I hold that my point remains valid, even if my jest appears ill-received. Nothing Rossi said was incorrect, but it could have been said in fewer words without loss of accuracy.

For what it's worth, I agree with this poor, downrated commenter.

Article lenght was fine, if you can't handle a few paragraph you ought to go back to 3rd grade.

Its good to have a more serious article every once in a while, I wish reading would be mandatory for every player wanting to spec tank (be it Warrior/Pally/Dk/Druid).

It's the very seriousness of the subject at hand that demands brevity and order.

Think of writing the same way one thinks of raiding. Serious raiding involves a very precise, efficient flow from trash pack to trash pack, minimizing any tangents or delays in order to reach the end point as fast as reasonable risk allows. There a crucial balance between risk and time efficiency involved that must always be navigated.

Serious writing is much the same way. The topics you're attempting to cover are very often of an extreme depth. By nature, you can not afford to meander around or belabor the point. For that reason each paragraph and sentence needs to have a clear purpose. Sentences or paragraphs which do not are excess which will clutter the thought process of your readers and detract from your point.

So consider, in an article with the clear purpose of elaborating on Warrior threat, was it necessary to spend the first two paragraphs on how the author constantly changes glyphs, respecs, and deals with gear mismatch issues without a single mention of threat?

There isn't one answer to that question, but in this case it's my opinion that the purpose of this article would have been better served by trimming the excess.

Brevity is important when in a raid situation. To that, I wholeheartedly agree. Reading this site is not a raid, and should not be written as such, however. Going off on the situation the writer finds himself in doesn't "belabor the point", it sets the tone. Besides that, Rossi has always been about balancing the important points of his posts with a level of humor and entertainment so that we don't get bored reading a text-book. It's called "The Care and Feeding of Warriors", not "How to Play Warrior". Even the title sets that tone.

That having been said, raids and dungeons that go smoothly and efficiently are certainly satisfying, but they can also be horribly boring if everyone is a robot. That same level of balance can improve enjoyment of the game.

I sadly got into the game late and missed all of the craziness of the raids my two WoW vet friends frequented in Vanilla. They could have tried a little harder to include me in their leveling groups, but they were impatient, and had too much invested in the end-game content with their mains. That always bugged me, but not because I was being left out of leveling with them. Their weekly raid stories were always hilarious. From something a guildy said over vent, to something that went ridiculously wrong in a raid that was funny. EVEN if it resulted in a wipe, it was something to laugh at. I you can't enjoy yourself, then the victories are hollow. If you CAN, then even defeat can be entertaining.

In other words, enjoy the post, and take what information you can from it. Don't dissect it so much that you miss the point.

Everything you said regarding writing essentially falls under the "every sentence/paragraph must have a purpose" rule. The purpose can very well be humor, breaking up the dryness of the post, maintaining a friendly, jovial tone etc. As long as the purpose is clear, and followed, then there isn't an issue.

The intent of the author is what determines those purposes. A "serious" article, as Elmouth posits, has very different intentions than the generally humorous but still informative article you have as your premise. The resulting article should look and feel very different accordingly, but need not violate the basic rules of organized thought and writing to do so.

I essentially hold that the article failed at times to maintain this basic order, and that this is true so long as it wasn't Rossi's explicit intent to do so. Whether the article is "serious", "humorous" or "casual", I do not believe that disorganization is inherently necessary.

But that's enough from an anonymous armchair editor.