guide-to-warriors
Latest
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mists of Pandaria Arms 101
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 doesn't want to tame your animal style. If there had been any way in the world that I believed it possible that ye olde editors would have let me name this post "Shooting at the walls of heartache," that's exactly what it would have been called. However, since this is week four of our 101 guides to Mists of Pandaria for warriors, I felt constrained by the already established naming convention. Nevertheless, what is true is true, and heart to heart you'll win, if you survive. Bang bang. Anyway, I really have to stop referencing that song and give you an article about arms in Mists. Arms is one of two DPS specs the warrior class will have available in Mists of Pandaria, and it's a storied specialization with a lot of history. The arms spec was the premier PvP and PvE spec in vanilla World of Warcraft. It was not only the most-played spec for PvP, it was the most-played spec for both DPSing in raids and for tanking. The 31/5/15 arms/fury/protection spec ruled the class.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mists of Pandaria Protection 101
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 week, we covered fury; this week, we're moving to protection. Before I do, yes, I saw the most recent beta patches. This is what we have to expect and to some degree endure from the beta, continuous patch cycles that can follow hard upon each other. All we can do is wait for release, ultimately, and see where we stand then. The Vengeance changes will have an effect on several abilities including our scaling ones like Shield Barrier, but that doesn't really change their intended use, which is what this post will be covering. Protection is the warrior tanking spec. Of the three warrior specs, it's the most "ready to go" spec in terms of how it feels to play on the beta right now, and I suspect it will launch with patch 5.0.4 feeling pretty good to most warrior tanks. It's not completely unchanged -- far from it, in fact, as rage for protection warriors has been fundamentally altered and new abilities have been introduced -- but warrior tanks in Mists of Pandaria will still be charging in combat, still using Heroic Leap to drop a huge burst of threat on certain pulls, still pinballing with Intervene and still slapping bleeds on multiple targets with their AoE. Some of it will even be easier now. A lot of the stuff that's changed is under the hood change, stuff that will affect the game fundamentally but not in immediately obvious ways.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mists of Pandaria Fury 101
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 was intending to write Protection 101 this week, but with the only major changes for warriors being the change to Vengeance and Shield Barrier, I decided to give myself time to digest those and to move on to DPS warriors. This week, we'll be discussing fury, a spec that's seen some interesting changes with the new talent system, the incorporation of both Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury into baseline, and the reworking of rage and stances. When I wrote the original Fury 101 post back in Wrath, I summed up fury fairly succinctly. That much, at least, is still the case. Fury is the spec that fills both hands with a weapon and smashes those weapons into things as many times as possible. There are no pets, no magical abilities, no fancy tricks. Fury is still the "DIE DIE DIE DIE" spec.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mists of Pandaria Warrior 101
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. For the next few weeks, I am going to break down warriors in Mists of Pandaria for you. This will be an absolutely basic article, covering stat caps, basic rotations, and how the new talent system works. It's aimed to be accessible for the new player but still useful for long-term players. In following weeks, we'll cover tanking and DPS specs in more detail, but this post is intended for general use. As a result, it will touch upon offensive and defensive stats as well as talents. The warrior has seen a lot of change, yet that change doesn't alter the class by adding a new resource system. We still use rage. We just generate it differently now. A lot of work has done into the new rage system, as well as changing our abilities and making a lot of former talents baseline abilities. This week, we'll cover what you need to know to start playing a warrior or take up playing one again in Mists of Pandaria. One thing that absolutely needs to be said, though. Warriors are still the class that hits things and yells at them. We still don't use poison, divine magic, arcane magic, nature magic, the elements or the shadow. We hit things, yell at them, sometimes drop a banner on or near them. We have remained the most brutish of the brute force, the screaming, bellowing, weapon against shield-pounding, two-weapon-whirling, single-weapon-mastering, metal-wearing maniacs of World of Warcraft. And long, long may it remain so.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Cataclysm postmortem for fury
