Well, Well, Well, Block Rating, We Meet Again (Though You're Not the Same)

If you're not Protection-specced (Warrior or Paladin,) you've probably never thought much about shields. Sure, Holy Paladins, Elemental Shamans, and Restoration Shamans have historically worn a big dinner plate on their backs (the expectation was was so strong that they had to give The Silver Hand a 30% boost to your armor in addition to its other effects,) but these guys are too busy casting to pull their shield out and block an attack.

And honestly, if you're not a tank, the only times you'll really worry about defensive stats are when soloing or PvPing - and the former generally tunes things so that you're not going to worry about it too much while the latter encourages myriad defensive gameplay styles like kiting or stunning in addition to straight up damage reduction.

The point is: if you don't play Protection, this is going to be wonky about something that really doesn't mean much to you.

Ok!

Way back in the day, Shields had a value called "Block," typically followed by some number comparable to the armor that it gave you (I think generally lower, maybe half or something.) This was your block value. What it meant was that when you blocked an attack with a shield, the damage reduction was subtractive, rather than multiplicative (by a less-than-1-factor - so arguably divisive.)

Your Block Value was then further altered by two things: you would find block value on armor (you'd also get Block rating, which would increase your chance to block,) and you would gain block value as you increased your Strength, which makes a certain logical sense, as it's as if the stronger you got, the more of an impact you could absorb by holding up your shield.

The interesting consequence of this was that, depending on a fight, block could be enormously powerful or not very powerful at all. I started tanking raids in Wrath, during which this system was still in place (I suspect that the introduction of the Death Knight, as a tank that wore plate but couldn't make use of any of these block-related stats, might have been what convinced them to get rid of them, as DKs had to either search high and low for gear that only had defense/dodge/parry/hit/expertise - all stats that don't exist anymore - or just use gear with useless stats.) Fighting the Scourge, one often found oneself fighting off large swarms of weaker minions - skeletons and ghouls and the like. When the main source of damage is not the power of the hits, but rather the frequency, blocking shined, as you might only take some small percentage of the actual damage of the strike.

However, a block value of a 1,000 was not all that impactful when you were getting hit for 30,000 by some powerful raid boss. You had to rely on other forms of mitigation or use a tank with very high "effective health" (a kind of value determined by max HP and total damage reduction) like a Blood Death Knight or a Feral (what would become Guardian) Druid.

Anyway, in Cataclysm, they changed the way that shield-blocking worked: Instead of a set value, blocking would reduce an incoming hit by 30% (raising to 40% in Warlords.) Paladins got a mastery that increased their chance to block (by the end of the expansion, Paladins' main goal was to get a 100% block chance) while Warriors got a mastery that increased that chance by a lesser amount, but also gave them a chance to block for 60% instead. They got rid of block value on gear because it no longer had any meaning, and they got rid of block rating because the only specs that would care about that stat could simply go for mastery instead.

Then, I believe in Mists, perhaps concerned about Paladins' ability to hit 100% block chance (meaning any further mastery was useless,) they made some changes. First off, they added more effects to the Paladin mastery, tying it into self-healing (initially something called Bastion of Glory, which would buff your next self-applied Word of Glory each time you used Shield of the Righteous, stacking up to 5) but they also changed how block was calculated: While previously you would put dodge, block, and parry all together to kind of push regular blows off the table (in Wrath and earlier, you also had to worry about crushing blows from raid bosses, which required getting crit-immune from defense rating and then getting sufficient avoidance/block to get rid of these as well,) the new system would first check if you had dodged or parried, and then within the circumstance of having been hit, they would then apply your block chance.

Of course, what this meant was that as your pure avoidance went up, your block chance would effectively go down: consider if you had 20% parry, 20% dodge, and 40% block chance. Originally that would have meant that you only had a 20% chance of getting hit. Under the Mists-and-later system, that 40% block chance would only apply to the remaining 60% after dodge and parry would apply, meaning that it was more accurate to call it a 24% block chance.

And so has it been for nearly eight years. And now it's back... but here's the thing:

Blizzard has started to change the wording of certain things on gear - you never see anything called a "rating" anymore. While something like Strength increases your attack power by a flat amount (if you use Strength,) ratings would scale with level, becoming less effective (and thus requiring more) as you got to a higher level.

But while gear used to have special green text that would say "increases your haste rating by 374" they now tend to just say +374 haste.

And as it turns out, when I started writing this very post, I didn't think about that change in terminology. And it appears that block on the shield isn't a value - it's a rating.

So block rating is back: but it does not do what it used to. To increase your chance to block, you'll still focus on Mastery.

Block on your shield will increase the damage reduction of a block.

I think you'll only ever see block rating on shields now, but this now becomes a very important stat for the shield. My Paladin on the Alpha has a block rating of 1716 - all coming from his shield. That translates to a 35% reduction in damage when he blocks. We can probably assume that as one progresses at the level cap, one will be getting fancier and fancier shields with higher block ratings. I wouldn't surprised if, by the last raid tier, shields will be blocking for as much as 50% (maybe more?)

This could push shield-wearing tanks to really favor mastery, because blocking becomes a more and more effective means of damage mitigation as they get better shields. By contrast, mastery might be undervalued in early tiers like Uldir, as we might have shields that aren't blocking for all that much at 120 when we first hit the level cap.

It's really wonky, and I'm sure a lot of theorycrafters will be furiously working out the relative value of these stats. I think what's interesting about this is that just as weapons are becoming less important, with ability damage now being determined entirely by attack power, shields are playing a much more active role than they have previously, when they've basically just been a nice chunk of armor and a prerequisite tool you needed in order to take advantage of the block ability.

Battlelord, Huntmaster, Grandmaster, and High Priest Mount Quests

Oh right, I was doing a quick rundown of these quests.

With only the Druid to go (waiting on world quests now) I have, over the past few weeks, gotten the mounts for Warriors, Hunters, Monks, and Priests. Let's take a look!

Battlelord:

This is one of the simpler ones, though like the Mage, it involves a couple of somewhat tricky combat encounters. You need to make ample use of mobility and survival abilities (and interrupts!) to make it through yet another trial that Odyn is putting you through (seriously Odyn, you're like an emotionally distant father for whom nothing is ever good enough.)

The mount itself is a much more up-to-date Proto-drake model that changes colors based on your spec. Arms gets red, Fury black, and Protection purple (not sure why they chose those. I'd think Red was the obvious fury color, and given that Arms has a partially Old-God-corrupted sword and Protection has a shield made from a scale of Deathwings, it seems really obvious that they should get purple and black, respectively. But oh well.)

Huntmaster:

This actually involves Odyn as well, and sends you to the Fields of the Eternal Hunt, where you track down various beasts of legend (using your Beast hunter tracking you can easily find tracks or leavings of various kinds.) Ultimately in culminates in the discovery of the ancient Wolfhawk spirit, and you get a mount of that kind.

The Wolfhawk mount comes in various colors that, like the Paladin mounts, require you to fill out the upgraded artifact tree to get. However, Beastmasters don't get a recolor but instead get the ability to tame a wolfhawk pet (I'm not sure yet where to find these guys, but I'm a ways from finishing the artifact.)

Grandmaster:

Monks get a relatively lengthy quest chain taking you through a fair amount of Kun Lai Summit at the behest of Master Bu as you attempt to track down Ban-Lu, a son of Xuen's who has served many Grandmasters through the past.

Ban-Lu does not change appearance and there are not variants on that appearance, but the baseline's very pretty. Additionally, Ban-Lu will speak with you occasionally as you ride him, which is kind of fun.

High Priest:

Brann and Magni contact you when you start the mount quest, taking you to a long-lost Titan vault that contains the last three remnants of the Seekers, a kind of Owl/Gryphon hybrid that apparently once served the Titans. As often happens, you presence activates some sort of defense protocol, and so you have to fight off waves of Titanforged (Watchers, Golems, and Earthen) before you take the Seekers into your custody.

There's one seeker for each spec, with the "void-corrupted" one going to Shadow Priests. Like the Warrior, Death Knight, Shaman, and Mage mounts, this changes automatically based on spec.

