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Leveling warriors in Mists of Pandaria, 1 to 30
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. Continued from last week, our guide to leveling a warrior in Mists of Pandaria talks about the 1 to 60 game, focusing on the first 30 levels. Redesigned in Cataclysm, the content remains the same, but the process has literally never been simpler than it is right now. Even excluding elements like heirlooms and refer a friend bonuses, the following changes happened to make it easier than ever. There is no need to see a trainer to learn new abilities as you level. Instead, as soon as you gain the appropriate level, they appear in your spellbook, ready to be used. The talent trees from Cataclysm were removed, and most abilities were either removed or folded into class abilities you simply gain as you level. You now need only choose 1 talent out of three every fifteen levels, starting at level 15. By level 60, you will have four talents, up to and including one of three AoE damage abilities. Each talent is accessible to any class specialization, meaning that your chosen role doesn't limit you from choosing a talent that sounds interesting to you. Almost all dungeon quests are accessible via a quest giver inside the dungeon entrance as you zone in, which combines with the Dungeon Finder to make it easier than ever to run dungeons as a means to level your character. With abilities having been redesigned, leveling provides something useful roughly every 2 to 3 levels between specialization abilities (strikes like Colossus Smash are a specialization ability, accessible only by arms and fury warriors), talents, and class abilities. You get Charge at level 3 now, and once you do, it will open up the real fun of the warrior class. Namely running headlong into things and smashing them.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Leveling a new warrior, 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. Congratulations! You've decided to level a warrior. I applaud your choice in leveling satisfaction. This article is designed for the use of a new warrior, whether it be an experienced WoW player who hasn't picked up the class yet or an entirely new player. Warriors are a melee DPS/tanking hybrid class that use a variety of combat stances tailored towards their specific role in combat as well as the situation to hand. They're uniquely mobile due to several abilities and talents designed for quick movement on the battlefield, and can use every single kind of melee weapon, although weapons with strength should definitely be the priority over ones with agility, and no warrior should use a weapon with intellect, spellpower or spirit on it.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Taste for Blood
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. Let's just jump right into it, shall we? Ghostcrawler - PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues Warrior - For Arms, we are going to try Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death instead of autoattacks. This will make haste slightly worse (which we can fix) but we hope will help make the rotation slightly more compelling, since autoattack procs can feel really random. With Overpower you can anticipate it a little more. - Likewise, Overpower will cost no rage in Execute range. We agree that saving rage for Overpower and spending it all on Execute don't play well together. - We haven't made a tuning pass on Arms (or any spec) yet. Don't fret about DPS numbers at this stage. source I actually like this change quite a bit. Yes, I am capable of liking things. It's not all whining about haste over here. What I like about it is that it emphasizes Overpower over autoattacks, which are fairly unimportant for an arms warrior anyway. You hit cap at 7.5%, which is absurdly easy in comparison to fury anyway (which is why no fury warrior bothers to try, leaving hit a fairly pointless DPS statistic... but we've talked about hit and expertise before) so you're going to land those slow hits and generate rage with them... and that's pretty much all they should do, in my opinion. With Mortal Strike and Colossus Smash both so important, giving Overpower more to do is fine by me. I also absolutely agree with the idea of making Execute completely discount Overpower's rage cost. In fact, I agree with it so strongly that I'm sort of bemused here. Usually I don't wholeheartedly endorse a proposed change.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Never mind about haste
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 actually got excited for a second that haste was going to become a viable stat for DPS warriors. I wrote an entire 1200 word column that you won't be seeing based on my PTR experiences, my testing out arms and fury with the 100% buff to haste. Fury didn't really see all that much improvement, ultimately, save for smoother rage flow and overall easier uptime on certain abilities - my raider dummy DPS on the PTR was about the same as TG fury. Arms actually saw a mild improvement, though, between changes to mastery and haste, and I was excited that warriors might have been moving away from the 'stack crit to the exception of everything else' gearing paradigm. Luckily or unluckily, that won't be the case. Instead, with some of these changes being reverted and other changes coming in, both arms and fury are going to gear in 5.2 exactly like they do in 5.1, there's no exciting new paradigm and no thought needed about what stat you value. You will be stacking crit forever, even if they don't put any on the gear.