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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: DPS itemization and encounters

The Care and Feeding of Warriors continues looking at gear and class design this week with a discussion of DPS warriors itemization and how they interact with encounters. Matthew Rossi has had a lot of time to think about this stuff since he switched back to tanking.

If you've been looking over the itemization on Icecrown Citadel gear you may, like me, have noticed that some of the items that one could conceivably acquire are itemized more straightforwardly. We'll use Shadow's Edge, the precursor to Shadowmourne, as an example. If Shadowmourne didn't exist, people would look at this weapon with its 3.7 speed, two red sockets, ArP and Crit Strike rating and massive native strength and would be going ape over it. It's difficult to get, but I expect every single serious DPS warrior, be he arms or fury, will at least do the chain for Shadow's Edge if there's any way he or she can do so. Of course, the face that you will need to beat two bosses in 25 man difficulty and then get 25 of the IC equivalent to Crusader Orbs indicates that not every serious DPS warrior (especially not serious DPS warriors who exclusively run 10 mans) will be able to do so. Furthermore, with Icecrown progressing via gates it will be a few weeks before you even get the chance to kill these two bosses, meaning that you're not going to see a Shadow's Edge (much less a Shadowmourne) on your server within days of IC going live.

In the meantime we can consider weapons like Quel'Delar (a quest reward) and the CItadel Enforcer's Claymore (from 10 man IC) as examples of less compelling itemization. For a fury warrior the fact that they're swords isn't an issue, but for arms it's still an issue. Furthermore, they're just not as well itemized in general. They're only iLevel 251, of course, so it's not really fair to compare them to TotGC 25 drops like Decimation or the Dual-Blade Butcher. (The Butcher/Justicebringer from TotGC are itemized pretty solidly for a warrior.) However, Icecrown/patch 3.3 still keeping mixing it up in itemization terms with drops like Bryntroll, which just leaves me scratching my head. Honestly, I can't imagine switching out my TotGC 2h for Bryntroll, with the 3.4 speed, lower stats, and the proc over stats like crit, ArP or hit. Heck, I'd rather have haste than that proc, But the same instance difficulty also provides us with Cryptmaker.

Yeah, I scratched my head too. I would be remiss if I failed to mention Landsoul getting a shout out, since he's worked so tirelessly on DPS spreadsheets for us.

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Filed under: Warrior, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: DPS itemization and encounters originally appeared on WoW.com on Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Author: SUPPORT@WEBLOGSINC.COM (Matthew Rossi)
Category: class-helpfeaturedguidetalenttalentswarrior-guidewarrior-infoworld-of-warcraft-class-guideworld-of-warcraft-guidewow-class-guidewow-class-helpwow-guidewow-talent-guidewow-warriorwow-warrior-info
Publish Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:00:00 EST
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