Warrior Tips
From Game Theory
Contents |
Tanking
First and foremost: ZorbaTHut's Protection Warrior Spreadsheet
- This spreadsheet gives you a good idea of the AEP, or Armor Equivalency Points, of any piece of gear and how it ranks compared to the rest of the gear you can obtain. In addition, this spreadsheet lists the best enchants that a warrior can have, in order of the AEP.
Weapon Enchant
Go with Blood Draining for the most survivability. As detailed further in EJ's Tanking Enchant Discussion, Blood Draining has the highest percent chance to save you in the event of a problem occuring. According to the math done on EJ, the three most prevalent tanking enchants have the following percent chances to save you:
- Blood Draining: 2.00% with one stack. This is multiplied with further stacks.
- Blade Ward: 0.95%
- Mongoose: 0.94%
Rotation
This is fairly complex as warriors do not have the pleasure of hitting anything that's off cooldown. For a detailed guide to the generals of protection warrior threat, rotations and specs, visit Tank Spot and watch the TankSpot's Protection Warrior Guide.
In general, protection warriors work off a priority system for threat abilities which is as follows:
- Shield Slam
- Revenge
- Concussion Blow
- Shockwave
- Devastate
Of course, the very first few GCDs of a boss fight look different, as you want just enough snap aggro to not lose threat but enough free time to stack Sunder Armor with Devastate as fast as possible. This can be easily accomplished by switching to Battle Stance right before the boss is pulled and using Retaliation and then immediately switching back to Defensive Stance. When added with Misdirects and Tricks of the Trade, using this ability along with Shield Slam and a Revenge can put you well over 10,000 Threat Per Second for the first few seconds of a boss fight.
In high rage fights, you want to be using Heroic Strike as much as possible to generate extra threat.
This priority system should reset itself every time that Sword and Board procs. Anytime that this ability procs, Shield Slam becomes the most important ability you can and should use.
Protection Specs
Protection warrior specs can vary greatly. In general, this is the spec that most people use along with the glyphs generally recommended:
The third glyph slot can be used for whatever the situation calls for. Generally, most people will have the Glyph of Revenge or the Glyph of Heroic Strike, but these are by no means the only options.
Damage Per Second
Go and get this right now: Landsoul's Warrior DPS Calculation Spreadsheet
- This spreadsheet can be used for almost all of your DPS concerns. It allows you to set current SEP, or Strength Equivalency Points, for your gear at the touch of a button. Additionally, it gives you a very simple DPS readout of what DPS you should be doing with given raid buffs. This tool can also be used to determine what gems would increase your DPS the very most.
For a general guide about the rotation and specs, go watch TankSpot's WotLK Fury Warrior Guide.
Fury or Arms?
Fury is generally accepted as the better of the two specs for raid DPS. Arms is perfectly capable of outputting very high DPS numbers and there is no reason that you shouldn't try it out to see which one you are better at. As a general rule of thumb, Fury tends to scale better with higher levels of gear while arms is better at lower and mid-range levels of gear because of its ability to passively cap Armor Penetration with reduced Expertise.
STR vs. ArP
There are a lot of questions about what Armor Penetration does and when it is good to start putting Armor Penetration Gems in your gear as opposed to Strength gems. A general rule of thumb is that when your gear alone gets you to 40% Armor Penetration rating (which can be seen by hovering your mouse over your Hit Rating), it is time to move your Strength gems over to Armor Penetration gems.
Fury Rotation
Fury warrior has a very tight rotation. You will not master it for a long time and many fury warriors still make mistakes with their rotation. The rotation is as follows (this is present on a timescale):
- 0.0 Whirlwind
- 1.5 Bloodthirst
- 3.0 Free GCD (instant Slam if available)
- 4.5 WAIT 1 second
- 5.5 Bloodthirst
- 7.0 WAIT 1 second
- 8.0 Whirlwind
- Repeat
Fury Builds
Again, many people's Fury builds look very different because there are a few points that can be shuffled around as the raid requires them. The most generally accepted fury build as of 3.3 is:
- 3.3 Fury Build Use this build most of the time. If your raid requires it, you can switch the five points from Commanding Presence to Improved Demoralizing Shout.
References:
