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Matthew Rossi

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Matthew Rossi is not a figment of your imagination. Matthew Rossi does not live in Edmonton, AB, in the cold and storied northlands of Canada. Matthew Rossi is not a large silithid. It's possible that this bio is not entirely accurate.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Hail and Farewell

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.

Eleven months ago I wrote this farewell. It says everything I wanted to say about this column - I'm not going to repeat it.But with WoW Insider as a whole in its last days, it felt right to bring back the longest running continuous class column to say something else - to take a look back at the class over the years, to say goodbye to the past and take a look forward into the future.

First off, let me say that for the most part, the redesign of warriors in Warlords of Draenor seems to be working out. Arms and fury DPS? Too low.l Arms in general doesn't feel good to play, and any arms warriors saying so are correct - the spec didn't get the overhaul it needed. Or more accurately, it got an overhaul, but it didn't need one, and now it feels like a once grand 1969 Shelby Mustang with half the options yanked off. Fury plays fine, if somewhat boring depending on your talent choices, but it's clear that it still lacks the bite it needs to be a competitive DPS spec. The buffs it received recently have helped, but in my opinion they haven't helped enough. What I'd like to see for DPS in the future is an arms spec that recaptures some of the fun and feeling of the Mists arms warrior, and simply put, more damage in a less spammy format for fury. A big, big hit instead of having to get off three Wild Strikes when they're free.

As for Gladiator Stance, it's the hit of the expansion. Everyone loves it. People are raiding as DPS using it, because for quite a while it was head and shoulders above any other DPS spec warriors had. Even after the fury buffs and the change to the talent, Gladiator specced prot warriors are a force to be reckoned with, and it's a huge proof of concept success for designing a tanking spec that can also perform as a DPS spec. So kudos to Blizzard there.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about warriors one last time.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

The Queue: Dinosaurs, Twitter Questions, and a hug

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Matthew Rossi will be your host today.

I don't really have a favorite dinosaur. Or it's more like I have so many favorite dinosaurs I can't pick one. And to be honest when I do sit down and think about my favorite dinosaurs, my opinion changes with the research to a degree. At the moment, I'm fond of Deinocheirus with those massive arms. But a lot of people ask me what's the deal with all the dinosaurs, like there's a proper age to like them, and I'm way, way over the limit. So I'll try, just this once, to explain what the deal is with the dinosaurs.

They were our superiors.

They were better suited to life on Earth than the mammals. This is indisputable. They first arose 231 million years ago during the Triassic, at a time where our own therapsid ancestors were recovering from a mass extinction that nearly wiped out all life on Earth, just as the mammals were starting to evolve. Our ancestors. Us, in potential. And our ancestors, with their highly evolved teeth, with the start of the mammalian body plan that we see today in everything from tigers to dogs to sheep to cattle, lost the competition with the archosaurian dinosaur clans. It's just that simple. For over one hundred and thirty five million years, mammals went head to head against dinosaurs in the evolutionary arms race. And in all that time no mammal larger than a modern housecat thrived. The dinosaurs won. Their dominion was so total that even after the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, it was birds that first evolved into truly massive predators feeding on our mammal ancestors.

So that's it. Dinosaurs are proven winners. They lasted for one hundred and thirty five million years, and they still exist today in the form of birds. And you'll notice that no mammal has managed to push birds out of their aerial niches. So yeah, I like dinosaurs, and I see no reason not to keep liking them for the rest of my life. I realize this was a huge digression, but to be honest, it simply wouldn't have been right for me not to talk about dinosaurs in this edition of The Queue.

This edition of the Queue will likely be very, very long. I got quite a few questions on Twitter, and there's 981 comments, so we're going to try and get through as many of those as we can.

Sean Boyle asks:

Here's one for you Rossi. Why haven't we seen any Naga or Ethereals on Draenor?

Naga are native to Azeroth. The ones we saw on Outland were part of Lady Vashj's contingent, pledged to Illidan's service. Etherals are also not native to Draenor, but were cosmic exiles whose native world of K'aresh was destroyed by Dimensius the All-Devouring, and in the process of trying to save their people from his arcane devastation the Ethereals lost their corporeal forms. Neither group was on Draenor thirty five years ago in our timeline, and as a result, they aren't on the alternate Draenor we now explore.

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Filed under: The Queue

Breakfast Topic: My first character

That's my first character ever, Marketh the warrior from Azjol-Nerub. That's him in his hideous mismatched DPS gear (I was tanking back then, in the Naxx 10/25 days)

He's been through several race changes, faction switches, and realm transfers, but he's still around, and I still log on and go on rampages through older content for transmog gear, or a dungeon run or two. And that seems very important today.

Are you still playing your first character? Is she or he a main or an alt? And how long have you been playing her or him?

