7Likes
4.1 Champion DPS Guide
Champion is the Warrior area-of-effect (AOE) damage soul. It excels at sustaining high DPS to large groups of enemies. It also has impeccable single-target DPS (among other AOE souls) and provides the important crit debuff to the raid.
Point Spread:
61 Champion/10 Warlord/5 Warchanter
Masteries:
61: I prefer Dying Breath to make sure Berserker never wears off, but Resonating Strikes is viable if you want to stun a group of adds (careful: hard to time the stun)
62: None impact DPS. Soul Regeneration is typically the most effective for staying alive.
63: Champ can have power issues when it uses Breaking Blow, so I like Energy Reserves, but take Runner's Training if you need the mobility (dead DPS is no DPS!)
64: Precision Strikes is the highest DPS.
65: Power Variation is incredibly strong for AOE damage.
Legendaries (and why):
Punishing Blow - While you are doing your normal AOE rotation, you'll deal 125% more damage to your primary target, making your ST DPS comparable to many pure ST souls.
Thunderous Strike - Double the effectiveness for (more than) twice the duration. yes please.
Dominating Bearing - It is very difficult to run out of stacks, so this is effectively a 30% to all AOE abilities (and it's in the active buff stack!)
Breaking Blow - Incredible synergy with death blossom, especially since Champion has no power concerns.
Seasoned Strike - With the nerf to shock pulse, this is now the best 0pt builder for AOEing.
Legendary Alternatives:
Bladefury (replacing Thunderous Strike) - Allows even more ST DPS, but sacrifices AOE output, so I opt to not take it.
Synergy Crystal:
Brutish
Gear & Stats:
Like all specs, you will want to get as much Crit Power as you can until you reach the softcap of 40%.
After that, you'll want to build up your Strength and Attack Power.
Physical Crit is also worth getting, but is less important than the above three stats.
Buffs:
Dominating Bearing (legendary)
Shared Suffering
Recovery Posture (optional, doesn't impact DPS) [warlord ability]
Important Abilities:Spoiler!
Rotations:
AOE Rotation:Spoiler!
Opener:Spoiler!
Important Sections:
Death Blossom > Punishing Blow > Breaking Blow - In order to maxmize DPS, always cast Breaking Blow on a DIFFERENT target than the one you cast Punishing Blow on. This is because Punishing Blow's debuff boosts Death Blossom hits, but not the initial Breaking Blow hit.
Seasoned Strike > Savage Sweep - Both of these will be refreshed early, but this is still a gain because it is important to keep them up 100% of the time.
Mark of Extermination - Use this whenever a new target spawns and refresh it every minute. Ideally, refresh it away from using Breaking Blow (due to power concerns), but otherwise there is little harm in refreshing it early. (spamming it will starve your power and eat unnecessary stacks of Dominating Bearing, but using it every 30s or even 15s is completely fine)
Unfortunately, only one mark can be active on a target, no matter how many champions are attacking it. This is the best of the three, so it is important to use this one, so that everyone always gets the crit debuff.
Single-Target Rotation:
As long as there are multiple targets, the above rotation is the strongest ST rotation.
If there is a single target for a prolonged period:
1) rethink using Champion, there are better ST options
2) replace the Death Blossom > Punishing Blow sections above with Punishing Blow > Decisive Strike
3) Use Breaking Blow whenever you have more than 70 power, its timing is not important if you are not using Death Blossom
4) Respec your legendaries and pickup Legendary Bladefury.
Your new ST rotation would look something like this:Spoiler!
Probably not the best rotation, but again, there are better full ST options.
Conclusion:
Currently, Champion is incredibly, incredibly strong. Even if it weren't, Champ is effective for its purpose and is always worth learning.
As always, if you have questions, let me know.
Dummy Foundry Parse:
Left image is the overall damage breakdown, right image is the damage breakdown across all eight targets.
Originally Posted by Kajib 
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks