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

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Second verse, same as the first - we're talking warriors of lore and story in the Warcraft universe. What does it take to get on either of these lists?

1. Don't obviously be a member of another class. I skirted the edge of this one for last week's list, but not this week - these are the warriors. No Bolvars, no Turalyons, no Rexxars or the like. If you cast spells or skulk in the shadows or are a death knight, you're not on this list. Sorry, Highlord Alexandros Mograine, but you were a paladin, and you don't count. Maiev Shadowsong definitely uses stealth, she's out.
2. You have to be somehow more iconic than the badasses on last week's list. That means, in my opinion, you're more important in terms of lore than Muradin Bronzebeard, Baine Bloodhoof, and Broxigar the Red. That's not an easy bar to jump over.
3. Those are my criteria. I just think lists with less than three points on them look weird.

Let's get started on the list.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Okay, this week, I'm going to do something massively nerdy and more than a little ridiculous. I'm going to rank the best warriors from across the World of Warcraft, according to my own subjective criteria for what 'best' means. It's not just who would win in a fight (that's in there, but it's not all of it) and unfortunately, some races are going to get shafted here just because they don't have as much representation. I'm trying to keep the list somewhat representative, but there are some races that just dominate it - orcs and humans get big representation, while other races like draenei just don't have an established lore warrior as of the time of this writing. I'm sure there are draenei warriors (I play one, even) but we tend to see paladins from the boys in blue. It's a sad lack.

Some of these are kind of iffy because Blizzard does weird things sometimes - some of these characters have abilities you'll never see a warrior use in game - but none of them will be specifically mentioned members of another class. No demon hunters, paladins or rogues on this list. Sorry, Garona fans.

Yeah, goodbyes are hard.

I started this column on June 15th, 2007. It has run continuously, one column a week, since that time. No one else has ever written a single The Care and Feeding of Warriors but me, and I have never missed a week. That's because, when I started this job, I had one goal - to tell you all how much I love playing a warrior in World of Warcraft. How awesome warriors are.

It's 2014. A lot has changed in my life and in the game but one thing has not - I still love playing a warrior in World of Warcraft. I've loved the class through my days of PvP and through every raid in the game. I've loved them through being the least popular tank, through being underpowered and overpowered, through every mechanical change and system. I was here when Titan's Grip was announced. I was here when we got, and lost, and got Heroic Leap. I have played this class since 2004, and I have written about it since 2007.

I'm going to keep playing a warrior, of course - I have like five max level warriors at this point, I'm not likely to stop now. And I'll keep writing about warrior news as it comes up. But this column you're reading now will be the last weekly The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the last time I sit down and write what has been a part of my weekly routine for more than six years now. There were many ways I could have chosen to end it - we could have done a retrospective column, going over my favorites from the past several years. I could do a big "This is what I hope for the class in Warlords" post. (I expect I'll be doing that in a different format anyway.) But this is the end.

So I'm going to end it the way I started it - I'm going to tell you a story.

@MatthewWRossi As shown at BlizzCon, talents can be spec-specific. Ignite Weapon is for Arms/Fury. Gladiator Stance is in that spot for Prot

- Celestalon (@Celestalon) February 21, 2014

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 got to do some tanking in Heroic Siege this week - nothing major, just offtanking on Dark Shaman - and it was pretty fun all around. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy tanking in raids. It was fun to get to see the Warrior 2 piece Tier 16 tanking bonus in action in a current raid at the cutting edge of content, instead of in an LFR or using it to solo Cataclysm raids. It's a very solid set bonus, and I'm going to write more about it in the future - basically, I think it should be baked into the baseline Shield Block and Shield Barrier abilities, or perhaps be baked into Shield Slam in some way (so that, for ten seconds after a successful Shield Slam, you heal a percentage of your Shield Barrier absorb or Shield Block damage prevented, as one possible example) - but I'm not quite ready to write about that yet.