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The future is 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. So, how about patch 5.2 as of the most recent PTR. Second Wind is currently back up to 3% healing a tick (still lower rage gen), Defensive Stance is nerfed for non-tanks but should remain exactly the same for tank specced warriors, Impending Victory got a mild buff to its healing (up to 15% from its current 10%), Slam is still slightly buffed, Taste for Blood is still completely redesigned (and I will talk about it, having gotten the chance to play around with it some) and frankly kind of weird, but none of these changes are massive ones aside from that Taste for Blood change and its repercussions. As we discussed before, most of the changes seem aimed either at Vengeance and its scaling, or PvP issues like everyone taking Shockwave for a stun on a 20 second cooldown. The Taste for Blood change is obviously also rooted in PvP, but one of the more interesting consequences of that change is that it makes Heroic Strike even less desirable for arms than it already was. For fury, the Bloodsurge change is clearly aimed at getting us to want to use Wild Strike more and Heroic Strike less since it's more rewarding to pool rage and throw off a couple of HS after a Colossus Smash than it is to wait for a Bloodsurge proc and use a low damage Wild Strike, and squeezing in three of them just doesn't fit the rotation most times. Still, there are definitely things to talk about with this PTR and warriors. A lot of them aren't implemented yet is the problem.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Titan's Grip
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 as I predicted, I did not get a second weapon for SMF. I've decided this is the universe telling me that my fury spec is to forever be Titan's Grip, and I'm okay with that. What with the holidays raiding itself was slow over the past two weeks, so I jumped onto the beta and messed around with some older content to test out my theory about Second Wind, and I was right - it's a significant kick in the teeth to our ability to solo older content. Granted, it mostly means we need help with Wrath era raids, but if you were feeling cocky about being able to solo, as an example, Trial of the Crusader 10, adjust your expectations. So far in Mists raiding, TG seems to be on par with SMF for the most part. I've had days where I handily beat the SMF warriors in our raids, and days where they beat me just as easily. I raided with Shockwave instead of my customary Bladestorm/Dragon Roar last night and it worked out fine, but in the end I switched back to Dragon Roar for its being useful both as a single-target and a multi-target ability. In general, I feel fairly confident in saying that fury warriors can raid with either TG or SMF, depending entirely on the combination of personal preference and what drops for you. That being said, four piece tier 14 is pretty much essential for parity as a DPS warrior, and even more so for fury with its desperate need to crit on pretty much every Bloodthirst. Since TG swings on average a full second slower than SMF, it seems exaggerated. Keep in mind that SMF sims better at present, so all things being equal it might be the best possible choice for a DPS warrior min-maxing obsessively.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: 2012 ends, 2013 begins
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. Above you're looking at the consolation prize the game finally handed me for not getting a 1h weapon for testing out Single-Minded Fury. As consolation prizes go, it's a fairly nice one. I enjoy hitting things with it. While looking over the patch 5.2 notes we saw last week, I got to thinking about the warrior changes, most of which seem aimed either at reducing protection warriors' AP scaling (which I assume must be 10% too good, based on these nerfs, despite my not noticing warriors tearing up the universe as tanks) and several changes rooted entirely in PvP. The Shockwave change will leave it basically unchanged for tanking warriors while making PvP warriors less likely to use it as an every 20 second stun (potentially making Dragon Roar and Bladestorm slightly more competitive in PvP again) and the Taste for Blood change was expected ever since they nerfed the ability to only stack once in PvP. So I'm not surprised by any of it, save the Slam buff (moving Slam up to 220% weapon damage means to me that there's an expectation that arms DPS is going to drop significantly with the new TfB) but I am contemplative of it all. See, to my mind, the warrior class exists in a state of AC (After Cataclysm) and it will be patch 5.2 that makes the first really significant changes to warriors in the Mists of Pandaria world. So let's take a look at these notes, and see what they tell us.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: My dream for haste
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 really want to like haste. I really really do. The problem is, it just doesn't do as much for us as it would have to for me to like it. What would it have to do? Well, for starters it would have to reduce the cooldown on our rage generation abilities. The fact that no amount of haste affects, as an example, my Mortal Strike or Bloodthirst or Shield Slam cooldown hurts the stat for us. I've tested this by stripping completely naked to ensure I had no haste at all, then putting all of my gear back on and having 6% haste - 2,545 haste rating - and making sure that none of my abilities can be used more often. While haste still does increase our rage generation in Battle or Berserker Stance, by increase how fast our autoattacks are, this is a piddlingly low benefit compared to other plate DPS. It does even less for us as tanks. Some tanks like paladins and DK's are able to use haste items as tanking gear, because the haste increased their resource generation and thus their active mitigation. But for us, haste does nothing for tanking because we generate no rage from autoattacks when we're in Defensive Stance. There are three plate classes, all three can tank or DPS, and of those three only one of them gets minimal rewards from haste as melee DPS and absolutely nothing from it as a tank.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Tanking itemization
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. Still waiting for the extra 1-h weapon to start looking at Single-Minded Fury. But I did start working on my tanking again recently. I went back to September to look at Theck's posts on warrior mitigation statistics and started thinking about how warrior gearing works now. To oversimplify for convenience, the value of our various active mitigation statistics and our passive avoidance statistics varies depending on how you prioritize Shield Block and Shield Barrier. This means, among other things, that you can gear, gem and reforge differently if you intend to be running primarily five man dungeons vs. raids, and that you can even change your tactical outlay of stats based on whether or not you're running 10's vs. 25's to some extent. Really, what it comes down to is Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier use and the tension between trying to avoid the absolute most incoming damage vs. trying to create the most predictable spread of incoming damage. Theck makes the point that, while spamming Shield Barrier might cause you to take the least amount of damage overall, you're going to end up taking spiky damage. Spiky damage is something healers hate. A healer would much rather you were taking hits that kept you constantly losing about 60% of your health than be in a situation where most of the time you took no damage, but occasionally you took 90% of your health in one hit, especially when those hits could occur back to back. As a result, while it may be mathematically best to rely on Shield Barrier, it won't work out that way in actual practice because healer mana isn't infinite and they can't just bomb heal you to full if you go down to almost dead in one or two hits. Damage spikes are the enemy, and a balanced use of Shield Block and Barrier will cause your incoming damage to be far more predictable and easier for your healers to cope with.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Birthday Miscellany
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. Still waiting on 1h weapons for an SMF build. So I've decided that this week, I'll go and take a look at smaller topics, things that won't fill up a full column by themselves. I'm doing this because the day I write this is my birthday and I want to treat myself. One of those things is soloing old raids, which I've been doing a lot of since patch 5.1 dropped. Whenever I post to twitter that I've completed another old raid or boss, people ask me what spec I'm using or what talents I'm choosing. Now, none of this is remotely as impressive as soloing Baleroc at level 80, but it's fun and pretty easy to do. I've found that I can solo any boss up to ones that require a certain class ability a warrior doesn't have, up to and including Professor Putricide in ICC-10.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: My ludicrous experimentation with offspec tanking
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 all started while I was leveling my worgen warrior, above, to level 90. I kept getting into dungeons as fury, then the tank would flake out, display a total lack of understanding of threat mechanics, or what have you. Since I didn't intend to level as prot, I hadn't really gotten a shield or 1h weapon yet, so when I inevitably got asked by a group to tank so that we could keep going through Shado-Pan, I just switched to D-Stance, threw on the few tanking pieces I had, and got to work. And it worked well enough that I decided to finally get off of my backside and work on that level 90 DPS-tank build I promised months ago. Of course, we should clarify that: This is not a valid tanking strategy for progression content and you shouldn't do it in any situation where you don't know the other players involved, unless you're simply the only alternative to not moving forward at all. After waiting 20 minutes for another tank to sign on, quite a few healers are quite amenable to arms or fury tanking. If you do this, you are tanking at a fairly steep disadvantage and are demanding a lot more of your healer. This is not the kind of thing to just spring on a poor person trying to keep the group alive, since your active mitigation in this setup is practically zero. I always made sure to tell people up front what I was doing when I was the tank of last resort, and at 90 I've only done this with groups I knew. This is something I did purely for fun. Sometimes, we actually get to have fun while playing World of Warcraft. I do not expect Blizzard to itemize for this, nor do I expect them to redesign the warrior class around the idea of this being viable. It is crazy fun, however. Offspec tanking is one of those things warriors most often find themselves doing because the tanks are dead. In those situations, you can't really do more than hit taunt, maybe switch to Defensive Stance and pop Die by the Sword to try and stay up as long as possible. If you happen to have a Shield Wall macro that equips a shield for you, you can do that too, but that's basically it. Most warrior players who want to tank will do so by speccing protection. Why wouldn't you? It's a great tanking spec.