at least, you could hardly call them rare – day#2 of patch; I wonder if legendaries are the new epics?
Watch out for those 2 tanks specs btw. Unfortunately our RLs in their infinite wisdom decided to sit a prot warrior during ulduar coz he didnt have a dps spec setup yet…. I’m not saying that was right, but in the heat of the moment, RLs can make mistakes like that with people. You often simply do not need too many tanks. Its quite a significant change; Blizzard said they’re only making an existing process easier + cheaper, but the truth is that it gives you ways to experiment with raiding that people just never did before, due to cost & time constraints.
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Hey all,
Just a follow-up/side-note to the glyphs. I have been trolling the AH since I heard about glyph of enraged regeneration…finally I picked it up for about 75G and swapped out glyph of devastate. The first 5-man I used it in was Heroic Nexus (we were running one of our fresh 80 healers). We were about half way through Telestra when people started dropping, till it was just me and the healer, who was OOM…Great time for enraged regeneration. Long story short, I waited till I was almost dead, hit the button, and WHAM! I’m a pally! Saved the day, blah, blah, blah. Best 75G spent yet!
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