Arms Warrior DPS 4.2 - Test

I just released a new DPS Test vid on my youtube channel :)

In the vid I go over my opening rotation and some thoughts in general.

I plan on doing a more proper look in to Arms DPS as 4.3 hits, provided that the raiding and gearing does not take up all my waking hours (it should not though). It might even turn in to a proper guide but that we shall have to see.

Blizzcon and Mists of Pandaria

Blizzcon this year was huge. As a follower of all Blizzards games I must say that this years event had the most information ever. Tons and tons of info on Diablo 3, Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and of course WoW: Mists of Pandaria (aka MoP).

Mists of Pandaria was both expected and unexpected. Crafty people had already found out that Blizzard had trademarked the name a few months before Blizzcon so it was no surprise really. What was unexpected was how drastically Blizzard had changed from their ususal semi-dark themed expansions into something that could basically air on the disney channel.

The theme is controversial and personaly I'm not very happy about it either, however a lot of people have jumped on the "omg I'm gonna quit this game after cataclysm"-train solely based on pictures of pandas. For those of us that followed the panels there was a lot of other points that really stood out.

Kill-vid celebration!

Ok, I must admit that I have a weakness for neatly edited kill-vids. This is especially true is it manages to capture some of the lore or premise of the fight in question. There is also, in my opinion, no better way to honour your guild. Some guilds are famed as much for their fast progression as for their inspiring videos. Examples would be Paragon or Vodka or even the WotLK Ensidia kills.
Paragons video of their amazing world first Heroic Lich King 25man will forever be remembered as a milestone in both the art of making kill-vids and in guild promotion. The second bit is important as nowadays people can actually follow their favorite guild, see them progress and also distinguish individual raiders performance thereby learning and improving their own techniques. The mystique previously attached to the top end guilds have dissapated somewhat and instead revealed their true dedication and skill, plain for all to see.

Now with the release of the Firelands 4.2 patch a new flood of kill-vids are about to decend upon us. In a sort of celebration of this impending delight I've put together a little list of the top five videos from the patch 4.0 era. All after the jump.

Arms Warrior DPS in 4.1

I recently put together a new dps-test vid to see how patch 4.1 had treated Arms, and I was pleasantly surprised. 19k dps on a raid dummy is not hard at all.

(view on youtube for proper annotations and info)



The major change that came in 4.1 was that Mortal Strike now refreshes Rend. This is a bigger help to the complexity of the rotation than one might think, however with the removal of re-rend'ing Arms suddenly feels very different.
Rend is at the core of the mechanic that makes the class tick (no pun intended) and with the removal of it from the rotation it almost feel as if Arms has lost some of it's soul.

I have not yet had the pleasure of testing the new system in the execute phase of a fight. I really hope that this change improves the buff tending bore that preceded it in patch 4.0.6.

Even though Arms is far from the 'very challenging to play' class it used to be, it is still a ton of fun. And to new warriors out there it is at present a very appealing dps-class choice.

Patch 4.2 and the new legendary staff

Lately I've been afk a lot. Either not having access to my computer and when I have, I havent had access to the internet. So I have not seen much of 4.1, except that my raid dummy DPS has increased quite a lot. Thank you Blizzard, Arms pve is quite sweet atm.

During my gaming absence I have however been keeping up, as much I can, with the new info comming out on 4.2. And from what I can tell it will be really good. The new phasing technology that only affects what you as a player can see, while you still can see people who are in different "phases", seems like a huge leap forward in enhancing the personal progression experience. They have said that it is a bit experimental but I hope that this works out well since this would mean that you truly get a feeling of having your actions affect your enviorment while at the same time not losing out on social interaction (no more invisible node-stealers, yes!).

Editing vids and why Sony Vegas hates me

I thought I'd write and explain a little bit about why my vids are so few and far between at the moment. I know a lot of people are waiting for Part 2 of my "Scepter of the Shifting Sands" movie (link to Part 1 here, also avalible on warcraftmovies.com).

The big issue I have with the videomaking process at the moment is limitations with my computer hardware. Sony Vegas is operating quite slow on the system I have available today and that makes working on a project the scale of my "Scepter of the Shifting Sands" movie most taxing. I will however not let that stop me of course and I will keep working on it.

I have a lot of other projects lined up that I want to get to working on but I feel it is important to finish this movie before I start with something else, exceptions might be smaller simpler vids I can throw together just for the fun of it like boss kills or exploration vids.

Why the 4.1 "Call to Arms" is really bad

Blizzard recently announced that they will implement a new feature in the upcomming 4.1 patch, this feature will be called "Call to Arms" (Link). This is an improvement of the LFG aka dungeonfinder feature, that is already implemented, and is aimed to resolve the very long queue times that the dps classes are having to deal with in cataclysm heroic dungeons.
This feature will reward the class (tank, healer or dps) that is in shortest supply in the dungeonfinder, at the time of entering the queue, with an extra lootbag after finishing the dungeon. This to motivate basically tanks and healers (since dps are not really in short supply) to queue for heroics more. To be eligible to recive this lootbag the player must have entered the queue on his/her own and not as a part of a group.

Now this in itself has upset some people that are saying things like: 'So the classes that only have 5 sec queue-times are to on top of that going to get extra loot?' or 'This will cause everyone to roll tanks and then we will have tons of tanks that can't tank making PuG's worse'.
However what has gotten a lot of people upset is what is going to be in the actual lootbags.

Blizzards april fools (updated)

This is always something I look forward to, this and their x-mas spoof. Just goes to show how groovy and how in touch with the community Blizzard really are. By far the best game company around.

Links.
Dungeon helper: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/game/dungeon-helper/
New dungeon!: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/game/dungeon/tomb-of-immortal-darkness
Horadric app: http://eu.blizzard.com/diablo3/media/horadrapp/#horadrapp-disclaimer

Starcraft 2 on consoles:

Wonder if there is a page where one can see all past april fools and other such things? I know they had one for their x-mas stuff back in the day...

Moar fools:
Paragon vs Ragnaros Heroic Strategy: http://www.paragon.fi/articles/sneak-peek-ragnaros-firelord

How to build up your DPS in raids

 This is going to be some of my thoughts on the subject of damage per second. This is not aimed at bleeding edge raiders, they should know this. Note that I do not claim that this is the only way to do things.

Raid DPS.

First and foremost it is important to note that in a raid environment it is your raid dps that matters most. To some of you this is perhaps obvious but it is very common that people just focus on their own personal results.

Why is this important to state? Because there are ways to increase your own dps by sacrificing potential gains to the raid. Example: not applying sunders or shattering throw as a dps warrior. Not doing that extra work will, most likely, improve your personal dps but lower the raid dps and in the end it might cost you that important boss kill.

How to tackle this? Find out what raid buffs and boss debuffs you have and see if they’re already covered. To continue with our dps warrior, if you have a warrior tank in the raid you will not have to stack sunders for example since he will do that automatically through devastate. Once you have gone through your abilities and you see what your need to worry about, and what not to, you can move on to what you can do to improve yourself.

The reintroduction of long, difficult and time consuming questlines

We all remember certain questlines.

Linkens “It’s a secret to everybody” or “You are Rakh’likh, Demon”, "The Scepter of the Shifting Sands" or some of the old attunement quests.

We remember them not because of the loot we got in the end or the experience points they gave, we remember them because of their epic scale and how much we had to work and travel to complete them. They where not something everyone did, in some cases very few got around to completing them (for example Dungeon Set 2).

A lot of old old-world quests had you traveling all over Azeroth. Some of these where just normal quests that where just annoying to complete and completely broke you off from the area you where questing in to deliver some package or something to someone on the other side of the world. For just normal quests this was not very good.

However for end level questlines that the developers had put extra time in to developing and that had a great story this was very cool.

The reason this was so cool was because it brought depth to the world around you, it made it feel more alive. A lot of them made sure to be annoying and difficult, this was a great thing since that made you feel as if though you had actually completed something special. Another huge factor in this was how they often started off as unassuming average quests that didn’t seem like anything special and also how “un required” the quest rewards where.

When Cataclysm came and remade the old world and its quests most, if not all, of these kind of questlines where lost. They might have been breaking with what the forward jump in time that occurred and changes to the zones had brought, they might have been dropped due to the fact that they did not bring any end game rewards or they might have been dropped because of the fact that they where too messy for newer players to complete.

Cataclysm quests where at first very appealing and interesting to me due to how streamlined they where, but after a while I realized that it was all a railroad. Jump on and ride along but no choices are allowed.

Where is the forsaken in Kalimdor that in the middle of a questing zone convinces me to take up the banner of the banshee queen as an undercover agent and travel to Eastern Kingdoms to start a whole new line of quests instead?

