Posts with tag protection-warrior-the-care-and-feeding-of-warriors

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 is part 2 of our look at PVPing with a spec mainly thought of by others as a PVE spec. Protection has waxed and waned in popularity as a PVP spec since Wrath of the Lich King launched. Its mobility, stun potential and kite resistance (as well as some nice spell interrupt utility), combined with excellent survival, weigh against its lack of raw burst potential. Protection can do many things well in PVP, from carrying a flag or protecting a tower or cap point to tanking in Alterac Valley or the Isle of Conquest, but its strengths are balanced by one factor. Compared to other warrior specs, protection in PVP just plain lacks the raw killing throughput of arms or fury.

This doesn't mean a prot warrior can't get off a Shield Slam that will make another player cross-eyed, because it can and does. But unlike arms, when prot charges a target and stuns it, even using Shockwave immediately afterwards, it simply isn't likely to burst out anything close to the raw damage of the non-tanking specs. If you're prot in PVP, you should be maximizing your strengths, not dwelling on your weaknesses.

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, so you leveled as protection. Let's assume you intend to tank on said warrior. Since you're now level 85, it follows that you should look up what the top raiding tanks are doing and do that, yes?

No.

Sweet candy-coated Garrosh clusters, no, you should not do that. Those guys are wearing gear you haven't even started to collect and are in 10- or 25-man raids that are composed of some of the best players in the world. You're just starting. You're most likely going to be tanking in pickup groups where the other four players are complete strangers who neither know you nor care one whit about your gameplay. In some cases, sure, you'll get a good group and everyone will work together and kill the monsters as a unit. That's great.

I'm here to write columns to help you out, and frankly, you don't need help with good groups. You need my help for the groups with the fury warrior in full Firelands gear who shows up in your heroic Deadmines run and does 28k DPS. (I said I was sorry.) You need my help for the ret paladin who doesn't know what his interrupt is called (Rebuke) or the mage who won't cast Polymorph because it's just going to break anyway when he starts jumping around casting Arcane Explosion constantly for no reason.

This week, we're going to talk about how to gear and play a tank starting out in normal level 85 instances and the first tier of Cataclysm heroics.

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.

Having talked about Firelands for a while and then the rather esoteric concept of reforging and optimizing your gear, this week we're going to switch gears and talk about leveling in Cataclysm. Specifically, we're going to talk about leveling as protection, which quite possibly is the best leveling spec for a new player. This guide is aimed at people who are just starting the game or the class.

Leveling as protection in the post-Cataclysm landscape offers several advantages.

• Once you reach level 14 or so, you can begin queuing for instances as a tank, leading to fast experience and rewards. This makes gearing up a protection warrior fairly easy.
• If you intend to tank in the endgame, leveling as protection will allow you to learn the role as you level rather than having to pick it up all at once.
• Protection works well as a PVP spec in many brackets as you level.
• Especially as you hit Outlands and Northrend, protection offers a good combination of survivability and the ability to destroy mobs for ease of questing, even for quests that normally indicate a group. Prot warriors can often pull more mobs and solo faster than DPS warriors.
• Vengeance is a lot of fun.
• If you're playing an alt, there are now several heirlooms for tanking warriors.
• Hitting things in the face with a shield is pretty awesome -- I'm not going to lie.

Quite frankly, even if you don't intend to tank at max level, protection can be an extremely fun way to level. Let's take a beginner's-eye view.

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.

All right. With patch 4.2 dropping next week, it's time to discuss it in detail -- at least, what it means for warriors. What changes will it have in store for tanks (almost none) and DPS (less of it) warriors? What will happen to us in PVP (arms and fury warriors will lose burst, prot won't)? Why is our PVP set so ridiculously ugly that it makes me cringe?

We'll start by looking at what Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said about class balance. And specifically about warriors, because that's the column, you see. I could give a rat's hindquarters about the other, lesser classes. Except shamans. If you can't be a warrior, being a shaman is a good backup plan. Why not be both? Go ahead and roll six warriors and a shaman, I'll wait.

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.

We should talk briefly about two nerfs to warrior DPS in the most recent patch 4.2 PTR. They're not earthshaking in and of themselves, but I would be remiss if I didn't address them.

