Serpentsrhine-Cavern
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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Learning how to wipe
The Care and Feeding of Warriors would like to pretend to be an exhaustive and comprehensive overview of warrior issues. Unfortunately, they're letting Matthew Rossi write the thing, and he's equal parts obsessed maniac, egotistical loon and occasionally informed poster. Proud pappy of three level 70 warriors, we think he may have been dropped on his head a lot as a child. That would explain why he enjoys playing the class that gets hit all the time.Playing World of Warcraft is supposed to be fun. I know I play for enjoyment. In the past I've done so through PvP, although I was never as much of an enthusiast as some warriors. Lately, I've gotten back into raiding, mostly because I have a lot of experience tanking and I found guilds looking for a dedicated prot warrior. In the short time that I've been with my new guild, I've gone from tanking A'lar in blues and greens to gearing up in Karazhan and the lairs of Gruul and Magtheridon respectively. These 'loot runs' aren't progression, and so they feel less 'real' as a tank than Zul'Aman, Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep do (Kael and Vashj are all that stands in our way now) because they lack that one crucial element that sets aside 'real' progression tanking.Wipes. They lack the endless wipes. We wipe in ZA, SSC and TK because we're still learning them. For some reason, I've come to associate real progression in raiding with wiping over and over again, watching incremental progress as people come to understand the fight. From the first time I killed Nefarian, a fight that took us several days and quite a few wipes to master, I seem to have been hard wired to accept wiping as part of the process. If you want to kill the bosses you have to die first. As a tank, one of the harder lessons you'll ever learn is in dealing with this expensive and often personally aggravating necessity of raiding. You have to grow a thick inner skin, not allowing the setbacks and odd quirks of a particular fight (A'lar won't move platforms, Tainted Cores aren't being handled fast enough, people are grouping up too much on Shatters) to frustrate you or cause you to start pointing fingers at people.
Totem Talk: A raider's valentine
Totem Talk is the column for Shamans. Matthew Rossi not only plays a shaman, he's come to appreciate their presence even when he's playing one of his other characters. That's his ridiculously mustached human warrior (who is still wearing a green belt to tank in SSC) next to one of the raid-saving shamans.It can at times be easy to forget why we rolled a shaman in the first place. Sometimes it seems shamans are overlooked and underplayed, and its fair to say that the last year hasn't been the kindest to the class. With all this negativity and upset, it's fair to say that sometimes shamans must feel like there's no point to playing their class at all. So here I am to tell you that, while shamans may indeed have suffered (especially in PvP) over the past year, they're still incredibly viable in PvE, and if anything I wish we had more of them.We've talked before about the shaman as a pinch hitter or panic button class, and these are both functions that they do excel at. But in running the 10 and 25 man instances, another aspect of shaman versatility is their broad array of totems and abilities - there's almost always a situation where a totem, a shock or a special ability like Heroism can help immensely with an encounter. I know having the ability to cycle in shamans to our DPS groups for heroism made a huge difference in our Tidewalker and Lurker kills, as well as finding the particular strength of Chain Heal very, very useful when a group of us are trying desperately to keep those murlocs tanked. Furthermore, I personally love having an elemental shaman in my group taking care of the priest add on Fathom-Lord Karathress, not only due to the damage they can inflict (and having seen it, I have had to re-evaluate my understanding of elemental shaman DPS - it's much, much better than I'd believed when geared properly) but due to their ability to buff not only their own DPS but the healer's healing at the same time with Totem of Wrath and Wrath of Air as well as being able to interrupt the heals after a tidal surge.
