Filed under: Warrior

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.

Before we get started, let's cover the previous posts in this series:

• Leveling a new warrior
• Levels 1 to 30
• Levels 31 to 60

What levels 61 through 90 cover is a staggering array of content, if you think about it, going from Burning Crusade (in many ways the oldest content still available in WoW) to Wrath, then Cataclysm and finally Mists of Pandaria itself. Even without raiding or running heroic dungeons, you're still looking at over 30 zones (I'm being conservative and not counting the DK start zone, the Worgen/Goblin start zones, Wintergrasp or Tol Barad) of content. And that content varies greatly, since it ranges from first being introduced in 2007 to 2012. That's over five years of game design iteration, and you can really feel it - in many ways, going from the Cataclysm revamped old world to TBC era Outland to start this patch of leveling off is like stepping into a time machine. Hellfire is a scattered zone, with multiple quest hubs only loosely connected and even with the quests having been adjusted to be much easier to solo it feels like the artifact of its time that it is.

Still, since both Outland and Northrend have had their experience requirements relaxed from their debut periods, it's not hard to get through them. Ironically enough, it's when you hit level 80 and start in on Cataclysm content that the game starts to feel bogged down. Several heirlooms currently stop working at level 80 (the hat, cloak and legs currently available last until 85, and new heirlooms are coming in 5.2) and the experience requirements, while reduced, are still more significant than the previous two expansions.

Still, let's talk about what you, as a warrior, will find when you hit these levels.

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 starting out and going from 1 to 30 as a warrior. This week, we'll finish off the Cataclysm-revamped content before heading to Outland. Some points to make before we get started:

• It's my opinion that the warrior class starts to open up in these levels, with several important class abilities like Deep Wounds, Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury, Shield Wall and other favorites. We also gain the last warrior stance, Berserker Stance, although with the revamp to stances with Mists of Pandaria it's not as important for leveling.
• Both tanking and DPSing become a lot more 'real' with these levels. Being the proper spec for your role is a lot more important, and by level 60 each spec feels like it will for the rest of your leveling. You'll still gain new abilities, but they'll supplement rather than define you compared to 31 to 60, which is where that definition comes in.
• PvP is, to my mind, more fun here than at lower levels. You just feel more like a warrior with certain abilities, after all.
• In past years, I would have advised a leveling warrior to get to Outland as soon as possible. Now, however, I advise that you wait until 60. There are some excellent quest chains in the revamped Winterspring, Burning Steppes and Blasted Lands that will get you to 60 painlessly, and once you head to Hellfire Peninsula you're heading into some of the oldest leveling content the game has. Delay that system shock if you can, I would argue.

All the initial points I made last week are still viable. So now, let's break open what you'll be getting as you level through the zones, hit the dungeons, or run some PvP.

The disappearance of strength polearms has been much lamented over the course of the past year, with not just one, but two questions in The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column, asking whether they will ever return. Ghostcrawler recently answered that question:

@albindahlander It's on the list, but unlikely before 5.2. Sorry.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) February 9, 2013

A light at the end of the tunnel appears! The problem with polearms, for those who weren't aware, is that they have a different animation to other two-handed weapons. Their set of animations includes a sort of poking motion, as well as the usual swinging and overhead smashing. This is the reason why they can't be transmogrified into other two-handed weapons when transmog restrictions are relaxed with patch 5.2.

This different animation issue also rears its ugly head when it comes to Titan's Grip -- the fury warrior dual-wield ability. There is no dual-wield animation for polearms, so warriors currently can't dual-wield them. This has likely been what's preventing Blizzard using them as end-game weapons, but Ghostcrawler's tweet heralds their return. There is already a strength polearm in the patch 5.2 loot table, as the tweeter says, so hopefully Blizzard will sort a fix for the dual-wield issue sooner rather than later.

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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.

Continued from last week, our guide to leveling a warrior in Mists of Pandaria talks about the 1 to 60 game, focusing on the first 30 levels. Redesigned in Cataclysm, the content remains the same, but the process has literally never been simpler than it is right now. Even excluding elements like heirlooms and refer a friend bonuses, the following changes happened to make it easier than ever.

• There is no need to see a trainer to learn new abilities as you level. Instead, as soon as you gain the appropriate level, they appear in your spellbook, ready to be used.
• The talent trees from Cataclysm were removed, and most abilities were either removed or folded into class abilities you simply gain as you level. You now need only choose 1 talent out of three every fifteen levels, starting at level 15.
• By level 60, you will have four talents, up to and including one of three AoE damage abilities. Each talent is accessible to any class specialization, meaning that your chosen role doesn't limit you from choosing a talent that sounds interesting to you.
• Almost all dungeon quests are accessible via a quest giver inside the dungeon entrance as you zone in, which combines with the Dungeon Finder to make it easier than ever to run dungeons as a means to level your character.

With abilities having been redesigned, leveling provides something useful roughly every 2 to 3 levels between specialization abilities (strikes like Colossus Smash are a specialization ability, accessible only by arms and fury warriors), talents, and class abilities. You get Charge at level 3 now, and once you do, it will open up the real fun of the warrior class. Namely running headlong into things and smashing them.

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.

Congratulations! You've decided to level a warrior. I applaud your choice in leveling satisfaction. This article is designed for the use of a new warrior, whether it be an experienced WoW player who hasn't picked up the class yet or an entirely new player.

Warriors are a melee DPS/tanking hybrid class that use a variety of combat stances tailored towards their specific role in combat as well as the situation to hand. They're uniquely mobile due to several abilities and talents designed for quick movement on the battlefield, and can use every single kind of melee weapon, although weapons with strength should definitely be the priority over ones with agility, and no warrior should use a weapon with intellect, spellpower or spirit on it.

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.

Let's just jump right into it, shall we?

Ghostcrawler - PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues

Warrior
- For Arms, we are going to try Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death instead of autoattacks. This will make haste slightly worse (which we can fix) but we hope will help make the rotation slightly more compelling, since autoattack procs can feel really random. With Overpower you can anticipate it a little more.
- Likewise, Overpower will cost no rage in Execute range. We agree that saving rage for Overpower and spending it all on Execute don't play well together.
- We haven't made a tuning pass on Arms (or any spec) yet. Don't fret about DPS numbers at this stage.

source

I actually like this change quite a bit. Yes, I am capable of liking things. It's not all whining about haste over here.

What I like about it is that it emphasizes Overpower over autoattacks, which are fairly unimportant for an arms warrior anyway. You hit cap at 7.5%, which is absurdly easy in comparison to fury anyway (which is why no fury warrior bothers to try, leaving hit a fairly pointless DPS statistic... but we've talked about hit and expertise before) so you're going to land those slow hits and generate rage with them... and that's pretty much all they should do, in my opinion. With Mortal Strike and Colossus Smash both so important, giving Overpower more to do is fine by me.

I also absolutely agree with the idea of making Execute completely discount Overpower's rage cost. In fact, I agree with it so strongly that I'm sort of bemused here. Usually I don't wholeheartedly endorse a proposed change.

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 actually got excited for a second that haste was going to become a viable stat for DPS warriors. I wrote an entire 1200 word column that you won't be seeing based on my PTR experiences, my testing out arms and fury with the 100% buff to haste. Fury didn't really see all that much improvement, ultimately, save for smoother rage flow and overall easier uptime on certain abilities - my raider dummy DPS on the PTR was about the same as TG fury. Arms actually saw a mild improvement, though, between changes to mastery and haste, and I was excited that warriors might have been moving away from the 'stack crit to the exception of everything else' gearing paradigm.

Luckily or unluckily, that won't be the case. Instead, with some of these changes being reverted and other changes coming in, both arms and fury are going to gear in 5.2 exactly like they do in 5.1, there's no exciting new paradigm and no thought needed about what stat you value. You will be stacking crit forever, even if they don't put any on the gear.

So, how about patch 5.2 as of the most recent PTR. Second Wind is currently back up to 3% healing a tick (still lower rage gen), Defensive Stance is nerfed for non-tanks but should remain exactly the same for tank specced warriors, Impending Victory got a mild buff to its healing (up to 15% from its current 10%), Slam is still slightly buffed, Taste for Blood is still completely redesigned (and I will talk about it, having gotten the chance to play around with it some) and frankly kind of weird, but none of these changes are massive ones aside from that Taste for Blood change and its repercussions.