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. And thus ends the Cataclysm postmortem series with a look at fury. Finally, we get a breather from Mists of Pandaria news and get a chance to look back at fury over this expansion. While summing up a whole expansion is pretty difficult, it's why they let me out of the box and at the keyboard for a few thousand words before tricking me back into it with a banana and a dart. So my thoughts on fury over this expansion, in easily digestible bullet points: SMF fury surprised us by being very competitive, even sometimes better than Titan's Grip fury, in the first tier of raiding and the heroics that launched with it. This was before the mastery nerf, so SMF could get enough mastery to make Raging Blow worth hitting, while its Bloodsurge slams still hit like angry, angry trucks driven by swarms of bees that mistook you for a bear. Trust me, that's not fun. After the mastery nerf, TG fury climbed ahead, especially once Firelands launched in patch 4.2. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that TG fury was quite firmly ahead of SMF (which never recovered) or arms in Firelands. As you all remember from literally hundreds of screenshots, I was a tauren fury warrior in Firelands, and I freaking loved it. Dragon Soul ended the hegemony of fury and moreover, pushed it down below just about every single melee DPS spec. There was nobody doing as poorly as fury. The combination of directly nerfing the spec's break and butter Dual Wield Specialization and indirectly nerfing Deep Wounds by fixing a long-term bug pushed fury under the water and held its head under until people just plain gave up on the spec for progression raiding. To a degree, it's a shame that fury became no one's choice of specs in heroic DS, because once a fury warrior starts to accumulate that heroic DS gear, a familiar pattern starts to reassert itself. A fury warrior in full heroic DS gear is once again an effective fury warrior. Especially on certain specific fights, fury can actually be very very competitive. So let's talk about fury -- specifically, fury right now at the end of the expansion.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The endless rage treadmill
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. You knew we were going to talk about this again, partially because rage and rage income is, by far, the most important aspect of the warrior class. The majority of warrior balance issues in the past have come from rage income. Whether it be too little rage (as it was in the first few months of The Burning Crusade) or too much rage (as was the argument for fury DPS in ICC at the end of Wrath of the Lich King), we always end up back at the same dance. Since the post earlier this week announcing that enrage would be changed, we've seen a new beta build where exactly that happened, and Ghostcrawler responded to a post on the forums in greater detail for how the rage design in Mists of Pandaria is intended to go. We're going to talk about both of those things this week in some detail, which is code for "Matt gets all long-winded." Luckily, in this online format, I don't actually have to say all of this stuff -- I just type it out. So let's look at the changes to Mists's beta build 15882 first. Many of these changes are merely tooltip changes, but a few definitely are more than that. They're the first stages in the change to enrage promised in that earlier post.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Practical Mists of Pandaria for 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. So last week, I covered what it will be like to play a new warrior in Mists of Pandaria. This week, rather than my usual dissection of changes and so on, what I want to do is paint a broad picture of what the game will be like for a level 85 warrior heading to level 90. What's changed? What hasn't changed? Will the new talents and the way specializations now work make the class feel wholly different and alien? Will the new stance mechanics and rage be confusing and hard to grasp? Am I fond of rhetorical questions? In the past, I may have oversold just how different Mists will be. That's not to say that it isn't changing quite extensively, because it is. But while a great deal is changing, warriors don't feel like a different class or anything drastic like that. Rage is still based on you hitting things, for instance. It's just that instead of being passively generated by damage you take, it's actively generated by special attacks (and you can even get the passive rage gen back, if you really miss it, by switching into Berserker Stance). The removal of Intercept and making Charge work in combat by default just streamlines what warriors were already famous for -- mobility.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Starting a warrior in Mists of Pandaria
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. People have asked me a few times now what leveling a new warrior from scratch in Mists of Pandaria is going to be like. I decided this week to level a new warrior to 10 in order to get a feel for how it plays out. I deliberately chose a draenei because the draenei and blood elf zones haven't seen a significant revamp since The Burning Crusade, and while I've already leveled a pandaren warrior to 10, I wanted the freshest possible beta build. Also (I admit it), I figured it would be pretty easy to do. I mean, I've leveled how many warriors at this point? I admit I've actually lost track. I went without heirlooms because I wanted to get a feel for what someone new to the game would experience (although I have to be honest, I'm incapable of really forgetting the game to that degree) in terms of speed and ease of understanding. So here we go. What is Mists of Pandaria like for a new warrior?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Once more into the Mists of Pandaria
