4.0.1 Protection Warrior Build at level 80

 
Here what I'm currently thinking for 4.0.1 at level 80: 2/3/31.

Firstly, with the new 31 point trees, I only have 5 points to spend outside of the protection tree. Given that the self healing talents are new, I just had to pick up Field Dressing in Arms and Blood Craze in Fury. If threat is more or an issue than survivability, I'll add a second protection spec to test out the threat talents.

In the protection tree, aside from the fairly obvious talents, I chose to spend points in:


Blood and Thunder: even on a single target I think this will be good bang for buck threat wise, and should keep threat ticking on multiple mobs quite nicely.

Hold the Line: While the uptime on this talent is dependent on a successful parry, hopefully it will be a promising threat and mitigation talent, increasing both critical strike and the critical block chance. Of course, once the talent is activated, you just get the extra critical strike, but for the critical block chance, you need to actually block something. It will be interesting to look at the logs for this talent and discover just how many blocks are "landed" while this talent is up. The other big plus is that the wording of the talent makes me feel like a stalwart defender, so the name alone will appeal to warrior tanks everywhere.

I could have moved those points into:

Incite: I keep reading that incite is mediocre with rage normalisation and therefore not needing to spam Heroic Strike. However, if rage is plentiful and threat is an issue, I'll definitely give this talent another look.

Impending Victory: Additional self healing while the boss is under 20% health is appealing, it just doesn't seem worth the points given it is only available for a fifth of the fight. I'll wait and see what feedback this talent gets before getting to excited about it.

Glyphs

Unfortunately the prime glyphs are set in concrete. There are only 3 viable glyphs. Now I know prime glyphs are supposed to be obvious direct improvements... but if I never change them, they might as well be baked into the abilities themselves.

For Major glyphs I have gone for Long Charge, Cleaving and Thunder Clap. It is important to note that the old Glyph of Taunt is no longer.

Shield Wall now reduces damage done by 40% with a 5 minute cooldown [2 minutes when talented], and its glyph actually increases the cooldown as well as the damage reduction. Depending on fight length and particular mechanics, the Glyph of Shield Wall might be an attractive addition.

Glyph of Heroic Throw applies a stack of sunder armor, so it might have some interesting applications at some point as well.

For Minor glyphs I have Demoralizing Shout, Command and Battle. Battle is for pure convenience when Commanding Shout is not required so could easily be replaced with Berserker Rage if rage is an issue.

The nice thing about glyphs from this point forward is that once learned, you can swap them willy nilly. I'm hoping that blizzard have built an API for glyph exchange that allows all glyphs to be changed at once [out of combat, with cast time - I don't mind] so that addons like Outfitter can add a glyph profile to sets of gear. It is easy to think of a set of gear for tanking trash... how about a set of glyphs, too?

Patch Day: BYO Dragon

 

Oddox really knows how to spice up a rep grind... BYO Dragon! I was pretty surprised while killing pirates when this Dragon showed up with its very own Oddox.

Twitchie Day(tm) - Part 5 - More days!

 

Day 2
Twitchie ripped through TotC10, completed the ICC Heroics and grabbed the T10 pants from VoA10 making the extra TotC25 token a little redundant (still worth 50g).

Day 3
Twitchie headed into VoA25, bought himself a Black War Mammoth and grabbed the Epic achievement. I grabbed [Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers] and an emblem wand to hit 5k gearscore.

Day 4
Into ICC10. Oddox rescued us from an early bail, and the spyglass failed to drop. Unfortunately the consensus was to bug the weekly quest [Fester and Rot] so Twitchie reluctantly complies. Abracadaver dropped from Rotface which was a fantastic upgrade. Finally I picked up [Gloves of Broken Fingers] and got up to 1000 haste (including spellstone).

Day 5
Into ICC25 with Kal’s mage Tylendel. We got the Frost Giant weekly this week, so lots of frosties straight away. [Crushing Coldwraith Belt] from Marrowgar saving a whole bunch of frosties. Lewtship was a hoot on another multi-dotter, but unfortunately got my self nuked from over enthusastic seeding. Kal had a ball as fire too (especially since he got brezzed and I didn’t). We fell over horribly on Saurfang which as pretty bad for a ranged heavy group.

So inside his first week, Twitchie had been through all the heroics, Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum, Eye of Eternity and TotC 10 and 25. He’d ventured into both ICC 10 and 25, hit 5.2k gear score and was pumping out some DPS. For Twitchie’s adventures in their abbreviated completeness, head to: http://twitter.com/twitchietgw.

Kingslayers

 

Yes, plural. While I’ve been jabbering on about a few other things a couple more of my toons have taken down the Lich King.

Firstly, Zenborg grabbed a Lich King kill in the week following our guild’s first kill. 13th June 2010. For the first night, we were short a healer and we wanted to give one of our regular tanks that missed the first kill at shot at LK so Zenborg plucked up the courage to try some hard modes on for size. The following night, Kalus was able to come, so I breathed a sigh of relief and was able to pew pew.

DPSing the Lich King fight is a lot of fun. I gave myself the task of mowing down the orbs that drift towards the group during phase transitions. Given that devouring plague can one shot an orb, and mind flay ticks so quickly, it was great fun handling the orbs while pumping as much DPS into the raging spirits as possible. Having AoE that works for the vial spirits is awesome fun, and dispersion really comes into its own as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get soul harvested, and still haven’t been on any of my toons to this day.

Next up, Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock). 28th August 2010. For a while there, we were really struggling to put together a 10 man group capable of making progress in ICC hard modes. We had our usual core toons, but some of our favourite people were unavailable both nights, or away on holiday. In particular we had a massive void in the healing department, with Jondayla our only regular healer. So we put together some alts groups and tore normal mode ICC apart, usually leaving Jondayla to keep healing. Eventually, helping numerous people get their Kingslayer titles [and then watching them sail off into the night] I managed to sneak Twitchie in for a kill. Using a lock portal to render the Val’kry impotent was quite satisfying.

Finally (so far), Borgelmir. 3rd October 2010. Despite making his main spec Unholy DPS, and trying to stick to my guns... he has ended up tanking quite a bit. The week Borgelmir got his Kingslayer title, the 10 man progression team extended a lock out to work on the Sindragosa and LK achievements for the Glory of the Icecrown raider. When we managed to finish of both achievements in one night, we had a spare raid night left over. Finally we managed to get Jondy’s warlock Jossamine her Kingslayer title, and Borgelmir was tanking away when it happened. Getting Lich King twice in a week was very satisfying.

So that just leaves Wrathborg, who unless he can sneak in this afternoon, is going to be doing it post Patch 4.0.1. I’ve got about 800 1002 glyphs ready to go, Jondy has scarlet rubies and fire in the mail... and I’m rearing to go.

(Re)Introducing Wrathborg

Wrathborg is my rogue and first alt (second toon) in WoW. He started out life as a tailor, because I wanted to make my own bags. In fact so much so that his leveling in the early days (before Borg was 70) was centered around breaking that next crafting skill cap. I soon got tired of a weird looking Elven tailor, and as Zenborg took over tailoring he was benched.

Despite Jondy’s many pleas to bring back the rogue (and severe objections to the notion that I might delete him)... he stayed benched while Zenborg, Borgelmir and Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock) all leveled through to 80 in Wrath.

Finally, I decided to ditch Tailoring for skinning, and keep engineering despite Borgelmir also having that profession. I also looked into the specs and decided that an Assasination (mutilate) rogue was right for him. While mutilate rogues get some teasing for being on the faceroll side of the equation, even while leveling I found dual wielding daggers, spending a lot of time in stealth and wreaking havoc with poisons just felt like what I wanted my rogue to be.

Wrathborg hit 80 late August, and in his second ICC 10 man cruised through 11/12 with his favourite companion Jorgie [leveling partner, and Jondy’s enhancement shaman]. Wrath has been extremely lucky with loot, picking up [Rib Spreader] and [Flesh-Carving Scalpel] in his first 25 and 10 man run respectively. I was very surprised to pick up the heroic [Ikfirus’ Sack of Wonder] in ICC 25 shortly after purchasing the regular version.

My DPS highlight thus far has to be in that second ICC10 run, when on Rotface, the combination of heroism, great buffs, great RNG (no infection) and a group that could kill him in 2m27s made for a delightful 11.2k DPS.

Bonus highlight (since I started writing this post): [Deathbringer’s Will] !!!!!!!!!! I was lucky enough to pick up DBW (although I was hoping for [Heartpierce] (for PvP as much as anything)) in a PuG this week. I then put it to great use and hit my stride for 13.8k DPS on Festergut. While there was some room for improvement (like better Hunger for Blood uptime and yelling a fellow rogues for tricks) it was nice to trash Borgthor’s effort the previous week with his newly acquired DBW.

I went out to farm leather while waiting for a PuG to form one day, and despite being not too poorly geared, the memory of how Twitchie would tear mammoths and rhinos apart was just too much to handle... so with the help of Jondy’s secret stash of low level herbs, I power leveled Alchemy in a quick session after breakfast one day (just wait until you see what she got in return). I went Elixir Master partly so I could produce the guild’s flasks myself, but mostly as a potential income stream come cataclysm. I gotta say, the 2 hour flasks and extra AP are pretty nice. An extra regular transmute per day is icing on the cake.

So after a very shaky start, Wrathborg has proved to be a joy to play.