As we discussed before, most of the changes seem aimed either at Vengeance and its scaling, or PvP issues like everyone taking Shockwave for a stun on a 20 second cooldown. The Taste for Blood change is obviously also rooted in PvP, but one of the more interesting consequences of that change is that it makes Heroic Strike even less desirable for arms than it already was. For fury, the Bloodsurge change is clearly aimed at getting us to want to use Wild Strike more and Heroic Strike less since it's more rewarding to pool rage and throw off a couple of HS after a Colossus Smash than it is to wait for a Bloodsurge proc and use a low damage Wild Strike, and squeezing in three of them just doesn't fit the rotation most times.

Still, there are definitely things to talk about with this PTR and warriors. A lot of them aren't implemented yet is the problem.

So far in Mists raiding, TG seems to be on par with SMF for the most part. I've had days where I handily beat the SMF warriors in our raids, and days where they beat me just as easily. I raided with Shockwave instead of my customary Bladestorm/Dragon Roar last night and it worked out fine, but in the end I switched back to Dragon Roar for its being useful both as a single-target and a multi-target ability. In general, I feel fairly confident in saying that fury warriors can raid with either TG or SMF, depending entirely on the combination of personal preference and what drops for you. That being said, four piece tier 14 is pretty much essential for parity as a DPS warrior, and even more so for fury with its desperate need to crit on pretty much every Bloodthirst. Since TG swings on average a full second slower than SMF, it seems exaggerated.

Keep in mind that SMF sims better at present, so all things being equal it might be the best possible choice for a DPS warrior min-maxing obsessively.

Above you're looking at the consolation prize the game finally handed me for not getting a 1h weapon for testing out Single-Minded Fury. As consolation prizes go, it's a fairly nice one. I enjoy hitting things with it.

While looking over the patch 5.2 notes we saw last week, I got to thinking about the warrior changes, most of which seem aimed either at reducing protection warriors' AP scaling (which I assume must be 10% too good, based on these nerfs, despite my not noticing warriors tearing up the universe as tanks) and several changes rooted entirely in PvP. The Shockwave change will leave it basically unchanged for tanking warriors while making PvP warriors less likely to use it as an every 20 second stun (potentially making Dragon Roar and Bladestorm slightly more competitive in PvP again) and the Taste for Blood change was expected ever since they nerfed the ability to only stack once in PvP.

So I'm not surprised by any of it, save the Slam buff (moving Slam up to 220% weapon damage means to me that there's an expectation that arms DPS is going to drop significantly with the new TfB) but I am contemplative of it all. See, to my mind, the warrior class exists in a state of AC (After Cataclysm) and it will be patch 5.2 that makes the first really significant changes to warriors in the Mists of Pandaria world. So let's take a look at these notes, and see what they tell 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.

I really want to like haste. I really really do. The problem is, it just doesn't do as much for us as it would have to for me to like it. What would it have to do? Well, for starters it would have to reduce the cooldown on our rage generation abilities. The fact that no amount of haste affects, as an example, my Mortal Strike or Bloodthirst or Shield Slam cooldown hurts the stat for us. I've tested this by stripping completely naked to ensure I had no haste at all, then putting all of my gear back on and having 6% haste - 2,545 haste rating - and making sure that none of my abilities can be used more often. While haste still does increase our rage generation in Battle or Berserker Stance, by increase how fast our autoattacks are, this is a piddlingly low benefit compared to other plate DPS.

It does even less for us as tanks. Some tanks like paladins and DK's are able to use haste items as tanking gear, because the haste increased their resource generation and thus their active mitigation. But for us, haste does nothing for tanking because we generate no rage from autoattacks when we're in Defensive Stance. There are three plate classes, all three can tank or DPS, and of those three only one of them gets minimal rewards from haste as melee DPS and absolutely nothing from it as a tank.

