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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Snapshots of tanking tomorrow
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. There's been a lot of news about class balance lately. Not only did the devs do a live Q&A recently (here are the important -- that is, the warrior-related -- answers), but they've also been commenting and clarifying on the forums. There's a lot of interesting stuff to consider, and so here we go considering it and the ramifications it all brings or will bring. Here's just one example. Daxxari - Mastery Raid Buff Quote: Q: "Currently block is a superior mastery to Blood Shield and Savage Defense. Are there any plans to bring the masteries closer together?" A: Yes, in 5.0. Block capping and mastery in general is currently too good for warriors and paladins. We think tank balance is close enough in 4.3 that dramatic overhauls could make matters worse. In 5.0 we will change things. source Right now, mastery is decent for arms, terrible for fury, and very solid for protection warriors. Apparently, it's too good for protection right now. While both paladins and warriors use block somewhat differently (Critical Block and Shield Block work together very well), it's pretty easy for either to get pretty high block. Since the active mitigation tanking model didn't manifest in time for patch 4.3, it seems likely that the mastery and block issue will be addressed when that rolls out. It's frustrating, but right now all we can do is wait and see.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Best things about 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. We talked about how specializations will work for us warrior folks in Mists of Pandaria last week, so this week I wanted to ground us. So I turned to the lovely folks on Twitter and asked them what they thought we should talk about. Some of the topics they suggested would make full-fledged columns of their own, but others can be handled in bite-sized chunks. That's what I'm going to do today. Please remember you can always find me on twitter at @matthewwrossi if you want to pose me a question. I'll do my best to answer one way or another. @Neener_nina asked: what race/gender combinations look best in plate? For both factions? Well, it's no secret I'm a sucker for Tauren. I generally think that big, blocky races look the best in plate because it allows for all the detail to really show. But to be fair, let's do a best to worst ranking for both factions, completely and totally biased, and let you see what I think and why.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Specializations 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. We are about to live in interesting times, my friends. Last week's BlizzCon effectively promised us most, if not all, of the candy I wanted. With the full awareness that this is all subject to change, take a look at the mock-up for abilities (not talents, core abilities) that all fury warriors will get as they level from 1 to 90 in the revamped Mists of Pandaria scheme. With the announcement that Slam will be an arms-only ability, I personally suspect that Wild Strike is the replacement for Bloodsurge's Slam proc. More importantly, you'll note a few things. One I really want to highlight at the start are the no-brainer talents that aren't talents anymore, like Flurry, Raging Blow, Bloodsurge and both Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury. You'll also note that you don't have to choose between TG and SMF. You get both at level 38. I used the fury abilities screenshot because that's the one I managed to get. If Blizzard did an arms or protection one, I didn't see it. But all three talent specializations are worth discussing, because we're heading into a future where your talent choices are no longer constrained by spec.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Wild, wild speculation and the BlizzCon effect
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, how about that change to Mortal Strike? I mentioned a few weeks back that it felt to me like arms had lost its teeth in PvP, that it needed all of its cooldowns lined up to really put the hurt on anyone and that it had lost its identity as a force to be reckoned with. Does this change restore it? Well, yes and no. Yes, in that it will indisputably increase arms (and rogue, and hunter pet) potency in the PvP setting. No, in that it will not increase it by all that much. A 10% healing debuff is trivial. A 25% healing debuff is more than twice as good, but we'll see if that means much against healers at the level of gear they're going to have. What the MS change really did to my brain (especially as I write this on the verge of BlizzCon, where hopefully many secrets will be revealed) is think about what I would like them to do for all three warrior specs. What do I want to see? What would I never, ever want to see again? Let us peer into this completely imaginary crystal ball and speculate. This post will be broken up into two parts. Part one will be my pre-BlizzCon speculations. Then, in part two, I'll come back after BlizzCon and react to what the announcements are, and see how close I managed to get to the mark.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 4.3 and its implications
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 admit I was hoping there would be more changes to warriors to talk about by now. At least so far, the patch 4.3 PTR has been fairly quiet on the warrior front. Sure, fury got a nerf, and a fairly large one. Fury's been the melee spec that's actually done good damage this raid tier, so I knew the writing was on the wall for it. What I didn't expect was the particular blend of buff and nerf that the spec has seen. Meanwhile, arms and protection have not changed at all, and this far into the PTR, I find that kind of baffling. Nerfing Dual-Wield Specialization to remove the 5% physical damage bonus -- that, I understand. It's an easy Band-Aid to rip off of the spec to flat-out reduce all damage done, and with all physical attack power buffs adding 20% instead of 10% melee AP in 4.3, it's likely we won't really even feel it. What that change does is lower fury's base so that it doesn't scale better than every other melee once the AP changes are in. No, I'm not surprised at all by that, and I wouldn't be surprised if Precision gets a nerf as well to reduce our white damage slightly. While I absolutely do not agree with these changes, believe them justified in any way, or support them, I at least understand them.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms in PVE and PVP
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 promised you arms PVP. Instead, I'm going to give you arms in both PVP and PVE over the next two weeks. Frankly, in my opinion, arms is the warrior tree in the most need of adjustment. It does not perform up to par in PVE once you get into raid gear, and while it offers some great PVP control, it lacks the true punishing power it once held. Without the feared Mortal Strike debuff of previous expansions, arms needs to pop reasonably long cooldowns and use its full arsenal of stuns and interrupts and snares to even have a chance to do what other classes can in PVP. What's worse, the arms playstyle, while extremely engaging and a lot of fun in terms of its pure mobility, nice tricks, and ability to throw out solid burst, can become extremely difficult to perform to its fullest.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A week on the patch 4.3 PTR
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 mean that headline quite literally -- I have been on the PTR pretty much every available moment since it dropped. I've run End Time close to 40 times now. I've messed around with transmog, copied over my warrior four times and run amok with options, done some DPS and tanking and mused over the set bonuses for tier 13. In general, I've gorged on the PTR like Thrall running headlong into hostile mobs in Durnholde Keep. As soon as I get a chance to run The Hour of Twilight, I'll let you know if he still yells I did not ask for this while throwing himself bodily at six hostiles. Frankly, Thrall, you so asked for this. So what do I think of Patch 4.3 at this early, early date? I'm glad I rhetorically asked. Well, for one thing, I am loving transmogging my gear like you would not believe. I'm vacillating between a mix of Onslaught and Ymirjar Lord's (I like the tier 10 chest and legs with Onslaught everything else) and the classic Horde level 60 PVP gear. But as much fun as transmogging is, it's hardly the meat and potatoes of this patch.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The visual set for warriors, part 2
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. At present it looks unlikely that other classes are getting dragon-aspect-themed tier 13 sets. This means that as of right now, with mage, warlock, druid, shaman, rogue and paladin sets also revealed, the warrior set is indisputably the best-looking set so far. We look awesome. Warrior tier sets in general tend to always look, at the very least, good and serviceable. One of the innovations moving from Naxxramas' tier 3 to The Burning Crusade's tier sets is that it took the idea of the warrior design aesthetic and branched it out to cover both role warriors could play in raids. When we talked about the visual set for warriors in classic WoW two weeks ago, one of the most glaring notes was that tanking sets got the unified look of a tier while DPS sets were cobbled together from various non-set pieces and had no unifying theme to characterize them. There was essentially one tier set per raid, and it was either tanking or tank-capable. Both Zul'Gurub and Ahn'Qiraj presented warriors with "sets" that were composed of both DPS and tank pieces.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: PVP with a PVE spec -- protection
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 part 2 of our look at PVPing with a spec mainly thought of by others as a PVE spec. Protection has waxed and waned in popularity as a PVP spec since Wrath of the Lich King launched. Its mobility, stun potential and kite resistance (as well as some nice spell interrupt utility), combined with excellent survival, weigh against its lack of raw burst potential. Protection can do many things well in PVP, from carrying a flag or protecting a tower or cap point to tanking in Alterac Valley or the Isle of Conquest, but its strengths are balanced by one factor. Compared to other warrior specs, protection in PVP just plain lacks the raw killing throughput of arms or fury. This doesn't mean a prot warrior can't get off a Shield Slam that will make another player cross-eyed, because it can and does. But unlike arms, when prot charges a target and stuns it, even using Shockwave immediately afterwards, it simply isn't likely to burst out anything close to the raw damage of the non-tanking specs. If you're prot in PVP, you should be maximizing your strengths, not dwelling on your weaknesses.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Tier 13 and the visual set for warriors, 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. I was all set to talk about prot PVP when Blizzard went and released a preview of tier 13 for warriors. Frankly, I think it was a little cruel of them. For one thing, we now know that warriors win the gear look competition for tier 13. Sorry, everyone. If for some reason I'm right and Blizzard's going with Aspect-themed armor sets, I apologize to whatever classes get the Ysera and Alexstrasza sets. But it's also cruel because they didn't release any specifics about the set at all. All we know is how it will look (pretty awesome) and not what it will do. What will the set bonuses be like? Are we again going to be in a position where there's no shoulder option outside of tier? These are questions that keep me up at night, people. In the blog post that revealed our tier 13 look, there's also a visual overview of every currently existing warrior tier set. We did a big post on transmogrification a couple of weeks back, so it seems like now's a good time to start talking about that again. Rather than just throw tier at you over and over again, though, I'd like to try for something more thoughtful. With Blizzard giving us a chance to look at every set of tier gear for the class, let's talk about the cosmetic approach of the warrior over World of Warcraft's existence. This will probably take me a few weeks to get through, so I'm going to alternate it with the PVP series already in progress.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: PVP with a PVE spec -- fury
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Last week we talked about transmogrification, and although I have more I'd like to say about that, I have been promising to talk about PVP for a while now. And in fact, I do PVP quite a bit. The problem is, I PVP as either protection or fury. I do a lot of battlegrounds, I hit Tol Barad about once a day, and I do rated BGs fairly frequently. What have I learned from all this? Fury is a surprisingly viable PVP spec. My raiding spec has room for mobility and versatility talents, so I don't even have to respec to PVP effectively. If I were a PVPer primarily instead of secondarily, I'd probably tweak my build for Furious Attacks, but I do fine without it. I prefer Titan's Grip to SMF for PVP use. I also raid with TG, but I've tried both and I just prefer being able to pop my cooldowns and throw a Bloodthirst/Raging Blow combo on someone after an intercept and get the burst potential of TG. Fury does lack some of the tools arms or protection can bring. If you've PVPed as arms lately, you'll know how addictive Charge/Throwdown/Bladestorm can be. Prot has a lot of tools for stunning, silencing, interrupting and otherwise hindering casters. Fury lacks these tools. If you're doing fury PVP, you're basically hoping to do as much damage as fast as possible. Doing as much damage as fast as possible is ludicrously fun. I'm going to be honest here: The reason I like fury PVP is because it's all or nothing. In an Arena setting, I expect I would just get burst down every time, but in the mad chaos of group PVP fury has the potential of doing sudden, savage damage to a single target or even a group, interrupt flag capture, hinder base turnover, and in general just be a gigantic prickly ball o'death at the worst possible time for the enemy. So let's talk about fury PVP.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Transmogging for the warrior
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. Frankly, I wrote a serious post this week about tanking that you may want to read. As a result of that post, however, and previous week's posts for this column that were fairly weighty, I find myself desperately wanting to shift gears. While considering a beginner's guide to PVP and a beginner's guide to leveling as DPS, I realized that I've played this game for years and collected a lot of gear over that time. With the announcement of transmogrification in patch 4.3, it's finally time to discuss a few truths. Warriors have had some of the best-looking gear in the game. We're finally going to be able to use whichever pieces of gear we want. I want to talk about sweet-looking gear. By these forces combined, I am Captain Clotheshorse. So I've dusted out the ol' trusty model viewer and I'm going to talk about gear you may want for your warrior's transmog needs. Like, for instance, the Whirlwind Axe. One of three weapons awarded to a warrior for doing the pre-Cataclysm level 30 to 40 warrior quest chain, the one that ended with Death to Cyclonian. If you didn't roll your warrior before Cata or deleted the weapon, fret not; there are several weapons with the same model.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Speculation on tanking design
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. And yes, if transmogging went live tomorrow, that would be what he would look like in raids. Last week, I talked about new warrior tanks at level 85 and promised this week to talk about what a new 85 tank can do to increase his or her threat. This week, Blizzard increased all tank threat significantly. The increase is so significant, in fact, that I don't see any real benefit to writing what I was going to write. If you were having trouble holding threat, I can't imagine you are now. Even if as a tank you do less than 6k DPS, that 6k DPS will become 30,000 threat per second, which will require your DPSers to put out 33k DPS sustained to pull threat off of you. Some 8-10k tanking DPS, which is what I usually see in most PUGs, will require between 44-55k DPS to pull threat. In short, I expect to see threat issues marginalized to the point of absurdity. With tanking heading toward the active mitigation model currently used by death knight tanks, it's probably the best time we could possibly have during an expansion's life cycle to contemplate sweeping changes. The issue I have with that is, frankly, protection warriors are probably the best-designed tanks in terms of toolkit and involvement. Prot warriors are a strong leveling spec, good at their primary role, and have a well-designed suite of abilities for just about any contingency. I neither wish to see them become more or less than they are now. So how, with active mitigation about to roll out as a concept, should warriors change? What follows are some of my ideas, because I love to speculate about this class.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The newly 85 warrior tank blues