Now, as I said, I've been using my tank set and prot spec to solo Cataclysm raids, up to and including the first three bosses in 10 man Dragon Soul. It's not always easy, but it is possible, and the reason I've been doing this is because I freaking love transmogrification, and therefore, I've been pursuing it with a fevered dedication that has completely robbed me of bank, void storage and even bag space. I've wanted to write about transmog and warriors forever, but I felt such deep shame at letting Cable, the mutant son of Cyclops and Madeline Pryor, write about it first. I mean, I'm so in love with transmog that I started a tumblr about it.

So let's talk about transmog and warriors. (If you're not interested in transmog, you should probably come back next week.) Why do I argue that warriors do transmog better than anyone? Well, here's a few reasons.

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'm going to tell you a story.

I recently spent a coin and got a pair of heroic warforged DPS shoulders. And yet, they are currently in my bank. Why is that? Because using them will cost me almost 2% critical strike chance, and I simply cannot afford it, instead sticking with the non heroic, non warforged shoulders that do have critical strike chance on them. And that, in a nutshell, is exactly what's wrong with warrior design right now.

See, I like crit. I think crit should be good. But it shouldn't be so good that nothing else can compare - that the heroic warforged pieces (a solid 19 ilevel better, when both are fully upgraded) simply cannot come close to competing. I current have two heroic 2h, but only one of them has crit. So I have to use a normal mode offhand rather than (again) a heroic upgrade. When you start to realize that all you're doing is piling crit on top of crit - and that something as seemingly simple as an upgrade can be massively higher in ilevel and still not be an actual upgrade - it starts to become maddening.

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 wrote about tanking as a new 90. The week before that, we discussed arms warriors. This week, I'm going to cover fury, the two weapon berserker spec. I was considering writing this column in character as an orc warrior, but let's be honest - orcs in World of Warcraft don't fit the stereotype of monosyllabic dullards that would be funny. Let's look at some classic orc warriors.

1. Broxigar - dude could talk your ear off.
2. Saurfang - even worse. Dude does whole speeches about honor and the cost of victory and it's all depressing and sad. It's been years since Saufang has said anything as cool as "I am he who watches they. I am the fist of retribution. That which does quell the recalcitrant. Dare you defy the Warchief? Dare you face my merciless judgement?" And even that is way too eloquent for the "me orc, me smash" stereotype.
3. Garrosh Hellscream - that dude writes entire letters to people telling them exactly how much he hates them. I'm totally not kidding.

So, when I said I was going to write this column in character as an orc, I was right - it turns out every column I've ever written is in character as an orc. So hi! I'll be your orc this time out. Let's talk about how to play fury as a new level 90.

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 covered arms. This week, we're covering protection. Like last week, this article assumes you just leveled your first warrior to 90, but it can also be useful for someone who's played a warrior for a while but who never tried tanking on her. If you're unsure about giving tanking a try, I can understand why that would be - it's a lot of pressure, it's fairly gear dependent and you may not have it yet, and most of all it's often expected that a tank will be leading a dungeon run, which can be daunting if you're unfamiliar with a dungeon. Frankly, I always found raid tanking preferable to PuGging, but I still tanked PuG's and I had a few tricks for how to establish myself when doing so.

1. It's okay to admit it's your first time or that you're new at something. Even experienced tanks don't always know the specific dungeon they're about to tank very well - if you're a new tank and you're feeling uncomfortable or unsure, go ahead and say so.
2. Even if you're comfortable with your class abilities as a tank, but are unsure about boss strategies, see #1 - often someone in the dungeon will be happy to explain to you what you should or shouldn't do.
3. Avoid the two extremes of 'tank megalomania' and 'tank doormat' - don't be an egotist who makes the tank run all about him or herself, and don't let yourself be walked over by players who deliberately make your life harder. Also, be cognizant of gear discrepancies when evaluating your own performance as a tank - if you're in 463 blues and the guy pulling threat is in Heroic Warforged gear, cut yourself some slack. You're simply not going to be able to do much against over one hundred ilevels in his favor.
4. Be cognizant of the healer. I know that you want to run and pull more stuff while you have a full rage bar. Believe me, I know how it feels. But if your healer is undergeared and needs a break, let them have it. It's good to get in the habit of paying attention to your healer's mana - believe me, healers will tell you when you can run and pull like a fiend.

