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.

We now have a new version of the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator to discuss. While we've covered the Mists talents and abilities before, every new iteration of the design process brings us new elements to consider. What we're effectively being presented is a snapshot of the future through the lens of current design, giving us a chance to muse about what warriors will be doing and not doing.

One of the things that jumps out immediately when considering the new talents is that the current capstones Bladestorm and Shockwave (as well as Avatar), which had been gained at level 90 before, are now level 60 abilities. I'm not actually surprised by this change, but I am pleased by it. Those are abilities people can currently get by around the end of Outland, so making them level 60 talents means they'll be useful for leveling characters again.

Let's go over what can be gleaned from the calculator update and discuss what it all means.

Able and willing

Looking first at the class-wide abilities, we see some interesting things. Incite is now a passive, class-wide ability, for starters. It's gained at level 64. I expect this is because just about every warrior spec at least considers Incite right now. The redesigned Mists version of Incite only provides the chance to guarantee a second critical and not the increased critical strike chance, which is a general trend in the redesign probably aimed at making crit from gear more attractive (which I find strange because it's already one of our best stats).

The ability War Banner at level 87 is now the last class-wide ability gained by warriors. At present, I don't know what the cooldown on War Banner will be. (If you can see one, please let me know; every time I look at the ability, I can't find it.) It has two 15-second duration possibilities and one 30-second duration. This implies to me that it's at least 30 seconds on the cooldown, if not a minute. Longer than that would entirely trivialize it to my eyes.

The Skull Banner ability (30% critical hit chance for 15 seconds) seems powerful enough that I have to believe it's a minute cooldown. Demoralizing Banner (10% less damage by all enemies with 30 yards of the banner for 15 seconds) and Mocking Banner (all enemies attack the warrior for 6 seconds; banner lasts for 30 seconds) are just revamped versions of Demoralizing Shout and Challenging Shout, and as such, I expect the ability can't be longer than a minute or they'll be fairly useless.

I suspect future design on this ability will actually break it up into an entirely new category of ability for warriors called banners, much in the same way that paladins have hands and blessings and seals. Warriors will use shouts for active abilities that generate rage and buff directly, and banners for passive buffs or static areas of effect. That way, abilities like Skull Banner can be uncoupled from Mocking Banner.

I really like how the level 1 abilities have been redesigned so that warriors just get Heroic Strike to start. No more clunky Strike ability you never use again. I also like that Enrage is now passive and class-wide and that it's been redesigned to increase rage generation. (We'll talk about how fury's mastery has been redesigned in the spec section.)