The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, into the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid, we're just crazy.

Good morning and welcome to this week's column, an overview of how the talent specialization changes affect leveling a warrior in the Cataclysm beta. Before I started this project, I made sure to keep to the following self-imposed rules.

No heirlooms. This is 100 percent quest rewards and random drops. (Yes, the Wyrmslayer Spaulders dropped randomly for me while questing in Felwood.) I didn't run any instances because after level 30 or so it got really hard to find an instance group at the levels I was at, but that wasn't a hard-and-fast rule.

Try and exhaust a zone before moving on. This means doing as many quests as I can, no skipping around, and experiencing as much of the new versions of old zones as possible. Turns out you can actually do fairly well that way. There are a lot of quests out there now.

Switch talent specialization every four or five levels. There was no real rhyme or reason to this, I just wanted to see how talent specs felt at different levels. Blood Craze is very strong now. Combined with Bloodthirst and the heal from Victory Rush, a fury warrior can easily take on groups without falling over dead or running away. The old warrior strategy of "kill them before they kill you" is actually somewhat viable now.

So let's discuss the experiment. What did I find were the pros and cons of the new system? What's good for warriors and what's bad?

The good

The goal for giving warriors (indeed, all classes) a feel for their talent specialization as soon as they take it has succeeded for the most part, even in this early stage of the beta. Playing my warrior from 10 to 14 as arms felt like arms. You're using a big two-hander (as big as they get at those levels, anyway) and mortal striking, rending, the standard arms deal. Further levels add depth to the playstyle, but they don't reinvent it. By level 64 or so (the level my worgen is currently at), you're using Rend for the Blood Frenzy debuff and to get Overpower procs while still mortal striking to set up the Lambs to the Slaughter buff.

In general, arms has started to take on that "disciplined, soldiery" feel so long touted for the specialization. It's all about getting conditions to line up. You set up overpowering strikes via shallow, bloody wounds that distract your opponent, and then drive in crushing, horrific blows that tear through his defenses and leaves him vulnerable to follow-up attacks. Imagine the arms warrior as the guy thinking five steps ahead in every confrontation.

Meanwhile, fury has become a much stronger contender for a leveling spec, thanks to having Bloodthirst and the dual wielding talents to start, along with a much stronger Blood Craze. As of last night, my fury spec used this build, which I think combines reasonable offensive power with decent survivability at level 64.

[View Remaining 13 Paragraphs]