wow-warrior-info
Latest
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 4.2 lurches towards 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. All right. With patch 4.2 dropping next week, it's time to discuss it in detail -- at least, what it means for warriors. What changes will it have in store for tanks (almost none) and DPS (less of it) warriors? What will happen to us in PVP (arms and fury warriors will lose burst, prot won't)? Why is our PVP set so ridiculously ugly that it makes me cringe? We'll start by looking at what Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said about class balance. And specifically about warriors, because that's the column, you see. I could give a rat's hindquarters about the other, lesser classes. Except shamans. If you can't be a warrior, being a shaman is a good backup plan. Why not be both? Go ahead and roll six warriors and a shaman, I'll wait.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How to level in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. One of the things I get asked to do is explain not how talents and abilities work, but rather how best to level a warrior. I'm always taken aback by these kinds of questions, because I feel that leveling (whether it be a warrior or another class) in WoW has never been easier than it is in Cataclysm. But, since the question comes up a lot between emails and Twitter, I feel like I should spend some time discussing it. I expect to be doing a lot of discussion of patch 4.2 in the weeks ahead, so now is probably as good timing as it gets to cover the leveling game. First off, I'm going to point you to some posts I think will be useful for you, the beginning warrior. Protection Warrior 101 for Cataclysm DPS Warrior 101 for Cataclysm Arms, fury and prot talents in Cataclysm Now that we've given you some reasonably useful overview information, let's discuss leveling. For purposes of the discussion I went and rolled a tauren warrior on Sisters of Elune. Yes, I have a problem. Still, I managed to level out of the tauren starting area without any heirlooms in one night, so it should serve as a useful tool for discussion.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Rage in Cataclysm, 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. Last week, we talked about rage as a DPS and tanking mechanic. This week, we're going to talk more about it as a mechanic, period. What are its defining characteristics? Rage is self-generated. There's no predictable rate of return, and even if you geared for rage generation, you're at the mercy of encounter design. (A fight that forces you to break off of your target for any reason is bad for rage generation.) Rage never inflates. An ability that costs you 15 rage to use when you learn it will forever cost you 15 rage unless a talent or ability discounts you in some way. Rage also never inflates in terms of how much you have. You will always have a maximum of 100 rage; there is no talent or ability that increases the size of your rage bar. It's 100 forever. You can generate rage via specific abilities when it is absolutely necessary. The most common are Battle or Commanding Shout, or perhaps Charge. With the exception of white attacks and some special cooldowns (Berserker Rage, Recklessness, Shield Wall, Retaliation, Rallying Cry), almost anything that doesn't generate rage costs rage. Damage taken also generates rage, but for most DPS warriors, it's not worth courting death by deliberately taking damage for rage. Tanks make heavy use of this aspect of rage generation, since they take damage anyway. Rage is alone among all other resource systems in that it starts at zero. While Runic Power also technically starts at zero, unlike a DK, a warrior has no secondary resource system like runes to allow him to still use major abilities in the way DKs can.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Rage in Cataclysm, 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 should talk briefly about two nerfs to warrior DPS in the most recent patch 4.2 PTR. They're not earthshaking in and of themselves, but I would be remiss if I didn't address them. Warriors Recklessness and Deadly Calm can no longer be used at the same time. One cannot be used while the other is active, but using one does not put the other on its full cooldown. Talent Specializations Arms Two-Handed Weapon Specialization weapon damage increase has been lowered to 12%, down from 20%. Fury Dual Wield Specialization weapon damage increase has been lowered to 5%, down from 10%. If I thought warrior DPS was through the roof or overpowered in any way right now, I guess I'd understand these nerfs. It more seems to me like, "Well, we nerfed some other classes ... We might as well nerf them, too -- it's protocol." I'm going to assume it's a change similar to the one we saw when Ulduar went live aimed at keeping warrior scaling from getting out of whack with the higher amounts of hit, crit and mastery that will be available.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A tale of two furies
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, all we've heard from the PTR for warriors is deafening silence. As I said before, my general distrust of patches has been fully awakened with patch 4.2's complete lack of enormous nerfs. The past week has been pretty active for me. While every boss in every raid who can drop shoulder armor of any kind has endlessly refused to, Cho'gall finally coughed up my axe, so I'm happy about that. I'm also working to gear up my other worgen warrior (he's pretty solidly ilevel 356 by now) and have started the climb on my tauren warrior. I just missed ol' hornhead so much that I'm willing to put up with Warchief NoNeck. I've also been running parse after parse on both my 85 warriors, in both SMF and TG specs and various gear sets -- literally dozens of parses. Why? Because I had a nagging voice in the back of my head after I recently argued that hit now totally overshadows mastery as a fury DPS stat. I want some Nutter Butter cookies, the voice whispered. Even though they don't sell those up here in Canada, I want them. Thankfully, after I got it some lesser cookies, it shut up about that and instead insisted I test my assertions out for myself. The results kind of surprised me.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Six months of Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. This expansion launched on Dec. 7, 2010. That means we're into our sixth month of the expansion now. That makes it a good time to stop and take stock of the expansion so far, what it's meant for PVP and PVE, DPSing and tanking. With patch 4.2 and the Firelands right around the corner, we're on the cusp of some pretty significant changes. New gear (including a whole new tier) will expose the class and its scaling in ways the first tier never can, and new encounters will alter the balance between ranged and melee classes. As a melee class and a tanking class, warriors are always pretty solidly mired in these kinds of changes, for good or for ill. So let's take a look at where we're coming from this far.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: What's ahead for warriors on PTR Patch 4.2
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. Despite not tanking for the groups I pug, I have in fact been running the Rise of the Zandalar heroics quite a bit on warrior #2. So far, he's managed to claw his way from ilevel 329 to 350, having snagged a few solid upgrades in his time in Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman. It didn't really make much sense bringing warrior #1 in after I got the hat and shoulders that made up for the ones that won't drop in raids, so project bootstrap was initiated, and so far I've enjoyed playing arms in PvE content on him. In the gear he has, I can manage a respectable 14-15k or so -- not awesome, but not terrible either. Of course, a lot of things are going to change in patch 4.2, and I'm looking at the patch with the healthy skepticism of the long-time warrior. The fact that absolutely no nerfs of any kind were in the most recent patch notes just makes me even more suspicious. I've come to expect nerfs from patches. It's kind of a thing. Seeing other classes get nerfed while warriors get no changes at all is like wondering where the alligators with clocks in their stomachs got off to. Meanwhile, in between expecting the sky to fall (it's going to one of these days, you'll see), I've been looking at the tier 12 set bonuses and thinking about them. I've also been digging on the armor itself; it looks pretty awesome, in my opinion. Since we just got another round of feedback from the devs as of today, I'll be incorporating that into my post.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: One warrior's view of the Call to Arms
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 doubt it will surprise anyone to discover that I have strong opinions about the new Call to Arms feature for the Dungeon Finder. As a warrior, I play one of the classes that can fill the tanking role, and I have gear that is more than adequate for even the Rise of the Zandalar heroics. As a result, you might expect that I'm out there tanking a load of heroics for instant queues and a chance at free pets and mounts. You'd be wrong. I haven't queued as a tank since patch 4.1. I have not, of my own will, tanked a single heroic since before February. When I have, it's been for friends or guildmates -- and yes, it's been generally successful. Why am I not tempted by the extra rewards of the CTA? Well, there are three reasons.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms tears off limbs in 4.1
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 promised it last week. This week, I deliver: How is arms doing in patch 4.1? Pretty darn well. I raided as arms Tuesday night and did respectable DPS (I was third for the evening, spiking between 17k and 19k DPS, depending on the pull), although I still fell short of my fury DPS. (I even managed about 17k DPS in a ZA run that same night.) For a 10-man raid, it was certainly a valid showing. On a dummy, arms seems also to come in second, but a close second to fury for me, with averages of around 14 to 15k. What does this all mean? Well, it means if you're more comfortable as fury (which I am), you'll probably want to stick to it. But if someone who does not fully feel at ease with arms and the rotation can still put out valid raid and heroics DPS numbers, then for those of you who prefer the arms playstyle, I can't see a reason you shouldn't be able to do better. This means to me that arms is definitely raid-viable in patch 4.1 as of right now.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Zul'Gearup
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 decided to wait until after 4.1 goes live (which I expect will be this upcoming week) to discuss arms in both PvE and PvP. Right now, for a short statement to tide you over, I'd say arms is viable in PvE and still strong in PvP. Part of the reason I want to hold off on discussing it is because I spent all week tanking and didn't get a chance to try arms out in raiding. So I feel like it would be disingenuous of me to tell you how awesome arms is in PvE right now when I haven't been arms outside of Tol Barad and Random BGs all week. (Well, okay, I've been arms on my level 70 alt. But do you care how arms is doing in outdated content? I don't think so. By next week, I should have had a chance to raid as arms after the patch 4.1 changes and should have a much better idea how it's shaking out.) That leaves us with this week. What do we talk about? Well, since I bend to peer pressure like a willow sapling (an extremely hairy one, but still), we're going to talk about patch 4.1's new heroics and a whole mess of new gear squarely between 346 blues and 359 epics. Yes, we're going to Zul'Gearup. Yes, I made that up. Yes, I'm suitably ashamed.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cultivating single-minded 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. I tend to fill whatever role our raid needs, from raid leading to tanking to DPSing. As a result, I don't tend to be able to get very comfortable in any one role right now at this point in the expansion's early life cycle. In part, this is why I spent the last four columns talking about tanking -- because frankly, I can tank in my sleep in a high wind on a greased pole in the middle of a rhino stampede. DPSing as a warrior has always taken more work for me. One of the reasons is that I tend towards fairly heterodox ideas when it comes to warrior DPS, and the other reason is because in the back of my head, that tanking voice is always screaming at me to watch my threat. Seriously, that guy will not shut up about threat. He's always in there, yelling at me every time I start to get comfortable as DPS. It has taken me the past several months to simply get to a place as a DPS warrior where I feel comfortable and able to get in there and cut loose and trust the tanks to keep aggro. That's their job. My job is to kill things.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cataclysm tanking, part 4