Heroic Professor Putricide 10 man

 
Last week we had a lot of fun finishing off the Sindragosa and Lich King achievements so that we could finish off ICC in a single raid lock out. Sindragosa required some precision in order to avoid stacking Mystic Buffet over 5, and once we got the tank rotation together, things started to proceed like clockwork. We would flip the boss from side to side, so that the tanks only had to run straight out to find the next ice block and by the end, the taunting was tight enough that I had to avoid running straight into incoming toons who were Frost Beancon’d. I had to grab a couple of extra toons for the night, and to my surprise advertising for the specific achievements resulted in some pleasant and competent toons; to date my best pugging effort.

The LK achievement took a couple of attempts to get the disease stacking correctly, but once we got it going it was a matter of a clean kill after that to bring the achievement home. We had a couple of hiccups with tank deaths due to a couple of enraged Shamblers, and once we had the plague skip from 29 to 31. It was also a joy to have the regular mechanics of the fight reasonably well known, and it was satisfying to see how fast some of the Val’kyr went down.

This last week our big challenge was the remaining two hard modes before LK, heroic Putricide and heroic Sindragosa. Heroic Putricide takes a bit of getting used to, since the unbound plague mechanic takes a reasonable amount of raid awareness and communication to coordinate. We found (like many groups do) that there is limited value in assigning an infection order, or a location from which to share the plague. Instead, everyone needs to fully understand the mechanic, and focus dealing with it in the most productive way given several variables.

First up, the unbound plague lasts for 60 seconds. After being infected for 10 - 12 seconds you become extremely difficult to heal (the damage increases with every tick) so you need to pass the plague (with the remaining duration) to another toon. The flip side is the the plague is that each time the plague moves, it leaves a stacking debuff (plague sickness) on the original target that increases the damage done by unbound plague by 250% per stack. In the normal course of dealing with the plague you can expect about 5 - 6 people to be infected if all goes well, however the more the plague bounces around, the quicker toons need to pass it off due to increasing stacks of sickness.

So the goals with the sickness are to:

• Keep the sickness as long as possible while remaining easy to heal (10 - 12 seconds)
• Pass the sickness to someone with as few stacks of sickness as possible (zero is best)
• Pass the sickness to someone who can easily identify the next person to pass it to
• Deal with strategy that require people to stack or move quickly, which can make it a lot harder to sensibly share the plague
• Deal with the regular mechanics at the same time while putting out significantly more healing / DPS / tanking than in normal mode

All that takes a little practise, and it really helps if people are able to communicate over vent to coordinate.

The next major change is for transitions, instead of getting stunned in place, you get to deal with a Green Slime and and an Orange Gas Cloud at the same time. The strategy we landed on was to zerg the green slime (all stacking near the spawn point) and kite the orange gas cloud until we got around to finishing it off. So if the Abom has more than 90 energy, it can slow both and if not, the orange gas cloud is the priority. At best, the tank in the Abom suit can spit on both slimes and everything goes nicely... at worst you can be dealing with a plague, people getting separated when the green slime explodes, and several toons dead in the process of a transition. It is also important to time the transition properly, since if you already have a slime/cloud up, you will end up with 3 which will most likely lead to a wipe. If you are running just a touch late on the transition, don’t worry if you force a transition just as he is starting to cast you can only end up with two. When I say a touch late, I’m not kidding, we forced a transition just as the ooze started to form, and we got three - so don’t try and take advantage of this as part of your strategy, just be glad if you you’re running late and only get two.

We ended up running with four druids, and while learning the fight the extra battle resurrections were valuable, but in our kill we needed none. If you have good enough execution for the last transition, you can have PP under 30% by the time he’s finished drinking his concoction which helps a lot with the soft enrage for the last phase (which aside from everything hurting more, requiring higher DPS and potentially having to deal with unbound plague is essentially the same). Since you aren't frozen, once you've killed both oozes feel free to give PP a whack while he's still drinking his concoction.

Big thanks to Therepoman, who ended up tanking on his druid, Healforreal. I’m still not sure it’s sunk in (for me), but he ended up with a well deserved (heroic) [Unidentifiable Organ]. Many of us would be a little reluctant to switch to an alt being so close the our ICC Drakes, and others oblivious to the opportunity they are getting to say... kill Lich King for the first time AND get Been Waiting for this for a Long Time. However, Repo logged without hesitation and did a great job in the meat suit.

So, speculation is that the patch is looming this week, leaving us just 2 more heroic modes in ICC.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention Moordenar picked up the heroic [Flesh-carving Scapel] just in time to see assassination make a comeback post patch.

Tamed at last!

After days of camping (lucky he's a Blood Elf), and with the help of a speedy alliance gnome (complete with 310% mount) Jondy finally tamed the Spirit Kitty on her horde hunter!