WoW.com

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is our weekly column about pie baking competitions. No, no, I'm just kidding you, it's about warriors, be their tanky or DPS. Matthew Rossi is feeling fine after a solid month of near continuous beatings from various creatures, constructs and undead beetles.

One of the interesting things about being a raiding tank again after about a year of DPS is how you come to enjoy being hit in the face. Or wherever they're hitting you, really... tonight I spent a lot of time using Spell Reflection to keep a giant robot head angry at me while the floor erupted in flames all around. That treacherous floor, always erupting in flames when you stand on it. Quite honestly, at this point it's really all I expect from the floor. If it's not on fire or seething void energies then icicles are falling down on it or there's paralytic poison or it just plain disintegrates and I plummet into a subterranean lair.

As I've relearned tanking (since not only do we have a lot more tricks than when I was last tanking in raids, but there's a whole different skillset when tanking for 9 or 24 other people compared to 4 other people) I've had a lot of discussions not only with tanks of other classes, but also with warrior tanks from other groups, since I'm the only raiding warrior tank in my current guild. So now seems like as good a time as any to discuss what's going on in tanking.

Read more →

Filed under: Warrior, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, News items, Classes, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's death knight column.

Hi and welcome to this post Day of the Dead Lichborne. I'm filling in for Daniel this week to talk about my personal favorite death knight talent spec, namely blood. Blood! Over the past year blood has seen its ups and downs, often lagging behind frost for tanking and unholy for DPS (and at times vice versa) but as of patch 3.2 blood seems to be in a really good place, overall. Strong for soloing/questing as well as instancing as either a tank or DPS spec, blood can stand shoulder to shoulder with the other DK talent specs.

Blood's reputation was formed in the early days of Wrath of the Lich King as one of the absolute best leveling specs due to its very strong self healing options. While these were toned down from their beta and early release heights, the tree is still the strongest at creating opportunities to regenerate health of the three, and is often used by enterprising DK's looking to solo older content. But it's capable of far more than that, and of the three specs it's the most physical damage based tree with Heart Strike being purely weapon based damage. Furthermore, blood DK's have one of the nicest pure physical DPS buff abilities in the game with Hysteria. You can be selfish with it and save it for yourself, as you're almost sure to make back the health you'll lose to the talent, but if you choose to share it with a DPS warrior or cat feral druid, the raw DPS they can put out (especially druids) can be rather crazy.

So let us talk about blood. Blood is life... and in your hands, it can also be death.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Leveling, Guides, Classes, Talents, Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

This week on Totem Talk we're going to continue the leveling with coverage of going from level 41 (so actually a little beyond SM, but "Razorfen Downs to Outland" or "Uldaman to Outland" didn't really have the same zing) to level 68, which is the level at which you can board the boat to Northrend. Some basic things to consider before getting to the meat of things.

• It is this writer's opinion that these are the levels that really define your spec and role. It's in the 40's that you can actually have enough talents and have trained enough skills that the real potential of each spec comes through: your elemental shaman actually feels and plays significantly differently than your dual wielding enhancement shaman, and while both can still heal, resto really starts pulling ahead here.
• Shamans were originally designed as 'offensive hybrids' to balance out the paladin's 'defensive hybrid' nature. Since shamans and paladins are no longer designed in opposition those roles have blurred somewhat, but elements of the original intent still show through. Keep in mind that two of the three shaman trees are DPS oriented, and at these levels the fact that one is a ranged DPS while the other is melee will not seem as distinctive as those roles become in raiding/instancing.
• Gear will start to drop in Outland that is more optimal for individual shaman specs. Before then, mail with spell power and/or MP5 is still somewhat rare on the ground in Azeroth outside of the various instance blues that drop. You're just going to have to work around it, annoying as it is.
• Shamans are pretty bloody flexible. I have a friend (Hi Will) who has leveled an orc shaman to 80 as resto, and is working on an alliance shaman as well. Again as resto. And he kills things just fine. It's slower, yes, but it can work, so if you have a spec you really like don't despair of leveling with it as a shaman.

Okay, now to talk about what you'll be doing for 28 levels.

Read more →

Filed under: Shaman, Analysis / Opinion, How-tos, Odds and ends, Instances, Leveling, Guides, Alts, (Shaman) Totem Talk, Battlegrounds

Interesting weekend for me: My schedule is such that I can't really do weekend raids with my Alliance guild, but with fall coming the crummy weather seems to have led to a renaissance for my Horde side play, and suddenly I found myself running Onyxia and TotC 10 on Malfurion in my finest Tauren warrior self. (Tauren warriors: great race/class combo or the greatest race/class combo? The world may never know.) Since I'm fairly familiar with the fights in both cases, it seemed natural enough to explain them for people who hadn't done them.

