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Posts with tag Plate

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: To Gear A Fury


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.

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: To Gear A Fury

HKO to take Paladins away from WoW

In an exclusive interview with HKO lead developer Hey'wod ya' Saiev'mie, it was revealed that because of the extreme ease and uselessness Paladins provide in World of Warcraft, they have been removed from WoW and transfered to HK Online. Those players that have Paladin will no doubt be happy since they'll finally be able to play a useful role in an online game. All accounts with Paladin mains will receive a free copy of HKO, and 3 days of play time.

In response to the outcry of support in the Paladin forums, Blizard CM Csyrd said "We are glad Paladins are finally happy. Our goal has always been to make them stop crying." Newly appointed HKO CM Ahol Isk'y said "Hopefully the Paladin community will appreciate their new opportunity to tank mice and the occasional dog. Of course this is nothing like Illidan, but it's a start, right?"

Continue reading HKO to take Paladins away from WoW

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Plate



The Care and Feeding of Warriors is being written right now on about 2 hours of sleep because Matthew Rossi has discovered the joy of introducing a new cat into a home that already has one. Oh, it's delightful, let me tell you, to listen to the high pitched shrieks of welcome and to constantly have to take part in the ritual greeting of cats, which apparently is where Blizzard got the idea for the Rogue class' Blade Flurry ability. Seriously, you haven't lived until your arms have been covered in scratches while two cats beat each other up like it's Marvin Hagler weekend and Sugar Ray Leonard just crashed it.

What defines the warrior class?

Is it poorly made PvP videos of big mortal strike crits with loud nu metal playing in the background? You know the ones, that conveniently edit out all the times you spend running away death coiled or the twenty seconds you spent as a sheep while your healer discovered a whole new and very painful definition of 'two for the price of one'. No, any class can make a bad video.

Is it big weapons? Sword and board? Good fury DPS? Let's look at this another way. What's the first thing other people complain about when they think of warriors?

"You shouldn't be able to do that and wear plate."

Even though paladins wear it too, and I'm sure they have to put up with their own version of the lament, since this is the column about warriors I'm going to discuss it from our side. Plate. It's what we get at level 40 that sets us apart from rogues, enhancement shamans, druids, not to mention those guys in dresses. Plate is where our high armor scores come from. Plate is one of the signature elements of the class.

Plate really is good for one thing, ultimately, and that's PvE damage mitigation on melee mobs. Combined with a shield it can allow a warrior to take more of a beating than anyone except a druid or paladin, but in PvP the high armor rating is much less useful against anyone, between armor penetration abilities like Expose Armor or Faerie Fire and the fact that unless you've decided to stack resistance gear, you're more or less naked to a caster. (And if you do PvP in resist gear, I admire your willingness to try and kill a warlock with 800 AP, if not your common sense.) The fact that Season Three of Arena gear seems to be stacking on the armor penetration as well means that any possibility of armor inflation is being kept to a minimum there as well.

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Plate

The Light and How to Swing It: Pre-epic plate healing gear, part 3

Hmm, this list of pre-epic plate healing gear is becoming quite epic in itself. After we covered the upper body and lower body, it's time to discuss things that are not, technically, made of plate: cloaks, trinkets, weapons, shields and librams. Although I would totally like to have a cloak made of plate (or of PLATES!), and sort of wonder why there aren't armor classes on cloaks. It would keep all those pesky clothies away from our +healing and +spell crit cloaks. Mwahahaha!

Anyway, on to the list, and I promise this is the end of the listiness. The column two weeks from now is going to be "A Field Guide To Bad Paladins", so please, save your eggs and tomatoes for that one.

Continue reading The Light and How to Swing It: Pre-epic plate healing gear, part 3

Phat Loot Phriday: Helmets of Second Sight


Today's Phat Loot isn't just one helmet-- it's actually your choice of six available from a neat questline in Outlands. So stick with me here. Things may get a little complicated.

Name: (Overlord's, Shamanistic, Druidic, Stealther's, Evoker's, Stalker's) Helmet of Second Sight
Type: Rare (Cloth, Leather, Mail, Plate) Head
Armor: Varies
Abilities:
  • They all have different abilities, of course, according to their title. You can see a list of all the available helmets here (the Scintillating Headdress is not one of the quest rewards, actually). Altogether, if you run this quest, you'll get a pretty nice pre-Epic helmet out of it.
  • Also: All the helmets "allow the bearer to see into the ghost world while in Shadowmoon Valley." It's a lore thing, stick with me.
  • And if you haven't noticed yet, all the helmets are reskins of the Tier 2 helmets (and in some cases, Tier 1-- see Warrior Helm above) that originally dropped from Onyxia and Molten Core. So if you never got to get your Dragonstalker's Helm or your Helmet of Ten Storms, here's your chance to get a lookalike. With better stats, if you ask me.
How to Get It: You've got to do the Teron Gorefiend quest chain in Shadowmoon Valley. It's quite fun, will net you a lot of XP (if you're not 70 yet), a little bit of gold, and your choice of these helmets.

For Alliance, it starts with a quest called "Ghost in the Machine" from Zoram the Judicator (geez, what did his mom have against him?) at Wildhammer Stronghold. Horde go to Chief Apothecary Hildagard in Shadowmoon Village for a quest called "A Haunted History." That chain will take you through about seven quests, most of which are soloable (one of them asks for two players, and one of them requires a full 5man group to do). At the end of the quest chain, you'll meet up with the man himself (and make a "mistake" that really wasn't your problem in the first place.

As for Gorefiend himself, I don't want to spoil anything, but you'll meet up with him later in the Black Temple (I'm not sure if you actually need the helmet to face him, as the questgiver hints, but you might want to keep it anyway). Meanwhile, you'll get a spiffy helmet that will get you ready to start up the level 70 instances at endgame. Grats!

Getting Rid of It: They all sell for different values, from about 2g for the cloth helmet, up to 4g for the plate version. Disenchanting any of them will hook you up with a Large Prismatic Shard.


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