Warlords of Draenor Beta: Impressions and Notes

[Estarriol 167]

For protection warriors: All dodge and parry on items converts to other stats. Dodge and parry gems, however, do not. Before you copy your character over, I highly recommend sending some crit, haste, or mastery gems over to replace your dodge and parry gems.

 

Notable Changes:

 

Riposte: Currently, dodge and parry rating gives crit. In beta, crit gives parry. It is opposite from what it was, but it works out to a very similar effect. Having more crit will give you more rage via Enrage procs, allows for more Heroic Strikes from Shield Slams, and more rage and damage from parries procing Revenge.

 

Cleave: The spell was not so great really, but I actually used it quite a bit when soloing and questing. The loss of its damage is completely unnoticeable, but I keep trying to press that keybind out of habit.

 

Stormbolt/Bladestorm: I think this swap was a really silly one, but useful to me. I did some questing last night and ran Dragon Roar/Bladestorm or Shackwave/Bladestorm. Having the multiple options for heavy AoE was rather nice, but I put Bladestorm on the same keybind that Cleave used to be on. Yeah... I reflexively hit it at bad times... a lot.

 

Vengeance: What a quality of life improvement! Currently, I feel powerful only when I'm getting hit hard but with the boost to tank baseline damage and the removal of Veng, I was feeling powerful even just questing. The only problem I had was that I kept one-shotting mobs as I was trying to pull groups of them.

 

Resolve: I really didn't get to see much of this because I was just questing. I'll update later.

 

Recklessness:   I miss it.

 

Battle/Commanding Shout: It no longer generates 20 rage when used and that really screws with my opener. Currently, I Shout and Charge before pull, then Revenge so I have 60 rage, then SBlk and Shield Slam. Now, instead of starting with 40 rage, I start with 20, so it's two GCDs before I can get a Shield Block up. Not really happy with that.

 

Haste: Naturally, I'm not hard haste-stacked, but even so, the difference that haste makes is noticeable. Mostly, it's a very odd feeling. The length of the CDs on Shield Slam and Thunder Clap are something I know instinctively. It's exactly 4 GCDs between Thunder Claps. On the beta, I currently have something like 5.08s CD on Thunder Clap. Not low enough to be only 3 GCDs between TCs, yet it's less than 4. It feels very odd, but not bad. Due to Sword and Board procs, the change to the CD of Shield Slam is less noticeable, but it makes the rotation feel slightly off.

 

Blood Craze: It'll be really interesting to play with this and see how effective it really is. What I like about it is that it is self-healing, but with a very warrior-ish feel.

 

Stats:

 

I have no strong conclusions to draw just yet.

 

Mastery:  Mastery does what it always has for us. Every crit block we have gives us an Enrage proc and therefore increases our rage generation. Additionally, mastery gives a % boost to our attack power. Thus, mastery provides extra rage and extra damage. The drawback of mastery is that you only get the full benefit of extra rage if you have a high Shield Block uptime. If you have a fight where you must prioritize Shield Barrier, your rage generation will plummet. Thus, mastery is superb for heavy melee fights, but weak for magic.

 

Crit: Crit gives extra rage through Devastate and Shield Slam crits as well as extra parries and extra damage and rage through Revenge procs. Crit will give good output and damage mitigation options.

 

Haste: By reducing the CDs on Shield Slam and Thunder Clap, haste gives more damage. The later gives more rage. I could see haste being more beneficial on AoE-heavy fights.

 

There is some nice synergy between these stats, particularly haste and crit. It's nice to see that all three options give extra damage and extra rage, but I think for overall rage generation and damage, crit will come out on top. I'm happy with that. Crit is for warriors and protection warriors are inherently warriors. Having high crit makes prot feel more warriorish, which I like. I'm liking the feel of haste significantly more than I thought, as well. I really want to get into some dungeons to see how haste, mastery, and crit play together. All three stats are going to be quite important, naturally. If we stack hard crit and haste, then we likely won't have high enough AP. If we stack hard crit and mastery, we'll be weaker on magic fights and AoE fights, but absurd on melee fights. Mastery and haste would be extremely weak on magic fights, but have really strong smoothing especially on AoE fights, but I'm not sure the extra AP would balance the lack of crit. From what I saw, albeit briefly, mastery rating increases our crit block chance more than it does currently. Not 100% sure about that one, but I'm certainly not mastery stacked and I have more mastery than when I was hard mastery stacking at the end of ToT.

[nefigah 26]

Ooo, good info. Generally when I've checked up on WoD patch notes, I've gotten pretty nervous about the amount of stuff that's been cut. Last I checked Arms, for example, they removed a crazy amount of their buttons (something like Slam, Overpower, Cleave, Enrage, Skull Banner, Shattering Throw?) so I guess they just talk in tradechat while waiting for Mortal Strike and CS cooldowns?

 

Btw do the new secondary stats they added have any value for Prot?

[Estarriol 167]

Yeah, Blood Craze gives a small (3% over 3s) heal every time prot's auto attacks multistrike. Bonus armor converts 1:1 to AP. Leech if just Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal. The others, I really haven't gotten to play around with. I'm in 587 gear and questing is giving me 513s and lower so far.

 

I forgot to add above that prot now has a 5% bonus to all sources of mastery, so that's some part of why I have so much mastery.

 

As far as buttons go, I can probably drop an entire bar wholesale, it's crazy, but at the same time, the overall feel of my rotation hasn't really been effected (other than haste). I keep hitting Cleave's keybind, but Cleave was worthless anyway. I can't say that it'll feel like this for Arms because they're giving it a heavy overhaul, but I feel like the changes aren't as drastic as they seem at first.