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 discussed hit and expertise. Before that, we talked about tanking etiquette and how to work up to tanking. This week, we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of warrior tanking in heroics and raids. Before we do that, we should point you at the Protection 101 and Protection 101 talent guides, which will cover a lot of what we talk about here in more exhaustive detail. Heroics and raiding are similar but have different demands on a tank. With the announcement this week of a new Call to Arms feature that will most likely result in added rewards for those of us willing to tank in the LFD system, it's a good time to familiarize yourself with the role and how to perform it to the best of your ability. Frankly, I view tanking as something that requires more effort than DPSing. On my warrior, I find it takes less effort and less work to top DPS meters than it does to tank. This isn't necessarily because tanking requires more skill (I would argue it's no more complicated than DPSing in either spec) but rather due to a combination of added pressure, expectations and labor required to do it well and make it look like you haven't had to work hard at all. So let's talk about ways you can make it easier on yourself.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cataclysm tanking, part 3
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. A week or so ago, while I was planning out this series of posts about tanking in Cataclysm, our old friend (well, okay, I've never met nor spoken to him) Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) had some interesting things to say about the current state of hit and expertise for tanks. I wasn't able to immediately address them because I'd already written out what would be published, and so I had to wait until this column to talk about the history of hit and expertise for tanks in previous expansions and what the current state of the art is. As warriors, we've been grappling with hit and expertise for years now. Why, you may ask, are they suddenly less viable for tanks than they were during Wrath? Well, believe it or not, hit and expertise have become less compelling for tanks entirely because of two big quality of life changes for tanks: the removal of parry hasting and taunt miss chance.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cataclysm tanking, 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. Last week we talked about tanking etiquette and how you can deal with the heightened stress of tanking an instance without convincing your run that your brother is actor Emilio Estevez. This week, we're going to talk about how you, as a new or returning warrior, can learn how to tank. I've been playing warriors for a long time now. Right now, I have three 85 warriors that I'm working on, for DPS, tanking, and PvP. This means to some degree I'm in a constant state of relearning the class. In addition, I'm leveling a druid, DK, and paladin for tanking purposes as well, because I think it does help you as a warrior tank to see how other classes tank. (So far, my perspective is that paladins and DKs are brokenly good and druids need a little work. I don't pretend this is unbiased.) The first and best advice I can give someone who wants to learn to tank is, go out and tank things. While this is akin to the old teaching people to swim via throwing them in deep water approach to swimming, it has several advantages.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cataclysm tanking 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. One of the things warriors do in game is tank. We're one of four classes that can tank, and one of two classes that can only tank or DPS, meaning that there's a reasonable chance that any warrior you meet will be a tank and an absolute certainty that if your warrior isn't DPS specced, it's tank specced. (I don't include PvP in this because there are PvP warriors of all three specs.) Since tanking is something I talked about at great length during the past year or so, I have been endeavoring to talk more about the DPS specs since Cataclysm launched. So, I've done that, and I'll continue to do it, but this week and as a recurring feature here at TCAFOW I'm starting a Cataclysm Tanking series of posts. These will come as topics suggest themselves to me. For this week, rather than discuss gear or rotations (some of which we covered in the Cataclysm Protection 101 posts a little while ago) I wanted to talk about something less tangible but more immediate in its impact, namely, how to behave while tanking and how to behave towards your tank. Lately, with running heroics so much a part of the gearing for raiding experience, and some people really feeling at the mercy of the tank and resenting it, it's time to talk about how we can all make each others lives easier and more enjoyable.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How to survive as a DPS 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. One of the oldest truisms in WoW is the old saw, "You don't do any DPS when you're dead." It's a truism because, well, it's true. And with the days of multiple combat resurrections during an encounter being a thing of the past, it's more important than ever for DPS warriors not to die. With healing classes having to save their mana as much as possible and so many things causing unavoidable, raid-wide bursts of damage, making sure to avoid damage that you can avoid becomes crucial. I have to make a lot of calls when I raid, so I'm pretty sensitive to the issue of avoidable damage and/or minimizing what damage you do take. Between abandoning the old Wrath idea of avoiding any talent that doesn't give you immediate DPS increases to simply grasping situational awareness instead of counting on the healer to pull you through every experience, the warrior DPS has to pay attention more than ever to what's going on around him or her. What are the biggest complications for a DPS warrior?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The complete patch 4.1 PTR conniption
