by Matthew Rossi

Still waiting for the extra 1-h weapon to start looking at Single-Minded Fury. But I did start working on my tanking again recently. I went back to September to look at Theck’s posts on warrior mitigation statistics and started thinking about how warrior gearing works now. To oversimplify for convenience, the value of our various active mitigation statistics and our passive avoidance statistics varies depending on how you prioritize Shield Block and Shield Barrier. This means, among other things, that you can gear, gem and reforge differently if you intend to be running primarily five man dungeons vs. raids, and that you can even change your tactical outlay of stats based on whether or not you’re running 10′s vs. 25′s to some extent.

Really, what it comes down to is Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier use and the tension between trying to avoid the absolute most incoming damage vs. trying to create the most predictable spread of incoming damage. Theck makes the point that, while spamming Shield Barrier might cause you to take the least amount of damage overall, you’re going to end up takingspiky damage. Spiky damage is something healers hate. A healer would much rather you were taking hits that kept you constantly losing about 60% of your health than be in a situation where most of the time you took no damage, but occasionally you took 90% of your health in one hit, especially when those hits could occur back to back.

As a result, while it may be mathematically best to rely on Shield Barrier, it won’t work out that way in actual practice because healer mana isn’t infinite and they can’t just bomb heal you to full if you go down to almost dead in one or two hits. Damage spikes are the enemy, and a balanced use of Shield Block and Barrier will cause your incoming damage to be far more predictable and easier for your healers to cope with.
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by Matthew Rossi

This all started while I was leveling my worgen warrior to level 90. I kept getting into dungeons as fury, then the tank would flake out, display a total lack of understanding of threat mechanics, or what have you. Since I didn’t intend to level as prot, I hadn’t really gotten a shield or 1h weapon yet, so when I inevitably got asked by a group to tank so that we could keep going through Shado-Pan, I just switched to D-Stance, threw on the few tanking pieces I had, and got to work. And it worked well enough that I decided to finally get off of my backside and work on that level 90 DPS-tank build I promised months ago. Of course, we should clarify that:
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by Matthew Rossi

Each faction has different items – some helms, others bracers, etc – and so, ultimately, it’s most rewarding to work on Golden Lotus first in order to unlock the August Celestials and Shado-Pan, since that will get you access to the most items. The Klaxxi are a good faction to work alongside the Golden Lotus until you get the Shado-Pan and August Celestials unlocked, since you’ll probably unlock revered with them before you finish getting Golden Lotus to revered, and can then focus on Shado-Pan and August Celestials. We’ll cover Golden Lotus and Klaxxi rewards first, since you’ll have access to them first, and then the other two.

It should be pointed out that if you are raiding 10 or 25 man normal Mogu’shan Vaults, you may already have access to gear on par with these rewards. That’s intentional – Blizzard wants raiders to gear up from raiding, with valor points more serving the role of consolation prize if you just can’t get that drop you need. But if you primarily run heroic dungeons or LFR, then these reputation rewards will be upgrades.
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by Matthew Rossi

I tank a lot. I moved back into tanking around March or so of this year, because a tank was needed, and I know how to tank. I’ve stayed a tank in Mists of Pandaria so far because the last thing anyone needs is another melee DPS, because I generally like tanking, and because the new tanking system has actually given me something to learn. What have I learned tanking so far? Well, lots of things, actually. Here’s a few highlights.

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by Matthew Rossi

I love scenarios because I can queue up and run them as DPS, and when I do, I end up DPS tanking everything. Whether or not there’s a healer, it almost always goes the same way. I queue, get in, wait to make sure everyone else is there, and start charging into things. The damage I take I mitigate with Die by the Sword, the Draenei racial and my ridiculously high parry chance. Finally, after eight years, I can get a sense of what arms tanking would be like and it’s glorious. It’s exactly what should have happened after Wrath of the Lich King, instead of DK’s losing tanking spec versatility, warriors should have gained it. Let’s rename protection into juggernaut spec, and all three trees should be able to tank or DPS!

