urukas-band-of-zeal

Latest

  • The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Trial of the Champion Loot

    by 
    Matthew Rossi
    Matthew Rossi
    08.14.2009

    Each week The Care and Feeding of Warriors discusses all sorts of warrior related topics. This week, Matthew Rossi discusses the gear options for tanks and DPS warriors in the new 5 man instance that dropped with Patch 3.2.I was actually pleasantly surprised at the various gear options available in TotC and its heroic version. Some of the drops (trinkets, weapons) will draw the attention of even people in various stages of raiding, and it's all solid for someone just getting into the 80 game.Since the loot list is fairly long, we'll just dig right into it. This week we cover weapons, trinkets and rings, and next week we attempt to wrap it all up.

  • Lichborne: A PTR preview of 5-man Crusader's Coliseum DPS loot for Death Knights

    by 
    Daniel Whitcomb
    Daniel Whitcomb
    07.20.2009

    Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly Death Knight column, with your host Daniel Whitcomb. The patch 3.2 PTR continues on apace, and with the background downloader now delivering content to the live servers, we can only hope that the release date is creeping closer. With that in mind, I am continuing our preview of the loot of the new 5-man Crusader's Coliseum loot, which is all epic all the time, and perfect for any Death Knight who just hasn't quite managed to break into the raid game. Admittedly, this loot is a bit less outright spectacular than that tank loot, if only because it has a lot of haste and armor penetration, which are less desirable for certain specs of Death Knights since we do so much of our damage with instant abilities or with frost and shadow magic which bypasses armor penetration altogether. Then again, if your rotation is heavy on Blood or Heart Strikes and Obliterates or Death Strikes, you'll still get some nice use out of the armor penetration, and as I mentioned a few weeks ago, with enough armor penetration (Although more than the amount that you'll get from this gear), armor penetration can even make Obliterate surpass Scourge Strike. So yeah. armor penetration isn't so bad unless you're losing a lot of strength to get it, but haste is sort of pretty far down on the useful scale. There's also a lack of hit rating on a lot of this gear, so you may find yourself frantically re-gemming or passing up an upgrade to keep yourself at the soft cap as well.And regardless, this is all epic gear, so the stats are all high enough that a bit of less desirable haste won't be that bad to deal with. Let's check it out.