Season 4 is up on the PTR. There are a bunch of new things, all of the predictable upgrades, and then this:

Brutal Gladiator's Swift Judgement
Main Hand
Mace
Classes: Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Druid
38 Stamina
25 Intellect
Improves your Resilience rating by 21
Improves your spell haste rating by 227

This thing is pretty damned interesting to me, for multiple reasons - first, it's the only item to date that gives you anywhere near this much haste; second, it seems to me that this is going to be preferred by a lot of healers in both PvE and PvP; and third, you can't get it unless you have a personal rating of 2050. Perhaps this doesn't merit its own open-ended thread (it's sure to be theorycrafted to death elsewhere, for each class, spec, and style of play), but I'm very curious as to what people think of this. I'll certainly be using it in PvP, and I could see a lot of raiding paladins and shamans put in the effort to grab this for PvE as well. Is this weapon as good as I think it is? Does itemization like this cross the PvE/PvP barrier in an unacceptable way? I am curious to hear others' opinions.

Being able to swap it when I mana burn is the first application that comes to mind, switching back to a healing weapon when I have to heal again. I haven't seen the stats on priest season 4 yet but I would be delighted if it had spell haste on it as well instead of just a couple more stam and int, it certainly would help it be comparable with sunwell gear.

Can casters swap weapons like that? Is it only melee/hunters that get effected by the global cooldown when changing weapons?

That seems like an amazing disc priest weapon for arenas. That weapon combined with mana burn is formidible.

It is my understanding that via weapon swapping macros, casters can piggyback their weapon swapping onto the global cooldown induced by using other abilities. This is why some casters (healers in particular) advocate having two weapons: one enchanted with spellsurge to get the mana regen buff, and the other enchanted with +healing to use when spellsurge's proc is on cooldown.

First thing I thought was: oh man Cyclone/Poly/Fears are going to be a bitch to interrupt.

Warlocks and mages can't use that.
Bah beaten.

There is a dagger.

The dagger is also usable by warlocks and mages in the tooltip.

On another note: shields finally have different skins!



Also, I wasn't able to find any two hand hunter only weapon.

Where is this mace located? Unless I'm blind, I don't see it on any of the S4 arena vendors.

It's a class-restricted item, so, just like the armor sets, you can't see it if you can't use it. Here's the dagger:

Brutal Gladiator's Blade of Alacrity
Classes: Priest, Shaman, Mage, Warlock, Druid
32 stamina
21 intellect
18 resilience
18 spell hit
227 spell haste

I don't PvP, so I may be missing something, but why are these weapons class restricted?

Because the other classes can't use them? The ones that can besides the listed have no use from them, rogues/warriors/etc. There's another version, a dagger, for the other classes that could actually use it.

227 spell haste is ~14.4% for anyone wondering (I know I went to look it up).

Speaking for warlocks in PvP here.

Wow...very interesting. Substitute this in when casting fear, for example, then go back to your spell damage weapon? You could do the same thing if you were summoning your pet also either hard-cast or when using Fel Domination.

227 haste is 14.45% haste. On a 1.3 second cast fear, it will lower the cast time to roughly 1.11 seconds. making it that much harder to interrupt.

EDIT: Perhaps it wasn't totally clear, but the idea for a warlock would to DoT with the spell damage weapon, and then switch over to this spell haste weapon and use fear, drain mana, CoT, CoEx, summoning pets, etc.

As was explained earlier, you can't do this retroactively.

If I'm using a tanking weapon, and I use a macro like:
/cast Flash of Light
/equip Merciless Gladiator's Salvation

My Flash of Light will gain the benefit of the Salvation's healing, because the amount of healing done is computed at the end of the cast.

I don't lose any cast time either, since the GCD created by casting the FOL and the GCD created by swapping the weapon occur at the same time (note that the macro specifically has to have the cast precede the equip).

One exception though would be if my FOL cast time dips below 1.5 seconds, since spell haste does not affect the GCD caused by swapping weapons.

The difference between using a swap to buff my heals and a swap to make my Fears cast faster is that cast time is computed at the start of the cast, whereas healing is computed at the end.

Thus, if I were to use a macro like:
/cast Fear
/equip Brutal Gladiator's Blade of Alacrity

The Fear would not benefit from the Alacrity's spell haste. Of course, if I cast it a second time, it would.

Another way to look at this is that if you're under the effect of Bloodlust/Heroism that has 1 second of duration left and you start to cast your Shadow Bolt, it will still benefit from the BL even if the buff fades halfway (or however long) in the middle of your cast.

EDIT: Another way to approach this would be to put the equip statement on a spell that you would follow-up a Fear with.

I really don't think so.
1 hit = 1 haste at best because it just means switching around yellow/orange hit gems for haste. Otherwise 1 hit < 1 haste.

That makes this weapon a 245 spell haste weapon.

Sunflare is 17 sta, 20 int, 292 damage, 30 crit, 23 haste. Depending on raid setup, ISB, etc., 30 crit ~ 25-30 damage. It should be at least 20 damage.

So Sunflare has at least 292+20 = 312 damage, Alacrity has at most 245-23 = 222 haste.
That means you'd have to value 1 haste above 1.4 damage.


I can't see that happen, especially if you actually raid Sunwell and have a solid amount of haste on your gear, which makes +damage better (and +haste worse in comparison to +damage).

Bear in mind that dropping a large chunk of damage (~300) and gaining a lot of haste (~200) will skew the relative values of damage and haste a lot if you go that route.


If you compare Spellblade and Alacrity directly, it's 227 haste vs. 266 damage. You trade 1 haste for 1.17 damage.
Now, that's pretty close to current TC for pre-Sunwell gear I think, where 10 haste and 12 damage gems are pretty close in power.


I see Alacrity comparable to Spellblade, and very close to Tempest, but I can't see it get close to Sunflare really.

I'll consider using that on a lot of fights. 25%+ haste with normal gear is insane for situational burst healing. I'm not sure I'd ever actually use it in PvP, though.

I gave it a try and entered it into Leulier's Spreadsheet and got a dps value of 322, Sunflare has 369, Tempest of Chaos 331. At least for a Warlock with my gear, add in a Chronicle of Dark Secrets and i get 425 dps for both (Alacrity+Chronicle), thats the fourth best caster weapon (Sunflare, Tempest of Chaos and Grand Magisters Staff of Torrents beating it) ingame.

< I fail at clicking buttons and somehow copied my post. Delete if possible. >

Looks like hunters are getting 1-handers this season: Brutal Gladiator's Waraxe and Brutal Gladiator's Hatchet, for 650 points each, which is somewhat odd, as it makes the pair more expensive than wands/librams/etc. I'm not sure if there's a rating requirement on them or not:

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...s4w_waraxe.jpg

Probably has something to do with hunters liking the +30 int to 1h enchant, as well as blizzard not wanting the "welfare" hunter stat-sticks to produce huge raptor strikes (which is why the attack speed on the S3 axe was nerfed).

There is a rating requirement on both hunter axes:

http://www.worldofraids.com/2008/may...ter-waraxe.jpg

http://www.worldofraids.com/2008/may...er-hatchet.jpg