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. And back once more, my friends, into the breach in the Great Wall of Pandaria. The Mists of Pandaria beta has seen another patch, this one with gear and everything. So what do we think of it so far? Well, they buffed Bladestorm up to being a worthwhile DPS ability again, and that's nice, but otherwise DPS warriors didn't get a lot of change. Prot saw some changes, with a small but incremental increase in rage generation in Defensive Stance and some other adjustments aimed at keeping us in Defensive Stance. Some of these seem more like tooltip changes (and confusing ones, like the change to Charge that removes the cooldown entirely), but I do think it's worth chatting about them, especially the change to defensive stance. I've scraped together a set of 483 PvP gear for use in BGs and running scenarios and dungeons. One of the things I'm noticing is that since your special attacks only need to be capped to 7.5% hit and since you generate your rage from Bloodthirst primarily, once you get to that 7.5% hit, you might as well stop entirely. With the hit cap so far out of your reach at level 90, while you certainly would like to cap all of your white hits, I think stacking haste is going to end up being a much more sustainable approach for rage generation, especially for fury. Arms can easily cap hit. It's strange to actually want some haste, but that does seem to be where we're going.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: 2007 to 2012 in warrior years
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. This was the first column I ever wrote for WoW Insider. A lot of things have changed in that five-year period; for one thing, I got five years older. In that time, I've written about tanking shortages, about dungeon etiquette, about killing Cyclonian and rage normalization. Together, we've tanked and DPSed our way through The Burning Crusade, Wrath and now Cataclysm. (I did vanilla before I joined the staff here, so I was woefully alone. Well, OK, my wife helped me out.) There have been a lot of ups and downs over the years. Warriors had some dizzying highs and some painful lows. Our tanking was weak in The Burning Crusade, with lots of AoE needed that we didn't have, yet later, certain raid bosses were designed to be tanked best by a warrior, putting all those paladins and druids who put us out of work earlier in the expansion suddenly out of work watching us tank. Wrath balanced things for all tanks, but DPS warriors got to ride the roller coaster of rage starvation until getting geared, the big Ulduar nerf, and the ascendency of armor penetration. Cataclysm has had peaks and valleys for us, but on the whole, we've weathered this expansion as a strong tanking class (once you're familiar with all we can do), and both fury and arms have been contenders for best DPS spec at one point or another. Strange as it may sound, Cata was probably the best overall expansion warriors have had. We've had issues (PvP), but overall, we've been in the hunt if not top of the pack. I wanted to take the opportunity of having a milestone like this to sit back, reflect and consider the pros and cons not only of the class but of my demented love affair with it -- and your participation in it. After all, without you, this would just be me writing these things to myself.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Level 90 in the Mists of Pandaria Beta
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'm taking the week off from my Cataclysm postmortem to go back to Mists of Pandaria's beta and talk about what level 90 is like so far. So far, I definitely prefer protection. It's far better for rage generation whether tanking or soloing, and once you get used to using Shield Block and Shield Barrier actively to lower incoming damage, it feels fairly strong for tanking. I definitely wouldn't call it overpowered, but it works, it holds aggro, and you can stay alive decently against most trash and bosses. Shado-Pan Monastery on heroic seemed doable, although I'm not sure how much of that was the instance compensating for my leveling gear. Arms works better than fury because arms ends up with more rage than fury does. Even with Bloodthirst generating 10 rage again, I spent a lot of time simply unable to do anything but hit Bloodthirst on cooldown and wait for it to come off cooldown so I could use it again. Having to get two or even three Bloodthirsts off before I could hit another ability made the spec feel absolutely neutered. Yes, I'm in a mix of leveling greens and blues, but the whole point of the rage redesign was to make rage less streaky. As it stands, fury will not be viable for someone newly 90.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Cataclysm postmortem, part 2 -- Arms
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 have yet to be guilded with more than two other warriors at any point in time since Cataclysm launched. I've had more rogues and warlocks than warrior guildmates, and those are the two least-represented classes in World of Warcraft. While I can't prove it, I suspect a lot of the warriors out there are alts, not often played these days. What I do know is, especially in a 25-man raiding situation, I have not been seeing a ton of warriors. However, one thing is indisputable: Arms is the most-played spec of the class. There are more arms warriors than protection and fury combined in heroic Dragon Soul. Arms is, by far, the most popular spec the class has to offer right now in both PvE and PvP. It was not always so. For most of Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, arms lagged well behind fury both in terms of the damage it could do and the popularity of the spec, although its prominence in PvP kept it afloat. The reduction in the Mortal Strike debuff as Cataclysm launched hurt arms in PvP, but the nerfs to Vengeance and fury's mastery meant that all warrior specs suffered. Arms is just one of the pack there, while repeated nerfs to fury and small adjustments to arms gave it the eventual dominance it now enjoys.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Cataclysm postmortem, part 1
