Filed under: (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

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.

So as I predicted, I did not get a second weapon for SMF. I've decided this is the universe telling me that my fury spec is to forever be Titan's Grip, and I'm okay with that. What with the holidays raiding itself was slow over the past two weeks, so I jumped onto the beta and messed around with some older content to test out my theory about Second Wind, and I was right - it's a significant kick in the teeth to our ability to solo older content. Granted, it mostly means we need help with Wrath era raids, but if you were feeling cocky about being able to solo, as an example, Trial of the Crusader 10, adjust your expectations.

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.

Still waiting on 1h weapons for an SMF build. So I've decided that this week, I'll go and take a look at smaller topics, things that won't fill up a full column by themselves. I'm doing this because the day I write this is my birthday and I want to treat myself.

One of those things is soloing old raids, which I've been doing a lot of since patch 5.1 dropped. Whenever I post to twitter that I've completed another old raid or boss, people ask me what spec I'm using or what talents I'm choosing. Now, none of this is remotely as impressive as soloing Baleroc at level 80, but it's fun and pretty easy to do. I've found that I can solo any boss up to ones that require a certain class ability a warrior doesn't have, up to and including Professor Putricide in ICC-10.

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.

If you didn't read Brian Wood's excellent State of DPS in Mists of Pandaria post yet this week, you should before we go any further, because I'm going to be discussing it as well as GuildOx's study of the most popular raiding and PvP specs. What I'm seeing studying these two related but different posts (one about actual DPS, the other about representation) is as follows.

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.

The problem with hit and expertise as stats in World of Warcraft is fairly simple: they do the same thing in practice, even if not in theory. The more hit you have up to the cap (i.e. the amount of hit needed to hit a skull level mob, which is effectively level 93 in Mists of Pandaria content since we're raiding at level 90) the less likely your attacks are to miss their target. This means that not only will they successfully deal their damage, but you'll properly generate the resources said attack would generate (if any), hold threat (if that's what you're doing) and so on. Similarly, the more expertise you have up to the soft cap (the amount of expertise needed to ensure that an attack from behind a skull level mob will not be dodged) the less likely that your attacks will be dodged, which means they're more likely to successfully deal their damage, generate resources, hold threat and so on.

Expertise' only real difference is that it also reduces the chance your attacks will be parried, at a much higher cost (the parry hard cap being almost twice the dodge soft cap) but, again, that just means that expertise does the same thing as hit twice. Since warriors don't need to worry about ranged attacks for the most part, we can be grateful that at least we don't really need to worry about spell hit caps and factoring both hit and expertise into spell hit chances. Since expertise caps out dodge chance and only then parry chance, it just becomes a very complicated means to determine whether or not your attacks do damage. In the end, while there's plenty of mechanical difference between hit and expertise, they do the same basic thing. The purpose to these stats is to give you something you can cap to add complexity to what would otherwise be a system where people figured out their best stat, then capped it. If crit is a warrior's best DPS stat, she'll stack crit until the cows blow up when she hits them, so by adding stats like hit and expertise you add a level where capping, reaching a certain level of X stat becomes a viable gearing strategy.

The problem is really that hit and expertise, because they do basically the same thing, don't serve us well. This especially becomes true when considering these stats alongside the other stats warriors will be using in their various specs. An arms warrior's relationship to hit and expertise is different from either fury or protection. This becomes even more complicated when considering SMF versus Titan's Grip, or hit/expertise/mastery tanks vs. mastery/dodge/parry tanks.

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.