wow-warrior-info
Latest
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mastery, CC and other dispatches from the future
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. Sometimes I get to feeling a little like Cassandra around these parts. Oh, I understand the hubris of it, but I often can't squash the feeling. This week, we're going to talk a bit about mastery and what little we know about it for warriors, but before that, a little tidbit that almost sank into obscurity. Ghostcrawler - Re: So if cc is going to be required... Not every pull is going to require crowd control, but there will be pulls that require crowd control, which isn't really the case today. Once you overgear content you overgear it, and you can take shortcuts. We're going to make sure warriors have reasonable crowd control. Redesigning Intimidating Shout is a likely candidate. source Anyone who played a DPS warrior in BC can remember what it was like to see constant "LF 2 DPS/CC" requests in trade and LFG and to absolutely know without a doubt that it wasn't even worth responding to that Shadow Labyrinth group that was forming up. It didn't matter how good your DPS was or wasn't. You weren't getting in because you couldn't sheep, sap, shackle or seduce. The change to dungeons in Wrath that did away with most CC was bemoaned by most classes with CC and some tanks (who now had to tank everything ... I myself complained about it a few times), but for DPS warriors with no CC, it was a positive boon. So when they said CC was making a comeback, I was concerned for DPS warriors, who I expected might start finding themselves vote-kicked from instances with a lot of CC needed. Thankfully, this sounds like it will not be the case. Frankly, this is one of those sacred cows that I had no real expectation we'd see changed.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: What does arms need?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. I mentioned last week that I thought warriors were undertuned. It was a controversial message, in part because people tend to miss half of it. What I mean by it is best illustrated by things like arms warrior DPS. It is an indisputable fact that arms DPS is near the absolute bottom of the physical DPS and never even comes close to its fury cousin. In a game where fury warriors in the best gear with the best understanding of their abilities can put out DPS approaching that of a pure class, arms simply does not scale in the same exponential way. Arms warriors do not gain the kind of sustained PvE DPS from incoming rage the way fury warriors do. And with the coming of rage normalization in Cataclysm, arms warriors are exactly the reason that I am concerned with the baseline undertuning of the warrior class. Basically, rage does need to be adjusted; the competitive DPS of fury warriors with specs like ret paladins and enhancement shamans shows this, because if not for rage scaling's being out of whack, fury would be as underperforming in ICC as arms is. The fact that fury does on average 1.2k DPS more than arms (and can do as much as 3k more) shows that, once the rage rug is pulled out from under warriors, the class as a whole is going to be doing arms levels of DPS ... and arms is simply far too low in PvE.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Undertuned
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. I have to admit that I'm concerned. First off, I'm concerned that I don't have a rival on staff. There's no fun warrior/X rivalry like there is for mages and warlocks, or hunters and everyone else, or rogues and whoever cares about rogues (casters, maybe?). It's hard, as a warrior, to really feel like I'm in a rivalry with the other tanking classes since two of them can heal or transform into a giant turkey or a kitty or a fishing lure or whatever it is paladins turn into (I'm aware paladins don't turn into anything, stop typing) and death knights are just warrior 2.0, and in Cataclysm will be even more so with two DPS trees and a dedicated tanking tree. In the end, the other classes are just sort of there. You can't ignore them and you have to be aware of what they can and can't do, but it's hard to really feel any animosity towards them. Maybe I need to start calling Chase names. I've also been concerned about the changes coming in Cataclysm, and have spent a lot of time thinking about how the warrior class will play and feel once they come in. With armor and stamina differences between plate DPS and other melee coming down, other classes getting boosts to survivability in PvP and PvE, and long time warrior mainstays like Sunder Armor, Mortal Strike, Whirlwind and Heroic Strike/Cleave getting adjustments (as well as rage normalization coming in) the classic advantages of the warrior that counterbalance our deficiencies are being taken out. At first, this had me in a relative fevered pet, a consternation that has since faded somewhat. You see, if gimmicks like Whirlwind are being rebalanced to not be gimmicky, and armor/stamina edges are being reduced, and tanking tools like Sunder are being revamped, and the very mechanics of rage are being rebalanced, it all ends up in the same place: in Cataclysm, warriors will need sizable, sustained single target DPS increases to be viable, both as tanks and as dedicated DPS, because warriors are undertuned. Yes, undertuned. What do I mean by that?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The changing face of AoE
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. I can't even believe I'm typing this, but frankly, enough is enough. Yet another long thread about warrior AoE tanking in Cataclysm and frankly, I'm sick to death of the debate. Let's break this down into its simplest component parts. AoE tanking is going to be cut back in Cataclysm, as will AoE DPS. There will be more use of CC and more danger that trying to tank a lot of adds can kill the tank. With 1 and 2 being the case, warriors most likely have enough tools for multi-mob tanking situations. Ghostcrawler - Re: Twitter chat on Warrior AoE tanking Our goals are that you won't be spending as much of your tanking time AE tanking in Cataclysm as you did in Lich King. A second goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use different abilities than when you are single-target tanking. A third goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use more than one (or maybe two) abilities. None of those seem contradictory. ... Maybe I'm misremembering something, but the goal going into LK was that warriors should be able to AE tank rather than every group using paladins for trash, and that casters should be able to use their AE spells, otherwise what are they there for? We succeeded in both of those, but a little too well on the latter to the extent that anything with more than 1 mob became a job for Blizzard / Hurricane / Mind Sear, etc. In Cataclysm, there will be more threat to the tank of dying if you try to just AE tank every pull. Likewise, AE damage won't be quite as awesome so that single targeting things will probably be a better strategy when there are say 3-5 adds. If it's a dozen twilight whelps, then sure, AE away. source
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection glyphs, enchants and gems
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. Amazingly, this week I'm not going to talk about Cataclysm. Back during the 101 guides, I promised to go over glyphs, gems and enchants for the various specs. While a lot is in flux, we're still playing Wrath of the Lich King and not Cataclysm right now, so it's fair that I should finally get off of my duff and talk about these things. This week, we'll loot at gemming, enchanting and glyphing for the protection warrior. One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these options come down to your own personal gear level and what you're actually doing in game. Tanking heroic Saurfang-25 takes entirely different skills, gear and glyphs than tanking Halls of Reflection, which takes a different setup than tanking Nexus as a fresh early 70s warrior. We'll cover a variety of glyphs of use to a warrior seeking max survivability, AoE threat, or even special case uses and discuss gems and enchants, as well.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cataclysmic
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. Words. Sometimes they fail us, seem inadequate to the task in some way. Very often the fault lies not in the words but we who poorly choose them. So it feels to me today, looking back at yesterday's analysis of the Cataclysm preview for warriors. When one commenter accuses you of taking kickbacks from Blizzard to whitewash changes and another calls you a whiner, you can either decide that you're doing something right or take the opportunity to go over it all again in hopes that this time your message will be more clearly understood. And since I simply can never shut up, I'm going with option #2. It helps that we had several posts of clarifications and elaborations from the folks at Blizzard to examine. I want to stress up front, again, that while I'm not farting rainbows over every change thus far, I'm very much willing to give lots of slack to the developers as they attempt to redesign rage and revamp old mechanics for the state of the game five years after launch. In many ways, Cataclysm is a huge undertaking, dwarfing previous expansions in both scale and complexity, so bumps are to be expected on the way. So let's take a look at the new information.
Cataclysm Class Changes: Warrior analysis
Well, hey, how about that Inner Rage, huh? I seem to recall asking for something like that a couple of weeks ago. Maybe I can see the future. In which case, where are these insights when big lottery jackpots are on the line? So far, looking over the warrior changes I see some good, some bad, some very good and some we don't know yet. So let's get down to brass tacks, as it were. Bornakk Heroic Leap (Level 85): This ability makes the character leap at their target and apply the Thunder Clap ability to all enemies in the area when they land. Heroic Leap will be usable in Battle Stance and shares a cooldown with Charge, but the Juggernaut and Warbringer talents will allow Heroic Leap to be used in any stance and possibly while in combat. The cooldown for this ability might be longer than the Charge ability, but it will also apply a stun effect so you can make sure the target will still be there when you land. source I really have nothing negative here. I hope they can make it work out, since in Wrath the biggest issue with this ability was its targeting. I assume they're getting around that by making it require a target to work, as the language seems to indicate.
