Unshackled-Fury
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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 4.3 and its implications
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. I admit I was hoping there would be more changes to warriors to talk about by now. At least so far, the patch 4.3 PTR has been fairly quiet on the warrior front. Sure, fury got a nerf, and a fairly large one. Fury's been the melee spec that's actually done good damage this raid tier, so I knew the writing was on the wall for it. What I didn't expect was the particular blend of buff and nerf that the spec has seen. Meanwhile, arms and protection have not changed at all, and this far into the PTR, I find that kind of baffling. Nerfing Dual-Wield Specialization to remove the 5% physical damage bonus -- that, I understand. It's an easy Band-Aid to rip off of the spec to flat-out reduce all damage done, and with all physical attack power buffs adding 20% instead of 10% melee AP in 4.3, it's likely we won't really even feel it. What that change does is lower fury's base so that it doesn't scale better than every other melee once the AP changes are in. No, I'm not surprised at all by that, and I wouldn't be surprised if Precision gets a nerf as well to reduce our white damage slightly. While I absolutely do not agree with these changes, believe them justified in any way, or support them, I at least understand them.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Stream of Cataclysm consciousness
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid -- we're just crazy. Having spent the last few weeks more or less avoiding talking about Cataclysm, I'm now going to dive back into the discussion of our "soon" to come expansion. While the most recent beta push didn't do much at all to our talents from previous beta builds, we did see some significant changes as the new glyph system was implemented. We also got actual plate models for a lot of green and blue quest drops so that my warrior now looks like he's wearing a classic Roman-style gladiator helmet and chest in the screenshot above. At this point, there's a lot to talk about in terms of how things are shaking out.
