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

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The fury of Diablo 3

by Matthew Rossi May 19th 2012 at 6:00PM

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 thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

The past week I have been doing two things in terms of my video game time. I have been tanking heroic Dragon Soul, and I have been playing a barbarian in Diablo III. 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 looked like when vanilla WoW launched.

So for the past week, as I contemplate the Mists of Pandaria revamp to talents and specializations, the huge rage redesign, and how the class is going to work, I keep casting covetous eyes onto the barbarian I keep rocking faces on. Now, Diablo III and World of Warcraft are different games with different design philosophies. WoW tries a lot harder for balance between competing classes because it has more classes. D3 has five classes, and no two of those classes does what it does the same way. The witch doctor and the wizard and demon hunter all fight from range, the barbarian and monk both fight in melee, but how they do these things is thoroughly different, and D3 doesn't have the tank/DPS/healer trinity to consider. You chug potions, you spec for survival, and you blow stuff up.

Still, there are things I really want to see Mists steal from Diablo III. Like, say, its version of Revenge. That thing is sweet.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Practical talents in Mists of Pandaria

by Matthew Rossi May 5th 2012 at 6:00PM

Before I get into this week's topic, I talked about War Banner this week (in case you missed it). If asked for my opinion of the ability, it would be good but not yet great. Each banner needs a little love -- perhaps a longer duration or more of a powerful effect -- before I'm totally sold on it. But I did enjoy playing around with it.

This week, however, I want to talk about the content we have, not the content we're going to have. The reason for that is because it will help me illustrate what I like and dislike about the current talent paradigm and how we're losing things at the same time we're gaining them with the new talent system. I am not calling out for the new scheme to be scrapped. On the whole, I am a big supporter of it. But that doesn't mean the current talent system doesn't have things to teach us. So let me begin with the following statement.

I deliberately specced fury for heroic Spine of Deathwing because I wanted to do less damage.

No, I'm not explaining that here. You want to know why? You come with me past the jump. Them there's the rules.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Rage forever changes in the Mists of Pandaria

by Matthew Rossi Apr 28th 2012 at 8:00PM

Remember when I argued that rage should work more like the Diablo 3 barbarian? Well, it totally will in Mists of Pandaria. Battle and Defensive Stance will mean that your rage is purely determined by your active use of rage generation abilities. Your shouts and active rage generation attacks like Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Shield Slam and Charge will be how you generate rage, along with normal melee attacks. You will only generate rage from damage you take by switching into Berserker Stance, which will reduce your rage generated by attacks since you'll lose the new bonus to rage gen Battle Stance provides (100% more rage from normal melee attacks), and you'll lose threat and your 6% critical strike removal from Defensive Stance.

This means that you won't switch to zerk anymore for AoE; you'll switch to zerk if you expect to take a lot of damage and want to generate rage for it. My greatest fears are that this will render zerk almost unused except for when we're running from point A to point B and expecting to take a lot of damage while we do, since Battle Stance doubles the rage generated by auto-attacks. I'm also concerned that warriors have absolutely no direct damage increases anymore. Stances don't give damage multipliers; enrage just increases rage generation. While these caveats concern me, I do think I enjoy the idea of rage being built up by your actions rather than just being a sponge for incoming damage. I do seriously worry about tanks, however.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A simpler and more variable arms spec for Mists

by Matthew Rossi Apr 21st 2012 at 6:00PM

Sometimes, writing these columns, I struggle to find a way to encapsulate the experience I'm having in game. With the Mists of Pandaria beta, I've sat down and detailed how fury and protection warriors have played out, how they've changed and how they're the same. And so I wanted to do the same for arms warriors. For one thing, arms is the spec I'm currently playing on live, in heroic Dragon Soul, so I'm fairly intimate with the spec and its demands. For another, arms is right now probably the most played warrior spec in terms of its representation in heroic level raiding. So what of arms in the beta?

Arms in Mists of Pandaria is arms now, but simpler and more variable.

That's it. The changes to arms are the changes to all warriors. Rend's being gone and Mortal Strike's automatically applying Deep Wounds means that all you have to do to light up Overpower in Mists is use your main attack that generates rage, which you would be a crazy mad insane fool not to use.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How Mists of Pandaria exposes the warrior past

by Matthew Rossi Apr 14th 2012 at 2:00PM

I have been playing a warrior since early December of 2004. I started the game when my wife (well, my wife now; we weren't married yet at the time) introduced me to it. She'd been playing in the beta, really enjoyed it, and thought I would too, since I was a huge Dungeons & Dragons nerd. In a rare example of my listening to someone else, I rolled a paladin (I often played paladins) and played him for two or three weeks before realizing a few things.

I didn't want to heal. Not at all. Not even a little bit.
People kept assuming I would do so.
I loathed every aspect of playing a paladin, right down to the names of the abilities.
I could, in fact, fix all of this by simply playing something other than a paladin.

This led me back to the character creation screen, where I was faced with the decision of what to play if I didn't want to play a paladin. Since when I played D&D, my #1 choice was usually either a ranger or a paladin, I considered hunter, but they didn't seem remotely melee enough for my tastes. Plus, my wife was already playing one. Then while looking at the classes, I tried out a warrior and read a few lines. Next thing I knew, I was killing wolves in Northshire.

Almost seven years later, that character is still here. He's had four race changes and a faction swap, but he's still here. So is the second warrior I rolled (he's a worgen now) and the third (a draenei) and the fourth (a tauren). I fell wholly, completely, and deeply in love with the warrior class, and I've never fallen out of love with it, despite its ups and downs over the years.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection Warriors in Mists of Pandaria

by Matthew Rossi Apr 7th 2012 at 8:00PM

Remember what I said last week? About how the beta is not in damage balancing mode? That goes double for protection warriors right now. Along with feral druids, protection warriors are doing substantially low DPS on the beta. How low? Low enough that threat's a real issue. This low, to be precise.

Ghostcrawler - Protection Warriors & Rage

As I mentioned recently, Prot warrior damage is probably 50% of where it needs to be. When we have that adjusted, your threat will be higher and those Shield Slam and Revenge hits in particular should feel meatier.

source

When they come right out and tell you you're at 50% of where Blizzard expects you to be, you know it's bad. But again, this is a beta and not one intended to balance our DPS yet. In fact, those prolific data miners over at MMO-Champion have already found signs in the next beta patch that the damage balancing is beginning.

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

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury in Mists of Pandaria

by Matthew Rossi Mar 31st 2012 at 4:00PM

This is not a damage pass. The beta is not balanced yet, so aside from some general "This feels underpowered" or "This is brokenly good" if I think it warranted, I won't be talking much about DPS or damage.
Emphasis is on rotation, how the spec feels to play, and how hard or easy rage is to come by. Right now, I'm more interested in discussing how the experience is playing as fury in the beta, not trying to argue for buffs or nerfs when it's simply too soon.
With the new talent system, there's simply not a cookie-cutter build yet for either. Since all fury warriors can go TG or SMF depending on what weapons they have (both are baseline abilities fury warriors all get) and any warrior can take any one of three talents per talent tier, there's no right or wrong yet.
While familiar, there's enough changed to make the fury priority system require relearning. It's not alien, to be sure, but the addition of Wild Strike, the removal of Slam, and the changes to rage generation and stances have altered the spec.

So, let's talk about how fury plays out in Mists.

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

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Mists of Pandaria beta impressions

by Matthew Rossi Mar 24th 2012 at 6:00PM

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 thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Go ahead and hate me for being in the beta. I know how it is. But believe it or not, I'm running around testing out the new warrior talents, the specializations, and I've even leveled a pandaren warrior to 12 in order to see how the new rage scheme plays out at low levels as well as for my level 85s. I also imported two 85 warriors so I could spec one arms and one fury and then play with talent choices.

Before I get too mired in details, let me tell you about Dragon Roar. Dragon Roar takes the place of Avatar in the level 60 talent tier, with Avatar moving to the level 90 talents, replacing Deadly Calm. At level 60, you can spec Bladestorm, Shockwave or Dragon Roar, and Dragon Roar is fantastic. It's a 1-minute cooldown ability that hits everything within 10 yards of you, doing damage and knocking them back and down for 5 seconds. It does fairly solid damage, too.

What this means is that the level 60 tier is actually compelling now, and you're able to choose between different abilities that each do something interesting. It also means warriors have a knockback that also stuns after it goes off, if they spec for it. Man, I would have loved Dragon Roar when we were doing heroic Ragnaros.

At present, only the pandaren starting zone is open for testing, you can't go to Pandaria yet. So after taking my tauren out for a couple of spins through testing out the new talents and playing with stance dancing, I rolled a pandaren warrior and saw what it felt like to level.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Toolkits and themes

by Matthew Rossi Mar 17th 2012 at 4:00PM

Daxxari - War Banner

Ultimately, we wanted to try and expand the design potential for warriors a bit. Increasingly, it seemed that any new ability had to be another type of movement, a weapon strike, or shout, or it wouldn't feel like a warrior ability. We wanted to try something new, and we're hoping that warriors will give them a shot once we're in beta and let us know how it feels.

source

What I really found worth examining is this idea of what feels like a warrior ability, exactly. So many people objected to War Banner based around the idea that it's a totem, and totems are shaman-only. War Banner isn't going to be implemented like a totem. But the idea of trying to design new abilities that broaden the feel of warrior abilities leads us to ask what, exactly, does feel like a warrior ability. Should all warrior abilities be shouts, movement-based abilities or weapon strikes?

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Buffs and debuffs in Mists of Pandaria

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 that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

Last week, we talked about incoming statistics changes. This week, we're going to talk about the details to changes in buffs and debuffs and which classes can provide them. This will of course center around the warrior class and which buffs and debuffs we'll specifically bring to the table. We're also going to hopefully get more into the concept of why buffs and debuffs matter.

When World of Warcraft debuted, warriors tanked primarily by their debuffs. Sunder Armor, Demoralizing Shout and Thunder Clap were considered essential for progression tanking. As time has progressed, debuffing mobs and bosses has diversified so that many DPS specs have access to these debuffs. Meanwhile, buffs grew in importance to the point that warriors (DPS or tank) also gained access to a few of those. As the game evolved from The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King and now Cataclysm, buffs and debuffs were consolidated so that various classes offered access to them to prevent any class from having a monopoly on them. Now, with Mists of Pandaria on the horizon, we're seeing more of this evolutionary process.

What does this mean for warriors? Let's talk about that.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Stat changes and you

by Matthew Rossi Mar 3rd 2012 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Keep yourself alive

by Matthew Rossi Feb 25th 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 thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

One of the most important lessons I was forcibly reminded when killing heroic Yor'sahj this week was that dying makes you useless. Even if you can be given a battle res, that's not only lost damage time for you, it's lost damage or healing time for the person bringing you back from the dead. It means that battle res won't be available for a tank as the fight progresses, it's just a big mess. This was further reinforced by our Ultraxion kill. Killing Ultraxion on heroic means not only does everyone need to hit a minimum DPS threshold of about 33k sustained throughout the fight, they need to do this while performing nearly flawlessly on Hour of Twilight and Fading Light.

Having tanked the past couple of weeks, it was a lesson I needed to relearn. DPS players can't rely on being the target of a dedicated healer -- there's usually two or three healers at most in 25 man raids (and less, perhaps just one in 10's) focusing their attention on the raid as a whole. Even if they break the healing up into assignments and don't deviate, there's still several people at any given time needing the healers attention. While they certainly usually do their best, if we don't help them out we're only hindering ourselves. The days of 'meh, they'll heal me through it' are long gone.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Considering the Mists talent calculator

by Matthew Rossi Feb 18th 2012 at 8:00PM

Filed under: Warrior, Add-Ons, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Single-Minded Fury redux

by Matthew Rossi Feb 11th 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 that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

In my first draft, I started this article off with a detailed explanation of what my main problems with Single-Minded Fury are. I still want to talk about those. But first, I want to say this about the talent.

It's crazy-fun. I've been raiding, Raid Findering and 5-manning with it all week, and frankly I love how smooth the rage generation is. If you ever played fury back in The Burning Crusade or even vanilla, before TG was a gleam in a designer's eye, SMF will be familiar and yet different to you. What's changed? Well, you don't use Whirlwind as your second attack anymore; it's purely a trash ability now. Raging Blow and Bloodsurge instant-cast Slams give you more to do but take the concept of rotation and shake it up, meaning that you're watching for procs more than ever. Colossus Smash gives you a very-long-cooldown ability that you're always going to prioritize. But for all those changes, the talent is still you dual-wielding smaller, faster weapons.

If you were the fury warrior with the Vanir's Fists in late BC, you'll recognize what this talent does for fury. If you leveled a fury warrior in Cata, it's exactly how levels 1 through 68 went. It's a fairly simple concept to grasp. You're not the warrior crushing everything in his path with raw power, and you're not the one using discipline and weapon control to make precise strikes, either. No, you're the one with speed and relentless assault over finesse.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Warrior mistakes to avoid

by Matthew Rossi Feb 4th 2012 at 6:00PM

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 thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

One of the interesting things about my current astonishing obsession with transmogrification and all things related to it has been seeing older itemization. You know, strength and agility plate. Warrior tier 6 is lousy with agility. That's a legacy of the past, of course, and as the design of the game moves ever onward, artifacts like that are left in its wake. After all, most level 70 warriors nowadays move straight to Northrend dungeons and are not likely to look at Black Temple until much later, when farming for transmog gear. The stats aren't important enough to go back and redesign the set.

What I really find interesting about this is seeing where the class has been, not just visually but also in terms of design. It's kind of like archaeology (the actual field of inquiry, not the in-game profession) or paleontology, reconstructing the class and its roots from the remainders of what it wore. Granted, I was there, so to a degree it's like excavating Pompeii with an immortal who survived the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius and keeps grumping about how people in his day didn't complain when they were buried in pyroclastic material. Which is a complete lie, by the way, we did nothing but complain about it. But I digress.

The warrior class has come a long way in seven years, and the artifacts of past design lie strewn about. New players and even old veterans can be forgiven for making a few mistakes based on the rubble. Let's go over a few.

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm

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