Also, one of my pet peeves as a DPS who knows how to tank is tanks who pull mobs, put no threat on them, then run down the hallway. No. I know you love chain pulling, but if you can't hold them, you're not chain pulling. You're just hitting mobs then running away and letting someone else tank them. Make sure you have solid threat before you decide to run away.

But let's get to the actual process of tanking - how do we play 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.

It's easy to forget what it's like to hit max level for the first time on a given class and have no idea what you're supposed to be doing. After months of playing your main at 90, you get a kind of muscle memory as to what to do - you hit the buttons without thinking about what they are or what they do, it's nearly instinctive due to the familiarity you have with the class. It is this inherent understanding that gets in the way of explaining to new players (new to the class, that is, not necessarily new to the game) how the class actually works. Not that the ideas under the hood aren't interesting - I've written entire columns about rage generation, why haste isn't meaningful for warriors, about the decline or lack of players for the class is an important issue, how the design of the class is in many ways antiquated - but in the end, sometimes it's worthwhile to go over basics again.

So if you're an old hand at the class and are about to bail, thinking "I can't possible get anything out of an article about the basics" I'm going to ask you to stop. Divert yourself to the comments sections and share some of that knowledge. I doubt seriously I'm going to cover everything a fresh warrior at 90 would want or need to know - dole out some of that hard-earned wisdom to our newer friends. Playing a warrior is the essence of solidarity, after all - you become a member of a group that eschews petty rivalries between spec or role, a class that has no need to trumpet itself. Those of us who remain warriors have been through the vagaries of Blizzard's redesigns and the ups and downs of the buff/nerf cycle, gear dependency, and the slings and arrows of PvP performance. Help your brothers and sisters be the best warriors they can be.

And so, we turn to you, the fresh 90. You've finally climbed that last hill, and stand at the top, surrounded by dead things. You did it. And now you realize, looking at your dungeon blues and quest greens, your haphazard action bars and your empty level 90 talent choice that you're not sure what to do now. Have no fear - we were all you once. For the next few weeks, I'll be talking about how to pick up the basics of playing the class at 90.

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, there's no good way to say it - since patch 5.4, warriors got buffs to tanking DPS that have definitely improved their overall damage output while tanking. If in the right gear and taking enough damage from Vengeance, tanking prot warriors can deal solid damage and be competitive with other tanks. This is really true for warrior tanks running heroic content, provided that they're in the right gear set - one that allows Riposte to do as much work as possible for them - and taking those really big hits to get that Vengeance stacked. So, if this is the case, why did I say there was no good way to say this? Because that's not what I was wanting to say.

The buffs Warriors recently received didn't magically fix their population problem and cause everyone to reroll back.

- Cynwise (@wowcynwise) January 9, 2014

In fact, as Cynwise's numbers show, the warrior decline has essentially continued unabated. Now, numbers are slightly up between 5.4 and 5.4.2, and that could be a good thing. It could mean that people are starting to realize that the warrior is a capable tank which, in the right hands, can put out solid DPS, but the fact remains that since patch 5.1.0, when warriors were first hit with a PvP nerf that cut our representation in arenas by two thirds, the warrior class has seen a drop in popularity at every single major patch of this expansion.

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 where the warrior class has been this past year. One of the things that's been most glaring about warriors has been the dichotomy between PvP and PvE content, and even which part of each warriors do the best in.