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: DPS warrior performance and perception
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 didn't read Brian Wood's excellent State of DPS in Mists of Pandaria post yet this week, you should before we go any further, because I'm going to be discussing it as well as GuildOx's study of the most popular raiding and PvP specs. What I'm seeing studying these two related but different posts (one about actual DPS, the other about representation) is as follows. Fury is twice as popular as arms for PvE DPS, but both warrior DPS specs combined are less popular than either of the popular rogue specs or any of the really popular DPS specs. Arms absolutely dominates warrior PvP, and is one of the single most popular specs in PvP at the moment. Fury's DPS is absolutely middle of the road in 10 and 25 man normal raiding right now, hovering right around the baseline. Fury sees a sudden shift upwards when going from normal to heroic raiding - Fury is a contender for the top DPS spec in 10's, and practically is the top spec in heroic 25's. Now, there's a lot that we can't say based on the data we have from these two posts - for starters, which fury, TG or SMF? These also don't tell us what talents in particular these crushingly dominant arms warriors are taking for PvP (if I had to guess, though, based on the Avatar nerf in patch 5.1 I'd go with a Bladestorm/Avatar combo) or what talents fury is using in PvE. Still, there's still a lot to talk about here. What does all of this mean?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Racial abilities and 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. The game's history shows us that racial abilities have always been a subject of contention. Since warriors are at present the only class that all 13 races can play (pandaren can't be DK's, worgen and goblins can't be monks) we're the only class that has to consider all racials. Some racials are stronger in PvE than PvP, and the inverse is also true. Still others (Arcane Torrent, Stoneform) are fairly good for both. I have over the years race changed between various options, usually for purely aesthetic reasons, but at least twice I became a night elf entirely for the night elf racial Quickness, which is astonishingly good for a tanking warrior. Now, does that mean you can't tank on anything but a night elf? No, not at all. For one thing, in our active mitigation system, hit and expertise racials are also fairly solid, but more to the point, no racial ability is so good that it must be chosen for any role. This isn't to say that some racials aren't fairly dominant in PvE or PvP, especially the latter - Every Man For Himself is always going to have a high representation among PvPing warriors. It would be foolishness to argue otherwise. My point is don't treat racials as must haves and force yourself to play a human if you'd rather play a gnome, or a forsaken when you want to play a troll. Let's take a look at all the racials and see where we end up.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The trouble with Execute
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 is not going to be a post where I tell you that warrior DPS is bad. That would be absurd. Arms is performing well and even fury can put out respectable numbers. There are problems with DPS warriors, but the problems aren't the kind that lead to low numbers. The problems are more esoteric. Fury's main problem is how staggering the dual wield miss penalty is now that there's absolutely nothing we can do save stack more hit to try and negate it, but all DPS warriors have the Execute dilemma. Again, before players of other classes come along and say "What problem? Execute hits like a truck" that is, in fact, the problem. Execute hits like a truck, all right. In fact, Execute hits like a truck full of angry bees that have just seen you crossing the street in your Winnie the Pooh costume. The problem is just how much of a DPS warrior's damage comes from Execute. It can be up to 25% of a warrior's damage, which considering it's only applicable during the last 20% of a boss fight, means that DPS warriors underperform during the learning portion of a fight, and overperform in the part of the boss fight that's at 20% or below. Now, this has been an issue since early in the Mists of Pandaria beta, with warriors in the beta test constantly bringing this up. The ability was even nerfed once we went live with Mists itself, and yet the problem persists. Why is that? What's the trouble with Execute, and what (if anything) should we see done about it?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The redundancy of hit and expertise
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 problem with hit and expertise as stats in World of Warcraft is fairly simple: they do the same thing in practice, even if not in theory. The more hit you have up to the cap (i.e. the amount of hit needed to hit a skull level mob, which is effectively level 93 in Mists of Pandaria content since we're raiding at level 90) the less likely your attacks are to miss their target. This means that not only will they successfully deal their damage, but you'll properly generate the resources said attack would generate (if any), hold threat (if that's what you're doing) and so on. Similarly, the more expertise you have up to the soft cap (the amount of expertise needed to ensure that an attack from behind a skull level mob will not be dodged) the less likely that your attacks will be dodged, which means they're more likely to successfully deal their damage, generate resources, hold threat and so on. Expertise' only real difference is that it also reduces the chance your attacks will be parried, at a much higher cost (the parry hard cap being almost twice the dodge soft cap) but, again, that just means that expertise does the same thing as hit twice. Since warriors don't need to worry about ranged attacks for the most part, we can be grateful that at least we don't really need to worry about spell hit caps and factoring both hit and expertise into spell hit chances. Since expertise caps out dodge chance and only then parry chance, it just becomes a very complicated means to determine whether or not your attacks do damage. In the end, while there's plenty of mechanical difference between hit and expertise, they do the same basic thing. The purpose to these stats is to give you something you can cap to add complexity to what would otherwise be a system where people figured out their best stat, then capped it. If crit is a warrior's best DPS stat, she'll stack crit until the cows blow up when she hits them, so by adding stats like hit and expertise you add a level where capping, reaching a certain level of X stat becomes a viable gearing strategy. The problem is really that hit and expertise, because they do basically the same thing, don't serve us well. This especially becomes true when considering these stats alongside the other stats warriors will be using in their various specs. An arms warrior's relationship to hit and expertise is different from either fury or protection. This becomes even more complicated when considering SMF versus Titan's Grip, or hit/expertise/mastery tanks vs. mastery/dodge/parry tanks.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mists of Pandaria Reputation gear
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 owe you all the reputation gear guide I promised weeks ago, and so, here it is. Never let it be said that I completely procrastinate on stuff I said I would do for weeks on end. I mean, it's true but you don't have to say it. The various quartermasters for the factions can be found here, if you're trying to figure out where to spend your precious points. They are precious, aren't they? Much like your torso. While there's ilevel 458 justice point gear, I'm going to be focusing on the epics, as those will last you longer overall. By the time you earn enough JP's to buy anything, you often have better gear from the dungeons you're running anyway. Each faction has different items - some helms, others bracers, etc - and so, ultimately, it's most rewarding to work on Golden Lotus first in order to unlock the August Celestials and Shado-Pan, since that will get you access to the most items. The Klaxxi are a good faction to work alongside the Golden Lotus until you get the Shado-Pan and August Celestials unlocked, since you'll probably unlock revered with them before you finish getting Golden Lotus to revered, and can then focus on Shado-Pan and August Celestials. We'll cover Golden Lotus and Klaxxi rewards first, since you'll have access to them first, and then the other two. It should be pointed out that if you are raiding 10 or 25 man normal Mogu'shan Vaults, you may already have access to gear on par with these rewards. That's intentional - Blizzard wants raiders to gear up from raiding, with valor points more serving the role of consolation prize if you just can't get that drop you need. But if you primarily run heroic dungeons or LFR, then these reputation rewards will be upgrades.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Tanking 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. I tank a lot. I moved back into tanking around March or so of this year, because a tank was needed, and I know how to tank. I've stayed a tank in Mists of Pandaria so far because the last thing anyone needs is another melee DPS, because I generally like tanking, and because the new tanking system has actually given me something to learn. What have I learned tanking so far? Well, lots of things, actually. Here's a few highlights. People will always want to be told what stat to stack. Saying "You should try and balance your mastery, dodge and parry, while keeping hit and expertise reasonable" is possibly the least popular thing you can tell people outside of telling them who to vote for. Shield Barrier is a lot easier to use than Shield Block, and especially in five man dungeons where you may not have a lot of rage to throw around on a pull. In a raid, you can usually time your rage acquisition to use Shield Block followed by Shield Barrier to smooth out incoming damage, but in a five man you're often tabbing around, gathering up adds, and in general using Revenge as your main rage acquisition move so you'll end up hitting Barrier for a cheap and easy damage absorb over Block. When I find myself with enough rage to hit Block, I do, but even then I usually follow it with a Barrier as soon as possible. I like the Glyph of Unending Rage a lot more than I expected to. Sure, it's a major glyph, but that extra 20 rage can actually come in handy. I like having the ability to bank rage in situations like Feng the Accursed and using it to blunt big damage spikes with a full rage bar Shield Block/Barrier combo. One of the biggest changes to tanking has nothing to do with the tank classes at all. The change to healer mana pools fixing them so that healers can't stack up a bigger mana pool means that we have to be more reactive than ever to incoming damage. The active mitigation system cannot be ignored: the more difficult the encounter the more you need to be on the ball with your Block and Barrier use and paying attention to cooldowns and mini-cooldowns like Demoralizing Shout and Demoralizing Banner. So let's talk about tanking in Mists of Pandaria.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Running Scenarios
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 love scenarios and I just figured out why. I love scenarios because I can queue up and run them as DPS, and when I do, I end up DPS tanking everything. Whether or not there's a healer, it almost always goes the same way. I queue, get in, wait to make sure everyone else is there, and start charging into things. The damage I take I mitigate with Die by the Sword, the Draenei racial and my ridiculously high parry chance. Finally, after eight years, I can get a sense of what arms tanking would be like and it's glorious. It's exactly what should have happened after Wrath of the Lich King, instead of DK's losing tanking spec versatility, warriors should have gained it. Let's rename protection into juggernaut spec, and all three trees should be able to tank or DPS! No? Just me? Ah well. At least in scenarios, this is exactly what warriors do. I come in as prot and I wreck faces, I come in arms and I Bladestorm/Sweeping Strikes everything onto me. And I'm having a blast doing it. Scenarios are perfect content for the warrior just getting used to level 90, finding your feet and trying to decide what role you want to play in instances. They're like danger room practice sessions and you get to be both Colossus and Wolverine, throwing yourself at the mobs. I find them excessively satisfying. For some, though, they might be a little daunting. So we're going to talk about how to approach the scenario as a warrior.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Pandaria and us
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 will get back to gearing, I promise, but having just hit 90 this week, I wanted to write one of those long, philosophy of warriors posts that takes an awful long time to say something fairly simple about the class. You know how I do. Because one of the things that strikes me is, as warriors, we're the worst thing to happen to the Sha in a very long time. It really struck me when running dungeons with fellows like the Sha of Violence and hunting down the Sha of Hatred in the Townlong Steppes that the warrior class is to the Sha what the Hulk was to Loki in The Avengers. Sure, they're monsters of pure emotion, but we eat emotion. We are rage. Go ahead and fuel that furnace, see where it gets you. In fact, let me tell you where it gets you - it gets you dead and it gets me loot. Or it gets me spirit plate, which is all that seems to drop. So far we've had a week to explore active mitigation tanking in a leveling setting, so it's time to talk about how the changes to Vengeance and the switch to the new system affect us in leveling content.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Gearing up in Mists of Pandaria 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. We all know this one's going to take a while. Every expansion brings with it the gear reset - without it, we'd just keep wearing our previous gear, and there'd be little point to running dungeons. Whether you're decked out in Heroic Dragon Soul gear or haven't quite hit level 85 yet, there's going to be a whole new gearing cycle, repeated with every patch. We remember it from the original game, from The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm and we'll soon get to know it again in Mists of Pandaria. There have been a few changes this time around - the reputation gear has been changed so that there's justice and valor point gear on each faction vendor, for instance. There are no level 90 dungeons, instead going straight to heroics as soon as you hit level 90. Therefore, there's gear you'll collect as you run dungeons, and gear you'll collect when you hit level 90 and start collecting the heroic dungeon versions of that gear. There's also a few epic pieces sprinkled through the dungeons. This week, we're going to talk about gearing up through dungeon running. Going from 85 through 90, dungeons remain a viable way to get gear to make leveling easier, even though I suspect attempting to level purely through dungeons will be extremely onerous. I wouldn't recommend it. We'll list each dungeon's drops both on normal (for when you're getting to 90) and heroic (once you're there).
