Friday Fiction - Fall From Grace, Part 1 - Pix

Pix's note: This part of the story picks up where Memory and Fate left off. This time around, it's just me, so consider yourselves warned, and I hope you enjoy it. By the way, the use of the Draenei language in this set of chapters will be taken straight from the in-game conversions, so I'm not inventing anything here. If you have an issue with it, take it up with Blizzard.

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Am I dead?

It's so warm and cozy here, wherever I am. It reminds me of the place Esmerellda and I picked out just outside of Stormwind, whenever we needed a break from our adventures. Sometimes we shared the space; days where we both felt we needed a retreat from the seemingly endless battles in Outland and Northrend. Other times, one or the other of us would be here alone, enjoying the quiet and solitude in the countryside, out of the way of the busy city.

"Lelissa? Are you awake?"

I open my eyes immediately, taking in my surroundings as I nearly leap out of the bed, only to be caught by a pair of hands wanting to restrain me. I'm in that little getaway of ours, but who...

My eyes finally rest on the person holding me back... Esmerellda.

My dearest friend... she is a beautiful sight to see, but not here. I wanted her to live. I wanted her to get away from that terror, to escape and survive. My failure comes at me all at once, and I can't stop the tears from falling.

"I guess this is the afterlife after all. I thought that I would be able to save you. I'm sorry, Es. I couldn't beat her. She was too strong." I hear my own words tumble out of me in a rush, anger and sorrow accenting every word. "I thought that maybe, even if I died, that the Gift would be able to keep you alive long enough to escape, but..."

She shushes me with a finger, shaking her head and smiling. "I don't know what you did, but it worked. I healed enough that I could get myself free, and had just enough power to bring you back and heal us both. I'm just glad you brought heavy cloaks with you, or Siegadormi wouldn't have gotten either of us back without concerns of frostbite."

Realization suddenly dawns on me, and I can't help but hug her tightly, laughing and crying all at once. Blessed Light, we're alive! The whole thing is so overwhelming, and I realize just how close we both came to death... I start shaking in terror of the thought, and it seems like it will never stop. Esmerellda, patient as always, just waits, quietly comforting me with her presence.

Finally, everything subsides. I'm not crying or shaking anymore, but I can't bring myself to let go of her just yet. It's a little embarrassing, but Esmerellda understands. Better than anyone, probably.

After a little while, she pulls away from me to look me in the eye. "Lelissa, I was healed somehow back in that cavern. What happened? What did you do?" I can see that she's concerned, but I can't help but smile a little sheepishly for keeping this a secret from her.

I feel like a child caught stealing from the cookie jar. I can't look her in the eye; it's probably something I should have told her before, but it just never crossed my mind as important. "Draenei are very closely linked with the Light, through our work with the Naaru. Because of this, the Naaru have granted us a small measure of their ability to heal. It's not much; usually only enough to stop bleeding, or heal a broken bone or two. We can use it on others, or ourselves. It works well in a pinch sometimes."

She's smiling and shaking her head, more amused than upset. "I'd say it worked wonderfully, in this case." She frowns. I can see her hesitating, wanting to ask a question, but afraid of what might happen if she does. "Lelissa, what did Malyss say to you in the cavern? I've certainly never seen you so angry at an insult, if that's what it was."

The question makes me shift uncomfortably. I have to take a deep breath before answering; I have to tell her what isn't widely known among non-Draenei. "It wasn't really what she said. It was the language she used." At the confusion on Esmerellda's face, I continued. "She was cursing me in Eredun... the language of the Man'ari Eredar, who lead the Burning Legion."

"But how did you understand what she was saying? You're not an Eredar."

I wince, definitely less prepared for this question than I was the last one. "I guess it's the day for giving up secrets... actually, that's not really true. You see, the Draenei and the Man'ari Eredar were once one race, simply known as the Eredar. When Sargeras came to our homeworld, Argus, he offered immortality to our Triumverate - Archimonde, Kil'jaeden, and Velen. Archimonde and Kil'jaeden gladly took Sargeras' offer, but Velen declined. He later fled our home planet, with his followers in tow. Those Eredar became known as the Draenei - in your tongue, it means, 'exiled ones.'

"Both the Eredar and the Draenei continue to speak Eredun... it's just that the dialects have changed so greatly over the millenia that to anyone who isn't Draenei, the languages seem completely different."

Esmerellda looks worried. "But what of Malyss, then?"