Arms warriors started the expansion doing very well in Arena play, saw a mechanics change that effectively slashed their numbers in top-end arena by 2/3rds, and then climbed back up to high representation and high end performance. At present, while arms isn't a juggernaut in BG's (due to the old standard 'focus the warrior down' mentality) it's a topic of constant debate on the forums, as casters hate it when warriors can kill them. Hate it. I expect arms to be redesigned between now and Warlords of Draenor and to see it struggle heavily in PvP for the start of the next expansion's PvP season.

If you're protection or fury, well, you may PvP for fun, but no one really cares about you one way or another. It's cool to have a prot warrior for flag carrying in rated BG's but that's true of any tank, and druids and monks are still going to be way better for it.

That said, this isn't a post about our current condition. It's about what we should become. And it isn't a post telling you, but asking you - what are our flaws? Where should we go from here? I have ideas, of course, and I'll share them, because that's what I do.

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 learn things writing this column. For instance, last week, I learned that 53 people will make comments on a post about ability bloat for warriors, and almost none of you will defend Cleave. To be honest, I was expecting a lot more nostalgia about it, but even the people who felt like warriors should retain the name (it's been with the class since beta, after all) were on board with the idea that it's not currently of much use at all.

I'm not surprised that Cleave is useless or nearly useless now - the removal of the glyph making it hit three targets was a clear sign that it wasn't going to be of much use for anyone except prot warriors, and even prot doesn't need Cleave when it has Revenge and Thunder Clap (and even Whirlwind, if it really wants to hit multiple targets). But I was surprised by the consensus. Reading the comments, you all taught me that if anything, I was understating how little use Cleave sees now. And that has me thinking about the class and what 2013 as a whole showed 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.

Well, I got my second heroic weapon last night (off of Nazgrim, so not the ideal choice, but still heroic is heroic) and so i went TG fury. Once the damage on that second offhand goes up, your ability to put out reasonable cleave AoE with Whirlwind and Raging Blow makes the loss of Blood and Thunder (and thus, all that sweet, sweet bleed spreading) somewhat tolerable. I'm still getting used to it (Nazgrim has a positive gift for doing his leap move just after I hit Colossus Smash, the son of a motherless ogre) but I decided to commit fully to fury and thus, gemmed and reforged my gear for it.

Considering that warriors are a hybrid class with two DPS trees, it's interesting how the current state of the game makes going from one DPS spec to another so tricky. For starters, in order to get my gear properly optimized for fury, I had to finally bite the bullet and change my gems around - right now, if I were to take off my offhand weapon and go arms, I'd lose enough expertise that I'd have to reforge for it, and probably regem too. I'd also lose a lot of mastery, since I get a lot of both mastery and expertise from my offhand. And since fury basically just slops on the crit indefinitely, while arms said "Okay, I'm good on crit" around the 32% mark, I end up short on mastery and yes, even haste, going from fury to arms.

One of the reasons I'm so looking forward to Warlords of Draenor is never having to do this again. As much as I have in the past defending reforging and gear optimization, it does get tiresome to get a weapon upgrade and immediately have to head off to a few websites and compare their recommendations on how to properly reforge and regem everything. But it got me thinking about warriors and how we interact with 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.

Believe it or not, I really try and restrain my warrior partisanship around here. I don't like to get ridiculous in terms of how I advocate for the class or hyperbolic in the rhetorical "Best Class Ever" sort of way - I leave it to other classes to brag about how great they are, because, well, they must feel insecure or something, and since they're not playing warriors I figure they probably need the help.

But today is my birthday, and I've been writing for WoW Insider on the subject of warriors for six years now, so I've decided to just write about what I would like to see warriors get in Warlords of Draenor today. These are purely blue sky musings - as far as I know, we're not going to get any of this stuff, and some of it might even be bad for class balance. I don't really care for this article, though - this is a wish list, meant to engender discussion and see if anything cool shakes out.

So here we go. What would I most like to see warriors get in the upcoming expansion?