Check out this really cool article all about The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Warrior’s Bounty

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about tree sloths. Why do you do this to me? We all know it’s about warriors as written by an extremely hairy man who crouches in a dark corner of his apartment muttering about block value vs block rating until his wife hits him with the hose. Matthew Rossi fears the hose. Completely unrelated to anything even tangentially warrior in WoW: Dragon Skin Armor . We’re one step closer to gigantic magical battle axes being viable in modern warfare. Since it’s a holiday in the States (which I’m from, although not currently residing in) and because I’ll take any excuse to gorge myself on turkey flesh and loll around in a swollen food coma (like, say, last week, when I used the fact that I’d washed red clothing with white clothing and now have a lovely pair of bright pink underwear and I don’t care if you know ) I thought this week we could compile a list of things we, as warriors, can be grateful for. If it’s really an issue for you, assume it’s Pilgrim’s Bounty of something. Anyway, let’s you and I get our best grateful faces on (that’s me being grateful up there, in case you couldn’t tell) and discuss things we as warriors can appreciate. Charge / Intercept / Intervene – I’m not sure what people in Azeroth actually pray to when they pray to the Light… it seems like an abstract benevolence slightly akin to the Force from the Star Wars series…but whatever it is, thanks for Charge and its iterations, boy howdy. No other ability can be seen to be as iconic and representative of a class (only Death Grip and Totems come close) as the warrior ability to get from point A to point B in order to put point C into something, or prevent point D from going into that helpful person in a leather miniskirt or what have you. Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Warrior’s Bounty Filed under: Warrior , Analysis / Opinion , The Burning Crusade , (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors , Wrath of the Lich King , Cataclysm The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Warrior’s Bounty originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Warrior’s Bounty

Check out this really cool article all about The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Design vs. Itemization

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Very often, what seem to be class balance issues or problems with a class or spec aren’t, in fact, problems with that class/spec at all. They are instead consequences of encounter design or gearing issues. One example of this is the current state of the DPS warrior: on paper, there’s nothing really tremendously wrong with either arms or fury for DPS in PvE content. Having used arms to great success in PvP recently, I sat down and really looked at what was hampering me when I switched to it for PvE DPS, and the problems I found seemed to be as follows. Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Design vs. Itemization Filed under: Warrior , Analysis / Opinion , Odds and ends , News items , Instances , Raiding , (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors , Wrath of the Lich King , Cataclysm The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Design vs. Itemization originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Design vs. Itemization

Here is a great article all about The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cooldowns

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Every week Matthew Rossi slaves in his kitchen over a hot stove, primarily because he needs something to nosh on while composing The Care and Feeding of Warriors, WoW.com’s column about warriors. Also, he’s chained to the stove. No no, don’t ask, it’s a long story. Cooldowns. Those abilities that provide a sizable benefit to a character when used, but cannot simply be used over and over again due to a time-based limitation on their use. As far as I know, every class has a few. For warriors, being a two role hybrid, cooldowns can be further broken up into tanking and DPS related, with some overlap (the famous and oft-neglected Retaliation comes to mind as a cooldown that can be used in either role to some extent).and it’s often the most basic and yet most easily overlooked aspect of warrior gameplay. While for a DPS, cooldowns are useful and even can be said to be required for top performance, for a tanking warrior’s cooldowns only grow in importance the more cutting edge the content becomes. Wrath of the Lich King stands out, a year or so into its development cycle, as having shifted tanking away from a process of gearing to either survive or completely avoid big spiky damage in the form of critical hits/crushing blows to a process of gearing to survive big spiky damage through stamina and, more often, cooldown usage. Whether it be Gormok the Impaler’s Impale, Onyxia’s combination of Wing Buffet, Cleave and Fire Breath, or Mimiron’s Plasma Blast, you as a tank will often be called to do anything in your power to make healing you through massive amounts of damage easier. Sometimes, it won’t be enough. So let’s talk about cooldowns. Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cooldowns Filed under: Warrior , Analysis / Opinion , Odds and ends , (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors , Wrath of the Lich King The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cooldowns originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cooldowns

Here is a great article all about Death to Whirlwind

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Well, no, not death. But the synergy between Whirlwind and Titan’s Grip is, to my mind, the reason why Titan’s Grip was nerfed in the first place. The secret is in Whirlwind’s tooltip. For those of you who just hate reading floaty boxes, here’s the skinny: ” In a whirlwind of steel you attack up to 4 enemies within 8 yards, causing weapon damage from both melee weapons to each enemy .” What’s the problem, you’re probably thinking, or maybe you’re thinking about pennies and kittens, I’m no mind reader. Plus, I’m writing this before you get a chance to read it, so while I’m composing it you’re not even thinking about what I’m typing because you won’t read it until later and I’m also incapable of prognosticating the future. Continue reading Death to Whirlwind Filed under: Warrior , Analysis / Opinion , Talents Death to Whirlwind originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments

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Here is a great article all about The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Armor Penetration

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This week The Care and Feeding of Warriors finally does that long piece about Armor Penetration. You’ll find Matthew Rossi screaming at the moon, caked in his own blood, after plunging into these non-Euclidian mysteries. I’ve been threatening to write about it for weeks. Thing is, I’m not too sure who I’m threatening, you or me. Armor Penetration has been with us in one form or another for quite a while now. There are abilities like Sunder Armor and Expose Armor that lower armor temporarily, of course, and the rogue talent Serrated Blades. My first conscious exposure to the mechanic was the epic weapon Bonereaver’s Edge , which dropped off of Ragnaros. Back then, the mechanic was fairly simple. Bonereaver`s Edge would ignore a certain amount of armor with each proc of an on-hit ability, in this case 700 armor. It could stack up to three times, so in a fight that lasted for long enough Bonereaver`s could maintain an effective -2100 armor debuff on a boss that only applied to the person using it. Effects like this weren`t terribly common in Vanilla WoW. I myself never had a Bonereaver’s (Don’t cry for me, I did all right on Rag drops if I do constantly brag so myself ) and so Armor Pen didn’t really impinge on my consciousness. Of course, I was mostly either a tank or an offtank back in the old MC/BWL/AQ/NAXX40 days anyway. Back when you could tank with an arms or fury spec and dinosaurs ruled Un’Goro. (They still do, we just don’t go there very often.) So it wasn’t until Burning Crusade that I really started to notice ArP. Back in BC, armor pen didn’t have rating yet. Enchants like Executioner read ” Permanently enchant a Melee Weapon to occasionally ignore 840 of your enemy’s armor. Requires a level 60 or higher item. ” Gear that had armor pen on it told you how much armor it was going to penetrate. Cataclysm’s Edge , for instance, just said “Equip: Your attacks ignore 335 of your opponent’s armor.” What this meant was, when you collected a whole set of ArP gear, all you had to do was add up how much armor you were ignoring. The plus side of this was, it was very simple to understand. The down side? Well, on bosses or classes with low armor (we’re talking those annoying skirt wearers who can take half of your health off in one attack that completely ignores armor, you know the ones) reducing up to, say, 3000 armor at level 70 was pretty dang nasty. So they changed Armor Pen to a rating. From there, all our troubles began. Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Armor Penetration Filed under: Warrior , Analysis / Opinion , Odds and ends , The Burning Crusade , (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors , Wrath of the Lich King The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Armor Penetration originally appeared on WoW.com on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments

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