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Yes, we're still talking about patch 4.1 on the PTR. To be fair, Blizzard keeps making tweaks and changes, so many that it seems like we can't talk about them all. But with the rapid flurry of changes comes a need to at least try and suss out what we're looking at. The most recent changes mean that in total, warriors probably have the most patch notes changes of any class in the game. This is somewhat baffling considering how many times we've been told over the past weeks that warrior DPS and tanking were right about where they should be. It seems astonishing to me that a class that is performing in the zone it should receive so many iterative changes in one patch. But let's take a look at the complete (as of March 3, anyway) notes for warriors first, before we get into discussing what these changes tell us about the class as a whole.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Patch 4.1 PTR Warrior changes
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. It wouldn't be a patch without warrior changes, and patch 4.1 is nothing if it isn't a patch. What are the really big standouts from an initial overview pass of the changes? Rallying Cry is a new ability that seems to work like Last Stand for the entire party or raid. Colossus Smash now only lowers armor by 70% for 6 seconds, down from 100%. Intercept stun is reduced to 1 second. In addition, Juggernaut will no longer increase the stun duration of Charge. Whirlwind will now reduce its cooldown by 6 seconds if it strikes four or more targets. Several arms abilities have had their damage increased, from Mortal Strike (175% weapon damage) to Overpower (145% weapon damage) to the talented Improved Slam (increases slam damage by 20/40%, up from 10/20%). These are most likely intended to compensate arms for losing Colossus Smash's armor penetration, indicating that nerf was aimed at fury DPS. Finally, Improved Hamstring will now also reduce the global cooldown on Hamstring by half a second for 1 point and a full second for two. Less stunning for warriors and more snaring seems to be the order of the day.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms talents
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Time to talk about arms talents. Patch 4.0.6 has probably made arms as close in raw DPS to fury as it's been in quite some time. At the same time, some of its PvP bite has been pared away. I would vociferously deny that arms is broken in PvP; I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's definitely the case that the arms rotation suffers in fights in which it becomes harder to maintain time on the boss. (I saw a rather significant DPS loss on Omnotron, with its rather constant target switching.) But if you can keep face time, arms has a lot more teeth than it did even a month ago with Slam hitting much harder and Mortal Strike costing less rage. I will say that with health pools so huge now, the 10% healing debuff on MS seems completely pointless. Actually, let me rephrase that. It's not completely pointless; it's close to absolutely useless. A 10% healing debuff doesn't even make a paladin blink, a druid squirm, a priest groan or a shaman shudder. I spent a Twin Peaks match this week trying to help a death knight burn down a paladin healer in the crafted PvP set, and we could not do it. With warrior stuns now so much less effective (thanks to charge adding to diminishing returns on stuns), Will the hotfix buff to arms this weekend help even it out? MS barely even slowing them down and pummel on a 10-second cooldown, arms really does feel pointless against a healer in comparison to its glory days. There are discussions about the future of arms PvP going on right now on the official forums, and some of them make interesting promises for the future. Daxxarri - Civil Discussion, Juggernaut nerf We understand that you need to be on your target to do your jobs, but it didn't really make sense to allow close to 100% up time either. On the other hand, we understand that without high up-time warriors might not bring as much to an Arena or Rated Battleground team, and we're adding new utility in a future patch to help address that, though we're not yet ready to share details. source While you contemplate what that will be (a new gap closer, a root, what what could it be?) let's look at arms talents.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury Talents
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Tanking is what we've talked about for the past couple of weeks, so let's switch it back up. DPS warriors come in two varieties, arms and fury, and for the next couple of weeks (depending on if/when patch 4.0.6 comes out), we'll be talking about the talents of each of those DPS trees and what you can use them for. Fury's going first because I despise alphabetical order and all of its works. Do you hear me, alphabet? I do not fear you. Well, except for when I try and spell Cataclysm. I always get the Y and the S flipped around. With some of the fights in Cataclysm being among the most unfriendly to melee DPS of any expansion, it's important to consider that taking survivability and mobility talents can be just as important for PvE as for PvP. So let's take a look at fury and its talents.
