Heavyweight Guide

Author: James
Note: This guide was made for newcomers to Ascension, and isn't necessarily the most optimized version of the build.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Pros
• Cons
• Leveling
• Starting Skills
• Mandatory Skills
• Luxury Skills
• Recommended Skill Cards
• Full Build
• Skills
• Random Enchants
• Stats
• Items
• Classic
• The Burning Crusade
• Skill Rotations and Priorities
• The Basics
• The Rotation
• Single Target
• Useful WeakAuras
• Useful Macros
• Conclusion
• Mechanical Issues
• Recent Balance Changes

Introduction

For this particular Melee build, we'll be focusing our attention towards the Heavyweight Random Enchant, this allows us to focus on a very familiar Warrior-based Rotation while getting a crushing DPS increase every 5 attacks, dealing massive Area Damage.

Alongside Heavyweight, we'll be using the Epic Random Enchants: Master of Arms, Weapon Command, and Insatiable, increasing your Overpower's damage, your Weapon Expertise, and Armor Penetration respectively. Worth noting most is Insatiable's Armor Penetration bonus, which allows your to reach 100% Armor Penetration, if you've got the gear of course.

With all of this in mind, let's go into the full guide, keep in mind that this guide was made based on Agags Heavyweight, and focuses on using the bare minimum of Heroic Strike casts.

Pros

• Strong Single-Target and Cleave damage.
• Strong Cleave Burst.
• Simple rotation.
• Simple to roll on Draft / Wildcard.
• Steady Damage Output.

Cons

• Melee build and often gets disrupted in Dungeons.
• Have to be focused while playing.
• Very gear dependent.

Leveling

For leveling, I'd recommend watching this YouTube video and following along with the path, it's quick & easy and avoids going into Dungeons.

Starting Skills

• Battle Stance
• Charge
• Sinister Strike
• Slice and Dice

Generally you'll want to have your core abilities at level 1.
Battle Stance gives you an easy 10% Armor Penetration, so it's worth picking up early. Additionally, you'll need to pickup Sinister Strike at level 1 so you can roll Slice and Dice at level 1.
Sinister Strike isn't important outside this, so feel free to roll it off afterwards.

Mandatory Skills

These are abilities that you'll absolutely need for this build to function.

• Battle Stance
• Heroic Strike
• Rend
• Overpower
• Mortal Strike
• Charge

Luxury Skills

These abilities are strong single use cooldowns, or passive damage buffs, and I would aim to prestige until you're able to get these as well.
But they are not mandatory for the build to work.

• Death Wish
• Pummel
• Rockbiter Weapon
• Hunger For Blood
• Slice and Dice
• Blade Flurry
• Bladestorm

Recommended Skill Cards

The only mandatory thing is Skill Card - Mortal Strike, as long as you've got that, you're good to go, and if you're willing to spend gold on Golden Sealed Ability Card, I'd recommend 3 of these 5 cards, and prestige or reroll using Hand of Fate till you get the last one:

• Skill Card - Death Wish
• Skill Card - Blade Flurry
• Skill Card - Rockbiter Weapon
• Skill Card - Aspect of the Beast
• Skill Card - Hunger For Blood

If you are lucky enough to have all five of these, then my priority list would be Skill Card - Blade Flurry > Skill Card - Rockbiter Weapon > Skill Card - Aspect of the Beast > Skill Card - Death Wish > Skill Card - Hunger For Blood. This is due to how Blade Flurry interacts with Heavyweight and how much damage we gain from Attack Power.

Full Build

Ascension Build Calculator [Level 60]

Ascension Build Calculator [Level 70]

Skills

• Battle Stance - Flat Armor Penetration increase as long as the Stance is maintained.
• Heroic Strike - This his how we'll keep ourselves from dropping Heavyweight stacks.
• Rend - Used conistently in our rotation to trigger Taste for Blood.
• Overpower - Used after Taste for Blood is triggered to then trigger Strength of Arms.
• Mortal Strike - Combined with Strength of Arms and Master of Arms, this will allow us to gain 10% of our Strength as Armor Penetration.
• Charge - Just our gap closer, so that we can stick to targets.
• Blade Flurry - One of our primary abilities to allow for even more Area Damage.
• Bladestorm - In combination with Blade Flurry this allows us to delete group of enemies in seconds.
• Death Wish - Our primary cooldown for increased damage.
• Hunger For Blood - Low cooldown damage increase.
• Slice and Dice - Permanent increase to Attack Speed used together with the Honor Among Thieves Talent.
• Pummel - Basic Interrupt.
• Rockbiter Weapon - Permanent Weapon Enhancement for increased Attack Power.
• Aspect of the Beast - Permanent percentage Attack Power increase.

Random Enchants

• Heavyweight - Legendary (1/1)
• Master of Arms - Epic (1/1)
• Weapon Command - Epic (1/1)
• Insatiable - Epic (1/1)
• Mace Specialization - Rare (3/3)
• Improved Overpower - Rare (3/3)
• Anger Management - Rare (1/3)
• Serrated Blades - Rare (2/3)
• Hasty Overpower - Uncommon (3/3)

Stats

Always prioritize getting Hit Capped, remember that Hit Rating is different from Melee to Casters.

(Stat Priority: Expertise: 26 = Hit Rating: 8% > Strength > Haste > Critical Strike Chance)

Here's a list of stats you'll want to be on the look out for.

• Expertise: 26
• Hit Rating: 8%
• Strength: As much as possible
• Haste is better than Crit, but both of them are pretty useless for us.

Hit Cap for Main-Hand is 8%, so we always aim to hit this, no matter what our other stats are.
Expertise Cap is 26 Expertise , and we're going to caim for the Expertise cap as well, although we're already getting 10 from Weapon Command and as well as an additional 8 from our Talents, which leaves us at 18, with only 8 left to go, you can obtain an additional 3 Expertise from being a Human if you're using Maces or Swords. Sword Specialization / Mace Specialization

Items

It's very hard to create a Best-in-Slot list of items on Ascension, as the progression is pretty fast and missing an item in one place, means we'll have to supplement the missing stats somewhere else, and it leads to a mess.
But assuming that you'd be able to obtain the absolute Best in Slot, these are the items I would aim for.

Classic

Best in Slot for Classic

The Burning Crusade

Best in Slot for The Burning Crusade

Use Sockets to balance your stats according to the Stat Weights.

Skill Rotations and Priorities

The Basics

Essentially, we want to Overpower every other global and then Rend or Mortal Strike in-between those.
It's very important to note that, if any auto attack goes through without Heroic Strike being active, it'll reset our stacks of Heavyweight resulting in a lot less damage.
To prevent this, we'll be using WeakAuras to keep a watch on our Swing Timer and Heavyweight stacks.
To put it simply, you'll want to have Heroic Strike active for every auto attack you do, until Heavyweight has reached 5 stacks.

This combo is the heart of the build
Rend > Overpower > Mortal Strike > Overpower > Rend > Overpower > Mortal Strike
if you have that committed to memory, then the rest is simple.
Anything beyond it is simply watching our swing timer and using Heroic Strike before every auto attack, until Heavyweight has reached 5 stacks.

The Rotation

Single Target

1. Rend
2. Overpower
3. Mortal Strike
4. Overpower
5. Rend
6. Overpower
7. Mortal Strike

Useful WeakAuras

Download WeakAuras Here
How To Download & Install WeakAuras

Weak Auras is the most important AddOn for players seeking to master their class and take their gameplay to new heights. WeakAuras allows you to display helpful visual cues anywhere on your screen, which enable you to play better. Most players use it to track their trinket procs, highlight on screen displays of their most important cooldowns, or track the timers of boss mechanics. It is highly customizable and makes keeping track of your procs and cooldowns effortless. The drawback of WeakAuras is that is has a bit of a learning curve and isn't the most user friendly. WeakAuras allows you to import other players data directly into their UI, however, and most players choose to simply import other people's WeakAuras rather than make their own. WeakAuras can be used to create just about anything you can imagine, as it is a LUA scripting tool (essentially an AddOn that creates other AddOns, in-game).

List of WeakAuras made specially for Ascension can be found here.

Useful Macros

These are some useful macros that I use for my own Heavyweight build.

Bladestorm Stopattack

Blade Flurry + Trinket

Rotation Macro

Charge + Heroic Strike

Conclusion

I've really enjoyed playing Heavyweight lately, and it seems to be competing very well with other top Melee Builds, of course it has to be stated that on a pure single target fight, with no movement, Casters and other hard hitting builds, would top you, but as soon as there is any kind of cleave, watch yourself climb those meters!

In Dungeon Content, we're able to push a lot of cleave on demand through proper usage of Bladestorm and Blade Flurry I have peaked at 53,400 Damage Per Second over a 29 second duration, deleting several packs of mobs.

This build scales really well with gear, meaning that we'll never be put behind on raw throughput and will always be able to compete with the other builds.

We're also a Melee build, so we are able to keep up with heavy movement fights, as long as there is no long duration Crowd Control to reset or even delay our Heavyweight stacks.

Mechanical Issues

After recieving a Stun or other disrupting crowd control, your Swing Timer can sometimes be delayed and cause your to drop stacks of Heavyweight

Recent Balance Changes

None worth noting as of now.