The Care and Feeding of Warriors takes a look at gear and the fury warrior this week. Matthew Rossi has been playing with fury on his tauren this week, when not forgetting to re-equip his shield on Kael'thas while playing his human. Sure, the Phaseshift Bulwark is nice, but if you leave the instance it goes away, which I really should have paid attention to. On the up side, it's hilarious to go down in two seconds to a trash mob because you forgot which button is your shield macro. Well, hilarious now. With distance. At the time it was less hilarious and more smashing my face into the keyboard.

Before we get rolling, you should take a look at this thread from the Elitist Jerks forums that gathers up a lot of information on warrior DPS specs and what to look for when gearing. One of the things to keep in mind is that it's not as straightforward as just piling on the stats that help you do damage... much like tanking, where you first stack defense until you reach the target (in the case of tanking you want 490 defense) when assembling fury gear you prioritize hit until you reach 9% chance to hit, and then start stacking crit, attack power and armor penetration.

So what's the hit cap? Well, in general a fury warrior with full precision should look to accumulate hit gear until roughly 96 hit rating, which should put you at about 9% actual bonus hit. Up until 9%, it's generally accepted that hit provides the greatest boost to your damage both from the damage that you actually do with your white hits and from the rage you generate by them, as well as reducing the chance of special attacks like Bloodthirst (not Bloodlust, you can tell I play my shammy too much) and Whirlwind to be missed, which is not only annoying but amazingly does not seem to hurt monsters. Not even their feelings.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors knew that there would be discussion of whether or not warriors are broken, and so decided to provide picture evidence that at least one warrior is broken indeed! Matthew Rossi apologizes for that pun. Really, he couldn't be expected to resist it, now could he? Look, mob violence never solved anything.

I have in the past written about what's not broken in the warrior class. So you might think that a column entitled "Are warriors underpowered?" would be easily answered with a no, and then we could move on.

And so it is. See you next week!

Oh, right. I still have to write a column. Also, to be fair, the answer is more complicated than no, although it ultimately works out to a no by means of averages. Warriors in the whole are not underpowered or broken, but they have some issues. Some aspects that have always annoyed me. It's too bad I don't have a weekly column about warriors so I can talk about that, isn't it?

Last night Amanda Dean, Amanda Miller, and I got together and fought a few arena battles. We were online and fighting between 10:00 p.m. CST and midnight (timed so I could watch the first showing of Battlestar Galactica, and Amanda D. could watch the second – we write for a computer game website, what do you expect?). The server itself was interesting, and the matches were a blast.

We've been at this before on the Tournament Test Realm server, which was the "beta" version of the Arena Server. There was only one server and everyone could make a character, so it was often crowded and slow. On the Arena Server, you have to register to enter the Arena Tournament, which costs $20. Only then can you get on the Arena Server. This makes things a bit more manageable in terms of population and server stability. There wasn't much lag or other issues.

One thing that I found was the queue times were very fast. We didn't have to wait more than 10 seconds to get in a game. We were playing 3v3 matches, so this might have had something to do with it; as I'm sure the queue times were higher for 5v5 or 2v2.

If you're wondering, and I'm sure you are, our team name is "WoW Insider" on server one, and we're named "insideradam", etc... How many matches did we win?

In the past here on Hybrid Theory, we've discussed what Hybrids are capable of doing in a raid, as far as beneficial talents and utilities. We talked about the fact that a few well-placed hybrids in your raid can take your DPS from 'good' to 'horrifyingly good.' All of this comes to the front again in a boss that many high-end raid groups are clashing against right now: Brutallus.

If you haven't read anything on this boss yet, it's the single largest gear check in WoW yet. It's Burning Crusade's Patchwerk, mostly. To beat Brutallus, you need roughly 29,000 sustained DPS across your entire raid. If you don't pull that off, you hit his enrage timer and he destroys all of you. Simple as that! If you're lucky you can burn off a final two or three percent of his health after the enrage, but that's about as far as you go. That three percent is about 300,000 health, so don't get too confident.

When we showed you the Assassine trailer last month, your consensus was that it attempted to knock off the Fury trailer. Now, DTB Productions has released the full version of Assassine, which is about a female rogue that avenges the death of her husband. Using no voice acting, he tells the story through music and actions.

I enjoyed the way that DTB used the sound effects and music intensity to signify that something was going to happen. For a first effort, this is really good! In the constructive feedback department, some commenters on Warcraftmovies felt that the perspective and shadows were off, while others felt that the action scenes were too slow. If those are his worst problems, when he improves upon it in the next film, he'll be golden!

[Via Warcraftmovies.com]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Previously on Moviewatch ...

Some have accused this trailer of being a blatant ripoff of Fury. But I have to be honest with you, I don't mind if it is. I love me some action-based World of Warcraft machinima. The author said his longer piece will be available in April and when it is, I'll be there to check it out.

[via WarcraftMovies]

Previously on Moviewatch...

The Care and Feeding of Warriors burns from within this week. Matthew Rossi has played a lot of warriors, and this week he dedicates the column to fury warriors, the spec which seems the most basic to the rage concept, really. It's a rage bar, after all. No, not a place you go to drink rage. How would that even work, rage potion cordials? It doesn't bear thinking about.

My first warrior leveled as arms, back in the dim past before patch 1.2. It's hard to explain to people just how bad playing a warrior was back then. We didn't generate rage on blocks, parries or dodges, executes took all of your rage even if they missed, and there was a bug that caused attacks that were dodges to be calculated as misses, causing you to miss out on a ton of overpowers. Berseker stance used to grant 10% melee haste, but no one really knew what that meant. (I wonder if warriors today would trade 3% crit for 10% faster attacks?) I managed to get him to 60 mainly through instancing with friends/guildmates. (To be fair, I was ahead of most of my guild, with the exception of a couple of hunters who'd started playing before I did.) So when I created a new warrior on a new server to play with some real life friends, I wanted to do things differently.

And so I went fury. Being the stubborn cuss I am, though, I didn't level fury with a dual wield build... I didn't like the way I'd miss so many attacks and at that early stage of the game there wasn't much I could do to prevent them, so I stayed with my beloved 2h weapons. I still remember when I got the Relentless Scythe and started to really understand how to output DPS with it. While most warriors were carrying Arcanite Reapers around, I was tweaking my gear for AP and crit and trying to figure out how to squeeze the most DPS out of a two hand weapon (although I also had a pair of Bone Slicing Hatchets enchanted with +15 agility to annoy my wife... as a hunter, she found it irritating that I got them before she did, and I did enjoy using them) - amusingly, just as dual-wield specialization was coming into the game, I was getting into raiding and the guild I was in didn't need a prot warrior, just an off-tank for various MC mobs. I picked up a Draconian Deflector cheap off of Drakkisath (he was very slightly dead at the time, he got better) and headed into Molten Core - you could tank as fury in those days, and I did.

Welcome everyone to this week's edition of Ask WoW Insider, where we throw your questions out to the wisdom of crowds. Last week we looked at how to approach PuGs when everyone can see your spec in one click, and this week we have another talent-related question. David wants to know if there are any truly great builds that are highly viable in both PvP and PvE:

I'm on my second re-roll and finally have my character to 70, fairly well geared and have found myself in the exact same position as before... My PvE 5-man spec is entirely unsuitable for raids, or PVP, my raid spec is unsuitable for soloing or PvP, and my PvP spec is useless outside of BGs and Arenas! I was previously a Warrior, who needs to be Prot for tanking but Arms/Fury for Arena and I at least only had to bounce between two specs. Now I'm a Mage, and I have to consider bouncing between THREE specs to be what everyone expects me to be if I expect to be competitve!

I know the common answer is "suck it up and pay to respec whenever you want to do whatever you want to do" because dailies give out so much free money, but this doesn't work for my mage with however many hundreds of gold and hours of work put into getting my Frozen Shadoweave set. The problem is, I rolled a mage for the exclusive purpose of not HAVING to fill two roles with one character and not having to respec every time I wanted to branch out and experience multiple aspects of the game.

So, my question is this: Is there any class+spec out there, that is equally effective and in demand for 5-man instances, raids, solo play and PvP?

You heard the man -- what's your answer? How do you find a balance between PvP and PvE-oriented specs, and how do you maximize your ability to enjoy all the types of content you want to enjoy without spending a fortune respeccing every 5 minutes?

We know you've got questions, and Ask WoW Insider wants 'em! Send us your queries at ask AT wowinsider DOT com.

Warriors, turn and face the community! Once again Schwick has compiled a list of what the EU forums put forth as the issues of a specific class, this time our buddies in plate without mana, the warriors. You've seen what the community had to say about druids, about rogues, priests and hunters. What do they want to see changed for warriors? Here are a few highlights.

Block value
Currently Block values aren't affecting Warriors that much. An idea to make this stat more desirable could be to enhance the Threat levels of Sunder Armor and Devastate based upon Block values. This would also help with the aggro generation on mobs/bosses.

I can't really say I disagree with this one. I'd like to see more done with block.

Improved Mortal Strike
While Mortal Strike is nice, this talent doesn't help much. Most Warriors agree that the reduced cooldown and more damage don't have much affect. Removing this with something more useful might help.

I see a lot of warriors saying this, but while I get the logic that speccing that deep into the tree loses you fury talents like flurry, I still find myself agreeing with WarriorPWNS when he argues for Imp MS. The talent could maybe use a little buff, but it's hardly useless.