I shrug... and smile inwardly at such a human response... Esmerellda's influence at work. "She has been corrupted by fel energy. She can be saved, I'm sure, but I wonder how much of her really wants to be."

She smiles and gently pushes at my shoulder. "Well, we won't worry about it tonight. Plenty of time tomorrow to decide what to do. Now scoot over."

"What? Why?"

"Because it's the middle of the night, you've been out cold for three days, and I can't sleep sitting up anymore. Make room; it's the only bed we've got."

Arms Warrior Elementary School, Grades 20 - 29

Welcome back to class!

Last week, we covered the early levels of talents. I hope you're ready for this week's quiz!

I'm kidding. Relax, class, we're not going to test you on this. That's up to your guild. Anyway, if you feel the need to, refer to your text for last week if you need to catch up, and let's get started!

Part 1 - Abilities

Reaching this stage of your training, you will begin to discover more of the Arms repertoire, especially those abilities that will carry you well into your career's prime. As Warriors, you will find yourselves needing to be experts at the art of the riposte, and you will soon find that your manner and ability can even inspire fear in others.

Any questions?

As I mentioned the last time, we'll continue to group abilities by level. For this particular segment, we've got 14 abilities to discuss.

Level 20

Cleave - Situational Ability. - This is one of those handy abilities for multiple-mob fights. The trick is that this ability, like Heroic Strike, is a "next melee" attack, meaning it will replace your normal melee swing. Cleave is set up so that it does weapon damage plus a set number (which increases each rank) to your target, and the nearest ally of that target. Cleave works extremely well with the Sweeping Strikes talent, but we'll be covering that in the 30-39 class.

Rend - Key Ability. - Another upgrade to Rend, and again, this is and always will be your first ability in your priority list.

Retaliation - OSB Ability. - Retaliation is the first ability of three that many of my guildmates and I refer to as an "Oh Shit Button," otherwise described as "an ability that will save your ass in an emergency situation, usually tapped in response to the player saying, 'Oh, shit.'" It's a fun trick in PVP, especially in later stages when combined with Sweeping Strikes and Bladestorm, but in your early levels, this may be an ability that saves your bacon more times than you can count. The ability requires Battle Stance and is on a 5-minute cooldown, but using it will allow you to instantly counterattack (aka riposte) any enemy that strikes you in melee combat for 12 seconds, up to a maximum of 20 attacks. Enemies that attack you from behind cannot be counterattacked with this ability. Nice, no?

Stance Mastery - Passive. - All Warriors get this, and it's nice to have. Stance Mastery allows you to retain up to 10 of your rage when changing stances. Coupled with 3 points in Tactical Mastery, you're saving up to 25 of your rage when changing. It doesn't seem like much now, but later on down the road when you get Recklessness, you'll thank the devs for this one.

Level 22

Battle Shout - Key Ability. - Once again, always up (unless a Retribution Paladin is around with an Improved Blessing of Might).

Intimidating Shout - Situational Ability. - This is another one you could classify as an OSB, but the success of the ability is limited by a few things. Intimidating Shout causes up to 5 nearby enemies (within 8 yards) to run away in fear. Now, the ability says that the effect lasts for 8 seconds, but there's an unmentioned caveat: this fear is always broken by damage. Use this one intelligently.

Level 24

Demoralizing Shout - Situational Ability. - Covered in the last class, this ability lowers the attack power of your enemies.

Revenge - Situational Ability. - This is one of those tanking abilities again.

Heroic Strike - Useful Until. - We're starting to get to the point where this ability is about to be phased out entirely. You can still keep this one on your hotbar for now, but definitely expect to see this attack going the way of the dodo.

Execute - Key Ability. - Once obtained, this attack will never leave your hotbar. Ever. In your early days of use, you'll only be able to pull off this trick when your opponent is below 20% health. The ability itself requires 15 Rage, causes damage relative to your Attack Power (at this level, the equation is 93 + AP * 0.2), and then converts each additional point of Rage beyond the first 15 into bonus damage (which is 3 per Rage at this level). This is easily a finisher for many opponents, and currently does not have a cap for amount of Rage spent. After 3.2, however, Execute will use a maximum of 30 rage, which actually makes the glyphs and talents for this ability look pretty attractive in the future. (Hmm. I should get on the test server.)

Level 26

Challenging Shout - Situational Ability. - This is really a tank ability, but could be used to buy a few precious seconds in a pinch. Challenging Shout forces all enemies within 10 yards to focus their attacks on you for 6 seconds. Basically, it's an area-effect Taunt.

Charge - Key Ability. - Charge upgrade! Go crash into stuff!

Level 28

Shield Wall - Situational Ability. - Another one of those tank-type thingamawhatsits. Read it, but don't get too used to it unless you're planning on being a punching bag, in which case, your blog is thataway.

Thunderclap - NPW/FDT Ability. - Leave this one to the Protection Warriors, and don't bother with a Feral Druid Tank around.

Part 2 - Talents

Finishing up at level 19 the last time leaves us at level 20 with the third tier of Arms talents available. At levels 20 and 21, my choice would be for Improved Overpower, increasing the critical strike chance of that ability by 50% (this is a very big deal, and you'll see why we're taking this first).

Levels 22 and 23 will focus on Impale, which increases the critical strike damage bonus of your abilities by 20%. Please note the terminology here - it's very important. "The critical strike damage bonus of your abilities." This means that only your special attacks are affected - normal swings are not. A minor distinction, but a very important one. This talent is the reason why we went with Improved Overpower first.

Level 24 gives us our first point in Deep Wounds. That first rank will grant our critical strikes the ability to cause our opponents to bleed, dealing 16% of our weapon's average damage over 6 seconds. This ability will activate from normal attacks (that crit, of course) as well as any abilities that crit. Another important thing to note is that this ability causes a bleed effect with every crit that is unique from the others before or after it. What this means is that if you have a critical strike on one attack (treat as the 1st second) and then crit again 4 seconds into that bleed, another bleed is added that will deal its damage in addition to the first bleed. The second bleed will also continue after the first has run its course (2 seconds later). Assuming you could get enough attacks in (you can't, really - it's impossible through the GCD), you would be able to have six of these bleeds going at once. It adds up to a lot of damage, trust me.

At levels 25, 26, and 27, we turn completely away from Deep Wounds. Don't worry, we'll come back to it, but we're after something much more important at this time.

Taste for Blood.

This little talent allows us to use Overpower when Rend deals damage. The effect allows the use for up to 9 seconds, and has an internal cooldown of 6 seconds.

Levels 28 and 29 will return us to Deep Wounds, finishing off that talent, and unlocking the fifth tier of abilities in the Arms tree for next time.

Part 3 - Glyphs

Unfortunately, you don't get any new slots until level 30. Nothing new here.

Part 4 - Gear

By now, you know that you should still be looking for mail armor with Strength and Stamina. In the early- to mid-20s, my favorite set is Battleforge, but that's mostly because I play female characters (go ahead, poke fun) and the set actually looks very nice on them. It's also got some pretty good stats if you can find it.

As far as rare items go, there's actually quite a few by this stage. Check out this list at WoWHead and you'll probably get a few ideas.


That's all for today, class; you're dismissed. We'll see you next time for levels 30 to 39, where we can finally get rid of that bloody Heroic Strike.

Focus: Warrior Changes - Patch 3.2

It's almost that time again, where the WoW developers turn the world upside down and make sweeping changes to the character classes (usually in the name of e-sport balance).

Arms has been one of the talent trees greatly impacted by the changes toward the end of the Burning Crusade expansion as well as the first few patches through Wrath. At first glance, the changes typically don't appear to have a clear-cut reason, but in the end, they usually work out for the best.

Patch 3.2 will be no different, so let's take a look at the changes that will affect Arms the most.

Bloodrage

Currently, Bloodrage offers 10 rage upon activation for a cost of health, followed up by 10 more rage over 10 seconds. The new incarnation of Bloodrage after 3.2 will generate 20 rage upon activation, with no change in the rage over the next 10. For Arms, this is a big deal - the build tends to be rage-starved late in the game, and especially on boss fights, where many of our primary damage-dealing abilities (Mortal Strike, Execute generated by Sudden Death) typically have a high rage cost.

Pix's Rating: Great change. Even more reasons to use it when it's available.

Execute

In the past, Execute was the Arms Warrior's biggest rage-burner. The original design of Sudden Death allowed for a Warrior to burn an entire rage bar on a triggered Execute, and typically had some spectacular results. The drawback to this was that it left the Warrior with nothing on the rage bar for followups.

Blizzard decided they didn't like the results, so they adjusted Sudden Death so that it would never burn more than 30 rage. Executes under 20% would still burn a full rage bar (if allowed), and Sudden Death would still trigger Executes that would only burn 30 rage.

The drawback to Execute was that you rarely wanted to use an Execute that would burn more than 50 or 60 rage, unless you were in an unlimited rage situation (Vaelastrasz, anyone?). The argument for this varied; whether it was because there was (believed to be, I don't think it was ever confirmed) a diminishing return on the rage beyond 50 or because a player would be setting themselves up for more rage starvation (which I never quite understood), the consensus was the same: Executes using more than 50-60 rage were bad news. In all of my testing, I've never seen evidence of any existing diminishing returns, nor have I ever seen a delay in rage generation following a high-rage Execute (longer than the swing time of my weapon, anyway).

The reality of it, though, is that when a boss hits that 20% mark, an Execute will slow you down a little. Sure, it's a powerful attack, but it was intended for maximum usage against targets with smaller health pools (read - other players and non-elite, non-raid/instance NPCs), not really against a boss who started with 8,000,000 health (Hi, Vezax!). Sure, you might nail him with an Execute that deals 16,000 damage, but guess what? Against that 8,000,000 hp mob, when it's at 20%, you just did 1% of his health... and now you're out of rage. Stalled, until you can generate more for another Execute.

It hurts the DPS a little. Not overly much, but enough that it makes the last 20% of a boss fight a little boring.

Execute, wait, Execute, wait...

Blizzard's solution to this is just make Execute with a 30 rage maximum across the board. At first glance, it appears to be a huge nerf. In my opinion, though, this is only a benefit. By capping Execute's rage cost no matter when it's available (either by Sudden Death or 20% health cap), they've ensured that we're less likely to be rage starved late in a battle, and that we'll be able to maintain a good priority of attacks, instead of having to wait for a solid weapon swing (or two) to generate enough rage to use Execute again. Seems like a win to me.

Pix's Rating: Excellent change. I look forward to seeing how it works on live.

Armored to the Teeth

Currently, this talent provides 1/2/3 Attack Power for every 180 armor that a Warrior has (provided they take this talent, obviously - if you're DPS, you should be, and if you hadn't by level 80, shame on you). The change coming in 3.2 is that they're reducing the requirement to 108 armor per AP boost.

There are two reasons I can think of for this change. The first is that the change to Titan's Grip for Fury Warriors really hit their damage output pretty hard, and this somewhat makes up for it. The other reason is the Death Knight talent, Bladed Armor.

Bladed Armor is exactly like Armored to the Teeth with one minor difference - Death Knights can spend 5 points in it to get 5 Attack Power for every 180 armor. In terms of high-armor values (we wear plate, it's going to be a lot), those extra two points can mean quite a bit.

By reducing the necessary armor amount for Warriors, it gives us a chance to meet the Attack Power gains that Death Knights receive without having to spend as many points. I'm sure a lot of Death Knights are going to cry nerf on this one, but having played both a Blood Death Knight as well as the Arms Warrior, the Knights can kiss my ass. They already have a much higher DPS output potential (they're a Hero class - it's to be expected), and don't have any room to complain.

Pix's Rating: Excellent change.


At this point, I'm remaining optimistic. The nerf to Blood Frenzy I'd read about hasn't made it into the patch notes yet, so hopefully it won't make it into live at all. Arms really doesn't need the loss of raid utility, and high physical damage raid groups without Rogues (much like the one Lelissa runs with every weekend) would be greatly impacted by this change.

We'll see what happens.

I can't wait.

Upcoming Warrior Thoughts

I'm currently reviewing all of the information coming out about 3.2 Warrior changes. I wanted to make the post today, originally, but the night before last, I hadn't slept at all, and ended up making up for it last night (when I planned on reading it).

So, the plan for tomorrow is a double post!

In the morning, I'll have the review for Arms changes coming up, and in the afternoon, we'll have the next portion of Arms Warrior Elementary School.

See you then!

Saturday Sideshow, June 28 - July 4

Today's Sideshow is dedicated to Blogatelle, an excellent RP blog written by authors with an interesting and unique perspective. They were also crazy enough to allow me to write for them - something I will always be appreciative for. They will be missed.

In honor of their passing, today's Sideshow will contain a few interesting blog posts from their time on the internet. They deserve the recognition.

• Play Big
• Tanks, DPS, and Healers in Roleplay
• Roleplaying the Five Man Band (Part 1)
• Pirates: Bad Boys of the Sea
• The Succubus and You
• Blood Elves: The Dangers of Magical Thinking
• The Subtle Badass

Go. Read. Enjoy.

And bid farewell to a great blog; a blog that I've been reading almost since it began.