Burning Crusade Talents and Spells

Well, anyone who keeps up with World of Warcraft news probably knows about all the information that they have released concerning the upcoming expansion.

New Races, Exploring Outland, 25 Man Raiding...and so on.

So far, everything that I have heard regarding the expansion sounds great. I feel like Blizzard is listening to their customers and trying to improve the game. Though, you never know how things will turn out until they are actually experienced (a.k.a. looks good on paper).

I believe the 25 man raid cap will have the most significant impact out of anything else they release. This change will probably cause turmoil in the majority of end game raiding guilds. I personally think it is a great idea because managing 40 people is hell. It is just too bad Blizzard did not make this decision when they initially released the game.

Anyways, on to the topic of this post. As you probably know, I play a protection warrior and have been tanking practically since I hit level 60. So, the new abilities and protection talents are of great interest to me.

BC Protection Talents

BC Warrior Abilities

Let's start with the new protection talents:

Improved Defensive Stance: Reduces damage taken by up to 6%
-Cannot complain about this talent. Taking less damage is one of the most important aspects of being a tank.

Focused Rage: Reduces the cost of all offensive abilities by up to 3.
-Interesting talent. In most end game raiding scenarios, a tank will practically infinite rage against bosses. This would certainly be useful in any other situation. Another interesting thought is combining this with improved sunder...a 9 rage sunder would certainly sound good to any tank.

Shield Mastery: Increases the amount absorbed by your shield by up to 30%.
-I would have to play with numbers to really see the effect of this talent, but it sounds good. Currently, Zenos blocks around 150, so adding another 50 to this value certainly couldn't hurt; especially considering I block over 25% of the time.

Vitality: Increases you stamina by up to 5%.
-The talent that tanks have been asking for, but it is not as good as I had hoped. I personally would have expected a bit more for a tier 8 talent. The problem is that 5% is not very significant. In fact, the tauren racial ability is better simply because it is 5% of your total health points, not just stamina. With all that said, any stamina increase is a good one for a tank.

Devastate: Instant one-hand weapon attack
-Wow...that is all I have to say. No more spamming sunders beyond 5! No cooldown! Possibly an actual DPS ability for tanks! Granted it is only 50% damage of your MH weapon...but imagine fighting a boss with all your rage. It is basically the ultimate way to hold aggro on anything.

New Warrior Abilities:

To be continued...

My Turn:)

Not only has Zenos been getting cool new loot, but I have managed to pick up some nice items as well. The guild that we joined (OmegaMuGamma) is quite far in endgame progression, which has been awesome for us since we hadn't experienced anything past MC with our characters. They have BWL completely on farm status, and we've been making headway in AQ40 (downed Huhuran) and Naxx (downed Razuvious). OMG also seems to have Transcendence loot drop like water, so even though I don't have very much dkp I've somehow managed to get 6/8 trans already (I came into the guild with 2 pieces of it).

In our last BWL run, which was on Friday, I picked up 3 pieces of trans: boots, bracers, and shoulders. I've already gotten them enchanted as well.


I now have the 5/8 set bonus, which you can see in the shoulders pic. It's pretty sweet stuff:)

Here's what I'm looking like nowadays:

Insane Week

Just thought I would post a few more comments about my week...

It has been insane. Zarina and I bought new computers, I finished my Thunderfury, and received three new tanking items!

Some links to all my new items:

Thunderfury

Breastplate of Wrath

Legplates of Wrath

Styleen's Impeding Scarab

As for our computers, talk about a serious upgrade. I knew our computers were outdated, but was far worse than I thought. Our old computers had not been upgraded for 3-4 years. Zarina was playing on an old AMD 1.4Ghz with a GeForce 3 and I had an Intel P4 2.4Ghz with a GeForce FX...

Simply put, playing on the new hardware is like experiencing the game all over again. Seeing your opponents half way across the BG is just crazy. In Orgrimmar I would get 20 FPS if I turned down most of the settings to low and there were not too many people around. Now, we both get 60 FPS all the time and let me tell you...it is nice.

We bought the exact same hardware for each computer so neither of us would be jealous of the other. So, the new specs:

ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz)
ATI Radeon X1900 XT
2 GB Corsair DDR2 800
2x 320GB Segate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3Gb/s

I configured the hard drives using the onboard Intel matrix raid controller. So, we have a 100GB RAID 1 partition and a 400GB RAID 0 partition.

I also bought Oblivion, mainly just to see how our hardware would handle it and what all the hype was about...damn that game has amazing graphics...and our computers perform flawlessly.

Thunderfury!

Well, now that everything has settled down a bit after the disband, I finally managed to complete my Thunderfury quest with the help of my old friends and the new guild I joined.

The quest line is quite trivial, but the materials you have to collect are a serious pain. I have probably had the two bindings for 2-3 months now and have been held up by two things. First, Continuum was not running BWL at the time, so no elementium ore. Second, 100 freaking arcanite! It takes a long long time to buy, farm, and transmute that many arcane crystals.

Overall, Zarina and I probably spent around 2000 gold in mats and I also had many many crystals donated from friends. With each arcane crystal costing 30g, it adds up fast.

Arcane crystals: 30g x 100 = 3000g
Elemental Flux: 12g x 30 = 360g

So, the out of pocket expense to make one of these weapons is probably around 3.5k!

As for the weapon itself...GODLY for a tank. The debuff is amazing, the aggro generated is unparalled to any weapon I have ever used. For example, just today I was three manning live Stratholme for orbs and kept aggro on the large undead packs with just the proc on everything except my target. In raiding situations, the 20% attack speed reduction should be quite an asset, I have not had much of chance to test this out yet.

So, a big thanks to anyone that helped me obtain this weapon. It was a lot of work and I could not have done it without lots of people.

Here are a bunch of screenshots from the Thunderaan event. He is a joke to kill btw.