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. Okay, so you leveled as protection. Let's assume you intend to tank on said warrior. Since you're now level 85, it follows that you should look up what the top raiding tanks are doing and do that, yes? No. Sweet candy-coated Garrosh clusters, no, you should not do that. Those guys are wearing gear you haven't even started to collect and are in 10- or 25-man raids that are composed of some of the best players in the world. You're just starting. You're most likely going to be tanking in pickup groups where the other four players are complete strangers who neither know you nor care one whit about your gameplay. In some cases, sure, you'll get a good group and everyone will work together and kill the monsters as a unit. That's great. I'm here to write columns to help you out, and frankly, you don't need help with good groups. You need my help for the groups with the fury warrior in full Firelands gear who shows up in your heroic Deadmines run and does 28k DPS. (I said I was sorry.) You need my help for the ret paladin who doesn't know what his interrupt is called (Rebuke) or the mage who won't cast Polymorph because it's just going to break anyway when he starts jumping around casting Arcane Explosion constantly for no reason. This week, we're going to talk about how to gear and play a tank starting out in normal level 85 instances and the first tier of Cataclysm heroics.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A beginner's guide to leveling as protection
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. Having talked about Firelands for a while and then the rather esoteric concept of reforging and optimizing your gear, this week we're going to switch gears and talk about leveling in Cataclysm. Specifically, we're going to talk about leveling as protection, which quite possibly is the best leveling spec for a new player. This guide is aimed at people who are just starting the game or the class. Leveling as protection in the post-Cataclysm landscape offers several advantages. Once you reach level 14 or so, you can begin queuing for instances as a tank, leading to fast experience and rewards. This makes gearing up a protection warrior fairly easy. If you intend to tank in the endgame, leveling as protection will allow you to learn the role as you level rather than having to pick it up all at once. Protection works well as a PVP spec in many brackets as you level. Especially as you hit Outlands and Northrend, protection offers a good combination of survivability and the ability to destroy mobs for ease of questing, even for quests that normally indicate a group. Prot warriors can often pull more mobs and solo faster than DPS warriors. Vengeance is a lot of fun. If you're playing an alt, there are now several heirlooms for tanking warriors. Hitting things in the face with a shield is pretty awesome -- I'm not going to lie. Quite frankly, even if you don't intend to tank at max level, protection can be an extremely fun way to level. Let's take a beginner's-eye view.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Reforging and gear optimization resources for warriors
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Last week, I complained that I was still DPSing in ZA shoulders. This week, Cho'gall finally dropped the tier 11 shoulder token. I got one day's worth of use out of it. And then Majordomo Staghelm dropped the tier 12 shoulder token. The lesson? Complain about drop rates when writing columns. You know what else doesn't drop enough? Everything I want, that's what. As you might expect, my recent fortune in terms of new gear (I also got a nice new hat) got me thinking about how to best gem, enchant and reforge my gear in order to make maximum use out of it all. This is nothing new to this expansion, of course, but the cumulative effect of the variety of options we now have to customize our gear means it can all be somewhat complex to get everything lined up the way we want it. This is where various gear optimization tools come into play. Much as we used to use (and still do use) spreadsheets to tell us which pieces of gear will provide maximum benefit, we now use gear optimizers to tell us what to do to our gear once we have it -- what gems should we use, which socket bonuses are worth gemming away from our usual and which ones aren't, what enchants in which slots will help us get maximum effect. Sure, you can do this all manually, but with some statistics having hard caps and others having soft caps, and each piece of new gear changing each stat's amounts, it can be pretty daunting. Whether you're raiding in the Firelands or just beginning to get gear that can even take a reforge, it's worth taking a look at a few resources.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: DPS in the Firelands
