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.

Last week, I complained that I was still DPSing in ZA shoulders. This week, Cho’gall finally dropped the tier 11 shoulder token. I got one day’s worth of use out of it. And then Majordomo Staghelm dropped the tier 12 shoulder token. The lesson? Complain about drop rates when writing columns. You know what else doesn’t drop enough? Everything I want, that’s what.

As you might expect, my recent fortune in terms of new gear (I also got a nice new hat) got me thinking about how to best gem, enchant and reforge my gear in order to make maximum use out of it all. This is nothing new to this expansion, of course, but the cumulative effect of the variety of options we now have to customize our gear means it can all be somewhat complex to get everything lined up the way we want it.

This is where various gear optimization tools come into play. Much as we used to use (and still do use) spreadsheets to tell us which pieces of gear will provide maximum benefit, we now use gear optimizers to tell us what to do to our gear once we have it — what gems should we use, which socket bonuses are worth gemming away from our usual and which ones aren’t, what enchants in which slots will help us get maximum effect.

Sure, you can do this all manually, but with some statistics having hard caps and others having soft caps, and each piece of new gear changing each stat’s amounts, it can be pretty daunting. Whether you’re raiding in the Firelands or just beginning to get gear that can even take a reforge, it’s worth taking a look at a few resources.Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Reforging and gear optimization resources for warriorsFiled under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, CataclysmThe Care and Feeding of Warriors: Reforging and gear optimization resources for warriors originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

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.

Last week, I complained that I was still DPSing in ZA shoulders. This week, Cho’gall finally dropped the tier 11 shoulder token. I got one day’s worth of use out of it. And then Majordomo Staghelm dropped the tier 12 shoulder token. The lesson? Complain about drop rates when writing columns. You know what else doesn’t drop enough? Everything I want, that’s what.

As you might expect, my recent fortune in terms of new gear (I also got a nice new hat) got me thinking about how to best gem, enchant and reforge my gear in order to make maximum use out of it all. This is nothing new to this expansion, of course, but the cumulative effect of the variety of options we now have to customize our gear means it can all be somewhat complex to get everything lined up the way we want it.

This is where various gear optimization tools come into play. Much as we used to use (and still do use) spreadsheets to tell us which pieces of gear will provide maximum benefit, we now use gear optimizers to tell us what to do to our gear once we have it — what gems should we use, which socket bonuses are worth gemming away from our usual and which ones aren’t, what enchants in which slots will help us get maximum effect.

Sure, you can do this all manually, but with some statistics having hard caps and others having soft caps, and each piece of new gear changing each stat’s amounts, it can be pretty daunting. Whether you’re raiding in the Firelands or just beginning to get gear that can even take a reforge, it’s worth taking a look at a few resources.Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Reforging and gear optimization resources for warriorsFiled under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, CataclysmThe Care and Feeding of Warriors: Reforging and gear optimization resources for warriors originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments