Filed under: Gear, Lists, News, Raiding | Tags: Icecrown, Icecrown Citadel, Patch 3.3, spoiler, Tier 10, Trinket
This is no great surprise if you have been paying attention. But for those of you who haven’t, let me point you at some linkage:
- Here’s some maps: The Entryway, Frostwing Halls, The Plagueworks, The Crimson Halls, and The Frozen Throne. (No those aren’t entirely right… but there’s a lot of crossover.
- Here’s some pictures of the raid armor sets. Broken down by class:
- Here’s some spoiler-ific boss text.
- And a spoiler-ific Lich King related movie.
- Here’s a boss fight. And another. And another.
- Oh, and some jazz about tanking trinkets.
No loot yet to parse and list for you, but you know it’s coming.
Filed under: Gear, Media, News, Roleplaying | Tags: Gear, Patch 3.3, Tier 10
Following up on Monday’s love-fest for Tier 10, here is the screen shots of our plate armor, now broken down by race and gender – courtesy of the ever digging MMO-Champion.
First, the ladies:
And now the gents:
Did you see it? DID YOU?
Check out the Tauren models. Blizzard finally put holes in the helmet for our horns. I thought that Tier 8 would be the last time I would turn my helm graphic on. Man, was I ever wrong.
Here’s hoping that this is the beginning of theme. Elves and Trolls need some loving too. Maybe dwarves. Let’s face it, helms chop off and through a lot of things people took time or spent gold to customize. It’s about time they gave us helms that actually let us show that off.
Filed under: Analysis, Gear, Uncategorized | Tags: Gear, Raiding, Tier 10
So, now that we have a good sense of what the new Tier 10 set bonuses are, let me express a word of praise for the design of the Prot Warrior set bonuses:
- 2 Pieces (Tank): Your Shield Slam and Shockwave abilities deal 20% increased damage.
- 4 Pieces (Tank): Your Bloodrage ability no longer costs health to use, and now causes you to absorb damage equal to 20% of your maximum health.
To provide some context, here are Tier 8 and Tier 9
It is fairly easy to see the pattern here. The 2-piece set bonus is always something that generally increases threat. It’s hard to argue with something so basic and functional – though never something to write home about – not unlike getting that 3rd rank in Incite. By contrast, the 4-piece bonus is like an extra glyph slot, some secret new functionality to an already useful ability.
I’ve already talked about how I love the functionality of the Tier 8 4-piece bonus. I’ll not mince words, however, about the Tier 9 bonus. It’s terrible. Sure, you could pop Shield Block every 20 seconds for the bonus to your shield slam, but from a defensive point of view it adds no particular functionality because Shield Block is such a weak cooldown. The 2-piece bonus is actually even worse, in some ways, because Taunt has become so handicapped.
With that in mind, the Tier 10 4-piece bonus is a really awesome addition to the Warrior repertoire. Assuming the continued growth in health pools, it’s easy to imagine being able to produce a shield that can absorb 10k worth of damage every 30 seconds. That’s magic damage. That’s physical damage. It’s a lot of little hits. It’s a good chunk off of a large hit. I suspect it will stack with healer damage absorption. It scales very well with your gear. It’s hard to imagine a situation where this wouldn’t be useful, and easy to imagine a situation where it would be very useful (I’m thinking Heroic Gormok the Impaler here).
Now, bear in mind, these things have a way of changing on the PTR, so take this with a grain of salt. But until then, there’s something to smile about warriors – this is probably our best protection set-bonus yet.
I personally thing that the new Tier 10 looks awesome. As far as the texturing goes, it probably looks more like actual armor than most of the tier sets. There are some things I am sure we could quibble about, the fact that once again the Horde (red) version looks infinitely cooler than the Alliance version (blue). I just have one small, teensy problem.
I’m going to have to be correcting people about the animal on the shoulders.
It’s not a pig. It’s a boar.
You might want to practice saying it in the mirror, because it would seem that you’re going to be saying it for some time to come – or something like it. Apparently Blizzard has this crazy idea that Warriors should not have animals on their shoulders that could be un-ambiguously wild. First it was the Sheep/Goat/Ram thing. Now we have the Pig/Boar thing. What are we doing here? Putting on a production of Animal Farm? Seriously folks.
Druids? Nothing ambiguous about stags or moose.
Shamans? Nothing ambiguous about wolves.
Hunters? Nothing ambiguous about anything. Remember the giant blinking eyes on their shoulders?
But Warriors? We can’t even get a predator on our shoulders, let alone something that’s unabashedly un-domesticated.
So here’s some future inspiration Blizzard: How about something that makes us look like a Bear? Hell, even a badger would be preferably unambiguous, if probably stupid looking considering who is designing it. Or, you know what, how about no animals what-so-ever. History is replete with awesome looking examples of plate armor that have no animal symbolism.
I’m not picky, my blue worded friends. All I want is armor that doesn’t leave me open to ridicule. They have focus groups for this, but I’m sure if you just asked Ratshag he would be happy to inform you that there’s a pig on the shoulders. What can I say? The orc has taste.
I suppose at least I don’t have to worry about Saurfang eating me. Not that I wouldn’t wipe ten thousand times over just to have a chance to fight by the side of the greatest warrior who ever lived.
Oh wait. I do.
Man I love being Horde. Sometimes you really need pity the Alliance. You all miss so much awesome, it’s not even funny.
Courtesy of MMO Champion, once again!
Update: 8:16 AM EST – But wait! There’s More!