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. Here we are, at the end of the expansion. Deathwing is dead, Azeroth is saved, and we're all waiting for Pandaria in our own ways. One of the ways I wait for the next expansion is to look back over the expansion we just had. I'm funny that way. It's been an expansion full of ups and downs for warriors. As tanks, we've suffered a bit in comparison to, well, everyone else. As DPSers, we've seen SMF fury, TG fury and arms all rule at one time or another. Both fury specs were nerfed in their turn, while arms saw some buffs that left it near the top of the DPS charts in Dragon Soul. By the end of the expansion, prot remains what it often has been since the beginning of Wrath, a solid second place in just about every role in tanking. Threat changes, a mastery that works best on physical damage in raids where magical damage was the primary concern, and a few gimmick fights that rewarded specific warrior talents have made tanking on a warrior a roller coaster. For every heroic Magmaw that rewarded warrior mobility and talents like Impending Victory, there's a Chimaeron where blocks don't really balance out the vast amount of damage. For every heroic Nefarian with kiting galore, there's a Cho'gall or Sinestra.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Enrage changes in Mists beta
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 last time we talked about the Mists beta, I mentioned that rage was the big story. It continues to be so, especially the Enrage mechanic. Right now, for all three specs, Enrage is the means by which rage generation gets accelerated. Since you only generate rage by damage dealt and specials in the beta, enrage is really necessary to make rage generation work. So the most recent change to Enrage needs to be thoroughly discussed. With this change, arms will proc Enrage with Mortal Strike and Colossus Smash, while fury will use Bloodthirst and Colossus Smash. Protection will rely on the Critical Block mechanic of the protection mastery. All three specs will be able to force an enrage state via the ability Berserker Rage.No longer will any attack have a chance to proc the enraged state, instead, specific attacks and abilities will do so. In the case of fury, the critical hit chance of Bloodthirst has been increased to compensate for the loss of potential enrages from other attacks.
How I learned to love tanking again
So yeah, I'm tanking again. There are a few reasons for this. Reason #1 is my experiences testing prot in the Mists of Pandaria beta. Quite frankly, I think it's going to be much easier to level to 90 as a tanking warrior, what with the spec working quite well on the beta at the moment. Since I expect us to be doing so by August at the latest, I wanted to get a jump on things. Another reason is simple necessity. We needed a tank; I happen to be capable of doing the job and doing it well. Even back when threat was harder than it is now, I always knew I was a respectable tank. I pay attention to my positioning, I know how to use my cooldowns, and I've got a lot of experience with the role. When my guild found itself short a tank, it seemed like the right thing to do. It's just plain easier to recruit a DPSer and have someone established doing the tanking. I've asked before if it's time to kill tanking. Almost a year down the road from that question, here I am tanking again. I think what I'm learning is that, at present, it's fairly easy to tank decently and not very hard to tank well, but tanking itself is now split into two halves, and one of them is actually more difficult than it has ever been. It's easier to learn but not easier to master.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Rage in the Mists of Pandaria
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. Because we already had a lot of stuff to discuss this week, let's look back at the Ghostcrawler forum post thread before we get rolling. A lot of the changes Dr. Street mentioned have gone live in the most recent beta build. I ran around and tested out the protection and fury changes while exploring Towlong Steppes, did some grouping, and in general played around to see what the average player experience would feel like. I haven't gotten a chance to play with the Glyph of Unending Rage yet, but I am definitely interested in doing so. Frankly, right now, protection feels much beefier than fury. It seems like it hits much harder and takes so little damage that you can essentially never stop for food or bandages and are never in danger from quest mobs, whereas several times as fury I went below half health and into sub-25% territory. Instancing is still taking some getting used to. Right now, I think Shield Barrier is coming out ahead in terms of the mitigation abilities you'll want to rely on.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Practical talents in Mists of Pandaria
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. Before I get into this week's topic, I talked about War Banner this week (in case you missed it). If asked for my opinion of the ability, it would be good but not yet great. Each banner needs a little love -- perhaps a longer duration or more of a powerful effect -- before I'm totally sold on it. But I did enjoy playing around with it. This week, however, I want to talk about the content we have, not the content we're going to have. The reason for that is because it will help me illustrate what I like and dislike about the current talent paradigm and how we're losing things at the same time we're gaining them with the new talent system. I am not calling out for the new scheme to be scrapped. On the whole, I am a big supporter of it. But that doesn't mean the current talent system doesn't have things to teach us. So let me begin with the following statement. I deliberately specced fury for heroic Spine of Deathwing because I wanted to do less damage. No, I'm not explaining that here. You want to know why? You come with me past the jump. Them there's the rules.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Rage forever changes in the Mists of Pandaria
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. Remember when I argued that rage should work more like the Diablo 3 barbarian? Well, it totally will in Mists of Pandaria. Battle and Defensive Stance will mean that your rage is purely determined by your active use of rage generation abilities. Your shouts and active rage generation attacks like Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Shield Slam and Charge will be how you generate rage, along with normal melee attacks. You will only generate rage from damage you take by switching into Berserker Stance, which will reduce your rage generated by attacks since you'll lose the new bonus to rage gen Battle Stance provides (100% more rage from normal melee attacks), and you'll lose threat and your 6% critical strike removal from Defensive Stance. This means that you won't switch to zerk anymore for AoE; you'll switch to zerk if you expect to take a lot of damage and want to generate rage for it. My greatest fears are that this will render zerk almost unused except for when we're running from point A to point B and expecting to take a lot of damage while we do, since Battle Stance doubles the rage generated by auto-attacks. I'm also concerned that warriors have absolutely no direct damage increases anymore. Stances don't give damage multipliers; enrage just increases rage generation. While these caveats concern me, I do think I enjoy the idea of rage being built up by your actions rather than just being a sponge for incoming damage. I do seriously worry about tanks, however.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A simpler and more variable arms spec for Mists
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. Sometimes, writing these columns, I struggle to find a way to encapsulate the experience I'm having in game. With the Mists of Pandaria beta, I've sat down and detailed how fury and protection warriors have played out, how they've changed and how they're the same. And so I wanted to do the same for arms warriors. For one thing, arms is the spec I'm currently playing on live, in heroic Dragon Soul, so I'm fairly intimate with the spec and its demands. For another, arms is right now probably the most played warrior spec in terms of its representation in heroic level raiding. So what of arms in the beta? Arms in Mists of Pandaria is arms now, but simpler and more variable. That's it. The changes to arms are the changes to all warriors. Rend's being gone and Mortal Strike's automatically applying Deep Wounds means that all you have to do to light up Overpower in Mists is use your main attack that generates rage, which you would be a crazy mad insane fool not to use.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How Mists of Pandaria exposes the warrior past
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 have been playing a warrior since early December of 2004. I started the game when my wife (well, my wife now; we weren't married yet at the time) introduced me to it. She'd been playing in the beta, really enjoyed it, and thought I would too, since I was a huge Dungeons & Dragons nerd. In a rare example of my listening to someone else, I rolled a paladin (I often played paladins) and played him for two or three weeks before realizing a few things. I didn't want to heal. Not at all. Not even a little bit. People kept assuming I would do so. I loathed every aspect of playing a paladin, right down to the names of the abilities. I could, in fact, fix all of this by simply playing something other than a paladin. This led me back to the character creation screen, where I was faced with the decision of what to play if I didn't want to play a paladin. Since when I played D&D, my #1 choice was usually either a ranger or a paladin, I considered hunter, but they didn't seem remotely melee enough for my tastes. Plus, my wife was already playing one. Then while looking at the classes, I tried out a warrior and read a few lines. Next thing I knew, I was killing wolves in Northshire. Almost seven years later, that character is still here. He's had four race changes and a faction swap, but he's still here. So is the second warrior I rolled (he's a worgen now) and the third (a draenei) and the fourth (a tauren). I fell wholly, completely, and deeply in love with the warrior class, and I've never fallen out of love with it, despite its ups and downs over the years.