A quick and dirty guide to rage normalization for Warriors
So we're getting rage normalization in Cataclysm. Great, you say. What does that mean for my level 22 warrior in Darkshore? First off, shouldn't you be in Ashenvale by now? Second, rage normalization takes the random factor of rage generation and makes it more predictable, reducing its scaling factor. At present, rage is based on how much damage you deal per attack and how much damage you take, modified by things like the attacker's level and so forth. As a result, we often see peculiar artifacts of the rage system. As a DPS warrior gears up, as an example, his rage generation becomes effectively infinite: He or she does enough damage to make rage a near constant, creating a situation where the only limitation to her or his DPS is the amount of time between abilities and making on-next-swing Heroic Strike effectively unlimited in use. (This is one of the reasons HS is going to become an instant in Cataclysm.) Another artifact of this process is that as they gear up, rage-based tanks often find themselves rage starved in content they outgear, becoming less able to hold threat without removing or substituting their tanking gear. (I wrote more about the current state of rage generation here.) Rage normalization is intended to move from an exponential rage model (the more damage you do/take, the more rage you have), which penalizes lower-geared warriors and rewards the absolute best itemization, toward a more controllable system where the difference between a level 25 warrior in quest greens and a level 85 in full raid gear isn't that they are almost effectively different classes.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Terror, fear, loathing and rage
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. Rage is a broken mechanic. It's broken in that it allows DPS warriors (well, okay, fury warriors) to do DPS almost equivalent to that of "pure" DPS classes, if the warriors are wearing the absolutely perfectly ideal gear setup and are in an encounter that is absolutely, perfectly suited to them (i.e., one that allows for a lot of Heroic Strike and Cleave spamming with minimal lost time that keeps rage generation down). It's also broken in that it constricts lesser-geared warriors to doing a fraction of equivalent hybrid-class DPS. Rage is broken in that it starts at zero, forcing a warrior to either take damage or deal white damage to generate rage or use an ability like Bloodrage, while other classes start with some or all of their resources and can open up with a powerful ability to start. This makes it far harder for warrior tanks to generate snap aggro and keeps warriors from having any sort of a rotation, forcing them to rely on priority systems instead. Both tanking and DPS warriors tend to find themselves spamming abilities to generate threat/damage, with one of the biggest culprits being Heroic Strike.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The problems with DPS
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. Okay, patch 3.3.3 dropped this week. The Revenge change? Pretty darn awesome. The change to Imp Revenge makes it really great for PvE. The change to Vitality was a nice bump in our health. But since I've covered tanking topics for weeks now, it's long past time I make good on my promise and talk about DPS. First off, they already hotfixed the 4pcT10 set bonus down from its near 100% up time back down to the 20% intended proc chance. That's a shame, because for one brief, shining moment, our 4 piece set bonus was almost as good as the rogue 2 piece. Of course, there was a nice duration buff to Trauma, a much less nice nerf to Bladestorm, and Rampage changed to a passive aura (meaning that now I have to use Bloodrage if I need to use Enraged Regeneration, but otherwise I'm happy). We can talk about Rend Dancing. What, pray tell, is rend dancing? Well, it's fitting Rend into a fury warrior's DPS rotation. The reason this works (when it does) is because a fury warrior's DPS rotation has a lot of dead space between abilty and global cooldowns and waiting for procs to switch stances and put Rend on a target for more DPS. Generally speaking, a macro to switch you into Battle, apply rend, then switch you back to Berserker is very useful for Rend Dancing.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: But hitting buttons is fun!
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. Honestly, believe it or not, I'd actually like to talk about DPS today. My current raiding guild has between three and four regular tanks who show up for most every 25 man raid. As you might expect, you don't need three to four tanks for ICC. At this point in the raid's life cycle, if you have two tanks you can get through most everything except Putricide and maybe Blood Princes. (We have used two tanks and a DPS for this fight, but we usually use our feral tank for it, so three tanks.) Marrowgar at this point can be done by two geared tanks and a plate DPS standing up there mashing away, although to play it safe we usually just use three. So last night, after tanking Sindragosa, I got to DPS on Arthas, which is fun for a warrior. (Ah, Glyph of Cleaving, you make up for the mechanical deficiencies of my class.) Then I went and did some stupid fun heroics with a warrior tank, arms warrior, another fury warrior and a resto druid who kept healing in bear form. (I know they can't cast healing spells in bear form. He'd occasionally pop out and throw a HoT on folks. It was pretty much all we needed.) So it wall all sorts of DPS warrior fun last night. And then I went and read this endlessly exploding threat on tanking and now I have to talk about it. Why? Well, first off, Ghostcrawler mentions Monte Cook. That hits all of my nerd buttons. (If only you'd thrown in a plug for Kingmaker, Greg.) Secondly, we both hated the old Shield Block mechanic and we both hate the current Heroic Strike one. Ghostcrawler - Re: Just get rid of dodge and parry altogether I understand your point, but I hated old Shield Block. It was always the right button to push whenever it came off cooldown. It wasn't an interesting decision – there was no point in saving it for the right moment and no penalty for using it at the wrong time. It's okay to have some relatively spammy buttons, but old Shield Block crossed the line (and current Heroic Strike still does). source