Why can’t I choose a faction to support and, maybe not exclusively, quest for all over Azeroth from for example level 15 to 60 (tabards don’t give faction specific quests) and upon reaching exalted get access to a specific questline (levels 58, 68, 78 and 85) with a unique reward?

In summary.

Generally questing should not be a pain, but sometimes it should!

Do you miss your first months in WoW?

Just before Cataclysm hit I recreated one of the first screenshots I ever took in WoW. Back when the world was unknown and fresh.


I took ages leveling and stopped regularly just to check out side quests that where below my level. Like The Mithril Order quests, so much mithril and thorium. I miss that time.


What really has changed for me with WoW I think is time. Back when I was leveling my first character I had no end goal or other reason to hurry up. I was, and still am, a non social player. I like doing as much as I can on my own. This helped to shield me from information about endgame content, and for that matter any information on what was around the corner. Everything was so new.


I think a lot of people that perhaps raid or pvp at max level, or even just players that have been playing for a long while, easily get very cynical and upset about either Blizzard or WoW itself. I have recently been feeling unhappy with the game, a lot because of what Cataclysm did to it but more on that in another post.


I belive that players really have to just stop and take a breath now and then. Perhaps start a non guild alt without heirlooms that one only levels through quests or whatever is prefered but always focusing on the moment instead of fighting to get to some end goal.


If people did that I would bet that the WoW community, being utterly childish and aweful atm, would be a nicer thing to partake in and be a part of.

A new vid series maybe?

I've been thinking about starting a series of vids that focus on a little side hobby I have in WoW. Filling up my bankspace, well filling it up with interesting and shiny stuff really.

This whole collecting thing I think started when I did the warrior quest for the whirlwind weapon. I picked the sword of course and noticed that this was a weapon that looked very different from the other sword-looking swords I'd had before that (this was my first ever character in WoW so everything was new). When the time came for me to separate from it in favor of a better weapon I just could not vendor it. Ever since it has dwelled in my bank, a memory of simpler times.

That was how it all started.
After that sword many other things came and went in my bank, hard choices where made and less shiny stuff was taken out back and dealt with. In later days a lot more have been entering my vaults. A lot of stuff I have can no longer me attained, many things went the way of the Dodo when Cata came.

Anyway my idea with these new vids would be to show people the cool stuff that is out there and some of the history surrounding the items, Ashkandi anyone? And to show people that they can get items that are a big part of the history of WoW.
Also just to share with other collectors out there and speculate what Blizzard might remove next so that swift action can be taken. And perhaps to entice more people to get bigger bankbags.

Al'Akir joins his son in death!

Finally, after a lot of hard work, Vanguard managed to take down Al'Akir 25 man last night.
As I understand it that was the first 25 man kill of Al'Akir on the server, and I can understand why.

Al'Akir on 25 man is very rng, at least at first. But even after knowing the fight it is easy to have 1/25th of your raid screw the other 24 up. Especially in P3 where a cloud at the wrong level leads to what I call the "electric sandwich". The recipe is one cook and 24 pieces of ham. If it wasn't for that this fight might be concidered fun.

What I found most annoying about the fight is of course P1. The reason I hate it is because I can only speed it up by so much. Since the tank can't really generate a constant high threat, due to wind bursts and tornados, I as a dps have to be really careful not to overaggro. This is trickier than it might sound due to the randomness of the tank threat "pauses".

My trick to combat threat at the start is to use pre-pot but start by just stacking up sunders and saving my cd's for the 3rd rend. This is not enough in itself but it certainly helps. I wish I could just throw everything I have at the guy, Rawrr.

Anyway, I'm very happy to have defended this shattered world and to have gotten the raids done exclusively on 25 man.

Looking forward to crying about hardmodes now ;)

What is wrong with raiding, 10 vs 25 man, in Cataclysm

Ok let me talk before you start throwing things.

Raiding in Wrath of the Lich King (henceforth: Wrath) built upon the lessons learned by Blizzard in tBC.
They noticed that people loved the option of going with 10 man raids.
They also noticed that there was a huge problem with raiding in tBC. That was that you basically had to do every raid after the other, starting with the oldest easiest ones, in order for you to get to the gear you needed for the later raids.
If you wanted to do Sunwell you had to have done everything before Sunwell for you to have any sort of decent gear basically.