Filed under: Breakfast Topics

The Queue: Awesome Werewolf Superpowers

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Matthew Rossi will be your host today.

Guys, I love you all as if you were my children. My children who leave a lot of comments in the comment section. So many comments. 737 comments as of this moment. That is a lot of questions, statements, pictures, videos, non sequitur, all sorts of things.

I have to admit, on nights when I can't sleep (that's all of them) going through the Queue is like a portal into another dimension. Luckily, they still play WoW over there.

Chrth asks:
Q4TQ: If you were one of the humans on Fenris Isle, would you have chosen to become a Worgen or to be raised as one of the Forsaken? Consider this from a real life perspective, not game-wise (e.g. "Worgen because I love the Alliance" is not what I'm looking for).

Would I rather be trapped in a rotting corpse that's slowly deteriorating, forced to consume the flesh of the living and unable to feel, or would I rather have awesome werewolf superpowers? Yeah, that's a toughie. I guess I'd have to go with awesome werewolf superpowers.

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Filed under: The Queue

Breakfast Topic: Why not heirloom followers?

We have epic followers, we have a legendary follower, so why not heirloom followers?

Well, as is often the case when I have one of these ideas at three am, there are potentially a lot of reasons why to not have heirloom followers. For one thing, we level our followers and get them better gear and so on - a follower you could somehow send to your alts would mess up this whole process. Would they scale to your level? What level would they top out at? Could you gear them up? Could you make them epic?

All good questions. But man, it's daunting to have to try and get all the same followers over and over again, especially ones that are on rare vendors. Sometimes I wish I could mail my little minions to my alts, just so I wouldn't have to deal with flying out to the Spires of Arak yet again.

Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Patch 6.1 PTR: Heirloom necklaces datamined

So once again the folks at Wowhead are hard at work datamining away at Patch 6.1 on the PTR, and they've found something very interesting - new heirlooms. Specifically, neckpieces. A whole host of them, in fact. At present they don't seem to scale down on Wowhead, and they say 1 to 60 which seems odd to me, I'd expect 1 to 90. But that On Use is pretty amazing, all told. Since we're also talking about the heirloom tab coming in this patch as well, it's a good time for a set of necklace heirlooms.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items, Warlords of Draenor

Patch 6.1 PTR - New Blood Elf Models Incoming

We've been waiting for new blood elf models since Warlords of Draenor was announced, and now we finally know when we're getting them. Patch 6.1's PTR will have the first look at the blood elf of the future, soon to be the blood elf of the present. These are very definitely works in progress, so there are things to keep in mind - currently all male blood elves have the same facial geometry, for instance. But you can hop on the PTR yourself and take a look right now.

To my eye they don't look very different, just improved. But what do you think?

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, Warlords of Draenor

Breakfast Topic: What to do at 3 a.m.

I tend to like to do stuff at night, when there's practically no one else on. Partially this is because of my rather aggressive insomnia, a problem I've had for years now. But there's also something peaceful about it - stripped of the vast majority of players, suddenly I can wander about in the world, queue for dungeons or LFR, do the daily quest without worrying about other people doing the same, farm for rares if I'm of a mind to. The world feels broader, more expansive.

Perhaps this is simply a legacy of my being a rather curmudgeonly sort, but as I type this it's the waning hours of the morning. So I now ask you, what would you do in the quiet moments of the night?

Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Breakfast Topic: I want to unleash my followers upon my enemies

Seriously, I have like twenty of these people, why can't I loose them as an unstoppable force of destruction? I know we have raid missions, but I'd love to be able to go to, say, Ashran and do a 20 vs 20 PvP Follower match, or perhaps a special raid, just me and my followers. Some actual in the world gameplay for them beyond just sending them on missions or sticking some poor unfortunate in the mine (Sorry, Lantressor) or what have you. I mean, imagine a weekly mission where you have to coordinate your followers on an assault on an Iron Horde base?

Yes, I'm basically arguing that we should be able to play Warcraft III while we play WoW. I just feel like we should get to do something more with our followers, something that helps increase the feeling that we're the commander of this elite fighting force. Do you have any ideas for ways we could more directly utilize our follower base?


Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Breakfast Topic: What will Patch 6.2 be?

We're talking a lot about Patch 6.1, of course, because it's the new hotness on the horizon. But because we assume there'll be at least two more patches after it (and who knows, maybe that's a false assumption) I have to ask what you guys think the next patch is going to be.

I'm kind of hoping it'll be either Farahlon or Tanaan, although I suspect Tanaan will be in the last patch of the expansion, whatever that is, along with the final raid. For 6.2, I don't even know if we'll get a raid, but I have to believe we're at least going to see some new five mans.

Now it's your turn. What's 6.2 going to have in store for us?


Filed under: Breakfast Topics