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Initial Battle for Azeroth Warrior and Demon Hunter Impressions

These are my rough notes. I haven’t had a whole lot of time for the beta, just a few hours spread across weekends (planning a wedding is a real time suck). I don’t really feel like spending much time polishing them up into formal responses (I’d rather spend that time on the BfA guides), but I’d like to put them somewhere at least in this preliminary form. Continue reading “Initial Battle for Azeroth Warrior and Demon Hunter Impressions”

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First Draft of the Quick and Dirty Legion Dungeon Guide is up!

My raid tanking guides for previous expansions have been pretty successful, so I wanted to expand them to dungeons for Legion.  Right now they just include simple tanking strategies for normal mode, but I will expand that to heroic and mythic once I get more testing in.

I’ve been working on this guide for quite a while, and using it a lot for myself because there are a lot of bosses to keep track of and it’s easy to forget what they all do. I hope it’s helpful for those in beta, or for those who aren’t, something to keep in mind when you experience these dungeons for the first time after August 30th.

For easy reference, you can find this guide in the “Legion Beta Guides” sidebar to the left, and once the expansion releases, under “Quick and Dirty Tanking Guides”.

https://sunniersartofwar.com/legion/dungeon-guide/

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Initial Thoughts on Vengeance

[wowheadrename] There’s something poetic about contemplating vengeance.

I’ve spent the weekend playing with Vengeance on the Legion alpha, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re great. If I had to draw a comparison, I’d say it’s similar to the protection warrior. They generate resources similarly (through damage taken and rotational abilities) and spend them on similar active mitigation. They both have a cheap, maintenancy ability (Shield Block, Demon Spikes) and a expensive powerful ability (Ignore Pain and Soul Cleave). The Vengeance resource, Pain, is the same as Rage, except it doesn’t decay (yet). After that, they two specs are very different.

Continue reading “Initial Thoughts on Vengeance”

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More Wild Guesses about Vengeance Active Mitigation

[wowheadrename] Just like before, but with more Pain!

Big changes from the December build:

  • Pain definitely comes from Felblade. I also suspect it will come from taking damage, similar to Rage.
  • Wording changes suggest that Soul Fragments no longer spawn on the ground (like a demon-flavored Ox Orb), and instead automatically heal you for 5% hp.
  • Most Vengeance talents are up! But I’m not going to cover them in this blog post.

Continue reading “More Wild Guesses about Vengeance Active Mitigation”

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Tank Comparison: Patterns Emerging from the Legion Previews

[wowheadrename]

With the simplified versions of tanking specializations that we had the privilege to preview a few weeks ago, we now can compare each class and analyze the patterns that emerge. For this round, I’m focusing on the resources and utility of active mitigation abilities, primarily from the information provided by Blizzard and excluding talents and artifact bonuses.

Continue reading “Tank Comparison: Patterns Emerging from the Legion Previews”

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This Week in Brewmastery

As brewmasters are starting to settle down into our niches and the MoP release date draws ever nearer, the theorycrafters fire up their Mathematicas (do theorycrafters use Mathematica? I wouldn’t know). This gives us regular folks an opportunity to squeeze their mind grapes and make a delicious alcoholic beverage from whatever tastiness we can gather.

In this week’s edition of mastering the way of the brew, we will cover optimal Shuffle uptime, Avert Harm paradoxes, and why monks are going to be super overpowered in niche cases.

Continue reading “This Week in Brewmastery”