All Things Gaming
Sometimes you’re looking for a new look for your characters and just have no luck thinking of something to wear. Well, never fear, because… well, I’m here, metaphorically speaking. I’m going through a toon by toon process of my transmog in a new weekly article. Today: The Paladin. (more…)
I have to open with this: By the time I finish writing this post, I should have Wrathful Gladiator’s Decapitator . This will not be acquired through any particular PVP skill on the warrior, but through grinding of BG’s, WG, and random heroics. It costs 2550 honor and is the best a warrior can get outside of drops from ICC. Even with resilience wasting a stat for a PVE player, the damage on the weapon and pure attack power (324 AP) is nothing to scoff at. Keep in mind this is the item level 264 version and the 277 version is still only obtainable with rating. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on that last bit, but I don’t have enough honor points on any toon to attempt to buy the 277 version now.
It’s good to be able to say that Fury Warriors can still do great competitive DPS even with the rage normalization and loss of ArP.
Ruby Sanctum: Halion
Halion is not a friendly fight for a Warriors meters, especially when asked to switch to the physical realm and the twilight realm during the last phase. Fortunately, it is otherwise a pretty easy fight for melee dps. In the first phase, and if you are topside during the third phase, it is a standard dragon tank-n-spank with some fire to not stand in. In the second phase, and if you are in the twilight realm during the third phase, it’s also a standard dragon fight with purple fire to not stand in. Melee gets it easy inside the twilight phase because when the orbs connect their frickin’ laser beam, we can keep dpsing at basically full strength as we move to the side to not be cleft in twain. Also, the trash can be a little bit fun leading up to Halion.
ICC: Hardmodes:
Fury DPS in ICC is pretty much just bloody buckets of fun. With 10k dps on Marrowgar and 12k on Saurfang, I’m able to do very satisfying damage. Keep in mind, I’m not decked out in 25m gear on my warrior. As of this raid he was only using a 251/219 weapon set. Without a ranged slow or easy stun, Fury doesn’t really end up having a “job” during any of the fights in ICC. Interrupt Deathwhisper, deal with the correct adds on Putri, Valinthria, and LK (all same as any dps class really) and do mindless, raging dps. It’s a nice change coming from heals as a main spec. For me, doing dps in a raid is a lot more relaxing than heals for most content. Admittedly, with how ez-mode much of WotLK content is, healing can end up requiring less attention than dps. As for all the hardmodes that we’ve attempted so far, only Putricide has proven difficult. I think we had 4 wipes on him during our first round of attempts. Outside of him, we’ve cleared all bosses in HM except Princes, Sindra, and the big LK. Princes shouldn’t be too much trouble when we get around to them, but so far we haven’t done any attempts.
Today is a good day to be fury, though the future does hold a great many uncertainties. Can we hold back cleave spam on trash in order to not break CC and get our faces smashed in cata instances? Will blizzard nerf us into the ground while they laugh on the yachts? Is that guy named justinbieberz in trade chat really Justin Bieber? The last one easily scares me the most. Only time will tell. For now, keep careless smashing your face into things Fury Warriors, it’s why GC gave you big pointy helmets.
My guild is a very friendly, casual guild with a longer history and has had great success in previous tiers of raiding. We got hit hard by the end of expansion blues. Several of our more active players and officers took extended breaks, a few players quit wow, others had some real life issues take them out of raiding for a span. Several months ago, raiding almost completely stopped. We went from a 25 man guild progressing dutifully through ICC to not having the online members to fill a 10m ICC. At this point, we had downed 8/12 bosses in Icecrown in 25m and I believe our 10m group was 11/12. We were often tied or close for 3rd horde progression on our server. Admittedly, not a power-house server, but we were making progress. Even as we were doing fine, set to continue, the series of personal burn-outs and real life priorities reduced us to 1 of 6 active officers.
Sorry for the short post tonight, but here goes:
I’m going to need a couple more rounds in ICC and some random dungeons before I can give my full opinion of Holy healing post 4.0.1. This new healing model seems a bit wonky to me. I’m really not used to Holy Light spam being so weak. HL is down to about 40% of the effectiveness compared to its previous incarnation. Flash of light, which used to be the small heal, is now a bigger heal than HL. It’s fast and expensive and can’t be spammed recklessly. Right now, Holy Power seems to be on the verge of useless since Holy Shock is still better overall than a 3 point word of glory. There’s also this relatively weak AOE heal ‘Light of Dawn’ that is on a 30 second CD and therefore can’t be used very often.
So what does a Holy Paladin use to heal? Everything! Holy Light is the go to heal for the most part because of its relative efficiency. You’ll also want to throw in Holy Shock almost on cool down because of its chance to provide a 1.5 second reduced cast time on HL as well as 30% reduced cast time of next heal if you talent into it. Use Light of Dawn for when the raid takes some AOE, naturally, and flash of light if someone is taking heavy damage. Honestly, I didn’t much use the new big heal, Divine Light. High incoming damage is better responded to with Flash of Light.
Other than that, use the normal spells as before 4.0.1. Judge to get a haste buff and Beacon the tank. Mana isn’t much of an issue still, stack int/haste and cast away. Healing Dreamwalker is still a blast. I have no idea what’s coming tomorrow, but I’ll see you next time!