Each week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors looks at the warrior class, the dizzying highs, the devastating lows, and the agony and ecstasy of plate wearing, rage using toons everywhere in Azeroth, Outland and Northrend. Matthew Rossi is our slightly demented, hirsute guide to all things warrior. We're not kidding, the guy's really hairy. Like a sasquatch, really.

Okay, first off, a confession: I'm cheating on my fury spec.

I have been since the option to have dual talent specialization came out, actually. See, I tanked all through original WoW and The Burning Crusade (to be fair, I tanked as an arms or fury warrior because I could in MC and BWL) and so I figured, what the heck, I'll go prot for my offspec and tank some heroics. After an initial hiccough where I actually specced arms for some fights and fury for others, I settled back into a standard prot build for tanking heroics for friends. Then summer hit, and we all know what happens in summer: people suddenly want to go outside and froilic in the sunshine and you're sitting there waiting to raid with 22 people and no tanks. So what do you do?

Well, you strap on all that offspec tanking gear you collected 'just in case' and you tank Ulduar, that's what you do. Over the past couple of weeks I've tanked more than I've been DPS That's not the problem, however. It's not that I've been tanking that has me bothered... it's that I liked it. A lot.

What to say about patch 3.2 so far? One of the dangers of writing about the PTR in general is the possibility that, as you are typing out what you want to say, a brand new PTR patch is dropping. To some degree this would be a welcome circumstance even though it would erase what I'm writing about now, because the current PTR has nothing for warriors.

Well, okay, not nothing. They buffed Armored to the Teeth slightly. On the PTR it grants 1/2/3 AP per 108 armor, as opposed to on live, where it takes 180 armor for that same benefit. Why 108? Maybe because it was easy to swap the 8 and the 0. Honestly, I couldn't tell you. The amount of AP you get from the talent isn't tremendous, but anything's better than nothing I suppose.

Also, the block value changes are in (I tested them out yesterday), and, well, they fail even as a band aid fix to the problem of block performance: sure, you deal more threat to trash pulls and take less damage from them, but as far as bosses are concerned, block is still lackluster as a 'oh I don't want to die' stat. You can now block up to between 3 and 4k of a 22 to 25k hit, I'm not exactly breaking out the party hats. Especially when you'd have to stack the heck out of the stat to get even that much out of it.

And man, as nice as the T9 tanking set is in terms of pure stats and bonuses, you will not want to give up that T8 4 piece set bonus with the straight up 20% magic damage reduction for it. 10 seconds of 20% magic damage reduction? You simply can't undersell how awesome that is for tanking big spike damage bosses in Wrath raids. It's pretty much the only thing that keeps warrior tanks viable against DK's and druid tanks for those fights.

I promise we'll get back to our Ulduar guide for tanks and DPS warriors next week. For this week, however, since we're midway through the sixth month of 2009 and we've seen patches up to 3.1 released (and we're waiting on 3.2) I thought it would be a good idea to go back and cover some of the things a leveling warrior might want discussed. We get emails from all kinds of warriors, and so it's only fair to cover the concerns of warriors who aren't raiding Ulduar but rather just setting foot off of the dock in Howling Fjord.

Before we get started, though, the upcoming Patch 3.2 changes for Warriors in their current entirety: Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor. Try not to get too excited, people.

First off, I'm often asked about stats for up-and-coming warriors. We have covered some of these before back in the beta, but the beta was a year ago now and things have been changed and polished. First off, I'm going to link all the posts of interest to a leveling warrior and discuss how they may have changed, and then I'll try and cover some more general advice.

• Building Up To It covers some target numbers and stats to focus on. I should note that this was written before the changes to Armor Penetration made it much, much better as a DPS stat for warriors: the more ArP you have, the better it is as a DPS stat until you have enough ArP to reduce target armor by 100%.
• We covered Hit and Expertise in two posts, one for DPS warriors and one for Tanks. The tanking post is still accurate as of 3.1, but the talent changes to Arms and Fury mean that there is currently no talent that reduces chance to dodge for Fury Warriors and Arms has both Strength of Arms for passive expertise and Weapon Mastery.
• We discussed the dangers of overstacking a stat to the exclusion of other, also necessary stats.
• Finally, we covered gearing up in a four part post just before Wrath launched Parts one, two, three and four were all published before Wrath itself had actually come out, but they're still reasonably accurate to help your warrior get from 70 to 80, We covered weapons between 70 and 80 too.