Warriors

• Recklessness and Deadly Calm can no longer be used at the same time. One cannot be used while the other is active, but using one does not put the other on its full cooldown.

• Talent Specializations
  • Arms
    • Two-Handed Weapon Specialization weapon damage increase has been lowered to 12%, down from 20%.
  • Fury
    • Dual Wield Specialization weapon damage increase has been lowered to 5%, down from 10%.

If I thought warrior DPS was through the roof or overpowered in any way right now, I guess I'd understand these nerfs. It more seems to me like, "Well, we nerfed some other classes ... We might as well nerf them, too -- it's protocol." I'm going to assume it's a change similar to the one we saw when Ulduar went live aimed at keeping warrior scaling from getting out of whack with the higher amounts of hit, crit and mastery that will be available.

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 expansion launched on Dec. 7, 2010. That means we're into our sixth month of the expansion now. That makes it a good time to stop and take stock of the expansion so far, what it's meant for PVP and PVE, DPSing and tanking. With patch 4.2 and the Firelands right around the corner, we're on the cusp of some pretty significant changes. New gear (including a whole new tier) will expose the class and its scaling in ways the first tier never can, and new encounters will alter the balance between ranged and melee classes. As a melee class and a tanking class, warriors are always pretty solidly mired in these kinds of changes, for good or for ill.

So let's take a look at where we're coming from this far.

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 decided to wait until after 4.1 goes live (which I expect will be this upcoming week) to discuss arms in both PvE and PvP. Right now, for a short statement to tide you over, I'd say arms is viable in PvE and still strong in PvP. Part of the reason I want to hold off on discussing it is because I spent all week tanking and didn't get a chance to try arms out in raiding. So I feel like it would be disingenuous of me to tell you how awesome arms is in PvE right now when I haven't been arms outside of Tol Barad and Random BGs all week.

(Well, okay, I've been arms on my level 70 alt. But do you care how arms is doing in outdated content? I don't think so. By next week, I should have had a chance to raid as arms after the patch 4.1 changes and should have a much better idea how it's shaking out.)

That leaves us with this week. What do we talk about? Well, since I bend to peer pressure like a willow sapling (an extremely hairy one, but still), we're going to talk about patch 4.1's new heroics and a whole mess of new gear squarely between 346 blues and 359 epics. Yes, we're going to Zul'Gearup. Yes, I made that up. Yes, I'm suitably ashamed.

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 discussed hit and expertise. Before that, we talked about tanking etiquette and how to work up to tanking. This week, we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of warrior tanking in heroics and raids. Before we do that, we should point you at the Protection 101 and Protection 101 talent guides, which will cover a lot of what we talk about here in more exhaustive detail.

Heroics and raiding are similar but have different demands on a tank. With the announcement this week of a new Call to Arms feature that will most likely result in added rewards for those of us willing to tank in the LFD system, it's a good time to familiarize yourself with the role and how to perform it to the best of your ability.

Frankly, I view tanking as something that requires more effort than DPSing. On my warrior, I find it takes less effort and less work to top DPS meters than it does to tank. This isn't necessarily because tanking requires more skill (I would argue it's no more complicated than DPSing in either spec) but rather due to a combination of added pressure, expectations and labor required to do it well and make it look like you haven't had to work hard at all. So let's talk about ways you can make it easier on yourself.

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.

A week or so ago, while I was planning out this series of posts about tanking in Cataclysm, our old friend (well, okay, I've never met nor spoken to him) Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) had some interesting things to say about the current state of hit and expertise for tanks. I wasn't able to immediately address them because I'd already written out what would be published, and so I had to wait until this column to talk about the history of hit and expertise for tanks in previous expansions and what the current state of the art is.

As warriors, we've been grappling with hit and expertise for years now. Why, you may ask, are they suddenly less viable for tanks than they were during Wrath? Well, believe it or not, hit and expertise have become less compelling for tanks entirely because of two big quality of life changes for tanks: the removal of parry hasting and taunt miss chance.

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 tanking etiquette and how you can deal with the heightened stress of tanking an instance without convincing your run that your brother is actor Emilio Estevez. This week, we're going to talk about how you, as a new or returning warrior, can learn how to tank.