Tanking Competence and You! A Beginner's Guide

I just ran heroic Neltharion's Lair on my Enhancement Shaman. Our tank was a Vengeance Demon Hunter who seemed perhaps a little inexperienced. We wiped on Dargrul several times, largely due to some mechanics that he was either ignoring or just not dealing well with. Unfortunately, he and our healer were antagonizing each other, and so when we got a new healer and managed to down the boss, he declared in the party chat that it was clearly just the healer. I tried to explain in a polite and helpful way that there were some things he could work on, but he left before I could give him examples (some of which were advice he had ignored after previous attempts.)

Anyway, given that I play four different tank characters, I figured I'd put down a bit of advice.

1. Tanking is not as hard as it seems

First off, tanking can seem difficult, as it's a bit like DPS but with more responsibility, but in fact it's a pretty different set of skills. As long as you can maintain threat (and unless you severely undergear your DPS, you generally can) you don't really need to worry about damage numbers.

Your healer has your back. All you have to do is make sure that the enemies are in the right position and that you do what you can to reduce incoming damage or heal back your own depleted health.

Basically, remember that you're not competing to top meters. If you survive the fight and you don't get your party members killed, that's a victory.

As a tank, it's your job to try to make the healer bored.

2. Situational Awareness

Healers usually just ignore enemies as long as they're not pulsing some AoE that you can't stand inside of. DPS can focus down individual enemies. In general, a Tank can't afford to do this. Any enemy that is in combat with your party needs to get at least a bit of your attention. Thankfully, just about every tank class uses the same ability rotation for single-target and AoE. So just make sure that you get your AoE attacks on everything you're currently in combat with. Sometimes that means moving, because if a party member strays off the path or hesitates long enough to draw some patrol you avoided, you're going to need to pick it up.

Most tanks have abilities I call "snap threat," which are instant-cast abilities that hit multiple targets and that are almost always available. DKs' Blood Boil, Paladins' Blessed Hammer (a talent, but a recommended one,) DHs' Infernal Strike and Throw Glaive, and Druids' Thrash are all good examples. Monks and Warriors might have a little harder time, but while they're less often available, Warriors' Thunder Clap and Monks' Breath of Fire or Keg Smash are also great for picking up adds.

3. Positioning

Because enemies pay attention to you as the tank (assuming you got number 2 above right) you're going to have the power and responsibility to care about positioning.

First, there's the obvious: if an enemy has a big cone-attack that hits everyone in front of it, make sure you're facing the boss away from the group. Likewise, if it has any sort of tail-swipe ability that hits players who are standing at a particular angle, make sure that you're not wildly swinging the boss around. Whenever you can, plant your feet.

However, sometimes you can't. And you'll have to recognize when those situations arise. Some bosses make it obvious - like creating some big pool underneath them that you need to move away from. Sometimes it's less obvious - they might create a pool under one of your melee party members, and while you might be sitting high and dry, you'll still want to move the boss to make sure that everyone has a safe place to stand during the fight.

When moving a boss, be aware of effects that can be exacerbated by your movement. If the boss knocks you back periodically, don't back yourself up to a ledge that you can fall off of. If the boss has a tail swipe or frontal cone attack, make sure that you're not turning it to face your party or spinning that tail right into your friends' faces.

Also sometimes the boss will do something that even you shouldn't be standing in. If there's a frontal cone that they'll do without turning, quickly sidestep out of it, but be sure to get back into your position once the area is safe again to minimize how much your party needs to move.

4. Active Mitigation

Regardless of the fight, you'll always want to use Active Mitigation early and often. This takes a few forms, from increased avoidance to straight-up damage reduction to powerful self healing. In most cases, the effect is good enough on its own to be worth using. On certain bosses, however, there will be abilities that will specifically have extra effects (often doing significantly more damage) they hit a tank that does not have its active mitigation up. For bosses like this, you'll want to pool resources (and cooldowns) to make sure that you have the ability ready for when the thing goes off. (Though you also don't want to cap cooldowns or resources, as you'll still benefit from AM abilities during other parts of the fight.)

I highly, highly recommend using an addon like Weak Auras or something similar to track whether you have these effects up. Weak Auras allows something called "Progress Textures" which will allow you to have an icon that can either fill up or empty out as the buff wears off.

Let's go through each tank's active mitigation abilities:

Warriors: Both AM abilities are self-buffs. Shield Block has a set duration and will increase your block chance to 100%, which effectively causes you to take 40% less direct physical damage during its duration (or more thanks to Critical Block.) You also have Ignore Pain, which is a damage-absorption shield. This can be powerful when dealing with magic damage (that would usually go right through your shield) but can also wear off prematurely if the entire shield is used up. I'd recommend using Shield Block on any boss ability that cares about Active Mitigation, as you'll be guaranteed that it lasts long enough to still be up when the ability goes off.

Paladins: Shield of the Righteous is your main AM ability, reducing damage taken by a significant amount (based on mastery.) This is simply a 4.5 second buff that reduces incoming damage. Its effect (both the damage it deals and the reduction in damage you take) are increased if you're standing in your Consecration, so you should try to keep that up at all times. Additionally, Paladins have Light of the Protector, which heals you for a percentage of your missing health (again affected by Mastery.) This becomes more powerful the lower on health you have, but even if you're not dipping below 30%, it can still help out your healer. This heal does not grant any real buff, so it won't do anything for boss abilities that care about active mitigation, so make sure to use Shield of the Righteous for cases like that. Note that Shield of the Righteous requires you to be in melee range, as it's technically an attack that grants the defensive buff, so if there's a big hit coming in, make sure you can hit them first.

Death Knights: This one's a bit weird. The only official active mitigation buff you get is Blood Shield. If you're searching your spell book for this, you should stop, because it's actually your mastery passive. Instead, you'll want to be using Death Strike, which heals you for a big portion of the damage you've taken over the last 5 seconds (or 10% of your max health if you haven't been taking more than that amount of damage.) Your mastery will then generate a damage absorption shield that is proportional to this heal, and it's that shield that counts for active mitigation boss abilities. You do have other defensive abilities you'll want to use, but unfortunately these don't count for that type of boss ability. The main one is Marrowrend, which is a melee strike that generates three charges of Bone Shield. Each time you get hit with a melee attack, one of the charges on your Bone Shield will be spent to reduce the damage of that attack. Thus, you want to try to maintain at least one charge of Bone Shield at all times (or 5 if you have the talent Ossuary.) However, if you are sitting pretty on many charges, you'll instead want to use Heart Strike, which generates more Runic-Power-per-Rune-spent (15 for 1 or more if there are other targets to hit instead of 20 for 2) and thus means more Death Strikes.

Monks: Primarily, active mitigation for Monks is handled by your Brews, particularly Ironskin Brew. You can maintain very high uptime on this brew, which doubles the amount of damage you stagger from 40% to 80%. While this doesn't actually reduce the damage you ultimately take on its own, it will significantly smooth out the damage that you get, making the healer's job a lot easier. However, if you start to get a lot of staggered damage, you'll want to use Purifying Brew, which reduces your staggered damage by 50%. Be sure to use Keg Smash and Tiger Palm to reduce the recharge time on all your brews, but also be aware that Ironskin and Purifying share a cooldown, so if you use Purifying a lot it will make it harder to keep Ironskin up at all times. Ironskin Brew will be the buff you maintain in the event of boss abilities that care about active mitigation. I recommend taking the talent Black Ox Brew, which is a cooldown that restores you to your maximum Ironskin/Purifying Brew charges of 3 and also gives you full Energy. Because Black Ox Brew is a brew, its cooldown will also be reduced by Keg Smash and Tiger Palm, meaning you can use it very frequently. Aside from your Brews, you should also use Expel Harm to absorb any nearby Gift of the Ox orbs for a rather sizable heal, but again, the only real "active mitigation" buff you get is Ironskin Brew (actually, Fortifying Brew, your long-term defensive cooldown, might also count, but you can't use that rotationally.)