 

I'm still very rustled about Gladiator.

[ragebarr 153]

Arms is horrible right now, and Fury isn't far behind since they removed HS from it. Not even bothering to write anything on it until Blizzard changes something.

 

Btw Esta you're not missing much from Recklessness. It barely does anything now.

[nefigah 26]

lol, 

 

Arms is horrible right now, and Fury isn't far behind since they removed HS from it. Not even bothering to write anything on it until Blizzard changes something.

 

Btw Esta you're not missing much from Recklessness. It barely does anything now.

 

So not worth resubbing for a beta invite just yet? 

[Sajakain 104]

Arms is horrible right now, and Fury isn't far behind since they removed HS from it. Not even bothering to write anything on it until Blizzard changes something.

 

Btw Esta you're not missing much from Recklessness. It barely does anything now.

 

This is all I've been hearing. Man I hope they take feedback from Beta. Of course... I'd love to give my own feedback but I'm still waiting for my Beta invite. I should be careful with what I ask for, eh?

 

I'm hoping this is true Beta; things to be broken and eventually fixed prior to release. One can only hope.

[Bedle 11]

I know its still early beta, im afraid to say it but warriors are in horrific state atm. I love glyph of Glyph of Colossus Smash and i will for sure use it when expansion hits. I like idea of not having to pool rage for CS dump.

Fury warrs are ATM simply broken now beyond stupidity with infinite rage which we dont have how to dump. Damage is insane as were just GCD locked, only rage dumps are Wild Strike and Execute, but surv is slim to none. Talent choices for t5 row as well as spell reflect and Rallying Cry require def stance. Reworked version of Second Wind is close to useless so far (lvl 96warr here) as you are risking dying in bigger pulls. I guess that Second Wind will improve as our gear improves and our damage go up, but thats it so far.

I guess that their main goal was so far was Prot balancing as i hear/see a lot of positive comments about prot/gladiator warrs and arms/fury are simply feeling like glass cannons.

[Estarriol 167]

The changes to the t3 talent row were good. If we're really being honest, the only super useful thing in that row was Disrupting Shout and once they nerfed it to share a 15s CD with Pummel, it became lackluster (at least to me). As far as prot goes, all of the glyphs I used are now gone and I'm actually really, really liking it. Hold the Line is baked in and Incite and Heavy Repercussions are now talents. This allows prot to use quality of life and situational glyphs. I really, really missed the silence that Heroic Throw had in Cata and never used the glyph in MoP because there was always a more useful glyph. Same with Death From Above. With this major change, I'll now be able to tailor my glyphs to what I want or need in a given situation.

 

More on stat changes: They've now added Flaskataur to Orgrimmar and from him you can buy enchants, flasks, pots, and food. I used this to test out the effects of the different stats. As expected, crit gives the most raw rage in most situations. I haven't gone hard mastery just yet, so I'm not entirely sure if the raw AP boost from mastery will be equal to crit or not. Haste is interesting, but I wasn't able to get enough to see a huge difference. I got my Thunder Clap and Shield Slam CDs to 4.5 s, but with Ravager/Bladestorm/Dragon Roar the increase in frequency of TC is unnoticeable. I kill everything by the time Bladestorm is over and only have time for one TC. Shield Slam's CD decrease is also not as noticeable as might be expected due to Sword and Board procs.

 

Multistrike is the one I've found the most interesting so far. It's my go-to choice in dungeons, particularly with a pug healer. I've been using it less for its AoE damage than for its self-healing. It really makes Blood Craze noticeable.

 

One kind of odd thing I've noticed when dungeoning is the choice of item scaling. In level 95 dungeons, I'm scaled to 550. 97 dungeons to 570. LEvel 100 dungeons to 600. I am currently sitting at 589 on live, so to me this is indicating that I will not really be seeing item upgrades from quests or dungeons until 97 or so. I'm assuming the scaling will be the minimum ilvl to enter the dungeon. This seems like a deviation from MoP's release (the only one I have to compare to) where I was getting small upgrades by 86 even in my Dragon Soul BiS heroic gear. It's certainly not a big deal at all, just something I noted.

 

As far as the dungeons themselves go, most of them are very easy. A few bosses actually require attention to mechanics, even on normal. The ones that gave my group pause were kind of brutal, but that was mostly because it was myself and two friends and two pugs, inevitably one pug would leave after the first wipe and we'd never get another from the dungeon finder.

[Archieie 0]

Have you guys tried one-handers with Ignite Weapon? It's actually not that bad. Go haste and multi-strike and you might even pull 50% of a frost mage's dps

 

I don't know if it's high or low, but I did 23.2k sustained dps in a bit over 7mins without potions/lust.

Edited July 21, 2014 by Archieie

[Bedle 11]

Have you guys tried one-handers with Ignite Weapon? It's actually not that bad. Go haste and multi-strike and you might even pull 50% of a frost mage's dps

 

I don't know if it's high or low, but I did 23.2k sustained dps in a bit over 7mins without potions/lust.

 

I have tried it, looks decent and rotation is fluent. I personally love new SMF rotation and how it feels.

Im using Glyph of CS which adds +13.5s to CS debuff which makes rotation to feel even more "natural."

Im not quite sure what are they trying to do with new Raging Blow buff which adds 2s to CS every time you use RB. This makes Glyph of CS useless. Im also intrigued by new glyph which is "playstyle changing."

And i have a question. What spells are affected by Anger Management? I presume that its broken as much as Combat Rogues passive that reduces CD for every CP used.

I performed extensive tests i havent manage to find singe warrior skill that is affected atm.

EDIT: NWM, i found blue post that says that its incomplete talent.

Edited July 23, 2014 by Bedle