And then I realized that, without really even paying attention, I'd sort of taken the job over entirely. It just seemed like what I should do: even when I forgot to mention an element of a fight like Gormok's spell lock, I just found myself calmly explaining things in a voice that, frankly, I didn't really even recognize. It was as if I was comfortable telling people what to do. Almost without realizing it I'd started telling people what to do in a raid, and they were doing it. The whole thing was somewhat surreal all told.

So how about you? Ever found yourself leading a raid, an instance, or just a charge across AV without really expecting it? Or are you always in charge in WoW? Are you a leader, a follower, or a bit of both?

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast topics, Instances, Raiding, Wrath of the Lich King

Totem Talk is the column for shamans. Matthew Rossi has found himself healing endless heroics in a conscious decision to improve his healing gear before 3.3 drops. Meanwhile, other shamans are apparently doing something else...

This week, we at WoW.com have received multiple tips about tanking shamans. Several commenters linked to this post over at Righteous Defense discussing Sharicasmi, a shaman tank. I was disinclined to talk about it, first because I already play a couple of tanks as it is and because I feel like shamans have enough going on as melee DPS, caster DPS and healers. Do shamans really need to tank? Three out of the four possible roles in an instance isn't enough for them?

But then I thought about it from the other angle. Two of our hybrids can heal, tank and DPS, and one of those hybrids can heal, tank, melee DPS and ranged DPS. While elemental and enhancement are very different in terms of how they play and what they do, they're still both DPS, they just go about it differently. Am I dismissing the idea of a tanking shaman too soon? Should I be more open? In the end, I decided to let you as readers make the judgment call instead of me. If this many people are sending in the link, it deserves to be discussed.

So let's discuss shaman tanking's historical roots and why it is a hard road to hoe for anyone playing at 80.

Read more →

Filed under: Shaman, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, (Shaman) Totem Talk

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.

Read more →

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King

Lately, I've found myself messing around with alternative strategies, ways of doing things I wouldn't have tried before. One of them is Titan's Grip-less fury. Since I have so many warriors, I can devote a respec to a pet theory or a strange idea (like, say, building a leveling spec around self healing) and so, kitting out my tauren with a fist weapon and a tanking offhand (I don't have two DPS weapons for him) and seeing how it works in instances is one way to play around with the class. Gotta do something to keep the mold off the ol' cow.

I have characters I need to keep min-maxed (my alliance raiding toons, who generally have specs/builds that hew fairly closely to what might be called cookie-cutter) so having toons where I can play around and see for myself are fun. So far, the TG-less fury build isn't exactly rocking the world, but I'm going to stick with it until I can get an offhand that suits the spec for a more fair comparison. I'm not expecting it to end up replacing TG, I just want to do some tests to see for myself.

One of the reasons I bring this up is, a lot of the time we find ourselves looking for the way everyone else is using. And I'm not discouraging that: there are cookie cutter builds for a reason. Especially if you're in a position where people are counting on you to perform your job at the absolute peak you often don't have the luxury to spec in a way that's fun for you personally.

But some players seek the personalized build over the theorycrafted ones, and some others are lunatics who play way too many warriors (or paladins, DK's, I know a player with four max level druids so he can have one of each spec ready to go at a moment's notice, no respec fees or dual spec) and have the room to take one of our alts any way we want.

So now I turn to you: do you ever just throw caution to the winds and pick up that weird spec?

Filed under: Breakfast topics, Leveling

You hear a lot of complaining about leveling up new alts. Having to see the same content again. And I've even said so myself from time to time and meant it. But recently, I dusted off my JC alt and decided to make a push to 80 with him, in part to have a toon to cut all these epic stam gems I need for my tank set now that I'm prot/arms... and also because, griping be damned, I missed fury. (Yeah, yeah, no one's surprised I caved and went back to Titan's Grip, not even me.)

Yes, that's right. My JC alt was a level 70 warrior. And now, he's a level 76 warrior. And I'm having a blast seeing all the stuff I've already seen four or five times now (depending on if you count my Horde alts and taking into account that they have different quests to some degree) on a class I've already leveled to 80 twice. (I also leveled my draenei warrior to 76 before abandoning him.) To be honest, part of it is the fun of trying out a fury spec designed entirely around as much self healing as possible with the Glyph of Bloodthirst and Blood Craze, and part of it is just that I missed these particular questlines.

Read more →

Filed under: Paladin, Shaman, Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast topics, Leveling, Alts, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King

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.

Read more →

Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Talents

Filed under: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Events, Odds and ends, News items, Instances, Alts, Achievements