Demon Hunters: Your primary AM ability is Demon Spikes, which, much like Ironskin Brew, Shield of the Righteous, and Shield Block, is simply a buff that lasts a set amount of time. You get two charges of this and it only costs 20 Pain, so you'll have access to it pretty frequently. It also lasts a long time. However, another big part of Vengeance Demon Hunter survival is the use of Soul Cleave. This not only does a lot of damage to targets in front of you (and thus is good for threat in both single-target and aoe situations) but also heals you for a significant amount. It also draws in any nearby Lesser Soul Fragments generated by Shear, potentially healing you for a lot more than just its base healing. Basically, any time you've already got Demon Spikes up or on cooldown, you want to spend your Pain on Soul Cleave. Do not wait to amass soul fragments - while those will increase its healing by a lot, you'll be better served by getting the base healing of the ability and building up for the next one. Again, Soul Cleave does not give you an active mitigation buff, but its healing is a significant piece of the Vengeance survival strategy. You can pool Pain (though try not to cap it) before using Soul Cleave as it will heal you for more based on how much Pain is spent, I believe from 20 to 60.

Druids: I'll confess that my Druid is still sitting in the Dreamgrove having done almost nothing after getting the Claws of Ursoc, so this one's going to be a bit more sketchy. The primary AM ability for Guardians is going to be Ironfur. Unlike other tanks, there's actually a benefit to overlapping multiple applications of this ability, as you'll get the benefit of each stack (with each stack lasting its own separate duration.) Ironfur increases your armor by 100% for a few seconds, which of course will reduce the physical damage you take by a lot. This is the buff you'll want up when a boss hits you with one of those special attacks. Druids also have Frenzied Regeneration, which heals you for an amount based on the rage spent, but again, while this is a buff (it's a heal-over-time effect) I don't think this counts as true Active Mitigation for abilities that care.

5. Situational Awareness Again

As a tank you'll mostly be worried about enemies. But you'll also want to keep an eye on your party. Before charging on to the next fight, make sure that your healer has enough mana. Some healers will be fine with 50% or less, but if you see them struggling, it's ok to slow down a bit. If you see that the party is basically always at full health, you can pull a little faster or even take on two trash packs at a time (though make sure that these trash packs don't interact in dangerous ways - like having multiple healers or enemies within them that can cast fear on your group.) If instead your party is constantly at 50% health or dying, slow things down and try to employ stuns or crowd control to ease the burden.

Also, make sure that your party hasn't accidentally pulled something. Especially in Legion, there's a lot of dungeon trash that you can and should skip when possible. But all it takes is for one person (or one pet) to stray a little too close to them, or for some errant AoE ability to pull an enemy that normally is neutral, and you'll have some extra stuff to fight. Don't get too far ahead of your group.

6. Keep a Cool Head

Some players are awful. You don't need to do a ready check before every trash mob, but it's ok to take a second or two to assess your next fight. If you have a player who is pulling for you, you have a couple options. You can simply roll with it and pick up aggro on the things they've pulled, or you can politely ask them to stop doing that. If they keep doing it, you can try to get them kicked out of the group. You can also drop out of the group yourself if the party isn't cooperating, though this is definitely a last resort.

Ultimately, regardless of whether you're tanking or doing anything else, try to cultivate patience. Mistakes happen, and sometimes people are really just learning the ropes. Offer advice, but be sure to keep it in a helpful tone. If someone's being an ass, there's not much you can do about that, but if someone just genuinely doesn't know something - like boss mechanics or the optimal rotation for their spec, keep your advice friendly.

The Fast and the Furious in 7.0

Fury Warriors always had a similar thing to Frost Death Knights, having two "sub-specs." But in 7.0, Fury will fully embrace Titan's Grip to become all about dual-wielding two-handed weapons. To be fair, Fury's rotation was not nearly as altered by its choice of weapons as Frost, and going single-minded fury always felt more like you were trying to be contrarian than anything else. Fury gets to do something no other spec in the game does, so why resist it?

2 Fast 2 Furious:

Fury retains its Enrage mechanic, which it kept for itself in Warlords after it had previously been something all Warriors used. But Enrage now functions slightly differently. Getting Enraged increases your attack speed by 100%, but it also increases the damage you take by 30%.

Your Mastery still increases the damage you do while Enraged, but the attack speed focus will help you generate significantly more Rage while you are in your Enraged state.

Enrage lasts only 4 seconds.

Spending Rage:

You actually only spend Rage on a couple of abilities.

The primary one is a new ability called Rampage. This costs a whopping 85 Rage, causing you to make 5 strikes in quick succession, dealing a large amount of damage and then automatically enraging you.

Whirlwind is still your AoE Rage-burner, and causes your next Bloodthirst or Rampage to hit 4 additional targets for 50% of their single-target damage.

Finally, there's Execute, which which costs 25 Rage and deals a bunch of damage to targets below 20% health (unlike Arms, there's no "burn more Rage if you have it" component here.)

Generating Rage:

Bloodthirst is still the ability you'll hit on cooldown (4.5 seconds reduced by Haste, I believe) that generates 10 Rage, heals you for 4% of your max health, and Enrages you when it crits.

Raging Blow is now free, and instead generates 5 Rage when it hits, but can only be used when you're enraged.

Finally, Furious Slash doesn't generate Rage, but it costs nothing and has no cooldown, doing light damage and then increasing the critical strike chance of Bloodthirst by 15%, stacking up to 6 times (so 90%, which should be a guaranteed critical strike when you factor in base crit and whatever you have on gear,) but this buff is consumed when Bloodthirst does crit.

And the Rest:

You still have Charge, Heroic Leap, and plenty of utility stuff. You do not, however, have Victory Rush anymore, and in fact you'll mostly be healing via Bloodthirst.

Battle Cry is a new 1-minute cooldown for both Fury and Arms (might also be for Protection) that gives you 100% crit for 5 seconds - which should be extra useful for Fury, given that it means guaranteed Enrages.

Bladestorm is also baseline for Fury and Arms, as a cooldown you'll want to use in AoE situations.

My general understanding is that you're intended to use Rampage to spend your Rage, and then build it back up quickly with Raging Blow and the increased Rage generated by auto attacks during the Enrage, which will then put you near where you need to be to cast Rampage again. You actually get a spell alert when you have enough Rage to cast Rampage. You'll want to hit Bloodthirst on cooldown and fill in with Furious Slash whenever you can't do anything else.

I do wonder a bit about whether it's better to cast Rampage during an enrage if you can, given that it does so much damage - probably more than Raging Blow. But if it's not up, I'd guess RB is what you want to use while Enraged.

I will say that without Vicotry Rush or some of the great Arms survival talents (like Second Wind,) Fury definitely seems less capable of solo questing than Arms, though you can of course supplement yourself with food and bandages. In group situations, though, it'll totally be a matter of preference. If you want to be a blur of slashing swords, Fury definitely lets you do that. So cry havoc and let slip the hogs of war.

What was that? "Dogs" of War? Well I say hogs.

Bearing Arms in 7.0

Well, thankfully Arms is starting to look a little more like it did in Mists of Pandaria. The spec is still relatively simple, but most specs are getting trimmed down that way.

So what have we got?

Rage Generation:

None of your abilities actually generate Rage, but at least on my transferred-over Arms Warrior (who, with some demonic invasion gear, is ilevel 692) I've been getting enough Rage that it's very rare that I run out.

Colossus Smashing:

Colossus Smash is still a core part of the rotation, but they've brought back the proc passive, called Tactician now instead of Sudden Death, which will give you a chance based on Rage spent to reset the cooldown of both Colossus Smash (which is baseline 45 seconds) as well as Mortal Strike (baseline 6 seconds modified by haste.) Colossus Smash no longer has you ignore armor, instead it simply increases the damage you do, which I presume will be easier to tune, especially in PvP.

Your new Mastery, Colossal Might, increases both the damage of Colossus Smash as well as the damage bonus, so this is a pretty central thing.

Mortal Striking:

Mortal Strike is the center of your rotation, hitting harder than anything else except Execute. It's on a six-second cooldown, but you'll always have it up when you get a Tactician proc. It still applies a healing debuff and costs 20 Rage.

Slamming?:

When Mortal Strike is on cooldown and you have Rage to burn, your single target option is Slam. This does not do as much damage, but it has no cooldown and costs 15 Rage. This is absolutely a filler, but it's nice to see it back in the core rotation.

AoE:

You don't have a ton of AoE abilities, but you can play a little bit in talents.

