The Warrior’s Charge: Patch 6.2 and soloing Tanaan Jungle

This post can be summed up in one phrase — the lower your gear level is, the better Protection is for soloing Tanaan Jungle. It’s not because Protection doesn’t scale well, or because at high levels it’s not performing. It’s because at lower gear levels protection’s survivability will keep you alive long enough to complete your quest objectives and get yourself some 650 gear. And given enough time, you’ll even be able to upgrade to 690 gear, which will put you in good position to use a DPS spec if you’d rather.

But let’s not just sum things up — let’s talk about patch 6.2, Warriors and how Tanaan Jungle feels to play through.

So due to forces beyond my control I was without internet when patch 6.2 dropped. As a result, I was a day late in actually getting to play the new content. The final Patch 6.2 notes for warriors remained unremarkable but one consequence of them is this — Gladiator Stance granting increased mastery when active means that Gladiator Warrior damage will go up, and you’ll have more attack power from Critical Block. Meanwhile, Arms damage is going to decrease in the short term unless you happen to have high enough mastery to offset the Mortal Strike nerf. The Arms mastery affects the damage of Mortal Strike, Colossus Smash and Execute, but it’s a small buff (5.2 per point, up from 4.5) and so I don’t expect it will immediately counteract the MS reduction, since that’s a hefty 6% decrease.

Fury is of course unchanged.

I’ve found that going Protection means that I could fairly easily solo most of the elites (and even multiple elites) in most areas of Tanaan, including the larger elites up on the Throne of Kil’jaeden. Fang’rilla was an issue due to how many elites could add, but it wasn’t impossible in either Prot or Gladiator, and I even managed it as Titan’s Grip Fury. I haven’t tried it as Arms. In terms of pure efficiency, I’d say Protection has the edge — for fulfilling an objective or farming up fel blood you can easily pull a large group of non-elites and simply burn them all down, and Resolve builds to the point that Shield Barrier absorbs the majority of the damage, and what that doesn’t cover Victory Rush will heal back up to full.

I brought both a 670+ Warrior and a far less geared 620 Warrior to Tanaan. The 670 had success as Gladiator, straightforward Prot, and TG Fury. The 620 had to go Prot for a while, but once I started getting Baleful tokens, things got easier and I switched to Arms for non-elites just because I wanted to test it out.

The Baleful gear can be pretty random — my first chest was just mastery and I had a pair of gloves that was just haste — but it’s a way to get significantly upgraded gear immediately. Arms still feels kludgy, although it was hard to say with certainty that I felt nerfed on him — I’ll have to switch my better geared Warrior over to arms after next week’s Hellfire Citadel raid. I definitely liked how much more survival Protection (even Gladiator) had with Shield Barrier and solid AoE from Heroic Strike (Glyph of Cleave), Revenge and Thunder Clap. And that’s before you consider talents like Shockwave, Dragon Roar, Bladestorm or Ravager. Obviously if you’re a Gladiator you’re not using Ravager, but the others work.

The reason Protection feels like such a winner for a solo spec in Tanaan is mob density — it’s rare that you come upon one or two mobs solo, and you’ll often be surprised by a wave of adds as patrols discover you fighting, or respawns from a previous player show up. It’s quite possible to fight through this as Fury or Arms — I’ve done both on the higher and lower geared Warriors — but Protection’s combination of damage absorption, solid AoE and personal survival cooldowns (Last Stand, Shield Wall) makes it the best equipped to deal with any of those situations.

I’d call the breakoff point ilevel 640 — if you’re going into Tanaan any lower than 640, do it as Prot. After 640, if you’re careful you can go as DPS spec and do well. 660 and above have minimal difficulty with the non-elites, and once you’re at or above 680 I’d expect any spec could deal with most elites, save perhaps the stronger ones at the Throne of Kil’jaeden. Keep in mind this is all solo — in a group, you could easily relax all of these guidelines by 20 or so ilevels.

Tanaan is a pretty solid vacation destination for Warriors, especially ones looking to gear up relatively fast. Keep in mind that the Baleful tokens that drop from mobs and which you can purchase for Apexis are bind on pickup, unlike the more specific ones you gain from Naval Missions, which are bind to account and which are usually restricted to cloth, leather, mail or plate. So you’ll have to actually go to Tanaan to use it to gear up an alt, you can’t do what we all did on the Timeless Isle and just farm for pieces for our alts on our well geared mains. Pretty much any of the bonus objectives can be completed — there are less ruinously punishing caster mobs that just destroy melee, not like how the Timeless Isle was.

Next time we’ll talk about Hellfire Citadel itself.