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: I cannot see the future
Frankly, the Bladestorm nerf is a minor one, albeit an extremely annoying minor one. Granted, it means that opposing rogues, warriors and sometimes hunters (ah, hunters, the Y's of WoW) will be able to turn the major source of "And now YOU DIE" available to arms warriors in PvP into "Whee, I'm a pretty ballerina watch me spin". Arms is still pretty strong if it's geared to the absolute teeth and has significant backup, which is about the best you can expect from a warrior in PvP. PvP for a warrior has always been "die ten million times to other classes until you finally get geared enough to get some payback and then get nerfed because they don't like it when their free kill turns around and kills them back" anyway. This is just more of the same and not even really significant more of the same, it's a very minor change that only rankles because it's piled on the back of more significant (and in some cases more ridiculous) nerfs to the class. It irritates me, sure, but let's be honest: that's not terribly hard to accomplish. Arms in general has been getting the crap end of the stick this expansion. It's ludicrously difficult to gear for it in PvP, it got outperformed by protection for a while, and in PvE you end up as a bleed bot for feral druids while the fury warriors scale better even with all the neat tricks arms can do. Of course, part of this is ye old 'hybrid tax' which penalizes you for playing a class that has a tanking spec. There have been back and forth arguments on that... is it fair, should it exist at all, what would become to pure DPS classes without it (oh, boo hoo, we must protect the poor vulnerable little rogues and mages, let's set up a bloody nature preserve for the precious little darlings so they won't be threatened) etc etc. This week, I'm not here to debate whether or not it should exist or how it should be applied. It's here, we have to deal with it. Instead, I'm here to argue that due to the fact that it exists, DPS specs for warriors become even more important and must be as viable for as broad an application as possible. The time has come for the warrior to no longer have dedicated trees for specific roles. With the coming of Mastery, we're looking at an opportunity for real, meaningful change to the class that I hope Blizzard embraces. It's time for arms, fury and protection (yes, protection) to be viable tanking and DPS trees.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: On Future Tanking
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about exquisite little bejeweled eggs crafted by master craftsmen over a painstaking six year period. Or maybe it's about angry dudes in plate armor hitting things. Matthew Rossi was going to write about DPS this week, but then there was much discussion about tanking and plans changed. Frankly, we've talked quite a bit about prot warriors lately, and I wanted to discuss arms with the trauma change and what i see as fundamental limiting factors in the arms spec that do not need to be there. But if you read our Daily Blues feature, or just read the forums directly, you know that there's been some sustained discussion of warrior tanks and their tanking tools and I just have to jump in and comment. I'm going to pick apart the posts Ghostcrawler made and respond where I think appropriate. Before we move on to that, let me make it clear: I do not now and I have never been of the opinion that at present tanking or threat generation is 'too easy' or that a design model that counts on a specific and painfully rigid talent spec or being given threat handouts by mechanics such as Tricks of the Trade or Misdirection is the way to go for any tanking class, warrior or otherwise. When I see a statement like "Tricks and MD take too much of a burden off of the tank / hide issue #3" that indicates to me that giving DPS classes these abilities has created a scenario wherein tanks can't even gauge their own threat generation abilities adequately. That is, plain and simple, bad design. Do I hate Tricks or MD? No, of course not. But I hate that they've allowed real flaws in tanking threat design to be, effectively, masked or plastered over. A tank should be more than a big brick of meat that other people hand threat to, he should be working to generate threat. If scaling does not allow a tank to do this, then scaling is not working properly.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The homogenization factor
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is Matthew Rossi's valentine to warriors. (Yeah, I know it was two weeks ago.) One of the effects of the design goals for Wrath of the Lich King that should be lauded was the attempt (with varying degrees of success) to finally move hybrids into true viability in whatever roles they sought to perform within the limits of their class being intended to fulfill said roles. People who laughed at retribution paladins, boomkin, or shadow priests before Wrath would probably feel a good deal of whiplash to look at the state of the raiding game now. (This is not to imply that said classes/specs don't have issues, mind you, but I think it fair to say that said specs are all stronger now than they were in Burning Crusade.) Ironically, for warriors the 'hybrid' label has led to a general lessening of ability. Before Wrath, warriors were designed as a class that could tank or DPS, but not specifically as a 'hybrid' class in that their DPS role was not designed to be limited by a 'hybrid tax'. Similarly, while warrior struggled with rage normalization in early BC tanking, there were a great many endgame raid encounters that were designed with a warrior tank in mind and then a general mindset of 'oh, and this guy can do it if you don't have a warrior for whatever reason'. Of course, there were some fights warriors were just plain miserable on... Zul'Aman's Jan'alai was pure, sweaty agony for a warrior to try and offtank, for instance, and if you didn't have a paladin for the Hyjal trash waves, you'd get one.) In general, homogenization has been both a blessing (no target limit on Thunder Clap, Damage Shield) and a curse (DPS lowered to keep pace with hybrids instead of pure DPS classes, loss of 'main tank' status) to warriors, especially with the arrival of the hugely popular death knight class as well as the rise of the retribution and protection specs for paladins. DK's can do anything a warrior can do and they don't have to pick a specific tree to do it, while paladins can do anything a warrior can do as well as heal. That being said, I'm actually here to argue that this is good for the warrior as a class. Please hold off on launching rancid fruit at me until the end of the column.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Threatening
Yes, I still owe you an enchant, gem and glyph 101. However, I want to really get all my ducks in a row for it and cover both PvP and PvE glyph choices for all three specs. As one example of how complicated it can get, if you're running exclusively in five man content, you'll use different glyphs for your prot set than if you're raid tanking. I personally switch glyphs several times a day (in fact, my glyph switching has become what respeccing was before dual specs, a necessary step for different tanking situations) - I tend to use Devastate, Cleaving and Heroic Strike as my 5 man majors while I still use Last Stand, Shield Wall and either Vigilance or Taunt for raids. (Sometimes I mix these up and use Heroic Strike or Devastate for my raid glyphs as well.) Meanwhile, I use arms as my PvP spec and fury as my PvE spec, so in addition to re-speccing every time I intend to do some battlegrounds, I have to put in all new glyphs and even have an entirely different set with different stat weights and gems (for instance, a lot of my armor pen gear has expertise on it that's entirely wasted for my arms spec but needed for my fury spec) -- this all needs to be addressed in any post about gems and glyphing. But for now, lets deal with a more pressing issue.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms 101
This week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors continues its look at the warrior specs with Arms 101. Matthew Rossi spends some time this week talking about that peculiar form of finesse that involves smashing things with a two handed weapon. We've talked about protection, the tanking spec, and we've talked about fury, the Tasmanian Devil spec. This week, we're talking about arms. We defined fury last week as the spec for people who want to kill things, and that's fair, but if fury is that, what's arms? Well, fury is the 'kill it kill it kill it until it's dead and then kill it some more' spec, defined by Blizzard as the 'screaming barbarians in woad'. Arms, however, is the finesse spec. Yes, that's right, I'm defining the spec that relies on using a great whacking axe, polearm, sword or mace as 'finesse'. Welcome to the warrior class, where the fanciest Dan at the party is still a hulking madman in plate. As the class Q&A put it: However, we would like to reinforce a little more the kits of Arms and Fury. Everyone (I hope) gets the difference between Frost and Fire mages. Arms is supposed to be about weapons and martial training and feel "soldierly." Fury is supposed to be about screaming barbarians in woad. You get a sense of that, but it could be stronger. Indeed it could, and for my money, eventually will be, but that in a nutshell is arms. Fury is about grabbing anything big enough and beating on things until they're paste. Arms is about style, about finesse, about perfect control of your weapon, and about taking advantage of openings for huge, devastating blows that get around normal conventions and defenses. If you like the idea of being really, really good at hitting people with a sword the size of a barn door, then arms is for you.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury 101