Whirlwind is your main AoE Rage dump, basically just taking the place of Slam in your rotation. You also get Cleave, which is on a 6 second (reduced by Haste) cooldown and costs only 10 Rage. Cleave hits any number of targets, and it will buff your Whirlwind to do 20% more damage per target hit, up to 5 stacks (so in a group with five enemies, you can get it to hit twice as hard.) There is also a talent that makes Mortal Strike and Execute cleave to another target (man, are we going to have to start using a different term for Cleave damage now that Cleave is straight up AoE?)

Customizing:

There's lots of abilities you can add to the rotation through talents, like Overpower (similar to how it used to work,) Rend (likewise,) and Focused Rage (a stacking buff you apply to your next Mortal Strike.) It's still not super-complicated, but there's definitely more finesse you can work into the spec now, and it has very strong survivability while soloing.

Breaking Down Fury

While certainly not getting the kind of total revamps that some other specs are getting, Fury is in for some changes. Enrage will work a bit differently, and while you'll still want to get Enraged as much as you can, you'll have stuff to do when you're not.

Titan's Grip remains a thing, and the Fury artifacts will indeed be a pair of two-handed swords, strapped to the back.

It appears that they're going to focus more on auto-attacks for Rage generation, which should make Haste a more attractive stat to the spec.

As always, this is based on an early Alpha build, so everything's subject to change.

Bloodthirst is on a 4.5 second cooldown, doing physical damage, generating 10 Rage and restoring 5% of your health. It also has a bonus 40% chance to crit.

When Bloodthirst crits, you'll become Enraged, which now gives you 100% Haste, but also increases the damage you take by 30% for 6 seconds (good thing Bloodthirst heals you.)

Raging Blow strikes hard with both weapons and costs 10 Rage, but no longer has charges. Instead, you can simply use this as much as you want as long as you're Enraged and have the Rage to pay for it.

Rampage is a new ability. It costs 50 Rage doing 5 strikes over the course of two seconds (the last two do twice as much as the others) and always deals damage as if you were Enraged.

Whirlwind costs 30 Rage, dealing damage to all enemies within 8 yards and causes your Raging Blow to hit 4 additional targets for 6 seconds. (This second part is a passive called Meat Cleaver, which should be familiar, though it's been buffed.)

Execute costs 30 Rage and does a bunch of damage with both weapons to a target that's below 20% health.

Berserker Rage is a 30-second cooldown giving immunity to Sab, Fear, and Incapacitate effects for 6 seconds and Enrages you.

Recklessness is a 1-minute cooldown that gives you 100% crit chance for 5 seconds.

Mastery: Unshackled Fury increases damage you do while Enraged.

A lot of this should look familiar. You can add in abilities like Heroic Strike and Overpower (though they've been redesigned) via talents, but the overall shape of the spec is familiar, while being a bit more streamlined.

So, before artifact traits and talents, we've got:

1. Bloodthirst on cooldown.
2. Berserker Rage if not Enraged.
3. Execute if Enraged and the target's in execute range.
4. Raging Blow if Enraged and it isn't.
5. Rampage if not Enraged and Bloodthirst and Berserker Rage are on cooldown. (You might use Execute even if not enraged if you can, when you're in range, though I suppose that depends on how high your Mastery is, as Rampage always benefits from it.)

For AoE situations, you'll probably want to use Whirlwind instead of Rampage, and always make sure you have Meat Cleaver up before you hit Raging Blow.

Breaking Down Arms

I've made it no secret that I was really upset with the changes to Arms in Warlords of Draenor, taking my favorite Warrior spec and gutting it of all that made it interesting. Well, the good news is that they're rebuilding it in such a way that it's regaining some of the things I liked about it! It's not exactly in the place it was in Mists of Pandaria, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's worse. It's almost certainly better than it is in Warlords live right now.

As usual, the big caveats here are that this is in Alpha, and many things can change from now until Legion goes live. But we can probably expect these bare bones to work mostly the same as listed here.

So let's get into it!

Mortal Strike is still the big centerpiece of the spec, and they're sticking with the Warlords idea that this is your hardest-hitting attack that you'll want to use on cooldown, costing a modest 20 Rage, with a 6-second cooldown.

Slam you'll actually get at level 1 (players will now start off with a spec before they get to switch at level 10, and I assume Arms will be the default for Warriors.) It gosts 15 Rage and has no cooldown, but does not do as much damage as Mortal Strike, so presumably you'll use this to burn off excess Rage while MS is on cooldown.

Execute is its old self, costing 10 Rage but consuming up to 30 additional Rage to deal big damage to targets under 20% health, becoming your main Rage-spender in Execute range.

Colossus Smash is similar, but rather than letting you ignore the opponent's armor, it just increases the damage they take from you by 20% for 6 seconds, which I think works out to more or less the same in PvE. It has a baseline 45 second cooldown.

Most importantly, however, Tactician is a passive that causes your Slam, Whirlwind, and Execute to have a 20% chance to reset the cooldown on Colossus Smash, which you might remember as being more or less how the old Sudden Death worked (actually, technically speaking it was the middle-aged Sudden Death. Old old Sudden Death, from Wrath, actually worked how it does now, affecting Execute.)

Whirlwind is more or less its same old self, costing 30 Rage.

However, Cleave returns as a real ability, doing damage to all targets in front of you and increasing the damage of your next Whirlwind by 20% for each target it hits up to 5.

Recklessness is now a 1-minute cooldown lasting 5 seconds that gives you a 100% crit chance.

Mastery: Colossal Might increases the damage and damage bonus of your Colossus Smash, with 20% for both baseline.

Also, interesting to note is Defensive Stance, which reduces damage both taken and dealt by 25% until cancelled. Since all tanks will now always be in "tank mode," without the need of stances, this freed this ability up.

So the rotation is, I think, not too hard to figure out:

1. Colossus Smash on cooldown, particularly if you get the Tactician Proc.
2. Mortal Strike on cooldown.
3. Slam if you will still have enough Rage to do a Mortal Strike when it comes off cooldown.

In AoE, you might just toss everything out and alternate Cleave and Whirlwind (though given that Colossus Smash is free, you might as well toss that back in.)

Notably, both Heroic Strike and Overpower return as talents if you want to add some wrinkles and push Slam down in the priority list.

Gladiator's Resolve, Fistweaving, and Discipline

Gladiator's Resolve allows Protection Warriors to switch to DPS without changing their gear (well, unless they really want to maximize the best secondary stats.) It's an interesting experiment and one that allowed for an unprecedented playstyle - a melee dps that uses a shield.

But it's going away. The quasi-spec was certainly an interesting idea, but I always suspected that they would either have to give Warriors a fourth spec to allow it (something they only gave Druids out of sheer necessity) or they would have to give all tanks some kind of dps capability. They've opted to just remove it, which will upset a lot of people I'm sure.

Converting a tank spec to a DPS one consists of two challenges - buffing damage and reducing survivability.

Tanks already do damage enemies in order to generate threat, and as a result, tank damage needs to be balanced at a level that is proportional to DPS damage. Thus, it's not that big a challenge to simply add a coefficient when in "DPS mode" to make a tank spec work as DPS. (Ok, it's obviously more complex than that, but not substantially different from balancing between DPS specs.)

There's also the need to scale back some of the survivability. After all, if a tank-as-dps spec could take just as much punishment as a tank-as-tank spec, why would you ever take the latter? Or normal melee DPS?

But honestly I think that the main reason behind this is more about a return to fundamentals. They're doing this with all specs, trying to focus on the core of the spec's identity, and having this kind of dangling DPS quasi-spec off to the side for Protection was a bit odd.

Sort of in a similar vein, Mistweaver Monks will no longer be able to heal through their melee strikes.

Looking at Mistweavers in a vacuum, this makes tons of sense. If a healer can heal sufficiently while also contributing as much DPS as a tank or even a bit less, it clearly has a big edge over other healers. Essentially, you're in this place where balance is impossible. You either become far too overpowered - healing just as well as other healers but also contributing DPS, and thus making all other healers obsolete - or your healing is handicapped to make room for the benefit your damage brings. In a raid with four or five healers, that might be ok, because you could split the difference and be the half-healer within your raid's roster of four-and-a-half. But in smaller content, particularly 5-player dungeons, where you are the only healer, how can you justify taking up that spot when you're going to be struggling to keep everyone up thanks to your handicapped heals?

