The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The state of the class

Posted by on 01 7th, 2012

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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, as of right now, at least for warriors, the following things can be said. Warriors are still competitive as tanks. Two issues that are of concern for warrior tanks is that reaching total coverage for the combat table requires more work than, say, paladins (it’s still doable) and once you reach it, stamina becomes far more potent than avoidance, and the tier 13 four set bonus basically puts you in an unenviable position of having to save your Shield Wall (a personal cooldown) to try and cover group damage. In general, warrior cooldowns are lackluster in comparison to other classes. Arms is king of PvE DPS for warriors. It’s not really because arms got better, but fury got a lot worse. Mastery is still lackluster for fury (bad for SMF, slightly less bad for TG), hit is still way too hard to cap, and the nerf to Dual-Wield Specialization combined with the fix to the Deep Wounds bug has hammered fury fairly hard. In all cases, Gurthalak is basically the Band-Aid that keeps warriors viable as DPS. If you don’t have one, you’re doing less DPS even if you have a weapon with competitive stats. I’d replace a heroic Zoid’s or Skullstealer with a Raid Finder Gurthalak and consider myself lucky. PvP isn’t a lot of fun on a warrior right now. We lack real survivability buttons outside of Shield Wall (which needs a macro to work due to stance switching unless you’re prot) and don’t put out enough damage or debuffs to stay competitive in the Dragonwrath / Fangs of the Father universe that is PvP right now. (I know, right now it’s far more likely the rogue merely has stage 2 daggers. Those are enough.) Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The state of the class Filed under: Warrior , Analysis / Opinion , (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors , Cataclysm The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The state of the class originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 07 Jan 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink