The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, 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.

Having spent the last few weeks more or less avoiding talking about Cataclysm, I'm now going to dive back into the discussion of our "soon" to come expansion. While the most recent beta push didn't do much at all to our talents from previous beta builds, we did see some significant changes as the new glyph system was implemented. We also got actual plate models for a lot of green and blue quest drops so that my warrior now looks like he's wearing a classic Roman-style gladiator helmet and chest in the screenshot above. At this point, there's a lot to talk about in terms of how things are shaking out.

A Mastery of Mastery

So far, I'd have to say at least for the leveling game, with the level cap extended to 85 that fury is hands down the best mastery of the three. Why? I'll show you why.

Yes, that's Enraged Regeneration on the beta with some mastery gear. Not even a lot of mastery gear, either. On live, the ability increases your regeneration by a flat 30%, but with the effects of mastery increasing every ability that depends on enrages to work, as you can see, ER becomes absolutely amazing. And it's not just healing: your enrage effects (Enrage itself, Death Wish) increase your damage by more, and even more amazing is what it does to Bloodrage.

In the same mastery gear (959 mastery rating from gear, 17% mastery) Bloodrage adds an incredible 54 rage on use and 27 rage over ten seconds. The power and utility of fury's mastery is quite simply far broader in scope than either the arms or protection masteries. Strikes of Opportunity is a chance to proc another swing, and yes, that chance can get pretty high, but it's still just another swing with an internal cooldown. Critical Block is, well, critical block. They're not bad, but compared to an ability that boosts just about every enrage effect a fury warrior can have (and combined with the spec's new focus on enrages) and you're looking at a mastery that simultaneously greatly increases fury's offensive power and survivability. It's actually easier for me to solo harder quests as fury than it is as prot right now on the beta.

With Great Alacrity

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