The solution in Warlords was to give Mistweavers two stances - one to serve as a dedicated, classic healer standing in the back and tossing out healing spells, and the other to focus on "Fistweaving," which you could opt into if your group or raid didn't need quite as much healing.

But with this "starting again from the basics" approach, Blizzard has decided to simply make Mistweavers into straight-up healers. However, this isn't really getting back to how things were, because Mistweavers were originally designed specifically to be the "punch-to-heal" spec. In fact, I think this is a large contributor to people playing the spec (it was what finally got me to try out leveling a healer, though to be fair she never quite made it to the level cap, sitting at 88.)

Still, perhaps it's for the best. After all, a healing/dps hybrid spec is inherently kind of problematic.

What was that? Discipline Priests?

Oh crap.

So Discipline got an interesting mechanic starting, if I remember correctly, in Cataclysm. They could blast enemies with Smite and Holy Fire (finally giving those spells a use) and thus heal the party. It gave Discipline something to do if group/raid damage wasn't that much of a threat.

It was this Atonement effect that I believe really inspired the design of the Mistweaver Monk (which of course came in the following expansion.)

But Discipline's theme was more around absorption shields. Power Word: Shield was fundamental to the spec, and finally gave it a way to shine after the dominance of Holy in early WoW.

The problem is that those shields were way too powerful. Shield spells are inherently kind of over-powered. As long as the target is taking any significant damage, the shield will always be useful, and on top of that, until that shield breaks and the target starts taking real damage, everyone else's heals are useless.

So Discipline has been overpowered - partially thanks to our over-reliance on healing meters - and so Blizzard wants to move Disco priests away from that as their primary theme.

But once you take a holy-themed, cloth-wearing healer away from the one kind of heal that the other healing spec for the class doesn't use, you kind of paint yourself into a corner.

So Discipline is going whole-hog on this hybrid DPS/Healer thing. With all the problems I just described for Mistweavers.

As someone who doesn't really play healers, it obviously doesn't affect me that much, but I do really wonder how well this will work out, and if Blizzard might be forced to reconsider Disco again (yes, I like to call the spec disco.) They do seem to be designing this hybrid status as mandatory, which might make it somewhat easier to balance than Mistweavers. Still, it remains to be seen.

Honestly, I think this all would have been a lot easier if in 2004 they had made Priests like every other healing class, giving them one healing spec and then making Discipline into a kind of Inquisitor-type, casting holy spells from afar, with maybe more of a direct-damage theme counter to Shadow's DoT theme.

But that was 11 years ago. Then again, they did make Survival into a melee spec.

Warrior Class Blog Information

Warriors are actually not getting any really profound changes, at least baseline. Blizzard did emphasize that Warriors are going to build on their rotations a lot through talents, so I'll remind you that these are the bare bones on which you'll build the rest of your rotation. Some old abilities were explicitly mentioned, like Overpower, as coming back, but are not described in the various specs.

Arms:

I'm actually kind of puzzled by their description of Arms Warriors. I always saw them as the kind of calm master of arms, Samurai/Blademaster type, whereas they're talking about them as the sort of people who grew up in Dueling Pits and Gladiatorial Arenas. It's a very different concept for the spec, and one that I worry isn't really going to provide much to work with. But it does look like some of the old mechanics of the spec are coming back, so maybe I shouldn't complain.

Mortal Strike is still going to be the center of the rotation. It costs 20 Rage and does strong damage, with a 6 second cooldown.

Slam is now baseline, costing 15 rage and doing moderate damage and with no cooldown - so this will presumably be used to burn excess Rage.

Colossus Smash now merely increases the damage the target takes by 20%, but it's affected by two significant passives that we'll get to.

Execute looks mostly the same, with a 10 Rage baseline cost and burning up to 30 additional Rage for more damage.

Tactician is a passive that causes Slam, Whirlwind, and Execute to have a 20% chance to reset Colossus Smash's cooldown - it's basically the equivalent of the old Sudden Death, which was sorely missing from the Warlords rotation. Honestly, this might save the spec for me.

New Mastery: Colossal Might, increases the effectiveness of Colossus Smash.

Sample Talent: Titanic Might

A passive that doubles the duration but halves the effectiveness of Colossus Smash.

So this is a step in the right direction, but I don't know that I'll be happy with it until I see the talents. I was expecting something more radical, like using a different resource than Rage, but I'll wait and see here.

Fury:

Fury's getting a little less proc-reliant, which I'm actually fine with, even as a big fan of procs. You're still going to want to get Enraged as much as possible, but you'll still have stuff you can do when you aren't.

Bloodthirst looks largely the same, but with a 40% crit bonus now. It only generates 10 Rage, though.

Enrage now increases attack speed by 100% and "damage taken" by 30%. The wording here is a little confusing. They're either making Fury a little more vulnerable, or perhaps making you harder to kill if they actually mean reducing damage taken (which is what seems to be implied in the flavor paragraph.) But Enrage is now more about attack speed and thus Rage generation.

Raging Blow no longer has charges. You can still only use it when Enraged, but I believe that as long as you have the Enrage, you can keep using it.

Rampage is a new ability that seems to be replacing Wild Strike. It costs a whopping 50 Rage, unleashing a series of 5 brutal strikes over 2 seconds. It always acts as if you are Enraged, which means you'll always be able to burn excess Rage without wasting it.

Fury's version of Execute always costs 30 Rage now.

Mastery: Unshackled Fury will add a damage buff to Enrage, much as it does now, but that will be on top of the 100% haste increase.

Sample Talent: Frenzy:

15 Rage attack that stacks up a Haste buff (I think this is a Diablo 3 Barbarian ability.)

Protection:

Protection still has a ton of abilities baseline. I actually expected some of this to get slimmed down, but Prot Warriors seem to be Blizzard's sacred cow. There are some changes to defensive abilities.

Devastate, Revenge, Thunder Clap, Shield Slam, and Heroic Strike all look largely unchanged.

Deep Wounds can now be canceled if the target is healed to full, which I imagine will only really be a factor in PvP.

Shield Block is relatively cheap at 10 Rage, with 2 charges on a 12 second recharge. Also, Heavy Repercussions is now baseline, with Shield Slam's damage getting buffed by this.

Ignore Pain is a new AM ability that replaces Shield Barrier. It costs 40 rage and lets you ignore 90% of the next "massive" strike against you, with what "massive" is being determined by your max health.

Spell Refleciton remains, and Mastery: Critical Block looks mostly the same.

Sample Talent: Shield Discipline:

Passive that makes Shield Slam extend the duration of Shield Block and makes Shield Block increase the damage of Shield Slam by an additional 30%

So Prot really looks like it only has the one major change. Blizzard seems to want Ignore Pain to be the go-to AM ability.

Warrior Analysis:

Given the profound reworkings we've seen with other classes and specs, I've got to be honest and say that I really expected a lot more from-the-ground-up redesign for Warriors. Still, it does look like there's at least a solid mechanical base for all of the specs. Fury should be less concerned about waiting to do something (which seems anathema to the whole Fury flavor) and Arms seems to have the tools it needs to feel like a cohesive spec (though I still think Whirlwind just seems wrong for them - they should be using Thunderclap.)

Later today, we'll get Monks and Druids.

Spec in Review - Fury Warriors

Fury is a spec that I've flirted with from time to time, but in the Catalcysm/Mists era (and actually also in the Wrath era, though my sole warrior at the time eventually transitioned to being a full-time tank,) I was pretty staunchly an Arms guy. I hadn't really paid it much thought until Wrath introduced Titan's Grip, which of course iconically allows Fury to dual-wield two-handed weapons. Later Cataclysm introduced Single-Minded Fury for those who, for some bizarre reason, would want to stick to single-handed weapons.

Fury has gone through some evolution, and indeed some of the biggest changes to the spec on the Warlords Beta came through only recently.

In my last spec review, I really focused on what had changed, but this time I'm going to just sort of talk about what Fury's all about now.

The number of abilities to juggle for Fury is relatively small, but there's a lot of interactivity between them.

