A thought occurred to me the other day in battlegrounds.

In 2.3 hunters were given Mortal Strike and Purge on their arrows, and their “dead zone” was eliminated so that they can use their bows practically in melee range.

I must have missed the memo about hunters being 100% completely and utterly useless prior to 2.3

Imagine if blizzard had given warriors beast within as an 11 pt talent (tacked on to anger management perhaps?), made slam remove buffs, and gave us the ability to melee from up to 30 yards away.

That’s what hunters got in 2.3. Pretty freakin ridiculous.

Oh and as an aside, I’m feeling the indirect warrior nerf as a dwarf. Not only does stoneform not break blind anymore (its #1 use by FAR), blind now happens a lot more often with the shorter CD. Perception, shadowmeld, or escape artist would be a LOT more useful than stoneform now

I guess I can always go hunt for treasure… sigh.

Veritas

Long version:

Season 3 starts next week, so it’s high time to take a look at weapon enchants to make sure what to pick. Personally, I think I wont have this problem, since I’ll have to stick with weapon chain. For those of you who will have Weapon Mastery tho, a quick analise.

First, let’s compare Executioner to Mongoose. They are both proc enchants, and while I couldn’t find any real PPM for them to estimate their average uptime, I’ll just assume they proc on same rate. Mongoose gives 120 agility and 2% haste to attacks. 120 agility translate into 3.63% crit, 4% dodge and 240 armor. Executioner makes your attacks ignore 840 enemy armor, the trick here is that the exact dps increase form Executioner depends on the armor your enemy has, and as such it’s best when used on low armor targets. I’ve updated my Sunder Armor calculator recently to include Executioner. Without looking at Sunder Armor, Executioner on 5k armor target is 5.71% damage increase, which really increase burst damage, and it really works great with Sunder Armor. Also, S3 armor is full of armor reduction (not as much as some PvE gear tho). When taking on 10k armored target, that number goes down, but is till worth it, with 4.26% damage increase. If you have around 130% crit, 3.63% crit from mongoose is about 2.7% dps increase, when you take resilience into account it goes down to ~2.2 - 2.1 dps increase, there is no competition, Executioner is way better offensive enchant for warriors then Mongoose. My numbers can be not so accurate, I’m not taking deep wounds, flurry or whatever into account, but even if I would, there is no way that 2.2% would raise enough to compete with 5% of Executioner. The good side about mongoose is that it helps with your survivability, but then, dodge and 240 armor is not going to help you when you get nuked on the arena. Let’s just give mongoose to rogues.

Savagery is pretty simple, 70 attack power always. 70 attack power is 5 dps. 5 dps when you already have 250 dps (I guess that number will go much higher in S3, if it’s not already higher for heavily ap geared S2 warriors) is roughly 2% dps increase (again, not counting many factors, but it should be pretty close). As such, it already beat mongoose for offensive power as it’s active all the time. I don’t know how high can the uptime on Executioner be, but assuming 50% uptime, Executioner beats Savagery on average dps over time. Executioner also scales well better with gear, it gets better the more attack power you have and the more armor reduction from other sources you have, it’s a beast right here. The huge advantage of Savagery is it’s price, Executioner is rather expensive stuff, nothing out of reach for any warrior tho. It finally feels like we have an enchant that truly benefits our class.

Short version:

Executioner pwns.

Terhix

One of the warrior buffs in 2.3 was a change to the pathing on intercept and intervene to make us less likely to have these abilities blocked by objects in the way (think of the pillars in the arenas).

A side-effect of this however has given us a bit of an exploit for warsong gulch (possibly blades edge arena as well - haven’t had a chance to try). Basically if a player is above you but technically “in range” for intervene, intercept, or charge you can now use the ability and you will be zoomed along to that point on the map.

In the video below, a healer waits on the roof, and when the warrior flag carrier gets into trouble he intervenes to the priest - sending him running at intercept speed down the tunnel, up the hill to the roof to get easily healed by the priest. Definitely a bug that will be fixed, but worth noting if you happen to find yourself in the gulch and see enemy warriors disappearing with the flag.

http://files.filefront.com/warsong+bug+ownagewmv/;9061738;/fileinfo.html

Veritas

I keep seeing people on this site, and on the official boards talking about improved execute. Now talking about it is fine - if you talk about it like improved rend and improved cleave, but these people are talking about it as a talent that is worth taking.

I’ve done piecemeal arguments against taking it, but this will be my coup de grace on the talent, and will hopefully seal the deal against it for the vast majority (if not all) of you.

For the low cost of 2 talent points, improved execute will drop the up-front rage cost of execute from 15 to 10. I’m not sure why people think this is good, but I can only assume it’s because they don’t know what execute does. Rank 7 (level 70) reads:

Attempt to finish off a wounded foe, causing 925 damage and converting each extra point of rage into 21 additional damage. Only usable on enemies that have less than 20% health.

So, with improved execute, if you had 15 rage or more improved execute has converted 5 more rage points into damage - for the insane increase of 105 damage. To put that in perspective, 2 points in improved cleave will add 56 damage (or 84 damage for 3 points), of course you can cleave whenever you want and it can hit 2 targets… but I don’t know anyone who takes imp cleave seriously, and being twice as good as crap is still crap.

The only place improved execute does anything remotely useful is when you’ve got your target below 20%, but only have between 10 and 14 rage (less than 10 and you can’t execute even with improved, more than 14 and you could have done it with non-improved). When I get into an execute-spam situation, it’s usually after each white hit that I can execute. Incoming damage is not enough for me to hit it every GCD unless I’m being focused - and if I am being focused then I should be getting 15 just as easily as I can get 10. Remember - it’s a FIVE rage margin for improved execute to help you.

If I’m relying on white swings, I can safely say my white swings generate 15 rage even versus highly armoured paladins and druids, and closer to 30 versus cloth. I tried to use the rage formula to outright prove this, but that thing is a nightmare and is tied to how much damage you do anyways. I’ve played a warrior a long time, and I often use slam after white hits coming from 0 rage, I’m confident in my estimates.

Some classes can rage starve you, making you think you should have this talent in your arsenal to tip the scales in your favour. But if you manage to get them to 20% in the first place, you’ve obviously got the capability to generate enough rage against them. Execute is good because it packs so much damage so efficiently. It’s harder getting someone from 100% to 80% with MS/WW/white damage than it is getting them from 20% to 0% with execute and white damage.

To summarize, improved execute might as well read “Increase execute damage by 105 (or 11%)”. In a game where players pack 10-15k HP in pvp, that is not exactly impressive. It’s on the same level of the tree as enrage so you never “have” to take it. If you need 2 points to reach flurry take improved slam and/or weapon mastery instead. Oh, and if you do find yourself stuck at 10-14 rage all the time after white hits, put down the [Honed Voidaxe] and go get yourself a real weapon.

Veritas

To anwser doubts in this topic:

You will notice that the only skills he models are autoattack, ms, and whirlwind. ($whiteDPS, $MSDPS, and $WWDPS)

Obviously, there are a lot of other things he didn’t account for, like armor, global cooldown conflicts, etc, but only the factors that affect axe and sword differently are relevant. One such factor that would be interesting to see modeled would be rage, because right now he is assuming you have enough rage to cast ww+ms every time they are up. Axe and Sword spec will have different rates of rage generation, and the more rage you generate, the more you can dump it into other things, like sunders, heroic strikes, etc, which is huge. I could see how all this would be very difficult to model though.

You are right, and you are wrong at the same time :). There is no point in modeling hamstring or pummel for axe spec. In sword formula there is a magic variable $hitspersecond which is an estimation (there are way too many things that affect that number to make it constant) which includes auto attacks (with flurry if you have it, and flurry uptime is ruled by simulator for that case), MS and WW every GCD but also Hamstring. The number I put on hamstring is once every 20 seconds, which is LOW, and I know it. Calculator is not accurate, because it’s not possible to make one that’s accurate. Somewhere in comments someone asked me if I can do same thing for hamstring every 8 or 10 seconds and pummel every 20 (don’t remember exactly) and in that test axe went a bit below swords for targets that can’t parry (difference was negligible), and above swords for targets that can parry, so even if axe is not going to be uber superior for some encounters even for an orc warrior, it’s still not worse then Sword. There will be situations where axe is clearly superior, there will be situations where sword is clearly superior, no matter what. In other words: 5% crit + 2.5% avoidance reduction > 5% extra attack, 5% crit + 1.25% avoidance reduction = or > 5% extra attack.

Terhix