So enter wrath.
In wrath every raid had the option to go either 10 or 25 man. Great, everyone can choose what to go for. Current gear could be gotten through heroic dungeons and tokens.
The problem here was that 25 man raids where harder than their 10 man counterparts, another issue was that every raid had separate achivements for 10 and 25 man.
To clarify: Every raid achivement had 2 versions (some exceptions).

So people started thinking that 25 man was the more hardcore way of raiding, and Blizzard reinforced this by tieing certain quests (like Shadowmourne) to "only 25 man" and most of all through loot which was much better on 25 man.

So; Cataclysm.
In Cataclysm Blizzard wanted to remove any sort of "This way is the real way to raid" by having 10 and 25 man raids share everything. Loot, achivements, lockouts and difficulty.

My issue is this.
10 man is very different from 25 man! Now I'm not saying that 25 man is always harder or vice versa, but they are very different. Some bosses are easier on a certain raidsize, this is a fact. The problem is not that I want to go back to the wrath system of doing things, the problem is that I don't get recognition for what I have done.

Blizzard turned away from using separate achivements for the different raidsizes because they are supposed to be equaly hard now. They are not.
You tell me that Nefarian on 10 man is as hard as it is on 25 man with a strait face.

I want Blizzard to reintroduce separate achivements for killing Cataclysm bosses.
I don't want the metas to go that way though mind you, I don't care about them. I just want to have a separate achivement for Bastion of Twilight 10 man and Bastion of Twilight 25 man for example. That's all.

WTF does one play Arms?

Good question. Hmm, lets start with a short recap of dps warriors.


Once upon a time in vanilla.
Back in classic WoW Arms warriors, otherwise known as MS (mortal strike)-warriors, where the dps warriors. Fury was not working very well, this might have been due to suboptimal gear (this would later become a trend with fury and also arms to a lesser extent), and so arms reigned supreme.


Fast forward to WotLK aka the rise of fury.
Titan's grip. Now fury could suddenly wield twohanded weapons in one hand. This together with increasing crit and ArP from endgame gear made rage generation for fury insanely high. This alone made fury in endgame WotLK the ultimate melee dps class. Endless rage made it possible to use Heroic Strike on every attack and with Whirlwind working the way it did nothing could hold fury down. Single target or multi targets made no difference.


But the most significant thing about fury was; It was easy to play.
Yes I said it. It was damn easy to play. Add to that fact that if you could find your way to any sort of decent gear you would be putting out huge dps numbers and you have one hell of a onesided looking balance of dps warriors. Everyone (face)rolled a fury warrior. (Now I'm not saying that people that excelled at fury where just facerolling, but excelling at anything requires effort so)


Ok so what about Arms?
Arms is not easy to play.  ...Yeah that's about it.
If you where a good arms warrior in Icecrown Citadel you would be putting very big numbers out and if you where playing with anyone but people that knew exactly how to play their class you would outpreform them, unless they where better geared. I personally was constantly finding myself at the top spot(s) when it came to boss dps. This was very surprising to since all I heard from people was: "Arms can't dps".


Now the problem with arms in WotLK was that the class was capped, at some point arms could just not conjure any more dps. Arms didnt have the endless rage that fury had and that made using Heroic Strike a tricky business because of the fact that the used the "...on the next normal attack swing" mechanic. That always created, at least for me, the fear of: "What if my rage is not there when it goes off?".
I am at 85 rage, I hit HS, I continue my rotation, my rage goes down to 35 and then HS goes off leaving me ragestarved -_-
I always hated that mechanic and I love what Blizzard did with it in Cataclysm. If we would have had that in WotLK things might have been different.


So what is so great with Arms then?
People that play arms know and it is hard to describe but playing arms feels more ..real.
Think of arms as an arcade fighting game take on WoW. It is a frantic hammering of buttons, constantly knowing that if something procs you must react fast and make sure you dont lose that mortal strike/execute/rend/sunder-debuff/battleshout you've got rolling. There is no steady flow of rage comming in, it crashes in on you slapping you in the face screaming: "Omfg HS!".
Executing a perfect bossbattle in terms of your rotation is next to impossible and every single bossbattle is different from the previous one. You're constantly adapting, fighting to stay on top.
It feels excactly like a battle should feel.


In the end I can't really put into words what makes playing arms so rewarding.
But people that play arms know.