Essentially, Bloodthirst is your main Rage generator and your main means of becoming Enraged (in fact, it might be the only way - not sure about changes to Berserker Rage.) Bloodthirst has a 30% increased chance to crit, and when it does, it enrages you.

Wild Strike is your main Rage spender, costing 40 Rage and dealing rather high damage. Your Bloodthirst has a chance to proc Blood Surge, which makes your next two Wild Strikes free. I could be mistaken, but I also get the impression that Wild Strike triggers a shorter global cool down.

Raging Blow functions both as a major proc ability and also a kind of cleave ability. Whenever you become enraged, you activate Raging Blow, which costs only ten Rage, but can't be used unless you get this proc, but given the increased chance for Blood Thirst to crit, and the fact that you're going to be stacking a bunch of crit anyway, this happens pretty frequently. The Raging Blow proc stacks up to two times. This ability I believe hits harder than Wild Strike when you take into account the fact that it hits with both weapons.

Whirlwind is your primary AoE ability. I'm not sure how many enemies you'll need to be fighting to make it a full substitute for Wild Strike, but you might want to toss it in there for an extra effect, which is that it causes your Raging Blow to hit a second target, stacking up twice for a total of three targets (and once you get the requisite Draenor perk, the extra targets are doubled, so you can hit a total of five.)

The rest is pretty familiar if you've played a Warrior. Execute, Victory Rush, and Charge are all still there. The most notable absence however is Heroic Strike - the idea here is that Wild Strike will be your main Rage-spender.

Most recently, Colossus Smash was made Arms-only, which does change the gameplay quite a bit. Fury, at least in Mists, was built around building up as many procs and resources as you could, and then spending it within the CS-window. With CS no longer a part of the Fury rotation, you'll want to react a lot quicker to your procs and spend them as quickly as you can.

Notable talents  in the Warrior's "rotational changes" tier (which I think is either level 30 or 45) are the option to have Wild Strike cost 15 less Rage - meaning you'll be hitting it far more often, or to remove the cool down on Bloodthirst, which means you'll never not have something to hit. The last is available to all specs, which is Sudden Death, giving you a proc that allows the use of Execute on targets over 20% health or getting to do it for free when they're below that.

In many ways, I feel that Blizzard has kind of traded out the gameplay concepts for Fury and Arms with one another. Arms is now the spec that takes time to carefully build up resources for a burst of damage while Fury is much more dynamic and fast-paced as you respond to procs. Some veterans will no doubt be very unhappy with where Fury is now, much as I have been with Arms. But coming to the spec as a relative stranger, it... kind of works.

Mind you, I still think the version of Arms on live is better.

Should Gladiator's Resolve Just Be a Fourth Warrior Spec?

Gladiator's Resolve is probably the most impactful talent of any class or spec in the game. As a quick explanation - the talent is available only to Protection Warriors at level 100. It has one very minor aspect - increasing Block chance, I think, while in Defensive Stance, but the far bigger thing is that it transforms Battle Stance into Gladiator Stance.

Gladiator Stance transforms some of the Protection abilities, reorienting them toward damage-dealing and away from tanking. The stated intention of this talent is to allow Prot Warriors to DPS, and to do so competitively.

Gladiator's Resolve allows Warrior Prot to be both a tank and DPS spec, and indeed, tank players may in fact choose the talent for the simplicity of the block bonus. Blizzard is attempting to avoid the pitfalls of the old Feral Druid spec, which used to encompass both what we would call Feral today and also Guardian druids, by disabling the ability to change stances while in combat. You can't go into a fight as DPS and then switch to Defensive Stance if the tank drops.

Still, there are a few oddities that result from this talent.

The first is that tank gear becomes DPS gear for one lucky spec. Admittedly, there's far less "tank" gear than there used to be, with the removal of dodge and parry ratings. Still, rings, trinkets, cloaks, and necklaces (and shields) can have the Bonus Armor stat, which is generally slated to be the ideal stat for all tanks (encouraging tanks to have a full set of tank accessories.) In order to keep Bonus Armor and Mastery competitive with the other secondary stats, which of course also have an offensive benefit, both of those stats will increase your Attack Power, with Bonus Armor adding the AP as a flat amount and Mastery increasing it by a percentage. While I don't know how well this offensive benefit will be, it seems perfectly possible that Gladiator Warriors will look for, or at least take, Bonus Armor pieces that theoretically should be just for tanks.

Another oddity is that much of the ability set that Gladiators have is clearly built around getting hit. They do a decent job of compensating for this - Shield Block becomes Shield Charge, for example. But the quasi-spec feels somewhat jury-rigged.

Possibly the most frustrating oddity of the talent is that it doesn't come until level 100. If you're really just interested in DPSing, this means you won't have the benefit of leveling up as a Gladiator Warrior. Essentially all Gladiators are going to have to learn the new rhythms of their spec at 100. Veteran tanks might have an easier time of it, but tanking is of course quite different than DPSing. Certainly it's easier to transition from tanking to DPSing, but it's still quite odd.

Now, to be clear, I applaud Blizzard's efforts here. I think it's fantastic that after ten years we're finally going to get a sword-and-board DPS style. Really at this point the only DPS spec that can use a shield is Elemental, where the shield really just functions as a glorified off-hand frill.

Also, as someone who is sad to see Arms collapse into horrifyingly simplistic gameplay, it's nice to know there's another option if Fury doesn't really fit my style.

However, as we see this evolve, I suspect it may come to a point where Gladiators need to have their own, fourth spec. The only precedent for this is of course the Druid, and in that case, Feral was effectively two specs already, and had been since vanilla. Yet if Blizzard is serious about Gladiators being a real DPS spec, and not a novelty like Dark Apotheosis (which I believe was removed in Warlords, hopefully signaling that they don't want Warlocks stepping on the toes of a future Demon Hunter class!) they might have to bite the bullet and give Warriors a fourth spec.

A Farewell to Arms

I'll admit that Warriors were never my top pick for classes in WoW. It is always somewhat bizarre to me when people, presented with a world filled with magic and sorcery, decide that they want to be the guy who just fights with swords. On the ground of Lore and Style, Warriors were never going to be my top pick when there are Paladins and Death Knights around.

But I am, if nothing else, someone who likes to get as much out of his fantasy universes as he can, and part of that is playing every class (and every race. Yes, even Blood Elves.) I didn't really play Warriors seriously until Wrath - which was the expansion where I got 9/10 classes to the cap (Mists was the first expansion when I got 11/11 - actually, I technically got my Priest to 85 during 5.0, but before Mists came out.)

My sole Warrior (because I had both Alliance and Horde on the same server) was the Orc named Rechtar, and I had struggled with different specs for a long time. Finally, I went Arms and it just kind of clicked for me. Wrath, however, was my tanking-obsessed heyday, and I was resolved to have all four tank capable classes of the time as main spec tanks. But with the release of Cataclysm, and the new race that had been my absolute greatest hope for a new race - the Worgen - came out, I decided that a Warrior was a good fit. I felt that a physical class would be good for a werewolf, and I was between Rogues and Warriors (I wound up making both.) That Worgen Warrior, who was essentially tied for second place among my alts in Cataclysm, is in the background image for this blog.

And Arms in Cataclysm was fantastic. It was even better than it had been in Wrath. There was a great flow to it - you always had something to do. Rend was easily maintained through Blood and Thunder, and it had the unique spec identity of being the only melee class with a cast time, or rather "swing time" for Slam. Essentially, Rend would proc Taste for Blood, which would allow Overpower, and you'd hit Mortal Strike on cool down and fill in the caps, as best you could, Rage permitting, with those slow but massive Slams.

Mists saw some weird iterations on Arms, but by the end it had a great mechanical game. Basically, Mortal Strike came center stage as your Rage generator, and then you'd play a balancing game - conserving Rage with Overpower or burning it with Slam or Execute. And Colossus Smash was only semi-predictable, its cool down often being reset by Sudden Death. This made every move kind of a judgment call. Play too conservatively and you risked wasting Rage, play too liberally and you risked not having enough Rage to dump in the CS window.

Arms felt like a tricky spec, but one that could be fantastic when played well. To me, the very essence of an Arms warrior is that they are not controlled by their Rage - rather they use it as a weapon and a tool. An Arms Warrior is calm and professional - a seasoned veteran. Warriors are morally neutral, but you can basically assume that an Arms Warrior is going to be a worthy opponent, regardless of what side he or she is on. Fury is more about allowing that Rage to consume you, but Arms - flavor wise, at least - is about a respect for skill and thus lends itself to a kind of intricate gameplay.

Unfortunately, Blizzard does not agree with me. Their stance is that Arms is defined as begin the one that is about "big hits." Thus, Arms will be utterly transforming - in many ways, regressing, though under the guise of "going back to its roots." Mortal Strike is going back to costing, rather than generating Rage. Once again, Rage will be purely gained through auto-attacks (and Charge, but how often do you get to do that in PvE?) Overpower is totally gone - cut because it's a relatively small attack. Rend is back, though any interactivity it had with other abilities has been removed. The two bits that came together to make Mists' era Arms are now mutually-exclusive talents. Sudden Death - Arms' sole proc, now applies to Execute, rather than Colossus Smash (which, to be fair, was true in Wrath, as there was no CS.) Slam is now a somewhat more complicated ability, working a bit like Arcane Blast in that it gets more powerful and more expensive as you use it, but is purely a talent.

Blizzard has noted that the baseline complexity of the spec is not what one should be judging it on, but I really don't think Arms can have a sufficiently engaging gameplay unless they got both of these talents - and even then it might not be enough.

And there's a third talent that makes Rend grant more rage as it bleeds a target, but that's hardly that interesting.

Essentially, the entirety of the interesting nature of Arms has been jettisoned to make Mortal Strike a more powerful individual ability.

On the Beta forums, there has been some complaint about these changes (I have been among their contributors,) but Blizzard has remained resolute in this rebranding of the Arms specialization. I have tried to play it, and it is just, to be frank, not Arms as we know it. But beyond that, it seems like a relic from a much earlier time in WoW's design, and I mean that in a bad way. I'm talking about the times when Arcane basically just spammed Arcane Missiles over and over, or when Paladins essentially had nothing to do except cast Judgment and re-apply their seals.

The game has come very far in the last ten years, and I've almost always been happy with the direction they've taken. The occasional times when something doesn't work out (level 90 Mage tier, for example,) Blizzard has usually responded by fixing them (Mages, rejoice for 6.0.)

So sadly, I'm going to be leaving Arms behind on my Warrior come 6.0. I've played around a little with Fury in the beta, and it's decent. At level 100 I'll probably try out Gladiator's Resolve and see how it is playing Prot DPS.

I can only hope that when 6.1 comes out, or perhaps when 7.0 does, Blizzard will realize how they've gutted the spec and build in some interesting mechanics again.

I could say similar things about some of the other aspects of the ability squish, but while there are a few feather-ruffling things (like the idea that Blood will just use Blood Boil for both single-target and AoE, and loses Heart Strike,) nothing's quite so destructive as the changes I've seen to Arms.

Well, hopefully they'll come out with Demon Hunters next expansion and I can do what I did with my Draenei Shaman "Uterro" when Wrath came out and have that Worgen effectively change classes.

New Changes and Arms is... Still a Mess

The ability squish in the Warlords Beta has mostly been ok. Some specs, like Demonlogy or Enhancement, seem hardly affected at all. Others, like Retribution or Assassination, feel better and more proactive.

But Arms, oh my sweet Arms. Arms feels nothing at all like it used to, and doesn't make any goddamned sense.

I like Arms. I stayed Arms even when Wrath of the Lich King gave Fury Titan's Grip. Arms as a spec just made sense. And while it took a lot of iteration, Mists' eventual version of the spec made sense in a very clear way.

How Arms Works on Live:

In 5.4, Arms is all about managing Rage. You have the following key abilities for single-target situations:

Mortal Strike (MS) - On a 5-ish second cool down. It generates Rage, and applies Deep Wounds, a DoT. It also gives you Taste for Blood.

Colossus Smash (CS) - On a long rotational cool down, Colossus Smash is free and debuffs the target, making your attacks ignore its armor (or ignore some of it on other players.) It's also affected by Sudden Death.

Slam - An expensive ability with no cool down, Slam hits pretty hard but costs a fair amount of Rage.

Overpower (OP) - A very cheap ability but that hits for relatively low damage. It has practically no cool down (it's 1.5 seconds, which is the global cool down anyway before haste) but it is unusable without Taste for Blood

Execute - An expensive attack that hits very hard, but can only be used on enemies who are at 20% health or below. Also affects Overpower.

You have the following important procs/passives:

Sudden Death - Mortal Strike has a chance (probably 20% or so) to refresh the cool down on Colossus Smash

Taste for Blood - Allows you to use Overpower. You get it either when an opponent dodges an attack or you get two charges when you hit Mortal Strike. You can have a max of 5 stacks.

Executioner: Using Execute makes Overpower free for the next few seconds, but still requires Taste for Blood.

Putting it together:

A 5.4 Arms Warrior charges in and hits Colossus Smash and then Mortal Strike. While CS is up, they use Slam as much as they can until they run out of Rage. Outside of CS, they hit MS on cooldown, and then use OP to continue damaging the enemy without burning too much Rage. When Sudden Death procs, or CS naturally comes off cooldown, they go back into their high-damage cycle, hitting CS and then Slamming as much as they can. If they are near or at full Rage, they hit Slam regardless to avoid wasting Rage. At 20%, Execute simply replaces Slam. Execute is more expensive than Slam, but it also makes your Overpower free, so your "conservative" phase allows you to store up more Rage.

The "game" of the spec is making sure that you conserve enough Rage during your non-CS phase so that you can let loose with as many Slams or Executes as you can when it does come up. The challenge, then, is not to be caught with your pants down when Sudden Death procs, but also not to be too conservative and waste Rage waiting for Sudden Death.

How Arms Works on Beta:

In 6.0, Arms generates far more Rage from auto attacks, which is important, because other than Charge, it's their only source for it. You have the following abilities:

Mortal Strike (MS): Causes a fair amount of damage, costs a fair amount of Rage.

Colossus Smash (CS): On a long rotational cool down, debuffs the target, allowing your attacks to ignore armor.

Rend: A dot, costs some Rage. Deals more damage at the end.

Whirlwind: An AoE ability, but used as a Rage-dump in single-target.

Execute: An expensive attack that hits very hard, but can only be used on enemies who are at 20% health or below.

You have the following important procs/passives:

Haha! Just kidding. You have no important procs/passives.

Putting it together:

You charge in. You might hit CS, but you probably want to wait until you have more Rage. You hit CS, then MS. Then you're probably out of Rage. You wait. You get enough to apply Rend. You wait for Mortal Strike to come off cool down. You hit it on cooldown if you have the Rage. If you wind up with too much Rage before you can hit MS, you hit Whirlwind. You maintain Rend. At 20%, you start burning excess Rage with Execute, or maybe you just ignore MS and only do Execute and Rend, with CS when it comes off cool down.

The "game" of the spec is... is... waiting for Rage to generate?

Now, to be fair, there are some talents that throw in new twists. You can pick to either have Rend generate Rage, get Sudden Death, but one that procs Executes above 20% (or free ones below) rather than CS, or Slam, which now works a bit like Arcane Blast, dealing more damage but costing significantly more Rage with each attack. But are any of those fun? Are any as fun as 5.4 Arms? I mean, maybe if we had all three, but definitely not as it stands.

In Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard had a really cool idea for Warriors. Historically, Warriors generated Rage from damage dealt and taken. While they didn't get rid of this idea completely (though they limited it by stance, so that DPS would not try to get damaged to help their DPS,) they pushed for what I think is a far more sensible model, and is not unlike the Barbarian in Diablo III.

This idea was Rage Builders and Rage Spenders. Each spec got a builder: Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, and Shield Slam, and thus Rage was more of an active thing.

If anything, the direction I wish they'd take Warriors is to lean farther into that model. Make Rage come exclusively from builders. You could still have a randomized element - make crits (or multistrikes) generate extra Rage. But auto-attack significance is so 2004.

What this new Arms model does is take almost all the proactive nature of the spec, as well as all the reactive procs, and boils them down into simply hitting whatever's up when you have the Rage.