I've been playing warriors for a long time now. Right now, I have three 85 warriors that I'm working on, for DPS, tanking, and PvP. This means to some degree I'm in a constant state of relearning the class. In addition, I'm leveling a druid, DK, and paladin for tanking purposes as well, because I think it does help you as a warrior tank to see how other classes tank. (So far, my perspective is that paladins and DKs are brokenly good and druids need a little work. I don't pretend this is unbiased.) The first and best advice I can give someone who wants to learn to tank is, go out and tank things. While this is akin to the old teaching people to swim via throwing them in deep water approach to swimming, it has several advantages.

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 things warriors do in game is tank. We're one of four classes that can tank, and one of two classes that can only tank or DPS, meaning that there's a reasonable chance that any warrior you meet will be a tank and an absolute certainty that if your warrior isn't DPS specced, it's tank specced. (I don't include PvP in this because there are PvP warriors of all three specs.) Since tanking is something I talked about at great length during the past year or so, I have been endeavoring to talk more about the DPS specs since Cataclysm launched. So, I've done that, and I'll continue to do it, but this week and as a recurring feature here at TCAFOW I'm starting a Cataclysm Tanking series of posts. These will come as topics suggest themselves to me.

For this week, rather than discuss gear or rotations (some of which we covered in the Cataclysm Protection 101 posts a little while ago) I wanted to talk about something less tangible but more immediate in its impact, namely, how to behave while tanking and how to behave towards your tank. Lately, with running heroics so much a part of the gearing for raiding experience, and some people really feeling at the mercy of the tank and resenting it, it's time to talk about how we can all make each others lives easier and more enjoyable.

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.

Tanking. It's what we talked about last week, and if not for a massive burst of gut rot that hit me Thursday like a hammer wielded by the Spectre himself, we would already have talked about it more this week. Better late than never, I suppose. To give you an idea of how sick I am as I type this, I didn't want to move all day, so I'm actually writing the column from the floor of my living room using my TV as my monitor. I'm so sick and exhausted that I find this screenshot of my worgen in his prot stance and gear standing on Anduin Lothar's shoulder to be hilarious. You see, Lothar was so badass, he had a werewolf for his conscience.

Maybe you have to be extremely dehydrated to appreciate it.

Anyway, this week, we're going to talk about protection's talents, which ones are niche talents and which are more generally applicable. Not all of the talents we discuss will be in the protection tree, as we'll also look at arms and fury talents that are well suited to tanking. It would be hard to justify talking about useful tanking talents without discussing Field Dressing, for instance. I had to tank those annoying parasites on Magmaw this week, and I was very glad to have the boosted self healing from Field Dressing for my Victory Rush heals.

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.

Tanking. The role wherein you go and let very bad things do other very bad things to you so that they don't do very bad things to the rest of your party or raid, giving said party or raid time to do very bad things to them. I wrote a protection 101 guide almost exactly a year ago. We're revisiting the subject now for several reasons. Much as when we wrote the DPS warrior 101 guide, things have definitely changed for prot warriors over the past year. The addition of the mastery stat, the removal of defense on gear, the talent revamp and Vengeance have all had a cumulative effect on tanking warriors. So we're going to cover the basics and give as broad an overview as we can.

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.

So race change is a marvelous thing when it allows you to go from a night elf to a werewolf, that's all I'm saying. It's even better when you turn into a werewolf carrying what appears to be a rock tied to a bone. While leveling my old main has been a lot of fun, it's hard to stay away from my worgen for very long. This week, we start our look into the gear available through normal dungeons and heroics for both DPS and tanks. Because this is a lot of ground to cover, we'll probably need to take a couple of weeks to really go over it all. We're going to look at non-heroic gear first before moving on to stuff from heroics, since you have to crawl before you can walk and all.

Remember our previous guide to faction gear? That's basically how we're going to approach this, listing pieces in each dungeon. While you may make use of an agility cape, jewelry or weapon, since they're not optimal for warriors, I'm not listing them unless there's a compelling reason to do so. (For instance, I'll list ranged weapons with agility, since it's hard to find a strength ranged weapon.) The gear in these dungeons tends to range from iLevel 308 and up, so keep it in mind when you're trying to build your set for heroics that you need iLevel 329 on average to get in the door.