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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection Warrior 101 -- talents
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. Tanking. It's what we talked about last week, and if not for a massive burst of gut rot that hit me Thursday like a hammer wielded by the Spectre himself, we would already have talked about it more this week. Better late than never, I suppose. To give you an idea of how sick I am as I type this, I didn't want to move all day, so I'm actually writing the column from the floor of my living room using my TV as my monitor. I'm so sick and exhausted that I find this screenshot of my worgen in his prot stance and gear standing on Anduin Lothar's shoulder to be hilarious. You see, Lothar was so badass, he had a werewolf for his conscience. Maybe you have to be extremely dehydrated to appreciate it. Anyway, this week, we're going to talk about protection's talents, which ones are niche talents and which are more generally applicable. Not all of the talents we discuss will be in the protection tree, as we'll also look at arms and fury talents that are well suited to tanking. It would be hard to justify talking about useful tanking talents without discussing Field Dressing, for instance. I had to tank those annoying parasites on Magmaw this week, and I was very glad to have the boosted self healing from Field Dressing for my Victory Rush heals.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection 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. Tanking. The role wherein you go and let very bad things do other very bad things to you so that they don't do very bad things to the rest of your party or raid, giving said party or raid time to do very bad things to them. I wrote a protection 101 guide almost exactly a year ago. We're revisiting the subject now for several reasons. Much as when we wrote the DPS warrior 101 guide, things have definitely changed for prot warriors over the past year. The addition of the mastery stat, the removal of defense on gear, the talent revamp and Vengeance have all had a cumulative effect on tanking warriors. So we're going to cover the basics and give as broad an overview as we can.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms and the 4.0.6 patch notes
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 saw patch notes for the PTR and patch 4.0.6. Since then, we've seen updates to these notes. These updates mean that some of the things we talked about no longer apply. And then they went and updated them again. It would be fair to say I kind of groaned when I saw Blizzard do this, knowing I'd most likely have to basically spend another week talking about the notes. I was especially annoyed because I finally have my tank set to the point where I can tank in a raid or a heroic without feeling painfully undergeared, and I've gotten my DPS up to where I think it should be at the current gear level and talent spec design. In general, I think warriors are almost where they should be right now. We may be slightly weaker than I'd like as tanks, and arms is frankly pretty bad as a DPS spec right now. It's still good for PvP, although that's mostly due to its ability to chain stuns, which it will be losing somewhat in 4.0.6. With Slam still not scaling at all with haste, arms is going to need flat-out DPS increases to go along with the nerfs it's taking. Fury will probably be all right -- not the absolute top DPS, even among hybrids, but it will deliver in fights where melee is unduly punished for being melee. So let's go take a look at the cards we're going to be dealt in patch 4.0.6 as of the most recent update. If I had to sum up the entirety of the remainder of this post, it would be, "Okay, but why not buff arms for PvE?"
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Testing 4.0.6 PTR changes
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. If you're wondering where your heroic dungeon gear guide is, it's been eaten by the PTR. Frankly, I've been running heroics as DPS and as a tank for about a week straight now, and I'm kind of bleary-eyed anyway, so looking at something aside from a long list of gear might just be the way to go. Above, you may see my draenei warrior just after successfully getting his hands on a new offhand weapon and zoning out of Grim Batol, whereupon Deathwing immediately set him on fire. I mean, I wasn't even done loading yet. Or you may see me, this morning, waking up to the news of the patch notes for the PTR. Take your pick, I suppose. In an expansion that has already proven to be significantly melee-unfriendly (to put it mildly), today's notes make me a touch cranky. Some I understood the reasoning on; others I expected -- but they still didn't do much to make me feel like Cataclysm is going to stop dumping its particular form of love down on melee classes any time soon. So let's take a look at the coal Father Blizzmas is putting in our stockings, shall we? (Hey, I still have a tree up in my living room.)
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A 2010 year in review
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 will technically be posted in 2011 -- but that just makes it seem more necessary, in some ways. 2010 was 11 months of Wrath of the Lich King's ending, followed by one month of Cataclysm. We saw the complete flowering of Wrath's raid and dungeon design in terms of gear, encounter design, and the final iteration of the warrior class as tanks and DPS. Then everything changed with the Shattering (patch 4.0.1), as the mechanics we'd had all year (and the year before) changed utterly. Warriors saw several huge changes this year. Some of those changes ended up being effectively erased in November of 2010. That doesn't change how big they were at the time. And some of the changes introduced by the Shattering were even bigger, game-changers that made warriors a concentrated version of the class they'd been for the last two years.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cataclysm gear guide -- dungeons
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 race change is a marvelous thing when it allows you to go from a night elf to a werewolf, that's all I'm saying. It's even better when you turn into a werewolf carrying what appears to be a rock tied to a bone. While leveling my old main has been a lot of fun, it's hard to stay away from my worgen for very long. This week, we start our look into the gear available through normal dungeons and heroics for both DPS and tanks. Because this is a lot of ground to cover, we'll probably need to take a couple of weeks to really go over it all. We're going to look at non-heroic gear first before moving on to stuff from heroics, since you have to crawl before you can walk and all. Remember our previous guide to faction gear? That's basically how we're going to approach this, listing pieces in each dungeon. While you may make use of an agility cape, jewelry or weapon, since they're not optimal for warriors, I'm not listing them unless there's a compelling reason to do so. (For instance, I'll list ranged weapons with agility, since it's hard to find a strength ranged weapon.) The gear in these dungeons tends to range from iLevel 308 and up, so keep it in mind when you're trying to build your set for heroics that you need iLevel 329 on average to get in the door.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Stat stacking for tanks
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. One of the things that most Wrath-era tanks learned early was to stack stamina. It was a no-brainer. We were taking massive, massive damage on every boss fight. In the Naxx era, a 30k-health warrior tank was doing decently and could expect to take a 23k hit back to back on certain fights. It only got worse going into Ulduar, then Trial, and finally ICC. Tank health went up, and so too did the amount of damage the tank was expected to soak. Cooldown use became so critical that the time cooldowns took to recharge decreased dramatically. Fights like Sartharion (especially with three drakes up), Mimiron, the Beasts of Northrend and Deathbringer Saurfang (just to name a few) saw tanks being expected to come up with ways to stay alive from monstrous, unavoidable damage. Stamina and armor became two of the most popular means to that end, but armor could only mitigate physical damage, while stamina worked on everything, even the huge magical blasts of damage that ignored armor and all other avoidance or mitigation strategies. Stamina was king in Wrath. The more I think about it, though, the more I think that king has been dethroned.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cataclysm gear guide -- factions
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. Well, what do they say about plans and contact with the enemy? This week, I'd fully intended to write a Cataclysm 101 guide for prot warriors, but then Cataclysm actually happened and I immediately spent the time as fury. Since I'm going to start working on leveling my prot warrior soon as I get the fury to 85 (which I should have done by the time you read this) the protection 101 will be next week. This week, as I've been flitting around trying to decide which factions to grind rep with for which rewards, I've decided to share all that musing with you. Also I've been kind of running around like a chicken going 'woah' a lot, but you probably didn't need to know that. Yes, I was in the beta. I was in the beta on a four year old computer. Playing the expansion on a new machine has even my jaded warrior heart all aflutter. So far, I've kept my T10 pieces for the 2 set bonuses, which are boring but compelling (the two piece is now just all physical damage increased by 5%, while the four piece is all damage, period) but with Deepholm gear dropping I expect I'll be dumping set fairly soon. I've more or less replaced almost all my non set gear with blues and greens. So here's a sampling of the factions I'm looking at and the gear and arcanums they offer.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Cataclysm 101 guide for DPS 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. In short, if you remember our Arms and Fury 101 posts from earlier this year, we're going to do a roundup for the changes Cataclysm has brought to each spec. Since the changes have actually debuted before Cataclysm has, we've already had a chance to get familiar with what we're going to be seeing in the next few weeks. So let's go over what a DPS warrior is and isn't. Specifically, a DPS warrior is not a tank. This does not mean that the warrior class does not have a fully functional tanking spec. It does; it's called protection, and we'll be talking about it next week. But while DPS warriors (be they arms or fury) probably think tanking is great and love tanks to death, they would much rather be unleashing bloody murder on things, if that's all right with you. So let's talk about what the DPS warrior specs are, how they work in Cataclysm, and what you're signing up for when you sign up as a warrior to murder things and take their stuff.
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: Fury demolishes entire cities in 4.0.1
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. Forget Deathwing. After the horrible start fury got in 4.0.1, it saw some buffs that have made it an extremely beefy DPS spec again. While we may not be topping the meters in all fights, we're certainly putting out some very solid DPS numbers. "Solid" depends on your gear, of course, but my mixed-geared night elf can easily push out 9-11k in a heroic, and my much better-geared draenei can easily put out more if the boss stays alive long enough. With the ICC buff, fury is once again competitive for the top spot (although much less likely to own it) and is no longer a hindrance to your raid. And if you're not a raiding fury warrior, with the change to the justice point system and the removal of ratings on PvP gear, it's never been easier to get solid DPS gear (like I did for my night elf, above). The gearing requirements are different now, the rotation has changed and we have new glyphs to consider, so while the damage is solid again, there are some real differences to consider.
New changes to tanking cooldowns coming for Cataclysm
Blue poster Nethaera informed us today about a number changes coming to tanking cooldowns in Cataclysm (specifically, patch 4.0.3a). It seems an imbalance occurs in the current build when tanks stack mastery, leading to astronomical values of block. For now, specifics are only available for paladin, druid and warrior tanks. The post hints that cooldown changes for druid and death knight tanks will be coming later, once developers can get a better handle on the complexities of the classes' abilities. When asked for comment and analysis, Fox Van Allen's orc Grunk posited, "Me Grunk! Grunk fear change! Grunk smash!" Sadly, Grunk lacks the mental clarity to process the full meaning of all these forthcoming changes because as a warrior, Grunk does not stack intellect (and takes repeated physical blows to the head). If he did, the changes would be meaningless to him, as he'd have followed his dream and become an architect rather than becoming Orgrimmar's No. 3-ranked skull cleaver. In lieu of expert testimony from Grunk, we have the full blue post just after the break.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms DPS is back in 4.0.1
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. Hello, suddenly viable PvE DPS spec! I remember you! You were notable from such raids as Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ and Naxx 40. Also, I recall your performances in Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon, Tempest Keep, SSC, ZA, Black Temple and even the Sunwell. Arms was up and down throughout the life cycle of Wrath of the Lich King. Decent in Naxx and competitive in Ulduar, it really fell by the wayside again once fury got access to i245 and better gear. And when patch 4.0.1 launched, it wasn't kind of any warrior DPS spec. But when last week's rebalancing came down the pike, I decided to finally get serious about my arms warrior alt and see what kind of damage he could actually do in PvE, as well as taking him for a ride in PvP. Frankly, not only am I having fun, I'm actually doing surprisingly solid damage.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Too soon?
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. Yes, your DPS is too low. Be you arms or fury, yes, absolutely, it is too low. It is not my purpose to dispute this with you or argue with you about it. (I will point out it has already been addressed and you may already see an increase.) Frankly, I fear I have not been contentious enough the past few months. It was hard for me, looking at ICC DPS parses, seeing the highest fury DPS and even seeing my own in those times when I would go off-spec, to worry about fury DPS in 4.0.1. While arms has been low in PvE for quite some time, it was difficult for me to believe that patch 4.0.1 would launch and lower fury DPS so dramatically. I knew that it would lower it. Rage normalization, the loss of the Heroic Strike bug that allowed warriors to get away with so little hit, and the rooting out of armor pen was fated to topple us from our throne and humble us -- there is no disputing this. It was intentional. I could easily have imagined a drop as severe as 80 percent of what warriors were doing in Icecrown in patch 3.3.3 and not have been surprised.
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.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mastery, threat decay and Cataclysm tanking
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. Last week we talked about tanking and Cataclysm beta patch 13033, which was superseded almost immediately by patch 13066. Hard upon the heels of that comes patch 13117. If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that there will be more beta patches that will bring with them more mechanical changes to the class. But I wanted to take this time to cover a couple of interesting recent posts about the way the class is shaping up. We'll cover the patch 13117 changes first, the move on. Arms Mortal Strike now costs 25 rage, down from 30 rage. Obviously a nice little quality of life change but not a major dealmaker, I would think. Fury Slam now costs 20 rage, up from 15 rage. Bloodthirst now restores 0.5% of max health, down from 1%. I'm honestly not sure why these changes were made. I guess Bloodsurge was too easy to use? Or it's aimed at arms warriors using Improved Slam in their builds. The Bloodthirst change must be aimed at Field Dressing making it too good. Protection Defensive Stance now increases threat by 125%, up from 100%. Not much to say, other than it's a welcome buff. More would be better, as initial threat is still somewhat wonky (once Vengeance stacks up, it's not a concern, but the initial seconds of a pull can be rough for a warrior without Bloodrage, shouts just aren't making up for the loss of that ability) especially if trying to hold more than one.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Heroics, protection spec and build 13033
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. Last week, I said that we'd see changes to protection. This week, we're seeing them. It's build 13033, also known (to those of us who care) as the protection warrior pass. Last week firmly started balancing fury's DPS, but this week is definitely protection's turn. Today, in fact, just hours before this patch went to the beta servers, I got done writing a long post talking about protection in the beta, what I saw as its strong points and its weak points. Every single one of the weak points was addressed in this build. Every single one. This is what you call serendipity. It also means I have to completely rewrite my column with not a lot of time to spare, so as you may understand, I am at once pleased to see things improved and irritated that I spent all that time writing a column that will never see the light of day. It should be noted that these changes are on the PTR, not live on the beta as yet. It's a little odd to see the PTR get updated first, but I'd expect the beta servers will see a new build soon as well. Having been 85 for a week, as well as having transferred over two level 85 premades, I've been running around testing out various alternate specs and taking them into instances. Why did I do this? Because, as we have already established, I am certifiably insane. Even before this patch, protection stood out as the strongest of the warrior leveling specs, and now it should see increased power as a tanking class. Vengeance is amazing for a leveling protection warrior. It takes the greatest strength of the tanking classes -- the ability to soak up damage -- and turns it into offensive power.
