Filed under: Warrior

Shield Barrier is one of my favorite new abilities. One of the reasons I love it is that it scales both with the amount of rage you have when you use it and with your attack power, meaning that it will continuously get better as you level and gear up. Shield Barrier provides you with a damage absorption shield that, when used with the minimum amount of rage (20 rage), puts up a respectable amount of absorption. On my level 89 tauren warrior, above, it did roughly 6k with a baseline use, eating more than half of that Agitated Seedstealer's fire spell.

But when used at full rage, it can do significantly more. The most I've seen was a 20,000 absorption shield, which will admittedly be fairly rare because it's hard to ensure you have exactly 60 rage when you use the ability. You're more likely to pepper the area with 10k or 12k absorbs that make soloing an absolute dream. Tanking in 5-mans, it's still a potent part of your arsenal, but you're much more likely to alternate it with Shield Block there.

Shield Barrier is an ability warrior tanks have probably needed for a very long time, a way to mitigate incoming damage no matter what it is. I personally love the ability.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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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.

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.

War Banner is one of the abilities I was most curious to play with on the beta -- so curious, in fact, that I stayed up to level to 87 once the latest patch fixed my constant crashing issue. The downside to playing six warriors on the beta is that none of them levels very fast. However, now that I have the ability, I have to report I find it very interesting.

The interface is very familiar if you've ever had a shaman, since it's similar to the totem interface. Mouse over the War Banner, and you can select one of three banners, the Skull, Demoralizing or Mocking Banner. The banners are currently designated as totems in game, but all three have a far more limited duration. On the plus side, all three can be Intervened to, so placing one at a distances means you can use it to get distance for a charge or otherwise move around the battlefield. The banners do not share a cooldown aside from the global cooldown; I dropped each banner one after the other to test them out.

At present, Skull Banner increases critical damage of any party or raid member within 30 yards by 20%, lasting 10 seconds with a 3-minute cooldown. It's the handsome yellow banner in the screenshot above. Mocking Banner taunts mobs within 15 yards of the banner to you, forcing them to attack you for 6 seconds. It lasts for 30 seconds, making it the best banner to drop if you intend to use it for Intervene. Finally, Demoralizing Banner reduces all damage by every enemy in range (30 yards) by 10% for 15 seconds. Since each banner has a 3-minute cooldown, you can choose to stagger them out or drop them all one after the other, depending on your need.

The banners themselves look pretty cool, although they seem to have a tendency to float over the ground rather than sink into it. Time will tell if they become beloved additions to the class, but right now I'm fairly enjoying them just for novelty and using them to creatively mess with mobs.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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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.

The folks at GuildOx have gone through their database and done some simple filtering that reveals some fascinating things about who is raiding heroic Dragon Soul. GuildOx started with level 85 characters, filtered for characters with ilevel 400 gear, and then filtered out anyone with PvP gear. What you see in the chart above is the result of that work -- a representative sample of who out of the over 13 million level 85 characters in the GuildOx database is raiding heroic Dragon Soul.

If you remember the post about the complexity of systems and player retention that I made a couple of weeks back, you'll remember that I mentioned Cynwise's excellent posts about the warlock decline. Well, here it is again reflected in GuildOx's data. Warlocks are the least played class in heroic raiding.

Warriors aren't doing much better, really. Most other classes seem fairly healthy, with classes that have healing specs doing fairly well and rogues absolutely ruling heroic raiding despite being one of the least-played classes in the game overall. It gets even more interesting once we get to look at the GuildOx spec-by-spec breakdown.

Dragon Roar is the new talent in the level 60 tier of Mists of Pandaria talents for warriors. As such, you won't be able to take it and either Bladestorm or Shockwave; you have to pick one of the three. That being said, it's not an easy decision. Dragon Roar has several significant benefits.

For starters, it's a guaranteed critical hit. You can have no critical strike rating at all, and you'll know that Dragon Roar is going to crit. This means that it's a dynamite AoE threat move if you want an ability you can save for emergencies instead of using on cooldown the way you will Shockwave.

In addition, Dragon Roar's damage is substantial, and it combines an AoE knockback with a full 5-second stun, making it very potent for PvP as well as for dealing with sudden adds or keeping adds under control longer. And while it has a 1-minute cooldown, making it longer than Shockwave, it's a full half-minute shorter than Bladestorm, meaning you can use it more often.

Also, it's bloody awesome to yell and see an expanding blast of damage flow out from you in all directions. It's hard to catch a good screenshot of that, though. Dragon Roar combines good damage with excellent short-term control, and I have a very hard time deciding between it and its rivals.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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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.

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.

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.