Every week Matthew Rossi sits down to write The Care and Feeding of Warriors because he cares. He cares as much as an old Faith No More song. He cares so much that he's writing the column even though he's stuck in the frozen hinterlands while everyone else gets to go to Blizzcon. But he's not bitter, oh my no. Well, okay, maybe he's a bit bitter.

Speaking as someone who really loves the warrior class, at times it's hard to understand why anyone would prefer another. I mean, paladins can seem like a watered down priest grafted to a watered down warrior, druids are three classes stuck together (maybe four, even), I couldn't even begin to tell you what shaman are supposed to be... and that's just the hybrid classes. Why would you want to be a coward hiding until you can stab people in the back or a guy in a dress who blows things up from a distance and does everything in his power to avoid going toe to toe with the enemy?

Well, besides the fact that those are biased and unfair generalizations, the reason you might want to play another class is to get better at your own. I've got two warriors to 70 and a third warrior to 68, with two more warriors in the low sixties/high fifties. I've played a human, an orc, a night elf, a tauren and a draenei warrior. Partially I've done this to play with different friends on different servers, partially so I could have DPS, PvP and tanking warriors and experience the different playstyles, but for the most part I did it because I don't like mana. Never have, never will. I don't like depending on a resource I can actually run out of, and I don't think it is fair that a mana class can unload their best abilities as soon as they want while rage dependent characters like warriors need to wait for rage to build, usually while watching their life bar burning away to nothing. The amount of damage it takes to generate 30 rage is really rather sickening, and it didn't do much to make me like mana, or the classes that use it. So I wouldn't play one.

I know, I know, I could have played a rogue. But I am not good at playing a rogue. I have four rogues, all dead somewhere, not a one above level 10. It's a challenging class at the low levels and I never got to a place where I was enjoying it enough to stick with it. So basically, I thought I would never play anything but a warrior.

Then I rolled my shammy.

The shaman was a revelation to me. Yes, it was a mana class, and a very inefficient mana class at that. I would find myself drinking after almost every fight as I leveled up my plucky enhancement shaman. I realized that part of my enjoyment of the character was in how he could do things my warrior couldn't do at that level... take on multiple mobs, heal himself when things got hairy, and of course the totems were a whole new way to buff yourself that I was delighted to explore. It was, well, new. I've since hit 70 with him and respecced him to restoration, because I don't see a lot of call for an enhancement shaman in the 70 instances, which is a shame. I've learned that it's not all peaches and cream for the shaman... totems cost a lot of mana, they die really fast when hit, they only last two minutes, our mana efficiency still isn't very good... but I enjoy main healing in instances. Last night, on an Arc run, I main healed through the first boss (we were just going for a Kara key fragment) and I realized something.

I knew when to make sure Earth Shield was refreshed, I knew when to throw a big Nature's Swiftness heal because I knew when I would want these things. Playing my warriors was improving my healing.

It goes both ways. Playing my warrior now, I'm more mindful of range to the healer and I know the limitations of trying to keep five people up at once, I'm better about using my 'oh crap' abilities to keep myself up instead of depending always on the healer to keep me up no matter how fast my health is dropping. I used to hold onto my potions and other consumables until the absolute last minute, but now I used them more liberally because I know that any slack is helpful when healing and I wouldn't really know it the way I do if I hadn't experienced it.

I still love my warriors. I love plate, as limited as it is. I love going out there with the biggest and best 2h weapon I can find and smashing faces in. I love imagining saying something incredibly vile about Epoch Hunter's mother when I hit the taunt button. But I know it's helped me to level the shaman and play him in instances, and I know it will help me when I get my paladin to 70.

Tags: Alts, Epoch Hunter's Mother, Shaman, Warrior

Filed under: Warrior, Classes, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors