Tier 2 arms talents, what do you pick? I’ve been running with improved charge whole my life, got imp. TC with patch 2.0.1 and been playing with that for quite some time. Recently however, I re-evaluated those talents for pure arena PvP combat, and I felt it’s time for a change. I rarely used TC on arenas, most time I had in arenas were bashing casters. TC is awesome against retribution paladins and enhancement shamans, but neither of those really show up on the arena. I still think it’s an awesome ability, but simply too situational on arena.

Now charge is also something definitely worth 2 points, if only I weren’t targeted and put in combat 80% of time before I can get a charge off. Getting 6 rage every 5th match is not really sexy. I’ll heavily reconsider this talent, when we will be able to charge for like 3 seconds after entering combat, but so far - I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

Iron Will I considered a talent point waste. Charm resisting is a joke, like I’ll have a 15% to resist it once a month someone actually tries to MC/Seduce me? AWESOME! Imho this talent should be either reduced to 3 pointer, or the charm resistance should be increased (only charm, not stun). Yet, because of how charge and thunderclap works in PvP, I finally repsecced for 5/5 Iron Will, and being an Orc greatly helped me in that decision. After the nerf orc hardiness is kind of not-so-good, and so is Iron Will, but when you have those two combined, they suddenly start to work wonders. Ok, resisting a stun won’t give me second wind, and that’s a bad thing, right? WRONG! Resisting a stun, in group environment is more desirable then getting second wind, simply because that HP and rage regen won’t help your team getting ripped apart while you are being CCed, you can eat and outlast stunlock in 1v1 against a rogue, but arena is different story. Then again you shouldn’t worry about second wind not proccing - you are still going to get immobilized a lot, and while someone can dispell you out of nova, noone will take a stun away (except for yourself with pvp trinket).

Another good thing is that I can stack stun resistance even futher with [item]Powerful Earthstorm Diamond[/item] that also give me a whooping 18 stamina, there is no better gem to have for a warrior in meta socket. What? Want speed increase? Sure, get yourself boar’s speed on boots for another 9 stamina.

Terhix

It’s not really wow related, but damn it’s funny :D.

Terhix

So, my 5v5 team is kinda frozen atm, we just couldn’t manage to overcome a hunter with slowing trap on blade’s edge arena without a paladin, that tactic is a killer for any non-paladin team - you place a trap on the bridge, and when someone goes down he jumps over on the pillar while trap makes sure I can’t follow and finish him - so our Priest rerolled a pally is leveling hardcore, we might not get super high this season, but we will have more options now, finding a pvp priest is way easier then finding a pvp paladin on horde side, most of people who rolled a pally usually just had teams they wanted to play with.

So, instead we went to try 3v3. I was farming some honor till the end of the day, just signed the arena team chart and my folks went to try it out without me. Granted, when I was done with enough honor to pick boots today (hey! I just got to 70 recently ;P), my team was already at whooping 13xx rating, I couldn’t stop laughing at their success with mage/lock/druid or mage/lock/shadow priest whatever. When I was finally done with honor, joined the team and we went on with warrior/priest/mage combo, after few games priest (who was a big ambassador of shadow tree in both pve and pvp) respecced to discipline, so he can actually be usefull :p. Anyway, we ended up at 1560 or so rating, nothing fancy, but nothing to laugh at, I ended up at 22-11 win-loose ratio. Most problems we had with was a tri-mage team, you know the drill - go invisibility, go to our start point, all turn pom/ap on, target priest and nuke, we somehow managed to beat such team once, but that was with our mage left at ~30% at the end as last man standing and one of their mages standing at 100% as last man standing. With a lot of sheep-eating/bandage, “use the force!” shouts on ventrillo our mage squeezed the win.

Other team with priest/paladin, mage/lock and a hunter matrix was giving us a good fight at the beginning, once again it was proved that first target shouldn’t always be a healer, but the softest dps - in that case, that was the hunter. It’s way easier to kill a hunter then a frost specced mage, especially since they are quite defenseless when a warrior jumps on them, yet when you leave one alone, standing and just shooting people, it’s not even funny how much dps those guys do, combined with silence shot a hunter is bigger threat to our team (with 2 casters in it) then a mage or a warlock. And then again, after the hunter is dead we went on the mage/lock, ending with 3v1 against their healer as last man standing. In 5v5 facing tri-healer matrix taking a healer down is priority, but in 3v3 with just one healer and MS debuff, you can completely ignore the healer and go on nuking squishy dps down first, before their healer finds out what’s going on - it’s too late.

I’m pretty afraid of going into arena with druid instead of a priest now. Granted druid has quite some viability with cyclone, instant healing and ‘oh shit’ bearform, but lack of dispell magic is a pain (and I know something about this since I 2v2 with a druid :p). Standing full 12 seconds in frost trap usually ends up with lost game, one dispell in such situation is changing everything. Gotta see how it all works out in the end.

Terhix

Tseric actually is useful form time to time. He brought us the new rage formula from the devs:

Ok, so the old rage formula averaged a Warrior’s rage with 2.5 times weapon speed.

• Main hand hit: 2.5*speed
• Off hand hit: 1.25*speed
• Main hand crit: 5*speed
• Off hand crit: 2.5*speed

The change that occurred in the 2.0.10 patch increased the multiplier to 3.5 times weapon speed.

• Main hand hit: 3.5*speed
• Off hand hit: 1.75*speed
• Main hand crit: 7*speed
• Off hand crit: 3.5*speed

That is what was changed.

Rage Gained from dealing damage = ((Damage Dealt) / (Rage Conversion at Your Level) * 7.5 + (Weapon Speed * Factor))/2

So yea, they buffed the “normalized” part of our rage income quite nice :).

Terhix

Not so long ago I wondered where are the paladin tanks, seems Blizzard also noticed the problem. Tseric’s post:

The devs actually mentioned today that Paladin tanking wasn’t exactly where they wanted it to be and there would be attention paid towards that end of things. Overall, they do expect Paladins, Druids and Warriors to fill tanking roles in end-game, whatever they may be. While there may be a flavor distinction between tanks, we don’t want to (or want the players to) find some rigid hierarchy by which classes are measured in their tanking potential to the third decimal point.

So, they don’t want us to make a hierarchy? Well, if tanks should be equal but distinct to each other, that would mean we have to take 3 main tanks to a raid, and change them for different encounters that would favor different way of tanking. For me it means that either Blizzard have no idea where and how they want hybrids to become a viable tanks yet not exceed prot warriors OR it’s all just PR crap, since they can’t just go to the Paladin forums and say “lololo u can spec prot but u can’t tank raidz noobz!”.

Terhix