Last week, we started our homage to Chase's rogue tips for raiding Ulduar by discussing what you, as a warrior, can expect from that massive Titan fortress/prison for old gods and their flabby, tentacle faced minions. That's right, Vezax, I'm calling you flabby. This week, we'll discuss the bosses of the Antechamber, Kologarn, Auriaya and the Iron Council, three bosses in one! I was hoping that the warrior class Q&A would be up by the time I sat down to write this so we could discuss that as well, but such does not seem to be the case.

Since the Iron Council is the most complicated of these three encounters (and because it has two alternate, or hard modes, we'll discuss it last. Of course, as a warrior you'll either be tanking or DPSing in these fights... there's simply no alternative role for warriors... but there's more to it than that in each case. Let's start with Kologarn.

Since 3.1, DPS warriors (including myself) have been complaining about a lack of rage. To the point where Ghostcrawler himself chimed in recently (in a discussion of the nerf to Titan's Grip and the effect it had on warrior DPS) to inform us that the claim that warrior rage generation was hurt by the changes was a myth created by warriors upset with the nerf.

Now we have the following post by Landsoul. I freely admit this is the kind of math that makes my eyes cross and roll up into my head. But Landsoul's well known as a contributor to the EJ forums and frankly, his math-fu's good enough for me. (I should also mention Hellord, the original poster who saw things were hinky.) What this means is, while it's very possible that yes, the developers took Titan's Grip's decreased damage into account when they were making the changes, there was somehow another change made that cost warriors some rage generation. 25% of it, to be precise.

Bornakk posts later in the thread that they'll take a look "as we didn't make any intended changes recently to rage generation". So the good news is, for warriors, if this change did happen (and again, I'd tend to trust the math from the people behind the best warrior spreadsheets) then it wasn't a deliberate loss of 25% of our rage generation.

If you've been reading this column over the past few weeks you know I've been threatening to rant about fury DPS being too low. I've stopped myself because I dislike mindless griping and rant posts (I've done them in the past, that doesn't make them any more palatable to me) and I wanted to wait and see how things shook out with better gear.

By now I have some of the best gear you can get before hard modes in 25 man, and my general opinion is that both arms and fury DPS is too low. I linked to that post because, despite the fact that it states that fury and arms will see buffs, it not only has no specifics to offer yet but it also fails to address why such staggering nerfs were implemented in the first place.

Another week, another series of raids into Ulduar.

I'm not going to talk about it this week... I'm waiting for more T8 level gear (just got my pants last night) but in general, I'm moving from 'mild discontent' to 'frothing nerd rage' at the state of fury right now. The main reason isn't even my own DPS, which is going up... it's that other classes and specs that aren't 'pure DPS' are now bumped up to where my spec was before patch 3.1, when the reason for my spec's nerfs was stated as that level of DPS being 'too good' for a class that had options besides DPSing. If a class can tank, heal and DPS why is it okay for them to do the damage I used to do when I can only tank and DPS?

But that being said, I've discovered a unique joy in the past week, and that's the Dual Spec system. Ironically, I still respec about twice a week. In fact, I may even respec more now than I did before dual specs were available.

What can I say, I enjoy musical theatre as long as I don't actually have to go to it. (Did you know that was Murray Head, Anthony Stewart Head's older brother? I didn't.)

So for the past few days I've spent my in game time divided between 10 and 25 man Ulduar. I've almost moved into the place, really: save for the first day the patch dropped, I pretty much only log on to pick up consumables and flasks and head back to Storm Peaks. In part this is due to my personal life, as I actually have slightly less time to play now than I did before so almost all of that in game time has to be concentrated, and partly it's just been for the fun of seeing new boss fights. My guild is a 'learn as you go' kind of guild, so we're not worrying about PTR runs or prepared boss strats, we're going in and seeing what works for us, which so far has killed the four bosses in the Colossal Forge section. Razorscale died with three people up, but hey, a kill's a kill.

So far in Ulduar from a warrior perspective, I can say certain things.

I had originally intended to talk today about changes to protection in patch 3.1, especially since we're coming closer and closer to it (I wouldn't be surprised if it dropped this week) but then I actually stopped and thought about it, and honestly there's really not all that much to talk about. Last Stand gets a reduced cooldown, which is good. Defensive Stance reduces the damage you do by 5% instead of 10%, which is also good. Glyph of Shield Wall will let you use Shield Wall every 3 minutes instead of every five (every 2 minutes with Improved Disciplines) which again, is nice. But none of this is going to change the way tanking works, so it seemed kind of odd to try and go in depth with so little to go in depth on. We could talk about how Deep Wounds will no longer gain bonuses from effects like the enrage from Improved Defensive Stance, but it still doesn`t change the fact that a lot of prot warriors are going to take Deep Wounds for the DoT when their Damage Shield, Cleave, Thunder Clap or even Shockwave crit. In the end, protection saw the absolute least changes of any warrior spec and for the most part, there`s almost no reason for prot warriors to alter their playstyle or gearing significantly.

So then, if we`re not going to talk about that (well, I guess we just did) then what are we going to talk about?

I wanted to do an April Fool's column. The fact that this column is being posted three days after April Fool's isn't the reason I decided not to do it, though. No, I ended up not doing it because I couldn't think of anything particularly funny to say about the class. Not that it isn't a funny class at times, because it is. Any class where you spend a lot of time trying to get trolls to give you teeth, elementals to give you lucky charms (they weren't Marshmallowy Delicious, either) and finally get a fine 2h weapon just in time for everyone to get mad that you're not a tank is comedy, of a kind.

Anyone who remembers when warriors were rage starved due to us being bugged so that we were being given way too many misses, or when a missed execute ate all of your rage, can attest to the warrior class being really funny sometimes. My wife used to laugh and say that Blizzard had done a wonderful job of transferring the sensation of building rage to the player. Your character might be rage starved, but you? Oh, you'd be screaming at the computer as if you could yell your rage bar into red.

That's why I've decided to move away from talking about fury in 3.1 and to spend the next two or three columns discussing tanking and arms spec, especially as they're going to be. This week, we'll talk about Arms as PvE and PvP.

If you've been paying attention to the latest PTR changes, you know that among them is a change to fury that alters the talent Improved Berserker Stance. Instead of providing 10% of AP, it now will provide 20% of your Strength. (It's been buffed since it was first introduced, it was 15% then.) When I saw this I thought it was the greatest change ever... until I remembered there are no strength enchants to gloves in Wrath level content, but just AP. Massacre? AP enchant. Berserking? Provides AP. Blessing of Might? AP. What about most of the rings and almost all of the cloaks and neck pieces available in current Wrath raiding? AP. And of course, what about leather gear you may have been wearing because it's the best in slot, like say the Frosted Adroit Handguards? No strength on those.

In short, I went from ecstatic to that sinking feeling you get when you realize that lovely Everglades condo is in fact just swamp. I'd just told everyone how awesome this change was, and here I stood on test with less AP than I had on live. Was it a huge loss? No, about 70 AP or so. But I still felt that lovely combination of chagrin and slight anger that comes from not only being wrong, but being wrong and finding yourself worse off than you'd been.

To be fair, the change to 20% has brought the AP back up to close to where it was. My warrior on test is lacking a couple of best in slot items that I've picked up since transfering him, which means that to compare them I have to take off bracers and neck and look at the AP from there, but we're talking a 20 AP drop now. The real issue is buffs like Blessing of Might/Battle Shout and procs like Berserking. On the other hand, Blessing of Kings, Gift of the Wild and Horn of Winter/Strenth of Earth just got better for us.

Now Ghostcrawler has waded into the fray, and what he says confirms it: this change is purely meant to force warriors away from wearing leather.