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is here to hurt things this week. Hurt them, make them bleed, make them die, stand over their corpses and find something else to kill. Hear the warsong hammering in your ears? Let it out. Let it out and show the world your rage. Matthew Rossi knows that sometimes, dead is better. Last week, we talked about Protection. Protection warriors are the tanks of the warrior class, the guys who stand up there and bang on their shields and bang their shields into things ranging the gamut from large horrible squamous tentacle monsters in Old Kingdom to giant walking bone piles in ICC. And that's fine: somebody has to keep the monsters and bosses of the game focused on a hard target so the rest of us can kill it. It's good to see prot warriors alongside bears, walking corpses and daisy picking fancylads doing the tank job. (I kid you paladins because my heart is black and full of envy.) It's good that there are warrior tanks. But that's not you, is it? You haven't read this far because you want to tank. If you did, you'd have clicked that link and been on your merry way. You don't want to tank. You don't want to stand up front and keep monsters attention focused like some kind of giant nursery school teacher for the horrors of Azeroth. No, you don't want to tank. You want to kill things. You want to rip them into bloody gobbets and leave their ruined, looted corpses in your wake. You want to wear two huge weapons crossed on your back and reach up to draw them forth as soon as things get ugly, which can't come soon enough in your opinion. You want to get on up there and rip things heads clean off. You're the kind of person who thinks Grom Hellscream had a good idea but didn't go far enough with it. Come right this way. Fury is the spec for you.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection warriors 101
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is WoW.com's weekly column for warriors. This week, we jump on the bandwagon. Matthew Rossi tends to miss jumping on bandwagons, fall, and hurt himself, followed by a lot of swearing. It's actually somewhat entertaining to watch. There is, ultimately, only one thing warriors actually do. We hit things. We don't poison them, we don't electrocute them, we don't burn them or freeze them or hit them with diseases or the Holy Light. We just hit them.We don't turn into anything, we don't stand back and let an animal hit things for us, we just plain hit things. We hit things and get angry, and we get hit and get angry about that, too. That being said, warriors can specialize in one of two ways to hit things. One is to heft a big two handed weapon (or two of them) and hit things to death. The other is to put on the heaviest armor we can find, strap a car door to our arm, and get things to hit us as hard as they can, and then hit them back. This week, we look at protection, the "Is that all you got? Is that it? COME ON!" spec. 1. What is protection? Well, read the above. Now we'll go into more detail. The warrior protection spec is the oldest actively used tanking spec in World of Warcraft. Tanking is the role in a five man, 10 man raid, or 25 man raid (and originally 10, 15, 20 and 40 man raids as well) where one player deliberately attempts to hold a mob or multiple mobs attention so that they do not attack the healers and/or damage dealing players. To do this, tanks need to work on two separate but equally important aspects of play. They must hold aggro. Aggro (derived from aggression) is the hostile attention of the mob or mobs in question. They must survive the damage inflicted on them by the mob or mobs long enough to be healed. No, really, you need to do these two things. Otherwise, you're not tanking, you're just a greasy stain on something's fist and/or other means of killenating. Yes, I said killenating. What, you're too good for made-up words?
Ghostcrawler on AoE tanking: "The paladin method...is probably too good"
In a follow up to the thread we discussed recently, Ghostcrawler discusses where the buff to protection warrior DPS will come from (sorry, guys, but it sounds like a buff to Devastate to me, yay for spamming) and a whole lot more. The discussion indicates that while they're interested in single target DPS increases over AoE increases that they don't think tank DPS is that big a factor in boss fights (and to be fair, he's right, it isn't a major factor although the fact that players will overreact to minor factors and stress out their tanks over their DPS, that is) and moves on from there. The discussion about Devastate (that it's an easy ability to adjust) is fair enough but ignores the even easier solution of simply reducing the defensive stance penalty. To be honest I'd like to hear why there's still a penalty there when abilities like Righteous Fury and Frost Presence suffer none. I find the idea that buffing defensive stance would cause big problems for PvP balance kind of absurd. Battle stance grants 15% ArP and Zerker grants 3% crit, at most people would pop into d stance when focused, like they do now anyway. But we're likely to see buffs to Devastate, so just get used to it. My suggestion? While we're buffing Devastate, also have it queue Heroic Strike for us so that's one less button to spam and I can retire my macro.
You won't get a pony, but prot will get sustained DPS increase
In a forum thread discussing the recent prot warrior block changes and Warbringer nerf and the state of prot warrior DPS (it's basically acknowledged as the lowest DPS among the tanks) Ghostcrawler chimes in that they intend to buff sustained prot DPS while reducing burst in PvP. However, he quickly comes back to point that at this stage in the expansion they don't want to make any sustained mechanical changes and so, don't expect one. The sustained DPS increase will come from buffs to existing abilities. While I can understand the trepidation from prot warriors at this statement (no one is terribly excited about a buff to Devastate, not even me) it's an unfortunate but valid point he makes here. You really don't have the time to make drastic mechanical changes this far into the cycle. We might like a more drastic solution, but with Cataclysm looming on the horizon you don't really want to see too much tinkering with the base mechanics. Still, please don't just buff Devastate. Please. I'm begging you here.
