Category Archives: wow-warriors

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Lessons from Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader

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This week The Care and Feeding of Warriors talks about what the latest 10 and 25 man raid can teach you on its highest difficulty setting. Matthew Rossi has gotten his face pushed into the floor a lot this week. It's okay, he probably needed a touch of humbling.

So yeah, turns out the plants inside the Crusader's Coliseum taste awful. Must be all those yeti, worms and magnataurs they let traipse around in there.

This week, after our usual clear of Trial of the Crusader we got serious in TotGC, as Matt Low tells me is the proper acronym. After some bad experiences we got the Beasts down with minimal fuss, and Jaraxxus took us a night but eventually died. Faction Champions, on the other hand, just stomped on our heads over and over and over and over again. Eventually they went down, and we called it a night exhausted but glad to be done with the whole thing. Why do I mention this?

Because one of the things I've come to realize is that I'd gotten soft, or more accurately, I've grown comfortable in a tunnel vision, spam my rotation and shut up world. Whether tanking or DPS, warriors are notable as a class with a purity of focus... pretty much everything we do is physical in nature, with the exception of a few bleeds thrown in... and yet, a pretty widely varied toolbox to pull out. With Icecrown on the horizon and patch 3.3 on the PTR, it seems like a good time to discuss warriors as a general tacklebox.

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Lessons from Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms gearing for beginners

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors promised it would discuss Arms gearing for the warrior just hitting 80 three columns ago. Since we covered the changes to warriors in patch 3.2.2 this week already, it seems like a good time to at least try and discuss it now.

Let's get this out of the way up front: if every week you're rolling over Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader heading for A Tribute to Insanity, then this column will be completely wasted on you. It's like bringing coals to Newcastle (not the bitter, the actual town). While my human warrior is geared pretty well by this point, he's a fury/prot warrior most of the time, so the test bed for most of my Arms play is my tauren, who is mainly gearing up via Wintergrasp and various Battlegrounds as well as five man TotC and its heroic counterpart. (As an aside, if someone could explain to me why the Grand Champions and Paletress seem to have forgotten that they have 2H weapons on their loot tables, I'd really appreciate it.)

This column will be focused on a general overview of gear specifically for an arms warrior that you can acquire via PvP (not Arena, but Wintergrasp and BG's), reputation grinding, emblem vendors and running TotC 5/heroic 5. There's actually a great deal of easily acquired gear out there to catch up your new arms warrior.

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms gearing for beginners originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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