No? Just me? Ah well. At least in scenarios, this is exactly what warriors do. I come in as prot and I wreck faces, I come in arms and I Bladestorm/Sweeping Strikes everything onto me. And I’m having a blast doing it.
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by Matthew Rossi

Every expansion brings with it the gear reset – without it, we’d just keep wearing our previous gear, and there’d be little point to running dungeons. Whether you’re decked out in Heroic Dragon Soul gear or haven’t quite hit level 85 yet, there’s going to be a whole new gearing cycle, repeated with every patch. We remember it from the original game, from The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm and we’ll soon get to know it again in Mists of Pandaria.

There have been a few changes this time around – the reputation gear has been changed so that there’s justice and valor point gear on each faction vendor, for instance. There are no level 90 dungeons, instead going straight to heroics as soon as you hit level 90. Therefore, there’s gear you’ll collect as you run dungeons, and gear you’ll collect when you hit level 90 and start collecting the heroic dungeon versions of that gear. There’s also a few epic pieces sprinkled through the dungeons.

This week, we’re going to talk about gearing up through dungeon running. Going from 85 through 90, dungeons remain a viable way to get gear to make leveling easier, even though I suspect attempting to level purely through dungeons will be extremely onerous. I wouldn’t recommend it. We’ll list each dungeon’s drops both on normal (for when you’re getting to 90) and heroic (once you’re there).
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by Matthew Rossi

It’s hard for me to write about protection right now, because it still doesn’t feel finalized to me. I’ve been tanking on the side lately, since raiding is on hiatus until Mists, and I have mixed feelings about it. The thing is, I don’t think it’s because the current state of protection is bad, so much as I’m spoiled a bit.

See, here’s part of my problem in terms of being fair to patch 5.0.4 for protection. The protection warrior talent specialization was the best designed talent specialization in Wrath of the Lich King, and it was the best designed talent specialization in Cataclysm as well. And it was better in Cataclysm than it was in Wrath. In short, not only was protection the best spec in the game for four years (2008 to 2012) but it managed to be the best spec in the game without being overpowered, in fact being a better spec than specs that wereoverpowered. You can keep your paladins, your druids and your DK’s, all of whom had their moments of being blatantly too good for this fight or that fight. Warriors were never that. The tanking warrior was the best designed spec because it managed to have tools for every single possible potential tanking situation you could imagine without ever once being considered the only possible option for the job.
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by Matthew Rossi

I got my Thunderfury this week. Yes, after eight years, Garr finally gave up his binding, and I’m now tanking with TF. What’s amazing is, I can actually hold threat doing this. That’s not due to TF’s proc, though — in every way, tanking with TF is a downgrade from using a modern weapon, save stylistically. No, what’s keeping threat on trash packs is Revenge. On one trash pull, I did 19k DPS with TF equipped, and Revenge accounted for over 50% of my damage.

I’m going to say that again: Revenge accounted for 50% of my damage. I hit Shield Slam to start the pull, and from that point on, Revenge was constantly lit up. I talked with a friend of mine who is also a prot warrior, and he told me he was seeing similar results. Frankly, I was tempted not to say anything about this. With Revenge proccing so much, it becomes simplicity itself to hold threat, and it means that you really don’t need to worry about hit or expertise nearly so much.
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by Matthew Rossi

If there had been any way in the world that I believed it possible that ye olde editors would have let me name this post “Shooting at the walls of heartache,” that’s exactly what it would have been called. However, since this is week four of our 101 guides to Mists of Pandaria for warriors, I felt constrained by the already established naming convention. Nevertheless, what is true is true, and heart to heart you’ll win, if you survive. Bang bang.

Anyway, I really have to stop referencing that song and give you an article about arms inMists.

Arms is one of two DPS specs the warrior class will have available in Mists of Pandaria, and it’s a storied specialization with a lot of history. The arms spec was the premier PvP and PvE spec in vanilla World of Warcraft. It was not only the most-played spec for PvP, it was the most-played spec for both DPSing in raids and for tanking. The 31/5/15 arms/fury/protection spec ruled the class.
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