|
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The fury of Diablo 3
Joystiq And frankly, they bleed together, because although World of Warcraft's story draws directly from the Warcraft RTS and setting, WoW had Diablo in its DNA. Don't believe me? Roll a paladin in Diablo II, then go take a look at what paladin talent trees … |
|
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How Mists of Pandaria exposes the warrior past
Joystiq by Matthew Rossi Apr 14th 2012 at 2:00PM 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 … |
|
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury in Mists of Pandaria
Joystiq by Matthew Rossi Mar 31st 2012 at 4:00PM 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 … |
|
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Buffs and debuffs in Mists of Pandaria
Joystiq by Matthew Rossi Mar 10th 2012 at 4:00PM 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 … |
|
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Stat changes and you
Joystiq by Matthew Rossi Mar 3rd 2012 at 4:00PM 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 … |
|
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How to tank for non-tanks
Joystiq Whatever your situation, the tanking game in World of Warcraft is available to you as a warrior. A lot of guides tend to focus on gearing and speccing your warrior to tank, glossing over what you actually do as a tank. What buttons are you hitting and … |
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.
In the past, I’ve done Year in Review columns and liked them well enough. The first one I wrote was in 2007 and discussed rage normalization, which to my eyes was the biggest and worst change the warrior class had undergone in The Burning Crusade. Flash forward four years. Here we are in 2011, and rage normalization has been with us for a year and the sky didn’t fall. This has me in a contemplative mood. The future is Mists of Pandaria and a new talent system, but right now, it’s time to look back at what were the biggest developments for the warrior class.
I don’t necessarily mean good or bad, here. These are simply profound changes, things that may have also affected other classes but which definitely affected us. While 2011 was a year we made contact (because we’re melee, we have to make contact) it was also a year of a great many changes.
Mastery
I’ve talked about it before, but mastery really has been a game-changer for warriors this past year. Fury warriors got so much out of the stat before patch 4.1 that the amount of mastery they have at base was nerfed from 8 points to 2 points. It worked, after a fashion, because until patch 4.3, it became impossible for fury warriors to assemble enough mastery to make them interested in the stat again. It may be possible with Dragon Soul gear for TG fury, but with arms the dominant DPS spec for warriors in Dragon Soul raids right now, it’s not likely to be tested exhaustively.
Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: 2011′s warrior in review
Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: 2011′s warrior in review originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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.
Leveling in Northrend was made easier with patch 4.3′s reducing the experience necessary by 33%. In addition, many quests in Outland and Northrend were retuned from group quests to soloable, and the major quest givers for instance quests were moved inside the instances in most cases so that players using Dungeon Finder to level through them could turn them in more easily.
These changes make leveling through the oldest content in the game (with the Cataclysm revamps, Outland and Northrend are in fact older content than the 1-to-60 game) easier than it has ever been. That makes now the perfect time to talk about how to level through these 19 levels and get ready for the 80-to-85 content. Since we talked about 1 to 60 two weeks ago, we’ll follow much the same format.
Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Leveling from 61 to 80
Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Leveling from 61 to 80 originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
|
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Proc weapons and the future of itemization
Joystiq Proc weapons have a long and storied tradition in World of Warcraft but they've also somewhat fallen from favor, since they're never as reliable and predictable as pure stats. People would argue the Blackhand Doomsaw vs. Arcanite Reaper into the small … |
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.
For the first time since the brief period following the launch of the pre-Cataclysm patch, arms has achieved parity with fury as a PvE DPS spec. Granted, this required a painful mauling to fury’s DPS output and relies heavily on arms’ ludicrous AoE potential as well as getting your hands on a Gurthalak. The proc on the weapon can add as much as 15% of your current DPS; in raids and on heroics, I’ve seen the Tentacle of the Old Gods put out more DPS than Rend and Deep wounds combined. Even on a high-trash dungeon where you can use Blood and Thunder to spread Rend around, Tentacle can still put out a respectable 5% to 6% of your total damage.
The sword is just as good for fury (I did in fact try out a fury build with it off-hand to test if it procced, and it did, quite frequently). While it won’t make up for the nerf fury took, it does put me in mind of weapons like Bryntroll and Shadowmourne, proc weapons that did excellent damage in a warrior’s hands from the end of the ICC era. I’ll admit it’s unfair to use Shadowmourne as an exemplar here, as the weapon was a legendary, but that’s OK — this isn’t meant to be a pure comparison.
Proc weapons have a long and storied tradition in World of Warcraft but they’ve also somewhat fallen from favor, since they’re never as reliable and predictable as pure stats. People would argue the Blackhand Doomsaw vs. Arcanite Reaper into the small hours back then. But I think Dragon Soul’s two proc weapons (Gurthalak and Souldrinker) have me thinking a lot about where weapon itemization has been and where it’s going, and what that means for us warriors.
Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Proc weapons and the future of itemization
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Proc weapons and the future of itemization originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.