Are you a proud orc, or just like to dress like one, and you want to show solidarity with the Kor'kron Overseers who've been watching Undercity since Varimathras pulled his attempted coup? Well, we have a look for you! It actually comes fairly close to matching up with the Kor'kron. Now, this is a plate set, because that's what the Kor'kron wear, and it's designed around the use of a 2h weapon for the same reason. Also note, this is specifically designed to look like the Kor'kron Overseers that guard Undercity - it's not a match for the old Kor'kron who guarded Thrall in Orgrimmar, or the ones you see in Northrend, Cataclysm's zones or Mists.

Despite the fact that this is a set modeled after the Kor'kron, it's technically speaking not a Horde specific set. It can be mostly replicated by any Alliance players who just want to feel Hordely for a day. Yes, I know that's not a word. What's interesting about the Kor'kron Overseer look is that it can be approximated fairly closely with in-game items and you can even vary the color on several of the pieces if you don't like the original for whatever reason.

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.

Still waiting for the extra 1-h weapon to start looking at Single-Minded Fury. But I did start working on my tanking again recently. I went back to September to look at Theck's posts on warrior mitigation statistics and started thinking about how warrior gearing works now. To oversimplify for convenience, the value of our various active mitigation statistics and our passive avoidance statistics varies depending on how you prioritize Shield Block and Shield Barrier. This means, among other things, that you can gear, gem and reforge differently if you intend to be running primarily five man dungeons vs. raids, and that you can even change your tactical outlay of stats based on whether or not you're running 10's vs. 25's to some extent.

Really, what it comes down to is Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier use and the tension between trying to avoid the absolute most incoming damage vs. trying to create the most predictable spread of incoming damage. Theck makes the point that, while spamming Shield Barrier might cause you to take the least amount of damage overall, you're going to end up taking spiky damage. Spiky damage is something healers hate. A healer would much rather you were taking hits that kept you constantly losing about 60% of your health than be in a situation where most of the time you took no damage, but occasionally you took 90% of your health in one hit, especially when those hits could occur back to back.

As a result, while it may be mathematically best to rely on Shield Barrier, it won't work out that way in actual practice because healer mana isn't infinite and they can't just bomb heal you to full if you go down to almost dead in one or two hits. Damage spikes are the enemy, and a balanced use of Shield Block and Barrier will cause your incoming damage to be far more predictable and easier for your healers to cope with.

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.

This all started while I was leveling my worgen warrior, above, to level 90. I kept getting into dungeons as fury, then the tank would flake out, display a total lack of understanding of threat mechanics, or what have you. Since I didn't intend to level as prot, I hadn't really gotten a shield or 1h weapon yet, so when I inevitably got asked by a group to tank so that we could keep going through Shado-Pan, I just switched to D-Stance, threw on the few tanking pieces I had, and got to work. And it worked well enough that I decided to finally get off of my backside and work on that level 90 DPS-tank build I promised months ago. Of course, we should clarify that:

1. This is not a valid tanking strategy for progression content and you shouldn't do it in any situation where you don't know the other players involved, unless you're simply the only alternative to not moving forward at all. After waiting 20 minutes for another tank to sign on, quite a few healers are quite amenable to arms or fury tanking.
2. If you do this, you are tanking at a fairly steep disadvantage and are demanding a lot more of your healer. This is not the kind of thing to just spring on a poor person trying to keep the group alive, since your active mitigation in this setup is practically zero. I always made sure to tell people up front what I was doing when I was the tank of last resort, and at 90 I've only done this with groups I knew.
3. This is something I did purely for fun. Sometimes, we actually get to have fun while playing World of Warcraft. I do not expect Blizzard to itemize for this, nor do I expect them to redesign the warrior class around the idea of this being viable.
4. It is crazy fun, however.

Offspec tanking is one of those things warriors most often find themselves doing because the tanks are dead. In those situations, you can't really do more than hit taunt, maybe switch to Defensive Stance and pop Die by the Sword to try and stay up as long as possible. If you happen to have a Shield Wall macro that equips a shield for you, you can do that too, but that's basically it. Most warrior players who want to tank will do so by speccing protection. Why wouldn't you? It's a great tanking spec.