I hope that it's not too late for them to do a massive re-think (or just a rollback. Is 5.4 Arms really that broken?) but I fear that, with the development team most likely getting anxious to start on their tuning passes, this bizarre, broken, and utterly illogical version of Arms will probably make it to live.

I guess we can hope for some changes in the major patches, but I think the elegant Arms of 5.4 may be going away for good.

The New World of Tank Stats - Determining Values

DPS and Healers have both historically valued throughput stats. DPS is all about throughput, to the extent that it's really the only thing (after hit/expertise, though that's going away) they care about when it comes to gear. Healers gain a great benefit from greater throughput, as when their heals come stronger, they can cast fewer of them or more mana-efficient ones, though Healers also have Spirit to take into consideration, which gives them longevity.

Tanks have always been about survival, though. And survival is a different beast than throughput. Arguably, tanks are concerned more with reducing the throughput of the enemy attacking them, and until Warlords, tanks have done so with different stats. Before Mists, a tank's attacks were pretty much just there to maintain threat (though Death Knights got on the "active mitigation" train an expansion early.) The line between survival stat and throughput stat has blurred a little, but in Warlords, it will be utterly eliminated. Dodge and Parry will no longer be found on gear, and tanks will now be taking on only stats that also provide some throughput boost. That said, while in most cases these stats will be more obviously throughput-ty, some will come the other way around, being more obviously defensive.

In Warlords, there will be six stats that tanks look for beyond the standard Strength/Agility and Stamina: Critical Strike, Haste, Mastery, Multistrike, Readiness, and Bonus Armor. Let's look at each of these stats and see how they affect tanks.

Mastery:

Mastery is already pretty well-suited to various tasks because the very idea of Mastery is that it does different things for different specs. Since its introduction in Cataclysm, this has made it quite good as a stat for gear that is useful to both tanks and DPS, because the Mastery can provide, say, extra block chance for a tank and bonus attacks on a DPS.

So the only real tweak to Mastery is that, to keep it in line with other tank stats, it will now also boost one's attack power by a percent.

Readiness:

Readiness, like Mastery, is a stat that lends itself to being good for just about every spec. Readiness will boost the recovery rate of tanking cool downs, though I don't know if it will provide any offensive benefit, which does make it something of an odd man out (unless they do something like giving Protection Paladins back Avenging Wrath, and having Readiness affect it.)

Bonus Armor:

Bonus Armor will be the only tank-exclusive stat. But even though it's only for people who just want survivability, it will, like Mastery, boost attack power, but in this case by an amount proportional (perhaps even equal) to the armor it grants.

Haste:

Now we get into the trickier territory. For some tanks, the benefit of haste is already obvious. Death Knights and Monks recover their resources more quickly with more haste, and Paladins can use their Holy Power-generating abilities more often (which amounts to the same.) But the two Rage tanks need a little more incentive to make haste look good. Warriors will be gaining their own version of Paladins' Sanctity of Battle - theirs being called Headlong Rush, which is a pretty elegant solution. Likewise, haste will now lower the cooldown of Mangle for Druids, so it looks like the Paladin model is being spread across the various classes that need it.

Critical Strike:

The first major way that crit is being made useful to tanks is that among the three plate tanks, all will be getting the new version of Riposte. Crit Rating will now convey parry chance to these three specs. Likewise, Warriors will still benefit from the crit-induced enrages. Monks already had the benefit of getting Elusive Brew stacks from their crits, and Guardian Druids gain, I believe, Tooth and Claw as well as Rage from their crits through Primal Fury.

Multistrike:

Multistrike is a totally new stat, and one that does not obviously lend itself to tank survival, so every class needs some kind of baked-in benefit.

Death Knights will now gain their Scent of Blood procs through Multistrike.

Druids will gain extra max health as they Multistrike with auto attacks, Lacerate bleeds, or Mangle.

Monks now gain their Gift of the Ox healing spheres through auto-attack Multistrikes, as opposed to crits.

Paladins now have a chance to effectively Multistrike on receiving heals, with a chance for 30% extra healing based on one's Multistrike rating.

Warriors gain a self-heal through Multistrikes, which refreshes the duration with each Multistrike auto-attack.

Gearing Defensively:

Overall, it looks like there won't be a single stat (other than Spirit, but we won't be picking that up now, will we?) that will be utterly useless to us in 6.0. Certainly, some stats will be better than others (if it is mathematically possible for them to all be equal, I doubt it's something Blizzard could easily achieve,) but I think that the philosophy here is good. One might even find that certain stat weights benefit different styles of tanking (that said, there's bound to be one proven "better" than the other - these days you could imagine a Mastery-heavy Paladin who has good timing, mitigating all the biggest boss hits with super-effective ShotR's, but the vast majority of them will go for higher uptime with haste.)

While overall it might not be a problem, I wonder how this will all effect tank DPS. Vengeance has been a pain in the ass, but it's also been something of an equalizer. If one tank favors, say, Crit and Bonus Armor for survival, but Haste and Multistrike for threat, are they going to be at a disadvantage if another tank gets the biggest benefit to both threat and survival through the same preferred stats? Readiness might not confer any benefit to threat, and even as they've eliminated Haste breakpoints, Readiness seems like a stat that will definitely have breakpoints (either you have enough Shield Barriers for every Deep Breath or you don't.) Still, I think we're heading in the right direction, and I'm excited to be able to just switch out my sword-and-board for a warhammer and be ready to go Ret.

EDIT:

Not really related to gear, but all tank stances are getting a buff, raising threat generation by 900%, as opposed to the current 600%. They really want us holding off the DPS/heals. I remember when you got like, only 200% threat.

Changes Coming for the Arms Rotation

Arms Warriors will be seeing some big changes to the way that their spec operates, but fundamentally, the core idea of the rotation will remain largely unchanged. Specifically, Arms will still be about being efficient with Rage and then blowing as much of it as possible while under the effect of Colossus Smash, which of course, thanks to Sudden Death, is somewhat less predictable than it is with Fury.

In fact, most of the pieces are sticking around. Mortal Strike is still the main Rage generator and will be a central ability in the rotation. You're still going to have Colossus Smash and try to maximize its uptime.

The big change is that Overpower is going away. Overpower's old funkiness, with its activation on dodges and its bypassing of avoidance mechanics, doesn't really fit in the brave new world of no expertise. Also, while it's been a useful ability to be frugal with Rage, Arms is being re-focused on very hard-hitting abilities.

The big change here comes to Execute. The cost of Execute is getting doubled, but Arms Warriors will now be able to use Execute regardless of an enemy's health. What this means is likely that Execute will be used during Colossus Smash, and Slam will now take the place of Overpower as the "cheap" ability to use when conserving Rage.

But if you thought that sounded like a serious nerf to Execute, here's the fun part: When the enemy is actually in Execute range, your auto-attacks will generate 40 Rage. That's right: 40. That's a lot of Rage.

So I imagine that in that bottom 20%, Arms will be able to almost spam Execute (weaving in a Mortal Strike now and again.) It also makes haste more attractive, as this Execute spam will be more sustainable when in that range.

This certainly cuts down on one of Arms' rotational abilities. While I don't know that this was the spec that needed such a central ability removed, I'm eager to test out the new rotation.

Fundamentally I think the Arms Warrior is about getting in those major strikes, which makes it kind of fun that Slam is the "cheap" one, assuming it still does massive damage.

I do think that what we'll see with these changes is that Arms Warriors are going to have to plan ahead a bit more. "Do I really want to hit Slam again before I get this Colossus Smash up?" Without Overpower as a practically free ability, you might find yourself saving up Rage until you can get CS up. But on the other hand, when you are ready to spend that Rage, you'll be able to blast away with gigantic Executes. It'll certainly make for a less frantic rotation, but Arms was never one of those frantic specs anyway. The question is just how much you can slow the rotation down (and that's assuming that slowing the rotation is the actual effect of this - I'm not a very experienced theory crafter) before it gets too slow.

And as a side note, Arms' mastery (which currently feels a lot like Multistrike) will now buff Mortal Strike, Slam, and Execute, reinforcing that idea of getting off gigantic hits.