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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Six years of trends
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. OK, first up: I have been playing a warrior and writing this warrior column for quite some time now. So while this week's savage, astonishing ravaging of the warrior class wasn't something I haven't seen before, I feel pretty confident in saying that yes, it was really jarring. Not jarring like a friend braking a little too hard while driving because she was totally checking out that person's butt and missed the light change. Jarring like a friend driving into a concrete abutment at 95 miles an hour seems more apt. The whole epic saga of metagem changes didn't help anything, either. Still, we can't say we were surprised, can we? I wrote a post that mentioned it a while back, but it bears repeating in this calm after our collective jubblies have been kicked right in that we were kind of nuts for a while there. It was not uncommon for arms warriors to lead the DPS and fury warriors to do more DPS than everyone else combined on some 5-man fights. Frankly, even with these changes, fury is still capable of decent numbers. (Not great, not what I would say they should be, but good enough for now.) Arms was the more hard hit, of course, as it always seems to be. I'll also admit to disappointment that the whole rage redesign didn't remove from us the constant buff-nerf cycle we've been living with for six years now.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Returning to your WoW warrior for Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Going back a few weeks, I wrote Ol' Grumpy's guide to Cataclysm instance protocol. Since it was a general post, it didn't focus specifically on warriors, which made it strange and weird and got my hands all itchy. Trying to think about things from the perspective of a ranged DPS or a healer just makes my head hurt. (To be fair, if you've seen the average warrior's int score, you understand my difficulty.) So now I'm going to try and provide a more warrior-centric view of the new Cataclysm instances and how we're going to have to change and cope. I'm also going to try and provide some advice for people who are just coming back to World of Warcraft after a break. I'm going to assume you at least have a passing familiarity with the class from The Burning Crusade days, if nothing else. (This column would be very, very long if I tried to sum up everything from classic to today.) So if you're just coming back to the game and your warrior, what's changed? Quite a lot.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How will mastery affect warriors?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Right now, I expect to take the ramp-up from 80 to 85 and raiding more slowly than I did in Wrath. For one thing, I've decided to try and level two warriors to 85 at the same time on the same server so that I have two 85 warriors ready to start raiding at the same time for purposes of having the same option available for separate meta-lockouts. (I've coined that term for the way the new lockout system works per boss, since once you do a heroic boss, things change significantly.) Another reason is that I'm starting over on a new server with a new guild, and that's always scary. My old guild was awesome, but they wanted to change servers and factions; while I'm OK with a server jump, I don't want to change my main warrior so drastically. However, another reason I expect to take things a little slower is to give myself time to really play with the new mechanics of the class. One of those new mechanics, besides rage normalization, new talents and abilities, and a revamped leveling approach, is the introduction to the mastery stat on gear. So far, in order to get mastery on live, you have to reforge gear to it. But Cataclysm itself will bring mastery into a full implementation with the stat available via gems, enchants and gear. So I'm going to take a look at the stats each spec will be looking for, how mastery fits into them, and how the stat changes the playing field (or does not).
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection in 4.0.1 -- a Cataclysm spec in a Wrath world
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. The short version: Single-target threat is pretty solid, AoE threat isn't what it used to be, and certain talents are good on paper but not really worth taking right now. Slightly longer, before-the-cut version: Basically, the redesign of rage and abilities like Heroic Strike/Cleave, combined with the total talent redesign, have had a significant effect on protection as a spec. While it's certainly a viable tanking spec, there is definitely a noticeable shift in tanking mechanics. Threat is once again much more in the hands of the DPS to take, rather than in the hands of the tank to lose, especially when talking about AoE threat. However, while the Cataclysm mechanics are already being felt, we are still in the Wrath era and many heroics will be tanked with DPS who simply will not wait for a tank to establish any sort of threat before unloading. You will lose threat in those situations. In some cases, even if the DPS does hold back, it doesn't matter. Their damage is so much higher than your threat generation that there is simply no way to prevent them from pulling aggro, and since the mobs die so quickly, they see little to no consequences for doing so. This is a habit that will only be solved with the coming of Cataclysm dungeons that punish such behavior with repeated wipes. Until that time comes, grit your teeth, do your best, and accept that the fundamental balance has been altered. It may feel a bit like being a whole new class, but ultimately protection is still primarily about the same things.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Comes the Cataclysm redux
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, old gods, and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Last year, we talked about Cataclysm. Since then, we've learned an awful lot about how it's going to affect warriors, starting as soon as patch 4.0.1 drops and changing a whole host of systems we've grown accustomed to. We've learned that the release date is my birthday. I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence, but I'm still going to ride that coincidence for all it is worth. What's interesting to me as we look at the coming expansion with another year's perspective is how much of what we heard about is going to be delivered. Yes, defense is gone, armor penetration is gone, reforging is coming, mastery is in. Rage normalization, a rebalancing of tanking to move away from AoE threat's being the expected norm, the transformation of on-next-swing abilities to become instant attacks. Three new warrior races, with the two expansion races and blood elves finally being able to be warriors. It was a heck of a laundry list and amazingly, Blizzard actually seems to be on track to deliver almost all of it.