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. Now that we've covered gearing up in detail, it's time to talk about what to do with that gear. Now that the Firelands have been out for a while, we've all had a chance to get in there and kill some mobs. That includes me; I have also had a chance to do that. So what have I experienced in my excursions to the hell of upside-down fire elementals? (Okay, they're not upside-down.) For starters, all three DPS warrior specs are really close together right now. In my experience, arms and fury DPS is neck-and-neck, with arms performing better on some fights and fury better on others. Also, SMF and TG fury are both pretty viable, with TG seeming to move ahead once you're using a pair of Firelands 2H weapons. Once again, gearing up takes you past the nerfs in a few weeks. I basically raid with a fury spec and an arms spec, and some nights I respec from TG to SMF and/or the other way around. (Now that my axes have dropped, I usually stay TG.) My DPS was much poorer going into Firelands than it is now. The difference was pretty dramatic, and while I'm hardly blowing ahead to the top of the charts, DPS is solid again. Basically, what's controlling my DPS (again) is encounter design (again). Be prepared to use your utility abilities. Rallying Cry. Remember it? You'd better, because it's a raid-wide cooldown that you're definitely going to be using on Majordomo Staghelm. Speaking of Majordomo, if you have Seeds on you and you blow up the raid, it's because you forgot you have one of the best abilities in the game to get out to range in time and then some of the best abilities in the game to get back in. Blizzard needs to very quickly create and implement a set of non-tier DPS plate shoulders. Look at me -- I'm still wearing ZA shoulders. I am knee-deep in Firelands every week. I've killed Domo several times now. Why won't you give me shoulders? There is absolutely no option for plate DPS save tier, although there are several pairs of tanking shoulders. This is bloody insane, and it needs to be addressed. Firelands or the valor point vendors need more loot, guys. So let's discuss the Firelands from a DPS warrior perspective.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How to spend your valor points
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. Patch 4.2 is in full swing by now, with most players having unlocked either the Shadow Wardens or the Druids of the Talon for the various vendors. Many guilds are already working on heroic modes, and even more are fighting their way through the raid to one degree or another. And what does this all mean to us warriors? Well, it means new gear, for one thing. The past couple of weeks, we've discussed gear you could pick up in the Firelands raid itself as well as via reputation rewards and unlockable vendors (and a quest chain). Now, it's time to discuss what you can buy for valor points, since we're getting close to the third week and you should have been able to pick up some points as well as had a shot at Occu'thar. Before we go into the big list o' loot, I wanted to say that a couple of weeks in, I'm feeling like I'm getting a handle on how warriors perform in the Firelands raid. It's like I figured: Once again, warriors need to get geared up to equal other DPSers. I feel that for right now, arms DPS is the easiest to sustain, then SMF fury, and finally TG fury. I expect TG will pull ahead once I'm using a couple of Firelands weapons. On a fight like Rhyolith or Staghelm, I can sustain more DPS than on an Alysrazor or Shannox, where I have to target switch more, move around to chase down mobs or avoid damage and even interrupt. I think perhaps the nerfs to fury were more than was needed, but we'll see once a couple more weeks are gone and we're talking about set bonuses and Firelands level weapons. Speaking of set bonuses, let's start talking about valor point rewards.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Firelands reputation rewards
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. Patch 4.2 is still here. And we're all rolling through the Firelands, some of us already on heroic modes, some of us still clearing some bosses, others working on the dailies. Something for everyone. Today, we're going to talk about the loot you can get out of the Firelands without actually getting a single drop from a boss. Some of these rewards require you to kill trash for rep (or even bosses, in the case of Avengers of Hyjal rewards past honored), but others you can get through Marks of the World Tree or even from the Thrall quest line added in patch 4.2. Before we talk about all that, though, I have to say that if you're able to raid Firelands, even on a limited schedule, you really should. These are some of the best-designed, most well thought-out boss encounters I've seen in years of playing the game. Trash runs are absolutely puggable (and the trash drops are worth pugging for, as last week covered); a coordinated group in 359 epics from tier 11 raids absolutely can do the first four bosses and can probably learn to do Baleroc in a week or two. There's no reason to avoid this raid. It's fun, well-designed, and within your grasp. Of the five bosses I've now seen, none of them is so easy as to be boring nor so hard as to be daunting. Now, let's talk about gear you can get before or just after setting foot in here.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Firelands non-heroic raid 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. Patch 4.2 is here. As I indicated last week, this week I will be discussing Firelands gear options for warriors. I expect I will have to do at least three weeks to cover all the possible upgrades for both DPSers and tanks, especially with Avengers of Hyjal rep rewards, regular and then heroic Firelands raid gear. If we get it done faster, that'll be nice. Also, I'm a tauren now. That's right, I'm playing Horde again. I do still love worgen, but for now, I'm a tauren. I got a pretty necklace this week. It's one of the things I would like to tell you about. So let's talk about Firelands.