If you're keep to see what the posters had to say (including what seems to me to be a lamentable focus on gutting fury of all its good PvP talents in exchange for, well, nothing) then take a look here, s'il vous plaît.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors just wanted to point out that the Headless Horseman dropped my beautiful hat last night. This doesn't have a lot to do with today's column, which is about warriors in 2.3 and beyond. Matthew Rossi is actually dancing with glee, which makes it damn hard to type.

Before we get rolling I wanted to link to this site. He doesn't always have complimentary things to say but I find the candor refreshing, and it's nice to see this post. Yes, a paladin/warrior team does well in the arenas. No, it's not the end of the freaking world. Quite honestly, anything that gets paladins and warriors to cooperate is a good thing in my opinion. There are some good posts back in the archive there on PvP builds, various spec issues, patch notes and so on. And this post about Black Morass and Shattered Halls mirrors my own views exactly. If you're interested in warriors, especially arms warriors, you should go give it a look see.

Now, to discuss the warrior. Specifically, the future of the warrior in 2.3, as I managed to port my horde warrior over to test this week and played around with specs as much as my limited gold allowed (getting an initial free respec helped). Things to tell you up front: a 41/5/15 arms/fury/prot build can tank heroics with average tanking gear now. I'm talking Latro's Shifting Sword as a tanking weapon average. I did heroic Mana Tombs and heroic Sethekk on test with minimal issue (the warlock pulled aggro a couple of times, nothing earth shattering, I got it back) and so far as I could tell without being able to use a threat meter because I forgot to install one, Mortal Strike is getting the threat bonus they promised from Tactical Mastery.

So it seems to me that, if things continue as I've experienced them, we may be looking at the return of the Arms warrior as the default, cookie cutter spec. And to be honest, I don't know if I like that idea.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more with The Care and Feeding of Warriors, or close the wall up with the dead of the other faction. We hate those guys! Matthew Rossi plays warriors of several races, which often leads to the cognitive dissonance of a night elf trying to take Stormpike Graveyard. It seems when the blast of war blows in his ears he cannot tell a tauren from a draenei.

The problem with playing a warrior, and also one of the most satisifying aspects of the class, is that it can do three things exceedingly well. We can PvP. Some will say we can PvP too well, of course, but then again everyone thinks everyone else is overpowered in PvP... witness how Warlocks think fear has been nerfed to hell while everyone else thinks fear is overpowered. Except priests, who think they're the ones who get nerfed when locks pwn everyone. (I still remember when warriors got nerfed over fear. Ah, everyone was surprised in AQ20 when the warriors couldn't fear everyone anymore.) We can tank. Whatever you think about other tanks and their advantages, it cannot be denied that the single best tank for a boss fight is a warrior and that a protection specced warrior can tank any instance in the game hands down. We have the best itemization for tanking, we have some of the best mitigation on our gear and some of the best talents for getting and keeping aggro and some of the best moves for pushing our defense and heading for uncrushability. And we can DPS, of course. With the right gear and spec, a warrior is capable of rather impressive damage and can be entrusted with roles like solo killing all of the adds in Black Morass. In fact, yesterday I respecced from protection to fury/arms just so that I could help some guildies get their Karazan keys in three back to back to back Black Morass runs. Some nice stuff finally dropped, too.

But that's also the rub for the warrior. Are we powerful? Yes, we're powerful, in our limited ways. Are we flexible? After a fashion we're flexible. But the key to our power and flexibility lies outside our gear and in the hands of something else. We have to respec to unlock our flexibility. You cannot, as a warrior, switch from tanking gear to DPS gear if you're specced full protection and expect to really do any significant damage. You simply won't have the tools you need to increase your AP, throw out instants and otherwise become a whirling wall of steel that hews your enemies down. A prot spec warrior is a tank, plain and simple, and one without much of a cannon on board. A fury specced warrior is a mobile gun, all damage and not much survivability against a boss or multiple elites. Arms is a baseline, a light tank with a decent burst weapon. You have to play with the talents if you're going to get the most out of your warrior, and that costs. I won't lie to you, if you want to go between dedicated tanking and PvPing, you may have to respec twice a week, going prot for your guild runs and going arms/fury for Arena and BG's. And if you're like me, and are in a guild where there's another excellent warrior who is more geared for tanking? (Hi Vish!) A guild where there's a feral druid who also wants in on the tanking? (Hi Vash!)

Well, then sometimes you're going to be asked to come along on an instance run as pure DPS. Sometimes people will ask you to burn down the adds in Black Morass, or to help with offtanking and DPS in Shattered Halls, or to come along on a Slabs run because there's five people on and you're one of them. And that means respeccing fury, my friends. Say hello to the talent trainer. Bring 50 gold.