beta-build-8962
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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A short intermission
In all the talk about the beta, about nerfs and buffs to the class, about design philosophies and alterations to talent trees it can be pretty easy to lose sight of the class as a living entity. The other day, while trying to level my night elf warrior on test in the face of the 132 error (I'm pretty sure my drivers are up to date, but I'm going to check to make sure after I get done writing this) a friend asked me why, since I'm almost always tanking, I'm so concerned about the fury and arms trees and their upcoming viability."You never DPS. You're always tanking. So what if fury and arms aren't as good?"I had a hard time answering this until I logged onto my old Horde server and talked to Elle, a friend of mine who plays a warrior. Elle has never played prot spec seriously, doesn't like tanking. A discussion of the state of the various trees made her unhappy, and she made the point that even if prot were capable of good DPS, it wasn't a playstyle she wanted for her warrior. This makes sense to me: she's always leveled as fury or arms, generally, and she's done so in a guild with at least two serious, dedicated tanks around most of the time. The thing about tanking is, you only need so many. In a guild that fields at best a 10 man raid by itself, two or three tanks is plenty.With paladins, druids and DK's as well as warriors, that's four tanking classes, all of whom are expected to be viable for trash, offtanking and MT positions. Warriors are one of the most played classes in the game, so it's clear that with four tanking classes not all members of these classes are going to be tanking. And two of those classes can only DPS or tank, there's no healing DK or ranged caster DPS warriors.
Spirit beast pet family on Wowhead (Updated)
Over on Mania's Arcania, sharp-eyed commenter Goofball Jones noted an interesting tidbit: there's a new family of pets on Wowhead's WotLK site. Spirit Beasts. What do they look like? No clue yet, but one commenter noted the new skins for cats in Zul'Drak and posted a tantalizing screenshot from Wotlkwiki.info.Now, I'm not a hunter nor do I play one on TV, but I do note, looking at their abilities, that they appear to have cat family abilities save for replacing Rake with Spirit Strike, an arcane damage ability. While that makes poster Mattias's theory make sense to me that it's one of the cats from Zul'Drak, it's hardly conclusive.That's pretty much all I know to date. The family exists on Wowhead and has a very similar ability spread to cats. I now await hundreds of hunters running around taming everything that might even remotely be in this family for feedback. Keep an eye on Mania's Arcania as I'm sure news will break there first.(And thanks to my lovely wife for the tip and encouragement... we'll go with encouragement... to post.)Updated: Yes, that is a spirit beast. Kudos to Mania and her readers for solving the issue.
[EDITED] Paladin changes in Beta build 8962
Unlike last build, where Paladins got so many important changes it took me two posts to cover them all, we get just a little love this Beta build. So little, in fact, that I didn't bother writing it up until now. For those curious Paladins, however, here are the goodies (and baddies) that popped up in Beta build 8962.ProtectionHammer of the Righteous was changed from a triple-target Crusader Strike -- which was kind of silly, really -- into a weapon strike that works off DPS as base damage. The spell now reads: "Hammer the current target and up to 2 additional nearby targets, causing 3 times your main hand damage per second as Holy damage." Which means that even fast one-handed weapons work well with the spell because it calculates from DPS. It makes perfect sense and is a definitive step away spell damage weapons, which traditionally have low DPS. Meanwhile, Improved Devotion Aura's healing effect was also buffed to a maximum of 6%, up from 3%, and Toughness was nerfed to a 30% duration reduction for all movement impairing effects.
